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Friday July 19, 2002

Using positive thinking to combat problems of aging

LIZ HARRISBulletin Correspondent

While everyone needs to be reminded occasionally of the essential role attitude can play, the message becomes even more important as we grow older. In our senior years, the process of aging -- and the loss of loved ones -- can become a substantial, if not overwhelming, burden.

A positive attitude can help us age "gracefully," contends Palo Alto psychotherapist Eva Maiden, who gave a recent talk on the subject in San Francisco. Maiden applies her insight from both personal and professional viewpoints to assist older adults, including Holocaust survivors.

Maiden herself fled Vienna with her parents and brother at the end of 1938. Escaping to Switzerland, they endured "plenty of harassment to leave," she recalls, before catching "the last ship out of Italy" to the United States in 1940.

She was the featured speaker June 28 at "Lunch and Learn in the Sunset," a monthly "social event," which falls under the umbrella of the S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children's Services' Cafe by the Bay program for Holocaust survivors.

Maiden also serves as executive vice president of Tikvah, a support and advocacy group for survivors in the Bay Area.

She has spent all of her adult life on the West Coast, first working as a school psychologist for 20 years. For the last 25 years she has been in private practice as a licensed marriage, family, adult and child counselor -- in the last decade working primarily with older adults.

The mental health of seniors is an area of special interest to Maiden, who has two grown sons and whose second husband died two years ago. She still belongs to the hospice bereavement group that she joined upon his death, only "when we get together these days we laugh a lot" rather than cry, she says. She is also working to complete a book her husband, a professor at San Jose State University, was researching: It is about America's response to the Holocaust.

Maiden hopes to complete the manuscript for publication in the academic press.

She shared this bit of herself with those attending "Lunch and Learn," providing a real-life example of how reaching out to others for help and companionship -- of how connections -- can make you feel better even in the most difficult circumstances. Her story also reinforces the importance of deciding on a positive course of action, and following through on it.

"I think people need to tend to their mental health all the time," she stresses. "First of all, being able to make decisions one's self is terribly important." Paraphrasing Dr. Viktor Frankl, the famed psychiatrist and neurologist who wrote "Man's Search for Meaning" and other texts, Maiden suggests that "even in the most dire situation we can choose our own attitude."

What are some characteristics of a "mentally healthy" individual? She cited the following as generally accepted by mental health professionals:

*Accepting the aging self as an active being, through mental stimulation and physical exercise.

*Engaging available strengths to compensate for weaknesses.

*Creating personal meaning, by putting meaning into things rather than taking the meaning out.

*Maintaining maximum autonomy. ("In this society," she notes, "we're all very good at autonomy. But paradoxically, it's difficult to ask for help. This is especially true among survivors; allowing others to help can be difficult.")

*Sustaining positive relations with others. Borrowing a popular phrase, Maiden says: "Our connections to other people are vitamins for the soul."

She says "we should make use of the power of talking to ourselves," to ensure that wise decisions are made and executed. Like resolving to exercise regularly, and then going to the gym. Or, if illness or disability sets in, contemplating "what have I got left?" that still functions well, and determining "what can I do with that."

For even with debilitating chronic conditions, says Maiden, "there are good days and bad days. You make a choice of thinking about the good day coming when it's a bad day."

Acknowledging that depression "is a barrier to positive self-talk," Maiden described some of its symptoms during her talk, encouraging those who recognized manifestations in themselves to seek professional treatment.

It all goes back to positive thinking, hence, positive action.

Even those "who have survived the worst thing that could happen in the 20th century," the Holocaust, should be proud of their basic accomplishment: building a new life in a completely foreign society. "After all, they came to this country with nothing" she says of America's survivors.

Truth is, most survivors exemplify the power of positive thinking, she believes. Maiden has come to know many through her work with Tikvah, where she still meets with survivors once a month at the Albert L. Schultz Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto, and does some community organizing.

"I feel that the survivors have been pathologized too much," she says, "and this is a population of very, very strong people.

"Part of the subtext of my talk was 'you have a lot of amazing strengths. Hang on to that picture and use that.'"

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