« Staretz Ambrose on Mindfulness »

What does Marsha Linehan (who, in the early 90s of the 20th century, pioneered the Dialectical Behavior Therapy for the Borderline Personality Disorder) and Father Ambrose (a 19th century Russian ascetic who became the prototype for Dostoyevsky’s starets* Zossima in Brothers Karamazov) have in common?

Both Linehan and Father Ambrose were advising on the matters of emotional dysregulation – Linehan, a psychologist, by virtue of her professional choice to work with the Borderline Personality Disorder; Father Ambrose – by default, by having “to cope with the effects of the Russian temperament on the religious lives of those who sought his help” (1).

Linehan defines emotional dysregulation/emotional vulnerability as a) high sensitivity to emotional stimuli, b) intense response to emotional stimuli, and c) slow return to emotional baseline once emotional arousal has occurred (2). If I may be permitted to self-stereotype: in my own native Russian experience, the “Russian temperament” is a cross between Histrionic and Borderline…

But don’t just take my word for this cultural stereotype. Hear the great literary psychologist Dostoyevsky himself put it: “I believe that the main and the most fundamental spiritual quest of the Russian people is their craving for suffering – perpetual and unquenchable suffering – everywhere and in everything. It seems that they have been affected by this thirst for martyrdom from time immemorial… <…> Even in happiness there is in the Russian people an element of suffering; otherwise, felicity to them is incomplete. <…> The Russian people, as it were, delight in their afflictions” (3).

While Dostoevsky’s characterization of Russian “enthusiastic self-denigration” (4) might be in need of a post-Soviet update, the “Russian temperament” of the days of the Father Ambrose appears to have certainly run a close parallel to the so-called “Cluster B” personality traits (dramatic, emotional, and erratic that account for Histrionic, Borderline, Antisocial, and Narcissistic personality disorder traits).

So, as you see, starets Ambrose just like Linehan was challenged with counseling an emotionally vulnerable, if not volatile, population. And just like Linehan he intuited the need for meta-cognitive distancing, for that proverbial “stepping back” from the “emotion mind.”

For example, in one of his letters, starets Ambrose responds to a spiritual seeker with the following straight-from-the-DBT-playbook mindfulness advice: “You complain of a storm of various thoughts… <…> Whether or not thoughts come to us does not depend on our will. But whether or not we accept them – that depends on us” (3).

What clinical eloquence and what forethought!

Ambrose’s advice, restated, is simple: thoughts come and go, you have a choice of whether to accept them at face value and act upon them or to let them pass.

Elsewhere, Ambrose writes: “You describe what happened to you (during prayer) <…> I think, (you) have become accustomed to believe both your dreams and that which you see or hear during the time of prayer; pure prayer consists in not accepting any external thought during the time of prayer and in not accepting anything that you may see or hear, i.e. the changing of icons or the hearing of any voices. But if you persist in believing your dreams, or in anything else similar, it is possible that you will go out of your mind” (2).

Notice Ambrose’s spiritual wisdom in not trying to harness the emotional intensity of his parishioner, and, instead, gently guiding him or her away from the “emotion mind.” And yet how easy it could have been to encourage this believer to believe the apparitions of the emotional mind. But instead Ambrose – in his Russian Euro-Asiatic synthesis of East and West – equates prayer to a kind of bare contemplative awareness, not unlike Linehan’s “wise mind” with its non-judgmental centered nonchalance.

Starets Ambrose and Marsha Linehan in one sentence! A bit of a stretch, you might say? In some way it is, and in some way it is not. But if a stretch – then a stretch in the same direction… In the direction of secular and non-secular clinical wisdom.

References & Notes:

 *starets - Ru. for “old man,” with the connotation of a “sage” 

1. Peter France, Hermits: the Insights of Solitude, St. Martin’s Press, 1996

2. Marsha Linehan, Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder, The Guilford Press, 1993

3. Bruce Crane, Man is a mystery: it must be unraveled, a collection of Dostoyevsky’s thoughts on the human condition, Writers Club Press, 2001.

4. John Dunlop: Starets Amvrosy; model for Dostoevsky’s Staretz Zossima, Belmont, Mass., 1972