Belonging, Therapeutic Landscapes, and Networks

Implications for Mental Health Practice

Ezra Griffith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351795715
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology

Why are certain places perceived to be therapeutic, to make people feel better about life, about themselves, and about their bodies? Could there be environmental, individual, societal, and attachment factors that come together in the healing process in both traditional and non-traditional landscapes? This observation is particularly important and has implications for the understanding of both healing and disruption in the lives of individuals. In Belonging, Therapeutic Landscapes, and Networks, Dr. Griffith examines factors that influence the intersection of health and place, one's sense of belonging, and the constructing of therapeutic spaces that minimize psychosocial disruption in our daily lives.

1
Theorizing Belonging, Therapeutic Landscapes, and Networks

In this chapter, I focus on an in-depth description of belonging, therapeutic landscapes, and networks. My interest in the first subject developed through my gradual recognition that medical students had repeatedly explained to me their unease and discomfort at the specific medical school where they had matriculated. They said they did not belong in the schools they were attending. They felt lost and uprooted from a sense of home. They regularly wondered whether they should have enrolled at a less prestigious university, or at one located closer to friends and family. Some black students suggested they should have considered attending an historically black medical school. They experienced loneliness and felt untethered. I realized that I, too, was uncertain from time to time whether I belonged at Yale University, where I went on to spend thirty-nine years as a member of its faculty. I saw with greater clarity the potential connection of belonging and the workplace. The insight progressively merged into a broader understanding of belonging and its relation to architecturally delineated spaces that encompass slices of life activity.

It was not obvious to me what caused the students’ pervasive sense of being out of place and not fitting into the usual scheme of life at their chosen place of study. I assumed the reasons behind this sense of non-belonging had to be multiple and intermingled. I continued for a long time to avoid the question about my own connection to a university that was in fact the only employer I ever had since my physician training years. Perhaps I’d been influenced by Chester Pierce, a distinguished Harvard professor and a graduate of Harvard College and Medical School. He left me disconcerted the day he told me unambiguously that although he had spent many years at Harvard, he had never felt he belonged there (See Griffith 1998). It made me understand that experienced and sophisticated intellectuals have these feelings too.

On Belonging

In thinking more about this phenomenon of belonging, interrelated stories come to mind about my self-questioning. I was seated in the balcony of the Morse Recital Hall at the Yale Music School. Aldo Parisot’s Yale Cellos were playing Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Lord, Now Lettest Thou Thy Servant Depart in Peace,” a movement from his beloved choral composition called “Vespers.” The cello group was, of course, putting its own spin on this instrumental adaptation of a sung composition. I wanted to hum the tune out loud, as I recognized it from my time as a member of the bass section in the Yale Russian Chorus. But in addition, I knew the words printed in the program next to the name of the composer. “Lord, Now Lettest Thou …” was from the Nunc Dimittis, also known as the Song of Simeon or the Canticle of Simeon. I had sung those words for years as a member of the Anglican Cathedral Choir in Barbados. We sang the canticle during Evensong.

“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word;

For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,

Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;

A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.”

(Luke 2:29–32, St. James Version)

Simeon was thankful that the revelation of the Holy Spirit had been fulfilled. He had learned that he would not die before he had seen the baby Christ. And he had the good fortune to hold the baby in his arms, which evoked from him the words that are now celebrated in many liturgical contexts. I did not think of Simeon as I sat in the recital hall, and I made no connection to a spiritual revelation. But in my own reverie, I was flooded by images of my good fortune over the years. The words from the Nunc Dimittis were fueling my sense of satisfaction with the course of my journey at Yale. The Russian composer’s rumbling harmonies took me to another period in my life and reminded me of the time I was walking through the courtyard of an undergraduate college at Yale. It was a very sunny day, as I remember it. The aging black lady stopped me with her respectful introduction.

“Excuse me, Sir.” Seeing visions of my own mother, I stopped and focused my eyes on her. I wondered what she was doing there, as she and Yale seemed incongruously linked.

“Are you a professor here?”

She didn’t pose the question with any forcefulness. There was nothing pugnacious about it. She uttered it while keeping a puzzled look on her face. I assumed there was much more behind the question, although she hadn’t yet made up her mind to share with me more of her thinking. I was a bit unsettled by what she had asked, even though her approach had been gentle and the query clear and precise. When strangers raise a question like that, I am always tempted to read more into it than would ordinarily flow from the simple words.

I finally said, “Yes, Ma’am.” I decided I had to match her simplicity and polite directness.

These interactions with my black elders, those who have explored the walkways before me, always evoke from me more humility and reverence than I can usually muster in other mundane interactions. I could find no other words for this stranger. I just kept looking at her, and I could feel an inexplicable sadness welling up in me. I didn’t know why. It wasn’t as though I knew anything about her. I believe I concluded that whatever relationship she had to the university had been established a long time ago. I didn’t think she was a retired faculty member, perhaps because her questioning had been too uncertain.

She came back with an unexpected, indeed a surprising, response.

“Bless you, son,” she said.

It was a peculiar form of public benediction. I didn’t stay and ask her who she was, what she was doing there, seemingly alone. I was saddened by the whole interaction, and her response bounced around in my ears for a long time, like some of the unforgettable low notes in Rachmaninoff’s work. It was at least clear to me that I had never been blessed like that before, at Yale. People at Yale, in the parts I have frequented over the years, don’t talk like that.

The woman’s words reminded me of my mother and the goodbye comment she would make to me whenever I took leave to return to my medical studies in France. She appreciated the natural hardship of those years. Whenever I returned to the States and then was about to go back to France by plane, she would bid me goodbye with a “Bless you, Son. Go and do your best.” That was the clearest association I could make. I wondered whether the woman in the courtyard had been a historian of the black experience at Yale, summing up everything in a one-line poem, accompanied by the sounds of my favorite church music. I was simultaneously in the middle of a college on her afternoon and in a corner of Morse Recital Hall in my evening. I thought she hoped all the short while of our interaction that I belonged there at Yale. I imagined that it had probably been her hope for a few decades or so. Without saying it, without uttering a single word of explication, her blessing had made clear that I had to stroll about the courtyards everywhere at Yale for her and for all my black brothers and sisters.

I have always been sure, but inexplicably so, that this black woman and I had established a connection: two blacks strolling in a Yale courtyard. By some magical means we expressed our needs to each other, bared our souls while saying so little, and gathered strength from each other. She had blessed me, and I walked away shamelessly trying to hold on to its warmth and simplicity while being in disarray over the confusion and sadness welling up in me. I was unsettled by the implications of the event, one so uncommon in my Yale experience. I thought she wanted me to belong at Yale. But her wish and the implicit blessing had come with responsibility and, at another level, accountability that left me uneasy. I just wasn’t sure I was up to it.

I eventually concluded, although hesitantly, that the Rachmaninoff piece had urged me too quickly to a point of contentment concerning the years spent at Yale. It might have been the effect of the composer’s deeply resonant harmony mixed with the profound sense of gratitude flowing from the words. But I wasn’t yet sure that I belonged at Yale, although the old lady had offered me some balm and solace and encouraged me not to give up. Yale had taken many years of my life, had given me much pleasure, and had certainly contributed to the flowering of my academic career. But concluding that I belonged to this institution was to provide an answer to a question of a distinctly different order of complexity. I wasn’t ready to reach that conclusion yet. I wanted to think about it some more.

I had started thinking about the phenomenon of belonging before my conversation with Pierce. I recall clearly the first time I tackled the question in a public lecture at Yale. It was on a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday celebration at the university, and my topic was “An Open Letter to Black Medical Students: On Belonging at Yale,” which I later published (Griffith 1990).

At that time, I defined belonging as a “total and confident sense of being”—in a place or by having membership in an organization. I suggested that when we belong somewhere, we behave as though we believe that others in the place or organization genuinely accept our presence. We feel welcomed by others and we have no sense that we are party-crashers or outsiders. I went on to note that the sense of belonging imbues us with grace and aplomb, and the feeling surpasses that of mere confidence. I argued that this emotional sense of belonging is particularly important to minority group members and to all those who find themselves in contexts where they are obviously outsiders to the dominant group. But of course, I never meant to suggest that the problem of belonging doesn’t also affect members of dominant groups. The problem of belonging is ubiquitous because there is an aspect of it that is clearly emotion-laden. But also, belonging emerges because we all engage in reflection about ourselves as members of a discrete group. We then compare ourselves with those who belong to some other group. In that 1990 lecture, the black medical students were non-dominant along racial lines. But their status was also defined in the dichotomous context of student–faculty and student–administrator.

Much of this dichotomous categorizing starts when we are very young and continues well into adulthood. We are taken with this effort to affiliate with others, as we benefit from the connection, gaining emotional strength from it and a host of other advantages. The connection can reinforce our self-esteem, provide financial leverage, offer us access to different forms of advice, and even help us build a foundation on which to establish our general community standing. But a part of creating connection to others is that we regularly do it with an eye on comparison or contrast with another group. It is in this way that dichotomous groupings are born, such as black/white and Jew/Gentile. These groupings are established along lines of ethnicity, race, and religion. Other groupings develop along lines of physical and psychological categories based on characteristics such as gender, height, sight, hearing, and cognitive abilities. Some groupings relate directly to life events such as serious illness, incurring immigrant status in a foreign country, losing financial stability, and acquiring new professional standing in a community. The salience of the identifying characteristic in our lives depends on our early upbringing, as well as on multiple experiences throughout our childhood and adult life stages. But our sense of membership in any group is not settled and sealed during the early years. Events and experiences will come in adolescence and adulthood that reopen and redefine the sense of group membership, in addition to weakening or strengthening the significance of the group membership in our lives. The Yale psychologist Daniel Levinson taught us about these principles decades ago as he and his research colleagues demonstrated how we respond to different stimuli and life tasks over a lifetime (Levinson 1978). Cross (1991) also contemplated these notions in his writing about the establishment of African-American identity.

One of the impressive efforts related to dichotomous thinking in relation to belonging has been chronicled by Sheryl Sandberg (2013). While a reader may be uncertain about Sandberg’s intentions on first encountering her book’s title, Lean In, there is no room for uncertainty in the secondary title: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Furthermore, on the book jacket, it is all made clear. Sandberg was preoccupied with the concerns of women. She was not happy that women’s voices were not equal to those of men, as demonstrated in the reality that men still held the majority of leadership positions in government and industry (Sandberg 2013). Sandberg described women as members of a non-dominant group, and she set out to do something about it. She encouraged women to develop coping mechanisms that are practically useful. She recommended, for example, that they form lean-in circles, small peer groups that would contribute to their developing a sense of belonging. Such membership would empower the women, enhance their voices, develop their sense of self-esteem, and magnify their pugnacious and effective presence in the workplace.

Returning to that lecture for the black medical students, its important points were that: understanding the concept of belonging allows individuals to appreciate better their reactions to slights and insults experienced in the context of race; such understanding also facilitates one’s constructing of techniques that serve to minimize the effect of caustic interactions with members of the dominant group; and the understanding is useful in allowing the non-dominant group member to concentrate more energy on the life task at hand. In the case of the medical students, the point was to learn as much as possible about the science and practice of medicine.

In the lecture, I utilized the example of behavior I observed regularly among blacks during their attendance at church services. I had made my observations during a research project on black churches over many years (See, for example: Griffith, English, and Mayfield 1980). I spoke about blacks’ being at home in their churches and feeling relaxed. I was struck by the way they expressed their knowledge of the customs and unwritten rules that governed the practices and rituals in their sacred spaces. They knew when to stand and sit, without formal guidance from the pastor. They seemed to know when during the service dancing in the spirit was permissible and not unseemly. In several ways, they demonstrated that they were in their home churches and they belonged there. At the time, I was thinking about the elements in the black church service that could be considered therapeutic. But my colleagues and I recognized only later that this phenomenon of belonging might itself contribute to the sense of well-being among members of the church. Later would come the connection between belonging to a black church and its identity as a healing community. Still later, I would understand the developmental interaction between belonging and the black church as a therapeutic landscape.

At first, I thought that the church context was the clearest example I could find to buttress my explanation of belonging. In later years I resorted to using in my lectures film clips of blacks participating in black-church rituals, particularly from Baptist and Pentecostal movements. The clips seemed to enliven my presentations. But I knew that while my example of belonging was a good one, examined from a certain perspective or angle, it could never be perfect. I recalled a conversation I’d had with a black family friend who on retirement had moved with his family to live in a Southern state. He needed to find a new home church. One Sunday morning he attended service at a church close to his new residence. He went there as it was a local branch of his denomination. It turned out that the branch had a white congregation. This was of no concern to him at first. He had traveled to many countries as a seaman and he was accustomed to finding a branch of his faith group and simply showing up for service. He counted on the openness of the faith group. However, on this occasion, at the end of the service, the pastor struck up a conversation with him and inquired whether he didn’t prefer to worship with his own people. My friend was very disturbed by the interaction with this white man of the cloth. I learned from the story that the church does not always do its best to encourage those in its midst to experience positively the concept of belonging. Put another way, you may feel you belong to a group. As a practical matter, the group still has something to say about your candidacy for membership. My friend thought the pastor had betrayed him. The pastor had interfered with my friend’s image of blacks and whites worshipping together in unity, and before their God for whom skin color was irrelevant.

There was a second lesson illustrated by this vignette. It is that learning about belonging is not a tutorial only for the young. You may encounter, in every phase of life, negative experiences that challenge and positive events that reinforce your sense of belonging. Obviously, there is variability in the intensity of the impact you experience after each interaction, which may be due to different factors: the unexpected nature of the event; the preparation you have undergone before the interaction; the robust nature of your own social and psychological supports; the frequency of contact with dichotomous experiences along the way; and so on. It is therefore hard to be sure how any individual will react to an experience that tests his sense of belonging during his development.

For some non-dominant group members, it may take years for them to acquire the techniques necessary to confront with equanimity these encounters. It may take time for them to confront these matters with ease, to work through the emotions evoked by the interactions as though they had been seen before. Some eventually move from one encounter to the other with an increasingly settled and hardened kind of habituation. But others take considerable time before this phase of resolution comes. They remain attentive, on guard, their antennae seeking signs of what they know must come: the caustic and retaliatory interactions from some of the entitled and insensitive members of the dominant group. Chester Pierce had explained those micro-traumata to me when I was preparing the chronicle of our dialogues (Griffith 1998). Belonging experiences don’t have an impact just when the person is young.

A story in the lay press on Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor adds more to this defining of belonging and frames the concept as a useful way of thinking about an individual’s life story (Liptak 2014). The newspaper article pointed out that Sotomayor, who has clearly identified herself as Latina, has argued that race and ethnicity matter. The significance is made obvious when a minority group-member experiences “slights, snickers, and silent judgments” that negatively influence the individual’s conclusion about belonging somewhere. Indeed, Sotomayor considered this kind of thinking “crippling,” presumably because it limits the individual’s concept of self, which in turn diminishes the person’s vision of what is possible to achieve in life goals.

The article suggested that Justice Sotomayor was interested in the concept of belonging and in its connection to the establishment of identity. Equally powerful was her rapprochement of belonging and representation. She saw her increasing sense of belonging to the Supreme Court over her five or so years as progressively establishing a mandate. It obligated her to represent her ethnic minority group as well as others who fall into the category of non-dominant group members. With waxing vigor, she developed her voice. She became more confident, staked out her position, understood she must confront inequity and went on to issue her legal opinions. She accepted the challenge to represent her group. And why should she not do so on behalf of her people and, as some like to say, signify? Other justices on the Court don’t shy away from expressing their voices about what they stand for. Sotomayor hinted at an internal transformation that must occur when the non-dominant group member feels the stranglehold of the non-belonging experience. The individual can’t just give in to the potentially paralyzing effects of the experience and become a victim. But through trial and error, one can find the healing balm that comes from a mixture of internal psychological clarity and external support of friends and care from health professionals. Members of a non-dominant group wishing to make a go of it, to live life fully and expansively, will face several choices. One is to withdraw from interactions with the dominant group and pursue a form of isolation that minimizes those caustic interactions; another is to resist the oppression of the dominant group at every turn; the other option is to pursue interaction, while utilizing an amalgam of techniques that facilitate judicious and healthful resistance. Non-dominant group members may spend years trying to untangle the complex web of these interactions and decide on their preferred solution. The wish to belong and the strength of an individual’s need obviously depend on many factors.

I recognize that the subject of belonging has been salient enough in many people’s lives to cause me to think about its use as a framework on which to construct the individual life story or narrative, both in my literary and psychological work. This kind of decision is uniquely personal. Some people see the salience of belonging as best expressed through their Masonic lodge, their church, or even through their personal family circle. I recently delivered a public lecture on belonging related to the construction of personal narra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• Preface
• 1 Theorizing Belonging, Therapeutic Landscapes, and Networks
• 2 The Home Landscape
• 3 The Work Landscape
• 4 Sacred Spaces
• 5 Travel and Migration
• 6 Prisons and Forensic Psychiatric Hospitals
• 7 Leisure and Citizenship Groups
• 8 Conclusion
• References
• Index