The Tricks of Sociopathy

There is a how-to. Genetics aren't everything.

Book burning, Nazi Germany, 1933

               I have to preface this by saying that I can only speak from then lens of my own culture, not teach (well) about anyone else’s. Although I would like to say that I could write from the perspective of someone who lived in Japan, or France, or Iraq, it would be warmed over, the experience of another.  So here’s what you get when you read from the perspective of a Jew.

               When some of us mention Hitler we add the words, y’mach sh’mo (sounds-like, rhymes-with y’locked-sh’go), meaning, His name should be obliterated from the face of the earth.  On Tuesday some of your Jewish friends or co-workers might have looked ashen and tired, fasting (yet going to work, which isn't encouraged but necessary sometimes) the fast of T’isha B’Av (sounds-like, rhymes-with mish-uh-b’-ah’v).  It is a long, grueling, 25-hour fast in the dead of summer, beginning at sundown on the eve of the ninth day of a lunar Jewish month, ending as the fires of Jerusalem had begun to wane, the next night. Three weeks before we began to show signs of mourning, the men stopped shaving. Then nine days prior observant Jews showered less, stopped wearing clean clothes (we drop them on the floor as a symbolic gesture). No meat, no music. Mourning.

               Mourning for what?  The loss of the Holy Temples, over two thousand years ago.  Not that's culture.  Every year, same thing.  Jews have other fasts, there are seven in all, but usually, if we get up before dawn and have a bite, they aren't as difficult, and none are as emotionally trying as T’isha B’Av. We had two of these holy places. The Babylonians, then the Romans, destroyed them both, built on the site that Abraham was asked to sacrifice his only son, where a mosque sits at this moment in Jerusalem.  The Jews, lost in battle for the city, were sent packing from Jerusalem, exiled.  Something like the Native-American experience for the likes of Tonto.  

               Now.  A proper fast, for an observant Jew, barring pregnancy or illness (which leaves out quite a few of us) means no water (zero, not even rain), and no food, not even a stick of gum.  No teeth brushing. Not a pretty day, Tisha B’av, between the dirty clothes, the bad breath, the sweat and a little starvation. The point of the fast, surely, to draw attention from the Old Mighty, She should notice we’re serious about redemption and hope for the universe.  No one should suffer, not even Her favorite scapegoat, the Jews.

               The other point, one more in line with therapy, is that we learn empathy. We are in the shoes of a Holocaust survivor, in the shoes of a Holocaust victim, in the shoes of a Ruwandan, an Indian, any indigent who suffers, starves, struggles daily.  One would think that this is empathy, but we learn, if we watch the documentary Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust   that our fast is a very weak approximation of the true horror, the true suffering of one who experienced the Holocaust. Nothing, nothing, nothing compares to this horror.

               Indeed, when Hollywood first took on the task of bringing the Holocaust into the homes of the international media-loving public, it was with trepidation.  The directors and producers of the time trembled at the thought of diluting the experience. Because, after all, to manipulate emotion, to capture our souls, a good film has an arc, and that arc is designed to be watchable, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, preferably a happy ending.

               Like dentistry or any surgery without anesthesia, there is no way to adequately convey the experience unless we have been through it.  And most who went through the Holocaust did not live to talk about it, and those who did were speechless for many years.  No words.

               The story, however, had to be told. So it began with brave attempts, The Mortal Storm, Charlie Chaplan’s The Little Dictator, Judgment at Nuremberg (the movie within the movie) and gradually culminated with War and Remembrance, very vivid, the Pawnbroker, Sophie's Choice, The Producers, Cabaret, and a first a television series, airing soon after Roots, The Holocaust.  That film-- four days in a row of nail-biting--captured one of every two Americans, had us glued to our television sets, a generation of teenagers, at once, newly aware of the Jewish experience in Germany. Then Schindler’s List, and ever since, more Holocaust films and documentaries than ever before, many so new that we can’t even get them on Netflix or Amazon-- each an amazing, sobering snap of life that none of us should miss, not if we wish to empathize with the most devastating experiences known to man.

               Therapists, certainly, need to be able to do this, empathize, if only to the degree that we can, having never been through such a thing.  

               Not to ruin your summer.  Here's a quick history lesson.* We learn empathy from history, too.  

Back in the thirteenth century, the French King, Louis IX, a religious zealot,made the Jews miserable if they didn’t convert. He would attend the baptisms of those who did this voluntarily.

When only 500 of the 3500 Jews in a town chose conversion over the alternative, death, an apostate, Nicholas Donin, came up with the idea that without their holy books, Jews were nothing.  Burn the books, destroy the culture. They will replace it.

Donin found an audience with Pope Gregory IX in Rome. He charged that the Talmud contained blasphemies against Christianity and God. The books were the power behind Jewish refusal to accept the true faith. The books needed to be confiscated, destroyed.

The Pope, convinced, ordered seizure of all copies of the Talmud and examined them. On June 12^th a stacked public debate sealed the fate. The rabbis defended the faith, but it was a foregone conclusion that 1200 plus copies of Talmud and related commentaries, all written by hand, some a thousand years old, would be lost forever.

The Jews, of course, were not.  That burning in 1242 included 24 cartloads of books. This didn't stop the people from writing about the event, or rewriting their books. All is recorded by eye-witnesses without iPhones.

By 1306, the French King Philip IV (the Fair) expelled the Jews from all of France, and in Germany, taxation, pogroms, blood libels, inspired them to leave for what was then Palestine, where they had originally been banished on Tisha B’Av, a millennium and a half before.   Rudolph I, not wishing to lose them, declared the Jews personal property and refused to let them leave. They were far too successful.

One doesn’t let a resource like this go so fast.

Then the Spanish Inquisition (Was Columbus Jewish?  Did he have to leave Spain?), the pogroms, and we didn't even talk about the previous Crusades. A people forever on the run.

Then in 1933, Hitler took note, burned classics, not just Jewish books, but any old classic that threatened the worship of Nazi ideology, books by:

 Henri Barbusse, Franz Boas, John Dos Passos, Albert Einstein, Lion Feuchtwanger, Friedrich Förster, Sigmund Freud, John Galsworthy, André Gide, Ernst Glaeser, Maxim Gorki, Werner Hegemann, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Kästner, Helen Keller, Alfred Kerr, Jack London, Emil Ludwig, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Hugo Preuss, Marcel Proust, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, Margaret Sanger, Arthur Schnitzler, Upton Sinclair, Kurt Tucholsky, Jakob Wassermann, H.G. Wells, Theodor Wolff, EmiléZola, Arnold Zweig, and Stefan Zweig.. 

You see, you can learn some of the tricks to sociopathy, it isn't all genetic.

Not to say that Hitler hadn’t an original thought in his head.

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*The full story can be found on p. 360, commentary to Kinah 41, the Complete Tishah B’Av service, Artscroll Series. The kinot  are lamentations, sad poems sung in a sad, sing-songy drone)..:

My 100 Children

Sometimes I feel that I have at least 100 children, maybe more. But that's ridiculous.

http://www.jewishfilm.org/Catalogue/films/my100children.htm.

We find our inspiration wherever we can.  Some of us have to slow down, get in touch with the old time religion, whichever one that might be.

As a Jew, I'm lucky, because my religion is really, really old. And when a religion is old and historically rich, there are many, many stories. There are so many they become one long story if you're Jewish. They are sad sometimes, but often, inspirational.

Today was Tisha B'Av (the ninth of Av, rhymes with wish-above).  Av is a Hebrew month. Most people haven't a clue what this means, Tisha B'Av, and that's okay, it won't be on the test.  Suffice it to say that it is a fast day commemorating several historical Jewish tragedies.

To name a few:

the destruction of both holy Jewish temples (where the Moslem Dome of the Rock now rests),

the papal decree to start the Crusades (otherwise known as: Let's get this murderous party going!),

the expulsion from Spain

and the start of World War I, a war that many feel set the stage for the Holocaust.

Twenty-five hours with no food, no water, it's not an easy fast.  We begin an hour before sunset, end the fast a few minutes after sundown the following day with food and drink that never tasted as good.  We sit on the floor in the synagogue, or on low stools, and as mourners chant poems, lamentations, the sadness of our people.  The Holocaust is still fresh for our parents, for survivors everywhere, and there are many stories to tell and we're telling them. 

http://www.aish.com/j/jt/Jtube_Schindlers_List.html#.TkFQ1rg5Tto.facebook

The best part is watching sad movies as a community, and everyone likes a sad movie.  The day seems to drag on forever, otherwise.

One of the funniest guys I know, serious on Tisha B'Av, linked on Facebook to

Why saving one's life like saving the entire world, a clip from the Spielberg movie.

 Worth the minute or two, for sure.
 
My friend thinks it's the best movie scenes ever, maybe because a man breaks into tears, I'm not sure, maybe because the message is so sublime.  I looked for more Schindler, only found the trailer.

Many of us blow off work to see Holocaust movies on this backwards holiday.  But this is not the only advantage to calling in sick (which is no lie, you feel pretty sick).  Going to work would be bad because no one can work without (a) caffeine, (b) snacks!

So far, nothing inspiring, right?  So try this:

A woman has lost her family in the Holocaust. Parentless, but an adult, she decides that she will parent 100 lost, parentless Jewish children who survive the war, too. She discovers dozens of orphaned Jewish children holed up the Jewish Committee Center in Krakow.  They have found their way to this place and she has found her way to this place, and her vision is about to come true.

Years later, Lena Kuchlar Silberman's biological daughter makes sure that this important story be told. The documentary, My 100 Children, patches together saved lives. We hear tapes of Kuchlar Silberman interviewing her "children", now adults. They are asked what they remember of those days, the days before finding a safe home with Lena in Zakopane, Poland, after the war. They say things like,

"I was so alone."

"I had no one."

"I knew no one."

"I had not a friend, not a relative.  No one."

"I had no one for as long as I could remember."

Being a child, every day with no guidance, is forever.

Being a holocaust survivor is not entirely like being tossed into a forest to fend for yourself, like a feral Child, born to be raised by dogs or wolves. But in many situations, indeed, these children hid in forests, in basements, in closets, cellars, in sewers. And they had witnessed more killing, more violence than they might have, had they been born in the woods.

Lena Kuchlar Silberman, became their mother. She "brought them back to life" in a Polish orphanage.  Growing antisemitism and violence in those post-war years forced her to smuggle the children out of Poland, first to France then Israel.

We hear the stories.  One little girl makes her way from the camps to take the train to Krakow.  She is crowded into a station with hundreds of people. She is weak, starving, febrile, unable to move another muscle.  She collapses in a corner of the station.  A priest sees her and asks her why she is sitting like this in the corner. She must go.

She tells him, I can't move. 

He says, You must get up.  The train is coming.  You must get on the train! 

She whispers, I can't get up. 

He begs, Try!  Please try! 

She tries to get up and she falls.  Her legs are swollen, she is very ill.  He picks her up, throws her over his back, carries her to the train. 

The identity of the mysterious priest is revealed at the end of the film.

Many stories. One about emotional blackmail. When it becomes too dangerous for the children to stay in Poland (antisemitism rabid), one of them refuses to leave without his sister.  She is living with a Christian family as a Christian and has no interest in leaving.  Her brother tells her that he will not leave without her, that he, as a Jew, will be killed if he stays.  She leaves with him. Emotional blackmail works.

Three of the meanest, most hard-core bullies, Lena's most difficult children, are judges in the orphanage.  The children run the disciplinary system, they try one another for misbehaving.  Either Lena thought they would learn to become humane with responsibility, or they chose the method themselves, I can't remember.  But they mete out justice, lots of it, justice their mother wouldn't approve.  But in the end, she changes them.  They change because she won't leave them, not even after emigrating to Israel, not until she is sure that each and every one of them is emotionally stable, can tolerate the separation.

And the worst day of their lives is the day of her death. 

Years later, interviewed in this documentary, the three judges are asked about their angry, vengeful childhood personalities. What made them this way, so mean, so cocky, so cold, so seemingly incorrigible?

The now adult children reply (and I'm paraphrasing if not rewriting the script),

all that loss,
all that loneliness,
the fear of death,
the running,
the hiding,
the violence everywhere,
no one caring.

This is the baggage they carried with them to Lena Kuchlar's orphanage. So much rage. It had to go somewhere. We would be angry, too.

An argument for benevolent, kind parenting, living, and an example of courage we just don't hear about anymore.

I don't know about you.  But I was inspired. 

therapydoc

Can You Cry Too Many Tears?

This will be a long one. Settle back and relax.

Today is the holiday that the Jewish people (those who observe it) dread for three weeks. Some people dread it all year long. FD says there should be a holiday that everyone dreads.

I'm not sure I follow his logic, but ours is certainly the religion for everything.

Tisha B'Av, the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av, is a day that marks destruction. Like every holiday there are certain laws to observe. The law specifically associated with this holiday is about tears. Crying.

You're supposed to make yourself cry and get in touch with the loss of the Holy Temples of Jerusalem, built and destroyed by conquering nations. We lost the first in 586 BCE, two thousand, twelve hundred years ago, to the Babylonians who desecrated the holy walls and holy vessels; the second in 70 AD to the Romans who seconded the motion.

We grieve the martyrdom of people of other eras (think Spanish Inquisition, for one) who died rather than convert, and we remember every pogrom, especially the Holocaust.

Our history is full of tears.

On Tisha b'Av we get in touch with the loss of holy land and what are thought to be the dwelling places of the Old Mighty. (That's how my grandfather referred to Him. ) When we're in Israel we say that prayers are a local call. The Jews trace a relationship and ownership to the holy places of Israel to Biblical times, fifteen hundred to two thousand years B.C.E.

In any case, a huge mosque sits atop the spot that Jacob wrestled with an angel and won but walked away, limping.

This is also where his grandfather Abraham said to the Old Mighty, "Sure, you want my son, you can have my son, my only son from this particularly incredible mother, Sarah, my helper, my friend, my companion, the woman who has grown old with me. "

The midrash (an explanation, also a few thousand years old) tells us that Isaac was no baby at the time he was offered as a sacrifice per the Old Mighty's request. Sarah, when she heard about the possibility that Abraham would do this, had a heart attack, probably at the age of 103. We think Isaac was thirteen years old at the time.

Bound, his father readying himself with a knife for slaughter, Isaac looked up at the sky and the Old Mighty opened up the heavens so that His young servant alone could see beyond the stars. The tears of the on-looking angels fell into his eyes, which is the reason Isaac is said to have been near-sighted for the rest of his life. Most of his descendants are, too.

Anyway, the angels cried and the Old Mighty had mercy and crying is a theme in our culture.

I believe I told you that my mother said, "Cry, it feels good, it's good to get them out." I'm sure she said it in Yiddish, too, but I've forgotten the Yiddish.

And I've told you that there is not an infinite number of tears. Eventually you will stop. If you need to cry, cry. At least I don't think there's an infinite number of tears. I could be wrong. Has anyone done the research on this? I don't think so.

The rabbis say, Cry, for sobbing is all that the Old Mighty really does hear. In other words, He's sick of words. And who can blame Him? We are all talk, are we not?

Which is why talk therapies, especially rational therapies tend to work, but it's also why we need them to talk out our many obsessions.

But there IS such a thing as too many tears, if not for this holiday.

The story goes that a woman could not stop crying for the loss of her husband. She was irreconcilable. Her family brought her to the holiest rabbi in town who told her that she shouldn't be sad. Her tears went to good use. The Old Mighty gathered all of her tears in a cup, every one of them, and when a terrible calamity threatened destruction to the world, he used her tears to avert the tragedy. This calmed her down.

She could stop crying.

So sometimes it's good to cry, and sometimes it's best to stop. I used to tell my kids what my mother told me, advice I hope they will tell my grandchildren, that they should squirt out a few tears now and then, maybe every day.

I still tell my patients this. But this doesn't apply to people who can't stop crying, like the woman in the parable. So without a rabbi to tell you the importance of your tears, how do you stop?

Therapy's an interesting process.

Sometimes it helps to look over your life and find the things that you forgot to cry for or weren't mature enough to cry for or had been taught that you shouldn't cry for, but you should have cried for when they happened. You should have cried at the time but you didn't.


So for example, some little kids, upon the loss of a parent are told that it's okay, they'll be well cared for and they need not cry. They're told they should buck up at the funeral. Be a man, be adult. Be strong. Kids grow up thinking this is the way we're supposed to be all of the time. Strong.

Then they wonder why, having stored up so many tears, when they find themselves at a vulnerable place in life, that the floodgates let loose and they feel as if they're drowning in their own tears. I tell these patients they have to mourn those old losses.

They're not all deaths, either, these losses. You know how to list your losses. Loss of innocence, loss of love, loss of functioning, loss of health, loss, loss, loss. Talking about losses puts those tears into place.

Stoicism can be a problem. Stoicism helps when you get rejection letters, and it's never good to feel sorry for yourself, really, so stoicism has it's place. But holding back feelings as a general approach to life can definitely be a set up for problems.

Therefore it is nice to know that most cultures build in ways other than stoicism to handle Big Losses. (We'll talk about the smaller, annoying losses as they pop up in other posts. Let's talk about the big losses here).

The psych literature tells us that Jews handle death nicely, so it's convenient that I'm Jewish. Maybe there are some universal truths for everyone in our customs and laws.

Let's start with a funeral. I'll go back to Aunt C's funeral. You last read about her when I visited her in the hospital. It made me feel so good, connecting with Aunt C, even though I knew she was heading towards hospice. Anyway, she passed away soon after that post.

In our culture, at the funeral service people lclose to the person who passed away talk to an assembly of friends and relatives (like in most cultures I think). My aunt had eight eulogies, one more beautiful than the next. One of my aunt's children, cousin Bobbie, said to me, Mom would have loved the service. She would have loved what we said, and she would have loved that the day was sunny and everyone came out to say goodbye.

At the funeral everyone is supposed to ask forgiveness from the mais, the person who passed away. So that's therapeutic for the community of mourners, too.

Then there's the shiva. If you're a mourner, a first degree relative or spouse, you stay home from work for seven days so that people in the community can visit you and you can talk about the life that's lost. People cry, sure, but it's hard for them to cry non-stop when there are so many visitors.

It's not a law that a mourner has to cry. You can tell who's in mourning because the males don't shave that first week and everyone in mourning tears their shirt before the funeral and wears it all week long. Crying during shiva isn't a requirement. It doesn't have to be.

So when my cousin's mom passed away, her sister, my mom, sat shiva with her two only other living sibs and my cousin Bobbie and her two sibs.

I cooked. The community cooked. Jews are all about food, at the end of the day. Food is life.

My cousin Bobbie had an incredible relationship with my aunt. They really were best friends. Now that the formal ritual is over, the funeral, the seven days, the month, she's into the year of grieving for a parent. In that year you don't buy new clothes or go to movies or concerts. I am quite sure my cousin cries often for her mother, expecting, when she picks up a ringing phone to hear my aunt's voice.

It's very surreal, you know. One day you can talk on the phone to someone, and the next day you can't. I'm sure my cousin picks up the phone to call her mother, starts dialing, pauses and puts the receiver back into the cradle.

Now that we're a couple of months past the shiva, she's probably crying a lot. She's supposed to stop after the year is up.

Because there is this prescribed grieving, at the end of the year a person does feel that the job is done. They can stop crying. Not for good, of course not. But the person who has passed away has been accorded respect, and a mourner feels he or she has truly mourned.

Immediate losses are hard for most people, especially that first year, and tears come often if we let them, whereas once they're a thing of the past, it's harder to remember, harder to grieve.

Which is why this holiday, Tisha B'Av is so hard for most people to wrap their heads around. It requires reflection, memory, a very long memory. For Holocaust survivors the loss still feels immediate. For the rest of us, it's harder.

But what do we do about it when crying is getting old already? That's the problem for most people. People who come to see me usually don't have to make themselves cry. They can't stop crying. And, depending upon the person and the context, too much crying can make one sick, not better.

Which is why the docs are forever telling you, Take these medicines. Happy is better. (My motto, by the way). I can't say, Take these medicines because I'm not a medical doctor.

But for the record, if a medical doctor recommends medication, I'll support that decision. And legally, therapy docs have to tell you to get a med eval, a medical evaluation to see if you need medication if you can't stop crying.

So consider that. And sure, get therapy. Grieve the past losses. There is an endpoint to the grief and suffering in any one person's past. Clean out some of it with a caring professional.

There aren't enough rabbis in the world, certainly, to take care of all of those tears.

Copyright 2007, therapydoc