All That Extra Time Together

 It is kind of an unfair kick that for most people retirement comes at the wrong time of life. 

You want to ride your bike ten miles but have been told your balance is off, biking is out after 65. 

Jason Segel in Shrikiing

You think you can buy an RV, travel more, but there are too many personal or financial details to handle. You aren't going anywhere for any extended length of time. 

Then, when that's over and you have the time and the money, your own health gets in the way. 

George Burns used to say, I'm so old that I don't buy green bananas. There are lots of jokes like that. 

I'm only thinking of this because I know a few people in their mid-fifties who have retired and are liking it. I also know couples in their fifties who are ready to break up because of the stress of early retirement.

For most of us this is a moot subject. Early retirement isn't an option.We're still working deep into our sixties, either we can't or don't want to hang up the towel. 

The family therapy hitch about retirement at any age is that it disrupts the homeostasis of relationships. Whereas once distance felt predictable, now emotional suffocation rules. We saw this happen during Covid. 

I had never been busier than I was during Covid. Closeness stressed relationships. Having the kids home didn't help. 

There's a good example of what can happen to a couple when the person who used to work outside the home announces, Honey, I'm home. For good. We find it on Apple television,  Shrinking. 

Shrinking is about a therapist who changes his work style after his wife passes away.  He self-discloses far too much. His boundaries with patients disappear. He invites one to live with him. That the boundaries have disappeared, shrunk to nothing, could be why the name of the show is Shrinking. I'm sure there are other interpretations. 

Anyway, the spouse of one of the main characters retires and tells his wife he intends to be around now. She tells him flat out, Not acceptable, find something to do. And he says, essentially, Make me. My house, too.

That's how it can feel. One partner is suffocated. The other is finally free, happy.  The suffocated partner can either get on the bus or figure out how to get out of the situation themselves 

The intimacy they have is threatened by the need for a smaller rubber band. I'm sure there's a rubber band post on this blog somewhere, stick 'rubberband' into the search bar above. 

Baby boomers retiring is keeping this therapydoc busy, that's all I can say. But this is not about me, right?

pickle ball for retirees

My point, however, is that if we start having fun before we retire, start a little younger, we are halfway there, maybe all the way there. The couples I see who do some kind of sport together, who really like playing together, who have that recreational intimacy that I have stressed so much about here, love retirement. It is about, What should I (we) try now? Tai Chi? Golf? They can do a jigsaw puzzle together and have fun. The thing I liked in that excerpt from my novel is that people had fun at the bowling alley. They loved it. They loved the entire gestalt of something as mundane as bowling.

I guess we could call it preventive medicine, becoming the co-captains of a boat. going fishing. Learning pickle ball. Just watch that ACL tendon, watch the knees on the latter. It's easy to tear one if you haven't stretched. 

therapydoc 

 

Why We Have Sex

We're always saying it around here, sex is marital glue. But it isn't always.

New study, University of Toronto, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, summed up in last week's WSJ. Worth a look.  What you learn:

We have two ways of dealing with this particular bodily function, sex.  We participate because either:
(1) we want to feel good, make our partner feel good, or
(2) we want to avoid a bad feeling about ourselves or about our partner or relationship-- the negative consequences of not participating.

Whereas it might seem that our motivations to approach or avoid are relatively circumscribed and few, a previous study at the University of Texas (2007) found 237!!! motives to have sex, everything from spiritual closeness to the Old Mighty to retaliation for a partner's affair. That retaliation could be sex with the partner, or with someone else. These are mind-boggling motives no matter how they shake out, and great fodder in therapy, they reveal so much about us.

There probably really are precisely 237 reasons to have sex because the Texas inquiry had to be qualitative, meaning social scientists interviewed enough people for a long enough period of time to literally saturate the category, reasons to have sex.

And we're not even talking about the reasons for not even bothering with sex, another study altogether which surely would include the intimacy fears-- those fears of exposure, annihilation, suffocation, rejection, etc.,-- as well as our personal mental status problems, i.e., depression, and let's not forget our physical laments, marvelous, valid, at least for awhile, excuses-- as in menopause, peri-menopause, pain, fatigue, hunger, etc. Such are among the reasons we literally, physically, but mentally, too, avoid having sex.

But avoidance in the University of Toronto and Texas studies is about avoiding psychological thoughts and feelings by having sex, not physically avoiding it.

See how confusing it is to be an academic?

The University of Toronto team divided responses into two categories. Self-motivated or partner motivated reasons for having sex. (Interesting that sex becomes the object of a preposition, not a verb here, and we're always saying that love is a verb.  Self-motivated and partner motivated reasons look like this. Try to figure out which are which:

If I do it, I'll start my day out right.

If I don't do it, he might find someone else and I'll be alone.

If I do it, he'll start his day right, and I want him to feel good.    

If I don't do it, he might think I don't really love him, might even look for someone else.

It isn't easy, sorting all of this out.

And yet, two basic, important findings:

(a) Partner motivated approaches are the most telling predictors of couple satisfaction. So it's okay, you see, to be selfless to a point.
(b) Whether or not it is for me or for my partner, if the reason is positive, there is higher relationship satisfaction overall. You feel like a better team.

That's the marital glue we're talking about.

It also means we shouldn't be having sex for negative reasons. (Obviously, the reasons are always wrong in any type of sexual abuse that isn't consensual or in which consent is coerced). But to make a seemingly good relationship (we have sex!) truly good, much better, the job would be to work out the negative reasons. Work them out and the relationship is more emotionally intimate.

And when that's how it is defined, truly emotionally intimate, it likely that sex will be marital glue. I would go so far as to say, only then.

I'm truly grateful for that study, because it makes it much easier to explain to my patients.  I mean it.

therapydoc

To the New Decade

Cuz we're all sick of the last one.

FD likes to go over the events of the year in December, has been obsessing about this for about a week. Between the two of us, without a blog to record them (for this is not that kind of blog), we try to remember what has happened to us and to the people we know. It's a long list of remembers.

I've just come from my mother's house, refreshed from a nap on her sofa. The day has started, as usual, at nine in the office, but I cut my afternoon hours to go to the funeral of a close friend, an expected passing. In our community it is tradition, following the service, to follow the mais, the dead person, to the grave, literally walk behind the casket. These days bodies are flown to different destinations, different cities, even countries. So we walk behind the hearse in the cold, the rain, whatever the weather, to say goodbye.



Our friend wasn't a rabbi, he was just a regular guy, but special of course, to us.

The rabbis of two synagogues eulogized David, spoke of his faith and acceptance of disease, this gorgeous, positive man, his sweet-disposition, how he and his family moved to Chicago thirteen years ago. He helped build two synagogues, two renovations of older buildings, one edifice now more beautiful than the next.

The rabbis of each shul claim him. It wasn't with money, although I could be wrong, but surely with time, that he gave of himself. Everything takes time, all worthy projects. They speak of him in one of the new synagogues, and after the speeches, we follow our friend, on foot, to the next.

It's really cold, and me being a cold kind of person anyway, cold-intolerant, wearing a short, fall jacket, could easily opt out of the march down the busy street, but it doesn't feel like an option. Maybe reading the stories from the Holocaust, the survivor tales, has changed me. I make an association, cold is an obstacle, nothing more or less, and of course, this isn't Poland, dead of winter, 1942. And that awful awareness of the elements and the coldness of death, too, disappear.

I meet up with FD at the destination, and he greets me with, "I felt I had to walk, even though it's really cold; that it was an honor to accompany him." Right there with you, dear.

We walk together to the car in no particular hurry and he continues, "Let's stay together the whole day. I won't go back to the office. I'll go with you, wherever you're going." He knows that I'm picking up my mother, taking her to visit my father in the hospital, but there are errands, things to do. The day is full like every other day.

"Sometimes," he says, as we buckle ourselves in, "I think you don't need this kind of thing as much as me, just being together, that I'm not so necessary."

Such bait. I reassure, explain that this isn't so, and why. You might call this emotional intimacy.

We swing over to the grocery store to pick up an anniversary cake for my parents. I blank on the year, how long they're married, but have the number 64 in my head (wrong), so I tell the woman behind the counter, "Just write on the cake . . ."

Mom & Dad, 64?

FD picks up champagne and sparkling grape juice, not sure if they'll let my father have a little champagne or not, and flowers, tulips. I pick out some cards, one from us, one from my mother to my father, forgetting to buy one from my father to my mother. Neither of them is in a position to buy the other anything.


We pick up Mom at her house. She's waiting at the front door. She doesn't know we're going to have a little party in the hospital room to celebrate her anniversary. FD and I are very excited.

Dad is sitting up in a chair, dressed. His hair is getting kind of long, in the hospital eight days. He's happy for the company but short of breath, six words to a breath, at most, sounds a little like the Godfather. He suggests, as we begin to sign the cards in front of him, that we get some post-its, write on these so we can recycle the cards.

You see, everyone's green these days.

But the cards are good, spot on, and we save them, so we sign them and hand them over. We don't stay long because he has work to do, it is time for rehab and if he isn't rehabbed, then what is he doing here, anyway? We want to keep him out of the hospital, but we're in no hurry. Every new decision is stressful. It's hard on my mother to shlep here every day. And she's lonely living without him, vulnerable, too.

It isn't easy staying awake on the drive back to the house, but I can't say this, of course. I flop on her sofa, asleep before I've even closed my eyes. While I nap she brushes off an old winter dress coat of hers because I've complained about being cold in my jacket, and haven't bought a new coat for myself in twenty years.

I wake up in a start and eventually ask FD. "What must it be like for her to see me age like this, crash on her couch like I just did? I was out for an hour!"

"We see our kids getting older," he philosophizes.

Not the same. Anyway. We start recollecting, without a blog, the year.

There have been other friends who are now gone, young people, at least we think so, one who left us at 50, suffering in silence, telling no one about her disease. A teacher. We call teachers in our community, stars. These are our stars. We lost a star.

Only about five weeks ago we lost another dear friend to a heart attack, 62. Playing raquetball. We escorted his body to the cargo hangar at the airport; he had a ticket to Israel for burial in the holy land. His mother, already there, reportedly said,
"I can accept it. I just can't believe it."

The week after that we heard that yet another member of the community had passed away in Spain, and the Spanish authorities want to embalm the body, not a Jewish tradition, unless the community, the family, comes up with $70,000 for transport on a private jet. Somehow this money is found. But an important person talks to another important person and the commercial airliner takes the body, as is.

And so it goes. Two of my uncles leave us, one younger than my father, one older.

People lose jobs, people lose lives, and we understand that 25% of all Americans are in danger of losing their homes. We watch, experience these statistics like everyone else, and worry.

Meanwhile, (K"H*) my brother-in-law has a new lease on life, a new kidney, not an easy find in your sixties, and my father, although gasping for breath, has a fistula and with the help of dialysis, could live for many more years. My grandson, an infant, has a heart that is whole. The surgeon who sewed it up is a doctor without borders who does this surgery on 13 year olds in impoverished villages, children who have not, until their surgery, lived a not-blue day in their lives.

We've had many new babies in the family, and marriages.

We have this idea, in my culture, that it's all decided, everything that happens to everyone in the world is decided on the Jewish New Year, a holiday that rolls around in September or October, depending upon the lunar cycle. We take off time for the holidays, look deeply into ourselves, our behavior, the things we've done, that which we haven't done, and we apologize, mainly to one another, for our greatest deficits, which we feel are communal, social. Then, ten days later, we fast for twenty-five hours, face our King, own up to our garbage, vow to do better, and hope for the best.

But since everyone else reviews their year at the end of December, some of us do this, too. We look back to look forward, as the snow falls and the temperatures drop into the single digits.

And it's New Years.

To you and yours, may it be happy, healthy, safe, and full of love,

therapydoc

*K"H means, basically, the evil eye should leave you alone.

Friendship Interruptus

It sound silly, but isn't as silly as it sounds. Friendship is sensitive, and it's those interruptions, past, present, and future, that can make it so ridiculously hard. A can't live with it, can't live without it thing.

But that's not the point of the hottest study at UCLA, which is worth talking about, if only for a minute, because I'd like to get back to that friendship interruptus thing. Gale Berkowitz's piece waxes poetic on friends (thanks J and others for the link). We get it, 100%, those of us who are female, about friends:

They shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage, and help us remember who we really are.

They help us remember our past, shape our identities, fill in gaps in other relationships, and more. Laura Cousin Klein, PhD co-author of the study believes there is a biological reason that friends serve us well when we're under stress. Fight or flight, the old stress response paradigm, is a gross simplification.

Actually, cognitive therapists have known that since the fifties, but okay.

I'll paraphrase:

. . .when the hormone oxytocin is released as part of the female stress response, it buffers "fight or flight. Females don't run, and they don't fight, they turn to tending the children and socializing with other women, which in turn stimulates greater oxytocin production, which further counters stress by producing a calming effect.

So it's pretty important that we do what is natural to us, arrange chick flick night.

Or at least lunch. Or dinner. Guys, apparently, because they're guys, don't get this warm and fuzzy oxytocin high because they are guys and their testosterone mitigates its effect, anyway. Whereas estrogen, the hormone that makes females softer in so many ways, might enhance it.

It does seem that men relate less intimately to one another, although some of us would suggest that this is a response to internal homophobia. Whereas the female brain gets warm and fuzzy at the very thought of shmoozing with other female brains, guys get prickly.

Even guys can be intimate, however, we know that, and we see it quite a bit in cyberspace where it's safe and there's less fear of exposure, thanks to anonymity. Having that sixth degree of separation, male bloggers are just like female bloggers, and master whatever intimacy fears they might otherwise face in life stuck being guys.

The study could be interpreted as a biological proof, the one that some of us have been looking for, that women, as a group, are truly superior in fundamental ways. We certainly score better on social report cards.

Can't wait for the comments. I'm ducking.

But you know it's much better to cry with your girlfriends than to stuff your feelings or throw back the Jack with the guys! Well, some of us think so.

All this and Jeffrey Zaslow's story (WSJ, Sat-Sun) about the Ames Girls. Eleven (now 10) women from Iowa have remained close friends for over thirty years. And they didn't stay in Ames, Iowa, either. They kept the mojo working from afar.

I love so many things about this story, but mainly hate that I don't have this, a minyan* of close childhood friends. Mr. Zaslow finds it marvelous, too, that these "girls" stayed a cohesive social unit, for he spent a good deal of time with them to research his book. The book documents their friendship and may imply that the magic that keeps the Ames girls together has something to do with having no issue with the label girls. Whatever the secret, maybe it's a private school or a church thing, I haven't read the book, or all of the article to be absolutely honest here, whatever the reason, we're jealous.

Because it's true that the people we grow up with are the ones who remember. They remember our parents when our parents were young. They remember how we looked, how we behaved. They're the ones who suffered at our sides or yakked with us on the phone until daybreak when our teachers embarrassed us, or boyfriends dumped us, or our parents spleened us or screamed at one another, shaking the rafters. So having friends around ten, twenty, thirty years later is a blast to the past, every time you meet up. Old friends refresh the old pages.

Now really. Why don't all of us have a group of ten or eleven best friends?

Families on the move are partially to blame. The army brats whose parents have to pick up and move to serve Uncle Sam cart their kids from city to city, post to post. And those brats (how I hate that word) sometimes attend upwards seven to ten schools before they graduate high school. The government should find another way, seriously, to stop this slam dunk to socio-emotional health. Friendship interruptus is in the mental health equation, no question.

Poverty is, too. Parents one step ahead of the wolves tend to be on the move. Bye, bye, class of 2010. We're heading south where it's warmer, west where nobody knows our name.

And then there's normal adolescence, for so many of us. Those of us who suffer from being normal might behave in unorthodox ways as adolescents, one might even say anti-social ways. We get depressed and withdrawn, difficult to socialize with, but we also get curious. And when that happens we want to know what other people are like, want to befriend new kids, ditch the old.

Dropping old friends was an occupational hazard for some of us, not only as adolescents, but as younger children, too, and is thought to be part of the developmental growth process. It isn't smart to ditch people, but some of us do it anyway, can't cop to that girl scout motto, Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver and the other gold.

And we know which ones are gold.

And when the new kids get boring there are others to replace them, there always are. So kids moves on, socially, don't always care or look back. Until ten, twenty, thirty years later they stop and say, Where did everybody go?

Moving from one peer group to another can be painful to the ones left in the dust. Teenagers, ten-year olds, don't have farewell lunches or termination discussions. They just drop each other. It's assumed if I don't call you that I don't like you anymore. It's painful and it's mean, but this is how kids are.

We have to watch this in the blogosphere because as our social circles grow, it is inevitable that bloggers will feel "dropped" when in fact there is no disrespect, no one is being dissed, it just happens, too many friends, not enough time to read one another's blogs and still write our own and occasionally wash the floor.

But we kind of know that our hearts are still in it, the social game, and we feel the love. We're not dropping anyone and the blogrolls roll on. But we're no Ames Eleven.

So much of this cut-off stuff is in the very fabric of our complicated realities, so much so that parents should warn children:

Life hurts, and it starts with friendship.

There are other reasons that groups of eleven are rare. To even establish such a group implies inclusiveness, the polar opposite of insulting exclusivity, and we need some social maturity, lots of it, and basic human kindness to keep adding members to clubs. Don't you kind of wonder, Who did the Ames Girls leave out?

Once I joined a choir and it was fabulous. We all so enjoyed it until, one day, a new singer joined us, and this person sang so loudly and so off-key that it was impossible to keep the choir going. We had to stop singing, the director had to make up a reason she couldn't work so that we could all save face. But that's social maturity, if not to the extreme, the nth degree.

Social maturity in friendship, keeping friends, having friends, is hard to muster up if you grow up in a family that is incredibly dysfunctional, chock full of neglect and/or violence. It's more likely that you'll be shy and insecure, that you'll develop some bad habits, too. Some of us become aggressive, like our parents, or jealous, insensitive, dependent, avoidant. These are casualties of having lived in emotional chaos.

And we don't want to invite anybody home, let alone eleven others.

In this position it's pretty obvious why having friends feel like a stretch. Friendship requires trust, more than a little risk. The skittish among us don't have that. So we don't have the friends to lose, let alone drop. And those of us who learn to be aggressive sometimes garner aggressive friends. And when we outgrow the tough skin, when we want out of the gang, well, there goes the Top Eleven.

Which brings us to another top-notch way to kill friendship. Get sober. An addict who loses the desire to hang around with people making love to their bottle of beer, will lose them, the beer drinkers. There might have been a history of years of drinking and smoking, shooting and sniffing and BAM! a person decides this isn't the healthiest way to live and off to a Twelve Step meeting he goes and never looks back.

Well, maybe not never.

And don't tell me they weren't good people, the people making love to the bottle of beer or the stick or whatever. Just because people have an addiction doesn't mean they have no feelings, have to be thrown away. I know it feels that way at the time, and surely they threaten sobriety and the whole nasty episode has to happen. But then they're gone, and for all we know, maybe they're sober, too. And you can't repair a relationship just because you say I'm sorry. (check out theSecondRoad.org for more on getting sober and making new pals in the process)

I just hate cut-offs, is all.

Do we have to keep going? Do we have to talk about the fact that as soon as women get engaged they gradually begin to dump their single friends? Or when they have their first baby, or first set of babies, they don't even know where they left their phones, let alone remember your phone number? Or how when they get sick and who doesn't, in one way or another, or depressed, they get introverted and hide, and sometimes, don't you hate this, some people have the audacity to die, to abandon everyone, not just us, to suicide, no disrespect to those who are no longer living. They got sick or were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Or went off to war.

So what I'm saying here is that we're drawn to stories about the Ames Girls, and to Sex in the City, and Friends, and the women on Desperate Housewives, I should say some of us are, because these female clusters have figured it out, how to make and how to keep friends, and we know, at least those of us who are female, how fan blanking tastic it is to have them.

I'm sure there's already a Hallmark holiday in the making to honor friendship. But for those who have lost them, the feeling is going to be bad, just like it is on Mother's Day, because of that oxytocin deficit, and half the time, seriously, nobody's saying goodbye

therapydoc

*minyan rhymes with gin-gone is a quorum of 10 Jewish men.

Complaining

The Jewish word for complaining, you might know, happens to be kvetch-ing.* But you don't have to be Jewish, obviously, to kvetch.

There's therapeutic value in it, and paid listeners spend the good part of their day in pursuit of the productive kvetch.
Meaning, if a patient can complain to a professional and get results, either feel better or resolve a problem, then it's probably good for that person to kvetch, and a therapist is doing a real service, just listening. It's what we do, among other things.

Even better is to orchestrate it so that the patient complains to someone in the family, builds an alliance there.

But forget about the therapeutic setting. Anybody with a friend or partner can complain just because it feels good. I suppose in certain religious circles this is frowned upon if it presents as gossip or involves casting of negative aspersions.

But let's not get all spiritual here. I'm pretty sure there are ways to complain to friends and lovers that are less gossipy or damaging than others. Talk to your local clergy-person if you have any religious questions about the right way to complain. Generally, you're allowed to do it in therapy to solve a problem, serve peace in relationships.

This comes up because a blogger wrote me to complain that he had blogged and let it all out, told a story that clearly felt good to tell. He disguised the people he wrote about as best he could, but worried that he had embarrassed someone.

He asked me, "Well, isn't the therapeutic value of getting it out of my system worth the slim possibility that I might have embarrassed someone, who, by the way, really injured me?"

Uh, no.

It's not going to be therapeutic in the long run if you're already feeling guilty about it. Maybe pull the post.

That's how kvetch-ing comes up in the blogging world. (I can just feel collective guilt festering all over the blogging universe right now as you read this.)

In the therapeutic world and the world of friendship, marriage or partnership, one person's proclivity to stuff it, as opposed to complain to, communicate with another, can be a problem.** Some people really do need to work things out, perhaps talk out loud, feel heard to feel better. But they won't. Or can't. People don't all have the words, or the clarity, vision fogged over with fears of exposure or conflict.

For some of us, complaining as children just wasn't allowed. Only the parents had the right to complain. So we learned not to. For other people, complaining feels horrible, like being exposed, raw, so out there, so vulnerable to criticism, rejection, and abandonment.

And then there are those of us who don't see that it will make any difference, complaining, don't think it will help, who can see kvetch-ing doing more harm than good, risking intimacy that will ultimately be lost, potentially create conflict, hurt feelings.

The emphasis on this blog, regarding communication, has always been

(a) You don't take away an umbrella until it stops raining.

In other words, if that's a person's psychological defense, not talking, you don't take it away. You don't make someone talk, you can't make someone talk, until that person feels safe in the relationship. Then it will be a natural thing, talking. Maybe. With a little work here.

And

(b) You want it to stop raining because intimacy, not distance, is valued in a relationship.

To me, one of the advantages of a committed relationship is that it lends itself to intimacy. Same bag of bones every night. You know each other's stressors, you know each other's outlets. You know if it's icecream or beer, and encourage watermelon. You encourage one another to share, because at the end of the day, only the two of you are living under that same roof, only the two of you can solve your problems. And if you have children, it is the two of you who will be accountable for their upbringing.

And the sharing feels good when you aren't punished for what you have said, rather have been rewarded with understanding. That feels very good, especially if it is a safe bet.

So we can talk all we want to our friends, complain all we want on the Internet, but if we have a significant other, the real juice is the emotional intimacy of complaining to him, to her. It's painful to listen to it, that's for sure, so often. We're tempted to feel we have to fix it, and sometimes we can, sometimes we can't. Problem solving, in relationships, is a different type of intimacy, requires different skills.

But listening is really the first order of business, the first course of intimacy, served up exclusively with a helping of words from someone else, words that fall, until further notice, on silence.

You notice, you really do, if someone isn't sharing with you, if a person is holding back, has things to say and isn't saying them. If you're sensitive, you can tell you're the only one who has been talking lately.

And for people like me, who don't like to let it all out, who would much rather read newspaper headlines aloud to bide the time, or tell Jewish jokes, or ask what's new in the community, the treatment is really less complicated than it looks. You tell people like us,

Just give me a little. Throw me a crumb. I won't ask questions, and I won't try to fix it. Just a couple of words, will do. Let me in. What's going on in there?

If you're lucky, and if you really refrain from trying to fix it or asking questions, it's likely you'll get some results.

Then maybe, if you're lucky, you'll feel you know this person. You can stop complaining about the lack of emotional intimacy.

therapydoc

* A kvetch is someone who complains all the time, but we use it as a verb, as in, lemme kvetch.

**This is where some of us have what is called interface, and have to talk to our therapists or push our finger nails into our palms to keep ourselves from saying something egregiously idiotic like, "ME TOO! I CAN'T COMPLAIN, EITHER!"

Intimate Opportunities

No, not what you think.

I'm thinking about opportunities to connect and simply be with people, the ones that will make a difference years from now.

Here's a typical decision.

My d-i-l, an up and coming therapy doc, did something really wonderful. She's young and idealistic and she put herself on a registry that searches for people who agree to willingly go through dialysis to become stem cell donors. Plasma phoresis can be a brutal procedure. They stick a catheter in your vein for hours, perhaps in the neck. But there are types of leukemia that respond to healthy stem cells, and it's a rare opportunity to save a life. Her DNA made a match.

D-i-l went through dialysis for 6 hours, and days of hormonal preparation that made her sick and crazy (she felt a little off, she tells me). My son was with her the whole time.

It wasn't easy and it wasn't risk-free. Without the procedure, the person she matched (and she has no idea who this person is) had little to no chance of survival. We don't know if it worked, either.

So why do I mention this? Not to brag, although I'm incredibly proud of her and fall off my chair at the thought of these generous, wonderful, idealistic kids.

I mention it because healthy people her age (early 20's) are really independent. They'll tell you, I don't need you with me, and maybe they don't, but if you're not there when they need you, any procedure, even a minor procedure, can be a pretty lonely, empty, scary experience.

But the default for young people is often, "I don't need you, I'm cool." And sometimes they are, sometimes they're not.

If you offer therapy to a kid in college, it's likely the kid will say, "I don't need it." By the way, it's a GREAT time to get therapy, college, if you're lucky enough to have the opportunity to go to college.

It can be a real relief to parents when a kid says "I don't need it" when it comes to therapy And parents who are still on the fence about the actual benefits of therapy will say, "Okay, good."

You know what I say, right? Every one needs it, at least for a little while, at some point or perhaps several points in their lives, if only to deal with everyone else. So on that score, push the idea with your kid. Tell the kid to just go, try it.

Kids in their early twenties, even in their teens, maybe at any age, want to be independent and should be encouraged to be independent. But almost all of us have one foot in childhood, even if it's an unconscious foot.

That piece of us that's in childhood wants company. It's a healthy, social piece, assuming it's not a whiny, overly dependent personality disorder (we'll get to those another day).

I remember once telling my mother I'd stay overnight with her when she was in the hospital. She said, "No way, I don't need it," but she thanked me for it. I'm not patting myself on the back. I feel I'd have been a snail not to have stayed. It's not a question of being a good person. It's a question of quality time and being there for someone.

But back to young adults. When your kid is going through a medical procedure and tells you, "I can handle it alone; you don't have to be there with me," don't buy it. Be sure that SOMEONE in the family or perhaps a close friend is there. It doesn't have to be you, but someone.

If it is you, it's an opportunity. It's one of those snapshot memories you two won't ever forget. Remember the time. . .?

Delicious.

(As I was writing this I ditched the computer to get a cup of coffee and caught an NPR story on daughters pulling away from mothers during adolescence, and I thought how that ties into this, how it's not so easy to create these memories when your kid is itching for separation. So for sure, we'll have to talk more on that another time.)

But working people like me feel we've missed too many opportunities for intimacy with our kids. ANY opportunity you have to be alone with your kid that gets you out of the everyday hum drum is something to really consider seriously, if they'll let.

Sometimes you have to construct the opportunities, create them, take a kid on vacation overnight even, alone with you, perhaps. The time together doesn't have to be a medical procedure. Any time will do. Family vacations are fine, but they're also potentially really stressful.

Going fishing works, or to a spa maybe even. It can be hard to find a good hook.

In my family, going out and buying a new marine fish made for intimate snapshot memories. Picking it out, bringing it home. You bring fish home in plastic bags. Plastic bags can break.

These kinds of memories go in the What We Won't Ever Forget Book of Life.

You could be writing it right now maybe, at least working on the intro.

Copyright 2007, therapydoc

Recreational Intimacy

The 5 Types of Intimacy. People tend to have very fixed ideas on the subject of intimacy, but there are at least five types. It’s not all touchy feely, which is good, because many people are very uncomfortable with direct, romantic expressions of love.

But because there are five kinds, relationships that are light on one, two, or perhaps even more of these varieties suffer. You sort of have to have it all, to have it all. Lacking any one of them can be the reason a committed relationship dissolves. And unfortunately, it's not at all easy to have them all.

We'll start with recreational intimacy. Counselors sometimes suggest that couples go out and find something they like to do together. Not bad advice, but it's not good, either. It's like saying, You guys go out and find a movie you both like.  There may not be such a thing.  And the process of finding one might be more trouble than it is worth, a prelude to an argument.

But the doc says, Do this.  So you choose one, but by the time you make the decision you are late for the  7:45 and didn't get tickets online. You fight the crowds, get frustrated and bored. You can do it, maybe, but why?

What these counselors should suggest is that you work less at finding something you both want to do and more at doing something together. Anything. The catch is having fun. The rule on an assignment like that is to keep it light, try to make it fun. You can still go to a depressing movie, but only if it’s good and one of you can do an imitation later.

I tell people not to worry about both of you liking an activity. Whatever you choose to do, it can be something one of you likes and the other totally hates, as long as it's not morally objectionable, disgusting or distasteful.

Games, sports, or the arts work nicely. Even pinball at a bowling alley. This is a personal bias, I'm going to admit. It could be that I'm showing my age, but video games don't seem to be as interactive as pinball used to be. Pinball was a whole body experience (a little more sexy, I think), the visual field more expansive. You had a whole machine to work. 

Regardless of the game, the partner who doesn't like the activity still has to have fun for a couple of hours, make himself have fun. Two hours is plenty of fun. It won't kill you.

Another misconception about intimacy is that you have to spend a lot of time at it. It isn’t a quantitative thing. Spending six hours trying to enjoy a Saturday night might be less worthwhile than a half an hour a night every night during the week. We really are talking quality time.

But you hate Gin Rummy? Too bad. You have to either make it fun somehow or pretend to be having fun. Pretending is one of life's most unselfish challenges. Don’t think of it as being someone you're not. Think of it as becoming someone you want to be. If it’s okay for your spouse, it’s okay for you. Of course if it's morally objectionable, then it's not okay for either of you.

Pretend you're Gerry of Ricky and Gerry (gender nonspecific). Ricky has picked an activity that Gerry hates, golf. Gerry has the hard part-- not-- bursting Ricky's bubble.

Gerry has to think, Ricky wants me to do this. Ricky wants us to have fun together doing this. How can I make it happen? The answer is:

By not complaining. By laughing as much as possible. By letting go of thinking how dumb you look when you miss the ball. By thinking of how funny you look—it's good to laugh at yourself! Try to remember how happy Ricky is that you are there, just chasing after a little ball. Complement Ricky on how well he plays. Let Ricky teach you and don’t get defensive.

Ricky, has a big responsibility here, too. Ricky can't make you feel like a clod. Ricky has to ingratiate him/herself because Gerry is doing what Ricky wants. Gerry is sucking it up, and Ricky will have to do that next time. Sorry, Rick.

Thinking like this is a challenge, no doubt. But it is just this sort of (1) empathy and (2) fake it 'til you make it that is the key to intimacy. It's hard to be happy doing something that doesn't naturally make us happy. It's unnatural by definition and yet. the pay back is amazing.

Recreational intimacy can be hard even when you're doing something you both love to do, too, primarily because the other types of intimacy interfere with the process of your interactions with one another.

That’s why all five plates, all five types of intimacy, have to be twirling at the same time..

Copyright 2006, TherapyDoc