Voyager

How Do You Deal With Grief?

December 10, 2012 by • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog, Star Trek • Tags: , , , , • 22 Comments

Sad Doggie by Amber WestBy Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

She dried her tears and they did smile
To see her cheeks’ returning glow
How little dreaming all the while
That full heart throbbed to overflow.

With that sweet look and lively tone
And bright eye shining all the day
They could not guess at midnight lone
How she would weep the time away.

–Emily Bronte

Very few of us know how to deal with grief in a healthy way.

In “Extreme Risk,” an episode in the fifth season of Star Trek: Voyager, Chief Engineer B’Elanna Torres is running dangerous holodeck programs with the safety protocols turned off. To hide what she’s doing, she treats her injuries—some of them very serious—herself.

When she goes to the holodeck to test out an experimental new shuttlecraft they’re building, she turns off the safety protocols and is knocked unconscious. The ship is moments away from exploding and killing her. Voyager’s commander finds her just in time.

As the commander and doctor investigate, they find out what B’Elanna’s been doing. The commander confronts her, and B’Elanna admits she’s been trying to feel something.

A few months earlier, she’d received a message from home that all her friends were dead—killed in an attack. B’Elanna doesn’t know how to deal with her grief so she buries it under adrenaline rushes.

Grief can’t be tricked, and it can’t be ignored. Ignoring it puts our health—both emotional and physical—in danger. Ignoring it can also cause us, like B’Elanna, to act in inappropriate or dangerous ways because, even though we don’t want to admit it, grief is rampaging around inside of us, smashing things, until we let it out.

I’m not a counselor, but in my own experiences with grief, I’ve finally figured out three important things.

Allow yourself to grieve around someone you trust. Because B’Elanna tried to hide her grief, her friends couldn’t help her. In a way, I understand why she did it. She felt like she needed to maintain her appearance as someone who was strong and independent.

I’m a shower crier (a person who cries in the shower so no one else knows they’re doing it). It started when my best friend died in university. I was rooming with another friend who fell into a deep depression because of our loss. She talked about wanting to die, and I was afraid that if I showed her my own grief, she wouldn’t be able to handle the added burden. I chose to be the strong one, and somewhere along the way, I forgot how to let other people help me with my grief. It’s not healthy. It means sometimes I’ll break down over something stupid and little because I try to hold too much inside. And it’s a difficult pattern to break.

Don’t force yourself to recover before you’re ready, but don’t wallow in it either. In “Extreme Risk,” B’Elanna tries to artificially cheer herself up by eating banana pancakes, a favorite from her childhood. They don’t taste the way she remembers, and she leaves them after a couple of bites.

A lot of times, we feel like we have to “get over it” because some cultural norm says the appropriate period for mourning has passed. That’s not true. Everyone mourns on their own timeline, and when we try to rush our grief, we never properly deal with it. It’ll come back on us later when we’re least prepared to deal with it.

On the opposite side though, we shouldn’t feel like we need to wallow in our grief. After my best friend died, I felt like I couldn’t smile or laugh, even if I wanted to. I was worried that if I did, people would think I didn’t miss her or that I never really cared about her. Those moments where happiness tried to return made me feel disloyal to her memory. It took me a while to figure out that those flashes were normal and healthy. They didn’t say anything about my relationship with Amanda.

Don’t expect your grief to look like anyone else’s. Grieve in your own way. Part of B’Elanna’s problem was she felt like she was abnormal because she felt numb after learning about the loss of her friends. She kept taking crazy risks because she wanted to feel something, anything.

My husband and I have discovered we deal with grief very differently. I need to work. The only thing I know to do is to keep my mind occupied. My husband, on the other hand, can’t work. He can’t focus. He needs time to himself.

Neither way is wrong, and the faster we figure out how we need to grieve, the faster we’ll be able to deal with our grief.

Do you have any other tips for dealing with grief?

Image Credit: Amber West from WANA Commons on Flickr

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How Much Responsibility Should We Take for Others’ Actions?

October 15, 2012 by • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog, Star Trek • Tags: , , , , , , • 32 Comments

Responsibility for Others' Actions and VoyagerBy Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

How would you feel if you were being held legally responsible for someone else’s actions?

In the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Random Thoughts,” the crew of the starship Voyager is visiting the Mari homeworld. The Mari are a telepathic people who’ve virtually eradicated crime by outlawing violent thoughts.

A man bumps into Voyager’s chief engineer, B’Elanna Torres, while she’s on the surface negotiating a trade. Being half-Klingon and having the temper Klingons are infamous for, B’Elanna thinks about hurting the man who bumped into her. A few minutes later, he beats up another man in the main square and claims he doesn’t know why he did it.

B’Elanna is arrested for harboring violent thoughts. The punishment is a dangerous medical procedure called an engrammatic purge, which is designed to remove the offending images from her mind. The equipment isn’t designed for Klingons and could leave B’Elanna with permanent brain damage.

Captain Janeway argues with the Mari officer that B’Elanna can’t be held accountable for something someone else did.

“His mind was contaminated by the image,” the officer says, “and it resulted in a loss of control. He may have committed the physical act, but it was instigated by you.”

B’Elanna barely restrains herself from going toe-to-toe with the officer. “Where we come from, people are responsible for their own actions.”

I can see both sides of the argument.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell talks about people being “infected by examples.” Studies have shown that when a suicide is highly publicized, the suicide rate skyrockets for a few days after. The effect is so powerful it even determines the mode of suicide. For example, if a single person kills themselves by driving into a pole, that kind of suicide increases. But if a person commits a murder-suicide instead, that kind of suicide increases. To someone who’s already troubled, another person’s actions make it more acceptable for them to act in a deviant way.

Gladwell gives an example we’ve all had experience with—jay-walking. You’re standing at a crosswalk, waiting for the light to change…right up until someone crosses against the light. Somehow their law-breaking gives you permission to break the law, and you’re trotting across the road after them.

While I don’t think B’Elanna (or any of us) should be held legally responsible for someone else’s actions, I wonder if we don’t have some moral responsibility for the way what we do affects others.

Yes, we’re all ultimately responsible for the choices we make. None of us has the right to blame someone else for what we’ve done. But, on some level, aren’t we also responsible for how our actions hurt, help, or push someone else toward a specific path?

What do you think? Should we feel any responsibility for how our actions influence the actions of others? Or is what they do 100% on their heads?

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Image Credit: Nicole Shelby from Stock.Xchnge

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Why Does Fear Exist?

September 17, 2012 by • Marcy's Blog, Star Trek • Tags: , , , , , • 29 Comments

Purpose of FearBy Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Fear can kill us in more ways than one.

In the Star Trek: Voyager episode “The Thaw,” the crew of the starship Voyager finds a planet that suffered an ecological disaster. Five of the aliens who lived there placed themselves into a timed stasis, set to release them when the surface was safe for them to live on again. The only problem is, when Voyager finds them, their scheduled time to emerge is four years in the past.

The crew brings the stasis pods on board Voyager to see what went wrong. Two of the aliens are dead of heart attacks, and the other three should have emerged, but for some reason, they haven’t. The problem isn’t mechanical, and they can’t wake them. They also can’t simply shut down the stasis pods without causing brain damage because all the aliens’ minds are connected to the central computer.

Two Voyager officers use the extra stasis pods to go in and see what’s happening. They find that the virtual reality where the aliens’ consciousness lives while they’re in stasis is pulling from their own fears to create Fear, a cruel, horrifying being. The two aliens who died were killed because Fear guillotined them, quite literally scaring them to death.

Fear refuses to release the surviving aliens—and now one of the Voyager officers—because, without them, he will cease to exist.

To rescue them, Captain Kathryn Janeway needs to figure out what it is that Fear wants. Why does fear exist?

“Why do people enjoy dangerous sports?” she asks Voyager’s doctor. “Why, after all these centuries, do children still ride on rollercoasters?”

She has a revelation about the answer, and she convinces Fear to trade her for the hostages.

“You show remarkable trust, Captain,” Fear says when she enters his world. “How could you be so sure I’d keep my word?”

“I’ve known fear. It’s a very healthy thing most of the time. You warn us of danger. Remind us of our limits. Protect us from carelessness. I’ve learned to trust fear.”

As Janeway’s consciousness filters into the system, Fear realizes she’s tricked him. She’s not actually in a stasis chamber at all. They’d found another way to let him feel her mind without putting her in danger of becoming trapped.

She tricked him because she realized the real reason for fear’s existence. “You know as well as I do,” she says, “that fear only exists for one purpose. To be conquered.”

It seems so simple. Whether we conquer fear by removing the threat, backing away from the limit we were about to break, or understanding, as Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his first inaugural address, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” fear only exists to be conquered. It was never meant to be an emotion we lived with constantly.

The unhealthy type of fear (that doesn’t warn us of danger or exceeded limits) is the hardest to conquer. Fear was, quite literally, all in the aliens’ heads, but they couldn’t control their emotions enough to get rid of him. He held them prisoner—just as our fear, fear created by our minds rather than by reality, so often holds us prisoner.

And just like Fear killed the aliens, our fear can kill our dreams.

In his speech, Roosevelt defines this type of fear as “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

So what can we do to make sure unhealthy fear doesn’t stop us?

Learn to recognize when fear is hiding behind the mask of other emotions. Fear is sneaky. When you snap at your spouse because they were late getting home, you’re probably not actually angry. You were afraid something bad happened to them. But they don’t know that, and your fear just hurt your relationship. Until we recognize fear, we can’t deal with the root cause and stop it from hurting us. We can’t conquer it.

Let go of your illusion of safety. I’m a hypochondriac (and very embarrassed to admit it, actually). I routinely believe I have cancer, a blood clot, food poisoning, or a host of other problems most people have probably never heard of. Does fearing them actually keep me safe from them? Nope. Sometimes fearing something has zero value.

“Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.” – Helen Keller

Recognize that failure can be a beautiful thing as long as we use it to learn. Many of us let fear of failure hold us back. If you try to reach your goal and fail, you’re back in the same place as if you’d never tried. So not trying doesn’t protect you; it keeps you stuck. In fact, if you don’t try, you’re actually further behind because you haven’t learned the lessons failure taught.

Have a contingency plan. I get laughed at sometimes because I’m extremely detail-oriented and I have contingency plans for my contingency plans. But I’m rarely caught off guard with something unexpected. I’m not afraid or stressed out because I know that if something goes wrong, I have a plan to deal with it, and I know it won’t take me long to recover. My much-mocked plans are actually my secret source of confidence.

Have you let fear hold you back? What’s your best tip for combating unhealthy fear?

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For an excellent post on how fear can be a gift, check out August McLaughlin’s Lifesaving Resolution #4: Trusting Your Instincts.

Image Credit: Lena Povrzenic (from www.sxc.hu)

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What Star Trek Race Are You?

February 2, 2012 by • Star Trek • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , • 51 Comments

When two nerds fight, especially two married nerds, it can take a very strange turn. She tells him that the problem is she’s a Vulcan and he’s a Klingon, and he counters that she’s not a Vulcan, she’s a Borg. And he’s not like a Klingon, he’s more like a Hirogen.

And pretty soon they forget what they were fighting about in the first place because she says, “Hey, wouldn’t that be a fun blog post?” And off they go discussing the traits that are unique to each race in Star Trek.

So now it’s your turn – what Star Trek race are you? Read the descriptions below and write down the letter of the one that’s most like you. (Don’t look for it to be exact, since you might be half-human, half-alien.) At the end, I’ll tell you what race you picked 🙂

(A) You hide your emotions and often devalue them, refusing to let them control you. You prefer things you can quantify and measure, so you’re drawn to math and the hard sciences. You’re rational and like your home to be neat and tidy.

(B) You like traditions and value honor above all else. You tend to see the world in black and white and don’t like indecision. Sometimes you can be hot-headed and easily offended, but you’re also strong and willing to fight for what you think is right.

(C) You’re a good judge of character. You’re also the kind of person complete strangers tend to open up to (whether you like it or not). You have a big heart and hurt when others hurt. You believe that honesty is always the best policy, sometimes to the point of embarrassing your loved ones.

(D) You strive for perfection, and love order and efficiency. You don’t know how to accept defeat and are creative in solving problems. You can be stubborn. Others’ opinions matter to you more than you’d like.

(E) You’re quirky and have a strong sense of humor. You enjoy the company of people and the simple pleasures in life like food, a hot bath, or working with your hands. Unfortunately, sometimes you’re also gullible because you think the best of everyone.

(F) You’re a very spiritual person and love culture and the arts. You defend your beliefs against attack and tend to prefer to associate with people who think the same way you do because you’ve been hurt in the past.

ANSWER KEY:

(A) You’re a Vulcan like Spock in the original Star Trek, Tuvok in Voyager, and T’Pol in Enterprise. Due to nearly allowing their strong emotions to destroy them, Vulcans learned how to control and repress their emotions through meditation so that they no longer feel them. Vulcans prize logic and are a generally peaceful, honest people unless logic dictates they must fight or lie.

(B) You’re a Klingon like Worf in The Next Generation or B’Elanna Torres (half-human) in Voyager. Klingons are a warrior species, passionate in all they do (including love). They’d prefer an honorable death in battle to going home in defeat. Ritual, tradition, and family honor are core values in their society.

(C) You’re a Betazoid like Deanna Troi in The Next Generation. Even though Betazoids look human, they have empathic and telepathic abilities, meaning they’re able to sense other people’s emotions and thoughts. While this means they can help others (for example, by counseling them), they need to be careful not to use their abilities to manipulate others for their own benefit.

(D) You’re Borg like Seven of Nine in Voyager. The Borg don’t reproduce like other species, but rather assimilate people from other species (usually against their will) into the Borg Collective. Their goal is to attain perfection by adding each species’ “biological and technological distinctiveness” to their own. Borg don’t consider themselves individuals because they’re all connected through a hive mind and function as a unit. They’re able to quickly adapt to almost any situation.

(E) You’re a Talaxian like Neelix in Voyager. Talaxians are a friendly, gregarious, well-meaning race who is always willing to lend a hand when needed, leaving them open to being taken advantage of. They enjoy food and entertainment, which made Neelix a perfect choice for cook and morale officer on Voyager (even though his cooking was often too creative for some).

(F) You’re a Bajoran like Kira Nerys in Deep Space Nine and Ro Loren in The Next Generation. Bajorans have a long history and rich culture, but their fertile planet was oppressed and pillaged by the Cardassians for years, making them fiercely independent (understandably) now that they have their freedom back. The major unifying force for Bajorans is their religion.

I still think that my husband is more like a Klingon than a Hirogen, but in the end, I had to admit he was right about me. I’m basically a Borg. Resistance is futile 😉

What race (or combination of races) are you?

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