Answer:
1. One of the core processes in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is “self as context” work, or, as we prefer to call it, flexible perspective taking. In our work with those struggling with chronic shame and self-criticism, this flexible perspective taking is key to helping individuals to develop a more compassionate perspective towards themselves and others. In this work, the idea is to help individuals begin to see themselves as a conscious person with whom they have a relationship, just like they have relationships with others. Once they see themselves someone with whom they have a relationship, they are then in a position to be able to get in contact with their values for relationships and begin to apply those to themselves. The idea of having a relationship with oneself is often a novel idea for clients. The question, “What type of relationship do you want to have with yourself” often results in either confusion or else an “aha” moment for clients, which can be signs that you are entering new territory where learning can occur.
2. Lemkin was a university student in the 1920s when he learned about the coordinated massacres of Armenians during World War I (see reading, Genocide under the Cover of War in Chapter 3). He was horrified to find out that no international laws existed to prosecute the Ottoman leaders who had perpetrated these crimes. Lemkin asked, “Why was killing a million people a less serious crime than killing a single individual?” Forty-nine members of Lemkin’s own family were later murdered in the Holocaust. Lemkin himself had fled to the United States, where he struggled to draw attention to what Nazi Germany was doing to European Jews—massacres that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called “a crime without a name.” In 1944, Lemkin made up a new word to describe these crimes: genocide. Lemkin defined genocide as “the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group.” He built the word, he said, “from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing), thus corresponding in its formation to such words as tyrannicide, homicide, infanticide, etc.” He wrote, “Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.” This was an important element of the definition of genocide: people were killed or excluded not because of anything they did or said or thought but simply because they were members of a particular group. For Lemkin, genocide was an international crime—a threat to international peace and to humanity’s shared beliefs.