Yale Bulletin and Calendar

February 22, 2002

Volume 30, Number 19

Doing good is good for you,
Yale chaplain tells students

One does not have to be an altruist in order to take action to help alleviate the suffering that exists all over the world, the Reverend Frederick J. Streets told a group of students and other guests at a Davenport College master's tea on Feb. 13.

In fact, there are some great personal benefits that result from "doing good," said the University Chaplain.

"Doing good work is good for your health," he asserted. "People who do good feel good about themselves. Doing good can have an impact on your own psychological and physical health. Evidence even suggests that people who do good have less dementia in old age."

Many people want to respond in some way when they are confronted with the pain of another or with large-scale human suffering as a result of war, famine or tragedies such as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Streets noted. But they are sometimes discouraged from taking humanitarian action because they believe what they do should not result in personal benefit, or that they are not good enough themselves to do good for others, the chaplain said.

"Don't get caught in the trap that your desire to help must be driven solely by altruism," he urged his audience. "You do get something out of doing good, and that's okay."

Likewise, letting personal faults get in the way of humanitarian service is also unnecessary, he commented. "All of us have good sides and bad sides," he explained. "What we need to do is to affirm our capacity to do good."

Anyone who wishes to become in-volved in humanitarian work should have two important qualities: compassion and an interest in the problems of others, Streets said.

"There is training you can get to work with others who are suffering, and there are certain skills you can learn," he said. "But first there has to be an acknowledgement of your capacity to do good, and you must not be ashamed of that."

Furthermore, he added, having a specific solution to a problem is not a requirement for pursuing humanitarian work.

"Doing good doesn't mean we're perfect or that we're going to solve a problem forever," he reminded the students in his audience.

Streets described how his own desire to help others, first as a chaplain and then through humanitarian service, has led him overseas to places of widespread human suffering, including the war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina and the impoverished Colombia, South America. The Yale chaplain traveled to Colombia on behalf of the Connecticut Conference of the United Church of Christ and went to Bosnia as a senior consultant to the Harvard University Program in Refugee Trauma, which was founded by his former Yale Divinity School classmate Richard Mollica. Streets, who is also an assistant clinical professor of social work at the Yale Child Study Center and an associate professor at the Divinity School, has more recently helped counsel the traumatized victims of the Sept. 11 tragedy through the Harvard program. He is now working on a book with Mollica about the victims of trauma, tentatively titled "Invisible Wounds."

Wherever he has gone, Streets said, he has found that all people react in the same basic way to trauma in their lives. In particular, someone who has been traumatized feels humiliated by another's cruelty and also feels a strong sense of betrayal "either by someone, by war, by society or by all three," he comments. Nevertheless, his experiences with the victims of trauma have also made Streets realize the "amazing resiliency" of people as they try to rebuild their lives.

When asked how he is able to sustain himself in the midst of the human suffering he has witnessed, Streets responded, "The beauty and wonderfulness comes through with people who have been traumatized. The majority of people in the world aren't Milosevic, Hitler or Osama bin Laden."

Still, he told his audience, there will always be evil in the world, and thus, there will always be a need for compassionate people to help ease human suffering. Streets encouraged the young students in his audience to respond to their strong instincts to help.

"You have more agency than you perhaps realize, even in the face of suffering and evil," he said. "Most of us want to do good. I say 'hurray' for the do-gooders."

-- By Susan Gonzalez

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