＜H18:特別選抜＞
(1)
Most of us are ill at some time in our lives.
Some of us spend many months, even years being unwell.
Could it be that there is something for us to learn through these experiences?
Until I worked with cancer patients and other ill people, I would have never expected them to express gratitude for being ill.
But many do.
Even so, what right have we, who are apparently fit and well, to talk about the meaning of illness to people who are in or close to those who are suffering?
It can sound hard, even irrelevant.
Pain and invasive forms of illness have to be dealt with by the person concerned.
Whatever support the ill person receives from doctor, hospital, family or friends, only he or she can know the quality and depth of that suffering.
To suppose that anyone can evaluate their state in terms of ‘meaning’ might seem totally inhuman.
Yet for every one of us who believe in the importance of wholeness in our personalities, and I am certainly one, there has to be an awareness of the dark as well as the light side of life.
Without both of these there would be no real humanity to our existence.
This acceptance of the whole means that suffering, despair, illness and death are as much part of us as love, joy exploration and occasional ecstasy.
It is the way in which we react to these two sides of ourselves which makes us learn and grow and ultimately learn how to respect and appreciate life.
（中略）
However, we begin to learn that what appears to be health in a person is often not true balance but a state of desperate fragility kept in control by suppression of real needs.
Many people have no real sense of self-worth or are unable to express such emotions as anger, hate or love.
We live in a society which nurtures the intellect at the expense of other forms of expression.
A child learns early that emotional behavior does not earn him or her the respect of parents.
When we become ill there is often the overwhelming realization, and relief, that we can show emotion.
It dramatically changes the scene, and opens up new and different ways of being and relation, which were not acceptable to us when we were ‘healthy’.
(2)
Clinical psychologists have two basic alternatives when they seek to create goals for a clinical intervention.
First, the clinician can choose to help clients make a better adjustment to their current life situation.
For example, the psychologist could provide a therapeutic intervention to help a clients adjust to an antagonistic family, without attempting to bring about any change in the family itself.
Second, interventions can be conducted to help clients alter their life situations.
For instance, the clinician could demand a family new ways to communicate and more effective ways to make decisions so as to change the entire family environment.
Although it is important for people to fit in with their current life situations and to change themselves in a realistic fashion, “adjustment” is a sham if the person must deny critical needs or values in order to make this adaptation.
A prerequisite to setting a goal of better adjustment is a thorough and honest exploration of the client’s abilities, interests, aspirations, and values.
For example, a clinician might help a depressed woman to clarify both the benefits and limitations of her current roles as a housewife and to examine any discrepancies between this life situation and her long-range goals for herself (e.g., education), before setting specific goals for therapy.
Another danger in helping clients to adjust themselves to their current social environments is that these life situations may be physically or psychological harmful or inadequate.
Physical threats are somewhat easier to teach than psychological dangers, but two characteristics of social environments that are widely held to be important for psychological “health” are openness to diversity and encouragement of self-determination.
Social systems that require all members to fit into a single “correct” mold are likely to develop problems that are detrimental for those involved.
Similarly, social systems that seek to dictate all decisions for their members are likely to engender apathetic, excessively dependent, or aggressive responses from their members.
Thus, social environments that prohibit or punish diversity and self-determination create restrictive, stagnant, and sometimes even dangerous for their members.
In such cases, it may be preferable to either accept the social systems or remove the client from that setting, rather than aiding the client to adjust to a destructive life situation.
