Tonight's picture was taken in September of 2008. This had to be one of Mattie's favorite activities, other than building with Legos. Mattie loved creating structures out of cardboard boxes! In fact, Mattie's support team at the Hospital quickly caught onto Mattie's passion with boxes, that they began to collect all sorts of shipping boxes that came into Georgetown Hospital for him! I mean boxes of ALL shapes and sizes. Mattie LOVED every box. You would have been impressed to see how he could transform a box. On this particular occasion, Mattie wanted to create a box to hide in, something cozy and protected! As you can see, he was successful!
Quote of the day: The two most powerful warriors are patience and time. ~
This morning Peter left out an article for me to read. The title of the article in The Wall Street Journal was "Still Hung Up on Your Past? A Therapy says 'Let it Go." I have to say the title was intriguing especially since I immediately (before even reading the article!!!) came to the conclusion that it would be impossible for me to give UP my past! Therapy or NO therapy! Mainly because my past centers around Mattie, and giving up my past would mean that I perhaps never had a child. Or is that what the article meant? Not quite!
This afternoon, I came home and read the article in more detail and then went on line to see the actual survey (or assessment tool) used by this researcher/psychologist at Stanford University. Dr. Zimbardo feels that redirecting the focus onto the present and future can make people happier, healthier, and lead to better relationships. He calls this method the Time Perspective Therapy. To find out which perspective you lean toward, Dr. Zimbardo designed a 61 multiple choice question survey to help you figured this out. He feels once you know where you stand on the time perspective continuum, it is easier to figure out what specific things you need to focus on, adjust, and work on to achieve greater happiness. Sounds good in theory. The article even claims that this method has helped people with depression and PTSD, when all else has failed.
Zimbardo has classified six different types of time perspective outlooks: 1) the past positive (you love the past), 2) past negative (you have regrets and bad things happened in your past), 3) present hedonism (you enjoy the present and like to reward yourself), 4) present fatalism (you feel that events are beyond your control so why bother?), 5) goal oriented future (you plan ahead and weigh the costs and benefits of any decision), and 6) transcendental future (you live a good life because you believe the reward is a heaven after death).
According to Zimbardo, the best profile to have is a high level of past-positive, a moderately high level of future orientation, and a moderate level of selected present hedonism (in other words, you like your past, work for the future, but not so hard that you become a workaholic, and choose when to seek pleasure in the present). The worst time perspective profile to have is a high level of past negative coupled with a high level of present fatalism (such a person he claims lives in a negative past and thinks nothing can change it).
Zimbardo believes that time perspectives are influenced by many things, including family and friends, culture, religion, education and life events. If you would like to learn more about Zimbardo's work and to also take his survey, I attached the links below!
The funny part about all of this is I went into this survey rather skeptical! I honestly did not think it was possible for Mattie's death not to influence every question I answered. But to my surprise, I learned that I have a very high past positive score. I suppose that is NO shock, since my past did include Mattie and I also had a very high future orientation. These two factors enable me to fall into Zimbardo's BEST profile to have, but hang in there, I also had a relatively high past negative score (after all what's not to regret about seeing your child get cancer and then die?!) and a high present fatalism score (again, I saw a major event occur which was out of MY CONTROL!), which would deem me has having the worst time perspective profile. So in just one survey I have been able to achieve both a BEST and WORST rating!!! That alone fascinates me.
The one thing I did get out of this survey was that I scored quite low on present hedonism! This may not come as any surprise to those people who truly know me. This particular outlook pertains to how willing one is to reward one's self. In essence how well one takes care of one's self and looks out for one's own interests. I found immediately after I lost Mattie that I didn't feel interested in feeding my own desires and needs. At first I think it was a matter of the fact that I did not think I deserved those things. For example, it took me months after Mattie's death to buy anything for myself (item of clothing, etc). I felt like I did not need or deserve them. Now however, I think the non-rewarding of myself is just more complicated than the simple feeling of not deserving something. I do think losing Mattie has prevented me from experiencing joy, allowing myself that feeling produces guilt and sadness, and therefore caring for others and making their needs supersede mine is the dynamic that has been playing out. Yet this survey helped me to see that this really isn't the best dynamic to set up for myself and in the long run will not help me feel any happier (again, another word I'm not wild about).
At first I thought Zimbardo was going to score my time perspectives and compare them to other people. But the way the score report reads, he does indicate an ideal, but what is more helpful is that you can plot your score against the ideal. It is from this plot that I can potentially be introspective and try to focus on avenues for self-improvement. Do I think this scale is the be all and end all, of course not, but it does give one food for thought. I love self-introspection exercises anyway, so this was of interest to me, as I hope it will be for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment