Pat Comella

Interview with Pat Comella

Pat Comella: Whatever, you know better the technology and how you want to handle it than I do.

Andrea Schara: So it says it’s recording, do you believe it?

Pat Comella: Well, can you hear me? If you can hear me then it should be recording and it says up in the corner, that it’s recording.

Andrea Schara: All right. Here we are. December the 14th, doing an interview with Pat Comella, whom I’ve known for many years. I’ve sent her the 10 questions and just asked if she will start anywhere she wants. At least she’s also given me the permission to interrupt and ask questions. But I would like to just let her start the long story of when did you meet Dr. Bowen?

Pat Comella: It was in 1966. We had a family crisis and we had a connection at Georgetown University, Medical School, and John called his contact up and his contact recommended we get in touch with Dr. Bowen, which we did, so that was our first contact with Dr. Bowen in 1966. We continued those consultations with him until 1968. I think that that was really a seminal part-time because of the fact that he was integrating the theory. He was coming to understand the principles of the triangle and how to apply them. When he does that finally, as I recall from what I’ve read, the theory becomes integrated. But we decided that we, it was a group session so there were three couples that met with Dr. Bowen. Each couple was given one half hour of direct consultation with Dr. Bowen, while the other two couples listened and learned from what was being said.

Pat Comella: And of course all three couples basically agreed to preserve confidentiality. They were quite open in that sense, so I learned a fair amount. How much I learned about the theory at that time, I don’t know. But the work that he did was very helpful in resolving the family issue that had brought us to him. I don’t recall all the details of why we decided to discontinue the sessions. Some of it may have been related to my work. We were living in Bethesda, the Family Center was down in along MacArthur Boulevard, in Washington, and I had to come from NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center to attend some of the sessions. I could only do that for so long. That was probably part of the reasoning why we didn’t.

Pat Comella: There was a hiatus of basically 12 years and about 12 years to the date afterward, in November of 1980, I realized that I was experiencing a pattern of functioning at work that was not entirely useful, we might say. It showed that I had some deficits there. I asked John, my husband, to call Dr. Bowen and set up an appointment with us. We both went to consult with him, and that began a 10-year consultation which ended just I think maybe three months before he died.

Andrea Schara: I’m a little confused because I’m not sure you had an issue at work and then you asked John to set up the appointment?

Pat Comella: That’s right. That would be typical of my functioning at the time and until many years later I was hesitant to make phone calls. Yes, that was the immature part of my functioning.

Andrea Schara: The sensitivity.

Pat Comella: Yes, the sensitivity. Anyway, John and I began then the consultations in late November of 1980. It was though truly a door opening for us at that time, especially for me, because he offered suggestions on reading and suggestions on things like that and reading in the natural sciences, which I always found fascinating. I began to read about the behavior and functioning of non-human species as well as human species. Then Dr. Bowen asked if we would like to attend the clinical conferences, the monthly clinical conferences. We started, and they were very, very useful. At some point, during this process of consulting with Dr. Bowen, he asked if we would be willing to be interviewed for a monthly clinical conference from time to time, and we said yes.

Pat Comella: That began a series of consultations with interviews by Dr. Bowen, first of John and me, but at one point he asked John a sensitive question and John decided he did not wish to participate in being interviewed any further, and so the rest of the interviews, which I think I was meant to pull out the discs today, because I haven’t looked at them in a while, but I think it was about 18 interviews that he did with me. As I said, the last interview was in 1990 and I believe it was in the summer or so of 1990. But it could have been earlier but it was in 1990.

Andrea Schara: Was it taped at Walter Reed?

Pat Comella: Yes. It was taped at Walter Reed. I was trying to remember where it was taped. There were one or two that were maybe taped in his home when he had become too ill to really go out anymore.

Andrea Schara: Okay. That makes sense. Because he died in October.

Pat Comella: He died in October, yes.

Andrea Schara: Would have been able to keep seeing people until close to that time. I wanted to go back and ask about your work situation because your professional background is so unusual.

Pat Comella: Oh, it’s very unusual for a woman of my age because most of the time women were secretaries or teachers or nurses, things like that. There were just few professional areas where they could really have a career. I was very lucky—my parents wanted me to be sure that I was employable. I wanted to major in English in college and my father and mother finally put down their foot and said you have to major in Math. My undergraduate degree was in mathematics and I did quite well. It turns out that—I graduated from Hofstra on Long Island—it turns… I get this telegram in the mail that is from NASA, and they’re offering me a position at Goddard Space Flight Center.

Pat Comella: I had the standard form and it’s hilarious really, had the Standard Form 50 that you had to fill out, I think it was 50 or 52, and my father, because I had been interviewed a number of times and most of the time because I was a woman the position that was offered, they didn’t really want to give it to a woman, they’d say, we’ll interview you because it helps you to build your capability for an interview. I applied, and my father would say to me, “Pat, you should be asking what men are being paid at the entry level.” So I would dutifully mark in the space the amount that he told me to mark down that he thought I should be employed at, and then I would lose my courage and I would erase it. But we didn’t have the whiteout that we have today. I ended up where it asked for the salary that I was seeking, there was a hole in the application. But they were desperate for mathematicians and engineers.

Pat Comella: I received an offer, and I accepted it and that’s how I came to Maryland in June of 1962, and I stayed with NASA for 13 years. I took graduate courses in computer science and mathematics. But that was really not what I would call my forte because you really needed a PhD and I was working at the Masters level. I didn’t think I had the social skills to withstand the dissertation review and the oral examination that would take place and it would be quite, I didn’t think I could do that. Someone suggested that I might like to apply to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission which had just come into existence in 1975, the Atomic Energy Commission was separated into two components. One was on the weapons side, and one was for domestic uses of the atom, and that was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I applied there and I got the job. I was there for eight years.

Pat Comella: And I advanced up the scale, the civilian employment scale. Ultimately became a charter member of the Senior Executive Service. Got a promotion, but the problem was I had already started law school at that point at night and the job required a lot of travel to different parts of the country at different times. So it would have meant that I could not complete the night school law degree if I did that, so I lacked federal service for a short period of time, worked for a contractor who had a contract with the Department of Energy. So I always was working in technical areas though I wasn’t technically trained but I worked well with the experts and I was slowly coming into my desire which was to write and to do the regulatory work and to develop the standards and things like that which I could do with the help of engineering experts, etc.

Pat Comella: Anyway, so I always worked in that arena. Then someone suggested to me, he knew I wanted to go back into civil service, he said, “Why don’t you join the Foreign Service? Just take the exam for it.” So I took the exam for the Foreign Service, both the oral and the written. Oh my gosh, today’s Monday. Okay, I’ve got to stop. Can you hold it there? I have to go down and pick up the food that’s being delivered.

Andrea Schara: I think I can pause. Let’s just pick up where we left off.

Pat Comella: Oh fine. Well, I was going to say that, then I’ve given you this exposé about my work that still continues, but it’s pro-bono work and it’s always regarding environmental kinds of questions. But I could have done none of this without that decade of being able to engage the theory to the best of my ability with Dr. Bowen. Now, one of your questions is, what did I learn? Well, I learned elements of the theory during the time of his lifetime. I had the courage, it took all my courage, believe me, and the help of my father to begin to look at the extended family system in a way that used the theory. I didn’t realize until shortly before my father died how cut off the family was. I could never quite understand why whenever we visited my father’s family, I always felt a little bit uncomfortable.

Pat Comella: From the time I was little, until this is in my 40s when my father and I are doing this. And he was having me, this is what’s so funny about it, he was having me get in touch with his siblings. There were six children all together, he was the eldest, and I would make the contact. Because it so happened that I was traveling to areas where some of the siblings lived. He began then to feel more comfortable with the family. One time I went with Chris to visit my father and I think Chris was about 15 years old at the time.

Andrea Schara: That’s your son, Chris, just for the record.

Pat Comella: Chris is my son. My son Chris who was born in 1969. He was born with the same birth defect that I have, and It was very upsetting to the nuclear family and I think in the extended family. Then my father on a visit to him in Connecticut where he was living at the time, he told me a secret. That secret was of his expulsion from a junior seminary where he was studying to be a brother in a teaching order. He inquired why one of the other postulates or whatever you call them who had not taken his final vows yet, that this might be happening because he had a cleft lip and palate.

Pat Comella: He was expelled at that moment. The brother whom he asked about that became furious and said, “You don’t have a vocation.” Which for different reasons was true but he was expelled at that time. I think that some of what… So I wrote an article for the Family Systems Journal sometime after his death as I tried to put together what that meant to the family when I was born with a cleft lip and palate, and then it was reenacted again when Chris was born.

Pat Comella: I used the theory to try to understand it as best I could. But it started me on a path, so this is in the early 1980s and I’m learning and Dr. Bowen is recommending books to read. He’s recommending we attend the conferences and everything. But it helped me to try to puzzle through and it began to engage me much more closely in trying to understand the dynamics of my nuclear family, meaning my father, my mother, my sister, and me. Then the dynamics of the larger extended family, both the Courtois family which was my mother’s maiden name, and the Egan family which was my father’s name so that was my maiden name, so that was very, very helpful. But I still didn’t really engage him, Dr. Bowen, the way that I have engaged the theory after his death.

Pat Comella: How that happened was, in 1995, I entered the Foreign Service. Now, here’s a funny story. In order to enter the Foreign Service you had to be in good physical and mental health. Of course, you filled out the form for clearances. One of the things that you had to do was to reveal whether you had ever seen a psychiatrist or a psychologist. I had to answer that yes. They wanted to know how long and so that was 10 years. I had to have an interview by a psychiatrist in order to see whether or not I would be able to be admitted to the Foreign Service. Well, the interview took place in a padded room at an office of the Foreign Service in Arlington, Virginia. It turns out, he knew Dr. Bowen, and his position was, how long have you consulted? We started talking about Dr. Bowen. He said, “I can understand why anyone would spend 10 years consulting with Dr. Bowen.”

Pat Comella: He said, “Absolutely, not to worry, you’re signed up.” He signs everything out that I am fully competent to just serve as a Foreign Service officer. But because that made the senior psychiatrists made people a bit touchy, somehow that final approval necessary for hiring got covered with some other things. I would call up periodically, I always got the same woman, finding out what the status was of my appointment, my being selected in my appointment. Finally, she says, “This is ridiculous.” She says, “When they get something like this”, she said, “You know what they do? They just bury it, and then forget it. I’m just going to go down the hall and I’m going to get the form that the psychiatrist signed and I’m going to take care of it.” Two or three weeks later, I had the appointment to the Foreign Service.

Pat Comella: Then I got assigned to the Azores. It was a remarkable experience: one that I still cherish and also have many humorous stories about. But my first boss was absolutely fabulous. He was a lawyer, I was a lawyer, we weren’t afraid to look at the huge book of instructions that consular officers consult when they’re dealing with an applicant for a visa or something like that, it’s all there. The second boss, during this time I came to the United States several times and we did the vibrant call…the two organization conferences you may remember them. One was the one that led to the publication of The Emotional Side of Organizations, which I edited with lots of help and everything. Anyway, when I went to Washington DC on a visit to home or whatever, I made an appointment to see the woman who would be my new boss when the rotation out came.

Pat Comella: My current boss said, she’ll be very impressed with your resume. Well, she was extremely impressed with my resume, but she determined, because she only had a high school education, that I was after her job. It was a lovely, what? 12 months working for her. This is when I finally said, you got to get the Bowen theory stuff down. I read the 1978 book in chronological order, not order of the chapters, but the chronological order in which each of the chapters was created. I got up at 4:30 in the morning in order to, since I had studied probability theory, I would put down my hypothesis for the day as to whether I would get through the day okay because I was an untenured junior officer.

Pat Comella: I was reading books about animal behavior. One of the books I read was a book by Dunbar, Robin Dunbar. I think it was about a baboon, and the baboon was the harem master, but he was put down by a younger, more attractive harem who became a male. He was able to survive within that troop because he lost all his luster. Well, it turns out the boss, the second boss, while I was in the Azores, and I had the same person that we would go to when we shopped for clothing. So I thought, whoa, this isn’t helping. I decided I would dress more drably, like the baboon who had lost its luster. Then I would not be so apparently competing with her. I had some other animal books about animal behavior and then human behavior and the triangle and everything and that was where I finally began to master the triangle and the principles of the triangle and be able to use that in my work.

Pat Comella: She was not good on the policy side, so I would draft her material for her and then that would become hers, so she upped the quality of her work. But then there was one last thing…well, there were several little incidents. One time, she liked men and a group of Sea Bs came, and they were gathered around her on the lawn in the backyard of the consular residence. She said, sometimes I had spontaneous utterances, and she’s there surrounded on her back, legs spread apart saying, “It’s so cold.” I said, “If you get off ass, get off your butt, you wouldn’t be so cold.” Sometimes I could endear myself to her. Anyway, I managed to get out, and I was fortunate enough and decided… John didn’t want to take another tour overseas, and I was about to be sent to Zimbabwe when I thought, well, John, absolutely will not come so I’m going to have to find a position elsewhere.

Pat Comella: I looked for the hard to fill positions at State Department and abroad. Lo and behold nobody wanted anything to do with the hard-to-fill nuclear-related positions because they were not deemed to be career advancing. So I applied for two of those positions and within a half an hour I had an offer. Well, I didn’t realize it, but it turns out that I happened to apply to the Office of Nuclear Energy Affairs of the Bureau of Non-proliferation, and a former colleague of mine from NRC was head of the office. He calls all his buddies that he knew knew me and he got their thoughts about how they found me at NRC and I got great report, and that’s how I got to the Main State, and ultimately ended my career and retired at the age of 62, because I was diagnosed with cancer, and it began almost a year-long treatment of cancer and we moved here to the Eastern Shore.

Pat Comella: But again, I applied all that I knew about Bowen theory, while I was in Azores and it’s that, that got me through. Then while I was at the State Department, I did a lot of bi-national, multinational negotiations and I would use Bowen’s theory on triangles and on making emotional contact as well as intellectual contact. Again, it got me through. I have so many stories that I could tell where my use of the theory, especially of the importance of the triangle, and functioning in triangles, and then the importance, absolutely, if one was effecting a change, of maintaining both the emotional contact and the intellectual contact. I’ve used that all the way through, up until the present.

Andrea Schara: Well Pat that’s a pretty good description, I think, of being able to use even evolutionary ideas that Bowen pointed you to read in the literature and then taking some of these stories about how animals manage relationships with each other and apply it. Especially to the difficulty in the Azores. I think you were saying somehow or another, I got that also your ability to manage yourself with the family upset about the birth defect. And that finding out about that secret that your father had, where the germ, I guess, the beginning of the idea that there could be nothing more upsetting than getting fired, or asked to leave the seminar for him, and he correlated that with the birth defect, which was amazing that you found that out. You must have created an atmosphere where he felt safe to tell you that.

Pat Comella: Yes, he did, and he asked me that I not tell anyone about it. But here’s where my immaturity plays in, because I had not the courage when he said to go back to him and to ask him the questions, and he died before I could have had that courage to ask questions. Because my educational background through Grammar School was where corporal punishment was administered. Because of the facial anomaly, even though I had excellent repairs for the time, there was still a facial anomaly and you can see part of it right here if you know what to look for. Anyway, what that meant was that sometimes I was singled out, or to be the scapegoat, because I was quite certain, kids can observe and they might not talk about it, but they see the process that’s unfolding and they know that they’re the target and they know why they’re the target.

Pat Comella: That happened enough times that I never asked questions. I did not really learn to ask questions until well into adulthood. That means when I began to have enough courage to be more of a self and to be able to finally have the courage to ask the questions. That was very recent. Then, that led me to doing studies of myself to identify the areas, and this had started in about 2013 or so. So around the time that we did the first interview, where I was getting a little bit more courage in part, too, because TMBAP, The Murray Bowen Archives Project, was moving ahead and there was always some things that were coming up that we needed to look at.

Pat Comella: But I began to say, “What are your unresolved issues?” I was also doing some neurofeedback at the time with Dr. Bolea. You know Dr. Bolea, Angelo Bolea. John and I were doing that. He was encouraging me as to how to bring into the present, he said, “You must bring [the past] into the present, the unresolved issues, and you write so well, why don’t you write as if your mother is still alive?” I began to write [letters] to my mother as if she was still alive, laying out some of the impediments to my functioning more fully as a mature adult. He would then read them and say, whether it had come off, as it were, right. Well, from this I was able to resolve a number of questions about… they’re speculative, because of the fact that I never addressed them to my mother and I never addressed them to my father.

Pat Comella: One of the ones that’s speculative is that my mother never wished me to marry. My mother never wished me to have any offspring. Because my mother was very fearful that there would be another child with a birth defect. My mother lost her best confidante, her sister, when I was seven years old, so I would be a perfect [companion]…and my sister Lynn was three and a half years younger. Lynn was still just about a toddler, a little bit beyond toddler. I would be a perfect target, as it were, for someone who wanted to have a companion for life. In many respects I was able to carry that out because I would, before I married, I visited my mother once a month would drive up from Greenbelt, or Washington, wherever I was living at the time, and see her for the weekend, then come back home, until Chris was born.

Pat Comella: Until I became pregnant, my parents were living on Long Island, and so John and I would go up once a month. Then they moved to upstate New York and that wasn’t possible anymore. But anyway, I did have some vulnerabilities that came out of, I believe, my mother’s and father’s anxiety in their marriage.

Andrea Schara: I think the way that you got a method from Bolea to address it, really useful.

Pat Comella: It was and it has been and it has led me then to also be able to think about, well, what was it like for my mother and father when I was born? Well, they were only 24 and 25 years old. Here they have something that is stirring up the history in the family as well. My sense as a child, excuse me, I have concluded is that the family was uncomfortable, on my father’s side, was uncomfortable with me and with what happened, or didn’t happen, in terms of my father’s becoming a brother, as opposed to marrying his childhood sweetheart, who while the brother that kicked him out of the seminary didn’t know this, he was corresponding with my mother as his “cousin,” because they were not allowed to write to people who are not relatives.

Andrea Schara: One thing I’ve noticed is that you’re very good at answering questions. Your academic work is so profound. Constantly being able to manage these people around you, Bowen theory was a huge help to you in doing that.

Pat Comella: Absolutely.

Andrea Schara: Really to be able to answer questions and imagine what it would be like to correct these difficulties and challenges that were living in your family. But I want to put in one more thing which was about how families scapegoat people that the family as a unit is more or less a scapegoating machine, that once the anxiety goes up, whatever reason they have, it doesn’t matter whatever reason, but everybody does pick on people and a hierarchy forms. Then you’re able to do something about it based on knowledge which is so beautiful.

Pat Comella: Knowledge and experience. Which is what he says. You can achieve a shift in the level of differentiation based on new knowledge and experience, and he makes that point, Dr. Bowen makes that point over and over again. What’s so important about it is that I used it in my professional work to enable functional shifts in differentiation of the group to occur. Without that knowledge of the functions of the triangle, I wouldn’t have been able to. For instance, during one of the meetings at the… John, this is an interview.

John: I can’t tell if the white car is blocking my view of the driveway or not.

Pat Comella: It is blocking your view, but the newspaper is in, it is down on the table. John has Alzheimer’s, as you may know.

Andrea Schara: Yes. You’ve mentioned that.

Pat Comella: But anyway, we did a survey, we wanted this convention on the physical protection of nuclear material to be strengthened. It was a 15-year process. But anyway, both while I was at State Department and then afterwards, I was asked to consult with the International Atomic Energy Agency by a director within that, and so I used to go to Vienna with some regularity and attend these meetings. Then there would be interventions. That’s when the representative of a country was ready to speak, then they would take note of it and it would be in the order in which the interest was indicated. This one time, we had done a survey to find out, if the convention were amended, how should it be amended. It went around through our embassies to different countries to well, any country that had an embassy and that was a party to the convention already.

Pat Comella: I then… I made my intervention on day one which explained the results of the survey. The head of delegation of another country made the intervention and said that it was just self-serving what the United States wanted to do. Clearly, he was under instruction. At the break, again, here’s the use of the triangle, at the break I went up to him and I said, “I agree with you.” The part that I could agree with, I said, “I agree with you that this is what the United States wants. But I can assure you that the report I gave were the results of the survey that we took and everything in what I said in that report was factual in the sense that I was reporting what we had received back in response.”

Pat Comella: My hypothesis for the day was that he was under instruction therefore he would have to go home, that’s what we referred to, send the cable back to his government, and explain what this was. He came back in the next day, he made an intervention and he said, “We agree with the US position.”

Andrea Schara: You gave him a leg out, you gave him a triangle way to deal with his boss and superiors to get the facts across.

Pat Comella: I taught myself to listen to interventions at both the intellectual level, and the emotional level and that I would then find a way to make a point, [in] a way that both recognized the intellectual content, but also spoke to the emotional content. Andrea Schara: In this case, you gave him a way to talk to his boss so that he and his boss weren’t ganging up on you and the United States.

Pat Comella: Yes. He had been instructed to say this, whatever the intervention was the US made, to just say something like that. Then, when I went to him and I explained how we came up with this report and that everything in the report was factual of what we had learned, then he was able to take that back, because he had to report that and he had to report back reliably. When there was understanding that other countries had provided this input, then they were able to accept it.

Andrea Schara: The last two questions really are about this, what you’re working on here, in terms of the use of the triangle in… not in proving the theory, I think, and in refining the theory, and maybe offering other professionals or the question was, which parts of our society and what professions might benefit from Bowen’s ideas?

Pat Comella: Yes, I was very fortunate to be able to have accepted Chapter 24 of the Noone-Keller edited Handbook of Research. Chapter 24 is my chapter. In it, I went through, I used Kindle, my Kindle capability, and I took the 1978 book, the Butler edited book on the years at NIMH, and the Boyd book, but not so much the Boyd’s take, the Clarence Boyd one, but those two books that were basically Bowen’s words. I did searches by areas that I wanted to explore. Then instead of interpreting what Bowen wrote, to the extent that I could, I selected passages that could be quoted, and I put them together into a sequence that would make that was consistent with the odyssey towards science which I consider as his last guide to theory extension.

Pat Comella: It was as a guide to theory extension. That’s in the Kerr-Bowen family evaluation book. That has been received by some, I don’t know how, how many people have read it. But it was extraordinarily helpful to me to put that together. I have some anecdotal stories in it, for instance, that came out of this period that we’re going through, or at least coming up to the period that we’re going through. We’ve had plenty of time to have the two cats and the dog, and John and me, all together in the same room. When you sit there and you monitor what’s going on, you realize that you’re being monitored by the two cats, and the dog. They’re monitoring each other and they’re monitoring us, and it’s all got to do with who is getting the most attention. Is the male cat getting more attention than the female cat? Are those two cats getting more attention than the dog? They’re all busy monitoring all the time.

Pat Comella: It’s opened my eyes to a new world. In putting that together, something about how we humans aren’t that much different from the dogs, from animals. The other thing I did is I found a huge book that was in the second edition, I think, and that was about toolmaking in animals. It’s like an encyclopedia of many, many different species of animals and how they have learned to do things, so they’re culturally transmitted. Fascinating. That’s another part that I wrote about, because he talks about human relationship with nature so I drew upon these examples that actually involved animals and could document that, that would enable extension of theory. Then also some examples of trying to, and I chose nutrient insecurity as the example of human interaction with the rest of nature.

Andrea Schara: Food supply, you’re talking about, or…nutrient…?

Pat Comella: What?

Andrea Schara: Food supply you are talking about?

Pat Comella: I am. Those are how I have tried to come at some of the areas where many times clinicians are not operating in those areas and those do with the regression hypothesis. Then applications at large scales are not often found, so my chapter has something on managing complexity. It has a section on deconstructing the emotional system in order to reconstruct it all using the principles of the triangle.

Andrea Schara: Well, I’m not sure if that applies now to the COVID crisis that we happen to have, and the election and how your thinking would involve, I think that last question was, which parts of society and which professions might benefit from Bowen’s ideas? They have full access to them.

Pat Comella: Yes.

Andrea Schara: Well, if that’s about that we probably need to wind up here.

Pat Comella: Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much for this opportunity to bring… give you the history of my encounter with Bowen theory… more of Bowen theory, than my encounter with Dr. Bowen. But without his work, I could never have done what I’ve been able to accomplish, so I am eternally grateful to him, and I am now also applying it in understanding my own family and extinguishing some of the unresolved attachments that impaired my functioning over the years.

Andrea Schara: That sounds really interesting and I hope you keep writing about it. Did you want to put anything in about the society that we’re living in today? Does Bowen theory give you a path forward?

Pat Comella: Yes, it does. Again, I couldn’t possibly do it. Because every day is a new day, it’s emergent. His way of developing the theory was the inductive method. I’m basically applying my understanding of the inductive method on a daily basis as I try to deal with what the relationship here and also to continue to do pro bono work, which is always on environmental issues. That’s where I have placed my deepest work when it comes to societal things is in areas where we see the degradation of the environment due to human activity and how does one then approach that in a way that can be heard and not stir additional reactivity.

Andrea Schara: That’s beautifully said. Well, Pat, I really appreciate this time with you. I hope this sparks a lot of interest in thinking carefully about theory and I think how you tied it together with the unresolved emotional attachment and your ability to move forward through difficulties, real serious difficulties, too, it’s beautiful.

Pat Comella: Thank you for giving me this opportunity. I’m deeply appreciative. I wasn’t sure what I would say. I knew it would come out spontaneously but thank you so much.

Andrea Schara: Yes, you’re welcome. Okay.

Pat Comella: All right.

Andrea Schara: I’ll send you a copy and talk to you later. Thanks so much.

Pat Comella: Okay. Thank you. Okay. Bye-bye.

Go to Top