©️ 2020, Rozalina Gutman,
Creator of LIBERATE BACH! Intl Campaign of J.S.Bach-led emotional liberation for performers of J.S.Bach & their audiences, part of TRANSFORMATIVE LISTENING™️, music-centered cognitive advancement technology
HOW CAN JUSTICE SYSTEM PERMIT EXCLUSIVE ATTITUDES?
BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT DEMANDS FOR THE PARADOX OF INSTITUTIONALIZED INEQUALITY AND SELECTIVE JUSTICE TO SEIZE NOW AND FINALLY !
Instituionaoized inequality of Justice system is the obvious paradoxical irrationality that normalizes the rule of cruel and painful for ALL uncivilized insanity.
But, the systemic allowance for the murders of innocent black people by police gun shootings to avoid responsibility sadly isn't the core problem... There are related CORE matters that often escape from the attention of involved progressive activists for various reasons, including novice and unconventional nature of these CORE solutions that demand the mindset changes on more than one level, calling for the multiple systemic shifts. And this complexity should not longer be oversimplified.
Indeed, if J.S.Bach transcended throughout the time and came to compare the way justice is administered 300 years after his passing, he would be shocked by the presence of the cruel and absurd relics of barbaric order that continues to rule the system of law enforcement in what we aspire to call ”democratic society”. He would be bewildered by the cognitive dissonance of today's public leadership representatives, who allow for the oppressive approaches at so called "correctional" facilities that don't differ much from the incivility that J.S.Bach had to experience during his false retaliatory imprisonment: the majority of the inmates commit crimes, due to their severe and most obvious or/and underlying mental illness and PTSD from unrecognized trauma.
Indeed, how can mental illnesses of various degree and types of the majority of the inmates be "corrected" by the so-called ”correctional” institution that prides itself for using intentional emotional injury approach, based on deliberately cruel, disrespectful, degrading, humiliating methods of treatment of those, whose mental condition evidently demands for care, kindness AND, most importantly, adequate to the problem AND HIGH EFFICACY(!) treatment modalities?
Current rise of BLACK LIVES MATTER movement had been striving to hi-light the most cruel and absurd paradox of institutionalized systemic and routine injustice of deliberate infliction of emotional distress by our current official societal structure that impacts its many underprivileged victims and their families. Finally, the societal discourse had begun reaching the issues that are far beyond the horrifying deadly shootings at the innocent people of color in our communities. And evidently, without banning illegally legalized POLICE IMPUNITY this issue would have no chance for any meaningful resolution.
The in-depth and honest analysis points to the fact that we can no longer oversimplify, but instead, must address head-on the complexity of the matter of assuring for the prevention of the recidivist incarcerations of many underprivileged people of color and minorities, who are misplaced and routinely cycled in a wrongfully cruel agency of prisons and are unjustly used as the the excuse for their profitable tax-payer-finded private and state enterprise at the high human cost of deepening their emotional trauma, and being the subject of violation of their human rights by dire lack of accommodations for their mental disability of various degrees and types, while at the very high taxpayers expenses.
During the recent protests more and more demands were voiced to defund such operation at the lavish and unjustifiable expense of the taxpayers, since they come at a great cost of other unfunded and under-funded critical needs in our society..
But no matter how much attention social protests had brought to the horrible problem, the paralysis of inaction continues to remain. And there are various reasons for it, including THE ROOT of this complex problem that has not been even merely recognized:
adequate high efficacy means of mental health - Expressive Arts and Music Therapies, have to be prioritized in funding over cruel punitive policing and unjust further damaging psychologically incarceration. These modalities address the root problems of mental health on the level of FELT SENSE, thanks to accessing the underlying COMPOUND trauma on unconscious level, that is impossible to verbalize adequately ( if at all?) through currently widespread VERBAL-ONLY counseling modalities. This issue is well known to all psychology professionals, but the blind spot of resentment to change continues to rule the field that is expected to ...solve the blind spots for others in our society. That is the actual root of the instituionalized cruelty that is administered by jails to unsuspecting victims of unsolved by conventional counseling practices for mental health, who are from underprivileged populations of color. Such approach to mental health problems in our society is unconscionable, since it is well known to be paradoxically unproductive.
Such lack of true intellectual leadership in the field of clinical psychology isn't so innocent, instead, the existing day to day inertia of training clinical psychology-students to practice low efficacy partially correct modalities comes at the increasingoy high cost of the vast amount of innocent lives of families of mentally ill convicts in many generations, continuing the cycle of inslavement with no glimmer for change, with no hope for consciousness...
But, satisfaction from work of the counselors can be achieved, instead of having to suffer from severe cognitive dissonance.
This above issue isn't simple to grasp for an average person. In fact, majority of people have no idea about what such modalities involve. Majority of the public don't know that Expresive Arts and Music Counseoing actually involves BOTH verbal and none-verbal practices of counseling In fact, even those Teaching Artists and Musicians, who already practice holistic approaches to teaching, don't realize that their good teaching methods can be utilized in cognitive-behavioral therapy. And at this current time of the great lack of the qualified college-level professors in this domain, equipping Teaching Artists with the additional expertise, by offering continuing education courses can be indispensable for the next several decades, while this gap is bridged in higher education for counselors.
And along with well-known to everyone pressing priority of the coverage by universal health care, the free access to high efficacy mental health resources, such as the venues to practice self-care and self-mastery through Expressive Arts and Music Practices. The creation of the government-funded venues for sharing and accessible for ALL Arts and Music therapies that improve the level of mental health in the communities should be recognized as the essential and join such funding priorities as free higher education, tangible and fully funded measures to achieve environmental justice for people who are forced to live in the most polluted areas, due to their poverty, etc.
Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, co-editor of the book Are We Born Racist? New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology (published by Greater Good Science Center) who has also published other groundbreaking research on bias, stereotypes, and prejudice, makes a general suggestion to use music among other shared experiences with people of other races, in order to broaden the tolerance through expanding familiarity with them, in order to overcome the blind spot of prejudice that otherwise caused by hyper-active amygdala, resulting from instinctive uncontrolled fear-based response of “Fight-or-Flight” mechanism, capable of paralyzing the logical processing and critical thinking function of neurocortex. (The above brief and general suggestion of Prof. Mendoza-Denton about the use of music for mediation of this problem appears to be intuitive, based on the common and widespread experiential knowledge about transformative power of music that isn’t fully understood and utilized, most paradoxically...)
Prof. Mendoza-Denton also states in the publication by Greater Good Science Center that “...A few years ago, research that made headlines seemed to suggest that we are hardwired to be racist. Scientists found that when research subjects were asked to make distinctions between photos of black and white faces, a part of the brain called the amygdala lit up. The amygdala is part of the limbic system, an evolutionary early part of the brain, so the findings seemed to show that biases are a very basic, primitive response. But we’ve since discovered that the amygdala lights up when people are asked to make almost any kind of socially relevant distinction, positive or negative. When research subjects are asked to distinguish between team members and nonmembers, for example, the amygdala lights up...” (in online UCB magazine Berkeley Wellness https://www.berkeleywellness.com/article/are-we-born-racist?ap=604 )
When it comes to prevention of loss of innocent lives from the violent shootings and other injustice by the armed police officers, routinely practiced against the people of color, we need to search for the solution for the root of this blind spot of prejudice, caused by the hyper-active amygdala in people with unpacked trauma issues. They are rooted in unconscious instinct of TRIBALISM that is the tendency of the human brain to otherize and ofte seethrough the prism of fewr-driven negativity those, who belong to a different group. It served as the critical survival instinct for our ancestors in early tribal society, in the process of saving lives of our ancestors, thus, it is deeply rooted and it can be a challenge to undo such hardwired synaptic pathways in unconscious mind. So TOP PRIORITY should be given to finding the optimal solutions in our contemporary multicultural society that help mediate and repattern the unconscious relics of this millennia-old evolutionary adaptation, as it is one of the most critical goals for the survival of our multicultural human race.
During the past decade the term Fight-or-Flight had become colloquial, due to the interest to gain control of it. Of course, the yearning to overcome the impacts of it is universal, since it enslaves us all into the periods of lost focus, dysfunctional memory, troubled logic, and many other cognitive problems. Indeed, when it comes to the actions of sudden gun violence in otherwise appearing civilized police officers, they too result from the instantly unfolding stress reaction of Fight-or-Flight instinct, that enables amygdala to respond with hormone adrenaline to the stress, by overriding and paralyzing the function of newer formations of the brain - the frontal and prefrontal lobes of neurocortex, responsible for the logical processing and critical thinking. (That is the instinct that had enabled our tribal ancestors to escape the attack of the tiger, so they could pass their genes to us through generations of our prehistoric relatives...)
Due to more and more increasing stress in our society, resulting in more and more logical paralysis among population, that in turn causes more and more misfiring-based stress-related outcomes, finding the tangible means for breaking this self-perpetuating vicious circle of trauma on individual and societal levels is the most urgent task, with most highly anticipated increasingly important implications for all parts of our society...
And in addition, if the antidote of prevention for this instinctive stress-related cognitive paralysis could be found, it may serve as the propelling tool for the evolutionary development of the human brain, after being in use through several generations. (If studies show that we may inherit emotional trauma of our ancestors through genetic changes in our DNA, the opposite may be true too: the resilience to trauma may be passed on through generations as the inherited trait...)
Needless to say, every person on this planet would benefit from such incredible solution for this universal deficiency of the human brain, causing tremendous lack of productivity, avoidable conflicts, multitude of errors and related suffering from the cruel retaliation actions in response to correct them etc.
Of course, the inventor of such remedy that would shift the course from the demise of the human race back to the evolutionary progress, would be honored with the variety of highest distinctions and instantly earn the status of celebrity in the scientific circles. But, would the same kind of tributes follow the discovery about the fact that most surprisingly, such invention had been already made 300 years ago? Such measures of publicity would be most necessary, in order to help this unique gift to be fully and promptly developed, made known to the wide populations and promptly integrated into our reality, despite its most unexpected and unconventional source that everyone loves intuitively - THE MUSIC...
Indeed, surprisingly such quite impactful solution for mediating the disruptive impacts of Fight-or-Flight instinct and for overcoming the related blind spots of the human mind had been provided 300 years ago by J.S.Bach. And yet it remains unrecognized and untapped, due to the false tradition of emotional repression, made possible by withholding of important evident biographical facts.
(The detailed analysis about the permission for emotionally nuanced interpretation of music by J.S.Bach, including distortive educational standard for the approach to the musical legacy of J.S.Bach can be found on the web page LIBERATE BACH!).
In fact, even such abilities as the emotional resilience to the type of unconscious impulse of the violent response by shootings of the police officers (that is often the result of misfiring Fight-or-Flight instinct) can be built through conditioning of the brain by intellectually/emotionally BALANCED brain activity that J.S.Bach's polyphony provides.
And the earlier in life such regular brain conditioning starts, the more chances for it to have rewiring success on the synaptic connections level. Notably, MRI studies demonstrate that those who began to study music before the age 8 developed 15% larger corpus callosum tissue of the brain that connects left and right hemispheres of the brain. (Intl Symposium on Advocacy for Music/Arts Education through Brain/Music Research, led by Rozalina Gutman, the founder of C.H.A.R.I.S.M.A.)
Only a few devotees of J.S.Bach (even among those with the degrees from professional music colleges) know that the revered by all classical composers unsurpassed Polyphony Master J.S.Bach, who is also called "the 5th Evangelist", was falsely imprisoned during almost a month long period of November 6 - December 2, 1717 in retaliation to his avid refusal to tolerate censorship of mediocre supervisor, and asserting his dedication to his strive to use music for healing purposes, despite the domination of the senseless rules for music that banned authentic emotional expression during his music time. But, most paradoxically, even during our time, the same odd approach to interpretation of his music is still conventional among many musicians, driven by the wrong expectations of their audiences, made official by avoiding the change, through preventing the important biographical info from being widely publicized.
As the result, although J.S.Bach was physically freed, his tormented spirit continues to demand through his music for the emotional liberation of his musical legacy, in order to allow for its resonance with emotional feelings of the audiences, and in turn, permitting its application in the form of still largely untapped healing tool of his transformative Polyphony that he designed to have therapeutic impact. (Experience and find more info on the recent discovery of previously unidentified Fugue-Parody of J.S.Bach )
J.S.Bach creative outcome was informed by the hands-on experience of the trauma survivor. Today’s majority of neuroscientists (most of whom had led sheltered life of privileged academia) are lacking personal commitment to addressing the issues that aim to reduce much suffering in our society. Most of current members of academia in the field of mental health are yet to catch up with the visionary lessons of Timeless Genius J.S.Bach, by choosing the subjects for conducting urgently needed studies on his uses of the complex polyphonic compositional concepts for cognitive advancement, in order to address the wide spectrum of transformative impacts from his music on struggling with the increasing stress, evolutionary young and still misfiring more often than we wish human brain (as discussed on page J.S.Bach's Fugue-- Parody)
This overdue and urgently needed scientific research will undoubtably have crucial implications throughout our society, including the blind spot that dominates the field of clinical psychology and psychiatry, that unjustly justifie the evolutionary relic from the Dark Ages - the current hazardous structure of the Justice system that had not changed since the time of J.S.Bach and before, and that is rightfully called “Just Us” system of institutionalized injustice that misuses the authority against the most underprivileged by senselessly criminalizing and deepening the emotional trauma in people with the mental disorders...
It should be clear that horrific paradox of incarcerations of the underprivileged population of color, majority of whom suffer from the variety of mental illnesses, does not solve the problem of improving their mental state, but only worsens it instead: the very people in our society, who need the most of the meaningful societal care and compassion, instead routinely become the victims of more and more of the institutionalized and normalized by the prisons cruelty, deliberate humiliation, horrible living condition, malnutrition, who joe deepening their social disintegration. And most importantly, the vast resources for the compassionate professional care for their mental illness are funneled into this cruelty-based undertaking, taking away the funding from the meaningful solution.
The above matters aren't hidden from the leaders in the Justice system and among the prison industry. So why no change could occur for centuries? Among various reasons, the complexity of brain plasticity in combination with unpacked compound trauma of individuals in authority chairs are the complex underpinnings of retaliatory mindset that is the obstacle to the positive change that often needs to be propelled by the capable intellectual leadership. But the level of the societal pressure has to rise, while being specific to these issues as well.
It should be clear that the current methods for the recovery from mental illness CAN NOT serve as the tool for solving this societal illness, if even in the cases when a small percentage of mentally ill inmates does go through the mental health treatment protocols, but often the results aren’t positive and measurable enough. Needless to say, the lack of desired results from the current counseling methods cannot serve as the reputable standard of achievement in recovery through the use of the currently common clinical psychology approaches.
However, very few people in the field of clinical psychology find it important to question the root reason for such serious professional failure with the increasing impacts on all parts of the society:
Indeed, how can VERBAL-ONLY modalities of counseling be used to diagnose and to treat the root causes of pathological behavior - THE FELT SENSE of the traumatic issues of developmental childhood trauma, as well as of inherited ancestral trauma, that is hard (if possible) TO VERBALIZE?... How can the mental treatment methods, based on emotional repression of the clients achiev emotional liberation from the emotional blocks of trauma, that is (or should be) the goal of any counseling?
This much overdue change to high efficacy counseling methods of Expressive Arts Therapies can have positive implications in every part of our life, including the shift from PUNITIVE MINDSET in law enforcement that should undergo through the immediate reforms, starting from the above underlining cognitively dissonant matters, in order for the barbaric system of Prison Nation to seize in our democratic society.
But the core reasons for piling up into prison cells the victims of mental health system crisis is the cruel audacity of the failure of the fields of Clinical Psychology and Psychiatr in using available high efficacy modalities of Expressive Arts and Music Therapy.
Most of professionals, who belong to the fields of Clinical Psychology and other type of counseling know, that in order to be effective in their professional practice, they are overdue to begin addressing THE FELT SENSE OF TRAUMA, by using high efficacy approaches of Expressive Arts modalities, instead of focusing on rather low impact verbal-only approaches. The intellectual leaders in thsee fields have THE PROFESSIONAL OBLIGWTION to raise their voices about their critical for our society aand most desperate need to begin the immediate transition towards training all types of counselors in HIGH EFFICACY FELT-SENSE APPROACHES TO THE TRAUMA TREATMENTS, based on the methods of EXPRESSIVE ARTS AND MUSIC THERAPY and other innovative methods, that allow for the integration of the complexity of engagement of the conceptual cognition, serving as the metaphorical gateway into unconscious mind, in combination with the traditional verbal dialogue, without unnecessary oversimplification.
Meanwhile, it is critical to raise the level of literacy in Music and the Arts that emerged as the healing resources of our ancestral gifts. No longer Music and the Arts and their practitioners musicians and artists may remain underutilized and have to be valued adequately by the society’s leadership, as the invaluable means of maintaining cognitive capacity to sustain and to overcome the blind spots of evolutionary relics of the human brain, through their capacities to nurture the brain ability to revamp widely malfunctioning sensory perception among the majority of the population, that is the well known root of most of self-destructive and harmful to others behavioral patterns.
Additionally, all professional practitioners of music and Arts gifts and teaching artists should be offered the additional government-funded training and the adequate resources to practice and to share their arts, in order to integrate and to recalibrate their artistic gifts with the purpose to derive the original outcome of the Arts - the applied use of the Arts and Music for the healing and transformative purposes through encouraging authentic self- expression instead of passing observation.
Such government incentives should include special meaningful tax breaks on various nesssecities for the individuals, who are involved in conducting artistic and arts-educational processes, including cancellation of property taxes for musicians and the artiets who have no alternative public, provided by government venues to share their arts, but instead are willing to utilize their homes (and home-based utilities, like internet transmissions, electricity etc.) especially critical during the time, when government agencies are unable to provide at no charge the building space for these critical for the reasonable functioning community revitalization measures.
The creation of continuing education programs for Teaching Artists, similar to the ones for counselors and therapits is also of the critical importance, should include introductory mental health training, along with the principles of informed by neuroscience approaches to educational practices. Still rare Artistic and Musical gifts among artists and musicians, evident of MORE COMPLEX BRAIN STRUCTURE AMONG MUSICIANS AND ARTISTS, may not be wasted through the unfairly traditional underpayment for their rare “commodity” while being yearned for universally, most paradoxically.
Such wasteful approach to the treasured properties of the society - the uncommon artistic gifts may not go on at the expense of the future generations and of the today's communities with pressing, yet unpacked and unaddressed emotional suffering needs.
The recent studies demonstrate that unpacked trauma may be passed down to the next generations in the form of genetic changes of DNA. The future of our civilization depends on the high efficacy methods of Expressive Arts and Music therapies for the resolution of the mental health issues in our society today. That is why, those elected officials and leader of the Law Enforcement and Justice Systems, who are incapable of grasping the significance of these complex matters of human brain and their implications for our society, may no longer lead our society into demis, by occupy leadership positions without adequate intellectual leadership capacity.
Artists and musicians should not be placed by the society into position to have the basic unsolved needs of their survival, due to the ongoing incivility of lacking proper valuation. They may not be forced by the society to either live under the Oath Of Poverty, or to waste their precious for our society, unique talents for the reasons of having to have unskilled daytime jobs, in order to pay bills for the most basic necessary essentials, while their gifts can and should be applied for what very few other members of our society are able to accomplish without their assistance - the invaluable application of transformatI've capacity of music and the Arts to balance and to improve cognitive function.
The absurd cruelty of the prison system that J.S.Bach had witnessed at the jail three hundred years ago during his false imprisonment remains with no change today, while responsible for the reform of the Justice system individuals somehow consider themselves civilized, despite continuing to practice the outrage of utter incivility:
Even a small fraction of currently wasted public funding for so called “correctional facilities” can make tremendous difference in the process of increasing the level of sanity in every part of our society. However, out of consideration of the next generations, who can be spared from suffering from inherited unpacked trauma of the past generations, therapeutic uses of complex music (such as J.S.Bach's polyphonic compositions, especially when used with Transformative Listening scaffolding) has the incredible, yet still largely untapped capacity to promote mental clarity, by restoring disrupted by stress and trauma emotional/intellectual balance that contributes to the capacity to overcome the blind spots, such as the blind spot of prejudice and tribalism, among other.
It can also effectively assist in the release of cognitively dissonant paralysis around THE POLICE IMPUNITY that may not continue to encourage and normalize criminal actions of those who should not have above-the-law privileges. (When fully developed, this tool of recalibration and restoration of the cognitive balance can help the changes in how the human brain functions both today and through generations... Please, kindly inquire about how to support this undertaking by your donations and volunteer work in various capacities.)
And NOW is the time for each and every prison to be transformed into a COMMUNITY ARTS VENUE with the residential facility and with the skillful in Music and Arts-therapy personnel. Our society has no more excuses to tolerate any more the delay for these much overdue changes. It is a must for the sake of the mental state for the next generations to come.
