Faith: Don’t leave home without it


	Alan Bodnar, Ph.D. is the Co-Director of Psychology Training at Westborough State Hospital, Mass. and a consultant in the field of leadership development.

By Alan Bodnar, Ph.D.

What a pleasure it is to write my April column on one of the first spring-like days with the windows open, a warm breeze swaying the pine branches and the backyard showing green for the first time after months of winter snow. I have lived too long in a cold climate to have a very clear memory of spring and so I need these days to remind me that life can be different and to feed my imagination with images of what that difference will look and feel like.

My deficiency of memory and imagination when it comes to spring is a condition that sets me apart from family, friends, and co-workers who not only hope for balmy days to come but also know exactly what they will be doing when they arrive. Their vision constitutes a kind of faith, which I fear that I am lacking. When you accommodate to winter by learning to love it, you tend to lose faith in what is lovable about the rest of the year.

It is probably not a good thing for a psychologist to be afflicted with SFD or Spring Faithlessness Disorder. It makes it harder to model recovery-enhancing attitudes for our patients. Hope is not the problem. I have plenty of that and I hope I have no trouble conveying it in my therapy sessions. But faith is the foundation of hope or, in Biblical language, the "substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen." To hope is to have confidence that better days are coming, but it takes faith to have a vision of what those better days will look like. We need faith especially when we are challenged by sudden illness, mental anguish or any kind of adversity that wrenches us out of our familiar and comfortable way of going about our daily lives. It is then that we begin to wonder if things will ever be the same again, and if not, if we will be able to make peace with a new way of being.

Not long ago a friend had eye-surgery which left him temporarily without sight in one eye, a condition that his doctor assured him is "perfectly normal" and will resolve in a matter of three months. His vision, he was told, will return gradually from the top to the bottom of his visual field, the way progressively more light would come through a window if a shade could be opened inch by inch from the top down. Neither of us had any prior experience with this process, although the doctor, who does this surgery often, was perfectly confident about how it would work. The whole thing reminded me of the way the sun rises above the arctic circle after six months of winter, at first just a glimmer of light skimming the horizon before disappearing, only to rise higher and higher each day.

Picture the horizon overhead with the rising sun dropping from above and there you have it. I have no prior experience with this process either but the Internet supplied a video of the phenomenon, which I sent to my friend to bolster his faith and his hope. I am happy to report that he is doing well. His vision, in both senses of the word, is strong.

When you are blind, it is hard to believe that you will see again. Our immediate experience holds us with a force greater than the promises of the most knowledgeable experts. Psychologists working with people challenged by serious and persistent mental illness fight this battle every day. I am thinking of a young woman troubled by the delusion that every time she bites her fingernails she is causing physical harm to her mother who lives in a different part of the country. She then needs to call her mother immediately for reassurance that she is safe. Clinically, we may know how to diagnose or label the patient's condition and empirical evidence can even guide us in applying a therapeutic intervention. We can help her to understand that her belief is a false one, generated by a chemical imbalance in her brain producing an inaccurate message that she can safely ignore.

This is not easily done. But we do what we can, what we must, over and over and over again to build our patient's faith in a world where she can dismiss the fear of magically hurting her mother by indulging a stubborn habit. Perhaps, over time, she will learn that her mother has survived multiple episodes of nail biting and that, therefore, the psychologist was correct about the way he explained her fears and the techniques he suggested to distract herself from their compelling force.

It is hard to have faith in something other than what we are actually experiencing but, when our experience is one of distress and anguish, having faith in a better alternative is the only thing worth hoping for. Our challenge then is not only to offer hope but also to strengthen faith. We know that it is useful to measure a patient's level of hope and instruments like the Beck Hopelessness Scale provide a convenient yardstick. Perhaps we also need a Faithlessness Scale comprised of 20 true or false questions describing a person's ability to imagine a better life, to trust their treatment providers and to listen to the deepest inner voice of their truest selves that survives only as whisper when other voices shout predictions of doom.

Faith: Don’t leave home without it (April 2009 Issue)

By Alan Bodnar, Ph.D.

Faith: Don’t leave home without it
(April 2009 Issue)