Teach a Man to Fish

Teach a Man to Fish....

As some of you may know, I work assisting folks with disabilities.  I thoroughly enjoy this work! I get to promote, on a daily basis, the freedom & greatness in people who have had little to no reason to hope for either.

Most of the people I assist are developmentally delayed in some manner. They are capable of most everything you & I are capable of, however, it simply takes them a bit longer to assimilate the knowledge needed to accomplish a given goal or task. This is the "delayed" part of their development. Most people think of mental retardation as a "medical condition" that requires "treatment". In fact, usually the only thing "required" for folks with M.R. to experience freedom & greatness in their daily lives is a bit of patience & persistence by those who seek to assist them.

I am not a doctor, I do not have a medical degree. I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, I do not treat mental illnesses. I do NOT "treat patients", I teach people. That's it, that's all & it's that simple.

I am invited into the lives of people who recognize that they have a vulnerability on which they would like to work. They recognize that this is an obstacle that they are not fully prepared to deal with so they invite me to teach them ways to overcome that obstacle & attain their goal or goals. The weakness does not go away, & our goal, as a team, is not to make it go away. Our goal, working together, is to succeed DESPITE that singular weakness.

I do not "do for them"...instead, I help them to learn how to do for themselves. Much like counselors of all sorts of disciplines, I rarely give directions, instead I ask questions geared towards prompting thought & logic, study & reason. The intention is to essentially make myself, as teacher/guide, obsolete. I work hard to help them attain the level of self-reliance & independence necessary to no longer need my presence & help. Some folks often see that as a tad cruel -- refusing to "give them the answers" to problems. I personally would be insulted by someone who thought I was not worth the time to show me how to problem-solve for myself. I tend to treat others the way I would want to be treated, so I only make suggestions, ask questions & mention alternatives so that those I assist might find their own path to their goals.

We've all heard the old adage: "Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach a man TO fish & you feed him for a lifetime!"

I have often felt that a lot of the people I have met in daily life are also "developmentally disabled", although they have not been diagnosed thus. Just as M.R. can occur through trauma to the brain, so other traumas can cause other delays in development. Anyone who has experienced severe trauma to their psyche as a child can attest to the ways it often hinders the natural process of developing healthy interactions. Traumas, abuses, molestations, & neglect negatively affect the brain's development in the earliest months & years of life. A child whose brain has been crippled in this manner has difficulties throughout the rest of their life in areas such as 1)forming healthy attachments, 2) developing a healthy self-image, 3) normal nurturing of dependents. There are other areas that are deeply affected, but those are the most apparent & far-reaching. 

Many folks who had rough childhoods, marked by traumas & various abuses, are fortunate to have had what professionals refer to as "helping witnesses". While this person may not have been able to protect the child from the traumatic event, they ARE able to mitigate the resulting damage somewhat merely through their care, warmth & compassion following such traumas.

We learn what we live. Thanks to a few "helping witnesses" in my own childhood, I learned to help myself. I then turned about & found a way to help others overcome disabilities & delays. To me, it is important to pass on that spirit of balance, determination & self-reliance. It's rarely "easy" to overcome our flaws, weaknesses & disabilities, but the rewards are worth the hard work.  I am damned thankful that I had some help, a few excellent loving examples & the inner strength to overcome my own disabilities.

Of course.........one cannot begin the work to overcome such crippling beginnings unless one examines their life history & reveals such events, studies them & gets help to restore balance to one's manner of functioning.

Lots of people will tell you that life is too short to spend much time "over-thinking" things.  *I* insist that life is too short to dismiss such all-encompassing handicaps!  Examine your life, deal with the weights chained to your proverbial ankles, understand your own weaknesses & disabilities, then discover ways to succeed DESPITE them! There ARE people who can, & do, help! You just have to ASK!

Food for thought:

~"An unexamined life is not worth living."~Socrates

~"The more internal freedom you achieve, the more you want: it is more fun to be happy than sad, more enjoyable to choose your own emotions than to have them inflicted on you by mechanical glandular processes, more pleasurable to solve your problems than to be stuck with them forever."~Robert Wilson

~"The typical human life seems to be quite unplanned, undirected, unlived, and unsavored. Only those who consciously think about the adventure of living as a matter of making choices among options, which they have found for themselves, ever establish real self-control and live their lives fully."~Karl Albrecht

~"People who exercise their embryonic freedom day after day, little by little, expand that freedom. People who do not will find that it withers until they are literally ''being lived.'' They are acting out scripts written by parents, associates and society."~Stephen R. Covey