My new car came with more safety features than I knew existed. It has a blind spot indicator that flashes and beeps to keep me from sideswiping another vehicle. The steering wheel shakes to warn me that I am drifting out of my lane while an orange coffee cup takes over my dashboard admonishing me to wake up! One day the dash lit up with Tire Pressure Low. I pulled over and looked at my tires. They all looked fine. I drove another 50 miles and when I got out again, my tires still looked okay. My husband checked the tire pressure and one tire was a bit low so he filled it. I recalibrated the system. All good. Dashboard clear.

I guess these new computerized systems are just too sensitive, I told myself. Kind of annoying. But the next time I got in the car that pesky light went on again—Tire Pressure Low. Jeez! I’m starting to think all this high-tech computerization isn’t worth the bother. I called the car dealership and they told me this and that about tire pressure at high elevations. My husband thought I was overreacting. You’re fine, he said, but I was starting to worry so I went to town and got the tires checked out. Lo and behold, there was a nail in my tire! Thank goodness for that very sensitive computerized safety system! I could have had a blowout. I might have crashed my car and myself! And then, if I had lived, I would have kicked myself from here to eternity for ignoring the warning my car tried to give me over and over again. I know now to trust my car’s highly refined safety system. It was built that way for a reason.

We human beings have a highly refined warning system, too, but we are being taught to ignore it, prevented from listening to it, and/or stopped from acting on it. In too many ways, we are told and tell ourselves we are fine (or should be) while we are being conditioned to ignore the red light of human suffering flashing across the screen of every known device. Emotional pain is too often seen as a weakness. We live in a culture that still tells us to be tougher, less dependent and “needy”. Learning to deal with difficulty and stress is of course part of mental health. We expect ourselves to tolerate a cold and cope with a broken leg. But we don’t ask ourselves to tolerate the agony of cancer or appendicitis. We rush to the nearest hospital and rely on expert medical help to keep us alive. We also expect we can deal with a grumpy salesperson or a difficult employer, cope with financial stressors or even the death of a loved one.

But today we are, as a race of beings, expected and too often expecting ourselves to tolerate genocide, terrorism and the destruction of our planetary home, instead of being hell-bent on stopping these horrors. We don’t know how to get ourselves to the nearest place of physical and emotional safety, because too often there isn’t that place.

The biggest threats we face are national and international, but there is no peacekeeper of that magnitude we can turn to and no global safe house or treatment center we can check us all into, and find the kind of psychological expertise we need to save our country and our species from our most lethal impulses. We have created this level of threat, and we have to be the ones to un-create it. We can’t allow ourselves to be talked out of it, shamed for being frightened, doubt our knowing or rendered powerless by the enormity of what we face.

Rocket flares are flashing in the side mirrors of all humanity, trying to warn us that there is something potentially lethal in our blind spot and if we don’t get back into our lane we are headed for a crash none of us may recover from, a crash that is premeditated, and the thousands and millions of causalities are foreseen.

I know the issues in all the current wars are complex and the hostilities are not easily resolved. What I ask what I pray for, is that when we report on the wars already ongoing, we don’t only focus on the atrocities and the justifications, that we don’t pour gas on the outrage and spread more hatred. Yes, without any doubt we must look war and our own savagery in the face, and feel the unfathomable human suffering left in war’s wake. But please, let us convert our outrage into the commitment to look together, from all possible angles, at the roots of hatred and violence like we would look into the causes of any life-threatening illness— to heal it AND to prevent it from recurring. War is both a disease and a symptom of life-threatening mental illness. Can we focus on getting to the root of it, heal the wounds that feed it, and not grant ourselves one more reason to kill? Can we commit to reconciliation, not retribution?

Because this is how we make the house safe. Healing the deepest wounds we have inflicted on one another and suffered ourselves– individually, nationally, and globally– are the building blocks of peace, and we are the only ones who can build it. We have to live in this house… or die here. And the whole point is that we want to live, all of us do.

America In Therapy is my peace offering. It is an exploration of all I have gathered in my experience as a psychotherapist and from 76 years wandering the rocky terrain of 20^th and 21st Century planet Earth.

Thank you for taking this journey with me. I’d love your feedback– thoughts, suggestions, feelings, and questions.

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