Core
Malaise
Gerald van de Velde MA, LPC, LMSW
Last
Updated: April 5, 2009
Please feel welcome to send me your comments:
Introduction
This work began as a personal exploration and as part of my work as a psychotherapist. It developed into a series of group exercises in self-awareness, and led to some theoretical ideas about intrinsic values, attachment, and what we need to feel whole.
Examining with clients the issue of core malaise, the feeling that there is something essentially wrong with one’s life, I was surprised to discover that by sharing it, it went away. Repeating the exercise again and again for over a year, the same results appeared. As clients opened to each other at the level where their malaise existed, they appeared to communicate in an easier, more joyful, fluent and authentic manner. And they reported that their sense of malaise went away.
I came to see core malaise as core loneliness. I believe it is an attachment issue resolved by re-discovering a quality of relationship with each other and with life around us which was previously familiar to our species and which became largely lost.
This quality of relationship can be discovered and developed in wilderness travel and it can be shared in community. It helps us remove the walls we have created to keep us apart and invites a person to feel whole.
This web site remains under construction. As I share what I have experienced and the exercises I developed with my clients, I find better ways to say what I mean. I also continue to discover kindred authors whom I add as new references.
The exercises focus on how to wake up one’s senses and how to become more open to experience life around and in us.
Philosophical Orientation
"Attachment" means in this work one’s sense of relationship to the life in which he finds himself. Albert Einstein offered an eloquent expression of what I have in mind here:
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and of a foundation for inner security.
The Idea Awakens: A Bear Cub in the Ravine
A National wilderness area, as I understand it, is a designated plot of land recognized as never having been lumbered or plowed. It is virgin land. The Porcupine Mountains in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula are so designated, and I was hiking there one day a few years ago.
As I approached a deep ravine, a lady coming up the other way on the trail asked, "Did you see the bear cub?"
If you have traveled in the great outdoors much, you probably know that seeing a bear cub is not desirable. Mamma bear is probably near by and doesn't like you seeing her cub. So it is a good idea to avoid bear cubs.
I sat down and waited a while. Nice view, had a power bar and drink of water, and after about half an hour headed down into the ravine.
Bear smell everywhere. If you’ve been to a zoo and seen the bears, you know what that ravine smelled like. Not as heavy as at the zoo, but recognizable. And as I was smelling and watching out, I noticed I seemed to have eyes opening in the ground and in the forest which I didn’t even know I had.
Mamma and baby had moved on and I didn’t see them. But I carried with me amazement about how I had experienced those moments in the ravine. Returning to my truck, I read in the campground brochure that senses our forefathers depended upon for survival are reawakened in wilderness areas. I concluded that I was not delusional, but was rather experiencing a sensory awakening.
Keeping my "macro senses" operational was harder on pavement, in the city and in areas where the soil had been tilled. I Thought I’d have to go back to wilderness to find it again. And I did return many times, gradually awakening more until I believed I could feel surrounding life coming into me, feel loved by the bushes, the earth, by the sky.
Of particular significance here is that in wilderness travel, for the first time, I felt attached to my life. I felt at home on this land under this sky, with these bushes and wildlife. For the first time, I felt I belonged.
Finding Others Who Felt What I felt: Aboriginal Ways of Thinking
I have been enchanted with stories about Australian aborigines. I'll tell you one of my favorites (passed on to me by Peter Melchoir, one of my teachers).
People who study languages reportedly noticed that there are an awful lot of words in the aboriginal language. About as many as modern Italian. But the people don't have much stuff, just fire, rock, loin cloth, etc. What could all those other words be about? They discovered the words are about philosophy, states of consciousness.
I wanted to find out more about those states. In the days of my early searching, I emailed the Australian National University and found a lovely girl who advised me to find The Coombsweb. I had to go to Alta Vista to find it, and did my searches for "Australian aboriginal prehistory".
Eventually I stumbled upon the Polynesian Voyaging Society. This one had a lot of what I was looking for.
Sometime around 1200 BC, near New Guinea, a culture known as the Lapita began exploring their ocean in canoes. The canoes measured about 6 feet wide by 60 feet long, just right for the swells of the Pacific Ocean and about as wide as their largest trees. They started by heading up-wind only, so they knew they could turn around and make it home, and as they became gradually more proficient, learned to travel in any direction for greater and greater distances. By about 1300 AD, then known as the Polynesians, they had inhabited 1/5th of the planet, all by canoe.
The first Europeans to encounter Polynesians were impressed by their navigational skills. Lacking clock, compass and sextant, they arrived at destinations more precisely and more on time than the Europeans. Their methods, called "way-finding," were complicated and until the 1980s had remained mysterious.
The Polynesian Voyaging Society is composed of modern-day, mostly native Hawaiians who wanted to learn the ways of their ancestors. They built a traditional canoe named Hokule’a and studied ancient navigational methods. They heard of one old man on a distant island who was reported to know the old ways, but when they first contacted him, requesting his instruction, he refused. Later on, after one of their members had drowned during an experimental canoe voyage, the old man changed his mind and agreed to help them. He said he was afraid that without guidance, out on the open sea, they would kill themselves.
Stories conveyed how their navigation was accomplished. For starters, to become a navigator, a small child would be directed by his grandfather to sit in a puddle and notice the changes. This would help awaken his senses to the subtleties of movement in water, and later to the systems of ocean currents which could be felt.
Their map of the sky had three layers. Briefly glimpsing only one star in a cloudy sky was sufficient to combine with known information about the rest of the sky to find one’s location and direction. (see Maori ocean map.)
In the days when the 60-foot canoes were hand-hewn, interior rot hidden in a tree meant a lot of wasted effort. The builders learned to rely on a helper bird who picked on one side of the tree to indicate rot, and the other side when the whole tree was sound.
They didn’t leave home until the local shaman had good dreams about the journey. Bad dreams meant you waited.
Lost one time, out at sea, the sailors awakened to discover that while they slept, they had reached their destination. The boat had apparently found it’s own way, and it’s route was faster than the way the sailors would have taken.
The Common Thread
What I believed I had discovered was that Polynesians and I shared to some degree a sense of animism. The rocks, trees, earth and sky were alive spiritually, and noticed and responded to individual human beings. This spiritual connectedness, first awakened in me by watching out for a bear cub in a ravine, is what gave me my sense of belonging and what helped Polynesians inhabit 1/5th of the planet in canoes.
"The term animism is derived from the Latin word anima meaning breath or soul… The belief of animism was that a soul or spirit existed in every object … and the spirit, therefore, was thought to be universal." Alan G. Hefner and Virgilio Guimaraes.
In Arctic Dreams (Vintage Books, 2001), Barry Lopez provides a first hand account of experiencing the animism of wilderness:
Whatever evaluation we finally make of a stretch of land… we will find it inadequate. The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can know. Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard. To try to sense the range and variety of its expression—its weather and colors and animals. To intend from the beginning to preserve some of the mystery within it as a kind of wisdom to be experienced, not questioned. And to be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there.
Thinking about recreating for myself in a city what I found in wilderness, I realized the power would be missing. In the wild, each second of the day, all around you, subtle and out of mind so you learn to live with it, is the power of nature. It could kill you.
Once you settle into wilderness, become acclimated to it, the part of you that shivers when afraid stops shivering. It is like a layer of muscle just outside of and adjacent to your skin (just deep to the feeling of plasticity when your muscles are working under load.) Under relentless threat, that layer makes you to ready to act instead of freeze. For me, it turns into a steady, quiet sense of competence. I have responded to the power of nature with a greater sense of my own power.
Extending the Concept
I think lack of core connectedness, experienced as malaise, sounds a lot like Anomie, first observed and described by Emile Durkheim:
"...The state of anomie is impossible whenever interdependent organs are sufficiently in contact and sufficiently extensive. If they are close to each other, they are readily aware, in every situation, of the need which they have of one-another, and consequently they have an active and permanent feeling of mutual dependence."
(1972, p. 184 [excerpt from The Division of Labor in Society])
And later, Durkheim said: "Man is the more vulnerable to self-destruction the more he is detached from any collectivity, that is to say, the more he lives as an egoist."
Durkheim was talking about collectivities of people. I’m talking about mutual dependence through all of nature, a state of consciousness within which one feels connected to individuals, groups of people, larger society, and life broadly. Studies of Anomie, Anomia and Anomic Depression when viewed from this point of view appear richer, more interesting and make better sense to me. If it is true that we are hard-wired to share caring with life around us, then I believe Durkheim’s understanding was a sub-set of what may actually have been happening.
Pathology of
detachment
To be able to feel connected with surrounding life one must be able to feel feelings and to feel caring.
Not feeling feelings is fairly common. It can be understood as an emotional withdrawal from one’s surroundings, a numbing of what is happening between the individual and his/her surroundings. This is a function of the brain’s limbic system, and its’ desensitization can occur as a result of substance abuse, growing up in an atmosphere where feelings are not recognized or valued, disregard of emotional boundaries, and trauma. ACOA issues and lack of bonding skills are examples of pathologies stemming from desensitized feelings.
A sub set of individuals having numb feelings are those demonstrating Antisocial Personality Disorder. In my work I have found them unable to find within themselves the feeling of caring.
Without feelings and caring, we are emotionally isolated, egoistic and do not feel whole. Intrinsically dissatisfied, we prop our self esteem with extrinsic rewards, often money, sexuality, status and/or power.
I noticed this week that my sense of connectedness with another person goes away as soon as I think of him in terms of any label. My feelings about the label are different, colder than, my feelings about the person. Notice how this happens in your thinking as you consider racism and materialism. It’s also a common cause of sexual dysfunction. In his book, What Everyone Should Know about Feminist Issues; The Male-Positive Perspective (1995) , Rod Van Mechelan presents provocative arguments against gender objectification such as seeing women as sex objects and men as meal-tickets. We label, we detach, then we feel lonely.
Growing up, many of us came to believe that acceptance among others depended upon beauty, possessions, and achievements. Recently, when I asked members of a group how many of them had felt inferior as kids, all answered in the affirmative. Apparently it is still not unusual for a person to doubt he or she lacks what is required to be acceptable.
In wilderness, for the first time I felt love coming from nature all around me. My sense of intrinsic worth, being acceptable and belonging here and now, was independent of my appearance, accomplishments or possessions.
I think perhaps I am still learning how to experience life without objectifying it or myself.
Feeling
Deservedness
Often, sharing our personal core malaise has winded its’ way into talking about nice things that we want for ourselves. One person wants a high quality watch, another wants a Casmir sport jacket someone else recalls a memory of a feeling he gets when traveling. I have no doubt that physiology becomes involved with a changed sense of well being, for example connecting skin and nerves with a psychological sense of deservedness. (At another time I’ll tell a story about how I felt during a rain storm in the vastness of West Texas amidst the smell of sage.)
I’ve
come upon what I feel we need to do about the degradation of our
environment. We need to bond with the
earth again.
The
nourishing of life is not a mechanical act; a baby is not satisfied by pushing
a bottle into her mouth. The feeding
occurs within the context of a relationship.
Our
relationship with our planet, its’ life, and with each other as part of that
life, is diseased.
You
can hear in TV interviews people’s attitudes that perpetuate the disease. They judge environmental issues in dollars
and cents. Their arguments do not
respect the planet as alive nor that that life is part
of our own.
Our behavior must come to be informed by and flow from a renewed, deep bonding with our Earth.
Under construction
Intrinsic Resilience—finding and building faith, courage.
Moral authority.
Opening To Each Other: The Jail Group Experiments
I hoped to find a way to share with my jail clients some of what I had been learning about feeling more connected with life. The group numbered sixteen men who had volunteered to participate at least ninety days. They lived in a segregated living unit, attended two groups per day, and had one individual session per week. Staff were three masters level therapists. From November, 2004 through February, 2005, in addition to the normal curriculum, we examined core malaise and related issues as they emerged. Some of our more profound discoveries were about how we blocked our sense of connectedness by carrying preoccupation about another’s pain, another’s anger, another’s malaise, and lacking self acceptance-approval .
Modus Operandi
Structured by my studies of Gestalt methods, my approach in general involves and is about:
" Phenomenological and subjective experience
Awareness and consciousness
Present-centered approach
Learning and change
Experimental stance
Human development and transformation
Intimacy and interpersonal interaction."
(This list of concepts is taken from educational materials developed by the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland.)
1.Core Malaise
Break into small groups and share your sense of personal core malaise.
Identify some of the things missing in your life and some of the major past events contributing to it.
Identify some of the ways you tried to make it go away (changes of location, actions, people).
The malaise we are looking for here always came back.
Notice any difference in how you are communicating with each other now.
Notice any change in the intensity of the malaise after sharing it.
(They consistently reported that their communication was deeper and easier, and that the sense of malaise had lessened or gone away.)
2. Discovering Discernment
Identify a polarity conflict such as strong/weak, leading/yielding, forgiving/resenting.
Hold the polar opposites in equal value in each hand.
Find a deeper confidence about moving forward while discerning the value of each polarity.
Notice energy moving in your back.
Notice the emergence of a deeper point of view and a deeper sense of self-confidence.
Note: For a fuller description of discernment skills, refer to Dialectic Behavior Therapy currently in use for treating Borderline Personality Disorders.
3. Meditation on my individuality
Feel your essential personal energy in your forearms.
Identify this same sense of personal energy in your back.
Connect this same sense of energy through your joints: ankles and wrists, knees and elbows, hips and shoulders, sacrum and neck.
Notice this feels like you, not the person next to you.
4. Removing My Armor
Consider emotional armor as automatic defensiveness based on past experiences.
Break into small groups and identify your routine prejudices about others, i.e., they want something, they will judge me, etc.
Close your eyes and find your sense of "core" (innermost and central sense of self) by connecting space through your joints: Ankles & wrists, knees & elbows, hips & shoulders, groin and throat, six feet below and six feet above.
Take a few moments to relax, saying to yourself "I breathe in, I breathe out."
Open your eyes and look at others around you without assumptions. Notice any new ways people appear to you.
5. Dropping My Front
Identify and share how you "front" to hide your inner feelings.
Behind your "front" find another level of despair and/or core malaise.
Discuss with others what your front serves to hide.
Realize your front is a habit.
Notice your communication becoming compassionate.
Notice your communication becoming happier and friendlier.
Notice six feet below the ground and find peace, serenity.
Connect this serenity through your back.
Reach this serenity forward, behind your habitual front.
Notice you can feel deserving, modest and proud at the same time.
Spread serenity to your boundary.
Discover bravery to be honest.
Quick Reminder
I find that meditating on feeling modest yet deserving at the same time takes me quickly to a kind of serenity. My point of view deepens and detaches a little from my daily drama while retaining a sense of myself.
6. Discovering Others
The previous exercises can lead to a palpable sense of oneself as a beautiful human being.
Take this feeling into core, where malaise was found.
Then extend this feeling to your outer boundary; spread intrinsic values outward into extrinsic values.
Find a feeling of warmth, companionship with others in the room.
Notice they are also beautiful human beings.
Notice a new feeling of accepting and being accepted in the presence of others.
7. Connecting With Others
Practice extending this new sense of self into contact with others.
As you walk around today, try feeling for people through the upper parts of your chest.
Notice you can walk this way.
Notice if people respond differently to you.
8. Judging My Life by the Life of Others
Recall getting through racism, seeing a person without noticing his/her color.
Try to apply this same thinking to poor people.
Apply it to rich people.
Apply it to beautiful members of the opposite sex.
Apply it to people who you think are better than you.
Notice how it is difficult to do with people who you think are better than you.
Notice how you feel inside about yourself: small, compressed, wanting.
Less than the other person you saw without regard to his color.
You are not giving yourself the acceptance you give to others.
Replace it by pushing out your inner self values to fill all the space inside your boundaries.
Discover deeper value of your life, intrinsic value, less attached to props and image.
9. Desperation for Acceptance
Look for a sense of desperate need found in the vicinity of core malaise; like wanting mamma’s love, acceptance.
Notice you are continuing to carry a desperate childish desire to be accepted and loved.
Let it move when you breath, let it go.
10. On Being a Chump
Concern arises about feeling too vulnerable.
Memories arise about past betrayal, feeling used, learning to pull away from others.
Accept that we have all been chumps.
Allow yourself to feel like a chump.
Allow the feeling to spread and rise upward.
Notice it is easier to laugh this way.
11. Failure
Notice your emotional reaction to a series of words: the letter "a," wheel, bicycle chain, meat ball, sex.
Notice your reaction to the word "failure."
Discuss with others how you think and feel about failure. Did you ever get the idea that you are a failure?
Discuss and discern some new ways to think of failure.
12. Work and Team
As you did with the word "failure," discuss how you feel about the words "work" and "team" and some new ways to think about them. Find other words which hold difficulty for you (being accepted, commitment, freedom, love), and discuss them in the same way.
13. Weight On The Heart
Find weight on the heart, resentment in the heart, difficulty forgiving.
Share with group a little of who and what you can’t forgive.
Notice any change that comes from sharing it.
Find a sense of shock, incomprehensible sadness.
Let it move when you breathe.
Let the weight on the heart lighten.
14. Pain I Caused a Loved One
Near the weight on your heart, recall observing a loved one feeling emotional pain in reaction to something you did or failed to do.
Hurts, doesn’t it.
Consider it their pain, which you have carried as your own.
Let it go.
15. Trauma I’ve Experienced
Find a larger emptiness around the pain of a loved one you have carried.
Feels like an inner horror.
Find it connected to a crink of shame in the neck.
Let both move when you breathe, let them go.
Find an inner sense of relief, uplift, easier to breathe.
16. Current Effects of Early Experience
Identify one or two issues you have not yet shared with the group.
Identify adolescent experiences you can associate with this issue.
Identify early childhood experiences associated with this issue.
Describe current effects of those early experiences.
17. Birth Meditation.
Close your eyes and find sense of yourself at around age 9.
Find in memory a location where you spent time alone.
Find a nearby object on the ground.
Pretend you are shrinking to fit under the object.
Find under the object a hole leading to outer space.
Connect a long tether to your umbilicus and go out into space.
Out there, notice your inner mood.
Notice the mood three feet around you.
Notice the mood at a distance outside the three feet.
Notice the quality of relationship you feel with the distance.
Identify changes you would like to make in the relationship between your inner mood (the three feet around you) and the distance.
Return on your tether to the hole under the object on the ground in your childhood space.
Grow in size to age 9.
Grow in size to your current age.
Return to this room and open your eyes.
Describe your experiences and observations.
Notice how those feelings effect your current long term self esteem, capacity for vitality and enthusiasm about life and your relationships with others.
If you try this meditation again, notice if the relationships are different. Imagine the near area three feet around is the quality of relationship with people close to you when you were born, doctors & nurses, your parents, perhaps aunts, grand parents. I personally discovered I needed to seek contact with others outside my immediate circle to make the quality of my life more to my liking.
18. About Isolation
Recall a place you went as a kid feeling isolated, alone, angry, rejected, hurt, resentful, misunderstood.
Imagine you are at that place.
Describe what you are feeling there.
Notice and describe how you felt about engaging others at that time.
Notice and describe any of those beliefs, values and attitudes which you still hold about being with others.
Notice that in certain ways, you have not changed since you were seven.
19. A Place for Anger
Recall times you have exploded in anger, when your anger has gone beyond rational.
Consider that you mistook anger for strength.
Recall that you wanted to be stronger, more effective, working better and took anger as the way to do it.
Discuss times when anger could be appropriate to help you feel energized to deal with an issue.
20. Trying Too Hard
Find a vague sense of horror in your abdomen (like the effect of past trauma explored previously) in a big donut shape around your navel.
Let it relax.
Feel behind it for a sense of low self-esteem.
At this deeper level, feel upward for a stuck, slick and vague sense of trying to please.
Slowly settle further back into the slickness and let it soften.
Find acceptance and love of yourself.
Find memories of other people stuck inside you there.
Let those memories go.
Take your sense of love and acceptance deeper.
Look at others around you from this depth and notice if they look different.
21. Performance Anxiety
Prep: For the next exercise, first feel modest and proud at the same time. Add a sense of connectedness with your higher power. In other words, add a little quality of angelic, a little ethereal, until you can feel you are a beautiful human being among other beautiful human beings.
Find anxiety in your back like a kind of fear, based on past mistakes, carried into today. Let it begin to melt down and medial toward your mid line.
Find what feels like the bottom part of where you are aware, and let it drop and float.
Find anxiety in the top of your belly and begin to let it melt downward.
Open the top of your chest to feel others through it.
Notice the back of your neck remains in the dark, out of what you are doing.
Force it awake by feeling modest and proud again at the same time.
Back of front and front of back, move both up and down.
Stand and get familiar with these feelings, let them move, relax.
22. Dealing With Intolerance of Others
When others are intolerant, what do you do? Console, confront or walk away?
Consider that there is a "should" in intolerance.
You don’t have to buy into the emotional state of others.
Discern what you want to do.
As in previous exercise, at deep layer behind abdomen, find low self-esteem.
Recall times coming from here when others were critical, condescending or judgmental.
Find a light in the back of your neck.
Spread this light until it feels "friendly."
Practice changing this light to express a frown.
Practice changing it to express interest. Try concurrence.
Recall and discuss the last time you lost self-confidence.
Recall and discuss the people and or places when that occurred.
Stand up. Open the back of your neck, open your ribs, your back (through the area you felt low self esteem), and spread the feeling of being "friendly."
Notice and discuss any change in how you feel like dealing with the intolerance of others.
23. Find A Light In The Middle Of Your Mind.
Let the bottom of the room fall away, so your light is in open space.
Look into the dark around the light.
Feel the emotional qualities of the dark.
The dark is also you.
24. Finding A Sense Of Spiritual Strength.
Think of something you can say "no" to definitely, without doubt or vacillation, like your partner asking your indulgence of his or her cheating. Or something else.
Find where in your body you feel the power of your "no", your strength of conviction.
Some find it in the front of their chests, some find it in their backs.
Find a sense of substance in it, like muscle and blood, and find this substantiality in the sides of your neck, first one side then the other side.
Begin to identify values of others imposed upon you which served to bury your sense of personal strength and conviction. Which made you carry yourself as small and weak, unable to guarantee your word, your certainty or your behavior.
Let go of those impositions.
Take gently smiling love and acceptance into your neck and shoulders.
Open yourself to the universe. Find quality of respect. Share it with the universe.
25. Developing Strength
Strength is normal energy in an organism. Weakness is reticence to allow strength to come forward. Weakness is holding back strength out of fear or sometimes as an excuse.
Some of us may be attached to weakness for the enjoyment of being taken over. It can be sexual, as with limerence, an attachment to love sickness, swooning, the fantasy of being taken. Some of us enjoy coming together by sharing weakness. Being consumed by passion can also help us avoid dealing with burdens.
26. Thoughts On The Sources And Consequences
Of Feelings Of Inadequacy
The feeling of inadequacy appears to develop as a consequence of rejection. And anger stems from inadequacy.
Inadequacy also feeds anxiety, fear, obsession and codependence.
27. Death Wish
I think the death wish comes from self loathing resulting from the pain of detachment taken to the extreme.
Resume
Gerald A. Vande Velde, M.A., L.P.C., L.M.S.W.
Email: gvande1@att.net
Professional Experience:
1991-Present: Psychotherapist
in a Group Practice
1987-1990: Adjunct Instructor of Human Sexuality
1980-1991: Private Practice-Rolfing (Structural Integration)
1975-1976: Director of Residential Addictions Treatment
1970-1975: Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor
1965-1970: College Student Personnel Administrator
Education:
1980 Clinical Training, Mind/ Body Integration. Two year program, Rolf Institute of Structural Integration, Boulder, Colorado.
1979 Holistic Healing. One year program, Sante Fe Academy of Natural Healing, Sante Fe, New Mexico.
1975 Post Graduate Clinical Training, Gestalt Methods. Two year program, Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio.
1969 M.A., Counseling and Student Personnel. Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan. Honors: Phi Kappa Sigma (Graduate Education Honorary)
1967 B.A., Social Science, Michigan State University, East Lansing,
Michigan. Honors: Phi Eta Sigma (Grade Point Honorary), Pi Gamma Mu
(Social Science Honorary), Graduated Cum Laude