Common Ground

Leslie "Les" Gura, LCMHC, NCC, CCTP

Psychotherapist

Working regularly with people experiencing anxiety, depression, grief, trauma and other conditions can have a spillover effect for those in the helping professions. 

This effect is called secondary trauma. What can happen to counselors, social workers, nurses, doctors, paramedics and the like is that we adopt dysfunctional coping mechanisms for the pain and sorrow we encounter in those we treat. 

In the past few years, and especially this year, I’ve worked with many people whose lives, in addition to whatever crisis or stressor they are dealing with, have been additionally undergirded with anxiety by events going on in our country and the world. This, in turn, can ramp up my own sense of foreboding, and I have to deal with that much the same way I urge my clients—by focusing on self-care, accepting the things I cannot control and doing what I can to feel I’m contributing something.

One of my “go-to” relief valves in life has long been music, and two songs in particular have been racing through my mind, playing over and over on the turntable in my head to soothe me.

The first is a song written in the early 1980s by Steven Van Zandt, best known as guitar player in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band but an incredibly talented musician in his own right. “I Am a Patriot” as Van Zandt writes, is about spiritual disconnection in the place where you live. “I said what I believe in my soul, ain’t what I see with my eyes, and we can’t turn our backs this time.”

In the most passionate line of the song, Van Zandt says bluntly he isn’t communist, capitalist, socialist, imperialist, democrat or republican.” Rather, he sings, “I only know one party. And it is freedom.”

The second song, “Common Ground,” has shot to the top of my brain’s playlist largely because of its author, Glenn Alexander, an outstanding guitarist and longtime member of my favorite group, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. Glenn and I became friends during the Covid-19 pandemic, when he took to doing free weekly concerts on social media. His online shows, both with his own group, Shadowland, and with his daughter, Oria, were a place of peace amid the storm of pandemic.

I recently invited Glenn and Oria to play at my wife Terrie’s 60th birthday party, and he flew down from New Jersey for the event. At my request. Glenn and Oria played “Common Ground,” a song he wrote shortly before the 9/11 attacks, but as he has noted, is more relevant today than ever.

“Now is the time, to change our fate. Surrender our pride; let’s meet face to face. If we could view the world through the eyes of a child, we’d see that compassion is the only way that we can survive. The walls of misunderstanding come tumbling down when you and me meet on higher ground.”

Music helps us cope with both individual life stressors we face and those around us over which we have little control. When I listen to the words and music of artists I love, I reconnect with my values and beliefs. I find hope.

Here’s wishing we can all find that particular common ground.