SOCIAL WORK OR SCIENCES MP3

[Episode 59] Today’s Social Work Podcast is on incorporating religion and spirituality into social work practice with African Americans. Or at least that’s the official title. The unofficial title is, “If my client brings God into the conversation, what should I do?” I spoke with Nancy Boyd-Franklin, best-selling author, multicultural researcher, family therapist and clinical trainer, and recipient of awards from the American Psychological Association, Association of Black Psychologists, and the American Family Therapy academy.

When I was a social work intern, I worked with an African American mother who had AIDS and whose 6 children were HIV+. The father of her children had been an IV drug user who had died of AIDS. The mother was in poor health, and rarely sought her own treatment. I had a hard time tracking her down because she spent most of the day, every day, on public transportation with one child or another taking them to and from medical appointments. I remember being on the bus with her one day (because that was only place I could meet with her), listening to her talk about how she had successfully fought hospital administration to get treatment for one of her kids. Being the eager social work student that I was, fully prepared to acknowledge my clients strengths and resources, I told her that I was in awe of her strength. “How do you do it?” I asked her. Her response totally caught me off guard.
She said, “The good lord will give me only as much as I can handle.” I had no idea how to respond. See, I was expecting her to say something like, “a parent will do what a parent has to do,” or maybe, “I don’t know either – I sure could use a vacation.” I expected her response to be much more... textbook? You know, the kind of response that I had read about in my textbooks so that I could follow up with, “and so if you took a vacation, what would be different?” Which really makes no sense at all since she was obviously not about to zip off to the Dominican Republic for a week at the beach. Not so textbook. In that moment, on the bus, I found myself completely at a loss for words. Not that I didn’t have a million things running through my head – I did. I just thought they all sounded stupid. On one level I was trying to figure out what she meant: “OK. She said that the good lord will give her only as much as she can handle – does that mean that when she can’t handle any more, she’ll die? or that the good lord knows exactly how much she can handle and then when she can’t handle any more the good lord will stop giving her things to handle, or is there a third option I’m just not thinking about. I mean, I’m just a social work intern, I’m not sure what I can offer above and beyond what the “good lord” can offer her, so what now?” Ok, so in case you got lost in all of my self-talk here’s a quick recap. I asked my client a question. She responded. That’s it. What should have come next was me saying something intelligent. Instead, what I said was, “Wow.”

So why did I have such a hard time coming up with an appropriate response? Well, for one, I thought that as a social worker I should know what my client meant, and I should understand what she meant... Another things was that I had a different belief system from my client and it didn’t seem right to disagree with her, nor did it seem right to agree with her, because that wouldn’t be genuine. My social work education did not prepare me to deal with issues of religion and spirituality. My textbooks didn’t provide me with templates for how to respond when my clients brought up the issue of God. Prior to 2001, accreditation guidelines from the Council on Social Work Education didn’t require schools to include spiritual assessment in the biopsychosocial assessment, which I talk about in more detail in Episode 2, Bio-psychosocial-spiritual (BPSS) Assessment and Mental Status Exam. Another reason is that there has been a long and contentious relationship between religion and the helping professions. Religion was either the answer or the problem. On one hand, the social work profession is in part rooted in the Friendly Visitor movement which believed that the right version of religion was the answer to poverty. On the other hand, you have Freud’s legacy of religion being considered an obsessional neurosis. So for many providers, the only safe middle ground was “Religion is not within my scope of practice and therefore I’m not going to deal with it at all.”

Well, today’s guest, Nancy Boyd Franklin, would say that when religion or spirituality is part of a client’s life, the effective provider has to be able to deal with and be willing to engage in conversations about it. “Wow” just won’t cut it. She would see this mother’s belief in the power of the good lord as a sign of strength and resilience, not weakness or pathology. She would also say that I could have simply responded to the mother’s statement by saying, “tell me more.” In today’s interview, Nancy spoke about the heterogeneity of beliefs among Black Americans. She and I talked about the difference between religion and spirituality, what a church family is and why it is so important, whether or not social workers should ask about religion and spirituality if clients don’t bring it up, and what the role of religion and spirituality is in traditional African American families.

I interviewed Nancy at Temple University’s School of Social Work. She was the invited speaker for the school’s lecture series on social work research. For more information about Temple’s School of Social Work, or the research lecture series, please visit their website at www.temple.edu/ssa.org. And now, without further ado, on to episode 59 of the Social Work Podcast. Incorporating Religion and Spirituality into social work practice with African Americans: Interview with Nancy Boyd-Franklin, Ph.D.


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Transcript [pdf download ]

Jonathan Singer: Nancy, thanks so much for being here today and talking with us about African American families and religion and spirituality. I know that you’re really concerned about perpetuating stereotypes and I wanted to give you an opportunity to address that before we start the questions.

Nancy Boyd-Franklin: Yeah, I guess the first thing is that there is just tremendous variability and diversity in the Black community and that’s true of religion and spirituality too. You know, there are historically Black churches that are Christian, there are African Americans who are not Christian, there is a growing Muslim community both nation of Islam, Sunni Muslim, and other Muslim, there are a growing group who are very committed to African religions and I don’t think we talk enough about those in the field. I’m going to talk primarily, though, about traditional African American churches, so, Baptists, African Methodist Episcopal, Church of God in Christ, because we’re going to run out of time quickly.

Jonathan Singer: Why are religion and spirituality important issues for social workers to be aware of when they’re working with families that come from these backgrounds?

Nancy Boyd-Franklin: Absolutely. I think the biggest challenge in the field is that clients come in in pain. They don’t come to see us because they’re happy and everything’s wonderful. So they present first with their problems and our challenge, should we decide to accept it, is to figure out how to tune into their strengths. And in African American families, some of the biggest strengths are the family itself, the extended family and the church family. Now, that’s clearly not true of every African American client or family but there are many many families in which these beliefs are very strong and very powerful and can be used to help people overcome adversity, racism, loss, trauma, death, dying, issues in their lives.

Jonathan Singer: And so, in the African American community, is there a distinction between religion and spirituality or are they seen as the same thing?

Nancy Boyd-Franklin: Yeah, actually there’s research that’s been done where individuals have been asked are they religious or spiritual, and they’ve said religious and spiritual. Religion really refers to church involvement. Spirituality is a more general concept; it’s about a belief in God, or a higher power, or the Creator, and just a belief in spiritual action in one’s life. What I find is that there are just many situations in which social workers or practitioners in general in the mental health field now know they need to ask about religion, so they’ll ask, “Well are you involved in a church or a religion?” People say “no” and they go on to the next question. They don’t go after, “Well, would you say you’re a spiritual person, is spirituality a part of your life?” You get a much wider response to that kind of question.

Jonathan Singer: So, you mentioned the “church family.” What is the church family? In Black churches, what is the role of the church family?

Nancy Boyd-Franklin: In Black churches, we often describe our churches as church homes and, it follows, our churches are also our church families. It is hard for practitioners who haven’t experienced it to understand what an all-inclusive support network that is. You not only have the minister, the minister’s wife, the deacons, the deaconesses, but you have activities and supports for people at every stage of the life cycle. So you have things like the nursery where young parents can take their children and be a part of church services. You have Sunday school and all kinds of youth activities where many African American parents who live in very dangerous areas, in urban areas, have used churches as a socialization option for their kids. The strategy of many of the parents and grandparents I’ve talked to is tie up their time so they get them involved in after school tutoring programs. And people think vacation Bible school is just about spirituality, no, it’s a way to occupy kids in a very positive, spiritually focused activity during the time they’re off from school. But the other area for any social worker working in gerontology, this is a huge area because research has shown that African American women and older African Americans, both men and women, really rely on religion and spirituality to get them through the rough times, experiences of racism, trauma, loss, and so that issue becomes huge. There are tremendous services in the African American churches for the elderly. Reaching out to the folks who are homebound, folks in nursing homes, reaching out to families who are homebound because they have a family member, reaching out to hospitals when people are going through cancer and other life-threatening illnesses, so it’s an all-inclusive piece. The other issue, though, in today’s economic crisis, African American churches are like many social service agencies, services for the homeless, services for food banks. When the lists are so long for things like Big Brothers and Big Sisters, I will often turn to churches in the community for mentors or tutors for youth and people don’t think of these things in times when a lot of the services are drying up.

Jonathan Singer: So if I were working with an African American family and I knew they were involved in their church, could I say, “Is this something that your church family could help out with?” I mean, is that the phrase, “church family”?

Nancy Boyd-Franklin: Yeah, that’s one of the ways you could go but you first want to ask about, particularly if you’re not particularly religious yourself, or you’re not of this culture. You want to say, “You know, just curious, do you have a church family? Have you ever had one?” and “What kinds of things do you count on them for?” Even Black families, particularly single parent families who are isolated, who are not members of church families, may in fact find services for their kids offered through the churches, or for their elderly.

Jonathan Singer: So I can understand why it would be important to check in with a family to find out what their church involvement was, to find out what the norms are. I also know that there are African American families, any family, that might not be involved in churches, and yet, particularly in the African American community, you’re saying that churches are a huge resource. Are churches a resource for folks who aren’t members of that church?

Nancy Boyd-Franklin: Absolutely. Particularly in terms of services, services for youth. You have many African American families who get their kids involved in tutoring or mentoring or various activities, not because of their religious significance but because it keeps them off the streets. Also, there are a number of churches that have done excellent work, my own for example, on gang summits and trying to take kids back from the streets in that regard. There are some churches that have twelve step programs, a substance abuse ministry. There are numerous churches that have services for the elderly. So if you have a very isolated client or family, it may be a way to connect them.

Jonathan Singer: And I know that there’s a researcher out of the University of Pennsylvania who has been doing work on developing suicide prevention programs through churches. (Molock, S.D., Barksdale, C., Matlin, S., Puri, R., Cammack, N., & Spann, M. (2007). Qualitative Study of Suicidality and Help-Seeking Behaviors in African American Adolescents. American Journal of Community Psychology, 40(1), doi:52-63.10.1007/s10464-007-9122-3)

Nancy Boyd-Franklin: Excellent.

Jonathan Singer: Which I thought was a very creative view of combining this issue of religion and spirituality as a protective factor with the environment that might be most stigmatizing around issues of suicide.

Nancy Boyd-Franklin: Definitely. And Kaslow, as you know down at Emory has looked at religion and spirituality as a protective factor in terms of suicidality in African American women who’ve experienced domestic violence. (Kaslow, N., Price, A. W., Wyckoff, S., Grall, M. B., Sherry, A., & Young, S. (2004). Person factors associated with suicidal behavior among African American women and men. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 10(1), 5-22.)

Jonathan Singer: And we’ll put the link to those studies on the website for folks who want to hear more about that. So I’m sure there are folks listening to this podcast right now saying, “Ok, sure, Dr. Boyd-Franklin can talk about this but I don’t really know what to say.” Should social workers ask about religion and spirituality, and if so, how? And how might these issues emerge in therapy if they’re not asking directly?

Nancy Boyd-Franklin: Absolutely. I think one of the issues is that if you ask and you simply say, “Would you describe yourself as religious?” And they say, “Yeah, I’m a member of a church,” or ask “Are you a member of a church?” if they are, you’re going to have a hard time getting out of the room because you’ll be there two hours. If they say “no” you’ll want to ask, “I know there are a lot of folks who are not religious but they may be spiritual. Would you describe yourself as spiritual?” “Tell me a little about your spirituality,” or “Tell me a little about your church” if they acknowledge that they are church members. I get concerned because there are many people who know to ask the first question but the important thing is to encourage people, I think the most important thing you can say is, “Tell me more about it,” so you get a sense of how much is this a part of their lives? If it’s not, it’s not, but if it is, for those African Americans for whom it’s important, it’s huge.

Jonathan Singer: Are there resources out there for folks who want to learn more about how to address issues of religion and spirituality?

Nancy Boyd-Franklin: Absolutely.

Jonathan Singer: What are some of those?

Nancy Boyd-Franklin: I would recommend my book Black Families and Therapy. There’s a whole chapter on religion and spirituality. Also, a book by Froma Walsh on spiritual resources and family therapy. I have a chapter in that book with actually one of my graduate students who did research on this issue in African American families and I would strongly recommend that as a possibility.

Jonathan Singer: I know that students and educators listen to this podcast and I was wondering, what are some of the implications for training in both the field and in the classroom?

Nancy Boyd-Franklin: Yes, I firmly believe that this is an issue of cultural competency, that so often our courses that have a multicultural focus are very limited. And I really feel this needs to be a part of the training of social workers, psychologists, mental health professionals in general, family therapists, because for the families for whom it’s important, and obviously it’s not important for every family, but for the families for whom it’s important, it’s central and it is a strength, it’s a survival mechanism. If you ask somebody who’s just had an incident of racism, “How do you get through it?” they talk about their spirituality or their religious beliefs. I’ve done research and interventions, as you know, in the Gulf region after Hurricane Katrina, and in New Orleans, Louisiana, Mississippi, I’ve been so impressed with the spiritual beliefs of the people, even if they had family that helped them, you asked, “How did you get through?” they said, “God saw me through,” and that piece is central to their resilience, to their survival. And so, it is such an important area. When you do an assessment with an African American client or family, it’s got to be part of the assessment. Now, I want to remind you, though, that if it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit. I like the analogy of the camera lens, you know, it’s necessary to take the picture but you’ve got to adjust it for each new client and each new family that walks in the door, otherwise you create a stereotype.

Jonathan Singer: So, coming back to this example that you were talking about, folks from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when you talked about spirituality and religion as a resource. If my client starts to talk about that, and let’s say I’m not particularly religious or I have a different religious belief, how should I go about being there for my client and going down that path without stepping on the toes of ministry?

Nancy Boyd-Franklin: Ok, all right. That is a marvelous question. Therapy is not missionary work. I think the most important ethical issue is not imposing our own spiritual or religious beliefs on our client. What I’ve found as a practitioner for years and years and in training other practitioners is, if you ask, “Are you religious? Are you a member of a church family?” remember that you may get, “Yes, I’m religious and I’m a member of a mosque.” The challenge is that if you don’t ask, you miss the opportunity to do strength based work. And what I’ve found is that even if you spend five, seven minutes asking about these issues, and all you have to say is, “Is it important in your life?” if they say “yes” say, “Tell me more about it,” you’ll be there for two hours, trust me. That is the important part of the work. What’s important is to recognize that you don’t have to know all the little details. Cultural competency means being able to ask the question and then do reflective listening, “So you’re saying that this is really like your family. This is really central to your life,” so you’re saying, in a different client, “You’re not particularly religious but you’re saying spirituality is sort of who you are, tell me more about that. How might you use spirituality when you’re feeling depressed or when you’re dealing with issues in your family or in your life?” So it opens up the dialogue in a way that can be very powerful. And then it can be incorporated into therapeutic interventions.

Jonathan Singer: So it makes sense that you’re saying use your basic clinical skills to expand and explore this issue of religious or spiritual involvement even if it’s different from your own.

Nancy Boyd-Franklin: And let me add, since we may have researchers tuning into this too, Black churches are tremendous bases for both the development of intervention programs and for reaching a population in the African American community that you wouldn’t reach otherwise. Black churches do a great deal of education and prevention, you know, “Stop down after church and get your blood pressure checked.” Those kinds of interventions are very very powerful also. The other thing is that it can be incorporated into interventions. For example, in suicide prevention, I have had clients, and I’ve supervised my students’ clients, who have had a history of suicidality, they’ve been hospitalized in today’s managed care world, it’s a short-term hospitalization, so you have to support that person after they are released from the hospital and they may still experience moments of suicidal ideation. So for example, one of the things that can be very powerful is to have, for a person with a church family, that comes with a whole bunch of prayer warriors. You can ask, “Have you ever had a prayer partner? Would you consider having a prayer partner who can be an additional support for you when you’re feeling depressed so you don’t get to that suicidal point?” so that person can pray with them daily. In addition to therapy, it’s a phenomenal intervention, but if you don’t know about it, you don’t know to ask. So I would recommend the reading, those two chapters alone would give the reader tremendous ideas. Also, African Americans use spiritual metaphors in treatment. My favorite is the issue of spiritual warfare. I can’t tell you how many suicidal clients have described their struggle around suicidality as an example of spiritual warfare between the part of them that wants to adhere to their spiritual beliefs and the part of them that wants to end it all.

Jonathan Singer: So, Nancy, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today about religion and spirituality with African American families.

Nancy Boyd-Franklin: Thank you, Jonathan. I’m looking forward to listening to the podcast and I’d really be excited to hear more from your listeners about their interests.

Jonathan Singer: Along those lines, if they have questions, is it ok to contact you?

Nancy Boyd-Franklin: Absolutely.

Jonathan Singer: Alright, we’ll put your contact information on the website, ok.

Nancy Boyd-Franklin: Wonderful.

Jonathan Singer: Great, thanks so much.

-- End --


Bio
Nancy Boyd-Franklin's special interests include multicultural issues, the treatment of African-American families, ethnicity and family therapy, home-based family therapy, marital and couples therapy, the multisystems approach to the treatment of poor inner-city families, issues for women of color, the development of a model of therapeutic support groups for African-American families living with AIDS, and issues in working with African American children and adolescents. Her publications include numerous articles and chapters on the above topics. She has written four books including: Black Families in Therapy: A Multisystem Approach; Children, Families, and HIV/AIDS: Psychosocial and Therapeutic Issues; Reaching Out in Family Therapy: Home-Based ,School and Community Interventions, with Dr. Brenna Bry; and Boys Into Men: Raising Our African American Teenage Sons with Dr. Anderson J. Franklin. In 2003, the second edition of her book Black Families in Therapy: Understanding the African American Experience was published. Her honors include receipt of the award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Ethnic Minority Psychology and to the Mentoring of Students from Division 45 of the APA (2001), the award for Outstanding Contributions to the Theory, Practice and Research on Psychotherapy with Women from Division 35 of the APA (1996), the Distinguished Psychologist of the Year Award from the Association of Black Psychologists (1994) and the Pioneering Contribution to the Field of Family Therapy Award from the American Family therapy Academy.

Contact
Nancy Boyd-Franklin Ph.D.
Professor, Clinical Core Faculty
Rutgers University
Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology
Office: Psychology, A213
Phone: 732-445-2000 x 135
Email: boydfrank@aol.com
References
Dr. Boyd-Franklin provided this bibliography of works that relate to religion and spirituality with African Americans.

APA (5th ed) citation for this podcast: Singer, J. B. (Host). (2010, May 26). Incorporating religion and spirituality into social work practice with African Americans: Interview with Nancy Boyd-Franklin, Ph.D.[Episode 59]. Social Work Podcast. Podcast retrieved Month Day, Year, from http://socialworkpodcast.com/2010/05/incorporating-religion-and-spirituality.html

[Episode 60]Today’s Social Work Podcast is on social skills training with children and adolescents. My guest, Craig Winston LeCroy defines social skills as “a complex set of skills that facilitate the successful interactions between peers, parents, teachers, and other adults” (LeCroy, 2009, 653). Social skills include everything from dress and behavior codes, to rules about what, when, and how to say or not to say something. Social skills training is a form of behavior therapy, and as such focuses on behaviors, rather than thoughts or feelings, as the targets for change. Traditional behavior modification is often thought of in terms of task completion, for example, using star charts to get kids to clean their rooms or do homework. But in social skills training, behavior modification principles are used to teach people skills that help them to be successful in social situations.

I encountered an example of social skills training last week with my 2 1/2 year old daughter. My daughter’s daycare is really good about letting us know what the kids did during the day. My wife and I often use that information as the basis for conversations with our daughter. During dinner, we’ll ask questions like, “Did anyone plant flowers today?” to which my daughter has typically has yelled out an enthusiastic, “me!” Last week we were playing this game and I asked, “Did anyone pretend to be a train today?” For the first time since she could talk, my daughter sat there in silence. Was she ignoring my question? No. She was answering my question non-verbally. She was raising her hand. My wife and I were shocked. You’re probably not shocked to learn that at home, my wife and I don’t raise our hands in response to questions. So, who is teaching her to raise her hand? The next day, I went to pick her up from preschool, a classroom that she transitioned into about three weeks ago. The class was sitting in a circle and her teacher was asking the class questions. My daughter and her little friends were all answering by raising their hands. Clearly this is where she had learned this very specific social skill – that you answer questions by raising your hand, not by shouting. I don’t know how her teacher did it, but I suspect that she used basic behavior modification strategies such as explaining the new behavior, modeling it, and consistently reinforcing it by rewarding those who did it, and punishing (either by calling out or ignoring) those who did not. I also suspect that my daughter learned by watching her older classmates do it. While part of me was sad to see that my daughter’s enthusiastic “me” had been converted into a very calm, silent, and socially acceptable raised hand, another part of me understood that becoming Horshack from Welcome Back Kotter was not in her best interest.

Now, I can tell you that when I was working with kids who were getting expelled for talking back to their teachers, arrested for provoking the cops, or getting beaten up because they managed to say exactly the wrong thing to the wrong person, hearing a parental anecdote about a toddler raising her hand would have left me wanting just a little bit more. So I asked one of social work’s leading experts, Craig Winston LeCroy, professor of social work at Arizona State University, to talk with us about social skills training for children and adolescents. Professor LeCroy has developed and tested social skills prevention and intervention programs, including a social skills-based prevention program for adolescent girls (“Empowering Adolescent Girls”), a social skills program for training home visitors (LeCroy & Whitaker, 2005), and an empirically based treatment manual outlining a social skills program for middle school students (LeCroy, 2008). In today’s interview, Craig defines social skills training and emphasizes fit between social skills training and the ecological and strengths orientation of social work. He talks about the how social workers can effectively train youth in social skills, giving particular emphasis to the concepts of overlearning, role playing and modeling. He talks about providing skills training in groups, as well as an alternative to traditional expressive play therapy - individual child skill therapy. Craig emphasizes that successful social skills training requires knowledge of specific situations and can therefore be very culturally responsive. He talks about how early social skills training programs focused on juvenile delinquency, and discusses some of the existing evidence, particularly around modeling, to support social skills training as an effective intervention. Craig talks about his current research on using social skills in a universal prevention program with adolescent girls called “Empowering Adolescent Girls.” We finish our conversation with a discussion of resources around social skills training.

Interview questions:

One quick word about today’s social work podcast: I recorded it using a Zoom H2 recorder on location at the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) annual conference. If you listen closely you can hear the sounds of San Francisco in the background: a clock chiming, busses loading and unloading passengers, and even some pigeons congregating outside of the interview room. They don’t detract from the interview, but I wanted to give fair warning in case you were listening to this podcast anywhere were those sounds might be cause for alarm.

So, without further ado, on to Episode 60 of the Social Work Podcast, Social Skills Training with Children and Adolescents: Interview with Craig LeCroy, Ph.D.

Download MP3 [28:42]


Bio
Craig Winston LeCroy, Ph.d. is Professor of Social Work at Arizona State University. He is the author of over 100 scholarly publications including 10 previous books. Professor LeCroy has developed and tested social skills interventions in both prevention and intervention programs. For example, he developed a social skills based prevention program for adolescent girls (LeCroy, Empowering adolescent girls, W. W. Norton), a social skills program for training home visitors (LeCroy & Whitaker, 2005), and developed an empirically based treatment manual outlining a social skills program for middle school students (Social Skills Training in LeCroy, Handbook of Evidence Based Treatment Manuals, Oxford University Press). Professor LeCroy has directed numerous child and adolescent projects including an NIMH Training Grant, a substance abuse prevention grant, and a universal prevention program for adolescent girls. He is currently directing an evaluation project of home visitation services for at-risk families

Contact
Craig Winston LeCroy, Ph.D.
Arizona State University
School of Social Work Tucson Component
340 N. Commerce Park Loop Suite
250 Tucson, AZ 85745
office (520) 884-5507 xt. 15
fax (520) 884-5949
craig.lecroy@asu.edu
http://ssw.asu.edu/portal/about-us/faculty-staff/faculty-profiles/craig-w-lecroy  

References and resources
These references were provided by Craig LeCroy.

Research Press titles on Social Skills Training, and the Skillstreaming curriculae by Dr. Arnold Goldstein.

APA (6th ed) citation for this podcast:
Singer, J. B. (Host). (2010, June 28). Social skills training with children and adolescents: Interview with Craig Winston LeCroy, Ph.D. [Episode 60]. Social Work Podcast. Podcast retrieved Month Day, Year, from http://www.socialworkpodcast.com/2010/06/social-skills-training-interview-with.html

We've all heard the Serenity prayer. Even if you don't know what it is called, you'll recognize it by the first few words... "God grant me the serenity..." The serenity prayer is synonymous with Alcoholics Anonymous and 12-step programs that have transformed the lives of hundreds of millions of people. And it is only 25 words and three lines long.

Most episodes of the Social Work Podcast take huge topics - like stigma, suicide, and cognitive-behavior therapy, and try to distill them into 30-minute overviews. Today's podcast flips that on its head. Today we're spending over thirty minutes to unpack 25 words. My hope is that listeners learn something about the Serenity prayer - something that they can incorporate into their social work education or practice. In today's social work podcast, I spoke with Eileen Flanagan, author of the award winning book, The Wisdom to Know the Difference: When to Make a Change-and When to Let Go Her book was endorsed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. She holds a B.A. from Duke and an M.A. from Yale and teaches at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You can read more about her work at her website, http://www.eileenflanagan.com.

And now, on to Episode 61 of the Social Work Podcast: The Wisdom To Know the Difference: an Interview with Eileen Flanagan.

Download MP3 [29:31]


Bio
Eileen Flanagan is a writer and teacher whose work helps people to live with less anxiety. Her newest book, The Wisdom to Know the Difference: When to Make a Change-and When to Let Go, explores the message of the Serenity Prayer, accepting the things we cannot change and changing those we can. Endorsed by the Dalai Lama, the book won a 2010 Silver Nautilus Book Award. Eileen’s articles have appeared on the Huffington Post, Beliefnet, and the Washington Post’s On Faith column, as well as a variety of print magazines. She holds a B.A. from Duke and an M.A. from Yale and teaches at University of the Arts in Philadelphia. You can read more about her work through her website http://www.eileenflanagan.com/.

Transcript

Jonathan Singer: Eileen thanks so much for being here, and talking with us today about the Serenity Prayer, about the wisdom to know the difference, and my first question for you is, in the introduction to your book, you talk about the origins of the Serenity Prayer, and you included an earlier version that's different from the one most people know, and I was wondering if you could read the earlier version, and just talk to us a little bit about how this version, the early version, gives us insight into the meaning of the more commonly known one.

Eileen Flanagan: Sure, well first thanks for having me here. And why don't I read both so that your listeners can hear the difference themselves. The first one that I learned and the one that most people know goes like this, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can change, and wisdom to know the difference." Now as I started doing research on this, I found out that the prayer was originally written by Reinhold Niebuhr, whose a protestant theologian, at first people thought he wrote it in the '40s but now they've dug up even earlier versions, and he probably wrote it in the '30s although it was the '40s when it became famous, and the version that his daughter sites in her book on the prayer goes like this, "God give us grace, to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and wisdom to distinguish the one from the other."

Jonathan Singer: So those do sound different.

Eileen Flanagan: They have a kind of different style and tone, but some of the subtle changes also can shift the meaning. One of the words that usually jumps out as being different is the "should," and I sometimes give weekend retreats and, will give people the two versions of the prayer and ask them to reflect on which one speaks to them, and it's very interesting how people respond to the word "should," there are some people who feel very, beaten down with "shoulds" in their life; "I should eat less sugar" "I should exercise more" "I should not spend so much time reading e-mail at work" and so they hear that word "should" and they rebel against it, and they say I don't need anymore "shoulds" in my life, I don't want some prayer telling me what I "should" do. It's interesting because, Niebuhr was, very concerned with social justice issues, he was speaking during World War II, he was very outspoken about racism and anti-Semitism and poverty, and so when I hear the "should," I hear, the societal "shoulds," for him we should address segregation in the south, we should address poverty, and that to me has a different kind of connotation, it has a challenge in it, but not so much nagging, more the possibility that we might be able to change things that we don't think we can, and so I always think of the Civil Rights Movement, at the time Nieburh read this prayer, he could not have imagined the changes that would happen in the next 20 years, although he felt we should change those things if the metric had been, can we change it? I don't think people would have bothered trying, you know what I mean? The Montgomery Bus Boycott, when it started had no idea what it would lead to, they really did not think they would accomplish what they did, and so to me that word "should" can be, an opening of possibilities, rather than a limitation. But if we're speaking about our own lives, you know, sometimes the word "can" is more helpful, so different versions of the prayer might fit different situations. The other thing I'd point out about the difference, is that the most common version is in the singular, God grant me to change what I can change, and that version is sometimes said in the plural, in the recovery movement, but the Niebuhr version is definitely in the plural, and so that again shifts the meaning a little bit, you know, are we focused just on my own life, which is a very appropriate use of the prayer, but I think it can also apply to those bigger things that might be able to change together, which neither of us could change by ourselves.

Jonathan Singer: So it sounds like, the more common version of the prayer is really, a personal, version and the earlier version that you read, was really intended as a communal thing, what can we do, what should we do as a community.

Eileen Flanagan: Yeah, and I can't I'm an expert on Niebuhr's intentions, but that's how I hear it from the bit I know about his life. I think both have a communal aspect, because he was a preacher giving sermons, so he was addressing a community, and in AA community is really important or in every recovery movements, the community is very important but it is more focused on changing individual lives rather than changing social structures, for example. The third difference that I would point out is that Niebuhr's version says, God grant us grace, and then the other things are off shoots of grace, whereas the recovery prayer, or the prayer that's more commonly used just says, God grant me serenity and courage, and, both of them start with God, but it makes sense to me that the recovery movement uses, just God, and not God grant me grace, which to me, anyway has a more Christian connotation, it has a more specifically religion, we're depending on God for all of this kind of connotation, and I think one of the things the recovery movement has been so successful at, is opening up spirituality, to say, we believe in something bigger than ourselves but we don't care what you call it, you know, we want to welcome everybody, you figure out what this word God means to you, but we're not trying to limit anyone's understanding of that, and so that reference to a higher power can be an invitation rather than again sort of a scolding, you have to buy into this theology, whereas I think the word “grace”, some people love the word “grace” but for other people it has baggage. So it makes sense to me that that word got dropped as the prayer [chuckle] got more popular.

Jonathan Singer: So it’s interesting because, it sounds like the earlier version, is much more about, what should we as a Christian community do, to, improve the world, and the Serenity Prayer as is commonly used today, in the recovery movement, it, intentionally avoids saying, this is a Christian thing, and says, more what can I do, what can I understand about what I can control, what I can’t, and how can I make changes in my life.

Eileen Flanagan: Yeah that’s how I hear it, how can I make changes with the support of my community, and it’s interesting how, that word “God” still has a religious connotation to some people but the way AA and other recovery groups use it, has opened it up. One of the people I interviewed is a Buddhist, who’s been in recovery for 20 years, and so he talked about how, okay, so this is not my language, you know a lot of these things are still from the Judeo Christian tradition even if people think they’re not, it feels very Judeo Christian to me but it’s open enough that I can bring my Buddhist understanding to it, and I can see the way that these words apply, to my life and my understanding of spirituality.

Jonathan Singer: So in your book, “The Wisdom to Know the Difference,” you really unpack, the Serenity Prayer, and, I was wondering, if you could talk a little bit, about, for the people that you interviewed, how would they go about, identifying the things that they couldn’t change, and then, how do they go about accepting them.

Eileen Flanagan: Well I think it depends a lot on the person, and the situation, there are some situations where it’s clear that you’re not going to be able to change, something, but coming to acceptance might be an internal process, you know of, coming to peace with that, and that’s another thing about the word “acceptance,” you can accept it in a, superficial way without really being at peace with it, and, and again that gets into the question of injustice too, you don’t have to be happy about everything that you accept, for example one of the people I interviewed, her son was killed in Iraq, well, she accepted that that’s what happened, but that doesn’t mean she’s got to be happy about it. The word doesn’t necessarily have to have that connotation. But in another way, when we talk about letting go, which is one of the chapters in the book, we are talking about coming to peace with something, and so there were some cases, where, that was really a choice, is someone gonna accept the fact that her husband left her with a young child, for example is one of the people I interviewed, and that she’s not going to be able to convince him to come back and she should really stop trying because that’s not helping anything. There’s that kind of situation, there’s, the situation of one the most traumatic stories for me of letting go, of a man I interviewed named Dan Gottlieb, who is an author and Philadelphia radio talk show host, and when I had first started hearing him on the radio I didn’t realize that Dan had been paralyze in a car accident 30 years ago, from the waist down, and he talked about how he was really forced to learn to let go, this was not a choice, let me be at peace with my situation it was thrust on him, and he had to deal with that, and, went through many difficult years, struggled with depression, lost his wife and his best friend in the process, had a lot of health issues that continue because of his paralysis, but what helped him, come to, more peaceful place in his life, was learning actually about Buddhist meditation and mindfulness, and the idea of being present to what is, and appreciating what is instead of always having your mind focused on what you wish things were. So one of the, stories he tells that really has helped me probably more than any other, story in the book, is he talks about the picture, and how we often have a picture in our mind of how things should be, and he tells this story of a woman, who got married and she had this picture of what her perfect husband should be, and then he wasn’t that, and so she was disappointed, and then, other things happened that weren’t her picture of her life and she was disappointed, and then she thought, well my daughter’s getting married that will make me happy, but that guy wasn’t the picture either, and at the end he says, she says she’s had a miserable life, and he says, the problem was the picture, nothing else, that she couldn’t really appreciate these people in her life because she was measuring them against, whatever kind of myth she had in her mind, and I find that that is really true in big things and in small things, the only choice left to me is, am I going to have a good attitude about it, or a bad attitude about it, and there’s some situations where that ‘s really clear, I can’t stop the snow, there are a lot of other situations where it gets much more murky, and having difficulty in a relationship at work, or with someone in my family, in those cases the line between what do I need to accept, and what do I need to change can get a lot more blurry.

Jonathan Singer: So it makes sense that one of the ways people can accept things is by, figuring out what vision they have, in their mind for how things should be, and then, really just getting in reality with how things are.

Eileen Flanagan: Yeah and I would say paying attention to the stuff in our mind is a key in lots of ways, so knowing what my picture is, and when I need to let go of it, is one thing, another is knowing, myself and my social conditioning, my, personal strengths, I think, one of the things that’s interesting to me about the prayer is a lot of people tend to find one line, more difficult than the others, I think that some people grow up in ways that they sort of expect the world to fall into line with their expectations, maybe they’ve had a privileged background or a family that catered to them or whatever, and so when they hit a situation, where, they don’t’ get their way, it’s excruciating, it’s really hard then to accept, those things, whereas there are a lot of other people who, don’t get their way very much as children, live in a world that is clearly not in their control, especially if you grow up you know in a dysfunctional family or something where there’s lots going on that you have no control over, you might grow up used to being powerless, and for that person, taking the initiative to change something that they could change, if they took proactive steps, might be the thing that’s more difficult. So one of the things I talk about is reflecting on your life, and it could be influenced by your religious background, it could be your educational background, class, race, gender, generation, there’s lots of things that can play into it, and it’s very complex. I mean, for myself, I’m, a white middle class, person with an Ivy League education, but I’m also from a working class Irish family that has little fatalism running through it, and I’m a woman, and I can see how in different situations those different things influence me, what is more difficult for me, letting go, accepting, saying okay, I put this in the hands of some higher power, you know that person might need to learn, to step up a little bit more sometimes, or, there are other people who, for their growth as a person need to learn to let go and relax and say, okay I don’t need to control this.

Jonathan Singer: I really like this idea that, there are these different components of the Serenity Prayer and that, it might be easier, for somebody to accept the things that they cannot change, whereas for other folks, letting go, or accepting that you don’t have control, would be the challenge, and so I was wondering if you, if you could share a story about somebody who gained the courage to change.

Eileen Flanagan: Sure, one of the stories I tell in the book is of a woman named Hillary Beard who was stuck in a job that she really found dissatisfying. She was probably maybe around 30 when she started thinking about wanting to change careers, she could spend 30 more years being really miserable doing something really boring, and she’s a very smart person, who, could have done a lot of other things, but she was very scared to make a change, and so she talks about some of the things that helped her, and I’ll just outline a couple of them. One was changing her assumptions about what was possible, and she gives the very specific example of, being a black woman who wanted to become a writer, and, realizing that her father, who, had been very successful who was one of the first African American city planners of his level, in his city, had, trained his kids like, this is what you need to do to be successful in American, and one of the things he had said when she expressed an interest in a creative career early on, was, black people can’t succeed at that, you’re a black woman, go into business you know, this is the route for you, and so she had followed that advice, and then she describes, it was in the early ‘90s having this experience of turning over three different books. She found one by, Alice Walker, one by Terri McMillan, and one by Toni Morrison, and here on the back of each one was this big beautiful picture of a black woman, and Hillary describes, having this moment of realizing that thing that I believe isn’t true anymore, and she makes a point that it wasn’t that her dad was giving her bad advice, I mean he came up in a very rough time, and there’s still racism in the publishing industry, but this limit that she thought was impermeable, clearly had shifted, and so that was the moment when she, found the courage to go start taking writing classes, because she said this, this barrier isn’t there anymore and I shouldn’t let the barrier in my mind stop me. The other things she did, and she says that this is one of the things she got out of Corporate America is knowing how to make a plan, [chuckle] and how to set goals, she gathered a few other people, in her work environment who also wanted to make a career change, and they would meet over lunch, on a regular basis, and support each other, so first of all she had community, but they also supported each other in setting very specific goals; where do you want to be in five years, so imagine it, and then, write down what you need to do to get there, and part of what I love about this story is there’s been all these books about the Law of Attraction, and thinking positively, and there really is something to that, but I think that if you think of it as magic, I’m just gonna, imagine where I want to be in five years, that is not really what works. [laughter]

Jonathan Singer: Right, you can’t visualize, changing careers and then have somebody say, Oh my goodness, Hillary, let me offer you the career you want!

Eileen Flanagan: Yeah and actually, when you get on your path sometimes those miraculous things happen, I’m a Quaker and we use the term, “Way Opening,” that when you are making those steps in the right direction, sometimes, you do get the call out of the blue, which Hillary did actually, but you don’t get the call out of the blue until you do some ground work. You can’t just imagine being a writer and then expect to get the call, so what Hillary did was she made these very specific steps that she would have to take, and she said that she was terrified, partly because, her father was a very strong, positive figure in her life, but this meant going against, what her father’s advice was. So it was very frightening, for her, and so she would do a little thing each day. She said, one day she would bring her telephone book into work, this was back when people actually used telephone books [chuckle] to look things up, so she brought a telephone book into work one day. The next day she went through and she circled or made a list of all the colleges that might offer, a continuing ed class, that’s a little thing, I can do that it’s not too scary. The next day she called, each of the places on the list and asked for a catalogue, that’s a little thing that not too scary. And she said that by breaking it down into doing at little thing every day, suddenly she’s enrolled in a writing course and she said that was scary but by then, she was excited because she had taken all these little steps.

Jonathan Singer: Yet she had been successful, she had set out short, measurable, achievable, objectives, and she had done them, and so by the time she had gotten into the classroom, she’s like, oh I can do this cus I did those things.

Eileen Flanagan: Right, exactly. So, she gets great feedback on her writing in the writing class. She decides to attend a writer’s conference, and she lays out all these little things that she did, she started writing articles because, she had corporate experience there were some, writing opportunities that came to her that helped her build her experience, so that by the time she takes the big leap, to become a full-time writer, she does get a miraculous call, I mean you joked about no one’s going to call you, someone called her out of the blue and asked her to co-write a book on values with Venus and Serena Williams.

Jonathan Singer: The tennis champions.

Eileen Flanagan: Yes! That was one of her first books, she has now written seven books I think, a few of them are best sellers, so the call out of the blue does happen, but she did an awful lot of leg work. There are a lot of other threads to Hillary’s story but, I think those things of having community, setting measurable goals, and paying attention to your thinking, can all be really helpful when someone is trying to make a scary change.

Jonathan Singer: And one of the things that I got out of what you said is that, the courage to change, is incremental. So we’ve talked, thus far, about, granting me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and now, [chuckle] we’re at the title of the book, and the last line, and, how do people know the wisdom to know the difference? To know the difference between what they cannot change and the things they can change.

Eileen Flanagan: Well one of the things I like about that earlier version of the Serenity Prayer, is the line, “the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other,” which is a much less catchy book title, [laughter] and so I like “The Wisdom to Know the Difference” as a title, but the word “know,” makes it sound like something definite and final, and “distinguish” is more of a process, and it is an ongoing process of learning what we can and cannot change, so some things that help people, to develop that wisdom, one I think is learning from your mistakes. Psychologists have tried to come up with, a definition of wisdom that everyone can agree on, and they can’t, but there are some things that they agree, are qualities that wise people share, and one of them is that they learn from their mistakes, and so I found that as I was looking for people to interview, I tended to start with older people, and, what I realized is that you can live a long time and not learn from your mistakes so it’s not that, being 80 automatically makes you wise, but if you learn from your mistakes and you live to 80 you probably will have [chuckle] accumulated, some wisdom along the way. And one of the things that those people often talked about was accepting themselves, knowing themselves, and accepting themselves, and that that relieves an awful lot of anxiety. If you’re not trying to be someone other than who you are, if you know what your strengths and weaknesses are, it’s just easier to navigate the world, and you have less stress about impressing people, or trying to be what, they want you to be, so those are some things that I think can help people. Along with the self knowledge I would say that thing I mentioned before of reflecting on what’s your own background, what are the ways you’ve been conditioned, just so you have that awareness, in the way that Hillary realized, I was taught something by my family, that was a really helpful tool, to my parent’s generation but doesn’t fit me anymore, so having that reflection on your own life, can be really helpful, in, learning wisdom, or developing wisdom, another key I would say is community, in fact community I think helps in all three lines of the Serenity Prayer, if you’re dealing with something really difficult, having people around to support you, is going to be key, but also if you’re trying to change something scary, like Hillary gathered those other people at lunch who had similar goals, community can be really important in that, but it can also help you in the distinguishing. I think, well one example is, an artist who was unhappy with her agent, and was complaining to her friends year after year, and it was the friends who said, you know you’ve been saying the same thing for three years now, and it was having someone else reflect that back, they weren’t telling her what to do, they were just, observing, sometimes that can be really helpful, in letting us see ourselves. And the last thing I would bring it back to, that idea of some kind of higher power, the book draws on a lot of different spiritual traditions, and you don’t necessarily have to be a religious person I think to find benefit in the Prayer and, this way of thinking, about what you can and cannot change, but certainly for many people, part of the Prayer is the idea that there is something bigger than myself that I can lean on, in difficult times, and that can help guide me, and so some of the people talk about, learning to listen to the wisdom within themselves, paying attention to that inner voice, and trusting that it is connected to some bigger source of wisdom in the Universe, and so some of the stories are really about learning to listen to that, and finding that that little voice inside you really knows, what the right thing to do is in a certain situation, but in a busy world with cell phones and TVs and the internet going all the time we don’t always listen to it, and so making space in your life, for self reflection, for mindfulness or meditation, or for listening to that voice within, can all be very helpful.

Jonathan Singer: Well Eileen thanks so much for unpacking the Serenity Prayer for us today, I know that I loved your book and I found your words today to be thought provoking and inspiring and, I hope that listeners out there felt the same way, if you did, you can go to our Social Work Podcast website and leave your comments, or you could go to the Social Work Podcast page on Facebook, at www.facebook.com , and then search for Social Work Podcast, and I also hope that, in contrast to some of the big ideas that we talk about on the Social Work Podcast, that it was an interesting journey for you the listener to have these few words unpacked in such rich detail, so thanks again Eileen I really appreciate it.

Eileen Flanagan: Thank you very much for having me Jonathan.

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References and Resources

Eileen Flanagan's website: http://www.eileenflanagan.com/
Hilary Beard's website: http://www.hilarybeard.com/
Dan Gottlieb's website: http://www.drdangottlieb.com/