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South Florida Today
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PURCHASE |
Barry's Inspiration
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My dad, Lee Duncan, fled the hopeless poverty of an Appalachian hillside and an emerging violent confrontation with his step-father (that he later resolved) by joining the Army at the ripe age of 15. A year later, he was at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed in 1941. His frightened mother wrote the commander of the base informing him that my father was not yet of age, and he was honorably discharged. |
Less than a year later, Dad reenlisted in the Marines, and was quickly off to the South Pacific. Subsequently, he fought on Saipan during the bloody banzai charge, and was on Iwo Jima when the raising of the flag was forever captured as a symbol of our freedom.
Lee Duncan received citations for his courage under fire, but my father never bragged about his heroism, I had to pry these stories out of him and did not learn of some of them until he lay dying on a hospital bed. Like many of the Greatest Generation, he was only doing his job, and gladly. Right after the war, he and his new bride Doris, my mom, headed north for Ohio to find work in the factories. They worked like dogs, but were frequently laid off and had to return to Kentucky to keep from starving. They never give up. Finally, they gained enough seniority to maintain employment. They bought a house and realized the American dream. Years later, Dad took a supervisor position at the factory, and was then promoted to shift foreman. He worked under several bosses until finally, when he was close to the early retirement he dreamed of, a new manager took over his department. They didn't get along-at all. Their conflicts escalated and, unfortunately, Dad was not political or strategic in his interactions with the new manager. The new department manager fired my dad.
He was devastated. Like most men of his era, his identity was wrapped up in his job. But things got worse. Dad started having chest pains which resulted in an emergency admission for bypass surgery. While a commonplace procedure today (although not much easier), in 1977 it was relatively new and scary. My dad was fifty-two years old and faced a very uncertain future: no job and questionable health. He felt terribly wronged, betrayed, and defeated, and he became very depressed. My dad's response to adversity left a huge impression on me. Lee Duncan was no superman, and he was not perfect, but he certainly was heroic.
In light of his war record, he may have been heroic in the traditional sense of the word, but he was also heroic as a human being. In truth, there was a lot right about him. As soon as he was medically cleared, he went back to work in the factory, in a different department, but the same factory that had turned its back on his thirty plus years of dedicated service. Although he had been fired from his management position, he was permitted to return to the factory as a laborer. Most people saw this as the ultimate humiliation and totally unfathomable. I asked him how he did it, how he faced that day of going back. Dad thought for a while and, in characteristic fashion said that there is no shame in working for a living, no matter what the job entailed. And then he said that it was the only way he could be who he was--that staying debilitated by his heart condition or discouraged by his firing was just not him.
When he looked back on his life and the things he had faced, from a harsh stepfather, abject poverty, the tragedy of war, moving from the hills with nothing but his sixth grade education to working three jobs to feed his family, he concluded that if could handle those situations, he could handle this one--that within him was all he needed to answer this call to face adversity. And he did with grace and dignity--so much so that he was once again promoted to supervisor in the new department. My mother, with her unwavering support and tenacious belief in her husband, was integral to my father's resilience, as she has been to mine at many different points in my life. Dad worked as a supervisor until he realized another of his dreams-retiring in Florida and fishing every day.
As a young man, with the lessons learned from my parents in hand, I began my training to become a psychologist. I was soon disheartened to discover that the mental health field was utterly obsessed with viewing people as mental invalids. In fact, I learned that the defining question that eclipsed all others was "What's wrong with you?" But it was more than a guiding question. It seemed to be the field's very mission to hunt down pathology-often hidden in such a way that only an expert could find it-lurking everywhere waiting to strike its hapless prey like a monster in a bad horror movie. This view of people as damaged goods, hopeless victims of past trauma or their own biochemistry just didn't fit my experience.
Over the years, I was delighted to discover, that this pervasive attitude didn't fit scientific research about change either. Change, in truth, is far more about what's right with the people attempting it-their strengths, resources, ideas, and relational support-than the labels they are branded with or even the methods the therapist uses. This information resonated with my experience and I finally found a home in helping clients harness their abilities to solve life struggles as well as doing my best to influence the mental health field to abandon the self serving view of people as sick, fragile, and incompetent. My efforts (with my colleagues Drs. Scott Miller and Jacqueline Sparks) have spawned a worldwide "Heroic Client Movement" based on the desire to give clients a voice in their own treatment and applying the bottom line of over fifty years of research about change.
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| And that bottom line--you are the engine of change. Change happens by marshalling your inherent abilities, what's right with you, to address the situation at hand--in the drama of change, you are the hero or heroine. | |