0.3 Alfred adler and harry stack sullivan  (Page 34/37)

However, not everyone with a disability develops a handicap. Instead, some individuals become truly inspirational by the way in which they live their lives in spite of their disability, or rather, as if they simply were not disabled. Erik Weihenmayer (2001; see also Stoltz&Weihenmayer, 2006) was born with retinoscheses, a degenerative eye disease, which slowly destroyed his retinas, leaving him blind by the age of 13. In high school, Erik spent a month one summer at the Carroll Center for the Blind in Massachusetts. The summer camp included a weekend of rock climbing in N. Conway, New Hampshire (where the author has done a lot of rock-climbing). Weihenmayer’s rock climbing experience altered his life. He continued climbing rock, and then moved on to ice-climbing and mountaineering. He didn’t just followed more experienced climbers up the cliffs, he also learned to lead-climb: placing one’s own protection along the climb and then clipping in the rope, what climbers call “the sharp end” of the rope. I had the pleasure of climbing with Erik in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula a few years ago, while his seeing-eye dog slept in a sort of ice cave formed by the overhanging ice. It is truly extraordinary to watch him climb. He moves so smoothly, as he feels the ice above with his ice axe, and then sets the ice axe so deliberately when he finds the right spot, that you would not know he was climbing blind if you only watched for a little while. Eventually, Erik decided to pursue the Seven Summits, climbing the highest peak on each continent: Mt. McKinley (N. America), Aconcagua (S. America), Mt. Everest (Asia), Mt. Elbrus (Europe), Vinson Massif (Antarctica), Mt. Kosciusko (Australia), Kilimanjaro (Africa). He accomplished his goal in 2002.

Erik Weihenmayer is by no means the only well-known, disabled climber. In an amazing video, Beyond the Barriers (Perlman&Wellman, 1998), Erik goes climbing with Mark Wellman and Hugh Herr. Wellman was paralyzed from the waist down in a climbing accident (Wellman&Flinn, 1992), and Herr lost both of his lower legs to frostbite after being caught in a vicious winter storm on Mt. Washington, NH (Osius, 1991; Note: The author has suffered a small patch of frostbite during a winter storm on Mt. Washington). In Beyond the Barriers , Herr leads the hike toward the climb, while Erik carries Wellman. Once on the climb, Herr leads the climb, Erik follows, and they set ropes for Wellman to do pull-ups up the cliff. It simply has to be seen to be believed. One of the surprising aspects is how they joke with each other about what they are doing. As Erik is carrying Wellman, Wellman says: “I don’t know man. A blind man giving a para a piggyback ride? It’s a pretty scary thing!” When Herr starts climbing on a day when it was snowing, he says his hands are getting numb from the cold. So, Erik asks him how his feet feel! Humor was always an important part of Adlerian psychotherapy (Scott, 1984), so perhaps it should not be surprising that a sense of humor is an aspect of their personalities. One of the funniest stories that Erik tells is about the time he accidentally drank out of his climbing partners piss bottle (a bottle used to urinate inside the tent during storms). Erik became quite upset that the bottle wasn’t marked somehow, but his partner defended himself by saying he had clearly written on the bottle which one it was. It slowly dawned on Erik’s partner that the writing was of no help to Erik. As another example of Erik’s humor, consider the challenge he tried to avoid after having climbed the highest peaks in Africa and North and South America: