Has Anyone Seen a Theory to Explain a Family?

I was compelled to write this blog after reading an editorial by David Brooks in the New York Times. I thought it is worthwhile to consider the way people generally understand or are mystified by human behavior, and what if anything Bowen Theory might have to offer. 
In an editorial, May 11, 2009, DAVID BROOKS writes about the Grant Study, which consists of following 268 men picked from those entering the Harvard Class of 1938.[1]

 

As you might predict they were the most promising of young men and were selected partially because they were the most “well adjusted.” John F. Kennedy was one of them. And yes, problems arose in their lives, despite their being the best of the best.

 

Some say these life stories highlight the life of promise and disappointments for mostly unknown reasons. What happed to these men, David Brooks claims, is beyond any theory to explain. 
“Their lives played out in ways that would defy any imagination save Dostoyevsky’s. A third of the men would suffer at least one bout of mental illness. Alcoholism would be a running plague. The most mundane personalities often produced the most solid success.” 
Freud also turned to literature to understand the twisted way that the lives of talented people often turned out. Generations of psychoanalysts have preferred the Greeks to the Russians for their way to highlight repeating dramatic patterns within the individual. 

 

Once anyone begins to look at how the individuals function in a social system, the way of thinking and theorizing is altered significantly. 

 

A new way of observing human behavior, or if you will, a new page was turned, when Murray Bowen placed the human’s vulnerability to emotional problems in biological process instead of in literature which focuses on what is wrong within an individual and often highlights a fatal flaw.  

 

Perhaps Brooks makes the claim that theory cannot explain what happens to people as they mature and develop because he has never heard of Family theory? If so, Brooks is not  alone in not knowing much about family theory or therapy. A focus on what is “wrong” with the individual still dominates heath care. 

 

There is much in our culture today that reverts back to psychoanalysis for explanations.  So Brooks may also have been influenced to give up on a theory because the man who ran the Grant Study for many years, George Vaillant, also gave up on psychoanalysis as a theory which could explain outcomes.[2] 
This search for the missing theory reminds me of the following joke highlighting people who are looking in all the wrong places.  In this story a very drunk man is hanging onto a light post for dear life. A policeman approaches him and asks, “What are you doing here?  The tipsy man answers, “Officer, I am looking for my car keys.”  “Where did you lose them?” “Over by my car.” “Then why are you looking here”  “Officer can’t you see, its dark over there, and the light is here.” 
The light in this case, only shines because a theory, provides a way of understanding.

 

Most of us have personal theories about how things come to be the way they are. A few take the search for a guiding theory seriously.

 

Bowen was so bugged by the holes in psychoanalytic theory that he developed a different way of understanding human behavior, anchoring his observations of the human family inside evolutionary theory.  
Most of us might acknowledge that there are mysteries about how people’s lives turn out while at the same time seeing how the repetitive interactions in a system work to make some more vulnerable than others. 

 

It is not by accident that people seem to make poor choices. There are subtle and blatant forces operating on sensitive people, almost “forcing” them, despite their intelligence to overreact and thereby make less optimal choices.  Over time, patterns of reacting to feel better under pressure can lead people into certain dysfunctional positions in life.

 

For those who are serious explorers of theories to inform us about human behavior, the great unknown, Bowen family theory has reasoned explanations for what happens in families.  We know that people who are more dependent on others are vulnerable to decomposition or dysfunction when the relationship system is stressed.

 

Another point is that even if Bowen family theory has been around for forty years perhaps those of us who know the theory do not know it well enough yet to explain the outcomes found in the Grant Study. Or we may not be able to write well enough to capture the public imagination. 
Those who can write well have an ability to communicate ideas to a broader audience, as in an essay Brooks mentions, “What Makes Us Happy?” by Joshua Wolf Shenk in the recent issue of The Atlantic. It is also available online. [3]

  Brooks notes: “Shenk’s treatment is superb because he weaves in the life of George Vaillant, the man who for 42 years has overseen this work. Vaillant’s overall conclusion is familiar and profound. Relationships are the key to happiness. “Happiness is love. Full Stop,” he says in a video.

In his professional life, Vaillant has lived out that creed. He has been an admired and beloved colleague and mentor. But the story is more problematic at home. When he was 10, his father, an apparently happy and accomplished man, went out by the pool of the Main Line home and shot himself. His mother shrouded the episode. They never attended a memorial service nor saw the house again.He has been through three marriages and returned to his second wife. His children tell Shenk of a “civil war” at home and describe long periods when they wouldn’t speak to him. His oldest friend says he has a problem with intimacy.” [4]

Clearly people, even those who have personal problems with intimacy, (a very common issue when 50% of first marriages end in divorce, and second marriages have an even higher failure rate) are still able to make great contributions to society.
I would like to write well enough about family systems so people could see what kinds of interactions produce what kinds of states in a family system.  But each family is so complex it’s very hard to hold all the variables in mind and to see the impacts each individual has on every other individual.  Family stories do make the system come alive and gives people a better understanding of what it is people are up against in dealing with problems in any family. 

 

After all people have a deep hunger to know and understand.  People will tell you their story and feel better about it as long as you are reasonably neutral.  Many people who want answers now follow various authority figures, watch gurus on TV or on the web and buy self-help books to figure out what to do.

 

However there are few if any short cuts to learn how to manage one’s self in intense social systems. There may be general ways of understanding what we are up against in being our best, but the point is it is always a risk to change. The risk increases anytime one takes meaningful action.  Almost every emotional system functions automatically even if there are negative consequences. This is just the way nature is. 

 

 
Accepting the way things are is a big deal in any kind of effort to organize self and not focus on altering others.  I suggested in my book, that people write up their own version of their family history to help him or her get out of the personal focus and think about broader patterns over generations.

 

• Following are a few questions people have found useful in becoming better observers of any emotional system they live or work in?
  • What do you do first when you sense someone is having a problem?
  • Can you slow down to consider other possibilities? 
  • What is it that makes you want to change how you have been interacting with others?
  • Is there a principle involved or do you just want to feel better? 
  • Can you predict who will be upset if you change? 
  • What is the evidence that altering your part in an interaction makes a difference? 
  • How much are your worries and actions like those of the past generations in your family? 
  • How much are your worries, actions and reactions the opposite of the past generations in your family?
  • Do you stay in good contact with three generation of your family?
  • Who are the easy people to contact?
  • Are they easy to contact because they think like you do? 
  • What would it take for you to contact and stay in contact with someone in your family who doesn’t think at all like you do?
  • How do triangles alter your ability to relate one on one to people?  (If your mother/father/husband/wife/boss did not like them can you?)

 

Perhaps one is unable to even consider these types of questions unless one can somehow see that the mechanisms forming a system are impersonal.

 

One explanation of the nuclear family system
One of the main assumptions in Bowen theory is that people are born into a family with a relatively fixed level of emotional maturity.  Then they are subject to the anxiety generated both in relationships and by events. 

1) Every individual is shaped by a mixture of genetic influences, sensitivity to relationships and the importance of principles, which have evolved over the generations in his/her family.

 

2) The generational history of relationships leaves an impression of some kind on each developing person. When people leave home to start their own family/friendship systems, they form new relationships, which are highly influenced by the sensitivity to the old relationships in the family they were born into (their family of origin). 

 

3) Some individuals are freer of relationship sensitivity than others. This leads to diversity of functioning in the nuclear family. 
4) Much of one’s vulnerability to anxiety is determined by one’s position in the nuclear family, sibling position, the degree of cut off of the current generation from the past, and the degree of projection of worries and negativity onto others.

 

5) There are only four mechanisms to handle anxiety and most people in a family use all of them with a stronger preference for two.  The four are:

 

 (1) Distance:  whether geographical or  “psychological”

 (2) Conflict:  whether manifest in high sensitivity upsets or deadly anger. 
 (3) Physical:   emotional or social symptoms can occur as a function of reciprocal relationships in which one begins to function up or down in relationship to the other. This is difficult for people to see. One spouse can have an illness or a drinking problem and somehow that person may be carrying the symptom for the others.  Consider how a mother may feel needed if the child or husband is helpless.  

 

4) Projection:   parental problems are projected onto one or more children. 
 

Bowen used to say two individuals in a marriage fight for the ego strength and one becomes more dominant almost like if you hook up two horses, one steps out first and appears to be dominant. In the case of humans, one can pin the other one into a one- up position so they look dominant.  What’s really happening is that the person acts dominant while giving into to the other’s need to appear less dominant.

 

The back and forth movement results in compromises in order to form a common “we.”  You can think about this as a loss of one’s self to the common self.  (Page 110 in Family Therapy in Clinical Practice by Murray Bowen) 

 

Fighting for “rights” to be “happy,” to think for self, to have an extra treat, etc. creates conflicts.

 

Conflict goes away when one gives into the other and “loses self.” One gives in and becomes a slightly bigger “no -self” in relationship to the other. Over time the one who gives into to the verbal or non-verbal demands of the others is then vulnerable to physical, emotional or social symptoms. 

 

Outside relationships, especially those in the extended  family can help to stabilize a marriage and the mechanisms manifest less intensity. Those who are more invested in each other and have fewer stabilizing relationships in the extended family will have more conflicts or other symptoms.  If people have outside relationships they need fewer mechanisms to handle anxiety.

 

The use of mechanisms to handle anxiety results in people functioning at a less than real self level. It can happen so fast that it is hard to see all that goes into one giving in to the other/s.  It takes a disciplined approach for one to see the system that one is born into and to see the part one plays in the system. 
More objective observers can see people in an emotional system like chess pieces or ants in a colony or people in a Shakespearian drama. 

 

A see saw dynamic comes to live in marriages in which one spouse appears to be functioning better than the other. We often hear and see that one person becomes “done in” by the relationship’s dynamics. One is dominant and is often critical of the other.  Sometimes both are critical of each other and there is a race to the bottom. But when one person accepts the criticism and “gives in” to the other’s perception we can see the fusion between the two people.  People are “borrowing” energy from the other by positioning self as better that the other, or as the others care taker.  Think of two cells where one takes the other’s blood supply as in cancer.  In this case neither person is a well defined self they have simply been caught in an ongoing lending and borrowing of self making them more vulnerable to future stressors.

 

This process of giving up self to enable the other is easier to see in addiction problems. Often we see a dynamic emerge whereby one spouse “allows” the other to drink and “looks after them” in a pattern that has been called enabling behavior.

 

There are many explanations for alcoholism and or drug dependency. But if one is focused on the dynamic in the marriage or between an adolescent and parents then one can clearly see that there is tremendous denial or distance and/or cycles of negative blaming.

 

Anyone interested in breaking these kinds of patterns, “inherited” from the past,  can start just by breaking any cycle of thinking and talking negatively about or to the other.

 

Those who are ready to break past patterns have to (1) be prepared to let the other one fall and pick him or herself up and (2) at the same time deal with their own loss of the helping role. 

 

1. Changing self is hard to do and hard to understand. It is also one thing to change your way of dealing with others and then another thing when your near and dear begin to change and challenge you.

 

Coaching 101 
The following are a few ways I try to coach people who are caught in negative cycles on interaction.

 

The tone of family interactions is highly determined by the way one has “learned” to focus on the other. People are born into systems that have ways reinforcing certain  values and each emotional system has expectations for behaviors. If ones behaviors deviates from the norm then that person become a negative focus as attempts are made to get the person back into the fold. 

 

Christopher Buckley described this family emotional process in the last blog.  He understood that what was allowed to be talked about was not necessarily the truth. 

 

There in an automatic negativity which focus on others who do not behave in accepted ways. 

 

1. Feelings that you should go along with the way things are do have a big part in maintaining a  habitual way of interacting.

 

People who can understand this are motivated to observe and take the time to alter automatic behavior with others by acting rather than reacting. 

 
When the issues get hot, try writing both in one’s own journal (to clarify ones feelings) and then to the other person.  In this way one begins to be more objective rather than communicate negative feelings around issues.

 

A few ideas that can guide more neutral interactions are:

1) Don’t put much pressure on others for anything.

2) Stay with “I” statements and throw away the YOU word.

1. 3) Set limits by saying. IF – THEN statements: Like IF you want to do x, y or z   then I cannot stop you, but IF you do it THEN I will have to…

4) John Gottman http://www.gottman.com/research/  has identified a 5 to 1 positive ratio for marital interactions. This may also be needed in one’s own thinking process. 
5)  Can I weed my mental garden by not letting negative thoughts dominate? 

 

6) Can I be happy by to working on personal goals to balance out my need for relationship happiness? 
If any of this was useful to you, you will be ready to analyze the Grant Study families.  And you will even be able to think more clearly about the next story someone tells you about how a talented person fell into an unexpected abyss.  Perhaps Bowen Family Systems Theory can enable you to understand the natural forces operating on individuals.

Hope some of this was useful for you.  

I also wanted to thank Judy Ball for continuing to edit these blogs.

Judy helps me slow down and enlarge on my quick explanations and focus on the details.  

What a gift!  

And of course many thanks to all the grandchildren who are an inspiration for the future of the family.

 

A moment of happiness from Madeline and me!

 

 

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[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/opinion/12brooks.html?_r=1

 

 

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eman_Vaillant

[3] http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/happiness

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/opinion/12brooks.html?_r=1

Family Rules and the Social Atom

Recognizing  Patterns in Social Systems

May 3, 2009 

Recently there were several stories highlighting relationship process in the families of well-known people.  Two individuals, Bill Gates and Christopher Buckley benefit from their family experiences and emerged as stronger individuals while the Astor family is described as repeating destructive family patterns. 

In addition to how family emotional process guides individual behavior we can also take a look at other ways of studying human behavior. Mark Buchanan, a theoretical physicist, in his book The Social Atom points to the many studies where behavior is being tested and modeled.  His thesis is that we are something like social atoms, acting on the basis of simple rules, while also being benefiting from our on-the-fly adaptability to changing circumstances.  Like family emotional processes many of these simple rules are operating out of awareness.

We can ask what differences will it make that we are more aware of how these simple rules and emotional forces operate on all of us?

I would answer that in a world of chaos and confusion it is amazing for any of us to discover a few steps towards clarity to see how we are constrained and what we might become. People can learn about the nature of emotional process from observing ones own story or even others’ family stories. Murray Bowen made many observation of the family but he described togetherness and individuality as the primary forces.

In families and in work systems, togetherness can be identified as the way in which family members are identified as being alike in terms of important beliefs, philosophies, life principles and feelings. [1]   

In considering how togetherness forces play out in a larger unrelated social field Buchanan in his chapter called “Together, Apart”, attempts to explain the larger social dynamic that can lead to ethnic cleansing.  “You are either with us or against us,” and unsaid is “we already know which side you are on and have taken steps to see that you pay or are paid.”  

After every individual had interacted with others for a thousand times the world was stopped.  What they saw was counter intuitive.  The third strategy was the one that almost three-quarters of the individuals had turned to. 

A natural segregation of the world by color emerged. By cooperating with only their color, individuals met with cooperation in almost all of their interactions.

“In a world of bigots only bigots survive.” Prejudice at the most basic level of human activity is effective at promoting protecting the in-group and at making the outsiders the enemies.

How different is this from togetherness pressure in the family?   People are pressuring important others to be the same or like me in behavior and/or values in order to enhance cooperation at a very basic level.  

Computer simulations can help us understand the simple rules that lead to counter intuitive outcomes for large groups.  Hopefully these simulations can also us to see that the pressure in families arise from some of these same basic, perhaps instinctual, rules. 

In families there are many ways to configure the system and to reorganize in order to have greater tolerance for both diversity and dealing with increasing anxiety.  Perhaps families have a specific set point for differences.  If people are too different from the family values these “outsiders” might need to drink in order to tolerate the negativity that can get focused on one individual’s differences.

Is it possible to increase a set point around the ability of a family to better deal with differences?

In order to alter a dynamic first one has to see it.  To be able to observe a set point we need to understand the level of “togetherness” in the family system.

One way is that in this ever more complex world you can just count or observe how people use pronouns: the “we,” the “ you should,” the “everyone believes or does it this way,” the “it is wrong” and the more intense versions as in “you must” and the “YOU are wrong.”

I use to say I did pronoun therapy! I explained it cost a lot to use the word “I” in a meaningful way that creates differences that people will eventually find useful.  

The ability to define a difference and remain in relationship with others is the force Bowen called differentiation.  In this state people try to separate out from the group or the family to state their principled differences as respectfully as possible.  People do this at some cost to self.  It is important to state a principle and leave the other free to make a decision for self from within self.  One example is to say, “This is what I stand for, and what I will do or not do based on “x” which is an important principle of mine.” 

By not putting pressure on others to conform one can assumes greater responsibility for one’s own happiness comfort and well-being.

Bowen defined a scale whereby more mature people could integrate thinking and feeling.  Those who were more emotionally maturity were able to avoid thinking that tends to blame others or make demands on others to make one’s self feel or function better.

In any family story highlighting differentiation or the emergence of the individual you can hear the predictable tension arise as individuals try to be more of a self in relationship to important others. 

One example of this process as it worked its way through the family set point for tolerating differences concerns the pre teenager Bill Gates. 

The future software mogul was a headstrong 12-year-old and was having a particularly nasty argument with his mother at the dinner table. Fed up, his father threw a glass of cold water in the boy’s face.

“Thanks for the shower,” the young Mr. Gates snapped. Bill Gates Sr., Bill Gates and their family shared many details of the family’s story for the first time, including Bill Gates Jr.’s experience in counseling and how his early interest in computers came about partly as a result of a family crisis. The sometimes colliding forces of discipline and freedom within the clan shaped the entrepreneur’s character. 

Ms. Gates encouraged her kids to study hard, play sports and take music lessons. (Bill Gates tried the trombone with little success.) And she imparted a discipline that reflected her upbringing in a well-to-do family. She expected her kids to dress neatly, be punctual and socialize with the many adults who visited their home. For the most part, young Bill dutifully abided.

“She was the most engaged parent and she had high expectations of all of us,” says Libby Armintrout, Bill’s younger sister. “Not just grades and that sort of thing, but how we behaved in public, how we would be socially.” Then, at age 11, Bill Sr. says, the son blossomed intellectually, peppering his parents with questions about international affairs, business and the nature of life.

“It was interesting and I thought it was great,” Mr. Gates Sr. says. “Now, I will say to you, his mother did not appreciate it. It bothered her.”

The son pushed against his mother’s instinct to control him, sparking a battle of wills. All those things that she had expected of him — a clean room, being at the dinner table on time, not biting his pencils — suddenly turned into a big source of friction. The two fell into explosive arguments.

Eventually the parents brought their son to a therapist. “I’m at war with my parents over who is in control,” Bill Gates recalls telling the counselor. Reporting back, the counselor told his parents that their son would ultimately win the battle for independence, and their best course of action was to ease up on him.[2]

 

The way in which family members are aligned with one another is generated by a system of automatic responses to verbal and non-verbal contact.  These mechanisms regulate relationships and are largely out of awareness.

Every family has minor emotional stimuli that can trigger an overly intense response from the other. People wonder, “how come that person got so mad at me, all I did was …”

There are both negative and positive stimuli. So we can innocently drive the other into an angry or distant state, while others are so positive that one family member may spend an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to elicit a special smile or a kind or interested word. 

In either of the following two stores you will read beautiful descriptions of how people react to one another and how the problems then escalates leaving the people far removed from real contact with one another.

One written by Christopher Buckley is about how his relationships with his parents played out as though it were a symphony just slightly off key. In the new book, Mum and Pup and Me he revisits childhood memories of his parents as he sought a balance of togetherness and individuality to maintain a relationship with his father.

Pup and I had engaged in our own Hundred Years’ War over the matter of faith. Our Sturmiest und Drangiest times were over religion. Pup had the most delicious, reliable, wicked, vibrant sense of humor of anyone I knew, yet his inner Savonarola was released at the merest hint of (to use his term) impiety. Finally exhausted, I adopted — whether hypocritically or cowardly or wisely — a Potemkin stance of being back in the fold. My agnosticism, once defiant, had gone underground. I no longer had the desire to nail my theses to his church door. By now I knew we didn’t have much time left, and I didn’t want to spend it locking theological horns, making him heartsick with my intransigence.

My only consolation now was that I had finally stopped lobbing feckless, well-worded catapult-balls over Mum’s parapets. I didn’t even say anything to her about the Incident of July 2006.

However when he did call to let his father know [know what?] you can watch how the triangle unfolded and see how loyalty (similar colors) influenced the cooperation between the two parents over the reality issues of the moment. 

I breathed into a paper bag for a few days and then called Pup. “Well,” I said, “that sounded like a fun dinner. Sorry to miss it.” He feigned ignorance of the Skakel episode; perhaps he had excused himself early and gone upstairs to short-sheet her ladyship’s bed. He was, anyway, past caring at this, my 500th howl about Mum’s behavior. He tried to wave it away with a spuriously subjunctive, “But why would she say something like that if she weren’t a juror at the trial?” (Pup would have made a superb defense attorney) and changed the subject back to what kind of explosives work best for dislodging aristocratic British houseguests.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/magazine/26buckley-t.html?pagewanted=2&ref=review

 

For another look at how the nuclear family emotional process continues to be played out over the generations just read: Fight for Astor Estate Mirrors Battle 50 Years Ago By John Eligon Published April 25, 2009 in The New York Times.

I will not spoil the fun by over interpreting this story. Please do let me know what you think about the emotional process and how togetherness and the “in” and “out” groups might function in this family. These kinds of examples may make it easier for you to identify relationship patters that live below people’s awareness.   

Many thanks to Judy Ball for her editing efforts.

Andrea

 

 

 

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[1] Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, by Murray Bowen, page 218

[2] Raising Bill Gates, by Robert A. Guth

My happy news – this Easter season, my long awaited book, The Mindful Compass: Navigating in the Social World, will be published in Mexico, May 21, 2009.

Anyone who would like to come to a book party in Mexico City will be welcomed to celebrate at the museum Museo de Arte Popular. http://www.museoartepopularmexicano.org/

I am deeply grateful to Maria Teresa Arnago, the founder of the museum, and Don Lorenzo Servitje who thought Maria Bustos’s idea, to welcome the book to Mexico at the museum, was worthy of support.  They are two of the ten leaders who have told their story of how family relationships enable learning and leading. 

Two years ago I began what I believed to be a very simple task – just interview ten people for the Spanish edition of the book. The book was written. Along the way I have met many wonderful and openhearted people. I deeply appreciate being given this opportunity.

None of it would have happened with out my families support, especially my daughter, Michelle Mauboussin, and of course the prime instigator, my friend Maria Bustos, who introduced me to Humberto Ruz, my publisher.

You can see more by clicking over to the interviews or to pieces of the book that are on this site. 

Thanks for all your support and a very special thanks to my editors, Judith Ball,  and Deborah Schwab.

Andrea

Shaking the Globe: Leading with Courage

Welcome to Spring were ever you are!

Developing A Self in Your Organization

I met Blythe McGarvie in 2004. One of my friends, Laura Martin, told her about a meeting on developing leadership skills based on knowledge gathered in the far distant world of family therapy.  (Laura also  wrote up the one page outline of the concepts in Bowen Theory: http://ideastoaction.wordpress.com/dr-bowen/)

Being curious and brave Blythe left the comfort of the corporate world and came to visit the people in the relatively obscure world of family systems theory. She had published one book called Fit In, Stand Out when we met and continued her board work and public speaking, since then, she has published another book on the development of leadership skills. We have continued to have intellectually alive exchanges. 

Left to right back row:  Blythe McGarvie, Laura Martin, Andrea Schara, Jan Whitener

Front row: Kathy Wiseman, Priscilla Friesen, John Engels, Kathleen Guinan, Frank Gregorsky

Photo taken after the Leaders for Tomorrow Meeting

I interviewed Blythe at this meeting in 2006.  In addition to being able to tell her own story I think her newestbook, Shaking the Globe: Courageous Decision-Making in a Changing World is important and I will tell you why and, I’ll share the insights gained from the interview with Blythe concerning her early leadership training in her family of origin.

In Shaking the Globe Blythe considers the unique challenges of leading in our global community.

 “ Success requires a new and different set of competencies, particularly the ability to coordinate, communicate, and cooperate across borders and cultures.

Executives must be able to transcend their biases to adapt to today’s economy, learn to establish opportunities for future growth, and lead multinational corporations with strategies unrestrained by culture or nationality.”

I would add family knowledge to that list of needed
competencies.   We form early on our basic skills in how to
relate.  No one seems to get away without some sensitivity to his or her
family of origin.  In addition, I would hypothesize that those with deeper
roots and knowledge of their multigenerational family would have greater
competencies in adjusting to different cultures and values.

Overall, your country of origin affects your ability to be a
participant in a global culture. Just think about the relative wealth, power,
and cultural norms of the U.S. that give Americans the competitive fuel to
travel to other countries. However, the challenges, no matter your particular
nationality, are similar.   In every culture people are trained to
manage relationships and to learn about their impact on others.  The
challenge is to keep building useful personal bridges, to others.  The
challenges individuals face can arise from and in one’s family and then show up
in our functioning in small groups or in large organizations. One can ask
oneself this basic question:  what are we up against in becoming our best
as a leader? Or, how have we built our skill set in our family of origin to
relate well to difficult others?

There is no greater challenge than to bring different people
into alignment to achieve common goals without threatening their individuality
and autonomy at the same time.  People want different things, they have
different objectives and therefore being a leader in a global world is
extremely challenging.  

Blythe’s book highlights evidence of the many ways social
system pressure individuals and how individuals can handle theses
pressures.  Some have deep personal values that sustain them; others
automatically give up, or dominate the work group.  She is focused more on
the facts of functioning and the results produced when people are courageous
enough to change the status quo. 

It is important to gather facts to understand how people
have and may function optimally in social/emotional systems.  There is so
much evidence now of failure to function well.  We see evidence of
confusion and regression in behavior all around us.  There were errors in
the understanding of the models that were believed to predict risk. There was a
belief that markets will “self-regulate.” Then there are the continuing headlines
related to Ponzi schemes and greed.    The result of these
changes in the global environment has provoked a greater awareness of how
dependent we are on experts.

Do we need any more clarification about the importance of
self-focus and responsibility? Do we need more reason to identify courageous
and ethical leaders, capable of communicating realistic ways through these
tangled webs?

As one of the first ten women to become a CFO of a Fortune
500 company, Blythe has first hand knowledge and the observational skill to
identify the traits of mature leaders who are effective in managing the culture
of corporate social worlds. In her first book she identified six key traits
enabling leaders to both fit in and stand out: (financial acumen; integrity; an
ability to envision, build, and maintain alliances; learn; offer perspective;
and practice global citizenship.)[1] 

While there are many questions about how we know people have
these traits and are not “pretenders,” there is an obvious link between Bowen’s
ideas of differentiation of self and the process Blythe describes in her
books.  Few people link one’s ability to fit in and/or stand out in an organizational
environment, to one’s family history. 

In 2006 I thought it useful to see if leaders like Blythe
could describe how they learned to be a leader by fitting in and standing out
in their family of origin.  I asked Blythe if she would participate
in an experiment interviewing leaders about what they learned in their own
families about how to be a leader, and do it in front of others who would
listen and ask questions.  The reason for this format was to encourage
more openness and learning for a larger group.  

In the late 60’s Dr. Bowen began a video series at Virginia
Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.  This was the first time in
history that a psychiatrist, in real time, interviewed patients and the
interview was broadcast to other family therapists for training purposes. After
the interview the families would then be invited in to listen to the comments
of the audience. Dr. Bowen set up rules so that the audience could not have
direct contact with the families. 

Designing a Meeting to Consider the Links Between

                                        and

Being a Self in One’s Family of Origin and Functioning in Organizations

Building on these ideas I thought it might work to take
Bowen’s basic idea that people could learn from one another about what comprise
an emotional system by separating out a more thoughtful and effective self, and
combine it with ideas on mindfulness. 
Learning in the moment has been well researched in an academic
setting.  I found this research in
the book Leadership Can be Taught, (2005) by Sharon Dalz
Parks.  

Parks tells us about the work of Ronald Heifetz of the
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. His method is called, “case in point.”
Heifetz uses the moment-to-moment experience in the classroom as a
“studio-laboratory.”   This theory and experience model goes back to
the traditions of John Dewey, who saw that we humans learn best from reflecting
on our real life experiences. 

What I took away from the ideas of Heifetz’s experimental
method was that there was something to be gained from bringing people together
to work on a common goal and then giving up control over the group.  So, I
would start by asking questions of the person, in this case Blythe, and I would
not “control” the group.  Every one could ask questions.  Hopefully
each one would be thoughtful and aware of their impact on others. 
Everyone’s behavior in the group would be subject to questioning.  Even
“the leader” does not get a free pass.

In this kind of setting there is more uncertainty and risk
for anyone willing to participate in such a learning experience.  There
were positives and minuses that come out of the day.  There were not enough
positives to create an ongoing series of interviews and I returned to the old
fashioned way of interviewing people one on one. 

A couple of the participants said they learned a great deal
from telling their story. Others reported that they could see how hard it was
to tell their story when many people ask them questions. Some in the audience
said that it was difficult not to jump up and ask questions when the
others stories were unclear or made them anxious. 

The ability to tolerate differences and to see the impact
one has on others, were two of the major learning points people noted. On the
down side it was challenging for people to tell somewhat personal stories about
his or her life in a group.  It probably requires that one be practiced in
telling the story and then seeing what they themselves and the group gets out
of it.

We are all faced with very limited knowledge about the make
up and impact of social groups on our functioning. This is not for a lack of
effort, because professionals from social scientists to journalists offer
explanations of the social fabric that determines or at least influences the
behavior of individuals.  

Psychological Research on the Influence of Social System

To understand the extremes of functioning in social systems
after WWII, researchers like Stanley Migram began to look at the dynamics of
people in authority and the ability of individuals to resist being told to
participate in shocking events that they would ordinarily never do.[2] 
Later, Philip Zimbardo chronicled his Stanford prison research and questioned
our collective responsibility for the world’s ills.[3] 
Social systems have properties about which we know precious little compared to
what will eventually be known.   Part of the anxiety of this era is
seeing how our individual fate is tied up in our participation in the social
system.

In every newspaper and TV show on the subject, there are
various theories to account for the downfall of our economy.  The two main
camps are (1) that leaders of major companies were greedy people who captured
power  (see “The Quiet Coup,” by Simon Johnson in
the most recent issue of The Atlantic) or (2) the “stupidity hypothesis”, that
no one on Wall Street was smart enough to see the folly of the short-term gains
and the long-term growing imbalances (see David Brooks, NY Times, Opinions
4/3/09). There is no arguing that all of these factors and more collided to
bring a house of cards down.  Emotional systems are complex and non
linear. There is not one cause that can produce a regression like the one we
are living through today.

I am not sure how far this or any regression is enabled by
blame.  Some say more mature people only lightly blame self and look for
ways to improve his or her situation. 
This is far better than the less mature people who blame others and then
feel entitled to be revengeful. 

The main point is that there is a reciprocal relationship
between people. Research in game theory and economics has demonstrated that we
are nice to the people who are nice to us and motivated to hurt those who hurt
us.

It seems clear that the more people feel the lack of ability
to alter their situation and blame others for it, the more likely they are to
commit revengeful acts. Just in the last month we have seen four separate mass
murders resulting in the death of a record (38) innocent people.  Those who “feel” wronged by society can
also “feel” entitled to seek revenge and in the above cases killed innocent
people. 

More mature leaders are mindful of the dynamics creating
different levels of functioning within the group.  They are able to take positions to mange the emotions by
being more of a calm presence. This gives people the idea and the feeling that
there is an opportunity to be heard and respected. 

Shake the Globe: Thoughtful Courage and Actions in
Difficult Times

When people are deeply emotional they seek emotional
answers. This path results in more primitive behavior by the people most in
need of help and least able to accept help. Yet as noted, when the group is
confused there is also the opportunity for new courageous voices to
arise.  If the voice is one that inspires optimistic thinking then there
is genuine hope that the anxiety of confusion will be subdued.  As Blythe
notes throughout her book, to arise as a leader now requires that leaders be
willing to Shake the Globe.

 

Another of Blythe’s hypotheses is that market laws are
universal.  We know that both people and markets can undergo unexpected
changes. We also know there are paths to a brighter future. For example
she sees the opening of markets through free enterprise as promoting
opportunities for woman and other minorities. Change one significant factor in
the system and you see a tipping effect. Educate woman and you see lower
fertility, reduced maternal and child mortality and better heath. 

One way of seeing how social systems operate is to look at
the numbers and see what happens when change occurs. Her book contains many
examples of how one change influences other positive changes.  Another one
of my favorite examples from her book is that research shows that companies
that have several vs. one-woman board member, report better financial
results.  Clearly leaders need courage to risk doing something new based
on a deep value like equal opportunity. 

There is much to be gained in using relationship knowledge
in order to be a more effective and efficient leader in an
organization.   As the world changes ever more quickly, many people
become stressed and are unable to adapt well to the new conditions. 
Adapting often demands changes of habits, and assumptions. People are looking
for ways to think well and make better decisions.  Therefore a book like Shake
the Globe offers us a broader view and reasons for courageous optimism for
those willing to both fit in and stand out. 

My belief is that it often helps people to comprehend the
future by learning about the past. So whenever one can take the time to learn
more about their personal history, strengths and sensitivities, it is possible
to deeply address and improve our ways of relating to others.

Dr. Bowen used to advise people to get to know all the
living members of their family. If they could do it there was no better way to
gain emotional maturity.  Due to
variations in functioning among family members one can easily gain broader
knowledge of human functioning and compassion for self and of course others.  

Another plus is that going to visit your family mindfully can
be a kind of free group therapy. They can and often do tell you stores of the
unresolved emotional issues and of course of what they and others really think
about you and your line of the family.   This kind of effort is only for
the courageous who would like to have a stronger emotional backbone. 
President Obama took seriously the idea of getting to know his extended family
and it served him well.  If you read his book you may laugh, as I did, at
the somehow recognizable misadventures in getting to know his extended family.

 

Interview with Blythe
McGarvie

 

Andrea: Sometimes it is hard to see what our early
life in our family has to do with our leadership skills.  But just
suppose you could go back in time and imagine coaching your parents to resolve
one of their conflicts that you might have been caught up in? 

I ask this because I wondered what it might be like to have
learned enough from the past, that you know what you would say to your Mom or
to your Dad today, to enable them to cooperate and be more understanding of the
other one’s position?

Blythe: Coach them to have been a more effective
team?

Andrea: Yes, to be a more effective team, because
conflict that undermines people’s functioning goes on all the time. People
often tell me they feel like a child with their boss and there seems little
they can do to alter the relationship with them.  But there are other
times when individuals do have the courage to step up and enter into a
different kind of conversation with the boss or the authority/parental figure.
Often this happens after they have made some kind of change in relationships
with their parents or other authority figures.

 Blythe: I think if I were coaching my mother
and father as if they were working with me in an organization I would have a
goal to enable a more effective team.  If they had this conflict dynamic
going on, and needed to work together I wouldn’t tell them anything at first.
But I would ask a lot of questions and listen.  After the questions would
be some kind of challenge to try and get them to look at the situation
differently.

I think with my father, I would say, “Can you try to speak
up instead of avoiding the situation.  If you just do what you want to do
and avoid it and go away for a day, the problem can get worse.” I might remind
him of how he would say, “I’m just going to go to the cleaners, hon,” and then
he’d take the kids with him, and we’d all go to different places with him and
we’d be gone for sever hours instead of one hour.  All this to just get out of the house, we’d go to the bank,
the cleaners, maybe the park, you know, everything. 

In the past I would have gone along. Now I would be more up
front, and I’d say, “Help manage the expectations of your teammate who knows
you’re not just going to the cleaners. 
Can you do more to manage expectations?  Go ahead, speak up, and
confront the situation.  If she (my Mother) says, “No, I don’t want you to
do that, I want you to stay home and repair the garage” then say “I’ll get to
that,” or “I understand your needs, but these are some things I need to do.” So
I would encourage my father to speak up, manage his teammate’s expectations,
and maybe just observe a little bit more if he wanted to achieve things a
little sooner in life rather than later in life.

On my mother’s side, and I know because she struggled with
the principals of her schools for years, it was hard for her not to react to
them and say things she wished she had not said.  Therefore she had a lot
of difficult relationships. So seeing that I’d say, “Mom, you were never cared
for as a child, you were shunted off to a boarding school in high school,”
which she always thought was the peak of her life.

On the one hand she thought that the best time of her life
was in high school at this Catholic boarding school because she had some
stability there. But there were a lot of difficult issues for her.  By
observing how she was caught reacting to her history I would say, “Mom,
work on yourself, go to therapy, recognize some of the issues that you’re
carrying forward, as you have a lot to give. Old stuff gets in your way. 
You are a brilliant storyteller. You have a way of teaching that people want to
learn from you. They want to hear your stories.” I know because I used to
listen to the stories that she told me in that double bed until I fell asleep.

So I would be positive and also alert her to the power of
her negative reactivity.  I would try to be wise in how I advised her to
try to change these reactions. I might say, “Just keep your temper out of it,
because you have so many sharp barbs, that people shrink away from you. 
If you can drop the barbs, and just show the sweetness and the passion in a
positive manner instead of a negative manner, it would be a lot more
productive, and you might even be happier.”

Andrea: She might not need therapy if you talk to her
like that.

Blythe: In fact at one point we did finally convince
her to go to therapy, and she trusted the Catholic priest.   However
this is a story with a sad ending. I still have hard time believing it. It took
us years to convince her to go therapy, and she finally went to the Catholic
priest, and she came home from her first session and she said, “He didn’t
listen to me.” And we said, “C’mon Ma, he must have listened to you, this is
his profession.” “He fell asleep!” He fell asleep and she never went back.

Andrea:  It is hard to convince people to do
something for you and have it work out in a positive way.   The
majority of successful women whose stories I’ve heard seem to have almost
always related well to their fathers and were not interested in their mothers’
professions. Most did not have early fantasies of wanting to stay home and have
children either.  Often career-oriented woman saw their mother as not
really being as happy as she might have if she could have been out in the world
doing her own thing.

Blythe: In my case my mother was out in the world.
She was working when I was age 3 – I got dropped off at the nursery school and
she went to teach the 3rd grade.  She was never a housekeeper.
We had clothes from the dryer in a big pile on the dining room table. She would
say when I was very young, “Blythe, let me tell you a secret.  Hang up clothes, the wrinkles fall out,
don’t leave them on the dining room table.” And when we lived in Virginia with
lots of humidity, she said. “You never have to iron clothes if you hang them
right up.”  So she was not a very good housekeeper.

My father was the one who was at home more.  He was a
college professor, and so he had more flexibility. I used to joke, “Dad, you only
have to be at college 7 hours for an entire week.” He said, “Oh, but I have
meetings and I have office hours.” I said, “Yes, but technically, if I
understand your class schedule, you only have to be there 7 hours a week,
that’s a pretty good job!”

Now he worked a couple of other side jobs when we were
young, to make more money, and they were able to save. They were thrifty, very
thrifty. My parents bought three apartment buildings at different times and
then sold them.  That was their retirement money.   My Dad would
shovel the coal at the first apartment building – so not only raising a family,
working 2 jobs, getting his master’s, but also shoveling the coal so the
tenants would have heat in that six-flat apartment house.

Both of them worked hard. I actually admired that Mother was
able to raise a family, work hard, and get her master’s in English. She went to
school at night. On Wednesday night, when she went to class, Dad would throw in
the chicken, boil it, and that’s when we ate boiled chicken. He’d throw out the
broth, and we’d eat an hour-boiled chicken, not knowing we should have been
drinking the broth too.

Andrea: So you learned early on from career-oriented
parents. How about your grandmother?

Blythe: My maternal grandmother did not work when I
was around but she married several times. She had worked for over 33
years at the Western Union until reaching retirement. My grandmother was such a
strong force in our life, and was around for us when mom was working. 

Andrea: It is worthwhile to see the social forces
operating differently on both your mom’s and your grandparents’ generations.
There were many different career paths taken by the women in your family. 
 How helpful were their experiences in your finding your path?

Blythe: I think it depends, like so many things – you
may say, “Oh I saw this parent work but I wish they had been home more” and
maybe then you rebel. Or you can decide to stay home because that is what you
want to do and that makes sense to you.

Andrea: Did you rebel or did you do what made sense
to you?

Blythe: I don’t think I had to be as rebellious. My
younger sister was the rebellious one. My mother doted on Brian, my older
brother. My father doted on me. And then Marge was kind of like,
whatever.  In fact, Mother used to say, “Brian, you’re going to be a
doctor. Blythe, you’re going to be a CPA because you’re very analytical, good
with numbers, you like to count things. You count all of your Halloween candy
and have it all organized. I can’t steal Snickers from you, I can steal from
Brian and Marge, but you always know exactly how much Halloween candies you
have.”

I remember that, I thought, “Yes, I know, metrics, this is
how you get things done.” And then Mom would say, “Marge, I don’t know what
you’re going to be.” Today Marge still does not have a satisfying life. 
She hasn’t worked consistently in many years.  She has floated around
different jobs the few times she decided to work. So I think it’s very
interesting when you think about that family dynamic.

When my parents first married, they lived on the North side
of the city, because my father lived on the North side.   My mother lived on the South
side. My maternal grandmother, who was very strong said, “You live on the North
side, but you should be near me.” So a year later they moved to the South side.

Another funny thing was how my mother and father made decisions:
“We want to have all of our children’s names start with the letter ‘B’.” Just
some kind of code – Brian – unusual names – Blythe, they wanted a more unusual
name than Brain as it turned out there were more Brians than my mother
realized.

My grandmother said, “You had a daughter and didn’t name her
after me?” So the third child, the second daughter Marjorie was named after my
grandmother.  She was a major matriarch in our whole family. She died at
age 73.  But even when I was in my 20s and I had a couple of weeks’
vacation, I would make sure I visited my grandmother. She had a condo in
Florida.

I went to see her a) because it was warm, and b) she was
fun! The only time in my life I took Prozac was one day I was depressed because
I had 4 days in Florida and I didn’t have much vacation. I said,
 “Grandma, it’s my 3rd day on vacation, it’s rained, I’m going
back without a tan. I’m so depressed.” “Take half of my pill,” she said. She
gave me half of her pill, and a half-hour later she said, “Why don’t you take
an umbrella and go walk in the rain?” So I felt like Gene Kelly walking in the
rain. And I came back and I thought, “Never take these drugs again.”  I
never want to walk in the rain! And I hate getting wet!

But my grandmother was fun! You know, she’d give us sips of
the foam on her beer. Every Friday night they used to have beer parties, all
the relatives and she said, “Here just take the foam, that’s not dangerous.”
She was just fun.

Andrea: I really appreciate, and I wish we could hear
more from you, but our time is running down.  In the spirit of openness, I
would say if you have someone in your family who can be fun even a bit
rebellious, I don’t think you take life so seriously, or rules so seriously, or
authority so seriously.

Blythe: Sometimes you’re forced to make up your own
rules. Grandmother was forced to make up her own rules, because her husbands
were not functioning well. So she had to support herself and her
daughter. 

Andrea: She may have influenced you to be a good
entrepreneur?

Blythe:  Three and a half years ago, I started
my own company, so I guess I am.

Andrea: Now you can make up your own rules.

Blythe: But then I have to follow them. But that’s a
very good point. I still do a monthly status report, even though I report to no
one.  I write down my monthly status report, and at the end of the month I
look at what I’ve done, check it off, and then I create the next monthly status
report.

Andrea: Like a budget?

Blythe: Like a budget – to me, it’s my rules, I have
to know:

Am I working toward the right things?

Am I using my time wisely?

Andrea: The main point that I get out of your story
is, that your quest to enable people to function better, may arise, partially
at least, from watching the dilemma that was unsolved between your parents.

Blythe: Absolutely, I think it’s grounded in that.

Andrea: Every person who is a leader has to deal with
their followers and has to enable them to function better.

Blythe: If you have people working for you, they
don’t work for you, you work for them. You have to figure out how to get them
to use their potential the best way– and hopefully efficiently, so that you
don’t lose the opportunity – because we’re only on this earth for a short time
and you have to focus on what you can do to bring out people’s potential today,
not tomorrow. 

Andrea: Thank you for this interview and for your
time and good thinking.

---

[1]
Fit
In, Stand Out: Mastering the FISO FACTOR -… by Blythe McGarvie

[2]
Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View by Stanley
Milgram

[3]
The
Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by
Philip Zimbardo

---

Incorporating Fairness into Game Theory and
Economics, Matthew Rabio http://www.jstor.org/pss/2117561

Transitions and Breaking Family Patterns

Blog March 8th 2009

There are many transitions going on today affecting individuals all around the globe. The economy is provoking what some say is the end of the era of leveraging and unrestrained greed by some people. Global restructuring is underway. This is a time that requires a shift to a more realistic look at today’s problems. There is no hiding from the fact that we (and our leaders) are struggling to understand and solve these problems in order to make a thoughtful transition to the future.

Now that I have finished writing the interviews of leaders in Mexico, there are many topics I would like to consider from a Bowen theory viewpoint. There may be questions that each of you would like to see addressed and I encourage you to post your questions on the right column on this site. But for the time being, I will continue to interview accomplished people, noting how their family experience may have contributed to where they are today.

As more individuals clarify how they have found a new direction, the crowd itself can become wiser.

As fate would have it I was fortunate to be able to interview Sylvia Lafair whose book, Don’t Bring It to Work: Breaking the Family Patterns That Limit Success was published this month, March 3, 2009. I think you will enjoy her book and her interview. I found Sylvia’s effort to bring greater awareness of family patterns to motivated people, encouraging and useful. She offers a unique map of the way family and work systems mutually influence our ways of functioning.

At this same time I was also given two other books. Both authors are friends of mine. I read and enjoyed these books on my ski vacation. Since I know each of the authors I can include a bit about their family stories plus give you a quick look at their contributions. I’ll focus on those in the next blogs I write.

At the broadest level, Blythe McGarvie’s new book, Shaking the Globe: Courageous Decision-Making in a Changing World (Jan 27, 2009) is filled with interesting facts about her close up view of what it takes to be a central part in the changing world. Blythe is a special leader who allows us to learn from her first hand account of what it takes to be a responsible decision maker. You can get a lot of ideas from her book, whether or not you are not traveling the globe or working for international companies. Even if we stay at home, it is important to understand the forces operating on all of us as a part of the world community.

I met Bythe in 2004 when she came to the first leaders’ meeting that I had convened. She was curious about the ideas in Bowen theory. Some Bowen concepts seem to fit with what she has referred to as the FISO Factor. Differentiation, the concept about how people are able to separate out a self from their family of origin, was useful to her in developing a way of thinking about how people can maintain their ideas and still be a well functioning member of various groups. Her first book, Fit In, Stand Out: Mastering the FISO FACTOR – The Key to Leadership Effectiveness in Business and Life explores the numerous challenges one faces when one decides to be for self and for the organization.

Jeffrey Miller’s book looks at another level of functioning for people at work, the relationship system, the juice that runs the system. It’s often harder for people to see the relationship process and how anxiety functions in organizations, but Jeffery can see it. Most people find it easier by far to focus on individuals as saints or sinners. I have known Jeffrey for many years through the Family Center’s meetings. The Anxious Organization: Why Smart Companies Do Dumb Things, is now in its second edition. As the title suggests, it is for people looking for ways to be more aware of how relationships fall apart in a crazy system and the consequences of those relationship disruptions on the organization.

Jeff’s theme of staying calm, clear and collected while understanding the magic of process sheds another bit of light on interactions at work.

Each of these books focuses on the overall point that the more we can observe, the more knowledge we have, the greater the opportunity to make the world a better place. And, each of these books provides the reader with a “can do” approach to solving issues. Each one helps us look at a part of the system or part of the global elephant.

I first learned about or “met” Sylvia by reading the letters to the editors in The Harvard Business Review. The January 2009 issue was focused on Leadership. I was not expecting to see the word “family” much less “family as a system” mentioned. Much to my surprise, someone had written a letter encouraging people to see awareness of family patterns as a way of enabling profound change in work situations.

Hooray! I almost jumped up and clicked my heels but I was wearing boots. Being somewhat grounded I just paused and wondered who was this person shining a sliver of light on the basics of human behavior? HBR is a professional journal that seemed to me to stay away from family ideas. But perhaps no one had written a compelling piece for them? So I asked myself,, who is this person that can write such a concise note and get it printed?

Of course I wrote to say “WOW” and “thank you”. I thought, here is a woman, brave and clever enough to thread the needle between one’s personal life and one’s business roles. She wrote back immediately telling me about her training with Iván Böszörményi-Nagy and her great respect for Murray Bowen. She sent me a galley copy of her book. I thought it would be interesting to read her book and to interview her to see how her family life had impacted her professional focus.

It is long jump, for most people, to see relationships between the impact of family life and how he or she functions at work. Was it Descartes who said that one’s personal and family life are to be kept separate? No, it was not his doing. He simply rationalized the separation of mind and body, giving us all good reason to put subjective data into a pile that would be safe for scientists to ignore for centuries.

Needless to say there is long history of compartmentalized observations about human behavior that we all live with today. Human resource people are stuck trying to understand human behavior surrounded by all kinds of rules and regulations about privacy and family life that are barriers to understanding human functioning.

There are also many enterprising people, usually away from the workplace, who have found ways to bring up family dynamics, in seeking to understand human behavior. Many of them are my friends and colleagues.

I am pleased to have found a new voice who has been able to engage corporate leaders with the compelling message that family awareness and knowledge enables people to increase needed skills at work. In her book, Sylvia offers practical steps to enable anyone to be a more flexible individual. Her thesis is that the silent and heavy burden of family baggage can be lifted if one makes the commitment to learn to 1) observe, 2) understand and 3) transform repetitive patterns of behavior. She has seen that it is the automatic patterns that are out of our awareness that drive our reactions to one another. She does not wonder whether we have free will, but whether we are awake or willing to wake up and thereby be freer?

When I called Sylvia, I started by noting that both of our mentors, Bowen and Nagy, were probably up in heaven laughing about how we found one each other. She said she wondered if people ever really die? What a wonderful question about the shadows cast on future family members. In both families and organizations the roles people play are remembered and influence the future long after people have died.

Let’s take both Darwin and Lincoln who coincidently share the same birthday. They influence us in terms of our thinking but may not require us to play out a parent-child role with them. People die but their ideas and even their functional footprints linger on in these newly recreated systems of relationships. The closer people are, the greater the influence in some interdependent way. And to Sylvia’s point, we do take this family experience and reenact it, in some form, at work. If so, then the challenging question is how does one step off this family stage, which has been so artfully constructed?

First, as she notes, you have to see it. Being an observer takes practice. Sylvia’s book tells us about her ideas and how her solutions have been useful to people. Many people fail to see and deal with life patterns. If it is hard to see then you can understand how much harder the process is to change.

Sylvia’s hypothesis is that people are more motivated to work on understanding and observing their family patterns, because doing so has a beneficial outcome on their paycheck. Sylvia’s book is not about psychotherapy; it is about how to be more effective at work. She describes three patterns (gender, race and cultural background) to show how people are sensitized to understand the world around them.

You know the gender stereotypes: the strong silent type and the woman warrior, or the big shot and the modern goddess or perhaps the jock and the cheerleader. There is great deal of research about how our behavior is influenced by these kinds of stereotypes.

One compelling example of this is when older people heard the word “old person” whispered as they walked down a hallway, that whisper affected the speed of their walk. Our behavior can be affected by the social situation and the way we are seen or believe we are seen by others. The way we behave in social situations is vulnerable to social pressure and to very old rules of thumb that tell us how to react.

By looking closely at the influence of stress on individual’s behavior or clues activating an old program, Sylvia constructed her initial “types” or roles: the persecutor, the avoider, and the denier. Her thesis is that due to the pressure of survival and family loyalty, people have invisible parent child and sibling roles. Examples of these abound: the smart, pretty, weak, funny, bad, compliant, good, industrious, or even overly-social person.

These personality characteristics are short cut ways to understand who the other is and what impact their personality might have on us. We do, after all, react to the people we are with. Some of us are at ease with the funny person, and find the weak or “bad” person has the power to makes us crazy.

There it is, the parent-child dynamic being played out at work. People who participated in her program (The Total Leadership Connections) saw how they stepped into stereotypical roles and further, that there was something they could do to step outside those roles. She eventually developed thirteen descriptive roles to identify how patterns automatically play out. We are “given” or take a role and play it out in an old emotional play.

All this seems to go on without out our advice or consent. For those who would like all of this to stop or at least change a little, Sylvia offers a way to explore one’s family roots to see what might be influencing our functioning. She has developed a tool which she refers to as Sankofa Mapping. As she said, “this tool enables people to heal the past to free the present.” The map is her way of understanding three generations of family members and how they relate to one another over time.

One of my interests has been in emotional blindness. I wonder why people can’t see what they are doing? Family diagrams sometimes help and sometimes they are like so much dust before a steamroller of anxiety. I give a lot of credit to Sylvia’s ability to relate well to people so they feel comfortable seeing their map. Psychological information is not just information. It is information that can carry a charge. It is often hard for people to hear personal information.

Having a good coach who is able to stay with you while you learn makes a big difference in how well people can use the Sankofa Map. Sylvia has her way of reaching people with an explanation of how psychological blindness comes to be. She has a track record that people find useful. In addition she frames her ideas in ways that allow people to see how they have taken on a particular “role” in the family and how this role has come to dominate his or her response when working at a job.

Working still requires interacting and interacting can become a very automatic or old habit. Before one can develop a new sense of self, they have to be able to see where they are and the impact they are having on themselves and others. Some leaders are “born observers.” Often, I have noted in the history of leaders, that something happens early on that makes people better observers of relationships.

Always curious, I asked Sylvia how she thought her family life might have influenced her career and her leadership abilities.

 

Sylvia Lefair’s Interview

SL: I was fortunate to be raised in a family that knew how to encourage dialogue. Even as a child we were allowed to have a viewpoint and people did not move away from conflict.

Conflict was not seen as a bad thing. And so I think you could say I was a kind of gentle rebel as the youngest in my family. I have a brother who is five years older. He was slated to become a doctor from early on.

My mother, Rebecca, was born into the middle of a large family, the sixth of nine children. I see her as a gentle rebel. She was not a strict feminist but she was for women becoming aware of being free to choose a life. Since my mother wanted to explore, she did not marry until she was 24. She was a great influence on me until her death, when I was in my forties. I was also influenced by the social consciousness of both my parents.

I still recall as a child driving through some very poor areas and my parents saying things like, “We want to make a difference. We do not want to accept this kind of poverty.” This idea of making a difference stayed with me.

My father was the oldest of three brothers. His mother was having a lot of trouble getting pregnant and went to a spa in Baden-Baden Germany which she thought made the difference in her getting pregnant. A few years ago I went there and thought, “Oh my God this is part of my family heritage”. It is interesting how being there made me feel in better contact with my grandmother.

My grandfather started a family business named Lafair. It was a clothing accessories factory. His three sons worked there and there was always tension among the family in the business. I remember the conflict between my father and his brothers. Since I have a love of family business, perhaps you could speculate that in some ways I entered the area of family business to heal my own family experience.

Unfortunately my father died of a heart attack when I was fourteen. One day we were a family and the next day we were preparing for his funeral. My mother had the ability to carry on and keep us all going. Early on in my work with families I worked with one family that had a similar conflict between the brothers after the father’s death. I told them about my own experience in the hope that they could make a different choice.

AMS: Are you saying you look at what happens to us and see that often we learn from pain how to solve future issues? Do we think that we learn not to make the same mistakes that were made either early in our lives or in a previous generation?

SL: We are all standing on the past. We have to see the patterns so that we do not carry these disappointments forward into the current work situation. I saw my sensitivity in the family business and was able to use this to enable others to see. My motto is: Go back, learn and go forward. We learn to stay too much in the present. We are not learning well enough from the past.

With my husband I decided to change my work from therapy to strategic planning. I had to learn to change the language so people could understand the past. My first goal is to meet people where they are. It took years of trial and error to not let words in psychotherapy, like projection, slip out into the conversation. If I used one of these words, people would hold out mental garlic as though I were a vampire.

AMS: So you are saying that people tell us their story and we have to be able to relate to them so they can understand their story?

SL: I saw a situation today in which a woman’s family had adopted a foster child and when her son was ready to adopt she became fearful. It took her awhile to see how her old family situation was affecting her in the present. Of course she knew she had to make some sacrifices in her childhood when this foster child was in her family. But she was not at all aware that this might influence her NOW. She thought it would not bother her because that child was only in her family for a few years.

I encouraged her to think about it. Eventually she was able to share her early experience with her son. This also influenced the way she worked with people. She admitted that she was sensitive to people saying they might not be there forever. If she felt people were not loyal she would be more critical of them.

AMS: How are you brought in to work? Is it by individuals or by companies?

SL: Usually someone refers us to one person in a company, and then we begin to work long term with the company on how people are making decisions in the work place.

AMS: As you help them see their roles, it appears you clearly see people as being on a continuum. In other words, the roles people become stuck in can be and are transformed.

SL: People are so complicated. They are far beyond one role. I call it strength training to gain more flexibility. We also have about 12 professional trainers in our group. Very few come from the therapy world. The language is so different. The essence is that the way out is to become a better observer and to see how these patterns come to be. We have several programs to enable people to do their Sankofa map. We do not put people in the same group if they work together. Work colleagues do not need to hear personal information. I think it is important for people to feel safe when they tell their personal story to others.

AMS: Perhaps you might be more capable of leadership because you survived the loss of your father at an early age. SL: I know his death had an impact on me. For example, after 9/11 I wanted to go and help but it was impossible. I was upset and my husband reminded me that this could be due to the feelings I had when I was fourteen and not able to do much for my father. His comment made a difference. I also knew that during that time after my father’s death my mother was able to hold us together.

AMS: Perhaps I might think of your mother as a non-anxious presence.

SL: There are many stories in my book of how people discover the way real events in their lives have made them more vulnerable. But once they see it they can alter their responses.

AMS: I hear you saying that there is a great deal of hope in knowledge of how the past has influenced us. I also see my time with you is up. Thank you so much. I enjoyed being able to talk with you and hope we can continue in the future.

Sabina Berman Interview

Sabina Berman is Mexico’s most commercially successful and critically acclaimed playwright. She has won the Mexican National Theatre Prize an unprecedented four times.  She is also a journalist and has written film scripts, poetry and prose, in addition to her work for the stage. Her collection of interviews with Mexican women in positions of power, Mujeres y poder, won the 2000 National Journalism Award. She recently wrote director Jorge Fons’ new movie about the murders on the border of Juarez and the adaptation of “The History of Love” for director Alfonso Cuarón.

 

Maria Bustos was driving me through Mexico City on the way to see Sabina Berman.   My goal was to learn about Sabina Berman’s early family life and how her family might have influenced her decision to become a playwright. 

 

I was musing about the role of the artist to provoke and educate, considering the big picture and the role of playwrights in society.

 

The artist gives us a way to see the themes of our culture which most of us are not capable of seeing.  Deeper than the cultural influences of a specific time, a few artists penetrate deeply into the relationships process. Like Shakespeare, they can show us how people manipulate others , leading to confusion, polarities and paradoxes.    

 

 

In Hamlet, Shakespeare pulls back the curtain and shows us a grown child caught in the parental triangle. The audience can see and feel the bare bones of emotional confusion and the problems created in taking sides, leading to the essential question, to be or not to be?  After reading Hamlet, few will question the importance of being a well defined self.  Most of us can see the difficulty, in the throes of deep emotions, to know and declare who we are to important others. 

 

Who among us would not like to understand how to be free of these emotional quagmires? Yet we cannot free ourselves without understanding the deep and often unseen pull of relationship connections. It takes disciplined effort to be mindful of how our family history may be impacting our sensitivities and decisions.  We are tuned to react to important others, and when the pressure increases on us or them, our behavior can unfold in very automatic ways, often beyond our ability to control.  Do you ever wonder what made you say that or do this?

 

As to Shakespeare’s family life we cannot know what influenced him and how those influences may be reflected in his plays.  Did he just have the right genes for being creative? What about the influence of his parents or the social and political environment on his thinking and writing?  We will never know how he reacted to the expectations and pressures from his family or those around him.  We do not know if he liked his grandparents or used them to deal with his parents. 

 

But we can have a more complete picture of the lives and influences, and even genetic make up, of current leaders in many different fields.  As more people, like Sabina Berman, are willing to take the bold step of reflecting on their lives openly, more knowledge will be available about the process of managing one’s self in social networks.

 

I am grateful to Sabina Berman, a contemporary playwright, for her willingness to give us her impression of the influence of family relationships on her development.   I was curious about her life and how she developed her plays, which often combine both story-telling and ethical questioning.   Would Berman consider her plays mostly entertaining or did she purposely provoke with the intent to educate?  Would I remember to ask this kind of question when I met her?

 

Consider the predicament I was facing.  In one of her plays, Yankee, Berman focuses on interrogators and the interrogated.[1]  Now I had to ask her questions. What kind of an education would I get?  No doubt she would see my biases: my evolutionary take on the forces behind human behavior and my hope that knowledge of family emotional systems would enable people to see the importance of being a self. 

  

As an interviewer my task is to ask questions that will open doors to new ways of thinking.  These exchanges can also promote the ability of the interviewee to see his or her story differently.   Each of our stories changes depending on who is asking the questions and how those questions are posed.   If the interviewer asks more open-ended questions, the person interviewed has more freedom to clarify points or to deepen his or her understanding of the emotional forces that operate in his or her own life. 

 

David Slone Wilson, in his essay, “Evolutionary Social Construction”, notes that we constantly construct and reconstruct our selves to meet the needs of the situations we encounter.[2]  He believes we do this with the guidance of our memories of the past and our hopes and fears for the future.

 

With this big picture in mind I was ready to meet Sabina Berman. 

Maria Bustos and I arrived at Berman’s apartment building and took an elevator, which opened into her apartment.  A smiling Sabina Berman welcomed us.  Immediately I found her to be very open, disarming and delightful.  She is a very accomplished woman, and I hope you will enjoy how she tells her story and questions me.

---

 Interview with Sabina Berman

 

 

AMS:  I have a couple of questions about the bridge between family life and one’s life direction but please feel free to go in any direction you choose.

 

I was wondering how early could you remember if and when you were just slightly different, thinking different, doing things a little bit different from others. Then I was wondering if or how did your family react to you?  I was also wondering if there were other people in your family who have been artists or who have stood out who have been leaders? 

 

SB:  As I remember, I did anything to be different and be noticed. I liked to see people react.  I was a very good student but at the same time, I was said to have behavioral problems.  I wanted to get the attention of my peers.  And I could sacrifice my teacher’s attention if I could get my peers to pay attention. 

 

I am not sure why but I am the third child in the family.

 

AMS: How many were there all together?

 

SB:  Four. There were two older brothers and a younger sister. 

 

AMS:  So you are the oldest daughter?

 

SB:  But I was really depressed by my brothers.

 

AMS: How much older are they?

 

SB:  One is four years older and the other one is seven years older. 

 

AMS:  And your mother didn’t rescue you or help you… 

 

SB: She was too busy.  There were too many children and she worked. 

 

My mother, always she told me the story of how I was born.  Said she wanted to have a girl.  Said she was going to take time off just to have a girl.  She didn’t work for a year.  This seemed very important to her in retrospect, because she worked all the time, and she liked working.

 

AMS:  What kind of work?

 

SB:  After I was born, she became a psychoanalyst.  Before that she was a

 Criminologist.  She’s really is very happy.  This brings me to your second question.  My father was an engineer. They were both born in Poland and met in Mexico.   My father was thirty and she was eighteen and they married.  They did not really tell me the story of how they met.

 

AMS:  Maybe romance wasn’t that important to your mother to tell you the story of how we fell in love?

 

SB:  Our family is very intense, very Polish.  My parents clashed and then they got divorced.  Perhaps that is maybe why I don’t remember.

 

AMS:  Sometimes the fighting creates enough distance to mange the perceived or real difference between the parents.  And then other times, no, it is too painful and the parents just drift apart.  Often married people continue the relationships and just find other women, other men, other relationships, or they just bury themselves in work. 

 

In trying to understand relationship dynamics often we see that if parents fight there is less focus on the child and the child can grow up without as much involvement in the life of the parents.

 

SB:  Absolutely…absolutely!  They gave me very attention but wanted me to work hard. The message in which they agreed was very simple and clear.  My father use to say, “The night is young”.

 

 Sometimes I wanted to complain that I was working too hard.  I might be playing tennis five hours every day because he wanted me to be a champ.

 

My brother was a champ.  And the expectation was there when I went home.  If I complained he would say, “the night is young”.  So I worked it out and I mean, I really, really worked. Overall it was very useful!

 

Being an immigrant, especially in a country like Mexico you have to fit in.  There is a very open door, but once in the society is closed to immigrants. That secret has to be erased.  So my parents were very clear, you have to work to earn your place in society, you have to earn it.  So I go back to work as being a central value in the family.

 

AMS:  Were your parents escaping from Poland during the war?

 

SB:  My father came here because there was a lot of opportunity to study and work. This was somewhat before the war. 

 

AMS: About what year would that have been?

 

SB:  I think it was nineteen forty or thirty-nine.

 

AMS:  Did he sense that Poland was becoming a very unfriendly environment?

 

SB:  Yes, and that he should get out.

 

AMS:  So he could anticipate the future.  Did he come with any of his family?

 

SB:  No one, nobody!

 

AMS:  So who stayed behind?

 

SB:  You want to look at photographs?

 

This is my father and this is his mother. As you see, he stands out. He’s like a self-made man.  He’s very talented and very determined.

 

AMS:  And this is your father and the siblings?  Is he the oldest in his family?

 

SB:   I am not sure. He was the oldest child, yes.  There were five of them.  This one is the uncle. He came later to Mexico but most of them died.

 

AMS:  Were they in the concentration camps?

 

SB:  My father does not know.   He never got to know where they were.  The only one who escaped that he knows of was this sister. She came to live in New York.  Even thought she went through the concentration camp, she is very cultured. 

 

AMS:  It seems your father anticipated the future and was saved from the fate that happened to most of his family.  Yet he did not keep in contact with anybody except his one sister and his uncle?

 

SB:  Yes, as a matter of fact, he used the expression, “nobody survived” which was not precise.

 

AMS:  Perhaps it was too painful for him to look for these people.  He just assumed because of the tragedy that they were gone.  It can be just too hard to look.

 

SB:  No, I think his greatest love were his mother and grandmother who were dead.  The sister was not very much in his conscience.

 

AMS:  It’s interesting how he could escape and come here and then just make that assumption no one survives.

 

SB:  He looked for them when I was very young.  I only remember he told me that he went through the UNESCO.  He tried all that stuff you know that the Jews did during and after the war.

 

AMS:  But his uncle came here and found him?  And his sister later found him?

 

SB:  Yes

 

AMS:  How did they do it?

 

SB:  The uncle went through the war in the Polish resistance. His sister somehow escaped Auschwitz.  What she told me is that she had a machine gun, as a twelve year old.  She tried to join the resistance and they said, “you’re too young” but she had no home, she didn’t want to go back to Auschwitz so she continued following the people in the resistance until they said OK, you have the machine gun so we’re going to train you. 

 

Nevertheless, when I met her, the war had been too much and you could see that her image of herself was disturbed. She was very tortured, very resentful and always angry.  After the war she became a governess. 

 

AMS: What year did you met her?

 

SB:  I met her in 1990 or so when my sister and my cousins decided the new generation should have reunite. Then we learned that she hated my father.

 

AMS:  O yes the rise of sibling rivalry, which comes to us from Adam and Eve’s children.

 

SB:  My aunt felt that she deserved something because she went through the war.  My father didn’t believe so. Therefore it was very complicated.

 

AMS:  Yes, even birds have this problem.  They squabble in the nest and probably they also blame each other.  We may never know if they think about what they do. More than once I have wonder if people think much about one what they do to one another.

 

Birds push each other out of the nest in an effort get more food or attention if you will. Each mother and father have to decide how much should I give to these guys and how much for me. 

 

It was Robert Trivers who gets the credit for observing this common theme in social species. He developed the idea of parental investment and is one of the great names in evolutionary biology because of this.

 

The primitive question in social groups is, how much for the others and how much for me? It all boils down to is: “Am I going to survive or not.” 

 

Every family has this problem to solve. But if you go through a war or something horrendous like that it can be even worse.  And if you have Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome the effects of the war can linger for a long time complicating matters. 

 

Your aunt sounds like she went through a difficult period where it becomes almost impossible to keep herself going in a “normal” way. 

 

I saw this with my father who was an Intelligence Officer in the Second World War.  He was the first intelligence officer to fly in a B29s and gathered intelligence.  After a bombing raid they would exam the photographs and decided what were the targets that had been hit. Perhaps they guessed as to how many women and children may have been innocent bystanders of the war or they may not have wanted to know.   My father did a great job.  He got commendations and medals, but then after the war, he became a…

 

SB:  …a communist terrorist? 

 

AMS:  Close, he was a terrorist of some kind.

 

SB:  I’ll try not to, you know, to make a story.

 

AMS:  I will have to write that one if you will not.  But of course it influenced my life and my choice of career.  I needed to understand human behavior. 

 

SB: I was going to be a psychoanalyst but then I taught literature and became a writer.  I studied psychology and literature.

 

AMS:  And your mother was a psychoanalyst?

 

SB:  Yes

 

AMS:  And still is…  Where is she living?

 

SB:  In Mexico

 

AMS:  And how old is she?

 

SB:  Her name is Raquel Berman, Rachel in English. She’s 80

 

AMS:  Eighty, and she’s still a psychoanalyst.  That is wonderful. 

 

And your father?

 

SB:  He died

 

AMS:  What year?

 

SB:  1995

 

AMS:  And what did he die from?

 

SB:  Stroke

 

AMS:  So, very quickly?

 

SB:  No

 

AMS:  A stroke and then he suffered?

 

SB:  He lasted for seven years.

 

AMS:  Seven years

 

SB:  On and off, he was in and out of conscious.

 

AMS:  Did your mother look after him?  

 

SB:  No, they were divorced.

 

AMS:  Yes, that’s right they had the conflict, which didn’t help them. Then they found other people or they separated?

 

SB:  They separated and then they found other people then they went back to each other.

 

AMS:  Ah, that’s interesting.

 

SB:  They were embarrassed to tell us about this.   But they were seeing each other. But they didn’t go to live together.  They decided they could be lovers.

 

AMS:  So they never married anyone else?

 

SB:  No

 

AMS:  They had different relationships with people but nothing that really mattered as much as the fighting that they could have.  The fighting and the loving they could have with each other.  So when your father got sick, who took care of him?

 

SB:  We cooperated.  But my mother, no, she’s not that type.  My brothers and I were taking turns. 

 

AMS:  Who emerged as the primary caretaker?

 

SB:  My older brother moved to my father’s house.

 

AMS:  That’s how families are, eventually someone emerges and does what needs to be done, or things fall apart.  In well functioning families someone comes up to do the job.  If you don’t want to do the job, it’s ok because someone will come up and take the job.  How about your younger sister?

 

SB:  My younger sister and I are very good friends.  She lives in New York.

She immigrated to America but we talk on the phone at least one hour every day.

About every month I go to New York or she comes here.

 

AMS:  What does she do in New York?

 

SB:  She is writing now about Mexican American artist.  She has her PhD in philosophy of art.

 

AMS:  She is married with children?

 

SB:  She has two children. 

 

AMS:  And do you have children?

 

SB:  No I don’t.  She has two boys. They are fifteen and ten.

 

I never married by the civil law.  I’ve had three important men, in my life, so far.

 

AMS:  How about your two brothers?

 

SB:  My eldest brother never married.  My other brother married and had two children. The younger one died from a car accident three years ago.

 

AMS:  That’s devastating

 

SB:  Yes, his son was nineteen. The oldest one is a girl. She is very much like me.  She just finished at Harvard.  But she’s going to go into business instead of psychology.

 

AMS:  What will she know of your family? Your father’s family may be hard to find now.   He was not sentimental about his family but he treasured these pictures of his family. It sounds like he became a tough man.

 

Perhaps, we can speculate, he had to leave home at a too early age. When this happens it easy for people to become falsely over adequate. 

 

I don’t know if that happened with your father. But he seems to say, “I don’t need my family.”  I have heard many men say, “I don’t need my family.” “I can do everything myself.”

 

SB:  I think so. I didn’t know what words to use to describe it but he was distant,

perhaps he was even arrogant.   He was distant and he was disenchanted from all human kindness. 

 

He was not the life of the party but when he spoke his words were powerful.  He was such an anarchist. I use to laugh till I cried when he told me his morals about life.

 

AMS:  So he was an anarchist because of what he saw with the Nazi’s, that human nature is evil much of the time.

          

SB:  He saw that human nature could be molded to accept cruelty very easily.

 

AMS:  I understand, under the proper circumstances.  A book that looks at how people can be easily molded is “The Lucifer Effect” by Phillip Zimbardo.  He organized the prison experiment at Stanford University to understand how the Nazi’s could do what they did to the population.  He recruited normal college students and half of them were guards and half were prisoners. Within three days the prisoners had forgotten their names.  The guards were mean and oppressive, humiliating them taking away every shred of identity that they had.  So in three days, they had even forgotten their names. 

 

Amazed at this change Phillip Zimbardo brings his girlfriend to show her this amazing reaction. It was a version of what the Nazi’s would do.  And his girlfriend said, look if you carry this experiment out one more day, I will never see you again.  Not one more day.  Not in the name of science nothing.  It’s so horrible.

 

SB:  These kinds of traumas can last for a long time.  I had a cousin who was compassionate but he seemed very disenchanted, even though he became rich.  I remember once I was eight and came and stayed in his house. I saw he had a small room where he slept. I was surprise as every night he was sleeping with the light on.  I asked my father, isn’t he crazy?  He said that this was a useless word. His behavior was probably because he must have been very afraid.

 

I was so moved to imagine this guy being by himself, there alone without family, and being scared.  Even with his gun he was scared.   

 

My father could go on and just say things like that with a lot of insight about the very basic necessities of life.

 

You know it was not social skills at all. I think it was a way of being able to see himself in the person, on the other side.  He opened doors like this all the time.  We are the same. I recall him saying about a black man that he was so handsome.  It was not social skills it was the way of seeing himself on the other side. 

 

AMS:  To see the humanity…both positive and negative and not linger in a morbid way but to move on.  How did he earn a living? 

 

SB:  He was an engineer and later he built a screw factory. 

 

AMS:  What got him into a screw factory? 

 

SB: My father was fascinated by how machines worked.  He was a wonderful genius, very inventive but not so great as an administrator.

 

AMS:  Did he learn engineering in Poland?   

 

SB:  No, he came expressly to study here at seventeen. He went to the National University.

 

 

He falls in love with Lázaro Cárdenas, the president of Mexico at that time. He was a socialist. The first time he saw him talking in the downtown area, he was saying, we need to put the lights on all over the country. So my father became a young socialist in Mexico, even though he was Jewish. My father was always telling me, I’m saved as in this country I have a future

 

In fact what made my father decide to stay in Mexico was hearing the leader of the socialist party youth speak, The party was ruling Mexico and this leader was Jewish, and that made my father fall in love with the country. This young man’s family built this building. Then many years later I came here and I bought this apartment.  And still today over half of the floors in this building are owned by this man’s family.

 

AMS:  That’s a funny connection, a bit of synchronicity?   There is a great deal of interest in the unusual ways that we are connected to those who were of interest to our families. 

 

It seems your father is a very highly intuitive man.  He notices changes in society.  One clue, he’s pretty sure, two clues, yes, that’s it, he leaves Poland and shows an interest in changing society through socialism. He seems to say in his actions: “I don’t have to worry about this decision. I am going to move on to the next thing.” He makes a judgment, leaves Poland, comes to Mexico, become an engineer, and builds a factory and around thirty years of age he meets your mother.

 

SB:  No, he met my mother before he became the owner of his factory.  He meets my mother and then he has two children.  He knows he has to make more money and my mother, the daughter of an exiled entrepreneur, talks him in to building his own factory. So he builds a factory and they become rich. Sounds easy, and they used to say it was easy. 

 

 

AMS:  So after the two children, the boys are born he has a factory and then your mother is able to take off work for a year because she wants to have a girl.  Your Dad works harder and your Mom has time off.  That is my funny interpretation.

 

SB: It is funny, yes. Only it is only half true. My father expected to be the sole provider in the family. My mother worked out of her necessity to have her autonomous identity. Her words: autonomous identity.

 

Do you think she put the big pressure on him to be successful in order to have a girl?  And then when you’re born, the boys pick on you because you’re a girl?  It would kind of explain their picking on you.

 

SB:  I’m not sure why they pick on me? 

 

AMS:  Well, my daughter has two boys and then two girls and then a boy.  I had two brothers, younger.  So I picked on my brothers. 

 

Perhaps the overall explanation is that it is almost automatic for the oldest to pick on the youngest.  Men pick on women, some say because they are bigger and then they can control them and thereby have reproductive security. 

 

These picking on or controlling behaviors are an advantage in adulthood in managing self in a group, at least from an evolutionary perspective therefore as children we need to practice. 

 

Among my grandchildren I see how the girl wants to keep up with her brothers.  Before her younger sister was born she fit in with the boys by being a bit of a tomboy because she wants to be like them and they reject her and push her around. 

Now if I am there things change.  I take on the boys and demand respect for the girl or threaten to turn them upside down. Often the mother is so busy she doesn’t have time to really pay attention to this ongoing conflict.

 

I can also see how triangles play out. The two boys are natural allies. The girl is on the outside.  Without somebody who is going to run interference, the girl is going to get hammered.  In her case, as in yours she had a sister and now she has an ally.  

 

I’m not sure how much younger your sister is?

 

AMS:  Ok, that’s interesting.  So you had to manage much longer than my granddaughter.  She only had to wait two years for an ally.  You had to wait until you were five.  So you had to develop a lot of strategies to deal with these powerful boys.  I guess your mother went back to work after you were born?

 

SB:  Yes, but first she took another year off to nurse me and then she went back.

 

AMS:  And who was there in the house for you as when you were young and growing up?  Did they have a caretaker?

 

SB:  Yes, but they changed.

 

AMS:  So you found books?

 

SB: Right, I love books!

 

AMS:  Books, that’s what you found because you were good in school.

 

SB:  Well in my household, there was no option…you had to have good grades.

 

AMS:  To survive you have to be good at something. I’m a good tennis player, which helped me in school, as my grades were spotty, because I’m dyslexic.  I failed Spanish and Latin, as I could not repeat the proper sounds or words.  But a few teachers saw I had potential and encouraged me despite my learning disability. Sometimes people fit into the regiment of being good at school and they don’t develop their creative side.

 

SB:  Right

 

AMS:  What about you?  Did you have to develop a creative side or it just came?

 

SB:  I think I was very much by myself. I remember thinking about things that did not make sense.  I remember thinking about the Bible.  Many nights I was asking myself and asking God, is this justice? Is this a correct to think about men and woman?

 

First, he created man then woman.   I felt that was a way to show prejudice against women.  And there are no heroes in the Bible.  

 

AMS:  Yes, and you noticed that you had this in your family. There is an inequality because of the age and size of your father who is the dominant man, and then you see this inequality sanctioned in the Bible.

 

SB:  In this questioning state there is the beginning of my creativity. Different truths were presented which were not really true.  There were all these inconsistencies. 

 

I have to really think things out.  And maybe I’m like my father in some ways, as I always doubted that the authorities, the teachers, knew the real truth.

 

AMS:  That’s a wonderful thing.  There’s neurobiologist from Chili named Humberto Maturano and he says, “Question authority.”  Always seek more than one answer.  His contention was with increasing choices one’s brain becomes more creative, filling in the idea gaps with an artistic self.  To the artist often there is no ultimate truth just the momentary aha!  You were very young when you figured all this out.

 

SB:  I was very much aware of inconsistencies.  Americans seem to search for information, very factual, while Mexicans are leery at heart.  Mexico is a mixture. We come from Polish roots in addition.   Therefore I want the attention on the untruth, of the so-called truth.

 

AMS:  How did you develop this skill? Were you a good writer early on?  Did you write at eight or ten?  Did you write your own stories?

 

SB:  I wrote poetry. I love the technology of writing. You draw letters that are sounds that become words that become imaginary things in your mind. I’m still fascinated everyday when I write with written language.

 

AMS:  I see this playfulness with sounds early on in my little grandchildren.  The sound of the word becomes a joke because of the twist in how it’s perceived initially and then in what it becomes.  Is this what you’re thinking about how there is a twist in the meaning of words?

 

SB:  Yes, but also the word and its sound signify something greater or more natural.

 

 If I found a word or story I liked I would want to tell my father or want to tell my mother and then they went, “ah.” They were very positive. 

 

I use to come from school and tell them stories. I use to talk to my mother for an hour about stories that were completely false.  Now I know that she knew I was making things up but still she went “Ah.”

 

For me the big challenge was to make my mother and my father laugh.  They were always separate.

 

AMS:  Did you wanted to make them laugh and perhaps love one another?  Or just to make them happy for the moment.

 

SB:  To laugh and to love.   I have to joke.  People cannot change that much but they can laugh.

 

AMS:  So what you did with your parents, entertain them; you could do the rest of the world?  You could transfer that ability once you learned it from your built in audience.  Your parents were your first critics.  Fortunately they had a predisposition to admire you and appreciate your work.

 

SB:  Absolutely, I have to thank God for that.  My two parents, even though they weren’t with each other could appreciate the work.  I was not feeling guilt for their separation. They didn’t fight for me. My parents and sister were integrated as good objects inside of me.  I learned to fend for myself and although I was popular, I knew I had to do the work. 

 

AMS:  You have the courage to perform and give others your truth. You seem to be saying this truth does not have to be the real truth, it’s just is your own truth.

 

SB:  You know something I am having an insight. I cannot tolerate when there is somebody who needs negative energy.  I’m not the person who can perform like that.  I’m going just be very frank about it and say I don’t want to work with you.  But I’ve been wondering for a couple of years, why I’m so mean to those who try to influence me in this way.

 

AMS:  Perhaps it is not easy to set a limit.  You set a limit with people who are critical because it’s not part of the way that you want to be or the way you learn. Perhaps you expect them to know that about you? 

 

SB: It’s not part of the way that I prosper and I have nothing to give to people who are critical because they shown me their mind is closed.  If the door is closed, I can’t bother to open it.  It is a war I don’t want to fight.

 

But as you know, there are some people who really are very sly and rule over other people.  I do not always see this happening at first. 

 

AMS: I try too hard and much of this is a waste of time.  You could easily divide people into two piles.  It might be fun as away to understand others.  There are always the people who like to complain and whine, and then there are the people who are going to do something positive. 

 

Some will take action, accept responsibility and make some kind of a difference.  You can see that almost immediately when you ask people to help out.  As soon as they open their mouth, the critical people are other focused people. Once something goes wrong they look not to “what can I do” but to blame others and focus on what you are not doing right.  This is sweet trap for people who are trying to make the world a better place or the shadow of the parents happy.  I understand the trap.

 

And for you, you start out as a youth entertaining your parents and then your peers.  So was school a positive experience for you?

 

SB:  I started in psychology but then I was not sure why I was there.  I had to study something, as I was eighteen year old.  And then I found theater.  There was a drama company.  I was there as a student but to work I had to sign an application to be a professional. So even though I had not been to a drama class in my life, so I signed to be a professional. I quit school to be an actress. 

 

AMS:  You were how old? 

 

SB:  I was eighteen

 

AMS:  You were eighteen and did your father and mother have a fit? 

 

SB:  Yes, my father was not very happy.  He told me it was a mistake. There I was working in the theater and then I started writing for the theater.

 

AMS:  What year was this when you began writing?  Did you have a muse?  Did you have a person who coached or inspired you?

 

SB:  No

 

AMS:  You just thought again?

 

SB:  Of course, that was the most important. I remember the director.  He gave me an exercise, an improvisation with a monologue.  I said I prefer to memorize my own work than somebody else.

 

AMS:  You were brave to say such a thing.

 

SB:  I wrote the monologue, which was inspired by the Bible. I was talking to God.  But it was very tragic.  Eventually I started writing for my own company. After a year I gathered my own company. We won a tournament and the prize was to the country for several months.  And I knew then that this was my life, my passion.

 

AMS:  What do you think the impact of your work on other people has been?

 

For me it’s important to communicate, so my texts are very clear. But for me theater has to be also much more than words. It has to capture the mind of the public –fascinate it with beauty—and they bodies to –that’s why I want them to laugh, to shake them in their seats.

 

First, I made very abstract theater, philosophical. But I couldn’t achieve too much. So I changed, and what I do is –you might call it: social comedy. The comedy is with social themes.

 

 

In one way it’s interesting, because in some ways nobody gets it.  What I write is about the theater of the absurd.  You write about one thing and they think it is another.  It’s about a door that opens to some place and when you perform it people hear it and the door they saw went to another place.  I wanted to stop this talk about what they think they saw.  In one way a writer can become what are they talking about.

 

So I changed my world completely.  I always wrote comedy but now I write about the social scene.

 

AMS:  What year about was this?  What was the social issue that you were having fun with?

 

SB:  It began in the 1980s when gender issues were beginning to be important. Perhaps the country was ready to be shocked. This country is fantastic for that we invented the word machismo.

 

AMS:  How did you do it?

 

SB:  I made a comedy about the admiration of the patriarch in a fundamentally humorous, paradoxical way.  Then we made a movie out of how they cut up woman. I made a company about Machismo. Between (Between Pancho Villa and a Naked Woma)

 

AMS:  I am interested in how society has changed.  I too saw a lot of change in the way people live their lives and what they value.   I saw amazing changes.  First, I was divorced in 1973 and I noticed almost half of my friends were also divorced. It was almost like herd behavior.  The relationship between men and woman was disturbed.

 

First, there were the sixties, woman began using birth control and working and then there was a large increase in divorce rates.  It appeared to be independent decision but in society as reflected in the arts, the relationship between men and women was disturbed.

 

The women’s movement began, as did the civil rights movement.  Some kind of tipping point occurred.  I wondered what was the impetus for social change now?

 

I happened upon, Jack Calhoun’s work.  He did the population studies for the U.N.  and said the population would increase until the year 2024.  If there were not changes in reproductive behavior, there would be great difficulty in keeping the population at a sustainable level. 

 

 Calhoun predicted that family life would change dramatically and that three quarters of women would be divorced from reproduction.   Women will have to become procreated instead of biologically created.  If this strategy is successful eventually the population will decrease to a sustainable level. 

 

Creative people produce additional social space.  We use to explore physical space but now we are exploring social space.

 

Based on the structure of the life of early humans Calhoun thought the family of the future would consist of loose networks of twelve adults and eighteen children.

 

I had an Aha!  Our instincts to survive and to adapt to changing conditions could be influencing the structure of the family.  At any point in time people can say the world is going to be like this forever.  This becomes crazy making.  So I became very interested in self-organizing systems.  I was interested in people who had a method to guess about the future plus enable the population to adapt to change.

 

SB:  You think there is a race for wisdom.  I think you were saying that the anthill was wise?

 

Andrea:  The wisdom of the hive shows us how self-organizing works. There is no top down plan.  The emergence of an adaptive response by the group demonstrates that the group can know without being told what to do.

 

 People put a lot of faith in reason, yet it is hard to prove that your thoughts occur before your brain fires. Libet’s research was a shock. He showed that our thinking is a half a second behind our readiness for action.  The talking, thinking brain is often autobiographical rather than leading the way.

 

The exceptions are when you say no to some habit. I’m going to quit this… I’m not going to do this instead. Then yes, the mind can lead the way through inhibition. 

 

I like to ask, if you have all the power, how are you going to change Mexico? How do you think you could influence the system as it is now?

 

SB:  You’re asking me?

 

Andrea:   Yeah, I’m asking you, but you don’t have to answer right now.  But this is what you’re doing in your writing. You use entertaining information to help people see.

 

I think that people who know more about their past see more about the future, as they understand history and their roots.  You’re using entertainment to help influence people?

 

 

SB:

 

I use erotic information. Information that is full of life. That tends towards life.  This is one of my life decisions.  If I am going to something I will move towards the erotic. Fiction is important but I also have a program and it transforms me too. Last week we had transsexual people on Mexican TV for a whole hour.  These were people who were going to get married.  For me that was entertainment and a big service. For this small minority people, that is a service as people get to know them as real. It opens the mind of people.

 

We are not yet with the values of New York or San Francisco but we have the Internet. The world is going to be more and more globalized, even here in Mexico. 

 

We are not using the ideas within our country. We are having the invasion of ideas from the outside. We are paralyzed. We have a bit of democracy but now that we have it we are paralyzed.  We are afraid of change. Mexico is more conservative now than it ws four years ago.  What about what it is that is happening here. I am trying to look at this.  

 

Poverty is our deepest problem. Rich people are very convinced that they can make a change but it is not happening

 

Because we come from a long tradition of political power, Mexicans are overly concerned with power.   Power seems more important than before and now we have elected a democracy. 

 

And yet we are still so afraid of change.  People are more conservative now than they were years ago.  And what about what happens all around us, the social stuff.  What about the people?  How can we speak to what is happening around us.

 

AMS:  Democracy at its best represents the wisdom of the crowd, but it is dependent on information, which is autonomous. When we are overly influenced we act like a non-thinking herd of cows. 

 

 If any democracy were cut off from the rest of the world, it would be similar to the nuclear family cut off from their extended family. The problems become more intense in smaller systems with no or little outside influence. 

 

Are you saying Mexico is more cut off from the rest of the world than the US?  Perhaps the lack of information is due to the large numbers of people living in poverty? But you are saying the intellectual, the ones who could know better, are afraid to see and to act? 

 

SB:  Because we come from a dictatorship, part of the dictatorship has a legacy of maintaining power, political power.  Everybody wants to be the president of Mexico. 

 

Americans wants to be many things, some want to be artists, or rock stars.  There are lots of place where one can excel, although there is still prejudice and social injustice.

 

AMS:  That’s true. 

 

SB:  Mexico is very much obsessed about power.  So that becomes the main discussion.

 

AMS:  And I come here as a stranger and I say Mexico is complicated, who could have a vision of how to make things better?

 

SB:  You think it possible?

 

AMS:  Perhaps a new way of being in this country will not come through powerful people but from the grass roots efforts to promote opportunity for ordinary people. 

 

Sometimes America is called the land of opportunity, as it is possible for poor people to rise up.  In a capitalistic way people are able to solve problems at the local level.  This is how I became interested in the entrepreneurs culture here in Mexico.  

 

So far the Mexican government has not been able to figure out how to solve the problems of transportation, the tendency of monopolies to dominate, the increasing levels of pollution and as you said the crushing poverty.  

 

Perhaps there is no one smart enough to create a better path and therefore I would come to the conclusion that power doesn’t matter.

 

What might make a difference is a practical approach to the problems that people can understand.  This is how leaders stand out from the crowd. They find the pulse of what people can accept, and then lead them forward into an unknown future. 

 

Abraham Lincoln did this incredibly well. People could not accept that slavery was evil so he framed it as the importance of preserving the union.  Now we see Obama and Hillary Clinton trying to attract followers through their ideas.   

 

SB:  Absolutely…  That’s wonderful all the problems that we have today we think are about power.  Instead you think it’s about ideas.  

 

AMS: Ideas have a very different kind of power. They are more like a virus. No one can control them. They are everywhere and nowhere. Ideas, if they are entertaining, like yours, open the mind in unknown ways.  Ideas also create a social space, which is now becoming more important than physical space.   

 

I see our time has run down.

 

I hope we can continue this conversation. We began to open many of Pandora’s boxes. Thanks you for giving us your time and insights. It has been fun to know a little more about you.    

 

SB: You are welcome and I will look at your website.

 

Sabina Berman’s Mindful Compass

 

(1) The ability to define a vision:

Sabina Berman was young when she discovered the fun of entertaining her peers.  Early on she discovered a love of poetry and her fascination with the written language.  She discovered how to bring love and laughter into the lives of her parents.  Often she would come home from school and tell stories that delighted and amused her family.  Perhaps it was only natural that when she had the opportunity to quit college and become a professional person in the theater she happily took the chance.

 

Of course many children can be entertaining and technically excellent in their writing but still lack a profound way of understanding and communicating well to the broader world. One of the differences is the ability for the artist to develop a penetrating insight into the nature of humans. With a “different” way of seeing one will never be great.  Sabina Berman has the gift of seeing deeply and wondering deeply plus the well tuned ability to use words to shock and stimulate.

 

How much did her family experiences enable the profound nature of her work? One can only guess where her talents spring from?  We do know she was exposed to great literature and surrounded by intellectual parents. Her ability to observe relationship dynamics all around her is still informing her vision. Added to this is that she has an overarching sense of curiosity and wonder plus a feeling of social responsibility to inform people of the pressures of “evil,” in its many forms.

 

 At a young age Sabina Berman was questioning all things that just did not make sense to her.  Her highly developed sense of justice was useful in question everything, even God’s fairness.  

 

It was this deep curiosity that she credits with beginning her sense about her own creativity.  Much of her work has been focused on the ”untruth” of the so-called truth.

 

For me it’s important to communicate, so my texts are very clear. But for me theater has to be also much more than words. It has to capture the mind of the public –fascinate it with beauty—and their bodies to –that’s why I want them to laugh, to shake them in their seats.

 

(2) The resistance to change in self and in any system:

As we hear in her story her first real encounter in relationship dynamic pressure was when her parents were resisting her efforts to having a more low-keyed life as student.  She was given a push to work hard from her parents. The night is young, her Dad would say.  Eventually she found her own middle road. She notes, I learned to fend for myself and although I was popular, I knew I had to do the work.

 

When she was eighteen she decided to quite college and work in the theater.  Her father was not very happy.  He told her it was a mistake.  Nevertheless she began to work and write for the theater and then a new life opened up for her.  She dared to dream and to act.  In addition there was no anger expressed at the resistance of her family, just a willingness to persist. 

 

Another insight she had about resistance is that when people are negative she cannot keep trying to win them over. Eventually she is able to draw a line and just say NO to such people.  

 I’m going just be very frank about it and say I don’t want to work with you.  But I’ve been wondering for a couple of years, why I’m so mean to those who try to influence me in this way.  It’s not part of the way that I prosper and I have nothing to give to people who are critical because they shown me their mind is closed.  If the door is closed, I can’t bother to open it.  It is a war I don’t want to fight.  But as you know, there are some people who really are very sly and rule over other people.  I do not always see this happening at first.  

Seeing the resistance and the seduction away from her principles clearly and then taking a stand to maintain her own direction is one of the skills that Sabina Berman continues to develop. 

 

(3) The ability to connect and use systems knowledge:

 

Having a mother who is an analyst no doubt gave Sabina Berman a foot up in understanding human nature.   She lived in the atmosphere that was oriented towards thinking about human nature.  In addition she had an eye out for observing the humor in relationship dynamics. Even her early fighting relationships with her brothers amused and puzzled her. 

You could say that writing for the theater is clear evidence of one’s current understanding of the connected nature of our relationships.  Since her gift has been to use words to paint a picture of the human, galvanizing people, to take corrective actions. Sabina Berman questions the kinds of pressures put on people in the different segments of society. 

In one way she shocks people into waking up and seeing their own connection to others.  Clearly she has been able to clarify and use her talents in taking on societies pretends.  

Many people close their eyes to what goes on in the underside of any group. Sabina Berman takes her understanding and couragiously reveals to the public what it is they are participating in through silence.  This does produce discomfort.  Yet, so far she has been able to craft her knowledge into a grain of sand creating pearls of deep value.

 

Over time Sabina Berman has become more integrated in her ability to act on knowledge and to take a stand in her social communities. By continuing to participate in altering injustice in the social arrangements within society she is living out her way of dealing with her profound understanding of human nature. 

 

Sabina Berman continues to provocatively communicate and perhaps even slightly intrude on people’s comfort level.  She enlightens people in the way she dramatizes the predicaments of all people.  She remains a provocative voice that we can recognize as being deep and still elusive.

 

In one way it is interesting, because in some ways nobody gets it.  What I write is about the theater of the absurd.  You write about one thing and they think it is another.  It’s about a door that opens to some place and when you perform it people hear it and the door they saw went to another place.  I wanted to stop this talk about what they think they saw.  

 

 

(4)The ability to be separate:  

As noted in the quote above Sabina Berman has had to be able to be separate from her critics.  She has a talent to describe a world which can be sad or even horrid, as in how people take advantage of one another, yet she remains detached from the “evils” in and of the world, which is basic to seeing and communicating about these tensions in a new way.  

Being an artist may always require a tolerance in one’s soul for being misunderstood. 

The true artist has the ability to separate and still deeply strike a cord with the audience.  She aptly describes the process: an artist must arise above the tendency to give into the audience, to being bought and sold by the local social truths and the need for approval. 

Sabina Berman’s North Star is her deep ability to be a part of the social system while being deeply separate from it.  She tells us is she is alone in the creative spirit and rejoices returning again and again to entertain and possibly educate us before withdrawing again to muse.

 In one way a writer can become what are they talking about. The country was ready to be shocked. This country is fantastic for that we invented the word machismo.

Books and Articles Mentioned

Social Evolution by Robert Trivers

 

The Lucifer Effect by Phillip Zimbardo.

 

THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE : The Biological Roots of Human Understanding by Francisco R. Varela, Humberto Maturano

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1]  Theater in the Americas Robert A. Schanke, series editor

The Theatre of Sabina Berman: The Agony of Ecstasy It is evident that Sabina Berman’s theatrical acumen matches the depth of her dramatic design whether it is the sheer variety of techniques from song to staged tableau that appear in The Agony of Ecstasy; the physicalization of what it means to be interrogated and to interrogate in Yankee;  It is the combination of theatrical technique with universal themes of self-definition that cuts across cultures and ultimately makes these plays translatable.

 

[2] The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, Edited by Johathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson

 

 

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Lázaro Cárdenas was born into a lower-middle class family in the village of Jiquilpan, Michoacán. He supported his family (including his mother and seven younger siblings) from age 16 after the death of his father. By the age of 18 he had worked as a tax collector, a printer’s devil, and a jailkeeper. Although he left school at the age of eleven, he used every opportunity to educate himself and read widely throughout his life, especially works of history.

Cárdenas originally set his sights at becoming a teacher, but was drawn into politics and the military during the Mexican Revolution after Victoriano Huerta overthrew President Francisco Madero. He backed Plutarco Elías Calles, and after Calles became president, Cárdenas became governor of Michoacán in 1928. He became known for his progressive program of building roads and schools, promoting education, land reform and social security.

After establishing himself in the presidency, in 1936 Cárdenas had Calles and dozens of his corrupt associates arrested or deported to the United States, a decision that was greeted with great enthusiasm by the majority of the Mexican public.

Cárdenas subsequently decreed the end of the use of capital punishment (in Mexico, usually in the form of a firing squad). Capital punishment has been banned in Mexico since that time. The control of the republic by Cárdenas and the PRI predecessor Partido de la Revolución Mexicana without widespread bloodshed effectively signalled the end of rebellions that began with the 1910 Mexican Revolution.

Cárdenas is considered by many historians to be the creator of a political system that lasted in Mexico until the end of the 1980s. Central to this project was the organization of corporatist structures for trade unions, campesino (peasant) organizations, and middle-class professionals and office workers within the reorganized ruling party, now renamed the Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM).

During Cárdenas’s presidency, the government expropriated and redistributed millions of acres of hacienda land to peasants, and urban and industrial workers gained unprecedented unionization rights and wage increases. The railway Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México was nationalized in 1938 and put under a “workers administration”. However, Cardenas and subsequent presidents also used the PRM and its successor, the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI, to maintain political control; leaders of the worker and campesino organizations delivered votes and suppressed protests in exchange for personal favors and concessions to their constituencies. Also central to Cárdenas’s project were nationalistic economic policies involving Mexico’s vast oil production, which had soared following strikes in 1910 in the area known as the “Golden Lane,” near Tampico, and which made Mexico the world’s second-largest oil producer by 1921, supplying approximately 20 percent of domestic demand in the United States.

of March 18, 1938, Cárdenas nationalized Mexico’s petroleum reserves and expropriated the equipment of the foreign oil companies in Mexico. The announcement inspired a spontaneous six-hour parade in Mexico City; it was followed by a national fund-raising campaign to compensate the companies. The company that Cárdenas founded, Petróleos Mexicanos (or Pemex), would later be a model for other nations seeking greater control over their own oil and natural gas resources and is the most important source of income for the country, despite weakening finances. Seeing the need to assure the technical expertise needed to run it, Cárdenas founded the National Polytechnic Institute.

Lázaro Cárdenas was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize for the year of 1955.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1zaro_C%C3%A1rdenas

 

 

Libet, (2004)”Mind Time”

Murders in the “Backyard”: Sabina Berman Examines Juárez
By Marina T. Crouse

The first scene of Sabina Berman’s new screenplay, “Backyard,” is set in a strip of desert known as Las lomas del poleo outside the Mexican border city of Juárez. A woman’s body is found half buried in the sand. Although the mangled and decomposing corpse is unrecognizable, the uniform she wears reveals the name of the multinational corporation which owns the maquiladora or in-bond assembly plant where she worked. While photographers, reporters and investigators circle and pace around the body, the camera pulls away to gaze out at the incongruous backdrop of transnational corporate office buildings and juxtaposed shantytowns that make up a large part of Juárez, perched just below El Paso along the U.S.–Mexican border.

Since the early 1990s, Juárez has been under siege. Over the past decade roughly 385 women have been killed, often in sadistic and gruesome ways, and about 1,200 more have been reported missing. “Backyard” is a screenplay that explores the circumstances of these unresolved murders and the way in which they have been normalized in everyday life in Juárez. Berman’s text probes the reluctance and apparent refusal of both the Mexican and U.S. governments, as well as the multinational corporations that run the maquiladoras, to properly investigate the murders and bring those responsible to justice.

In the discussion that followed the reading of her screenplay, Berman stated that she wanted to situate Juárez as a cosmopolitan city, however contradictory and flawed. She also highlighted the fact that despite the status of Juárez as a border metropolis with a thriving drug trade and sex industry as well as a large internal migrant population that comes to work in the maquiladoras, Juárez remains a place of intense poverty and social injustice. The political instability and corruption that has come out of Juárez’s condition as a major industrial center is illustrated in Berman’s screenplay by the continuous struggle for power between the cronies of the multinational corporations and the local political bosses.

Also locked within this battle are those activists who, often against all odds, try to unravel the mysteries and inconsistencies surrounding these crimes and the identities of the perpetrators. This volatile situation reveals how deeply Juárez is affected by and involved in the politics of globalization. What is most interesting in this text is the way in which Berman pushes the audience to think about the way in which Juárez and its inhabitants are imagined from outside, as well as the way in which they imagine themselves.

Since the early 1980s, Berman has been one of Mexico’s most prolific and successful playwrights, and has significantly contributed to the rejuvenation and continued development of Mexican theater both nationally and internationally. The recipient of numerous awards, Berman has won the national playwright award from the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Institute of Fine Arts) four times in five years. In addition to being the best-known and most performed playwright in Mexico, Berman is also an accomplished director, producer, novelist, essayist and poet and has written and performed several plays for children.

Sabina Berman is UC Berkeley’s Writer in Residence for the spring 2005 semester. She presented a reading of her new screenplay Backyard in a talk titled ”Theater Crossing Borders“ on February 1, 2005, in Stephens Hall

http://socrates.berkeley.edu:7001/Events/spring2005/02-01-05-berman/index.html

 

 

Understanding One’s Family Dynamics

 

It has been very fascinating to watch our new president trying to solve complex issues by building coalition and avoiding polarizations within a blame seeing world. Perhaps he developed some of his skills when he sought to reduce the polarities in his own family. 

Barrack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, is an unusual man who, unlike most, sought out his very distant family all the way back to Kenya. 

Anyone who seeks to contact family members who have cut off or distanced will find they need courage to face the emotional turmoil both within self and within the social system. 

When you read the mindful account of his family reconnection the reader can see how this could have enabled president Obama to clarify his identity and build his character. 

Rebuilding his family roots allowed him to create a compelling story into a well-written book.  Dreams of My Father: A Story of race and Inheritance. http://www.amazon.com/Dreams-My-Father-Story-Inheritance/dp/1400082773

If you want to know more about how he was raised by his mother the New York Times had an article on his mother’s influence on him. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/us/politics/14obama.html?pagewanted=1&fta=y

There is a renewed focus on what can we learn from people who are looking to their family as one way to learn more about human behavior.

The continuing significance of the family on its members is in the headlines, despite the difficulty of researchers to agree on what data to collect, how to systematize it and what it means.   

In the past month there have been several articles in the NY Times about those who are willing to study different parts and stages of their own family life.

Test Subjects Who Call the Scientist Mom or Dad, (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/science/18kids.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1) describes the efforts of Deb Roy at MIT who has undertaken a language development study.  He embedded 11 video cameras and 14 microphones in ceilings throughout his house.  He recorded 70% of his son’s waking hours for the first three years of his life.  Some object to this kind of familial observation, claiming the data will be biased and may influence the children in unhealthy ways. Yet these scientists intuitively know that looking at their families in a factual way has the possibility of gaining deep knowledge that is unavailable in other types of studies.  

  

Last week, in the lead article in the New York Times Magazine, Stephen Pinker continues to argue against the influence of the family on individual functioning.  Pinker argues that since identical twins share the same genes, parents, “experiences” and environment, that family dynamics cannot be the driver of the obvious differences in personality.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11Genome-t.html?scp=1&sq=steven%20pinker%20genome&st=nyt

 

Yet, I would argue that by observing parents of identical twins, you could quickly see differences in the way each twin is dealt with. The challenge is to turn observational data on a small system like the family, into scientific facts showing some predictable effect on individuals. 

 

We can see that no matter how hard parents try, they cannot treat each child the same way.  Over time the small differences in how parents react to the differences in each child, produce greater differences in the way each child experiences the parents. It is predictable that increasing variation in behaviors will occur over time as each child reacts differently to each parent.

 

Add in the response to of each twin to his or her identical sibling as, for example, they reach for the dessert to be the first one to get it. These differences in the interactions can create a mathematically different outcome for any individual.  Can genetics account for the differences in each twin in reaction to “desert-orientation”? If so how does the relationships system impact the genes? 

 

Reactions to and from individual family members are part of what creates unknown behavioral outcomes.  The mother does this, then the father compensates by doing that.  Differences and taking sides emerge.  And yes, triangles arise.  It is a living system after all.  Seemly small changes over time reinforce sensitivities and overvalue or devalue sensitivities and talents.  Who knows, perhaps one small variation in relationship intensity over time could turn various genetic components on and off?   I assume that innumerable relationships dynamics are altering both adults and children’s functioning.  

We need factual information and a scientific way to consider multiple influences on individual development. To sort out the influence of family members on one another requires different tools. The current lack of tools is no reason to stop asking the questions and close the door on evaluating family influence.  To assert that parents and therefore the family treats identical twins, or any children, identically seems far fetched.  The problem is that our common sense observations have no statistical, causal evidence to offer demonstrating how the family does influence a person’s character development, genetic programing or functioning.

 

In looking for tools beyond first person accounts, I turn to scientists who are interested in modeling complex systems.  Iain Couzin at Princeton University is one person who is doing some very interesting work, creating new tools to measure the impact of relationships on behavior.  He is exploring how large-scale biological patterns result from the actions and interactions of the individual components of a system. We study self-organised pattern formation in a wide range of biological systems, including ants, fish schools, bird flocks, locust / cricket swarms and human crowds.  http://www.princeton.edu/~icouzin/  

 

Crowds are of course not the same as a small nuclear family. Families are complex and have repeated habitual ways of interacting.  They are influenced both by society and the multigenerational relationship system.   Someday we may be able weigh all these variables and perhaps even see how certain genes are then affected by these repeated and habitual interactions.

 

While this work may be far removed from the more common observation models of the human family, such work may lead to new understanding of how relationships influence individuals.  I remain hopeful and continue to collect stories from leaders who are observing and reflecting on how their families continue to influence their functioning.  This is one way to build a bridge between a leaders’ ability and the impact of relationships on him or her.  

It just so happened that at the same time our family-oriented president was elected, this current series of interviews of leaders from Mexico comes to an end.

The last interview, about to be posted, is with Sabina Berman, a famous playwright and journalist.  I was struck with her intelligence and kindness.  To me her insights about the conditions in society offer us greater awareness of the foibles of human nature.  We need all the insight we can get to alter the blindness within society.   With greater mindfulness hope overcomes fear. 

Andrea 

 

Happy Holidays 2008 – Welcome 2009

 

Happy Holiday from Andrea at The Museo de Arte Popular , Mexico City, Mexico

http://www.museoartepopularmexicano.org/

 

In this the best of all possible worlds, I celebrate this season, thankful for trustworthy family and friends. This has been a year where I was able to travel to Mexico three times and was privileged to meet amazing people.  Interviewing leaders in Mexico provides me with the experience I need to become a better listener and it helped hone my ability to give people more thoughtful feedback (nothing harder).

 

That is the best but what can we learn from the challenges? Can we learn anything from the financial world’s failure? There are similarities between large and small systems. Just as in a family this breakdown seems to have occurred with a lack of regulation, little or no transparency or feedback, and a failure of leaders to define problems well enough. Clearly there has been a lack of awareness about the long term impact of short term decisions. I am not saying it’s easy for family members or financial leaders to see the slow erosion of clear communication, and trust but I am saying these kinds of problems can snowball any system into a non functional state very quickly.

 

We see the break down of trust leading to a reassessment of how to invest in the future.  We see how the negative vision of one man, Bernard Madoff, leading to financial failure for his colleagues, friends and family. The dark side of human nature will always be with us. But how do we understand the relationships system that leads to or even promotes this kind of outcome?

 

In a new book, Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, looks at social forces impacting individual success. His explanation may also provide hints about those who represent the other extreme, the outliers of greed. Both are impacted by the social groups surrounding them. Clearly people are not rational utility-maximizing individuals. They are emotional social creatures subject to the delusions of the crowd. Gladwell’s ideas will slowly work to alter a world view that is focused on individuals as prime movers.

 

We use to believe the word was flat now we believe it’s all up to the individual.  Gladwell notes: “I am explicitly turning my back on, I think, these kinds of empty models that say, you know, you can be whatever you want to be. Well, actually, you can’t be whatever you want to be. The world decides what you can and can’t be.”

 

 

 

Art inspires and so perhaps the magical dragon pictured above will give us courage in the face of our current economic situation. 

The dragon told me he sees a coming transformation from an information society to a more compassionate society.

The dragon understands that all of us, the socially well positioned and the poor, are dependent on trust and on understanding the environment surrounding us.

The dragon watches how well we are we learning to adapt to a new reality.   

 

 

Without vision there is no art. Art express people’s deep understandings and can provoke emotions of joy as shown in the above picture. I hope to communicate my gratitude to one and all for the opportunities I have been given. I will be living in the moment with the dragon of uncertainty and the butterfly of hope.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fortunately, I followed Maria Bustos suggestion and ask to interview Marie Therese Hermand de Arango. Judy Ball was kind enough to edit and to ask good question.  She has become my left brain. I see the following interview as a demonstration of how one person, following her vision, promotes many others to do well.

 

Interview with Marie Therese Hermand de Arango

Marie Therese Hermand de Arango, founder of the Museo de Arte Popular (MAP) which celebrates indigenous art created by people living in Mexico was hard at work behind the counter waiting on customers.  Maria and I had been invited to the Museum’s yearly fund-raising event to interview Ms. de Arango for my book.. Every year many people, who support the Museum, donate clothes, jewelry, and various items to be sold to raise money to support the work of the Museum. Here was the excitement of both being for self, buying something useful or exciting, while being for others and supporting a good cause.

 

 

I was both looking around and looking forward to meeting Marie Therese Hermand de Arango when she walked over to say we could shop until she was ready for the interview.  She was full of positive energy, working with people, just like the other volunteers.  I had expected a more reserved museum founder and director but found a down-to-earth authentic person with a calm presence.  She did not make a big deal of her role.  At the moment she was an example of grace under pressure.

 

 

After she had handed over her job to anther woman, she led us to a table, away from the crowds of bargain hunters. She asked how I had come to write a book about leaders. I answered her with the following:  explained that as a family therapy therapist, I had observed how small family groups handle problems, noting that one person always emerges as a leader. No matter how much chaos or “craziness” in a family, eventually some family member gets tired of it, and begins to find ways to stand up for a principle.  That person, the emergent family leader decides in that moment of standing up, that the principle is more important then giving in and going along with the craziness in the group.

 

I explained that I realized this emergent leadership process in families applied to other small groups.   From these observations, I created a visual picture of a Mindful Compass to capture the four elements that emergent leaders demonstrate and that others could learn to use.   Usually the stories leaders tell me about themselves have these four ingredients:

1) I have decided, this is what I’m going to do; 

2) If you don’t like it O.K., I will try not to react to any negativity;

3) I will use my knowledge of relationships to move my vision forward and

(4) I might have to stand alone but I am standing up for a different way of seeing or doing things.

 

 Leadership requires thinking strategically about the relationships forces one encounters.  The Mindful Compass allows anyone to understand this natural process and to be more prepared for inevitable problems.  

 

MTA: That’s good.

 

AMS: I wanted to interview leaders who had never heard of family therapy, to collect their stories about how they learned to be leaders in their own family, and to build a bridge from what they learned in their family to how they managed at work and eventually how they were able to give back to their communities.

 

MTA: Exactly. An example of people coming together to give back to their community is  the Museum Board.  The Museum Board members are all leaders and have raised around twenty million dollars to make this dream a reality.

 

AMS: Clearly you are a living example of a leader who can bring people together to accomplish goals.  People are drawn to specific goals that will make a meaningful change in their community.  Still, there is a lot of pressure on leaders to both articulate the mission and do it in a way that captures people’s hearts. 

 

I am sure that people are drawn to the energy that you have, but they may know nothing of your journey as a leader. 

 

I usually ask people to describe a little bit about their family of origin, and how they learned in their family about becoming a leader.  I am interested in who you admired as a youngster, what you learned from your family and how that helped you in school, in your community, and now in your work.

 

MTA: I was born in Egypt of an Egyptian mother and Belgian father.

My father, a very good-looking man, was in the Belgian Army and stationed in the Belgian Congo.  He came to Egypt on leave and met my mother. After they met, he left the army and stayed in Egypt. As I recall he liked the sun in Egypt. He didn’t like Belgium. He adored the people in Belgium but he didn’t like the rain.

 

AMS: What is your sibling position? 

 

MTA: I’m an only child. Before my mother met my father she had married and become the widow of an Egyptian man.   I have two half brothers who are Egyptian. One is dead and the other is alive.

 

AMS: Which one died?

 

MTA: The older brother who passed away lived in Greece. He died last year of cancer. And the younger one, who’s married to a French woman, lives in Paris . We all get adopted by the country where we are.  Now I have been adopted by the Mexican people and I have a Mexican husband.

 

AMS: That’s a wonderful way to see how moving from one country to another effects us. You adopt the country and the people of the country adopt you..

.

MTA: I’ve been in Mexico now for the last 42 years. I have two daughters; one is 28 and the other is 24. One of them works in the Museum. She created what is called La Tienda del MAP, the Store of the MAP. She is doing wonderfully well. In addition we have opened a store in the airport. We represent 400 communities of artisans from all over Mexico.

 

AMS: That’s amazing.

 

MTA: We are selling much more than we ever expected, even in our wildest dreams.

 

AMS: How did this happen?

 

MTA: I think we’ve been very good at creating consciousness in the Mexican public of what wonderful art we have here in Mexico. Many Mexicans were not aware of this.  It really took a foreigner to see and appreciate the incredible art that the people of this country have given us.  Now Mexicans seem to understand the value of the art and you can see this in their enthusiasm for the art and this Museum.   The Museum would never have made it if I alone were the enthusiastic one.   

 

AMS: But you had the original idea for creating a Museum?

 

MTA: I had the idea about 10 years ago. I talked to various people and we started creating it in 1999.

 

AMS: Where did you get the idea?

 

MTA: I have always loved art, even as a young person living in Egypt.  When I came to Mexico I started collecting different pieces created by Mexican artists. I didn’t have much money.  My family had been thrown out of Egypt with nothing. My mother had been a landowner in Egypt. But the revolutionary leadership didn’t like the idea of foreigners like my father owning big properties in Egypt. So we had to leave.[1]

 

AMS: When did you leave Egypt?

 

MTA: We left Egypt in 1963. We went to New York where my father found a job as General Manager of the St Regis Hotel in New York.   In Egypt my fatherworked with Baron Empain, the President of a large  company.  I learned to appreciate art from both my parents but not from their businesses.

 

Much of this experience made me what I am today.   

 

I realized that the Museum needed to have a board of directors with a broad vision and reach into the community.  So when we founded the Museum in 1999, I invited 70 members onto the Board. Some people helped by making donations and others brought knowledge. 

 

Everyone brings a lot of love, dedication and, of course, many working hours. As you can see, we have a group of awesome advisors. In addition we have another Board of young people between the ages of 35 and 40. 

 

The current President of the younger Board is Fernanda Suárez de Guerra.  I want her to take my place when the time comes for me to leave.

AMS: She is a leader for tomorrow. I am hoping that stories of today’s leaders will help prepare people for tomorrow’s problems.   

What made you leave New York and come to Mexico?

 MTA: There was a Spanish friend of my father, Cesar Balsa, who created a chain of hotels, cafeterias and restaurants in Mexico.  He offered my father the vice-presidency of the Nacional Hotelera.

 

AMS: How old were you?

 

MTA: I was 17, full of life. I had finished my French degree in New York. I went to France and studied the history of ideas for two years in 1973 and 1974.   I lived on my own, studied at l’Ecole du Louvre in Paris and worked as an interpreter for UNESCO in special conferences.   It helped that I spoke five languages. 

 

AMS: Then you came back to Mexico after you finished?

MTA: I came back to Mexico after France.

 

AMS: You met your husband while you were in France?

 

MTA: No, no I met my husband here in Mexico. It took him a long time to make his decision so we had different boyfriends and girlfriends for awhile. He was 39 when we got married.  A man who waits makes a very good husband and father once he decides to get married.

 

AMS: Do you still fight with him about how he could improve a little?

 

MTA: Yes, no, maybe…. He is too much of an idealist. I’m the realistic one and he is the idealistic one. So maybe that’s what we differ about. I think that different backgrounds always make things more complicated. There is a lot of respect and admiration between us that is extraordinary in my experience.

 

AMS: Right. Any two people who marry encounter complicated issues, but when backgrounds are different it is more challenging to deeply appreciate the other’s viewpoints.

 

AMS: And what about your grandparents?

 

MTA: My mother’s parents were originally from Syria.   My grandfather was a poet and a writer. My grandmother was from a well-to-do family. 

.

AMS: Tell us about your father?

 

MTA: My father was an only child. His mother was also a widow who remarried.

 

They lived in Leige, Belgium. I never met my grandfather who died before I was born.  I saw very little of my grandmother because she lived in Belgium.  I really don’t know much about her.

 

I know much more about my Egyptian family.   My mother was the youngest of 3 sisters. She had a brother who died early in life and he was the youngest.

 

 

AMS: How old was he when he died?

 

MTA: He was in his thirties. I am not sure of his exact age.

 

AMS: More and more people now are looking into their family trees.   Our current democratic nominee for president Obama wrote a book called Dreams of My Father about his search for his family roots. 

 

 

(Bill Clinton was born on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas. His given name was William Jefferson Blythe IV. He never knew his father, William Jefferson Blythe III, a traveling salesman who died in a car accident several months before Bill was born. After Bill became president, he and his mother learned that his father had been married at least three other times and that Bill had a half brother and half sister whom he had never met. Bill took the name William Jefferson Clinton after his mother remarried. http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761564341/bill_clinton.html) 

 

 

But most of us, especially if we immigrate, can lose track of the multigenerational people in our family. Families drift apart.

 

 

MTA: You think so?  My father became very Egyptian.  He even learned to speak Arabic which is difficult for a Belgian.

 

 

AMS: People in your family have a good ear for language.   Were any of them musicians?

 

 

MTA: No, my brother who died had a textile factory. The other one, a medical doctor. did research in Paris.  He is now retired and plays bridge very well.   In fact, we all play bridge in our family. French education is very good at teaching you to discipline your mind, which you need to do to play bridge well.

 

When I came to Mexico I thought it was one of the loveliest countries in the world and wanted to get to know the country.   So I traveled throughout all of Mexico in a bus. 

 

I was really inspired by Mexico. I thought what I saw was beautiful, and I bought  lovely pieces of art made by local artisans. When I had a little bit more money I started a very good art collection which is in my house in Acapulco.  Eventually I started meeting with local artisans. When I went to visit them and tried to buy things from them, we talked and they became appreciative of my interest and knowledge of Mexican art.  Eventually I was selected to be on the jury for the National Arts and Crafts Group, where artists present their best pieces and the jury judges which ones deserve a prize.   Tonatiuh Gutierrez, a friend of my husband, joined me on this jury until his death.  I was invited all over Mexico to judge these events.

 

I met my mentor, Maria Teresa Pomar, who is the greatest connoisseur of popular art in Mexico during this period. She wanted to create a museum but she had no means to do it. Her husband was in the Communist Party, so we were from very different worlds. But we got along wonderfully and we worked hand in hand to make this dream come true.

 

AMS: One of the things you said which strikes a very deep chord with me is that the people in Mexico at one time couldn’t appreciate the work of indigenous Mexican artists.

This happens in many countries where the native people have been conquered, including Ireland and the United States.  My family history contains the stories of both slaves and slave owners.  Even though I’m Irish, (Maloney is my family name), I have Belgian ancestors, the Brabazon’s, who came to Ireland in 1650.  These conquering Belgians participated in taking precious things away from the native people of Ireland, including the Irish sense of their own accomplishments including their art.   The people in Ireland accepted this situation for many years.

 

MTA: Because you want to take over that culture, you impose your religion and language.

 

AMS: Exactly. The urge to conquer others seem deeply rooted in our biological instincts. 

You don’t even think about it. But as time passes the old culture comes to be respected. 

 

MTA: It is true. Also much of Mexican art came from the influence of the Spanish and  Arab worlds.  Both cultures have influenced Mexican art.

 

AMS: And you can see that?

 

MTA: Very easily.  The Mexicans were influenced by travelers from the Philippines and China. The Spanish Conquistadores brought all their art too and through them, the influences of the Arab world. Art develops over time as one culture influences another. In Mexico, the art of the people started when the Spaniards arrived.  There is a separation between the two worlds of indigenous Mexican art and Hispanic art. The Spanish appreciated Mexican art and the two civilizations became one.

 

AMS: I believe many people have the idea that the more they know about their family, the more connected people are to history in general. By looking at the past people are often more able to figure out what the future might bring. Your past is somehow informing your vision for the future. You could say one’s love of learning about the past allows us to understand more about patterns and or trends and thereby create a better future. This is true about knowing and appreciating the history of art as well as knowing and appreciating the history of relationships.

 

MTA: I remember my daughter, the one who is 28 years old, always telling my Mother, “We know so little about your family. Why don’t you tell us more?”  I never paid attention to it. I was not aware of its importance. I never gave it the significance I do today.

AMS: This is a relatively new problem.  One hundred years ago most people lived very close to many generations of their family and there were about six living children in each family.   Now everybody lives where they want and with that distance the old family ties are fraying.

 

Today there is far more focus on the nuclear family partially due to the distance from the older generations plus the small number of children being born to each family. In the United States, we have on average only 1.7 children in each family. The grandparents are often living far away so that many people today do not even know the names or any stories about their grandparents. They often do not know what kind of lives their grandparents live or lived.  Perhaps this would change if people believed this knowledge is important to their basic functioning and their future.

 What is the impact you would like to make in Mexico?      

MTA: I think that our impact, all of us working for the museum, is that we, through this Museum, are providing a venue for the work of 8 million artists. If you add to this the fact that these artists are able to sell their art in the market place, then the impact and influence may expand to as many as 20 million people. That is one fifth of the Mexican population.  Now many of these people need two jobs to survive. But if we can give one person a better job then hopefully they will not need to flee to the United States, as many poor people and artist do, or work the second job.[2] 

(The Mexican standard of living is way below the US or Europe. The minimum wage is 46 pesos per day, about £2.20, or $4 US Dollars. There is little or no welfare state and no unemployment benefit. Mexico is one of the 4 worst countries in Latin America for income distribution.http://www.mexico-child-link.org/mexico-factfile-statistics.htm)

 

Also, the Museum has published a book called “Arte del Pueblo: Manos de Dios”,

Art of the People: Hands of God. The title was created for us by Carlos Fuentes, the writer. He is a member of our Board too.

 

AMS:  Do you think about creating this story for television since you have affected so many people?

 MTA: I never thought I could be sufficiently eloquent to tell this story, but for the last three years, I have spoken on TV and radio and been interviewed by newspapers.   I’ve written prologues to books.   All of this was new to me.  I was not used to doing any of it.  I understand that it is very important that people become aware of our story so that they can repeat it and be inspired by it.

 

We still need to raise money and it is mostly the women on the Board who will do that work. This is our 5th year of holding “Vintage,” and as you see many people come and participate in selling their older treasures to help the museum.  This year we have raised more money in one day that we did in three days last year.

 

 

Frankly, I did not know much at all about philanthropy. My husband is a very good teacher.  He was instrumental in helping me understand how through the involvement of others in philanthropy, the museum could achieve its goals.  He has taught me how to do something very important for this country that has given so much to me. 

 

AMS: How do you think he taught you?

 

 

 MTA: I made fun of him when he started an organization called Centro Mexicano de  Filantropía. Mexican Center of Philanthropy. He started that twenty or more years ago.

 

Eventually, I understood what could be accomplished through philanthropy and I said, “Do you think you can teach me how to inspire people to give their money and their time?”  He passed on to me what he knew.   Now Mexico has many philanthropists.

 

AMS: Are many of these philanthropist entrepreneurs? 

 

MTA: Yes, one of my favorite examples is that of my father-in-law who started a wonderful business. He came here on a Spanish cargo ship when he was 14 years old. He paid his way by working on the ship. Then he married a Spaniard and they had three boys and two girls.  The three boys started a small shop and then enlarged it.  It grew into a chain of stores called Aurrera.  They sold the Aurrera chain to Wal-Mart.   The three brothers, each different from the other, were a good combination.

 

AMS: Which number was your husband of the three of them?

 

MTA : He was the youngest. 

 

AMS: The youngest is often the most charming and creative.

 

MTA: Yes, he is very creative and very charming.

 

AMS: Did he work with his Dad and all his brothers and sisters in the business?

 

MTA: No, the sisters were married and had children. They are housewives. 

 

AMS: What does he think about his family history? 

 

MTA: My husband knows a lot.  He hired someone to do an extensive family history. He thinks now that the most important people to try to influence are the ones who are capable of learning about philanthropy.  He believes that Mexico has tremendous opportunities and immense problems.

 

AMS: Perhaps all nations have many opportunities and challenges.  I believe that the backbone of a nation is the family and the family is changing, at least in developed countries.  With fewer children to raise, the role of women changing, families more dispersed, the changes and challenges continue.  What do you think about that?

 

MTA: I’m not a feminist at all. I adore the fact that men are very willing to be polite and look after their wives and children.    But I realize this is not happening anymore. I was taught to be independent by my parents in a very European way. And my husband never wanted me to depend on him. So I take care of my own finances, the house and the children. I have really done my own thing. But it is also easier for me, because he wants me to be independent. Overall I think there is no reason why a man should be better than a woman.  

 

The government has given women more rights than before and many women are in government now, both of which are good. The Secretaries of Education and Foreign Affairs are women. We have women in many, many jobs from physicians and engineers to computer technology and business leaders.  Social entrepreneurs influencing the government are often women.  In addition many non-profits run by woman cooperate with the government to achieve change in Mexico.

 

We also created the Museum by convincing different governmental entities, including the government of Mexico City, the Federal government’s Ministries of Education and Culture and Art, of the importance of this Museum.  It has worked out beyond my wildest dreams, but it took a lot of fighting and stubbornness.

 

Mexican people are very polite and are often hesitant to say what they think. I’m very straight-forward and usually say what I think. But I had to learn new strategies to encourage people to support the museum and to raise seven million pesos a year to sustain it.

 

AMS: It might be interesting for others to learn how you did this.  You might write about how you approached different individuals, groups, businesses and the government, for support.

 

MTA: The only thing I really want to do now is be a housewife. My oldest daughter is getting married in a month and I want to be home with my family.  But many people are scolding me, asking “How can you think of staying at home when you’ve done what you’ve done?”   

 

I would love to be a good grandmother, and then maybe I can think about writing about how MAP came to life, but for now I want to be with my family.  

 

AMS: That’s what happened to me. My first grandchild was born in 1993 and as soon as that happened I thought I wanted to retire and write a book.  I am sure I was influenced by the larger family field.  I wanted to be closer to my daughter. We are deeply influenced as we are members of living systems which historically have recognized the importance of the group to individual development.

 

It does help each of us to see how our families have enabled us to, as they say, “be all that we can be.”   Sometimes people have to convince the family that their vision is good for both the future of the family and for the individual, but that is another story for another day.  Your family was pleased with your love of art. 

 

MTA: I have always loved art even when I was younger and living in Egypt.  I am pleased to have been able to show the art of the people of Mexico and to work with fantastic people to create this Museum for the people.

 

AMS:  Has the Museum Board been like a family to you?

 

MTA: Yes, very much so, and I think that they all are good examples for Mexican society of how any of us can give back to our community.

 

AMS: I’m grateful to you for giving your time for this interview. 

 

MTA:  This project for the Museum has given me life again. I’ve really been very happy to be able to make it a reality. It has given me energy, a new goal and a good reason to concentrate on healthy things and not on my problems.

 

AMS: That’s beautiful and a good example for all of us. 

 

MTA: When you are older and are no longer needed as a mother, then you have some time of your own. I am fortunate to be able to have the time in my life to give back to others what life has given to me and I do it with pleasure. That is wonderful.  That is the reason why the Museum project came out so well.

 

AMS: In your case love leads the way.

 

MTA: I agree, now I have to go back to work in my stand.

 

Marie Therese Hermand de Arango Mindful Compass

 

(1)  The ability to define a vision:

Marie Therese Hermand de Arango tells us that she learned to appreciate art

from both of her parents at a young age.  Her parents valued education and encouraged her to follow her interests. In her youth she began collecting art on her own, despite not having much money.  She spoke of her deep appreciation for how art has an impact on people’s awareness of beauty and history. In an interesting twist, she wanted to collect art but ended up giving much of her collection back to the people through the Museum she helped found. 

 

Growing up in her family she was given the opportunity to see the inherent instability within a nation and this ended up emphasizing the importance of adapting to new cultures.  Her friendships and family provided a base through social instability.

 

Early on she became focused on understanding the history of ideas. This combined with her ability to speak languages lead her to work for UNISCO, providing her with knowledge of how larger organizations were run.  Once she decided to marry and become a Mexican she took an unusual trip on a bus to meet the people and see the country side.  Not many people think about how important it is to understand your country or to get to know the people and then set about doing it. An unexpected bonus occurred when she discovered the unappreciated talents of local artist. As she got to know the people and the art world she was able to put together a vision leading to the construction of a beautiful museum for the people.

 

Through the creation of the Museum, Marie Therese Hermand de Arango ensured the future of her vision, making it possible for all people to be able to see and appreciate the original art of the people of Mexico. She organized and gave life to the Museum, which has become a living gift to the people of Mexico and the world.

 

The Museum allows local artists to achieve world-wide recognition. It also allows local artists to give their work to their country. By promoting the work of Mexican artists and artisans, the Museum promotes jobs for people in the poorer sections of the country, creating ways for their art to be seen by the public. 

 

To bring any complex vision to life one has to have the ability to organize support for the venture.  Her passion is translated into energy for attracting and organizing a group of motivated people who brought this vision of a museum to life. To secure broad support in the country she put 70 very motivated members on the board of the Museum. In addition she created a Board of young people with the overarching goal of “creating consciousness in the Mexican public for those not aware of what wonders we have in Mexico.” 

 

Finally, she has the vision to provide for the leadership succession of the Museum. She has picked a younger woman to replace her when the time comes.  This is one of the signs of a mature leader, one who can select and mentor his or her replacement.

 

 

(2) The resistance to change in self and in any system:

When Marie Therese Hermand de Arango was young she saw that political circumstances forced her father have to leave Egypt and start over in new country.  He too had a vision and was unable to carry it out in Egypt. Her father did not pass on to her any negative stories about the changing circumstances. Instead the family rose to the challenge and was able to mobilize support from family friends to move to the United States.  Marie Therese Hermand de Arango saw how political forces operate.  We do not know what ideas she drew from this experience but we do know that she came out with the ability to work well with various government agencies and administrations.   In the best of all worlds government does enable a vision from the people, for the people, to come to life.    

 

On her arrival in Mexico, she took a bus tour to get to know the country and its people.   At the same time she discovered amazing art work that had been ignored by the people of Mexico.  This form of social resistance to indigenous art and the people who produce it is nothing new to those who have studied the history of ideas as has Marie Therese Hermand de Arango. 

 

There is nothing to dislike or get upset about when one runs into resistance. If you do it’s like disliking the second law of thermo dynamics. Nature is there to be understood and for those that are willing to make the effort they can see resistance as part of the price we pay for progress. Order begets disorder.

 

Those who can see and appreciate the process of resistance as part of the balance in nature and perhaps even a natural law, have the upper hand in formulating ideas to understand and overcome resistance.  Those who take it personally and look at resistance as evil or even as intentional willfulness, do less well in formulating strategies to deal with it because they don’t have a clear idea of how resistance emerges and dissipates.

 

 

Marie Therese Hermand de Arango encountered many obstacles when she approached the government for support of the museum.  But for every bit of resistance, she had the patience and energy to figure out how to move forward.  She could see the resistance in “the system” as an impersonal force, freeing her to face her own reluctance to move forward.

 

Marie Therese Hermand de Arango’s daughter is getting married.  Now her own family needs more from her, so she has begun to consider how she might reduce her full work schedule. As she told others about this possibility she encountered a new, but not unexpected. form of resistance. 

 

“I have had many people scolding me. How can you think of staying at home when you’ve done what you’ve done?” Stay tuned as to exactly what decision she will make. I for one am willing to make the bet that her decision will be more about her internal compass than the upset her decision may create in others. 

 

 

(3) The ability to connect and use systems knowledge:

Marie Therese Hermand de Arango negotiations with the government to gain support for the museum is perhaps the most complex example of having to use knowledge to connect with a wide variety of people.  How did she try to understand these complex systems of relationships?

 

First, she had a deep belief that the people of Mexico would eventually appreciate and support the art of the Mexican people. She believes that a committed board of directors would provide a diverse source of support for the museum.  These relationships were probably helpful as she dealt with the various governmental ministries to garner their support for the museum.  In addition she understood the subtleties of Mexican “culture”, noting that it is hard to know exactly what people are thinking because Mexican people are very polite and are sometimes afraid to say what they really think. She, on the other hand, is straight forward and outspoken.  Despite this difference she was able to persuade people to support the museum, which was no small task.

 

 

 

(4)The ability to be separate: 

Although this topic was not directly discussed, you can hear Marie Therese Hermand de Arango allude to it when she mentioned the bus trip she took around Mexico to get to know the people. She made this decision on her own.   On the trip she developed her own relationship with many people and artists.  From that experience she developed her own ideas about what she wanted to do to preserve and appreciate the art of the people.

 

Leadership often requires people to make decisions that others will not understand or approve of.  Such decisions may require the leader to stand alone, which is not a pleasant experience.  Yet standing alone is may in fact be required to get things done well. 

 

One way to gauge how well people can stand alone is to note how much they know about their extended family. The assumption is that if people are well connected to the past generations they will have an easier time facing challenges in their lives.  They will not put all of their eggs in one basket or rely on others for all the answers, but instead will develop a network of relationships including a firm foundation in the relationships in their extended family.  You can see how Marie Therese Hermand de Arango’s story is a good demonstration of this process.

 

Finally her husband was able to convey to her that he was willing to help her learn about philanthropy but that she was going to have to implement this project on her own. She gives him credit for his support and his encouragement. She had the freedom to learn and thereby to risk and to take action. The result is that she realized her vision, completing a complex process in the form of the Museum, which has become a great gift to the people of Mexico. 

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[1] The Egyptian economy was dominated by private capital until the revolution of 1952, which replaced the monarchy with a republic. The new government began to reorganize the economy along socialist lines in the late 1950s. The state played an increasing role in economic development through its management of the agricultural sector after the land reforms of 1952 and 1961. These reforms limited the amount of land an individual or family could own. In the early 1960s the government nationalized much of the industrial, financial, and commercial sectors of the economy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamal_Abdel_Nasser

 

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November 5, 2008 The Bridge Between Family and Work Experiences

November 5, 2008  The Bridge Between Family and Work Experiences

On this historical day when the first African American president has been chosen I thought it only fitting to publish an interview with another leader who rose up from life in a tribal community in Southern Mexico,  to become recognized as one of the 100 most influential woman in the world today.

Xochitl Galvez Ruiz, runs High Tech Services Firm, an engineering consultant business and she has created non profits to help people in poverty such as Fundacion Porvenir, the Future Foundation, which distributes a food supplement to indigenous children suffering from advanced malnutrition. On December 1, 2000, she was appointed Head of the Office of Representation for the Development of Indigenous Peoples of the President’s Office, by President Fox and then as the General Director of the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples, a federal institution responsible for coordinating public policies concerning the integral development of indigenous peoples and communities. She is middle sibling and comes from Tepatepec, Hidalgo in Mexico.

When I interviewed, Victor Lichtinger, the prior Environment Secretary in President Fox’s cabinet  2000- 20003, I asked him which woman he would suggest  I interview who he had known as a courageous leader. With out hesitation he suggested I contact Xochitl Galvez. I am grateful for his help in making this interview come to life.

 

Although Xochitl Galvez speaks English well she was more at ease speaking in Spanish. Therefore I have put Maria Bustos name to indicate that Xochitl Galvez was speaking in Spanish and Maria Bustos was translating.

 

************************************************************************

 

Andrea:  I see your brief biography on this paper.  Many of the important events in your life are mentioned but I gather this is just the tip of the iceberg?

 

I would like to know how you would describe a bridge between your earlier family experiences and your later commitment to your community.   What did you learn early on about leading?

 

 

Galvez/Maria:  My community was a system where women don’t have any value.  Women were told they did not need to study. Women were told they needed to stay at home. 

 

The first thing I did was to break this old paradigm.  I saw that in the indigenous community, unfortunately, woman cannot be in a power situation.  This is changing little by little.  Now some women can achieve a powerful position in the group.

 

I believe what made it possible for me to change started in my first trip to Mexico City when I was very young.

 

I realized that when I saw something as simple as a bath room cold be designed to solve many problems.  In Mexico City this bathroom was so different from what we had.   Here for the first time I saw a complex bathroom.  It was nothing like the hole that we called a bathroom.

 

Andrea:  This “hole” is what we would call an out house?

 

Galvez/Maria:  It was my nightmare because I was afraid that all around under my house was a lot of excrement.  At that moment I saw how the waste could be cleanly removed from the house.  It had been a nightmare to be in the close company of the excrement. This bathroom in Mexico City was all white.  You could see how the pipes were connected and how they allowed the water to fall into the bucket.  When I saw a shower it seemed impossible to make something like that.  Back in my village, every 5 days I need to carry the water to my house to take a shower.  This shower was a completely different system.  This bathroom was amazing. 

 

Seeing this had a very real impact.  I began realizing that this was an opportunity to have a dream. Yes, I knew at that moment that this dream could make my life different. 

 

After that the trip, I was trying to figure out how I could return to the city and study at the international public university. 

In the village there was only limited access to the schools. In order to go to a high school one had to travel a long distance.  I knew I wanted to go to the university and I would find a way.

(Galvez family came from a village of the impoverished Otomi Indians in the central Mexican state of Hidalgo. She excelled at school and won an award for outstanding indigenous students. Her stipend covered bus fare to a distant high school.

Although there were no computers in her small town, Galvez decided to study computer science after seeing a pamphlet advertising the career. She earned an undergraduate degree in the subject and a master’s degree in telecommunications at Mexico’s national university while working as a telephone operator.)[1]

Andrea:  What year were you born and did you have brothers and sisters? 

 

Galvez/Maria: I was born in 1963 and I am the fourth of seven children in my family. Two boys died when they were young. 

 

Andrea:  You are the first middle child I’ve interviewed. So far all the women have been the oldest, or the only female or the youngest.  I am thinking you might also be special in your family because two of your brothers died after you were born and you were a survivor.

 

Galvez/Maria:  They died because of poverty problems. There was a lack of medical help.

 

Andrea:  Yes, that also has an impact on you. You learn that life can be short.  Perhsp you could see that there is a need for more help for all of the families in your tribal area not just your family.  

 

In addition I would wonder if perhaps the death of males might lead your parents to understand that girls can survive and therefore they have value? 

 

I am not sure of the impact all these different things might have had on you. But clearly you were adaptive and able to learn in your circumstance, and this allowed you to break away from the traditional roles that women were supposed to follow.

 

Galvez/Maria:  Also I was born in the opposite way. That is I was born feet first.   Not with the head but with the foot coming out first.  

 

Andrea:  Feet first, funny! In a way you came out and landed on your feet.

 

Galvez/Maria:  It was good luck because not all the babies that are born that way survive.

 

Andrea: Yes, your birth was a complicated situation and you were born without medical help.  Tell me about your father.

 

Galvez/Maria:  My father drank too much.

 

Andrea:  Did he drink before they lost 2 male children?  

 

Galvez/Maria:  I always thought he drank because he saw so little hope for his life.  Perhaps also he had to see so much death.  I guess that is possible.

 

Galvez/Maria:  My maternal grandmother also died young at 34 years when my mother was only eight years old.

 

Andrea:  Do you know how many siblings your mother had?   

 

Galvez/Maria:  I think there were five but it was common that many babies died in the middle of the pregnancy.

 

Andrea:  Did you know any of these aunts or uncles growing up?

 

Galvez/Maria: I knew about three of them.

 

Andrea:  How about your grandfather?

 

Galvez/Maria:  He had four more children with another woman.

 

Andrea:  Who was important to your mother?

 

Galvez/Maria:  The oldest uncle.  He was very smart and he also was important to me as he encouraged me to read books. His name was Alberto. When I was growing up I would ask to read after doing my homework. I realized he had a special place for me. He would let me read and he would spend the afternoon with us.  He had a little room with books like a small library.  I can still remember that room and could even draw a picture of it today. It was here that I read a book by Garcia Marcus, One Hundred Years of Loneliness.[2] It is an amazing book. No one after me opened this book. 

 

Andrea: You seem to have the curiosity bug. It’s probably not a gene. It may have to do with the ability to sense the environment. Perhaps you had that special ability to use curiosity and knowledge to observe how things worked in the environment. Then you were also fortunate to be around people who stimulated your curiosity and provided very profound books for you. 

 

Galvez/Maria:  When I was a child I looked for all kinds of insects and keep them.  Some of the good ones I would sell.  I also sold things like Jell-O. I made a kind of ice box for freezing the Jello. It was a special bowl that I made and put it in a tree.  There the bowl was able to keep everything cold.

 

I did this as I wanted to support my mother in an economical way. I was seven when I was working to help bring home money.

 

Andrea:  What about your older sister?

 

Galvez/Maria:  She worked as a maid.

 

Andrea: Was she sent away?

 

Galvez/Maria: Yes, she left to be a servant in another place. There was a system for work that was supposed to give women an opportunity to study but in fact it was only to be a maid. Eventually she did get to school in the United States.

 

I decided to stay even though I had an opportunity to leave the area, like my sister. I decided to stay with my mother. She was an amazing woman.

 

My mother had an ability to give of her self to others.  She was very patient, very smart and inviting.  And she was a strong woman who supported woman who had been subject to violence. My mother had also been subject to violence and she survived it. At one time her husband was drunk and he had guns and tried to kill her. She was running to try to fake him.  I understood that it was not his intention to kill her only to be macho.

 

Andrea:  You need a gun if you want to be macho because women are so very powerful.

 

Galvez/Maria:  Finally, I finished high school. Then I participate in a political movement to put a new mayor into office.    I thought the old political system had become corrupt.  For seventy years southern Mexico was a controlled community. The PRI announced candidates, and that was all it took to win.

 

I was 13 years old and before I knew it I was giving speeches with all these revolutionaries.  I encouraged people to change their lives and the political story.  I said that all the citizens of the town had the ability to throw out the corrupt people.  I encouraged people to feel their importance and that became like a torch.   

 

Andrea:  What year was this?

 

Galvez/Maria:  1977.  The new party won and after that I was elected to work in the government’s civil registry. I worked in the administrator’s office where I learn to write all the facts of when people were born and died. I organized the civil register’s office.  I began to put out an agenda. In a very short time I was seen as the responsible leader.

 

Andrea:  One of the funny things I notice about the families of political leaders is that people who are revolutionaries often times have a father who disappoints them or disappears.  Right now in the U.S. both Bill Clinton, and Obama, did not have a father around when they were young.  Their fathers disappointed them or disappeared.

 

Galvez/Maria: I too have a father without having a father.

 

Andrea: Obama went back and found his family in Kenya when he was in his twenties.  In some deep way he knew that this was important to find his identity.  He had to understand his family to know who he was and so he went back and found his family.  The he wrote a book describing this when he was in his twenties call, The Dreams of My Father.   

 

Were there any people in your father’s family that you would say you knew growing up?

 

Galvez/Maria:  My father’s father was a very good man. He was a revolutionary man in the 1910. He was responsible to organize the land for the government; therefore, he could have taken a lot of the land for himself but he took only one piece of land for his family. He was not a greedy man. Also I saw that he spoke in a special language. Then I realized one day that he came from an Indigenous family.

 

In Mexico nobody wants to be from Indigenous people.  In the 70s they were not allowed to speak their languages. 

 

It was like a double political idea: on the one hand the indigents were too poor to amount to much, but then on the other hand to make progress they needed to lean the language of the dominant culture.

 

Political people used this argument to force them to give up their language.  They believed that if the people are to speak Spanish they will progress.  After that I was very clear about the tribal people that I came from. I was always very proud of my origins   Eventually I was appointed to help people from other cultures. I always was clear where I was from and proud of it. I wanted to attack poverty but never to reject my origins.

 

Andrea:  Over the course of history there are many examples of invaders who steal the people’s language and then their land.  Mexico has a long history of dealing with invaders and the difficulties that arose for the native people happened over many years.

 

Mexico has a complex history but similar problems with other dominate cultures who also repress the natives. This struggle is everywhere.

 

For example, part of my family is Irish and part is English. Well, the English part stole the Irish people’s language and their land and so now I have this heritage.  I am part slave and part land owner.   This kind of injustice also happened to the American Indians. 

 

It is easier to dominate people if you can convince them that they and their culture are no good. I’m very interested in how social systems influence small groups of people to alter their own belief about their place in the world.

 

The recent history of the Mexican people reads like a detective story. It is hard to know who the good guys are, if you are on the outside.

 

Perhaps it is easier to find a way to make a difference as an individual than to find out which political party to trust.

 

Galvez/Maria:  One of the things that made it easier for me to step away from the limiting beliefs about Indigenous people was that I had a personal achievement parameter.  I was not trying to be a millionaire. I simply valued honesty and hard work.  In my business right now I am focused on how I want to bring positive change to how people are able to live.  

 

The biggest issue for me is a lack of time to accomplish my goals. 

 

My business concerns how I can put pieces of a puzzle together.  I want to pay people well and to encourage them to do well.  I must ask then how can I help people break the constraints of their culture?  How can I encourage them to see the value of honesty work?  Work is important for adults but should not be for children.

 

I have tried to educate people to understand that children don’t need to work when they are very young. Children need to go to a school.  It is important to question old ways of doing things and to raise the value of woman and children in communities.

 

 The other problems that need to be solved in our nation have to do with basics; like the lack of clean drinking water, the lack of green spaces. 

 

All of these problems forced me to become a person who deals with this level of challenge.  Of course the most important and basic need that arises in our culture is to find the strength to love other people.   

 

These principles are my base for being a different kind of entrepreneurial woman.  My mother use to say that the only thing that you can go to hell for was to keep more than you needed.

 

I became a political woman and I have been determined to make a positive difference in the daily lives of people.   I know there is always the danger in politics of being a hypocrite. I desire to be authentic.  I also know it is important to be a very straight and open woman.

 

For instance, if I find out that someone has stolen money I am able to directly say to the person:  “You stole the money.  To President Fox I said you have a chance to give the money, if you really are supportive of the poor people.”

 

People can think better if you are direct with them, hold them accountable and give them choices.   

 

When I was in the cabinet of president Fox I helped bring electricity to two million people.  We also developed a sewerage system and assistance for portable water containers in the villages. 

 

There are over a hundred small states in Southern Mexico where the Indigent people are the majority and it is they who suffer the worst poverty.[3]

 

Andrea:  It is similar in way to the plight of the American Indians.  They use to have all the land. But they had no ability to withstand the onslaught of the invaders. 

 

Galvez/Maria:  The Indigenous were never important to the political people until Marcos lead an uprising in 1994.[4]

 

In that week ten thousands of millions of dollars disappeared from the country as people who had money were worried about what Marcos might do. The Salinas government said nothing about people taking money out of the country.   Yet we know that in that week millions of dollars immediately disappeared from the country because of Marcos and the movement.

 

Andrea: I can remember reading about this and seeing pictures of the guerillas. People believed that they could topple the government in Mexico.

 

Galvez/Maria:  The people who were supporting Marcos and staying with him were millions.  There were people all over the world that supported this revolution.  If I was 20 years old I would be willing to run in order to say with him. When I was in the university I was a member of a very radical group.

 

But I never thought that the PRE would never fall down as they did but it was the only way. Everything was controlled and it was very repressive throughout the country.  This was the only way. In 1994 I was 30 and had a family so I could not go with Marcos.

 

My daughter is now 20 and my son is 11.

 

Andrea:  How did your meet your husband?

 

Galvez/Maria:  He is also an engineer.  We have a very good way with each other. He has been very supportive of my professional development. During the 6 years I was in the government with Fox he looked after the family.

 

Not only did he take care of the children also he took take care of my father and mother.  My parents were sick and in our culture the father and the mother lived with the children until the day that they die and they don’t put them in another place.

 

My father died in 2003 and my mother in 2005.

 

Now my son, when he is upset with her says, “I don’t want to take care of you when you are old.”  But he really knows that this is a good tradition.  The most important thing is that women can break with the traditions that are creating suffering.  There are still good men, like my husband in this culture.  I love him and want to die with him.

 

But consider the heritage we are overcoming.  For example, there was a monk written up in a book, The Indian of Mexico. Apparently he arrived here in the sixteenth century and said that woman are pervert and strong.  So to achieve power over the woman the man on the first day of the wedding needs to be strong and have sexual relationships with her eleven times.   If he does not achieve this, the woman has the right to look for another man.

 

Andrea: These are the kinds of stories that make it easy to see why there is tension between men and woman.

 

Galvez/Maria Do you have any more requests?

 

Andrea:  I would like to know your father’s siblings position…

 

Galvez/Maria:  There were seventeen children.

 

Andrea:  And he was in the middle?

 

Galvez/Maria:  There are seven alive.

 

Andrea:  I try to look at how the family promotes leaders, how does the family promote leaders not even with intention? Are we similar to a flock of guess where the leadership changes to give everyone a chance or is it best if just one person emerges and stays in the leader’s position due to being wiser in some way.

 

Galvez/Maria:  I have a very good story about my maternal grandfather.

The people had great respect for him, even though he was just a working man, raising corn. But each Sundays he refused to work on the land.  Everybody believed he was a different person as he valued Sundays as a special day. He was different. He would dress well on Sunday and the villagers noticed he ate with a fork.  Also they saw he was different as he liked to listen to classical music.  In my grandfather’s house there was special equipment just for listing to music. Now I have this equipment in my home.

 

Andrea:  That is wonderful.  Clearly you value your grandfather and therefore your roots.

 

I believe the people who know the past the best will be able to see further into the future.  This happens as people can accept the imperfect past and therefore they can see the imperfect future. 

 

Principled people don’t run away from their own family, despite the difficulties.  It pays to understand that people we are related to were in their owe way trying to be the best person they could in their time. Those who are able to respect the people who were different in the family system developed more mature values.  How do we know what our ancestors were up against? It also pays to be humble instead of blaming.   If the truth be known none of us are sure that under certain circumstances we could have done any better.

 

Now I am wondering, how do you see the future at this time?  How do you see Mexico changing?  What would you do to make a difference in Mexico if you had unlimited resources?

 

 

Galvez/Maria:  Education is the best way to offer people a better life. It made a difference for me.  My life would not have been the same without an access to the university.

 

The people can not alter their lives easily.  It is not because they’re Indigenes or poor people, or lazy people. It is because people don’t have an opportunity.  We have lack of opportunity.

 

When I talk about education, I am thinking about a way of teaching that also touches the heart. To provide for a new way I believe we have to talk directly to the heart from the heart of the teacher. 

 

This is how I talk to the politicians.  Always it is important to talk directly to the heart of the person. Some say to think this way is ridiculous. But I have seen that women don’t have the kind of fear of being seen as ridiculous.  Many are not ashamed of speaking directly. Women can talk directly to the heart of the other person. 

 

I believe that we need that commitment in education. To make a difference we need the commitment of teachers who are willing to talk and teach from the heart.

 

I had a professor who had this commitment with me and every afternoon she would teach me mathematics.  She lived in town.  She talked with me many times.

 

I hope that our teachers will bring compassion and even bring food to the children.   Compassion works because the teachers are doing what they love for the children they love.  And I think this allows teachers to find a way to educate people to be happier people. These kinds of compassionate teachers will do more than what is expected of them. 

 

I have had a big frustration about educated. People have funny expectations.  Some people believe that because anyone who has a degree should earn a lot of money.  Instead of money I propose that when someone has been educated they will be able to create more opportunity.  In doing so you may make more money but it is more important that you are a happy person creating opportunities. 

Education can help people earn a good living but it also needs to help the general welfare of the people not just the economic welfare of the people.   

 

Andrea:  Yes, that kind value that says people are our main concern would bring about enormous social change.

 

Galvez/Maria:   There are some universities, which I will not name now, which do not have that commitment to the community. 

 

But our country needs the commitment to educate the people well because we have 50 million people living in poverty. 

 

Of course, I am also in favor of technology. I am in favor of the expansion of the Internet, as it makes available current science, and research. 

 

Better education is needed as it is the first was that we can bring meaningful change to large parts of the country.

 

 

Andrea:  One idea I have thought about is that a teachers might be able to communicate not just with the students, but also with the family.  At least in the states, if you are in poverty, your family is in poverty.  Therefore, the teacher also needs to be able to help the mothers and the fathers who come to pick up the children and who may learn as the children learn.

 

Galvez/Maria: Mexico is at an advantage as we understand the importance of the family to the child.  Last week in my town we were organizing sports teams to competition in all the levels at the elementary schools (1-6 grades).  I was encouraged that one of the fathers of a student will be the coach of the football team Now this has to happen as they don’t have money to pay a real coach but its best for the family if the fathers participate.

 

It is important to involve the men of the family. First, if they love sports and children they will have something important to do in the afternoons. They will not be out drinking alcohol. They will be participating in educating the children in a way that they too can enjoy.  This will heal some of the division in the family, where fathers can feel not as important and therefore go out drinking. Seeing that you are important to the future of your children is one of the best ways to avoid addictions of all types.

 

What I see now is that everybody is waiting for the minister of public communication, or a professor or a coach to do this. Instead of doing it ourselves we wait for others.

 

What we need is more leaders to encourage participation of the citizens.  I am sure if I stayed two weeks in a community I could encourage people.  

 

Right now my husband is doing this. Every weekend instead of sleeping till noon, like a lot of fathers, he would wake up at 6:30 and be at football camp for the kids by 8 o’clock. My husband and son are both very strong. I am convinced that it is very important for any son to see his parents participate.

 

When my mother was alive she also went to go to the games to root for the children.   This happened as her son encouraged her.  It can happen that the children encourage the parents or even the grandparents. For example, one day my son, Paolo arrived at his grandmother’s house. My mother asked: What was the score?  Paolo said, if you want to know why you don’t go?

 

For my son, it was very important to speak openly to his grandmother. I think he was very disappointed that his grandmother was not there and his speaking out was a positive way to encourage her.

 

Andrea:  That is a wonderful story that could be told on the Internet. These kinds of human interest stories could make a difference in encouraging people to be more open and speak up about what is important to them with the people they care about. People can learn from these stories. It gives them courage to see wht others can do and the difference it makes.

 

Galvez/Maria:  This is my actual job, to encourage indigenous woman to find ways to do what they love and make money. For example there is a store that features furniture, made by indigenous woman.   They make beautiful handmade furniture. Each couch cost about 4,000 pesos and this has been a successful business. 

 

Also, I am working with a French company that has invented a way to purify water by using special glass containers.  They have found a way to make clean water available cheaply for the poorer community.  They will not have to drink contaminated water.  Now we have a development project that promises a solution to the water problem plus a business for woman and men. 

 

 

We also have a project with Dannon yogurt. http://www.dannon.com/pdf/2007DannonCSROverview.pdf

You should interview the president of this company, Juan Carlos Dalto, as he is an amazing man.

 

We have also asked if Coke will donate money for a community television program. Coca Cola will donate millions back to the community. http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/citizenship/

 

All of these are examples of ways that business can give back to the people. Both the business and the people will benefit.

 

In this building I have two businesses. One is to make money by organizing buildings in a systematic way, and the other is to give money back to the community.   Most of the earnings of my business are donated to the foundation company.  I do not need to make money for myself.   

 

We ask people to give some time of service to the community. I gave one year of service for my community. Some say I lost a lot of opportunities in business.  But I think that it helps me to stay happy in my work. 

 

Andrea:   I think you are finding a way to help people alter the selfish part of human nature.

 

Galvez/Maria:  I believe I have the moral authority to clarify the real issues surrounding the poor conditions of the people and to say that we can and must change this. 

 

I gave this kind of a talk in front of 2,000 business people and they understood that nature of the task before us.

 

Andrea:  You are creating leaders for tomorrow by appealing to the heart and the mind to find a willingness to undergo great change in society. I deeply appreciate all you have had to say and I thank you for your time.

 

 

Xochitl Galvez Mindful Compass

 

 

 

(1)  The ability to define a vision:

 

It is unusual for people to recall and experience when they are ten which shapes their future in a profound way.  At the moment when Galvez saw the plumbing inside a bathroom in Mexico City, she saw how her life could be shaped in a different way. 

 

Galvez’s first goal was to be able to study at the international public university as she knew how necessary education was to be able to build a better world. By working hard at school she was able to win a scholarship to a distant high school, eventually earning a masters degree in computer technology and telecommunications.

Since she had also seen the suffering within her community, she was comforted by her mother’s strength in the face of violence and hardships. Other people in her family, like her uncle Alberto, provided her with opportunities to enjoy learning.  In addition there were stories of her grandfathers as a respected village leader, who functioned as  positive models. 

Galvez developed a steadfast approach to living a personal and deeply value oriented life. She sees how to organize larger corporations to enable them to give back to her community.  Her ability to see a lager vision and take concrete actions to make it happen has made it possible for her to emerge as one of the individual mostly likely to influence the future in a positive way. 

All this began in the way Galvez saw how to manage her self with her own family, then her community and eventually she became influential on the international scene.  

(2) The resistance to change in self and in any system:

 

Galvez was born into a family situation that was rebounding and dealing with managing early deaths.  As the fourth of seven children she had two male siblings who died when they were young, she also had a father who drank, and her mother had had to deal with her own mother’s death when she was eight.  These difficult events did not sink her ship. Rather she emerged with the ability to understand how individuals and groups can be thrown into a time of great difficulty and still emerge with far better functioning. She was able to accept facts that impacted her life.  “It was common that many babies died in the middle of the pregnancy.”  

 

Most importantly Galvez’s when faced with negative experiences in her nuclear family had to figure out how to focus on her life rather than fall into the regression of blaming others. 

When she was young she saw her father struggle with alcohol but she was still able to love and care for him in his later years despite the disappointments in her youth.  The ability to integrate the difficulties that people have without anger and blame is part of any leaders struggle. 

By seeing the poverty that her mother was faced with Galvez chooses to stay in the village and help her earn money. As a young thirteen year old girl she used her inventive mind to develop a way of keeping Jello cold.  This idea was the basis for her first businesses, selling Jello in the village.

When one develops a vision of how to help people in poverty it is basic to have principles plus an inventive mind and to see the obstacles of just how poverty, stress and drug use often go hand in hand.  Principles are like the guiding light of the north star. 

Principles are my base for being a different kind of entrepreneurial woman.  I became a political woman and I have been determined to make a positive difference in the daily lives of people.   I know there is always the danger in politics of being a hypocrite. I desire to be authentic.  I also know it is important to be a very straight forward woman.

 

For instance, if I find out that someone has stolen money I am able to directly say to the person:  “You stole the money.  To President Fox I said you have a chance to give the money, if you really are supportive of the poor people.

 

If one understands the resistance and difficulty in their family it is far easier to see it and deal with it in society at large.  Galvez practiced her principles in her family. They stood the test of time.  Principles are part of who she is.  They are authentic and enable her to have a backbone to withstand the pressures from the larger system to give in and go along with the status quo. 

 

(3)The ability to connect and use systems knowledge:

 

 Being able to experience how the larger family offers both love and knowledge despite the difficulties gave Galvez the ability to connect with the people in amazing way.  She found her self as a young teenager able to communicate with crowds of people in her community.  First, she participated in a political movement to put a new mayor into office.  By encouraged people to change their story, she made it possible for people to understand that they had the ability to throw out corrupt people.  Galvex saw that by encouraging people to feel their importance the people were able to carry that message forward, like a torch.  

 

Being able to connect with people then lead her to a new position where she was able to see the facts of peoples live spelled out in the civil register office. This was the first step in being seen as and acting as a community leader.

 

One of the things that made it easier for me to step away from the limiting beliefs about Indigenous people was that I had a personal achievement parameter.  I was not trying to be a millionaire. I valued honest and work and in business right now I am focused on how I want to bring positive change to how people live. 

 

 

(4)The ability to be separate: 

 

People are always asking wht does it mean to be connected with people and yet to be separate from them?  If you consider the many different ways that people try to so this perhsp Galvez has summarized in one sentence one approach that is always difficult in being separate from others at a deeply emotional level. 

 

 

People can think better if you are direct with them, hold them accountable and give them choices.  

 

The ability to connect emotionally with people makes it possible to be separate from others without a great deal of negative intensity. Emotionally people read differences as a signal that this or that person is NOT your friend. They are not with you.  There is a tremendous need at a primitive level to have people in agreement with you to feel safe and to trust the other.

 

This primitive need then gives people the idea that by seeking agreement they will be safe. Nothing could be further from the truth. Any new truth in fact is hard to see and hard to communicate to others. It requires the discipline of thinking and seeing deeply. Therefore the truth is often arrived at in solitude.  When one emerges from solitude to communicate some version of a personal truth to others there can be resistance.  Giving people choices is one way to avoid a showdown.

 

Galvez had had an amazing ability to communicate her views to people that touched something deep in the people which allowed them to connect with her view.   The solitude needed to see deeply resulted in her being able to communicate deeply.

 

******************************************************************

 

Murray Bowen, M.D. in letter written in 1977

 

 

 

“I have spent my professional life on defining and practicing “Differentiation” which is usually misheard as emotional distancing.

 

 For me “Differentiation” involves the ability to remain an emotionally contained entity while in the middle of emotional chaos, while relating actively to every person in the field. 

 

In so far as I am able to practice operational differentiation, then I am a free agent in the field, able to relate everywhere without the emotionality in any field interfering with my function.”   

 

Commitment to Principles, edited by Clarence Boyd, page 180  

 

 

 

 

   

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Xochitl Galvez Ruiz has received different awards and acknowledgments, among the most important of which are: “Female Entrepreneur of the Year” Award for two years running – 1994 and 1995. “Recognition of Commitment to Others 1999″ awarded by the Mexican Center for Philanthropy. She was recognized in January this year by the Economic Forum of Davos in Switzerland as one of the 100 Global Leaders of the future of the world, the first Mexican woman to receive this recognition; this year she also received the Pericles 2000 Award, given by the Amparo Museum of Puebla for social merit.

She has been Vice President of the academic area of the Mexican Institute of Intelligent Buildings; Full Counselor of the National Water Council, Counselor of CEMEFI and member of the working group on entrepreneurial social responsibility and member of the “Home Made” Foundation, an institution that seeks to promote values within the family.

She was born in Tepatepec, Hidalgo, on February 22 1963.

 

http://fox.presidencia.gob.mx/en/cabinet/?contenido=17934

 

 

 

 

---

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/1998/43/b3601035.htm

[2] One Hundred Years of Solitude

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Author), Gregory Rabassa (Translator)

[3] Consejo Estatal de Organizaciones Indígenas y Campesinas–made up of 280 Indigenous and campesino organizations throughout the state.

 

[4] The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), the army that woke up the world on January 1, 1994 by seizing four towns in Chiapas, the southern-most state of Mexico.

The EZLN has organized itself among some of the most dispossessed people of the world. Its composition is almost as diverse as the outside world to which it speaks.

 

Fortunately for us, the Zapatistas are very self-conscious speakers, and often speak to us about their own speaking, so that we will understand the words that come to us through their mouths. They are the words of those who have gone before us to the people of Chiapas; they are the voices of people who have learned to listen.

 

Marcos has affirmed the EZLN’s official support for women’s struggles against patriarchy. This involves not only a redistribution of responsibilities and work and the defense of women against men’s abuse, but also material support for women’s health and birth control.

 

The Mexican government’s response to the EZLN challenge has been surprising. With startling rapidity the state shifted from a truly massive military repression (over 15,000 troops dispatched to Chiapas, aerial bombings of villages, summary torture and execution of captives) to a cease- fire and high-level negotiations with the rebels, mediated by progressive representatives of the Catholic Church. Why?

 

Conventional political pundits attribute the change to the government’s fear of international scrutiny of its behavior in the wake of the implementation of NAFTA and in the light of its new pretensions to First World status.

 

Not only did the Zapatistas attack NAFTA in their very first declaration, but their uprising threatened multinational capitalist estimates of the risks of investing in Mexico. But this hypothesis of “sensitivity” to international opinion does not explain why the government judged that such opinions might turn negative or influential enough to affect foreign investment. To explain why it was worried we have to turn from the government’s reactions per se to those of Mexico as a whole, and to those of the world beyond.

 

Even as the Mexican Army poured into Chiapas, so too did representatives of human rights organizations, of other Indigenous peoples and of free-lance and foreign journalism which the Mexican government could not control. Within days these observers reported Army atrocities and repression. Others mobilized protest demonstrations all across North America, and even in Europe, to denounce the Mexican government. These actions tremendously strengthened the hand of the Zapatistas, and forced the government to withdraw to the negotiating table.

http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/Zapatistas/introduction.html

 

 

Anna Zarnecki who has been the President of the Mexican Red Cross and the International Red Cross

October 1, 2008

I wanted to introduce you to Anna Zarnecki who has been the President of the Mexican Red Cross and the International Red Cross. She agreed to tell the story of her life which you will find below.

 

 

I also wanted to acknowledge the Jewish high holidays as yesterday was the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. During the next ten days all the inhabitants of the world are belived to pass for judgment before God. The names of the righteous are immediately inscribed in the book of life, and they are sealed “to live.” The middle class are allowed a respite of ten days till Yom Kippur, to repent and become righteous ; the wicked are “blotted out of the book of the living” (Psalms 69:29).

 

Anna Zarnecki has striven to live a purpose filled life.  She allows us to have a glimpse into her life. We can watch her relationship system come alive with people willing to give her a hand or a meal in difficult times and how she returns more than she was given. She has witnessed the best and the worst of human nature. As the neurobiologist, Francesco Varela, used to say: “to live is to know.”  Now we can learn from Anna Zarnecki to be mindful during threatening times. She highlights the importance of living with principle and of defining and fighting for one’s deep purpose.   

 

People can read a story like this and say, “But how does this apply to my life?” I am not in the middle of a war. Well, that may be true on one level but consider how similar events occurred in your family in the past. Difficulties may have happened generations ago and you may or may not be aware of the impact on you. No family escapes without the memory of some disaster or as in this case, war, and its resultant turmoil. The unexamined life is full of memories which act on us and our interactions in unexpected ways.  This is not a good thing.    

 

Those who are dead are not dead,

they are just living in my head,

and since I fell for that spell

I am living there as well.

Coldplay - Album: Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends- Song -42

 

 

One goal of reading these interviews is to allow us to see how people overcame difficulties by being mindful of the importance of relationships and principles.  This gives us inspirations to put life’s problems in perspective.

 

When I am interviewing people I need to suspend judgment to create an open environment to discover the other’s story. Can I make too big a deal about suspending judgment to allow a story to be told? No, it’s a proven technique used in most forms of psychotherapy. It is also the state obtained in many forms of meditation whereby the mind becomes detached from the need to cling to various points of view.

 

It is safe to say that none of us completely understand ourselves, much less others. We must always be discovering who is the other based on what we “assume.”  With greater neutrality there are fewer assumptions. 

 

Life lived produces stories and our stories and lives change when we are disturbed and or begin to doubt the old and make room for the new.   

 

Let’s now see how one person discovered the new in the midst of the ashes from the old.

You will see how fortunate I was to be invited to the home of this well-known humanitarian, writer and painter. I confess that people like Anna Zarnecki give me inspiration to follow the compassionate path.

 

Being an American in Mexico City, and not able to speak the language I tend to be more mindful of what I see more than what I hear. After all I am still an American, a stranger in a strange land. I am learning as I go, about the diversity of the people and their deep love for Mexico.

 

On the morning of the interview I was looking around the neighborhood trying to find the house number and a place for Maria Bustos, the originator of his project and my translator, to park the car. Finally, we saw a helpful man on the street who said we were in the right spot. He was directing children headed for school. An enthused group of young Hebrew students, filled out of a bus. I wondered what stories would they be telling and who would be listening to them?

 

Ana Zarnecki’s home welcomes visitors with a charming flowery patio. As Maria and I waited for the door to open we were entertained by colorful flowers. When the door opened a tall, blond woman emerged with a friendly smile, inviting us to enter.

 

I had my plan. I was all, ready to sit down and proceed with the interview but as soon as I saw the incredible paintings on the walls I asked only one question, Is this your art work?

 

Now we were off and running. Anna Zarnecki began telling us about her paintings. There was no sitting and listening. I was semi mindful of the change and the challenge of focusing on her life story in the midst of all these paintings. But I thoroughly enjoyed falling into her enchanting way of telling stories and seeing her amazing paintings.

 

There was little I could do to keep this interview on a single track. Instead I followed her as best I could. I began to formulate the questions but Anna Zarnecki was already saying that her first instructor at art school did not like her painting. Her first painting was rejected but now holds a place of special honor.

 

This painting reminded me of the courage needed to go forward with our talents, even without approval from the local authorities. As a painter she became a survivor of criticism. Anna Zarnecki had created a different style by using thin lines, forming triangles, as the basic building block for all her art work.

 

Nothing is easy when you have to break through established barriers, called the status quo. Even in her loving family things did not happen easily. Perhaps because of the challenges and how she meets them, she has emerged to become the leader, the artist, the writer, the wife and the mother, and the grandmother that she is today.

 

As always I am wondering what gets a person going. What gives them the insight to see what needs to be done and the energy to do it? And then of course what can you and I learn from her story?

 

**************************************************

AZ: We must fight to do everything.

 

AMS: I understand you had to convince your husband to let you go to art school? Was his reluctance just part of the way life was after WW II? As I recall many women stayed home and did not engage in community activity. In fact there has been a long struggle in America for women to have more of a public life.

 

I just was reading the life of our second president John Adams. The poor man had to have many discussions with his wife about increasing woman’s role in society. Abigail Adams even tried to convince her husband that women should be educated and should be able to vote.

 

AZ: In my case my nun friend named Anna Maria Treviño helped me to go to the Institute of Art. My husband didn’t want me to go. I told her, that I want to study and he didn’t want to let me go. So my nun friend went and talked to him. Later he was angry and he said, “You said to her, that I don’t give you permission … but what she said is true and now you can go if you want.

 

AMS: That is so beautiful. You tell your nun friend and after she talks to him, he can see the situation differently and so he changes his mind. He let you go and did not keep defending his old way of thinking.

 

That is a gorgeous triangle. The more neutral third party, in this case, your nun girlfriend is the person who influenced him so that he could think well. This nun is also the person who influenced you to believe in the power of your first Jesus Christ painting?  This is also when you began using your triangle technique.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then amazingly triangles are basic in your paintings and they are also the building block of all social networks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In family therapy a triangle has three people. In the best of circumstances there is one outside person, enabling the two sides (you and your husband in this case) to be able to be listen to one another.  I assume, your friend made it possible for you all to rethink your positions.

 

 

In describing social triangles you often see and feel that two people are close and one is on the outside. Triangles can go in cooperative or destructive directions.  If negativity is in the triangles, polarization arises and this often pulls people apart.

 

Triangles can be useful when they are open, cooperative. They can function to clarify misunderstandings. They can be deadly when two gang up on a third and extrude them and of course often people or nations think they are right to do so. We see this in families and in grade school and of course more cleverly at work and in international politics.

 

It can happen innocently as when two people gossip behind a third person’s back. For example if I don’t take sides with Maria and I don’t take sides with either of you then I can talk to each of you about any topic without threatening the relationship system.  

 

To stay in contact and not to take sides takes real maturity or mindfulness. It is an extremely important concept in family systems theory and very hard for people to understand or to see how they participate in triangles.

 

I write about the triangle and you paint with triangle lines.

Is it Ok if I call you Anna?

 

AZ: yes…that’s okay.

 

AMS: Another thing we have in common is names as Anna is also one of my family names. Anna was my mother and my maternal grandmother’s name.

 

Now can you tell me a little about your family?

 

AZ: My son, in this picture, went to medical school at Johns Hopkins. He also went to Chapeaus in the southern part of Mexico to see how the indigenous people lived. After a year he told them he had to go back so that he could help people more at a policy level. Now he is working in the Ministry of Public Health acting as a Director of the Public Health Development.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AMS: I see you have painted all kinds of working and poor people.

 

AZ: Yes, I think all people are important no matter the skin color. We all suffer and we all must work.

 

AMS: The pictures you paint come to you as an inspiration?

 

AZ: Yes, because I am thinking about what is happening all around the world. I also know how important it is to pray for helping all the people of the world.

 

AMS: I know a little about your life. As I understand it you were in the camps during the Nazi era. How long were you there?

 

AZ: For more than two years.

 

AMS: Why did your family decide to go to Russia?

 

AZ: When the war began we knew the Germans were coming and we heard the Russians say they will save us. We thought we could be saved.[3]

 

But they took everything from us. Lot of people will never know how much we lost, houses and horses and everything. They left us one horse and two cows. We could live only in the kitchen. There was only one room for the whole family: my grandfather, grandmother, my mother, my father and my sister. In the other room were the men of the Russian Army. For one year we worked and had no permission to do anything else.

 

I still recall when they came. I was 13 years old. One day I was working in the field with my grandfather and we saw a lot of soldiers with rifles and they asked for my father. In 15 minutes we had to take our things and you go with them.

 

That was terrible. They took us to the train. It was a train for animals. They put us in box cars and sent us to Siberia.[4] We were on the train for a while then they put us on a ship for about three days and later they put us on a small train for five days and then they made us walk to the place where they gave us one room with a lady who has nine children. That family hated us, as we were making their situation worse. We could only sleep down on the floor.

 

AMS: Your mother, your sister, and your father still with you, but what happened to your grandfather?

 

AZ: The Russians did not want to take my grandfather to Siberia.  He was too old to work so he stayed there and passed away very soon.

 

AMS: I can understand that he was ready to die. My grandfather told me as he approached death that he was ready to die, “I’ve done all I can do for you people and now I have another life.”

 

AZ: Yes. I am agree, I though he was ready too, because he was a saint. But he was suffering thinking of us and his last words were to ask for a piece of bread for my aunt. He blessed the bread and prayed for us in Siberia knowing we were hungry.

 

We stayed in Siberia for about two years.  After this my father took us from Russia to Persia and later to India. The authorities asked us where do you want to go? We picked Mexico over Africa.

 

AMS: That seems to have been a very good decision.

 

AZ: I think so.

 

AMS: And you came out of this experience with this great love for humanity? How did that happen?

 

AZ. The Russians invaded Poland and took us to the concentration camps in Siberia, named “Journey Chormui Kluch” in order to work. We work very hard in the camp but they did not give us anything to eat. So my mother sold clothes, sweaters and dresses to pay for food. We sold everything that we had hoping that soon my father will return and bring us papers and food.

 

AMS: Who did you buy food from?

 

AZ: From the collective. My father was in the Polish Army. He went to process our papers so we could get out of the country. He was gone a period of about two or three months when we didn’t have anything to eat. It was very hard. We just took grass and put a little bit of flour and made something like a tortilla and we ate them. I want to highlight that I got sick all my body was bloated. Then we receive an “International Red Cross package.” This food helped me to survive until my father came to take us out of Russia.  The Red Cross package includes rice, flavor, sugar, (that we had not tasted for 2 years ago as well as salt) syrup, and some clothes. Immediately my mother changed my cloths and fed me, which saved me from death or disease.

 

This package was the principal motivation that encourages me to work and serve the Red Cross as volunteer during the last 38 years.

 

It is important to say I was willing and able to support and help people as I was helped in that extremely situation.

 

It is important to clarify that my father was a volunteer in the Polish army to fight against Hitler.  This was a key piece in his ability to get papers and take us out of the concentration camps and take us to Teheran, Persia.

 

It is historical to remark, that in this time were 35,000 Polish people, who were freed from the concentration camps of Russia and went to Persia and then emigrated to other places.

 

We came here to Mexico, to a small city named “Leon Guanajuato”.

I lived there for 6 months, then I moved to Mexico City where my sister was working in the Polish embassy. (She was invited to work there by the Polish Consul)

 

AMS: No other family was left in Poland?

 

AZ: My aunt was still there.

 

AMS: Is she your mother’s sister or your fathers?

 

AZ: My mother’s sister who later went to live with my mother in the United States.

 

AMS: Was your father an only child or did he have some siblings?

 

AZ: He was the only child.  (Just then the front door opened and her son, the doctor son came in. I explained that I was interviewing his mother for a book.)

 

AMS: As I told your mother, she paints triangles and I write about triangles. My focus is on how leaders learn to understand relationships. I wanted to interview people, like your mother, who has been an important leader in Mexico and who has made her way through incredible odds.

 

Dr: Thank you very much and welcome to Mexico. We all move through example.  I’ll go visit my father and see you later.

 

AZ: He wants to see his father because he’s been a little bit sick. He’s 94 years old.  We have taken care of him most of the time. When he is very sick it is hard for me to go to the Red Cross and work everyday. It’s enough for me to do to take care of him.

 

AMS: We can see other pictures now and still talk.

 

AZ: Now here is a picture that I painted of a Polish camp worker. And this one is of my granddaughter, who is also a doctor. Right now she’s interning.

 

This next painting I did was for my mother when she lived in NY City. It was a very big picture so when my mother passed away, I was going to bring it here but it disappeared and so I painted a smaller one. This is a painting of the house where I was born.

 

AMS: I think I saw that on your website? http://www.annazarnecki.com/

 

 

AZ: The house was about half a mile from a very nice lake. I wrote in my book about it and these people are my grandfather, my mother and my sister.

 

AMS: You grew up with your grandfather living in your house with you or close-by?

 

AZ: No, we were with him often on vacations. When the war began I went to live with him. I have remembered a lot of things about that time and I wrote all about it in one of my books. I translate this book into English but I have yet to publish it in English.

 

AMS: It is hard to find publishers but you can put the books on the web and people can download them through Amazon.  In the future this will be common practice I believe.  Everything is going to be digital. We probably won’t have many books to lug around in ten years. Amazon now has “Kindle” so you download your books electronically and you can read it on the Kindle. Of course they will also publish your book for you but I am not sure how you go about all that.

 

AZ: This next picture is one that people asked me to paint.

 

AMS: How long does it take you to paint a picture like that?

AZ: About two months.

 

AMS: How does your day go?

 

AZ: I get up at 6 o’clock and I go to sleep at eleven at night. When I go to the Red Cross and then I go from 9 to 1 o’clock

 

AMS: How did you get involved with the Red Cross?

 

AZ: I started in the Red Cross when I came here. Now I have worked for them for 38 years as I told you before. At first my sister who was working in the Polish Embassy and I wanted to live with her here.

 

AMS: Is she’s your older sister?

 

AZ: Yes. The authorities said, you don’t have papers to live here but if you want to study at the Red Cross that will give you the correct papers. My sister and I were thinking that maybe we will stay in Mexico, maybe six months or one year and then we will go back to Poland.  I never thought I would be able to finish my nursing study or get married to a wonderful Mexican man. But even when the Second World War finished we could not go back to Poland. The part of Poland where we lived was occupied by the Russians. So we decided to live in Mexico, where I finished my nursing studies. Then I was fortunate to marry my husband.

 

After this the Mexican Red Cross organized an international bazaar for raising money. Through the Polish embassy I began working with the Red Cross to raise money. When we did very well, one of the Mexican ladies asked me, Why you come and don’t work for all of us?

 

I decided yes, and became a member of the International Red Cross. Every year we have a very big party where even the president’s wife comes. Everyone was working and helping.  I was still volunteering at the Red Cross, when the President of the Mexican volunteer’s ladies asked me to be her Vice president.

 

AMS: Wow! You must have been a very good worker.

 

AZ: Eventually with my passion and good work I was elected to be the National President of the Mexican volunteers’ ladies.

 

AMS: I am sure that was a well deserved honor.

 

AZ: I had to travel all over Mexico and to talk to all of the volunteers, to show them how to work and how to make money. They liked me very much and I worked very hard for them.

 

After years of hard working with the Mexican Red Cross they asked me to be the Mexican Chairman in the International Red Cross.  Acting as a Chairman I participate in International congress in United States, Ginebra, Guatemala, Chile as well as other countries.

 

When I was in one of these congress (Ginebra) my husband fell down and he broke all of his ribs so I came back and I said I am sorry but I can’t work for the International Red Cross I have to take care of my husband. They understood. However I still working as an advisors and as a board member.

 

Then I was a little bored. I still have my office there with Red Cross. It is very difficult for me with my husband but when they need me I go. They know that I have problems … but they want me to stay there and work when I can.

 

Now, here is a painting I did of Pope John Paul II from Poland. [2]

 

When I saw him the first time, he took my hand in his hand and he and he was just asking me questions and talking.

 

The Pope asked me when I first came to Mexico, and I told him that I came from Siberia with 1,400 Polish refuges to Santa Rosa Leon Guanajuato. He told me “My daughter, we have had the same suffering living road, but we need to follow Christ”, and He repeat again “We must follow”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After that marvelous meeting my life changed. Suddenly I began to write in the Red Cross magazine as well as I began to be an important speaker in the Red Cross congress, and I began to write my books.

 

I don’t know what he did to me. He changed my life. For a long time I was feeling like somebody strange to myself.

 

AMS: What year was this?

AZ: I think it was 1984.

 

AMS: Do you believe that people can transfer their energy one to another?

 

AZ: Yes, I think … because it was some something I felt. I know that some energy was created or transferred right then. The pope told me, we must follow the path of Jesus. It was all very nice but I really don’t know what happened. Afterwards I was very strong and I felt I can do everything. We were close because we are Polish.

 

AMS: I would guess you were somehow in the receptive spirit and the Pope knew that. Someday there might be a scientific explanation but who cares if we totally understand just how it works.

 

AZ: Talking again about the Red Cross I was given many awards and received two of the most important ones for the volunteers “La Gran Cruz” and “Ben emeritus” medals.

 

AMS: Now you go to the Red Cross and you come home and you have dinner and then you paint until eleven at night?

 

AZ: I also work on writing my books. About 20 years ago I translate a book about the most important Polish writer named Teodor Parnicki who is considered a literature Nobel Prize. He was working here with the Polish embassy “Consejero de asuntos culturales”. My sister works in the same embassy. When the second war work finished and the government changed they were dismissed of their respectively jobs. Therefore my friend didn’t have any way to earn money while he wrote. I translated his book. It was about the history of Rome about 900 years ago to this century. Nobody wants to write a book like this. I still want to have this book publish because it’s a beautiful book. Now there are a lot of people who is interested in history.

 

AMS: If you publish a book, then everyone can have it that wants it. It is not like a painting. Only one person can have that painting, but with the books, everyone can have it.

 

AZ: Yes that right. Let me tell you that after I wrote “Polonia Viento y Tinieblas” an “Huellas en el alma”, and “Tecnica inovadora de triangulismo de Ana Zarnesky” I finished my book about Red Cross in which I describe my life in the Red Cross and the evolution of the  Red Cross.  I hope to include my 8 paintings referring to the Red Cross.

 

I gave this one to the president of American Red Cross. It has a big Red Cross where a little Mexican girl emerges with a piece of bread in her hand and a lot of different people are asking for a part of that bread, but she has only one. I expressed in this painting the lack of possibilities for help for the many peoples that are asking for help.

 

AMS: Do you have a history in your family of people in service?

 

AZ: I really don’t know, maybe my Grandfather on my maternal side, who was well known in the town, was like a great leader, his name was Piotr. He always tried to support people.

 

AMS: How about your paternal grandfather?

 

AZ: He too was always working for everybody. He had many friends and he made houses for every worker.  

 

AMS: So you saw how he gave back to his community. Now, your children have seen how you give to your community.

 

AZ: Yes let me tell you about them: my oldest son is helping the church and founded a foundation to support orphan girls with no parents. The foundation build an Orphanage named “Refugio de Maria”. I painted thirteen stained glass windows that I donated to them. My youngest son, who is the Doctor that you met, encourage the project for the “Seguro Popular” (Health Insurance for poor people) when he was Director of the Health School in the “Instituto de Salud Publica.” In addition to my family I have met many different and famous people who are giving back to the community through the Red Cross.

 

AMS: Now when you had earthquakes do all these people go down there and help out?

 

AZ: Yes everyone comes to work. It has been an amazing to see how people support others in a solidarity and brotherhood way. Mexico is prone to a variety of natural disasters including earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding and drought, the MRC runs a disasters training school in Toluca. To better prepare and respond to these disasters, the school offers free training in a full spectrum of emergency response activities.

 

AMS: In the States that is what happened with September 11th with the terrorist attack … and all the Red Cross people participated.

 

AZ: We here were also very concerned. I wrote a letter to the American Red Cross regarding our feelings and concern about it.

 

AMS: Lets go back to the time after you got out of the camps did you and your mother and sister came to Leon Guanajuato in Mexico. Do you think that since you’ve suffered a great deal you don’t want other people to suffer, and that you are motivated to try to end suffering?

 

AZ: Yes, of course for me this was the most significant fact that pushes me to be the person that I am.  I always try to help others avoiding the suffering.  I have also found a way to expressed hope, and yet the reality of suffering, through my paintings.

 

 AMS: It is an amazing story.  You came to Mexico, the immigration authorities let you know that you can stay by taking courses with the Red Cross. Then you meet and marry your husband and find a wonderful man with a great family. You learn the skill of painting and are able to transform your personal suffering through your paintings and of course by creating this warm and giving family.

 

Your paintings are like celebrations. Each painting reminds us of the history of people suffering and yet gives us hope and perspective. How many people will come out of intense suffering and give back as you have?

 

AZ: My grandfather, Piotr, influenced me, by saying, when you receive one favor you have a debt and you must give back. I think I tried to comply with this principle.

 

AMS: can you tell me more about the books you have written?

 

AZ: In the “Técnica Innovadora de Triangulismo”, I have many pictures of my paintings. I have painted about 250. I wrote a book called, Light in the Shadows. It is a very hard book because it covers the time from the first war to the second one and describes the life of one my aunts and my grandfather. Hopefully this book will allow others to know the people and to understand why they are fighting. Also it includes how difficult the war is as well as what it was like when the peace arrived.  In this book I wished to demonstrate that the war only leads to destruction, poverty and suffering.

 

AMS: Many people are still being threatened with versions of these problems. There are still governments that take the people’s goods and lands and where many people are starving. Always work to do.

 

AZ: My grandson is a philosopher and he’s a writer and I hoped he could help me edit this book but he’s working in the university and he has his own job.

 

AMS: How old is he?

 

AZ: About 26 years old.

 

AMS: Perhaps he will be one of the younger generation to help change the world.

 

AZ: Yes, I hope so. Also I have another grandson who is studying in England and plays the guitar. He has been able to obtain government money to investigate music and mathematics on the computer and compose.  He has had 6 concerts in Europe.

 

AMS: Another question is how did you meet your husband?   

 

AZ: We met in the hospital. I went to visit somebody.  It was providence and it has been a lovely life we have had together.

 

Another thing I am interested in is helping younger woman, just as my husband helped me. When I launched my first book “Polonia, viento y Tienieblas”, I was invited to participate as a member the Publicist Lady’s Association. This brings people together to raise money to so that people can publish.

 

I have been told that my books have moved the hearts of so many people. I found a group of marvelous women immediately who stay close to my heart. God never leaves us here alone for too long. I really appreciate this fraternity of sisters because I think if we are together we are like a team with the desire to see the world become a better place.

 

AMS: You deeply know how important it is to communicate, to keep your team together and to keep people focused and your vision alive.

 

AZ: Yes, that is why I have written many articles in the Red Cross Magazine. Once I went to a small village to show them how to work to increase volunteers. They had framed my Red Cross magazine speech. They said we want to read it because it shows how to love people. It gives me more motivation to help people to know what the Red Cross does. Sometimes people do not understand. They think it’s just an ambulance here or there.  I want them to see how deeply the Red Cross affects people’s lives.

 

AMS: The Red Cross helped you and you had deep suffering, you were beaten with a stick, you saw the cruelty and you gave back the love.

 

AZ: I think this is important because we have to decide to hate or to love

I think if you give love then you receive love.

 

I remember when I went to one hospital. There were about 18 beds with sick women and one of them had a terrible sickness. Nobody wanted to clean her. She smelled but I put on my gloves and the special clothes and went to cleaned her. She always looking at me when I was working and one day she said, come here. She took one peso that her sister had given her and she gave it to me: I want to give you this so that so you can buy something at the candy store. It was the only peso she had. She wanted to give. I said to her, No thank you, I don’t like candy but I will go to buy a candle and we will light it for you and ask for God’s help. She said she did not know how to pray. I said I will pray with you of course. I didn’t know how to pray in Spanish but she was very happy because we prayed for her. When I came back the next day she had passed away.

 

I remember a very sorrowful feeling because she had passed away; however, I was grateful to God because she was suffering so much. I painted her picture because she was suffering.

 

AMS: Perhaps being such a spiritual person you saw the love of Christ in the crucifixion as Mother Theresa has said?

 

AZ: I think it is important that those who can will give a little bit of love and then we will change the world.

 

AMS: There are very few people who can do this but with your help and example there may be more.

 

AZ: We have two choices in life: We can live careless of what surrounds us,

or live optimistic about what may happen in the future.

 

We can face our selves with honesty, reflect about life and its meaning, talk to as many people as we can and start building, and affirming life. This will shape our actions. It will   allow us to be more certain of the fact that being part of a strong community will give us a better future.

 

Our life is in a certain way chained to the destiny of others. We build through our acts. All of us have the right to live, but at the same time we must always serve others with a great spirit of service.

 

The love and gratitude that we receive from those we help, inspires us to carry out the Red Cross Lemma-

 

“Let us all be brothers”

 

AMS: That is a great thought to end on.  Thank you so much for taking the time for this interview.

*********************************************************************

 

THE MINDFUL COMPASS FOR ANNA ZARNECKI

 

(1)  The ability to define a vision: Anna Zarnecki tell us that in her early life she was taken by the Russians and sent to forced labor camp. Here she both bore witness and also experienced terrible suffering.  As she noted she has been driven all her life by the motivation to decrease suffering. 

In addition to her 38 years of work with the Red Cross she found a way to demonstrate and live a hope filled life in her family and at work ,while still pointing to the reality of suffering through her paintings and in her books.

(2) The resistance to change in self and in any system:  As a youth the social unrest took center stage in her life.  She was more aware of the need of her family and herself to survive. She also had to face the damage to her own body that occurred for months due to limited or no food available.  Anna Zarnecki was able fight the good fight and resist giving up in the face of illness and brutality.

Later in life she faced legal resistance in the requirements to enter and stay in Mexico.  Understanding the regulations offered her an opportunity.  She took the chance to attend school and get a nursing degree in a foreign country. 

Next, as a young wife, she wanted to take art classes and was able to find a way around her husband’s objections by talking with some who her husband respected. 

While in art school her teacher rejected her technique of drawing using triangle lines.  She kept on going despite the negative comments.

Clearly Anna Zarnecki has faced many instances of resistance and time and again returns to her deep value to chart a way forward. 

(3)The ability to connect and use systems knowledge: Anna Zarnecki never seems to be trying to figure out how to use relationships in order to achieve a goal. Instead she appears to have people in her network who want to help her achieve a goal. They can be personal or even strangers, like the person who explain the rules for immigrating to Mexico. 

She has inspired people by her presence, or so it would seem. Her experiences are a wonderful example of how being your best self can lead to openings  in the relationship system that can support anyone’s goals.

 (4)The ability to be separate: The clearest examples of this ability we see in her determination to preserver in both her art work and in her ability to keep writing book with no hope for a publisher.

Few of us will have the kinds of struggles she faced but for all of us her story demonstrates how one’s internal principles can function, even through incredible hardships, providing a beacon of hope and courage for one and all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

****************************************************************************

 

FINALLY – Special thanks to Maria Bustos who spent a lot of time going back and checking facts with Anna Zarnecki.

 

 REFERENCES

[1] The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative edited by Jonathans Gottschall and David Slone Wilson

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_Paul_II

[3] The 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland was a military operation that started without a formal declaration of war on 17 September 1939, during the early stages of World War II, sixteen days after the beginning of the Nazi German attack on Poland. It ended in a decisive victory for the Soviet Union’s Red Army.

In early 1939, the Soviet Union tried to form an alliance against Nazi Germany with the United Kingdom, France, Poland, and Romania; but several difficulties arose, including the refusal of Poland and Romania to allow Soviet troops transit rights through their territories as part of collective security.^[7] With the failure of the negotiations, the Soviets shifted from their anti-German stance and on 23 August 1939 signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. As a result, on 1 September, the Germans invaded Poland from the west; and on 17 September, the Red Army invaded Poland from the east.^[8] The Soviet government announced that it was acting to protect the Ukrainians and Belarusians who lived in the eastern part of Poland, because the Polish state had collapsed in the face of the German attack and could no longer guarantee the security of its own citizens.^[9][10]

The Red Army quickly achieved its targets, vastly outnumbering Polish resistance.^[1] About 230,000 Polish soldiers or more (452 500^[11]) were taken prisoners of war.^[12] The Soviet government annexed the territory newly under its control and in November declared that the 13.5 million Polish citizens who lived there were now Soviet citizens. The Soviets quelled opposition by executions and by arresting thousands.^[13] They sent hundreds of thousands (estimates vary) to Siberia and other remote parts of the USSR in four major waves of deportations between 1939 and 1941.

The Soviet invasion, which the Politburo called “the liberation campaign”, led to the incorporation of millions of Poles, western Ukrainians and western Belarusians into the Soviet Ukrainian and Byelorussian republics.^[14] During the existence of the People’s Republic of Poland, the invasion was considered a delicate subject, almost taboo, and was often omitted from official history in order to preserve the illusion of “eternal friendship” between members of the Eastern Bloc.^[15]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland_(1939)

[4] Russia, later the Soviet Union, operated a series of labor camps, known as Gulags. They became so common that “Siberia” came to be used as metaphor for exile and punishment: “a bureaucratic Siberia. It makes up about 77% of Russia’s territory (13.1 million square kilometres), but only 30% of Russia’s population (42.2 million people).”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia

[i] Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life, M. M. Schlitz,C. Vieten, Tina Amorok

 

 

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