psychology

Mary Karr: Astonished by the Human Comedy (Krista Tippett)

and then, as I often do, once I’ve worked on a talk, I just — at some point, you have to just let go of the outcome. And you say, “Look, if they boo and they throw things, it’ll last for 20 minutes. And then it’ll be over, and I’ll have an anecdote. It’ll be fine. I’ll go back to my life.”

Ms. Tippett: In Now Go Out There, you said, “The opposite of love is fear,” and you told these graduates that “fear can take that expensively educated brain of yours and reduce it to the state of a dog growling over a bone.” But you did say, “Ask yourself who’s noticing how scared you are,” and that that’s where your soul is. And if you can get curious about it, you get less scared

.. you note the connection between “breakdown” and “breakthrough.”

Ms. Karr:Right. [laughs] Is it a nervous breakdown or a nervous breakthrough? That’s right. That’s a good question.

Ms. Tippett:Because you had both, right?

Ms. Karr:Well, I think every nervous breakdown is a nervous breakthrough, if you let it be. I really do. I really believe that. I believe that it’s the old Hemingway saw of: “All of us are broken, and some of us get stronger in the broken places.”

Ms. Tippett:Yeah, here’s something else you said. You called the place you went the “Mental Marriott.” [laughs]

Life Beyond the Mind: Eckhart Tolle (Onbeing.org)

Millions of people around the world have found pragmatic tools in his vision that fundamentally complicates the notion, “I think, therefore I am.”

I thought, “My God. Her voice — she never stops talking.” And I suddenly realized, well, I do that, too, except that I don’t do it out loud. And then I thought, I hope I don’t end up like her. And somebody next to me looked at me, and I suddenly realized in shock that I had actually said these words aloud, just like her. I said, “I hope I don’t end up like her.” [laughs]

So I realized my mind was as incessantly active as hers. Our only difference was that my thought was mostly based on feeling sorry for myself. It was depressed kind of thinking. Her patterns were fueled by anger. It took years before I finally was able to really step out of the stream of thinking and realize, there is a place inside me that is far more powerful than the continuous mental noise with which for many, many years I had been completely identified, just like that woman.

U.S. Says It Could Take 2 Years to Identify Up to Thousands of Separated Immigrant Families

It may take federal officials two years to identify what could be thousands of immigrant children who were separated from their families at the southern United States border, the government said in court documents filed on Friday.

A federal judge had asked for a plan to identify these children and their families after a report from government inspectors in January revealed that the Trump administration most likely separated thousands more children from their parents than was previously believed.

.. To identify these families, the government said it would apply a statistical analysis to about 47,000 children who were referred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement and subsequently discharged, according to the court filing. From there, the government said it would manually review the case records of the children who appeared to have the highest probability of being part of the separated families.

Officials estimated that the process would take at least one year and potentially two. In explaining the reason for such an arduous process, the government said United States Customs and Border Protection did not collect specific data on migrant family separations before April 2018.

Lawyers representing the Office of Refugee Resettlement did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday.

In a court filing for the government, Jonathan White, a commander with the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, wrote that identifying this group of children presented new challenges because they were already discharged from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, meaning the government “lacks access” to them.

The statistical analysis was required because manually reviewing the cases of nearly 50,000 children would “overwhelm” the office’s resources, he wrote.

The government’s proposed plan arose from a class-action lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California. In June, Judge Dana M. Sabraw ordered the reunification of children and parents who had been separated under the Trump administration policy. President Trump rescinded the policy that same month.

About 2,800 children have been reunified with their families or situated according to their parents’ wishes, said Lee Gelernt, who challenged the policy in court on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The January report, by the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, revealed that a group of separated families was unaccounted for because the government lacked an effective tracking system. In March, Judge Sabraw ruled that those families should be included in the litigation.

Mr. Gelernt said this identification process should take months, not years. “If the government believed finding these children was a priority, they could do it quicker than two years,” Mr. Gelernt said.

The families the government may now be tasked with locating are those who entered the United States on or after July 1, 2017, the earliest known date that families were separated; were detained by immigration officials; and have a child who was detained and then released to a sponsor, such as a relative, before the judge’s reunification order on June 26, 2018.

When the government previously identified children for reunification, it included only the children who were detained at the time of the reunification order.

Judge Sabraw wrote in his March 8 order that because all of these families had been subjected to the same policies and had been separated under “questionable circumstances,” they should have the same opportunity for relief. Although identifying the families may be burdensome, as the government argued, “it clearly can be done,” the judge wrote.

According to the government’s proposed plan, officials would update the A.C.L.U. about the families’ information after completing the analysis and reviewing the children’s cases. The organization would then use that information to help reunify parents and children.

Mr. Gelernt said a two-year wait to reunite families would be devastating. The longer these children remained separated from their families, he said, the more psychological trauma they would endure. He said the A.C.L.U. planned to argue against the proposed plan in court.

The family separations were a central part of the Trump administration’s effort to deter migrant families from trying to enter the United States through its southern border with Mexico.

Data released last month suggested that the administration’s immigration measures — including the separation policy and attempts to beef up border security and limit who qualified for asylum — failed to deter tens of thousands of migrants traveling to the United States, most of whom were escaping violence and poverty in Central America.

10 Minute Explainer: Teenage Meltdowns

Lisa Damour, psychologist, New York Times columnist, and author of Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls (Ballantine Books, 2019), explains why teenagers are so prone to meltdowns, and offers advice on how to help.