http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-shure/womens-world-cup-2011_b_897904.html

Once a soccer mom, always a soccer mom! How else do I explain organizing my lunchtime in front of ESPN, beaming in smile as the US Women’s World Cup team beats France to win a chance for the championship trophy in the finals?

The years of cheering and schlepping as my youngest daughter (now a college grad) played travel and varsity soccer has indelibly marked a soft spot in my heart for “the beautiful game.” I remember the day, twelve years ago, when Brandi Chastain impulsively lifted her shirt, exposing her sports bra for the world to see, as a sign of her joy and strength.. She, along with her teammates, had just won the World Cup in a penalty kick shootout. While shocked at how she broke female traditions, I was elated at her bravery to be herself and match her male counterparts on the field.

This week, asked by a sports broadcaster how the team was able to hold in the games to the very end, Abby Wambach, the team’s leading scorer, replied with one word: “resilience.”  “We are resilient,” she said, “we don’t give up.”

Tears welled up in my eyes. I thought back to the thrilling memories of indoor soccer championships and to the heartbreak of the much coveted outdoor championships never to be had. I instantly saw images of girls faces, growing through middle school and high school years, the team work involved to build cohesive teams and the tremendous commitment on the part of  parents and coaches.

Then comes the commercial - women in soccer uniforms and the announcer’s voice: “What if there were no Mia, no Brandi, no legends to live up to. What if there was no pressure?” A pause…The announcer’s voice continues, “then we wouldn’t have a chance.”

“Yes,” I scream out to the television. No one’s around, just me. Me and my deep appreciation for how great it is to work hard, to work together and to use “pressure” in a way that’s empowering.

“Yes,” I echo “then we wouldn’t have a chance.”

For more, click on http://resilientleadership.org/

What Makes Body-Acceptance Risky Business

By Jane Shure

I was a junior in high school when acclaimed writer and feminist activist, Gloria Steinem, helped found Ms Magazine. Coming of age at a time when women and men were encouraged to question authoritative messages about  gender roles and rights, profoundly influenced me. So imagine my excitement last week, when attending the 20^th Annual Renfrew Center Foundation Conference, “Honoring the Past, Embracing the Future,” with Gloria Steinem featured as the keynote presenter.

There we were, 700 eager psychotherapists and nutritionists, who daily work on the front lines helping people struggling with eating disorders. Gloria inspired us all, as she explored feminism among contemporary women and offered new ways of understanding the current climate in which women continue to struggle for equality. “If we are going to change the ethic where size 0 is an admirable norm, then we need to stand up and break the silence,” she guided. “It continues to be the simple acts of speaking out about our truths and challenging the myths” that exposes the cultural lies that harm us.

There was something in the simplicity of her message that I found empowering. In my own life, healing and growth has flourished when I’ve been safe to share my “truth” and expose the shame and embarrassment from my experiences. Safety always came from the same conditions - an absence of  judgment

“If we don’t take risks, we don’t make progress,” commented one of the conference attendees. She went on to share that her “most major risk is body acceptance.” That line caught my ear since I know that it’s only when we do accept our real bodies - the ones with curves and creases, blemishes and imperfections - that we grow in self-esteem and confidence. What are we actually risking if we accept our bodies? Are we risking living with more reasonable standards, ones that are achievable and sustainable? Are we risking learning to value what we have and minimize focusing on what we don’t have? Are we risking having brighter moods that empower us rather than attitudes that diminish us?

I asked Steinem to comment on this remark about body-acceptance and think her response was spot on:  ”If you accept your body, you then have to admit that you can’t fix it. We have ‘Ms. Fix-It’ complexes. When you admit that you can’t fix it, you are admitting you can’t control it … then you have to learn how to live with it.”

So we’ve got to ask - what’s so hard about learning to live with our imperfect selves? When we are bombarded at every turn with messages encouraging us to feel inadequate, we absorb it and are at risk for turning our bodies into civil war zones. In her brilliant understanding of the way patriarchal power gets used to dominate and control, Gloria Steinem reminded us that there is likely to be a backlash when women achieve power. “A way to stop that power is for the patriarchy to accuse: ‘It’s your fault and your body’s fault.’ If you can’t achieve body invasion, then you try, desperately, to control every other form of it - which is eating.”

We are sold the message that we’ll feel better when we fix our defects and improve ourselves. The advertisers hook us into believing their lies and we suffer under their selfish influence.

“Perfect is boring,” said the tireless pioneer for women’s empowerment. “I’m talking major league boring. There is no perfect. If you look at a beautiful flower, it’s irregular, not perfect.” Feminism has always taught me to value the strengths that are mine. It’s encouraged me to recognize my femaleness as qualities worthy of celebrating rather than abandoning in exchange for actions and appearances more reflective of males. As a psychotherapist, it is only when I rejected male notions of distance and aloofness and replaced them with values of connection, active expressions of compassion, and resistance to shaming, that I grew into my strength and competency.

While I agree with Steinem that “it continues to be the simple acts of speaking out about our truths that help to challenge the myths,” I’ve learned that it matters who you speak your truth to. Not everyone is capable of listening or being open minded. Many hold rigid notions of right and wrong and condemn those who differ with stances of righteousness. These are the folks from whom we need to keep our distance. I’ve learned that it’s a waste of my energy to appeal to those who are closed minded and think they know what’s best for all.

Seek out others who are capable of being open-minded for that’s where we can find personal safety and nourishment for our soul.  Dare to be heard and seen, dare to expand your sense of courage, and perhaps most challenging of all, dare to accept your body and yourself. For more, click on http://janeshure.com/blog and http://selfmatters.org

A friend of mine wrote: I struggle with the Great Steinem’s pronouncements, here. Seems she has spent a long time away from the working & middle classes where denial about BMI is doing serious damage. Two studies this week - one on a longitudinal study of the effe…cts of high BMI, another on how overweight people tend to see themselves as fit while too-thin people see themselves as fat - could be problematic in their class connections but a walk through a Walmart in most parts of the country sends a rather strong message that no matter what GS and the magazines say or show, zero is anything but the “norm.” I write this as someone who turned in a pathetic performance on a stress test this morning. I think I need a little MORE “fix it”-ism…

I wrote back: I hear you…you make an important point that some of us are hooked on overdrive to “fix” ourselves and some of us are hooked on being in under drive about mindful eating and consistent exercise. The BMI’s are a major problem - major problem.

Author of Can Preschoolers be Depressed? Pamela Paul, speaks to the complexities of diagnosing depression in young children. She says that while there are many reasons for refraining from categorizing developing children, it is useful to know that there are interventions that might help.

Having over fifteen years of experience using EMDR for treating symptoms of mood, spirit and body, I absolutely believe that there are creative approaches to activating the brain’s neuroplasticity during the early years - in such ways that may offset the neural tendencies that direct depression. Paul points out that “the brain literally changes course when you prod it in a given direction,” and it does. May we derive some hope here that as we continue to learn more about the healing powers inherent in the brain, we come to discover new ways to empower children and their families.

Here are some exerpts I found of interest:

• “Depression was originally seen as an adult problem with origins in childhood, rather than something that existed in children. The psychoanalytic view was that children didn’t have the mental capacity for depression; their superegos were not sufficiently developed.”
• “One of the most important mental-health discoveries of the past 10 to 20 years has been that chronic mental illnesses are predominantly illnesses of the young,” says Daniel Pine, chief of the emotion-and-development branch in the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program of the National Institute of Mental Health. They begin when we are young and affect us, often profoundly, during the childhood years, shaping the adults we become.
• Controversy over whether major depression could occur in teenagers, something we now take as a given, persisted until the 1980s. First adolescents, then grade-school children were considered too psychologically immature to be depressed. Stigma was a major fear. “There was this big worry that once you labeled it, you actually had it,” explains Neal Ryan, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. By the early 1990s psychiatrists had come to recognize that depression occurs in children of 8, 9 and 10.
• Still, in 1990, when Luby first broached the subject of whether children could be depressed even before they entered school, her colleagues’ reactions ranged from disinterest to hostility. Then in the late ’90s, the study of early childhood entered a kind of vogue among academics and policy makers. This was the era of President Clinton’s White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning, and there was a wave of interest in the importance of what was termed “0 to 3.”
• “We realized, Gee, maybe we better look more carefully at preschool, too,” Pine says. “And that’s where we are today. The issue of diagnosis of depression in preschoolers is being looked at very carefully right now.”
• Diagnosis of any mental disorder at this young age is subject to debate. No one wants to pathologize a typical preschooler’s tantrums, mood swings and torrent of developmental stages. Grandparents are highly suspicious; parents often don’t want to know.
• Some in the field have reservations, too. Classifying preschool depression as a medical disorder carries a risk of disease-mongering. “Given the influence of Big Pharma, we have to be sure that every time a child’s ice cream falls off the cone and he cries, we don’t label him depressed,” cautions Rahil Briggs, an infant-toddler psychologist at Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in New York.”

To read the entire article on NYTimes, click here.