The Power of Voices

I wanted to mark the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

On August 28th, 1963, African Americans, and others, voted with their feet when 250,000 strong participated in the March. Civil rights leaders protested racial discrimination and demonstarted support for the civil rights legislation in Congress at the time. [The Civil Rights Act was signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964.] Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech was given on this date from the Lincoln Memorial. 

This week, in support of protestors marching for Black Lives Matter following the shooting (seven times in the back) of 29 year old Jacob Blake by a police officer in Wisconsin and the subsequent death of two and the wounding of another protestor (allegedly by a ‘Blue Lives Matter’ seventeen year old), professional athletes in soccer, football, baseball, and hockey used their voices in massive protest, unlike any heretofore, by refusing to play or by postponing games and cancelling practices. Ray Allen, former NBA player for the Milwaukee Bucks and Basketball Hall of Famer, told PBS Newshour’s John Yang yesterday August 27, “[N]ow we understand the power we possess.”

I might add from Corinthians 13:1 (Good News translation) I may be able to speak the languages of human beings and even of angels, but if I have not love, my speech is no more than a noisy gong or a clanging bell.

About the Voice

On August 18, 2020 I posted, on the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, about women having fought to obtain the voice of the vote. This led me to thinking about the voice in a more concrete way, in particular, when a patient’s voice is very loud, or productive, or seemingly pressured, patients who seem not to expect a dialogue with us or to let up ‘get a word in edgewise.’ A colleague complained to me about his patient’s very loud voice, shouting in the session such that she gave him a headache. He and I talked about the possibility that she had a great longing to be heard, having had a mother who would never listen to her. My colleague chose to ‘lean into’ her need to be heard, and even sometimes to muse aloud about this need of hers.

Another colleague of mine became annoyed with her patient with whom she had to struggle to get a word in, and to struggle to go from the patient’s complaints about external events to the patient’s internal longings. My colleague was tempted to interpret the patient’s seeming incapacity to be in dialogue with another and to let the patient know how left out from a dialogue she, the therapist, felt. Instead, my colleague decided to speak to the possible longings this behavior of the patient’s might be communicating. Perhaps the patient, like a loud patient, might have a great longing to get her story out, that is, to be heard, and had, in addition, the fear and expectation (learned from childhood experience) that a listener’s attention could not really be held for long and so the speaker better get in as much as possible before the listener 'disappeared.’ 

Childhood may teach us (and become a relational paradigm) that listeners disappear: A mother who is starting to give us attention, but then is distracted away by her other children, her own worries, or by her dissociated unresolved trauma. Caregivers may tell us to go away, that they don’t have time for us. They may teach us we are not really deserving of being listened to, or that we are boring, by pretending to listen while not really giving their full attention (e.g. while on the phone). Perhaps worse is to have had our parents dismiss our feelings and points of view such that we feel misrecognized and misunderstood, never heard.

An analytic attitude listens with heartfelt attention, allowing the patient the experience of being ‘a child of the universe [with] ... a right to be here.’ Another colleague told me how a particular patient would not stop talking at the end of a session, as if to “grab” the therapist, sometimes running over twenty minutes! I was reminded of children I have seen in play therapy who, when the parent calls for them at the end of a session, throw their arms around my legs and not want to leave. I notice aloud their attachment, let them know I will hold them in my mind, and that I will be here next time. Sometimes, because of our experience together, they know that to be true.

100 year anniversary of 19th Amendment’s ratification

There is no democracy without enfranchisement of all its citizens, and without the vote, there is no voice. [The voiceless are made helpless, vulnerable to depression and dissociation, and/or resentment and revenge.] The 19th Amendment enfranchised women, the right to vote giving voice to the speechless. [Psychotherapy strives to give voice, to enfranchise the speechless, empower the voiceless, to bring to fruition an individual’s potential.] This 100th anniversary is bittersweet; joy for the hard fought victory, anger that disenfranchisement lasted so long. [Our patients, too, may lament that it took so long to arrive at our offices where they work together with us to arrive at a stronger sense of themselves.] 

Woodrow Wilson had declared, “Liberty is the fundamental demand of the human spirit.” The suffragists he initially opposed replied-- with their daily picketing outside the White House,

led by Alice Paul--, “How long must women wait for liberty?” These women, demonstrating in nonviolent civil disobedience through the winter and into the fall of 1917, were jeered, called Bolsheviks by journalists, physically assaulted, attacked, arrested, jailed and beaten, [much like Black Lives Matter demonstrators are today]. When it became politically expedient, and after years of persuasion (the carrot) from the then president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association Carrie Chapman Catt, along with many months of embarrassment (the stick) by Paul and her sister demonstrators about his hypocrisy of America’s so called democracy with half its citizens unable vote, Wilson supported in November 1917 New York’s amendment to its state constitution for women’s full suffrage.

The Resolution for Amendment 19 came before the U.S. House of Representatives, gaining the required two thirds majority, and passing on May 21, 1919. One Representative left his wife’s death bed to, at her behest, vote ‘aye’ and then returned home to her funeral. The U.S. Senate passed it on June 4, 1919 by one vote over the needed two-thirds majority. Three-quarters of the states were needed to pass an amendment to the U.S. Constitution (in 1920, that was 36 out of the then 48 states).  All the southern states failed to pass, some would not even consider, the 19th amendment--black women voting would lessen their hold on white supremacy-- making ratification impossible, all except for Tennessee (its governor was a friend of Wilson’s). Tennessee was the necessary 36th state to approve, by one vote over the needed two-thirds majority, the 19th Amendment. After over 70 years* of activism, twenty million women finally won the vote, thanks, in part, to a mother who told her Tennessee State Representative son he’d better vote for women’s suffrage. The ratification of the 19th Amendment was a huge step toward realizing the United States’ potential.

*First Convention for Woman’s Rights held in 1848, in Seneca Falls, NY -- with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Frederick Douglas in attendance. Black women’s suffrage groups had the motto “Lifting as we climb.”

The 19th amendment reads, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”