‘It is only human’ is a phrase that I frequently come upon either as an explanation for or in a verbal response to expressed anger, loss of temper, irritability, failure and forgetfulness.  It is the adverb ‘only’ that affects me in that I perceive it as a diminishment of what it means to be ‘truly’ human.  Somehow, too, the ‘only’ human becomes a clever way to reduce the weight and impact of another’s particular actions, especially those that create an unsafe situation for another person – adult or child – to be in our company.  Furthermore, the ‘only human’ response suggests that such threatening actions are ‘beyond our control’ and absolves us of having to reflect on and resolve the causes and intentions of these responses.

If you had only a short time to live – a year, 6 months, 3 months, a month, a week – what would you do?  There are as many different responses to a terminal prognosis as there are individuals and points of view, much less beliefs about death.  Individuals can feel angry, get depressed, go into despair, blame self, or others or the world or God or all four, feel guilty or totally unprepared for death.  Some others go into fear and terror and there are some individuals who end their own lives before the illness takes their last breath away.  There are others who feel they have not lived but they often miss the essential point that death is only another opportunity to enter life wholeheartedly.

In all relationships conflict is necessary and creative because it alerts the parties to the presence of hurts, vulnerabilities and ways of relating that require resolution within each person as individuals and between the duo who are in a defensive relationship with each other.

When partners in a couple relationship view conflict as ‘bad’, the tendency is for one or both of them to bury it, ignore it, blame the partner, family of origin or the world, deny its existence or hope that time will heal matters.

In its response to human problems in living, psychiatry is both confusing and contradictory.  On the one hand, it proposes that individuals who are depressed, delusional, obsessive-compulsive, hallucinatory are suffering from ‘mental illnesses’ which are caused by biochemical imbalances or dysfunctional genes.  On the other hand, psychiatry has long advocated ‘not to open the can of worms.’  This latter admonition does not make sense in the face of their ‘theory’ that a psychiatric condition has a biological origin.  I deliberately say ‘theory’ because there is no research or clinical substance to their theory.  Nonetheless, the notion of ‘a can of worms’ seriously weakens their medical model of human misery.  I assume what they mean by the ‘can of worms’ is the unresolved sad and often massively abusive history of their clients. 

Over the coming weeks I am going to write a series of articles on adolescence, covering such topics as the nature of adolescence, the importance of boundaries, peer pressure, bullying, adolescent sexuality, adolescent turmoil, enabling adolescents’ educational career development.  The intention is to equip parents with the knowledge and skills needed to accompany their sons and daughters into the complex and challenging territory of adolescence.  Of course, parents can only do this when they work on have a mature relationship with themselves, so that from that solid place of self-reliance they can guide their charges towards that same goal.  This relationship with self is still a major challenge for many parents as their own child and adolescent experiences were of lean-to relationships, either that ‘you should be there for me’ or ‘I should be there for you’ or, sadly, the absence of belonging or harsh and violent abandonment.