A good therapist, like a good minister, should be part anthropologist. I have always believed that brain biology has a role in most mental disorders, but I also see an impact of the culture in which we live: disconnected, superficial, materialistic, and in the absence of the sacred. Media conditions us to seek happiness in possessions, and the noted sociologist Dr. Sut Jhally has pointed out that media has purposefully changed the ways it portrays happiness in life. For most of human history, people have understood that there are material resources that satisfy material needs, and social resources that satisfy emotional and spiritual needs. But today, we are conditioned to seek material things that satisfy emotional and spiritual things.

Sociologists have noticed the effects of this on our lives. The "happiness quotient" is a complex measure our emotional satisfaction. And amazingly, as our capacity to produce more material goods has increased, our happiness quotient has diminished in response. Meanwhile, more and more medical studies show a direct link between maladies such as depression in youth and lack of exposure to nature. As people increase time in nature, even planting gardens or hiking, the severity of depression declines! Some psychiatrists are now suggesting that nature encounters should become an essential course of treatment for depression. Richard Louv's book "The Last Child in the Woods" even coins the term "Nature Deficit Disorder", and he cites medical research concluding that exposure to nature not only relieves depression but also increases self-esteem, body image, concentration, conflict resolution skills, children's test scores, and an increased sense of responsibility to other forms of life. A Jewish wisdom tale tells of a boy who walked alone in the woods to pray, explaining "I go there to find God." The boy's father replied, "That is a good way to think, but don't you know that God is the same everywhere?"
The boy answered, "Yes, but I'm not."

Good spirituality not only pulls us into greater contact with nature, but also pulls us into the lives of others. Just as I am not the same person in nature than I am in a shopping mall, I am not the same person when I sit in a circle with trauma survivors as when I wait in a checkout line. Being called to cross lines and enter other lives is how we meet the God of Wounded People. The insights and stories we absorb from others becomes the trail of bread crumbs from the isolated people we once were to the reconnected survivors we are becoming. My tribe teaches that animals will leave the earth--our metaphor for becoming extinct--when humans begin to fail to notice each animal's songs, life patterns, and place in creation. Wounded people often feel exactly like those neglected creatures, grieving that their once-celebrated place in life has been snuffed out by the worst pain of all: indifference.

I never knew that when I was a boy climbing trees, hiking along trails, collecting rocks, and reading comic books in the grass, I was already beginning to be a man who, 30 years later, would sit in an Intensive Care unit reading children's books to a 20-year-old woman who had attempted suicide. But there is a connection between those events, just like there are connections between the times I was bullied and mocked as a boy to the many times I would sit, side-by-side, with adults who still grieved for the humiliation that was daily heaped upon them by their childhood tormentors.