Performance improvement at crisis centers Workshop by Hollis Easter
National Association of Crisis Center Directors annual conference
Rochester NY, 2013 October 19
How to look at performance problems, assess gaps, find causes, and propose solutions.
When to choose training and when to omit it.
Some principles of instructional design, performance improvement, and adult learning.
Workshop description
“Why are they still doing that?” Ever asked that question? Training is essential for good performance at crisis centers, but we often rely on training or re-training to fix all kinds of performance problems—and are surprised when the problems persist.
In this workshop, we’ll look at why training often fails and talk about how to build it toward success. More broadly, though, we’ll use the performance improvement model to examine a host of crisis center issues (including those shared by participants) and look at the wide variety of performance interventions that go beyond training. You’ll leave with a new framework for looking at hotline performance and a sharpened sense of what training can accomplish, what it can’t, and how to tell the difference.
Presenter biography
Hollis Easter has worked in crisis centers for the last 20 years. He recruits, trains, and supervises the volunteer corps at Reachout in northern NY, and he’s also active in teaching suicide intervention. He served for four years on Contact USA’s national board and was a founding member of New York’s Suicide Intervention Skills Training Consortium.
He holds a Master’s degree in instructional design and technology with certification in training and performance improvement, and he has developed or consulted on many training programs, conferences, and workshops around the country.
In 2011, the professional organization for instructional designers honored him with its award for Outstanding Practice by a Graduate Student in Instructional Design, and he received New York State Office of Mental Health’s Excellence in Suicide Prevention Award in 2012.
(I’m in Rochester, NY for the annual conference of the National Association of Crisis Center Directors and Contact USA, and I often draw or make lists during workshops, which often helps me dispense with the distraction of whatever thought has arisen, letting me get back to the workshop’s content.)
That’s odd. We typically see something praiseworthy about people who refrain from exaggerating their achievements or throwing them in others’ faces (although this often leads to people being unwilling or unable to accept any credit for their good works, for fear of seeming arrogant). We talk about being humble (as Indiana Jones tells us, “the penitent man is humble before God”).
But people say it feels horrible to be humiliated, it’s rude to humiliate others, and we work really hard to avoid humiliation.
Are these words referring to the same thing? Does being humiliated lead to the same end state as choosing to be humble? Or are they different?
I guess it makes a big difference whether you’ve chosen humility for yourself or been forced into it by others. Actually, that’s true of a lot of things.
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Langston Hughes asked, in “Harlem”, what happened to a dream deferred. Whether it would fester or grow or change or harden, or sag, or even explode after a while. We can ask the same question about grief.
I learned the concept of the Grief Closet in a training session by Maureen Underwood, a social worker who’s done a lot of work designing suicide prevention programs for schools to use. It was one of those metaphors that perfectly explained its concepts, and I loved it instantly.
The Grief Closet comes up when we’re trying to understand why people are so unpredictable in their relation to crises. We’ve long observed that a given person can go through major trauma one week and seem fine, and then a seemingly minor thing happens later and the person breaks. What is it that’s so much more poisonous about the minor thing?
What’s the Grief Closet?
Imagine a person, Alice, who’s pretty much normal. (Whatever that means). Alice goes about her daily life, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, just like most of us. On the day in question, something bad happens to her–something that causes her grief. Maybe she gets some bad news, maybe someone close to her dies, maybe she loses something important, whatever–something causes her grief.
In an ideal world, Alice does her grieving right away. She participates in normal stages of grieving: maybe she pretends the grief hasn’t happened, maybe she tries to bargain with it, maybe she accepts that the bad thing has happened but suddenly feels really angry about the whole thing… normal grieving. Eventually, the grief recedes and takes its place within the larger context of her life.
But what about those times when Alice has to just get through the present moment, knowing that she doesn’t have time to fall apart right now. Maybe she has young kids and has to get them fed and put to bed, or maybe she’s on a business trip and needs to represent her employer well. Whatever the reason, now isn’t a good time for grieving. But now Alice has a problem, because she has all this grief and she needs to stash it somewhere.
She stashes it in the Grief Closet.
The Grief Closet (intro), (c) 2013
What’s wrong with that?
Nothing. It’s normal. Everybody does this. We’ve got to keep our game face on, deliver good performance, and pay the cost later. It’s totally normal. Shove those problems into the Grief Closet, baby!
For a while, this poses no problems at all. An empty closet, especially if it’s a really big one, has plenty of room for some excess grief. No problems. (See my Pillar Metaphor article for some additional thoughts–think of ‘lots of pillars’ as ‘having a spacious Grief Closet’.)
After a while, though, what happens to closets?
Unless you consciously go clean them out, closets fill up with crap. They’re natural collecting places for piles of stuff that doesn’t really belong anywhere, and they tend to perpetuate that state because closets have doors that shut. Out of sight, out of mind! So we forget about what’s in the Grief Closet.
And why do we get those huge crises that come seemingly out of nowhere?
Because sometimes when Alice tries to shove more stuff into the Grief Closet, the whole disorganized mess collapses, flooding out the door in an overpowering rush of pain, loss, grief, and negativity. When that happens, is it any wonder people struggle?
The Grief Closet (full), (c) 2013 by Hollis Easter
Thanks to Maureen for the idea.
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(Originally published 2013 October 11. Updated 2013 November 21.)
You’re so talented!
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, photo by Patrick Landy
… please stop saying this to people.
We have some peculiar ways of recognizing excellent performance in this country. We claim to be driven by a desire to excel, and we’re proud of people who do, but there’s this whole set of cultural expectations built up around how we talk about excellence, what we say, how we say it, and who we say it to. We say things are wonderful when they aren’t, and we leave unacknowledged the marvels that surround us.
Sometimes we do it by exaggerating the quality of things. How many times have you heard someone say “you’re so special!” or “that’s amazing!”? Older folks often talk about how millennials are the “you get a trophy just for showing up” generation, but what they’ve taught us is that all performance is noteworthy and that none is really more noteworthy than others. So words like “special” and “amazing” lose their meaning because, on some level, all they denote is that you did something–no assessment of quality.
Yet we still notice quality, and we still talk about it.
Failure and the Need to Do
We’re uncomfortable saying that something failed to meet our standards; most of us won’t return products that break, we put up with legislators who disappoint, we tell kids who’ve failed a test that if they try harder next time they’re sure to succeed…
Hold onto that last statement and unpack it a little with me. When people fail at something–even though we’re pretending not to use the language of failure–we usually tell them that if they worked harder, they would succeed. More work = more success. We see this in all kinds of venues, from school (“Just study harder, honey!”) to weight loss (“Yeah, she didn’t have enough willpower so she’s still fat”) to job searches (“You just gotta be disciplined and keep looking”), ad nauseam.
When someone isn’t meeting our standards, we often translate their scenario into what they do. In this case, our perception is usually that they need to do more.
Success and the State of Being
Excellence means different things in different contexts: a high school cellist may be a star performer even though she’d never even get noticed in a professional audition. On some level, excellence is a slippery concept, but I think we can nail it down by saying that excellence involves exceeding expectations for performance, whatever those expectations were. The excellent high school cellist can play several major works; the excellent professional cellist has a large current repertoire of major works and also teaches well; the excellent world-class cellist can groove like Rushad Eggleston while laying down archetypal performances of the Bach cello suites like Pablo Casals. The standards are different, but ‘excellent’ often means that we’ve exceeded them.
We seem to be similarly uncomfortable talking about excellent performance. Most of the time, people say something like “Chris Thile is so talented” or “Man, Steve Jobs was so smart” or “Tim Thomas is so good!”. When people are successful, we talk about what they are, not what they do. We use these labels as compliments, acknowledging excellence in a subtle, tacit way but almost misdirecting attention away from it. If Chris Thile is “so talented”, of course he’s going to play Fisher’s Hornpipe literally 100 beats per minute faster than I can, and better to boot. It’s expected. He’s Chris Thile. He’s so talented!
(Did you notice that I wrote “when people are successful” instead of “when people succeed“? And that in the previous section, I framed it as “when someone isn’t meeting our standards“? That’s what I’m talking about.)
The thing is, being told you’re so talented doesn’t always feel that good.
Michelangelo allegedly said that if people knew how hard he to had to work to achieve mastery, it wouldn’t seem wonderful at all. I’ve had the privilege of knowing a lot of people who are genuinely world-class performers in their fields, and very few of them got there on talent. They work, hard, to achieve what they do.
Talent has a role, certainly… but talent doesn’t get you anywhere without work. Talent speeds up your learning process, improves your chances of success, helps you make better choices, and perhaps gives you a head start sometimes. But again, talent without effort is worthless.
When we compliment excellent performance by focusing on the performer’s talent, intelligence, strength, aptitude, whatever, we’re implicitly devaluing the effort the person put in. In Scotland, I had students who achieved more in three years of lessons than I had in six years, and I spent a lot of time wishing I could have been talented like they were. Then I started talking to their parents and learned that these kids were practicing 6-8 hours a day, every day. They had talent, for sure, but they were also working their fingers to the bone with practice. Carefully-guided practice, aided by talent, but practice nonetheless. If we spent 60 hours a week practicing, we’d get better in a hurry, too.
We mostly don’t see that stuff from the outside. We see the talent. When you see a major league pitcher throwing strike after strike, we see the strikes–the talent–not the 20 years of practicing every day to prepare for that event.
The Taoist calligrapher
There’s a story I learned in studying Taoism that relates to a man who commissions a work of art from a noted calligrapher. The artist names a large price, explains that it will take a year to produce the work, and bids him return in a year to collect his painting.
In a year, the man returns, they have tea, they talk about worldly affairs, they agree on the price, and the man asks to see the promised work of art. The calligrapher goes to his desk, selects a blank sheet of paper, returns, grinds some ink, mixes it, chooses a brush, and then proceeds to do the painting. The customer gets angry, although the art is gorgeous, and says “why should I pay you for a whole year of work when all it took was 15 minutes?”
Talent is like that. The customer sees that the artist only needed 15 minutes to produce an outstanding work, because he was so talented, and in this case he thinks he shouldn’t pay as much because, well, it only took 15 minutes!
The artist leads the man to a closet, which he opens. Inside are hundreds of nearly-identical pieces of work, all clearly working from the same model, but with more imperfections. The paintings on top have only minor flaws, but the farther down they go in the stack, the more problems we see. Early on, the work lacks cohesion and, though the strokes are beautiful, they don’t seem to go anywhere.
The artist says “You’re paying me for a year because a year is what it took. I had to make all those paintings before I could learn to produce the one you wanted.”
Edison’s lightbulb
Thomas Edison wrote, in the January 1921 edition of American Magazine, “After we had conducted thousands of experiments on a certain project without solving the problem, one of my associates, after we had conducted the crowning experiment and it had proved a failure, expressed discouragement and disgust over our having failed to find out anything. I cheerily assured him that we had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldn’t be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way.” This is often re-quoted as something like “When I was designing a lightbulb, people said I failed 1000 times before succeeding. I did not fail. I found 1000 ways not to build a lightbulb.” Edison was brilliant, but it took years of effort before his brilliance could shed any light for the rest of us.
Brilliance, excellence, and great performance do rely on some innate characteristics like intelligence, drive, passion, and talent. But they never go anywhere without work.
So what should I say?
If you’re talking about excellent performance, say so. Thank them. It’s fine to say that people are talented, but also honor the work they’ve put in. That talented dance caller may just be naturally good–or she may have spent 400 hours working on that dance, seeing how it’s put together, trying out words to help the dancers know what to do, thinking about problem areas, ruminating on what kind of music is needed, thinking about how to support the dancers, considering where in a program that dance should go, and preparing to handle it if things go wrong. Talent, to start with… but then work. Work, making visible the love the caller feels for the dance.
If your daughter aces her chemistry test, don’t just say “you’re so smart!”. Find out what she did to prepare, and compliment her preparation, or say that you’re proud of her and of what she achieved. Honor the work.
And honor what people do, not just what they are.
(It probably goes without saying that I don’t always succeed at this, either. Most of us aren’t naturally talented at what I’m asking for here, but I hope that with some work, we can improve.)
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Last night, I wrote a tune while practicing mandolin. The first bones of it just arrived in my head and the rest came quickly as I played. I rewrote a few bits this morning to tighten it up, and this tune is the result. I pulled out my phone, opened the MP3 recording app, and played.
I sent it to a few trusted music buddies* to make sure it was original, and they all reported that they hadn’t heard it before. Mills asked how I’d feel about him learning it and playing around with it a little bit, and of course I said “sure!”.
I often struggle with titles for tunes, but this one came easily: as I was playing, I found the melody reminding me of wind and tide, and my friend Jay O’Hara came to mind–one of the most passionate sailors I know. Jay grew up on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and he still makes his home in the town of Bourne where he often lives on his boat. I love tunes with the old naming convention that includes where people come from, since a sense of place is important to me, so: Jay O’Hara of Bourne.
Jay O’Hara
Modern recording technology staggers me. Mills sent me back a recording of a backing part he’d composed, mixed with my tune and sounding good. It’s not album quality, but it’s decent–and the tune is barely 18 hours old at this point. Did I mention that he lives in western Massachusetts, a five-hour drive from here? We talk about the power of the internet, but I haven’t gotten to play the musical collaboration game like this in a long time. So much fun! I can’t wait to see what else we cook up together.
So, here it is: a tune in its first day of life. I hope you like it!
Jay O’Hara of Bourne
Composed by Hollis Easter, tune and performance copyright 2013
Bob Mills: Nordic mandola by Ola Söderström
Hollis Easter: mandolin
If you enjoyed that, you might also like our performance from the Pipers’ Gathering instructor concert this year: a set of Swedish tunes as a duet and the March of the King of Laois joined by Iain MacHarg, Katie McNally, and Bruce Childress.
Thank you to those waiting patiently for the next installment of my series on Using Metronomes Effectively. It’s been a busy work week and I haven’t made time for writing yet. I’m teaching all weekend and hope to finish it after that! The audio files are all done, so it’s just the writing now. Cheers!
Everyone knows you’re supposed to buy a metronome if you’re going to be a musician. It’s one of those pieces of wisdom that passed into our culture as an article of faith. Music teachers will all tell you to get one, but we rarely offer much help in terms of how to use them effectively.
Korg MA-1 Metronome
I’d like to start by talking about how people tend to use metronomes most of the time. Most people use metronomes in ways that don’t guide them toward good performance, so they don’t get much value from the practice. We’ll look at why it doesn’t help much, and then we’ll talk about what actually works.
What are metronomes good at doing?
Metronomes are good at exactly one thing: setting a steady beat that isn’t affected by the player. The simplest metronomes just tick at various speeds, and while fancier ones can play different sounds on different beats, articulate different rhythms, etc., the basic purpose is still the same. They are designed to provide an external stimulus that shows us where steady time is. They’re a temporal reference.
Electronic metronomes do this job really well. People disagree about whether mechanical metronomes are less accurate; I stick with electronic ones because I trust their mechanism. Assuming it’s in good repair, your metronome’s opinion of time is pretty accurate, and therefore you can rely on it.
Whatever speed you tell your metronome to click, it’s going to do it. Mindlessly, perfectly, without variation, forever, until you give it a different command. It’s reliable. Trust it.
What are metronomes bad at doing?
Metronomes provide a reference. Think of them like graph paper, where each tick of the metronome is like one square of graph paper. They can help you to play evenly (sort of like graph paper helps you to draw evenly), but they can’t force you. All they do is show you where the time is; after that, it’s up to you.
More to the point, a metronome is not a coach. It doesn’t know why you’re practicing, what you’re trying to accomplish, how skilled you are, or anything else. It just does what it’s told to do, clicking away indefinitely. It’s a useful tool, but the intention and care need to come from you. The metronome is just a guide.
The metronome also can’t make you listen to it. If you stop paying attention to the clicks, the metronome can’t get you back. We need your brain for that.
What are we trying to accomplish with the metronome?
Music is about the relationship between sounds and time. The better you understand time, the better you’ll be able to speak the language of that relationship, and the better you’ll sound. When we talk about musicians with good rhythm, usually we mean people whose playing is precise in relation to time (different genres address this concept differently, but it’s there in all the styles I’ve studied, from jazz to piobaireachd to gamelan to opera). It stands to reason that if you don’t have a good sense of time, you’re not going to place notes with precision, and your playing will suffer.
So, most of us are trying to use metronomes in service of rhythm. Maybe it’s needing to play a difficult passage at 165 beats per minute (bpm) in a bluegrass session, or it’s about Alberti bass in a quick harpsichord piece, or it’s about fitting drum fills into the right spot, or it’s about getting that reel to swing at dance tempo. We know we need to be “in time”, so we set the metronome at performance tempo, take a deep breath, and fire on.
An example – The Torn Jacket
I recorded a quick example of how this sort of metronome practice (set metronome to concert tempo; play the piece) tends to go. It’s on mandolin, which I’ve played for almost three months. I’m playing an Irish reel called The Torn Jacket here, and since I intend to play it for contra dancing at 118 bpm, that’s where I’ve set the metronome. Once you’ve listened, keep reading.
Done listening?
Let’s analyze that!
What did you think of my performance? Was it musical? Pleasing? Competent?
Or was it painful, out of time, rushed, and generally pretty awful? I know how I’d answer.
What’s going on there? I’m a competent musician, and although I’m new at mandolin, I’m not that bad. What happened?
The biggest factor is that I’m trying to play at a speed that’s just not realistic for me right now. Although I’ll eventually play this tune at dance tempo, I’m just not ready for it right now: I don’t have the tune under my fingers, and I’m not skilled enough at mandolin to handle it at that speed.
In terms of measurable things, what went right and what went wrong in that practice session?
Right:
I got through the tune, mostly. At 118 bpm, which is performance tempo!
I practiced.
Wrong:
My beats didn’t line up with the metronome, which means I was wrong.
The subdivisions of my beats (my eighth notes) didn’t line up with the metronome, which means I was wrong.
I often stopped listening to the metronome because I was concentrating so hard on what I was playing.
I gave different amounts of time to notes with the same rhythmic value because I was alternately rushing and lagging behind.
I produced very poor tone on the instrument.
I got frustrated (did you hear the heavy sigh?) and I didn’t enjoy playing.
My hands got very tense, and my neck and arms did too.
The critics would boo me off the stage if I played like that in public. But this was just a practice session. Let’s suppose I spent an hour practicing like that. Was it valuable?
Let’s reinforce some bad habits!
Practicing like that is worse than useless. Practice makes permanent, not perfect, and all I’m doing like that is forming bad habits that will last forever.
Every time I practice this tune, my brain is forging neural connections that will last. My brain is doing its job, just like the metronome: it’s memorizing what I did, comparing it to other experiences, and making sure I can repeat it next time. Practice it enough times and I’ll be able to do it from memory, without even really thinking about it.
Unfortunately, when I practice like this, I’m setting myself up for bad playing, pain, and injury long into the future, because I’m learning it as this stressed out, uneven cacophony that’s lurching along, out of control, and not fun at all. Even worse, I’m working so hard to fit the notes in that I’ve trained myself to stop listening: to myself, to the metronome to anything. I’ve stopped listening, and that’s bad news.
Yet this is how most of us were taught to use metronomes.
We know the piece needs to be at 118 bpm, so it seems to make sense to use the metronome to measure whether we’re there yet. But if we’re just learning the tune, it’s unlikely that we can play it at dance tempo, so we fail. We try again, and we fail again. And again. Maybe we admit defeat and slow the metronome down a little bit, feeling bitter shame as we set it for something “easy” like 100 bpm. Even if we manage to play the piece at the slower tempo, the knowledge of that 118 bpm failure sticks with us. Is it any wonder that people don’t like practicing, when ‘practicing’ is just shorthand for ‘failing repeatedly’?
If the purpose of practice is to improve our playing, we need a different approach. We need to get away from using the metronome to measure how fast we can play and start using it as a tool to guide us toward good performance. In the second half of this article, that’s what I’ll address.
Check back soon to read the second half of the article!
I’ve seen conflicting advice on different herbal recipes when it comes to adding vodka to alcohol tinctures. Some say to add vodka to cover the herbs; some say to add vodka to cover with an inch or so of clear alcohol atop the herbs. Further complicating the issue is the fact that some recipes mandate the use of more expensive 100 proof (50% alcohol by volume) vodka, while others seem to imply that the cheaper 80 proof/40% alcohol vodka is fine. What gives?
What does alcohol in tinctures do?
It has a couple of basic functions. The first one should be obvious from the alcohol tincture’s other name: ethanol/water extraction. We use tincturing because there are some desirable compounds in an herb that aren’t soluble in plain water, and the ethanol gets it out for us. This is also part of why garbling is important–the ethanol needs to have access to the compounds we’re looking for.
Alcohol’s other function in a tincture is for preservation: we want tinctures to last a long time, especially since we often devote a large quantity of herb to the making of a given quantity of tincture. I’ve seen figures suggesting that alcohol concentrations above 37.5% should have adequate ethanol content to prevent fermentation and rot.
So if we’re working with vodka that’s either 40% or 50% alcohol, why does it matter? Furthermore, why do we need the extra inch? Do we always need it?
Can you figure it out?
As a hint, I think we’d get different results trying to make a tincture of dried cinnamon bark than a fresh dandelion tincture.
I think it’s about the water content in the herbs, and that the inches thing is a red herring–or, at least, a rule of thumb. If the herb we’re using has very little water content, as in the cinnamon example, the 40% alcohol might be fine because the herb contains almost no water to dilute it. But with a jarful of fresh dandelions, there’s a lot of water still locked up inside the dandelions, and it’s not a stretch to imagine that it might dilute even 50% alcohol down below that critical 37.5% threshold.
Remember that people say to dry your herbs carefully after washing? Same story: every drop of water on a dandelion leaf is working to dilute our alcohol down below 37.5%.
So I think the extra inch of vodka isn’t about excluding air (unlike in fermentation where the extra inches of brine are needed to create an anaerobic environment), but rather about ensuring that there’s enough alcohol in the jar to handle any excess water that comes out of the herb.
Dandelions grow almost everywhere, in any kind of soil, in most climates. They’re tremendously adaptable and effective at surviving even in bad conditions. And they’re even good for you! Dandelions are really bitter and full of vitamins and other compounds that allegedly support healthy digestion. I’ve been taking dandelion tincture as part of my treatment for Lyme disease for a while now; here’s how you make it!
A quick disclaimer: do your own research about whether to use this stuff. I researched it and, on the advice of my medical providers, have been taking it. I’m not going to write much about what dandelions are supposed to do, or why, or what their risks are. This is a ‘how’ article, not a ‘why’. Similarly, make sure you know how to identify dandelions, for sure, before you harvest them. Never eat a wild food without knowing for sure what it is.
We’re going to make a whole-herb tincture here, meaning that it involves all the parts of the plant. This recipe is based on folk process herbalism, which you can look up if you’re curious. By ‘tincture‘, we mean that we’re making an ethanol-water extraction of soluble compounds in the herb. There are other terms you can use if you’re interested in the history of herbalism.
Gathering
Gather a bunch of dandelions, being sure to dig up the roots. Many gardeners will thank you for this task and encourage you to return, soon, to clean up their lawns make more medicine for yourself. Remove any slugs, worms, or other animal inhabitants from your dandelions. It’s better if you do this when the dandelions are flowering, so you get some of the petals, but I’m making this batch in September so it’s leaves and roots only.
It’s best to gather dandelions that aren’t right next to roads, driveways, or other places with car exhaust. Also, don’t harvest dandelions from a lawn that gets treated with pesticides. You want plain, natural, healthy dandelions.
There’s a tradition in herbalism that suggests it’s important to approach these tasks with gratitude in your heart and an awareness that you are asking these plants to die in order to give you greater health. The same tradition says that it’s important to really focus on good health while you’re working on making the tincture. You are, of course, welcome to omit these things if you choose, but I find that they bring some additional meaning into the process and, perhaps, turn the act of making tincture into a meditation on health.
Washing and Drying
I gathered enough dandelions to fill a plastic shopping bag. They were covered with dirt, so my next step was to wash them in several changes of water. It amazed me how many stones and weeds and grains of sand were stuck to my dandelions.
Washing the dandelions
Fill up the bowl and swish the dandelions around for a while. You’ll find the water getting muddy; repeat this process until it’s clear. As you do, pick through the dandelions to remove anything that’s not a dandelion: weeds, slugs, dead leaves, etc.
Dandelions, cleaned
Once the dandelions are clean, it’s important to dry them. I used a salad spinner, processing the dandelions in several batches. Keep spinning until no more water comes off. Here’s why I think it’s so important to dry them fully.
Washed, dried, and looking good!
Garbling and Chopping
Have you ever heard of a message being ‘garbled’, meaning that it was hard to understand because it had gotten all separated and mixed and chopped up? It turns out that garbling is an herbalism word, too, meaning to separate out the different parts of an herb (dandelion, in this case) and strip away anything that’s not needed.
We’re going to keep the leaves and roots of the dandelion (and the flowers and stems, if they were in season), but I like to discard the part that’s sometimes called the nodule. It’s the intersection between the leaves and the root. If you look at my cutting board here, you’ll see that I’ve cut out the nodule; we’ll compost it.
Leaves – nodule – root
From this point, we want to chop the herb into small enough bits that the vodka can do its work extracting the good stuff. There’s no great magic to the approach other than that smaller is better. I’ve read that you shouldn’t use a food processor, though, because the blade tends to heat up the mixture and drive off volatile compounds. I like to batch process the dandelions to save time: I’ll remove the nodules from about 10 dandelions, then chop their leaves, then chop the roots. I’ve found that if you roll up a bunch of leaves like a cigar, you can easily cut them up using scissors.
Once you’ve chopped your dandelions, put them into a glass jar, packing the mixture down with a clean metal spoon. Leave an inch or two of space at the top of the jar.
Filling and Shaking
Now it’s time for the vodka. It’s important to use 100 proof (50%) vodka because we want the alcohol concentration to stay high enough to prevent fermentation and rot. Various things I’ve read say the critical number is 37.5% alcohol by volume, and standard vodka (80 proof/40%) is too close for comfort. So spend a little extra and buy the 100 proof.
Once your dandelions are packed into the jar, start filling with vodka. Fill it up until you have at least an inch of vodka above the dandelions. Why an inch? Read this.
Filling with 100 proof vodka
Once you’ve done that, cut a square of waxed paper to fit over the top of the jar, cover with the lid, and screw down the band. Tighten it as much as you can. Then shake the dickens out of it, turning the jar all different ways. Once you’ve done that for a while, open it up and see whether you need to add more vodka to maintain that inch of coverage.
All sealed up
Labeling and Waiting
Always label your tinctures. Always. If you remember nothing else, remember this. A good label is worth its weight in gold. (Unfortunately labels don’t weigh much, so it wouldn’t actually be worth that much… anyway.) Label the jar, not the lid.
The label should clearly state what’s in the jar, when it was made, and what else needs to happen with it. At this stage, I’m just using masking tape since the tincture isn’t finished yet; later on, I’ll probably make nicer labels.
These jars are labeled “Dandelion whole-herb tincture in 50% alc.” and “9/23/13 strain after 10/23/13“. We want these to sit for at least two weeks, and preferably more like four to six weeks, before we strain them.
Labeled and waiting!
I like to put them on a sunny windowsill, partly because it reminds me to shake them every day and partly because they’re just pretty. Open them periodically and make sure you still have an inch of vodka covering them. (You may need to replace the waxed paper after a few rounds of opening them, because the vodka seems to soak through the paper after a while. No harm done; just replace it.)
It’s probably better not to leave the tincture jars in direct sunlight long-term, but I find that I forget to shake them unless I’m looking at them every day. Your mileage may vary! Once the tincture is finished extracting, I encourage you to store the bottles in a dark place.
We use lots of metaphors for talking about mental health. Lots of models, lots of approaches. Like different camera lenses, they all offer a slightly different view that, ideally, helps us see a little more clearly.
Imagine that you’re building a house on ground that’s very wet. Digging a basement isn’t going to work because it’s too wet, so you dig deep and set support pillars into the soil, bedding them as deep as you can. Once these pillars are in place, you build a pad atop them, and above that you build your house. That house is your life. You live in it, you work in and on it, you invite people into it… you live in it.
As long as things are stable, you probably don’t think much about whether your house is stable or not. You don’t notice whether your house has a lot of support or just barely enough–as long as it’s stable enough, you’re good. And as long as things are stable, you probably don’t spend a lot of time poking around underneath to see whether all the supports are in good working order.
This is normal.
There’s a fine line between proactive maintenance and obsession. Nobody’s suggesting that you should spend all your days under the house checking out the pillars, making sure their concrete is sound, clearing cobwebs, or anything. But neither is it a good idea to let your supports go too long without checking in–because otherwise you only learn about problems when you lean on the supports and they crumble.
So you’ve got this house, which is the metaphor for your life. At any given time, it has a certain amount of stress or strain1, which is like the total weight of the house and its contents. This is the normal up-and-down stuff of every-day life: family, health, job, friends, the person who shoved you in the grocery store, the toddler who offered you a flower on the way home, the feeling of waking up after a good night’s sleep, the lingering smell of burned toast, the questions about paying for retirement or college, the dinner party, all that stuff. Nothing world-shaking, nothing too far outside the ordinary. If your house was designed well and is in decent repair, you’ve got plenty of support for this stuff–so nothing bad happens when these things appear in your life.
But sometimes a storm comes along and trashes things. Maybe it comes with gale-force winds, which push really hard on your house’s walls and (effectively) add weight to the structure. Maybe it floods the soil and then lashes it with wind, which destroys some pillars if it lasts long enough. We all know what storms look and feel like; they’re the big events that hurt. Deaths, job losses, serious injuries, relationships ending… big stuff. We’ll call this stuff a storm factor. (Sometimes good things can be storms, too–ask anyone with a new baby).
Strain = House’s weight * storm factor
Let’s say that your house’s resilience is a function of its number of pillars. Basically, it can resist a certain amount of strain, for a while, if it has enough pillars. Since pillars can be different sizes, or be in bad condition, we’ll add a factor to show how strong the pillars are.
Resilience = number of pillars * pillar strength
As long as resilience is bigger than strain, everything is fine: the house stays up, nothing shifts, and the occupants are usually pretty oblivious to the balance. But if strain creeps above the resilience threshold, even just for a moment, things start to crack. Maybe the pillars start cracking, lowering total resilience for next time. Maybe the house starts to tip a little bit, and furniture starts falling over. It’s still salvageable, but things are pretty tough. This is where we start a lot of the interventions in the mental health and substance abuse worlds. Seems a little late, don’t you think?
If the strain gets a lot higher than the resilience, the house’s supports just buckle and the house falls down. At that point, it’s going to require heroic efforts to save it at all, and even if we succeed, it may never go back to quite the way it was. This is where a lot of people enter the mental health world: in the midst of a suicide attempt, at a psychotic break, or hitting “rock bottom” on substances. We can still help these people, but on some level we’re now talking about disaster services, which are really expensive and resource-intensive.
About those pillars…
Let’s revisit those equations I posted up above.
Strain = House’s weight * storm factor Resilience = number of pillars * pillar strength
Which factors can we control? We can have a small effect on the house’s weight–we can take a more- or less-stressful job, add or subtract relationships, etc., but a lot of the stuff in the house isn’t really under our control. We can’t do anything at all about the storm factor, because accidents happen and we can’t stop them.
What about the pillars? Most of our efforts work on increasing the number of pillars we have, because pillar strength is largely out of individual control. (Think of pillar strength as being innate–some people seem to be more resilient than others, have a more natively positive world view, etc.)
If your house needs more support, you can go out and find some. Maybe it works something like this:
Good family relationships –> you get 5% more pillars
Good health –> you get 5% more pillars
Mental health care –> you get 5% more pillars
Faith community –> you get 5% more pillars
Stable job –> you get 5% more pillars
Nice neighbors –> you get 5% more pillars
… and so on.
The more of these you stack up, the higher your resilience is going to be. Remember, this won’t matter on most days, because your house was designed with enough resilience for its intended normal load. But the more extra pillars you get, the bigger a storm has to be before it can knock your house down. You can weather the storm (forgive me) with way better odds.
But it’s not all positive. We can look at a lot of the crisis conditions we work with as vandals that go in and sabotage your foundations under cover of darkness. They go in and mess with the pillars. Again, under normal conditions, you may never know until things get really bad, because most people have some reserve capacity built in. But eventually, this stuff can weaken the foundations to the point where even normal life exceeds the rated strength of the foundation:
Schizophrenia –> knock down 20% of your pillars
Chronic illness –> knock down 10% of your pillars
Alcoholism –> knock down 15% of your pillars
Lyme disease –> knock down 15% of your pillars and put up paper replicas to hide the empty spaces
Loss of loved ones –> knock down 5-50% of your pillars
Poverty –> knock down 65% of your pillars and require monthly rent on the others
… and so on.
So what’s the point?
It’s not easy to see the foundations of things. There’s usually a lot of stuff piled on top: a house, a history, a life. Even with a lot of introspection, it’s hard to really know what’s going on under there unless things start falling apart. We just know one simple thing: it’s strong enough, or it isn’t.
Not everybody even starts with the same number of pillars, and some people’s pillars are stronger. John D. Rockefeller had some advantages compared to the people living under bridges, and we can think of these in terms of how many pillars of support they started with. Some people just get wired in ways that make them seemingly happy all the time; many of them got lots of pillars at the beginning. Some people come from horribly disadvantaged backgrounds, have very few pillars, and still do fine–we can think of this as having a few pillars with huge pillar strength factors.
But we often forget that people’s life conditions make them more exposed to instability, or we pretend that it’s all about willpower. How many times have you heard someone talk dismissively about an alcoholic who starts drinking again after a year in recovery or a mentally ill person who “loses it”? Heard someone tell a suicidal person not to be so selfish, or a schizophrenic that if they just try harder, the voices will go away?
Would a contractor say “well, your house wouldn’t have fallen over if the foundations had tried harder“?
No.
I’m not trying to say that willpower is unimportant, but I think it’s overrated. A lot of the problems our clients and callers face are saboteurs: they destroy the underpinnings for a stable life. Is it any wonder their boats are sinking when they’ve got so many stowaways drilling holes in the hull? Is it the house’s fault that it falls over if half its pillars are gone?
I’d like to see our behavioral health professions taking a more compassionate look at people’s circumstances. Real empathy starts with seeing people the way they are, and respecting what’s possible for them. Not everyone gets to have a house with tons of extra pillars, and some people can’t repair the ones that break. Some people’s houses fall down. Sometimes their choices lead directly there; sometimes they’ve tried good things but been overmatched; sometimes they succeed in shoring up the foundations. But when the strain outweighs the resilience, we shouldn’t be surprised that things fall apart.
And finally, take a look at your foundations. If they’re crumbling, find someone to help you rebuild–before you really need it.
So that’s the pillar metaphor: a new lens for seeing stability.
1: Yes, I know that my use misuse of ‘stress’ and ‘strain’ is probably giving the engineers in my audience conniptions. I’m sorry. Maybe you could use this moment to notice that my misuse of terms has momentarily increased the stress in your life (did you see what I did there?) and that your support pillars are under a bit more strain just now. Perhaps this will provide the impulse you need to force yourself to display a little more toughness in your relationship to words with linkages to multiple meanings, or maybe you’ll just think I’m a jerk. I hope this paragraph makes you smile, anyway.
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