Human Behavior and Social Environments: A Biopsychosocial Approach

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Learning is a place where paradise can be created.

—BELL HOOKS

Newspaper headlines announce the perplexities, terrors, magnificence, and drama of human behavior every day. Rebels in Sierra Leone slaughter innocent civilians as civil society disintegrates; a man risks his life to save a cat trapped on a telephone pole; a young woman gives birth to a baby during her senior prom and after delivering it in the restroom disposes of it in the trashcan and returns to the dance; a man who suffered the most egregious abuse as a child now spreads the word to others about how he survives—even thrives—as an adult; the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States continues to grow and fourteen million children still live in poverty; 11,000 tons of flowers and other tokens are laid in front of Princess Diana’s palace in the week following her death; a family survives without food for a week after they were trapped in a mountain gully and are saved when their sixteen-year-old daughter ventures out into the freezing weather and walks ten miles to get help; a Kansas man, two months after being diagnosed with colon and liver cancer and having had much of his colon removed, receiving heavy chemotherapy, runs the Boston marathon in his personal best time. And so it goes. The sacred and profane, the mysterious and the obvious, the mundane and the magnificent, the frightening and the heartening, the destructive and constructive are all elements of human nature and the human condition. As social workers, students of human behavior, we are obligated to understand, as best we can, those forces that shape and drive, constrain and obstruct, the human experience.

Human behavior is a subject so vast that it would seem to defy our ability to comfortably and confidently grasp its varieties, nuances, shapes, and dynamics. But as professional helpers we will be called upon every day to understand and to make judgments about our fellow human beings, judgments that lead to activities that will significantly affect their lives. We also have an interest as human beings and citizens of the world in understanding the bewildering and bemusing diversity of people, groups, institutions, environments, and events that surround us in our daily round of life.

To provide some guideposts and landmarks along this cluttered and twisting path, I will lay out in some detail a framework for approaching the subject matter. Of course, no perspective or framework guarantees truth. Rather, it is merely a means of providing some degree of order and direction to our journey. Perspectives allow us to see what has been hidden from us or to see the familiar in a new light or from a different angle. The framework I will provide is rooted in assumptions, biases, preferences, beliefs, and values that I have collected over the years. I know that for every certainty I hold someone may offer a convincing antithesis. I also realize that much of what we would like to understand about human behavior is shrouded in mystery, wrapped in complexity, or complicated by paradox. Furthermore, some of what we think we know about human behavior is provisional, other notions are probably just wrong-headed, some ideas or conceptions are in transition, and yet others are wishful thinking. Therefore, I ask you to take a critical stance as you encounter the elements of this framework. Think about what might be useful to you or simply interesting as a way of thinking about human behavior and about the physical and social environments that provide the theater for that behavior.

PHILOSOPHICAL PRINCIPLES

Principles direct us in our understanding and appreciation of human behavior and human experiences. They also provide a basis for exercising our moral imagination, taking ethical action, and responsibly consuming knowledge. Because they point our attention to basic attributes of the human experience and the conditions of being and becoming human, they are philosophical. But they are arbitrary, too. Someone else might choose a very different set of principles (or none at all). I have selected these principles because I think they are consonant both with social work values and with the values of humane conduct in general.

Liberation and Empowerment: Heroism and Hope

Liberation refers to the continuum of possibilities for individuals and groups, the opportunities for choice, commitment, and action, sought and pursued in relative freedom or in dire circumstance. Individually and collectively we have fabulous powers and potentials. Some are muted, unrealized, and immanent; others shine brilliantly about us. All around are people and policies, circumstances and conventions, that may nourish or release these powers or that may subvert or oppress them. All humans, somewhere within, have the urge to the heroic: to transcend circumstances, to develop one’s powers, to overcome adversity, to stand up and be counted. Though this is a precious urge, it is also a fragile one. Too often the economic, religious, and political systems of a society drive this craving underground or distort it so that it serves institutional, political, or religious purposes and movements. Nonetheless, the yearning for freedom and the heroic impulse abide. It is the task of the healer, the humane leader, the shaman, the teacher, and, yes, the social worker to promote the liberation of this spirit and this energy, to find ways for that impulse to express itself.

The heroic may be a problem in most societies. Things run more smoothly if people simply play their roles and pay their taxes. Liberation unleashes human energies, critical thinking, and the questioning of authority; challenges to the conventional wisdom; and new ways of being and doing. Not all of liberation is this dramatic. When liberation comes, most of us find ourselves trying out some new behaviors or trying on new thoughts and attitudes, or escaping the drudgery of a difficult relationship or demanding job, or sensing a more generous fund of self-esteem, or surmounting a persistent adversity. But in the cozy confines of our lives such emancipation often is of enormous importance.

Cultures, as Ernest Becker (1973) pointed out so convincingly, also have hero systems. These are available to all. Cultures can encourage and sustain real liberation of the human spirit. The rise of democracy, the spread of public education, the war against fascism, the civil rights movements, the many faces of feminism and liberation theology, for example, all mobilized millions to act beyond their roles, to sacrifice for the larger good, to make a statement about belief over convenience, to sustain epic struggles to survive, or to create something of lasting value for one’s family, community, or society. But often cultures do not celebrate the immense capacity of the individual or group nor do they issue a full invitation to that spirit. In contemporary American society, many of our cultural heroics revolve around celebrity, fawning over and emulating those persons designated as famous or fabulous by the media or marketplace. This is not real heroism; rather, it is a kind of oppression.

The heroic occasionally turns nasty. To liberate oneself at the expense of others—either as a culture or as an individual—to find satisfaction in the imprisonment, hurting, or ridicule of others is, in one sense, heroic. It enables the individual or group to surmount, for a moment, the limitations of self. But the damage wrought far outweighs such transcendence. Far too many of the current heroics in the world today are countenanced at the expense of those least able to resist their persuasions and depredations. Whether it is the slaughter of innocents in the name of a political theology and its leader, or the cavalier slicing of the cord of resources to poor people in the name of restoring the ethic of work and balancing the budget, such heroics do not liberate as much as they suffocate.

Liberation and the heroic depend mightily on hope. No matter how the possibilities of self are captive, hope is the beating heart of becoming free or freer. Paulo Freire, the great pedagogue of liberation, in his last book, a revisiting of his estimable Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1973), said this about hope (a factor he had earlier underestimated):

But the attempt to do without hope, in the struggle to improve the world, as if that struggle could be reduced to calculated acts alone, or a purely scientific approach, is a frivolous illusion. To attempt to do without hope, which is based on the need for truth as an ethical quality of the struggle, is tantamount to denying that struggle as one of its mainstays . . . Hope, as an ontological need, demands an anchoring in practice. . . . Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle. (Freire, 1996, pp. 8–9)

More practically, but no less importantly, Nan Henderson (1997) says that we must replace our thinking about youth in trouble as at-risk and begin to think of them as youth at-promise, drafting them into a program of possibilities, hopes, and dreams. Freeing human spirit, energy, and capacity, no matter how modest the venue, is driven by the lure of the possible and shaped by the magic of the vision. Rebounding from serious difficulty, coping with a crisis, and changing the course of one’s life depend on an operating level of hope that is tied to the image of the possible. People overcome unimaginable barriers as well as small hurdles because they see the possible dream. The dream need not be panoramic either. It may be modest and focused but nonetheless potent. There are epiphanies and turning points in life as well: moments when the possible becomes suddenly and strikingly apparent. It might be an encounter with a teacher, a book, a self-revelation forged in the fire of real difficulty and pain; who knows what it might be? The practitioners of solution-focused therapy and the strengths perspective know well the value of the dream, the hope, the possibility. The miracle question, for example, invites the person with a problem to flirt with possibility and hope and to imagine the heroic in ordinary life:

Suppose while you are sleeping tonight a miracle happens. The miracle is that the problem that has you here talking to me is somehow solved. Only you don’t know it because you are asleep. What will you notice different tomorrow morning that will tell you a miracle has happened? (De Jong & Miller, 1995, p. 731)

Freire’s (1996) idea of untested feasibility also speaks to the reality of the possible. We are far too often naysayers, unwilling or afraid to consort with the imaginable and potential. Of course, without plans or action, to move to the feasible is naïve, if not harmful. But to deny the plausibility of the possible is also a mistake. Freire’s partner, Ana Maria Araújo Freire, says

Thus, the untested feasible is an untested thing, an unprecedented thing, something not yet clearly known and experienced, but dreamed of. And when it becomes something detached and perceived by those who think utopian wise, they know that the problem is no longer the sheer seed of a dream. They know the dream can become reality. (p. 206)

Empowerment as a philosophy and a practice refers to the work of helping others to see the wisdom and strength within and around and to use these resources in the journey toward the possible. Empowerment requires of us at the least a belief in the dreams and hopes of others, a respect for the basic and innate wisdom of others, a willingness to collaborate with others in the project toward achieving the untested feasible, and a dedication to helping others understand the sources of their fears and the oppressive mechanisms that delay the realization of their prospects. Roger Mills (1995), in his compelling and effective approach to individual and community health and empowerment, says that the work of freeing people must begin with a profound and unremitting belief in the innate wisdom and health of the mind, body, and spirit. These may have been concealed with the esteem-blowing negative opinions, behavior, and attitudes of others in one’s life. But at some level the wisdom and health always remain.

Stephen Rose (1994) says this about empowerment:

Empowerment . . . is a relationship among people, based upon mutual connection, designed to produce knowing, creative, connecting persons who experience themselves as subjects [emphasis added] and who work together to create a world . . . where subjects are welcome. (p. 35)

As social workers it is incumbent on us to keep alive the dream, speak to the wisdom, promote the health, exalt the possible, create the connections, and treat people as subjects, not objects. It must be so since we often find ourselves confronted with people, groups, and communities whose lives, at least for the moment, have been compromised by the suffocating actions and policies of others.

Alienation and Oppression: Anxiety and Evil

The evidence around us cannot let us deny the reality of severe and repressive institutions, relationships, circumstances, and regimes. War, bigotry, hatred, condemnation, and, more subtly, setting people aside, acting as though they do not exist, making them invisible are all daily reminders of the reality of despotism and brutality. Why is evil the seeming companion to the heroic? There are no certain answers, but we can speculate.

A family or personal or a cultural or social history of oppression lends impetus to its continuation. Cruel individuals and brutal nations do not easily have a change of heart. To be raised in an environment where others who are different are defined as a threat and are to be dismissed or discriminated against is a difficult catechism to resist. The tradition of domination of certain others may be passed on from generation to generation. But where does that need come from? How often do you and I stand, mouth open, horrified, when we encounter in the news or through our own eyes incredible acts of violence or vicious acts born of intolerance? How, we cry, can this happen? Yet, it may be that some of us at one time or another have been encouraged to act or have been a party to actions that have inflicted emotional or physical pain to others, others who are often different from us. And this to assure our own place in the cosmos, the scheme of things.

Human beings are only motes in the eye of an enormous cosmos (Becker, 1973; Fromm, 1973; Wilber, 1995). We tremble at the smallness and frailty of our being in the face of the magnitude of time and vastness of space. On occasion our trepidation and fears are best handled by taking matters into our own hands and dealing the instruments of fear and trembling to others. Thus, we calm our own uncertainties and obscure our very smallness. It may even be, as some have suspected, that these acts of oppression and violence are immortality projects designed to blind us to the reality of our own organismic vulnerability and eventual collapse (Becker, 1973; Rank, 1941).

Another possibility hinges on the fact that as human animals we have no sure way to get into our world. Instincts for the most part fail us. We cannot walk with the assuredness of the cat nor fly with the effortless ease of the eagle. Our existential needs place us in the position of attempting to find security in a world we did not make, a world whose dimensions and unpredictability can be stupefying and frightening. Cats and dogs, bees and wildebeests probably do not hang around wondering about their place in the universe, their worth, or the meaning of life. Their places are fairly well secured by the knot of instinct. Clearly, the capacity to learn varies by species, but it is probably true that even the highest primates do not have the degree of self-consciousness and awareness that humans do. Such self-reflexivity does impose burdens on us, however. We must assess our place and position vis-à-vis others, past and present. We must find ways to mute the occasional anxiety and despair that overtakes us as we look at our situation honestly. We must find ways to develop beliefs and ideas about which we can have conviction and that propel us in to the world of relationships and institutions, nature and organization with some degree of equanimity. We must find ways to impound the realization that we are small and frail and that someday we will die. To look, if we choose to do so, at the reality of the human condition can be a mind-blowing experience.

But it isn’t just the dread that imposes a burden upon us. It is the existential responsibility to use the fabulous powers of mind and spirit that make us essentially human. That can be as daunting as the realization of our limitations and seeming insignificance in the universe. To be all that you can be, as the commercial would have it, is a heavy requirement should we choose to face it. After all, we don’t want to get too big for our existential britches, do we? And if I do begin to tap into my possibilities and the obligations of my vision and talents, what steps do I take, where can I find support, and what if I fail?

So, for human beings the stakes are high. Fromm (1973) suggests that because of our self-consciousness and the need for us to learn how to be of and in the world as opposed to relying on instinct, we have a range of needs born of the requirements and conditions of our existence that we must meet. Two of the most important are the need for a frame of reference and objects of devotion and the need for roots (a place to be, a place to be from, and a place to belong). The first bespeaks the importance of having a system of meaning, belief, and values; a worldview wherein you ensconce yourself. To have a system of ideas, words, symbols, and images that provides you direction, insight, membership, and understanding makes life seem more solid, manageable, and resonant. The devotion to, and conviction about, such frames of reference—religious, political, social, or philosophical—thrusts one more confidently into the world. The frame of reference can be life affirming, spawning those emotions and intentions that draw us together—love, caring, respect, wonder, charity. Or it can be destructive, procreating those emotions that separate us—hatred, prejudice, aggressiveness, and envy. Cultures and social institutions for the most part carry these systems of meaning and rationale, belief and devotion to us. These infuse or shape our individual belief systems. The message here is clear. We can satisfy our existential needs through any variety of behaviors, identities, social institutions and programs, cultural inventions, and traditions, and these can range from the constructively humane to the destructively inhuman. Morally galaxies apart, the followers of Jesus and the followers of Hitler were travelling very different paths to the same end: the resolution of the existential dilemmas of being human. Each, of course, had profoundly different consequences for the human race.

But from the ashes of oppression and destruction, we still may witness the flourishing of the human spirit. Lewis Lapham (1998), commenting on the predictions (and realities) of the direness that accompanied the approach of the millennium, says it well:

It is true that time destroys all things, but it is also true that against the usual heavy odds men [sic] preserve what they have found useful, beautiful and true. The annals of destruction bulge with reports of drowned cities, and although they duly take note of man’s inhumanity to man, they also speak to the human capacity for regeneration. (p. 11)

We have taken a rather panoramic view of these principles, and they may seem far removed from the habits and rhythms of everyday life and practice. But the sweep of history and the grandeur of wholesale creation and destruction find their way inevitably into the nooks and crannies of our lives and the lives of those we help. You see a single mother and her ten-year-old daughter. They have come to the family service agency you work for. The mother is worried. Her daughter, once sweet and compliant, a joy to be around, is becoming morose, uncommunicative, anxious, and weepy. The quality of her work at school is plummeting, and friends seem unimportant to her. The father left the family suddenly and left them in dire financial straits. It had been a marriage of youthful misjudgments, the mother allows, but she says that in spite of the financial hardships maybe it is better that he has gone. The mother wonders if her daughter’s current woes aren’t related to his leaving about six months ago. You spend considerable time over the next weeks exploring the situation with the mother and daughter. Eventually you discover that for a period of almost two years the young girl had experienced physical and sexual depredation and brutality at the hands of her father. She had vowed—to herself!—never to tell anyone. Never to let him know how much he had hurt her. Never! And she maintained her vow until he left. Now she was falling apart, grieving, experiencing rage, and feeling the wounds of violation. But in the ashes of devastation, this young girl’s spirit, against all odds, flourished. Now the mother and the social worker must make an alliance with this tiny, amazing soul.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS

The chapters that follow will discuss each of these frameworks in more detail. Here they will be introduced and briefly discussed.

Meaning-Making: The Construction of Human Experience

We exist in many realms: the material (the world of objects and things), the organic (the body, the natural world), the social (the world of relationships and institutions), and the mental (the world of ideas, symbols, and meaning). Although the arguments about the reality of each of these realms rage on, our concern in this brief section is to understand the mental or, more appropriately, the world of meaning and meaning-making. Human beings build themselves into the world symbolically. How we are to be is not a given. We do not come into the world with a ready plan for the unfolding of our being over three score and ten years (not to ignore, however, what our genetic endowments may predispose). Nor does the world reveal itself to us as nakedly obvious and thoroughly transparent. What we must do, it seems, in league with those who care for and instruct us, with our culture’s predilections, and through our own ingenuity, is to fashion out of words, symbols, images, stories, and narratives a working, operating sense of the world of people and things, of the seen and unseen. There may be a physical world out there apart from us. However, we do not understand it, experience it, and participate in it without interpretive lenses on. This idea can quickly turn into some precious pedantry and philosophical debate if we are not careful. What it means is this:

When you awaken and begin your habitual routines of grooming and eating, or whatever you do to prepare for the day, you feel a sense of firmness and solidity about the world and your place in it. You look out on the street and see familiar sights, hear familiar noises, and no matter what your day may bring, the customary situates you in what seems to be a palpable and real world. But what you see (and fail to see) and how you define it or what you call it and how you experience its impact on you is an interpretation: a mixture of thoughts and words and pictures authored by you over time with a little help from your culture, your friends, your memory, and the reality itself. Other persons from the same neighborhood and culture might see and experience very different things. The lenses they wear, ground by their own experience and relationships and history, may let them see things you don’t see, cause them to react to things you see with very different responses, or allow them to come to very different conclusions about what those two men across the street on the corner are doing. Or, assume that you have the same genetic endowment you now have, but you happen to have been born three houses down the block. The course of your life would be different—to what degree we can’t imagine. But it is also likely that the ways that you interpret, see, and react to the world would be quite different—thanks to your family, the many environments and experiences you have been exposed to, and your own learning and need to understand. Only three houses down the street and you might as well, in some ways, be halfway around the world.

Children born in the same family, though they do bear similarities (Now that’s a Johnson kid, can’t you just tell?), experience very different environments. For that reason, the way they construct and construe their what seem to be not-so-different worlds can be unique, in many ways, for each of them. The first child is, for a while, an only child, the object of affection of doting, though nervous, parents. The third child has two older siblings; more experienced, relaxed, and tired parents (Mom now works fulltime); and they live in the ‘burbs, not the city. What’s more, the folks have given up going to the Lutheran church and have become Rastafarians.

So, your world is in part a theory; a creation of your culture, your relationships, your own interests and needs, your experiences, and your ingenuity. Theory means, at its root, to see. How you see, as well as what you see, and what you make of it (its meaning) are fateful for how you act, feel, and relate. Many people(s) have had their meaning and understanding of the world forced on them from the outside. The use of coercion, threat, violence, or simply the power of the media can swarm our own sense of our experience. For too long in our society, people who are outsiders, on the margin, or of a very different culture have had their theories muted or distorted by others who have more power or who control social and political institutions as well as the media of communication. The power and freedom to make meaning, for individual or group or culture, is a priceless and delicate condition. To have it stripped away puts individuals and groups in a difficult and sometimes perilous state. If you want to smother and subjugate one person or a people, strip them of their meaning and control of their bodies and senses (Berman, 1989; McLaren, 1995). Does this sound like something that might happen in a third-world country? Maybe. But it is happening here, too. Nightly on television, in the movies and in other media, we are being given and accepting a distorted picture of the world, one that while it amuses, sedates, intrigues, pacifies, and titillates also subdues our own sense of the world and the constructions that might be forged out of our own experience. Peter McLaren puts it starkly:

Television reality is one in which men outnumber women three to one, where women are usually mothers or lovers, rarely work outside the home, and are the natural victims of violence. It is a reality where less than 10% of the population hold blue-collar jobs, where few elderly people exist, where young Blacks learn to accept their minority status as inevitable and are trained to anticipate their own victimization (they are usually portrayed as the white hero’s comic sidekick or else drug addicts, gang members, and killers). (p. 9)

Mary Pipher (1994), in her sensitive and compelling portrayal of adolescent girls in America, shows how a variety of cultural forces buries the burgeoning sense of self fashioned out of experience, saps psychological energy, mutes hope, and sidetracks creativity. In its place comes the human manqué: a creation of advertising, television, peer pressure, and expectations from parents, from boys, and from the marketplace. Pipher observes

America has always smacked girls on the head in early adolescence. This is when they move into a broader culture that is rife with girl-hurting isms, such as sexism, capitalism, and lookism, which is the evaluation of a person solely on the basis of appearance. (p. 23)

So oppression is never really very far away. But neither is liberation. When we work with others who have lost credibility or conviction in their own sense of the world, we work to help them understand that their own system of meaning—their impression of things—has been debilitated and by whom and through what means (Mary Pipher does this directly with the young girls she works with; Paulo Freire (1973) calls the process conscientization). Then we work to help them restore their own meaning, their stories and understandings, and their narratives or maybe help them build better and bolder ones. In doing this we are invoking the power of language, and the powers of mind, in the project of coming to name one’s own world. Pipher (1994) cites Margaret Fuller in this regard: What a woman needs is not as a woman to act or to rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded to unfold such powers as are given her (p. 259).

Strengths and Resilience

The dominant culture, regaled in the media, institutionalized, and celebrated daily, seems increasingly preoccupied, if not obsessed, with pathologies, problems, moral and interpersonal aberrations, violence, and victimization. To this mixture we must add the increasing tendency to medicalize and pathologize almost every trait, pattern, bent of behavior, or habit typical of the human condition. We have, thus, a frothy concoction of diagnoses, labels, and besmirched identities. An influential cartel of institutions, disciplines, professions, businesses, and individuals—from medicine to the pharmaceutical industry, from the insurance business to the media—assure us that each of us has a storehouse of vulnerabilities and failings born of toxic and traumatic experiences (usually occurring in childhood). These put us at risk for an astonishing array of maladies: from addictions of all kinds to post-traumatic stress syndrome, from major depressive disorder to borderline personality. Victimhood and recovery also have extended way beyond their original and legitimate boundaries and have now become big business as many adults, prodded by a variety of therapists, gurus, and ministers, search out their wounded inner children and memories of the poisonous ecology of their family background. This phenomenon blurs the distinction between people who have been seriously traumatized and victimized and those who experience the expectable trials and tribulations of daily life (Dineen, 1996).

All this is tragic enough but made worse by the fact that it has encouraged us to overlook another, more persistent reality: people who face trauma, catastrophe, difficulty, disappointment, even abuse often—most often— do better in the long run than most of us would have predicted. This does not mean that people who have eventually surmounted adversity, even to the point of thriving, have not suffered or do not suffer. Clearly, most have and do. But many also have carved out a satisfying and productive life. What we are only now discovering is how they did that. We know all too well how people get sick, fail, and reiterate family miseries and fallibilities in their own lives. But we know all too little about the majority who move away from and beyond the turmoil and pain of all kinds of human upheavals. Surely there is a level of stress and shock that can overwhelm any child, adolescent, or adult. But people do rebound under the most difficult of circumstances, they do demonstrate a degree of resilience and hardiness, and they do develop a cache of valuable personal traits and virtues hammered out on the anvil of calamity (Saleebey, 1997). An exciting development over the past two decades or so is the number of practitioners of all kinds, researchers, and journalists who have dedicated themselves to understanding the sources of resilience and the origins of the capacity to rebound. Others have begun to examine the considerable array of strengths and assets that individuals, families, and communities have accumulated as they have faced the dramatic and trying challenges of their lives (Katz, 1997; Mills, 1995; Rapp, 1998; Werner & Smith, 1992).

Steven and Sybil Wolin (1993), for example, have moved away from a practice and research philosophy that directed them to observe, assess, and minister to the damage done in childhood that created various pathologies in the adolescents and adults they saw. Though noble work to be sure, it seemed to lack completeness and energy. If people got better, it was a slow, painstaking, and halting process. One day, seeking to change the course of conversation, Steven Wolin asked one of the people he had been treating for a while and who, like so many others, had continued to recount the same litany of troubles and trauma, how, given all her misfortunes, had she managed to survive? In disbelief, and hesitantly at first, over time she slowly began to recount some of the environmental resources and personal adaptive capacities that had allowed her not just to survive—but even to flourish. What struck Steven Wolin was the unmistakable change in the level of energy and interest in the client and himself when they began to talk of the personal capacities and environmental resources that had produced a more propitious outcome than one would have supposed. On the basis of their research with survivors of a damaged childhood, the Wolins began to infuse their work with the conviction that most people who had suffered as children and had faced serious challenges to their integrity and well-being developed personal capacities and traits that allowed them to overcome the adversity to the degree that the quality of life for them as an adult was far superior to what anyone might have predicted for them in childhood.

That is what the strengths/resilience conceptual framework obligates us to do. To search out and account for the considerable assets and resources that people have within and around them, especially those elements of character that have ripened as a consequence of coping with dire circumstance. To embrace a resilience/strengths model is not just a matter of acquiring some new techniques or a different vocabulary. Bonnie Benard (1991) observes that it is a matter of changing one’s heart and mind—a personal paradigm shift. A paradigm, as we will discuss later, is a framework that is deeply embedded in our identity and colors our perceptions, thoughts, and actions—it shapes the world that we see. There are some important points to be considered in shifting to a strengths approach. First, you are not required to ignore problems, pains, past hurts, and trauma. But you are required to put them in perspective. Children, for example, are wounded and they are left with scars as adults. But they are also challenged by troubles to experiment and respond actively and creatively. Their preemptive responses, repeated over time, become incorporated into the self as lasting resiliencies (Wolin & Wolin, 1997, p. 26). The conceptual and linguistic distance between a pathology-focused model and one built on the idea of strengths and assets to some seems too immense to span. These should not be seen as opposites but rather as complements; one incomplete without the other. Second, the problem or disease paradigm seems to have way too much authority to challenge. It is rooted in the medical model that is spawned, in part, by the institutions and methods of science—with a big S. To illustrate: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV TR (Text Revision) of the American Psychiatric Association (2000) is an ever-expanding encyclopedia of disorders and pathologies. It is a best-seller. It has roughly 720 pages devoted to descriptions of mental disorders. It has become the lingua franca of the psychiatric/mental health professions, insurance companies, and HMOs. But it is tragically one-sided. It claims the imprimatur of science but many of its conclusions and categorical descriptions are products of clinical experience and the mutual agreement of panels of experts. By comparison, there is no Diagnostic Strengths Manual. The language of resilience and strengths is, as Goldstein (1997) points out, simple, plain, and virtuous but not particularly compelling to professionals. Third, there is a moral and ethical hesitation to seek out strengths, capacities, resources, virtues, and resiliencies in children and adults who have and are suffering. But does emphasizing strengths in any way really dilute your obligation to those who are afflicted or tormented? (Wolin & Wolin, 1997). In the end, what do you have to work with in helping individuals overcome adversity and improve the quality of their lives? The resources and assets around them and within them. You surely will honor and respect their pains and scars, their struggles and tribulations, but the clearing of a pathway to their hopes and dreams comes from a similar respect for and awareness of their considerable capacities.

The Biopsychosocial Framework

Social work, over the years, has given itself credit for always being alert to the subtle and complex interactions between persons and their environments. In fact, some think that this is what makes social work different from other helping professions—the attention paid to the environment and the interplay between elements of the environment and the individuals, families, and groups within it. But, like other professions, social work has also succumbed, to a degree, to the enormous pressure to individualize and psychologize most problems and difficulties that people present. Despite its environmentalist foundations, the central thrust in direct practice since the 1920s has been toward the conceptualization and refinement of interpersonal helping, constructed largely in psychological terms (Kemp, Whittaker & Tracy, 1997, p. 45).

The systems and ecological perspectives have been among the most widely spread theories or frameworks in social work that provide designs for conceiving of person and environment transactions. General systems theory (Hearn, 1969) was the first broad conceptual backdrop for social work practice, but some found it too abstract, too mechanical, and lacking in the passion and compassion that fuels social work’s ethical interests—social and economic justice, the elimination of oppression, preservation of and respect for the dignity of all human beings—and lacking in the methodological imperatives and principles that would actually inform practice. A later development, meant to incorporate the breadth and transactional nature of systems theory but also to enliven the understanding of the interchanges and encounters between people and their environments was the life model of Carel Germain and Alex Gitterman (1980, 1996). They conceptualized the difficulties, the problems in living that people faced as occurring in terms of expectable or unexpected but stressful life transitions, maladaptive interpersonal relations, and environments that do not meet needs or sufficiently provide resources for adaptation. More recently there have been attempts to wed the two in the ecosystems approach (Gilgun, 1994; Meyer, 1983; Wakefield, 1996b).

While having made a serious contribution to social work theory and practice, there still remains some degree of dissatisfaction with these characterizations (Gould, 1987; Morrell, 1987). They are seen as wanting in conceptual tools that would fashion a necessary critique of groups and institutions in any environment that are toxic and that oppress populations. They are seen by some as apolitical because they fail to acknowledge the role of power and power relationships in the transactions between environments and people. Finally, others critique these perspectives because they virtually ignore the other elements of the person/environment equation, especially the biological foundations of human behavior and the physical environment (Besthorn, 1998; Saleebey, 1992; Weick, 1981).

So it is incumbent on us to understand this elaborate relationship among individuals, families, and groups and their environments. It is also crucial for us to factor into this equation the compelling role of our bodies and our status as organisms with a genetic history. An example will preview our later discussion (chapter 4).

TEMPERAMENT, PERSONALITY, AND ENVIRONMENT

Temperament, long an interest of philosophers, psychologists, and fans of human behavior, refers to our basic patterns of neurophysiological, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral reaction to the external world. Though interest in basic temperament or orientation declined in the middle of the twentieth century (because many thinkers and observers saw it as primarily laid down constitutionally—a combination of genetic predisposition and prenatal factors—and, thus, somehow, antithetical to the American belief in the autonomous, self-inventing individual), the past two decades or so have seen an explosion in research and thinking about the whole idea (Gallagher, 1996; Kagan, 1994; Ornstein, 1993). There is some disagreement about the many constituents of temperament or even what basic temperaments might be, but at this point scientists and clinicians and others tracking these developments are closer to agreement on the following.

Inhibited/Uninhibited. At one end of an imagined continuum, some individuals (maybe two in ten) seem to be born with an inherent sensitivity, high arousal, and some distress reactions to various stimuli in the first year of life. In the second and third years of life, this expands to fear of strangers and/or avoidance of novelty. These highly reactive children may come to be seen or defined as shy. But their reactivity has a neurophysiological basis as well as emotional and behavioral manifestations. There is another group of children (about two in ten) who seem relatively relaxed or unfazed by stimuli and somewhat fearless and assertive as they move into their second and third years (Kagan, 1994). Physiological correlates of these temperamental extremes abound and include reactivity of the sympathetic nervous system, body build, eye color, and facial structure among others. For example, high basal heart rates and higher levels of the excitatory neurotransmitter norepinephrine typify shy children, even though they may have parents who are generally confident and relaxed. But genetic predispositions to temperament are not carved in stone, impervious to the wash of environment. The behavior of parents, the appropriate comforts and demands in the environment, or the goodness of fit between environmental factors (importantly including parental attitudes and behaviors) and the child’s basic temperament can make a difference. Kagan found in his longitudinal research that temperament was a fair predictor of adolescent behavior. But he also found that, thanks to environmental factors, for example, one-third of the shy or reactive infants were not so by their second or third year. The environment includes a variety of elements: gender, intimate relationships, economic security, race, educational opportunities, and so on. These do not have a clearly predictable effect on temperament (Gallagher, 1996). But the message is clear. We come into the world with inherited dispositions of various kinds. These interact with our environment to produce patterns of behavior and adaptations to the external world. They are malleable to a degree, but they are mediated by neurophysiological and neurochemical processes. We must respect both biology and behavior in our understanding of human nature. Winifred Gallagher says it well:

Each [temperamental disposition] arises from constitutional variables in the nervous, circulatory, and endocrine systems that respond to the environment, affect one another, and change with development and experience, while preserving what psychologist Arnold Buss has prettily described as the native individuality that shines through the overlay of learned tendencies. (1996, pp. 14–15)

Difficult to define in any case, personality might be thought of as not just the bedrock of temperament but as the developmental accumulation of clusters and patterns of attitudes, values, traits, skills, emotions, opinions, and self-reflections born of experience and our capacity to think about ourselves. What is important to remember here is that who we are at any given moment is at least a result of the fascinating commerce among constitution, consciousness, and context.

INTEGRATIVE THEMES

These three frameworks will guide us as we examine some of the complexities, intrigues, puzzles, and enchantments of the human condition and human nature. In addition to these frameworks, themes will help us tie together the great and daunting variety of human experiences and situations that we discuss. These are intended to focus our gaze on important elements of the human experience in all its diversity. The themes are related, as you will see, to the conceptual frameworks just outlined.

Capacity

It is thoroughly human and completely understandable that the odd, the frightening, and the aberrant would jump out at us when we examine situations or involve ourselves in any number of adventures and happenings. But we must also attend to the aptitudes and endowments of individuals and families, the assets and resources embedded in neighborhoods and communities of all kinds—their human and social capital, so to speak. So as we discuss, for example, the stresses that adolescence can introduce to the individual and to the family, we must also attend to the considerable abilities, interests, and ideas that they bring as well. As we examine the ample environmental pressures on adolescents and the seductions of the media and the marketplace, we will want to recognize the resources and supports available for adolescents and their families as well.

Context

We will work diligently to not fall heir to the unbalanced individualizing and psychologizing of human experiences and relationships. With particular interest in cultures and communities and in social institutions and civic ambience, we want to understand and highlight the continuing interactions and mutual effects of people(s) and their environments—physical and social. In a neighborhood in a major city, the incidence of diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) seems to be rising dramatically. Attending only to family or individual factors, we might well lament the increasing disorganization of families or the lack of discipline, internal and external, that has come to characterize much of child–parent relationships in the contemporary world. But had we noticed an article in the paper about this very same neighborhood our attitude might be different. Once brimming with heavy industry, over the years plants had been shutting down, leaving in their wake empty lots and boarded-up buildings. Later, in many of these empty lots Environmental Protection Agency investigators discovered high levels of lead in the topsoil. Neighborhood children frequently played in these lots. Lead toxicity can produce symptoms that look very much like ADHD. So, in this instance, a toxic environment, rather than toxic parent–child relationships, is the likely culprit.

Contingency

We often underestimate the role of luck, chance, and locale in human affairs. We have usually understood the unfolding development of human beings over the life span to be a matter of biological, psychological, and social tasks accomplished (or not) in a prescribed series of stages that are relatively universal. Kenneth Gergen (1983) argues that an aleatory (chance-related) understanding is more apt. An aleatory understanding acknowledges that there are psychobiological milestones, laid down epigenetically (a ground plan for development), that the developing human passes through (e.g., there is an optimum window of opportunity for the development of speech). But it also suggests that most of us are products of the sociohistorical time and place we live and the contingencies of our lives. Even the fact that we were born is an immense piece of luck. Aldous Huxley (cited in Ornstein, 1993, p. 36) put it this way:

A million, million, spermatozoa,

All of them alive,

Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah

Dare hope to survive

And among that billion minus one

Might have chanced to be

Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne.

But the One was me.

Constitution

We are, after all, animals—members of a species—and we bring into the world, encoded in our bodies, not only the history of our species, but the history of our family. We carry, remarkably, in each of our cells, our history and our future unfolding. Environment and experience play a powerful part in this drama, but sometimes we fail to give the body—our biology—its due. Each of us, at any moment, is a manifestation of the ongoing and intricate communion between the world around and the world within. In a manner of speaking, we must always be as aware of the role of the molecules within as we are of the manifold influences without. Whether our concern is mental illness or the attachment between mother and newborn, we must understand as best we can how body, mind, and environment interact.

Construction

Human beings are inveterate meaning-makers, story-tellers, constructors of myths, creators of theories, weavers of dreams and visions. Our lives are spun out, in large measure, through the devices of language, metaphor, narrative, story, and histories. Individuals, families, and cultures have their own bildungsroman, the story of their journey. The triumphs and trials, the falls from grace and the rise again, the migration and the settling, the adversity and the opportunity are told and retold, refashioned, and refurbished over time. Professionals tend to rely on reason, theories, perspectives, and formulas to figure out the existential puzzles and to make sense of the life problems that clients bring. But these, too, are interpretive devices, stories developed in a different, perhaps more methodical way than the stories we tell at family reunions. We will discuss the antinomies and similarities between narratives and scientific knowing in the next section of this chapter.

PARADIGMS, POSTMODERNISM, AND POSSIBILITIES

Professionals faced with the pains and distress and the hopes and dreams of people who come their way struggle to develop a kind of understanding that probably goes beyond the usual manner of getting a grip on things. In our culture, professional understanding brings to mind theories—data gathered and evidence accumulated—about a class of problems or group of people. These are presumed to be the most important intellectual resources drawn upon in helping people understand and solve their problems. Calculated explication, analysis, reason, logic, and objectivity are the patterns of thinking assumed to be most appropriate for professional knowing and doing. The personal motives, emotions, and agenda of the professional social worker must be removed or conserved so that the client can be seen unerringly through the lenses provided by theory and/or data. Such discernment relies on the assumptions of predictability about human striving, the direction of the life course, and the well-defined parameters of the human condition and experience. We assume that there are causes for behavior that can be understood and, from them, principles derived to direct the helping process. Furthermore, we believe our understandings at some point, thanks to methodical proofs, will become established as truths as enduring as the Grand Teton range.

This scientific worldview has been a part of the Western world for centuries. Deeply embedded in our thinking, we celebrate its accomplishments from the revelations of the inner world of the atom to the wonders of the galaxies; from the miracles of modern medicine to the fascinations of information technology. We even ape the mannerisms and postures of science in advertising (Tests show that Scourdent toothpaste is 30 percent more effective against plaque) and public life (polls are taken about every conceivable interest and issue that comes our way). In the professions, we have sought to import not only scientifically derived knowledge into our professional lore but also to be more methodical in the development of the knowledge and methods that we employ every day.

Social work has struggled mightily over the years to become scientifically respectable, to have a knowledge base empirically demonstrated to have validity, and to amass a range of explanations that direct and rationalize our professional assessments and interventions. Social workers sometimes agonize over whether they meet the tests of intellectual and professional virtue: a rich body of knowledge, empirically derived and theoretically potent; a language and set of methods that are characteristic of social work in particular; and a demonstrated rate of effectiveness of our methods and interventions. We still smart from the charge of Abraham Flexner at the Conference of Charities and Corrections in 1915 (1915! Imagine that!) that we were not a profession (although he also charged us to go out and become one). So we have been working diligently for lo, these many years, to take our place in the pantheon of professions as equals to physicians, lawyers, and architects (Specht & Courtney, 1994).

The usual model of the professional knowing and doing has been called technical/rationalist by Donald Schon (1983). It is a child of the scientific worldview. Any profession is required to have a systematic knowledge base with four properties: (1) clear parameters and boundaries, (2) derived through the scientific method, (3) specialized, and (4) standardized. So you enter the school of social work. In the first year, you learn about some theories and frameworks for understanding humans. You might encounter these in human behavior class, foundation practice courses, and, to a lesser degree, in social policy class. Then you are introduced to the rudiments of the application of that knowledge—the principles and orientations to practice—in your foundation practice class. In your research class, you may learn how to evaluate your own practice and how to read research studies that might have useful information about various practices with various populations. Finally, you begin serious application through learning the attitudes, skills, and contexts of practice in your field practicum. During this whole process, you are instructed about and exhorted to be loyal to the rootstock of the profession—its values and guiding ethic. Finally, those who would be your educators and mentors want you to understand the importance of culture, ethnicity, class, race, sexual orientation, and gender in determining lifestyles and life-chances and setting the ground rules for helping specific groups of people.

This sweeping and grand pedagogy is meant to be a conscious, highly structured process of moving from theory to principle to practice application, a process derivative of the scientific method. What you actually experience is, of course, something in many ways probably quite different as a process. In some very important ways your learning experience is like no one else’s.

Paradigms

The scientific worldview is but one worldview. Extraordinarily important in the development of the commercial, industrial, and technological world, it may be understood as a paradigm. Paradigm is an often-defiled idea. Overused and bloated, it is almost as hackneyed as the word empowerment. Nonetheless, it is useful. It came to prominence thanks to the writing of Thomas Kuhn, a physicist turned historiographer of science. What began in the 1950s as a series of lectures was published as a volume in the series entitled the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science and eventually came out as The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970)—and it had immediate impact. Previous to its publication, the ascendant idea was that science in every field (biology, physics, astronomy, etc.) had been thought to be a progression; an increasingly refined and accurate accumulation of knowledge validated through investigation and bundled together with theories. Theories were examined continually (through the testing of hypotheses–theory-based predictions). Supporting evidence made them more precise and potent as representations of the world of that science’s interest. If this were the case in the social sciences, we would come ever closer to the understanding of what human beings, across cultures and time, are actually like. And the more that we would know for sure, the more effective our interventions would be.

Kuhn argued otherwise. He claimed that normal science (that body of knowledge in a given field celebrated in the journals, at conferences, and in the public mind) is essentially a mopping up operation, focusing in more and more detail on subjects of concern to the discipline. At one time, every normal science began as a revolution; it existed outside the walls of the prevailing scientific conventions. It was an alternative perspective on the world—a different paradigm. When it challenged the prevailing wisdom, it caused a rupture in the fabric of that science’s understanding, creating tension, insecurity, and conflict. Since a paradigm is a way of looking at the world and is constructed with its own language, principles, assumptions, and methods, it is also an important matter of belief and conviction for its supporters. And if it happens to resolve some problems of understanding or method of study that conventional science cannot, it gathers supporters and gradually supplants the prevailing wisdom. This view of the evolution of any scientific establishment (although Kuhn did not talk about social science—others did) was, in its time, revolutionary and created quite a stir among scientists. Kuhn also argued that external forces—economic, political, social—have an impact on the evolution of scientific paradigms in different fields. The development of astronomy was coincident, for example, to the needs of the newly emergent ocean-going commerce in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Kuhn, 1970).

As paradigms become more ingrained and established, they migrate deeply into our consciousness. We may not even be consciously aware of the directive power of the paradigm. Paradigms also exist outside of science. We have cultural paradigms. The dominant culture in America venerates money, acquisition, accumulation of wealth and property; individualism and accomplishment; progress and the control of nature; social status and celebrity; and religious faith and positive thinking to a degree that we hardly even think about. Shopping in a mall, cutting a good deal, going back to school, doing better economically than your folks, developing and improving your self, cheating a little on your income tax, jogging to forestall a heart attack, and going to church seem as natural as sleeping. It is not that these are right so much as they are taken for granted, barely thought about except by critics, dissenters, and assorted cranks. In our culture we tend to think that we can solve nature’s mysteries. We believe that it is okay to tinker with nature. We do not doubt that technology (and science) can solve most problems—from finding a cure for human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) to a means for cleaning up toxic waste. But every culture has an underside. For all our veneration of science and its powers, we have a tremendous hunger for the comforts of various kinds of spiritualism, faith, nostrums, and panaceas that border on magic—from the belief in horoscopes to the idea that you can lose weight and stay healthy merely by eating grapefruit. Though we are devoted to positive thinking about ourselves and future, we are also fascinated with the dark side of life, the seamy and tawdry, the weird and inexplicable. It is important to understand in this discussion that I am speaking of the dominant culture. The fact is there are many cultures in this land. As Renato Rosaldo (1989) has pointed out, many of us live in the borderlands between cultures. So the culture is not monolithic. It is permeable, and there are other cultural traditions and paradigms that guide and influence people.

Cultures as well as different fields of science have their own paradigms, each having devoted adherents. But, in time, any paradigm and its beliefs and methods cannot solve some of the problems that come its way or explain some of the phenomena it encounters. Usually when this happens, there are other mixtures of ideas, beliefs, and methods waiting in the wings that are encouraged by the new failures of the old paradigm. Another revolution has begun.

Social work has its paradigms and its lenses. Some of them are about methods of practice, some are about theories and frameworks for practice, some are about how we come to learn as professionals, and some are about values and philosophy. For example, we take pretty much for granted the person–environment perspective as a way of orienting ourselves to the worlds of our clients. We hardly ever think about how difficult it is to recognize and understand those transactions between people and their worlds. We also sometimes are not careful enough in thinking about what we include in environment. Fred Besthorn (1998) observes that we rarely include the physical and natural environment as a significant element of people’s lives. Carolyn Morrell (1987) makes another criticism. She claims that our characterizations of the interactions between environments and people are largely conservative—meaning that they support the status quo by implying that most of the work of adaptation