Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 10:53:46 -0700 From: sheilac To: Sylvia Caras Subject: Learning From Us Welcome WELCOMING ADDRESS by SHEILA A. COOPER LEARNING FROM US RECOVERY AND EMPOWERMENT: BEYOND RHETORIC AND INTO PRACTICE presented by The National Empowerment Center March 19-22, 1997 Albuquerque, New Mexico Sheila A. Cooper = First Serial Rights P. O. Box 312 Alcalde, New Mexico 87511 Copyright 1997 It is a great pleasure for me to be able to welcome you to New Mexico and to Albuquerque. Many of the faculty for this conference are people whom I have known and cared about for a number of years. I am particularly pleased to have them here in New Mexico and to be able to personally welcome them. I want to commend the clinicians and other professionals who are in the audience for being open to new ideas and to the concept of learning from us. I'm glad you're here. It is the duty of any welcomer to a conference in New Mexico to encourage all visitors to try the chile. Chile is our state vegetable. It comes in both green and red varieties. New Mexicans are passionate about our chile. It varies in spiciness from quite mild - La Tourista version to something so hot you really can't taste it and everything in between. Try it you'll like it. By the way, chile is spelled chile. Chili is something they make in Texas and we don't eat it. As a New Mexico farmer, I am proud to tell you that New Mexico produces most of the nation's chile. It sometimes seems that we consume most of it as well. As a person in recovery who is also a farmer, I find a lot of similarities between the agricultural system in this country and our current system of psychiatric care. For example, those who are considered the experts in agriculture are not the farmers and ranchers who are living this life, but those who have a graduate degree and work for the government or at the universities. Most agricultural research is paid for by chemical companies. It results in findings that chemical approaches are safe, effective, essential. The vast majority of farming in this country is based on regular applications of chemical treatments. Is any of this sounding familiar? The same can be said of the psychiatric treatment system. Someone once said you tend to find what you are looking for. Therefore, I don't think we should be too surprised that research paid for by chemical companies has produced results that are favorable to their businesses, whether in agriculture or in psychiatry. You have probably guessed that I am an organic farmer. Having been the recipient of a great deal of psychiatric chemicals in very large doses, for a long period of time, I support a more natural approach in psychiatric treatment, as well. At this conference you are going to be exposed to some *natural* approaches to managing psychiatric illness. Consumer demand has driven the growth in organic farming and has recently inspired the government to begin to research effective organic methods of farming. Consumer demand has also spurred the recent interest of the government and the traditional medical community in holistic and alternative healthcare methods. It is my greatest wish that something similar would happen in psychiatry. That would require a major change. Whenever I come to Albuquerque I think about change. I grew up here. Those of you who can see my gray hair can imagine that I have seen a great deal of change in Albuquerque and in my life. I particularly think about change in this hotel. I grew up about a mile west of here, went to high school about 1/2 mile to the north. I used to walk across an open mesa that is now the vast shopping mall outside the hotel doors. My mother, who hasn't been married to my father for some time, is married to the man who owns the shopping center, Encantada Square, across the street. Talk about changes. Change is on the mind of everyone in health care these days. We are enduring a phenomenal amount of it. There is a tendency to connote change with negativity. But change is neither positive or negative. Change is the norm in nature. As Darwin discovered, it is how we came to be human beings. Change is an opportunity. Those who can learn to cope with change can survive. Those who can adapt to change can evolve. Those who can anticipate or initiate change can prosper. You all probably know a great deal more about this idea than I do. I have spent a a good part of my life fleeing from change. I am still uncomfortable with it. Actually that is not quite true. I have always been willing to suggest that others might change and even give them the benefit of my insight as to why they might need to change and what changes they could make. I just didn't want change to effect me or my lifestyle. However, you have demonstrated your openness to change and new ideas by coming to this conference. I hope that you will consider the new concepts you will be exposed to in light of their mutual beneficialtity. When I was growing up in Albuquerque, it was a predominately Hispanic community. It is sad for me that is no longer the case. It is part of the Hispanic tradition to try to communicate ideas through the use of dichos which are sayings and cuentos which are stories. I want to tell you a little cuento about ranching. You might see some similarities with psychiatry. Cattle ranching is an industry that has also faced dramatic changes recently. The formerly beef loving American public has been told that beef is bad for you and not only that cattle ruin our public lands. When these viewpoints were expressed, did ranchers say well you know you're right. We probably could change some of our production methods so that our product was more healthy. Did they say you know you are right we need to change the way we manage our cattle so that they do not degrade the environment we all share? Uh huh Most of us don't when we feel threatened. They didn't want to change. Instead they said, people don't understand what we do; they don9t know how important we are; they don't know how hard our work is. They said, we are the true environmentalists. They chided each other for not educating the American public. Isn't it interesting how the meanings of words evolve. Education used to mean the imparting of universal truths. Today it seems to mean giving out information that will convince people of how right you are and how right you have been all along. More like indoctrination or what used to be called propaganda. At any rate, ranchers felt wrongly maligned. They went on the offensive. Anyone know who they targeted for their wrath? They blamed it on the vegetarians. I'm not kidding. I swear I actually read an article in a New Mexico cattlemans association publication about how vegetarianism results in irrational thinking and other forms of craziness, how vegetarianism was detrimental to our society. At first I thought it was a satirical piece. But they were deadly serious and they believed it. Does anyone see any similarities here? Is the name E. Fuller Torrey coming to anyone's minds? ........ It is interesting to note that many ranchers have gone out of business while resisting change. Others now produce a product more in line with the changing wants and needs of the American public. Many of them are doing quite well. As someone who is used to criticism, I'm one of those survivors Torrey has been talking about, I have decided to become a rancher. An organic rancher? Well yes, but something even better. A rancher whose methods improve the biodiversity of our ecology. I still don't understand most of how this is done. However, the basic change from conventional ranching is that you keep your cattle bunched together in small areas and you move them often. This requires a very different relationship with your cows. We all have an image of how cowboys move cattle. We have learned this from movies and TV. We know that all cowboys are tall and lean. They wear big hats and big belt buckles that signify their accomplishments in the rodeo arena. I have heard those buckles compared to the plumage on male birds that attract the female of the species. Those buckles sure worked that way when I went to school at New Mexico State. But we have an image of cowboys. They are the Marlboro man. Well it turns out that cowboys have that same image of themselves. And how we think of ourselves is very important to all of us. I know, I drive a tractor and a four wheel drive pickup. It turns out there is a little bit of machismo in all of us. You just have to get in touch with that part of yourself and then you'll buy a four wheel drive too. But the importance of our self image can make us resistant to change, even change necessary for our survival, to say nothing of our continued prosperity. In this new school of ranching there is a Canadian cowboy named Bud Williams who is a master at moving cattle. Bud is not the Marlboro man. He is scrawny, not lean. He does smoke. In fact, a cigarette butt is perpetually in his mouth. His hat is not real big and its stained and dirty. I don't know about his buckle. Now moving cattle is a job that usually involves a lot of manhandling. One writer describes sorting cows this way: It usually involves a lot of quick and forceful action amid horrendous bawling and scuffling and not uncommonly open rebellion and broken wire and smashed fence rails. Sounds to me like some psych units I have been on. Instead of charging at cattle, chaps and dust flying or using cattle prods, the modern cowboys electro shock, Bud can sort cattle by standing in a corral with them. He stands by the gate and takes one step to the right or to the left depending on whether he wants the cow to go through the gate or remain in the corral. In a short period of time the cattle magically seem to end up where Bud wants them. He has learned to do this by studying the cows and determining what makes them uncomfortable and what keeps them comfortable, by working with the cows, not working against them or working on them. Bud has quite a reputation and is something of a phenomena. He makes his living giving workshops on stockmanship. Struggling ranchers who want to prosper and are open to change pay one thousand dollars for a workshop. He sells a video for a 100 bucks. I bought a booklet on his methods. Bud says "Now I'm not a real scientific person. I didn't get all this high priced education. The only thing I did is I worked cattle." He says we've got to understand the animals a little better. - We have to know ourselves a little better. He says we're kind of strange in the way we go about things. We've taken things that we do wrong and we've built an industry and lots of support industries to perpetuate it. We do a lot of that according to Bud . At the end of the workshop, ranchers who have paid the workshop fee, taken notes and paid close attention are given a chance to move cattle. Bud's techniques are a challenge to the Marlboro man's ropes and whips and spurs and the rancher's self image. Bud says when you teach somebody, you just don't say this is how you do it. You gotta understand what they don't understand They just don't understand and you can say it and say it. I've shown over and over how to do it and then turned the job over to the people watching and it will not be two minutes before there's one guy up one side and one guy up the other and a bunch in back whipping and spurring. Its hard for Bud to understand why it is so difficult for people to use his techniques. Bud has spent more time looking at ranching from the cattle's perspective than he has thinking about his self-image. He says the fact is people want to go up there and they want to push the cow over to show they can do it. And when they do that they create all these other problems, but they are happy, because they did what they wanted. I know that this is going to be a very provocative conference. I know that you are going to hear some new and different ideas about working with people in emotional distress. I know you will try very hard to understand. I hope you won't be like those ranchers who go to Bud Williams workshops and then go out and continue to apply the whip, the spur and the electro shock. Bienvenidos a Nuevo Mexico (:-) Sheila