How can communication promote mental health?
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of presenting at a symposium organized by the Fiat Program on Faith and Mental Health at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. All the presentations were wonderful and thought-provoking. As a way of extending the conversation, I’m posting mine.
It’s been such a pleasure seeing you all today, listening to everyone’s papers, and noting where they overlap. In this symposium, everyone here has been asked to explore how their areas of expertise might advance the Church’s response to mental health and healing. As a communication scholar and leadership coach with a strong interest in trauma-informed practice, I see this prompt as asking me to explore how thinking about communication might help us care for others.
Exploring this question means we have to think about communication differently than we often do. When we think about communication, we often immediately think of media studies. I’m not a media scholar. My work is primarily interested in ethics and spirituality on the one hand, and interpersonal and organizational communication on the other.
We also often assume that communicating is about sending messages intended to get people to “buy” what we’re “selling”—figuratively and literally. It’s a form of telling and doing, a skill we learn to employ to “fix” problems, get what we want, and make the world the way we think it should be.
The dark side of this understanding of communication is easy to see. But even if we view it in a more positive light—teaching, delighting, and moving people toward faith, in Saint Augustine’s formulation—communicating is still about creating and maintaining agreement and understanding about things that matter to us. And so when we can’t get people to buy what we’re selling, when all we see is disagreement and misunderstanding and people who seem unteachable, implacable, and immovable, we assume something’s gone terribly wrong.
This disorientation can carry into our attempts to care for people in deep distress. The experience of trauma, as Bessel van der Kolk says, can be impossible for those who have experienced it to articulate, and the details of those experiences can be too frightening for observers to understand. Trauma, then, is a breakdown in communication that isolates us from others and ourselves, a gap we cannot breach. That breakdown makes trauma and mental illness more broadly so challenging. There’s nothing anyone can say or do to “fix” it.
Our discomfort and uncertainty, however, originate in our assumptions about communicating. And with apologies to Augustine, communication involves far more than preaching. Communication is a diverse field with numerous perspectives that define communication in different ways. If our assumptions about communication are inhibiting our ability to care for each other, we need to look for a philosophy of communication that starts from a new place.
One of my favorite explorations of this topic comes in a book by communication scholar John Durham Peters called Speaking into the Air. Peters notes that we often assume the word “communication” derives from unus, the Latin word meaning “one.” Doing so, he continues, encourages us to see communication as involving a sense of unity or harmony we have or should have with others. In such a view, disunity and disharmony signal problems in communication, emergencies we need to address.
But Peters reminds us that this etymology is wrong. The Latin root of communication is actually munus, a word meaning “gift, task, or responsibility.” Catholics are familiar with the three munera of the Church—munus docendi, munus regendi, and munus sanctificandi that refer to the priesthood’s duties of teaching, ruling, and sanctifying. Communication—literally a “com-munus”—is in contrast a much more ordinary gift and responsibility all humans share.
Communication is a gift because it reflects the intrinsic relationality of being made in the image of a triune God. Communication is a responsibility because we need to receive and give this gift if we’re to flourish. In his book The Developing Mind, psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel emphasizes how important patterns of attachment and relationship throughout our lives are for our mental and, indeed, spiritual health. The “mind,” which Siegel views as the integrating center of our personhood, is constantly changing and growing, an emergent product of both our innate neural networks and our relationships and experiences with others.
In his understanding of the mind, Siegel champions what he calls interpersonal neurobiology, a field of study that sees human development as a holistic process. In contrast to models that view our brain chemistry as the defining influence on our well-being, interpersonal neurobiology emphasizes the decisive role of relationships in not only activating how our genetic inheritance is expressed but also in healing parts of our minds that have been wounded.
For Siegel, the roots of our mental health lie in bonds of attachment between children and caring adults formed after and even before we are born. Where those bonds have been disrupted or damaged, he continues, our minds struggle to integrate our outer experience of the world with the inner experience of our own bodies. We struggle to feel regulated and whole, and so we find other ways to adapt and survive. Sometimes those adaptations are relatively benign, but other times, they can become quite harmful to ourselves and others.
While psychotherapeutic techniques and pharmaceutical interventions can be lifesaving, Siegel contends that restoring mental health and healing actually begins in our ability to make each other feel safe, attune to one another, hold space for one another, and bear witness to one another’s stories with generosity and grace.
Similarly, Christian psychiatrist Curt Thompson, in a recent New York Times interview with Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren, likewise says that one of his first prescriptions (if not the first prescription) for people struggling with burnout is to find someone to talk to—not a licensed therapist but friends, family members, or anyone else who can be a compassionate, coregulating presence who isn’t trying to “fix” them.
The fact that so many people, especially after the pandemic, are starved for these relationships is undoubtedly central to our current mental health crisis. In fact, as a coach, it feels ironic to me that in contemporary society, we’re now so wealthy that we need to pay professionals for the types of supportive relationships we should be getting for free.
The common gift of communication, then, is tremendously powerful across the entire spectrum of mental health and well being. It can restore dignity and help us reclaim our place in the community. And on an even deeper level, Siegel argues it can, through neuroplasticity, even rewire our brains for the better. Instead of looking simply to pharmaceuticals to change our minds from the inside-out, we can also transform our minds from the outside-in by seeking, making and strengthening relationships with people who care about us.
Or to put it another way, the culture of encounter Pope Francis calls the Church to bring into the world is, in and of itself, a vehicle for human healing. If the Church truly is, as he says, a “field hospital” for those who have been most wounded by living in a world of omnipresent violence, our innate capacity to build caring, supportive relationships with each other is, alongside the Eucharist and the other sacraments, one of the most important “medicines” the Church has.
What does the encounter Francis describes look like? In answering this question, I want to turn to the work of the twentieth century German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, whose philosophy of existence has been influential in both the fields of communication and religion. Although his work is too broad to summarize fully here, Jaspers defines communication not as a process of sending messages to one another but as the loving struggle that happens at the boundaries of what we can know and understand.
The loving struggle of encounter ultimately lies at and with the limits of life itself, limits that push us into the gaps of life, the places where we don’t want to go, where we feel most vulnerable, and where all words fail. But communication for Jaspers is not just a matter of telling and doing; it is even more so a practice of listening and being-with. And it begins with a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, knowing that something—Someone—will be there to catch us.
How can we prepare ourselves to take those leaps? What do we need to take with us when we make the leap? What do we need to leave behind? How do we stand in the gap with one another? And what role might the Church play in all of this? These are the questions that motivate my research and practice, and I’m looking for colleagues to work with me.
