Stumbling in the Man Box

I'm watching TV with my mother, who can't hear and has long stopped caring.

"Just put on Channel 7," she says.

I've learned to just put on Channel 7.  Nobody ever died of too much Wheel of Fortune.

What I find interesting is the way that disabled in so many physical capacities, she makes the best of each bad situation, even hopeless situations. So she can't hear, but she can watch.

Later on, in my home, I'm watching HBO's The Newsroom. Don Keefer (Thomas Sadoski), a news producer, is struggling with his office chair. He is on the floor in his office, has dissembled the legs, the wheels, and is changing them so that the chair will glide easier. He tells whoever it is that catches him at this that he is mechanically inclined. Later in the show we see him at his desk, seated very low. He looks like a child, too small for the man-size furniture. He leans back and the entire chair falls apart. He makes the best of a bad situation, but then, he could also have asked for help.

Different scenes, of course. My mom would ask for help, although she never liked it particularly, asking. But she always did when she needed it, and helping her, as children, developed character. (After all, we did nag for the dog, even if she was the one who asked for help walking him.)

If there was something anyone could do for my mother's hearing loss the other day, she would have asked for it, but at her stage of the game, it is the least of her problems.  Don, in The Newsroom, won't ask. It is a matter of pride. He'll stumble along and make the best of a bad situation, like my mother. His situation.

As a man, Don is stuck with certain, shall we say, man-isms.  A guy can fix his own anything.  A guy is capable, doesn't need to read the instructions, either.

One particle board kit and this myth about the necessity of instructions, bites the dust.  FD, who once stumbled in the man box, refusing to read instructions, put together a cupboard for me, a great deal, too, if a person doesn't mind hauling hundreds of pounds of particle board. Even with a good dolly, there is much muscle work here.

Before this new stage of life, the one in which instructions become valuable, deep middle age, he wouldn't do that, referred to the paper and print. The challenge is in figuring out the kit without instruction, without help. But now FD reads first, during, and last. That said, he won't be buying another this large and this heavy again. We humans of both sexes  are educable.

For Whom Would You Like to Make the World A Safer Place

We learn all kinds of things, and unlearn them, sometimes.

For example, we could say that not reading instructions, not asking for help, is learned behavior. The role models of boys in their Wonder Years, the heroes, the mentors, inadvertently or sometimes consciously buy into machismo (a word on Wheel of Fortune yesterday). They learned machismo when they identified with role models, other men, usually fathers but sometimes uncles, grandfathers, or foster parents.

Therapists often hear explanations about why people parent the way they do.

"I do what my parents did.  We didn't have books.  I parent like my father parented me, and I turned out okay."

Like ducks who follow the first thing they see after they hatch from an egg, we follow our parents and early guardians, at least until adolescence, and even after that, much is cemented into those neuro-pathways. What we do, what we believe, doesn't just die with childhood.

Assume, then, that children with role-models who freely display rage, who vent to children, break walls, for example, slap, crack the chandelier with their decibels all for a bad report card, model violence.  The role model might say that it is all for the cause, the edification of the child-- grades are important--they mean so much--but it is what it is.

So I went to a conference about stopping violence, always relevant.  I go to as many workshops like this as I can because some of the presenters are so incredibly talented and I always learn something. This one was presented by Up2USQSI.  You can find them on Facebook. Strangely enough, while visiting my mother in the hospital a few weeks ago, a rabbi stepped into her room. I thought  saw her there.

Rabbi Eileen introduced herself and began to discuss my mom, kind enough to include mom in the conversation, not talking around her. I recognized Eileen immediately as the woman who spoke up the most at the Up2Us workshop. She answered those thoughtful questions at circle time. She owned it, that she was there, in this other role, social worker, and effusively Liked the workshop, asked me if I learned anything that Thursday morning.  I said, "Why yes, of course.  The Man Box."

At the workshop, as a group, participants threw out adjectives about what it means to be a man.  Below is our Man Box. Woe to be in a box like this.  Not so good, being a guy.  I've always been thankful to be a woman, except when lifting something heavy.

The presenters, school teachers interested in changing the world, one workshop at a time, do it by teaching kids to shout out when others demean women, usually with verbal violence. They also teach professionals like me, people like us. Men don't have to identify with all the wrong things. They need not be joking at the expense of women, at the expense of anyone, and when someone else does, it can be labeled for what it is, not cool.

Not my job

I had to think, what does NMJ mean? (from the funnel), because I didn't pay enough attention at the workshop.  Not My Job, right?

But it is.

therapydoc

Making It Our Job

When She Leaves You and You're Sad

A young  man in his thirties, the foreman of a construction crew, sits across from me crying.  The woman he wanted to marry has left him for another man. Tears are streaming down his well-shaven face, his beautiful blue eyes, red.* A woman leaving him is the ultimate abandonment, but he is learning this tall tidbit about himself for the very first time.

We've been talking about his issues for a few months, his history, mainly, the many things he has done that he wishes he had not. We can blame his father for being a poor example, or his mother for assuming he was fine without much help from her. I see this in a lot of men. Mothers assume it isn't necessary to talk to them about private matters, that a nonjudgmental discussion of the real boy and his identity is an invasion of privacy.

We look for diagnoses, as if these will help, but all we find is an emptiness, and a loneliness that had never been discussed with either parent.  None of the people in his life ever discussed life, really, and how to be a real person, the one that people remember for the good, the special. There is a place in our heads that should shout out about what is right, what is good, what will live on when we are gone. That place, that sense of self is reason to care for the self, to nurture that very special being that we refer to as "I". It can't be empty.

My mother gave us a false alarm this past month. I say false, knowing she isn't out of the woods, but she was so sick that she asked that we write her eulogy because she wanted to edit it before she died.  She didn't like how my father's funeral went, I'm pretty sure. We roasted my dad.

So what do you do when you are in that position?  If you are a writer, you begin to write, although if you are me, you do it in your head. The words never hit the keyboard. They don't have to, either, because you're picturing yourself speaking and it is way too much work to add the pregnant pauses that are compulsory at a funeral.  Adding a pause to an essay feels so contrived, like writing a screenplay. So much about my mother gives me pause.

Not surprisingly, although there are things to say that are interesting and certainly descriptive, what popped to the forefront of the "eulogy" were superlatives!  Sure, my mother isn't perfect, but it is mostly herself she makes suffer. There is so much wonderful in her fairly old soul that it all surrounded me like flowers in the spring at an indoor arboretum. They burst out everywhere.

And I realized, listening to my hungry friend, the one who feels so empty because he has been abandoned, that this is what happens to me as I work as a therapist. The patient sits in his death-defying all but comatose situation, and all I can see is wonderful, or potential for that, and I nod and validate what he sees.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for the moment that he can walk into his own arboretum.

therapydoc

*Most blue collar workers shower and change into fresh clothes before therapy. Kids without jobs, no. They could be in pajamas.  Not that that's bad, but it does say something.

The Origins of Abandonment Anxiety

He's in there somewhere, being four years old.

The blanket is the original Hide and Seek tool, and everyone loves Hide and Seek, which is surely all about working out abandonment issues.

My daughter and her partner took a work vacation to a far away land, and FD and I volunteered to babysit for a several days.  That meant I was a single mother for the first time in a long time.

FD entertained the three boys by day, when he could, but the life of a family practitioner is defined by paperwork and long nights at the office, figuring out what in the world Medicare wants from him. Our lives have always been this way. Bring it on Affordable Health Care Act.

Parenting, of course, is like riding a bike.  So the ways I had with my own children carried over, bridged a twenty-five year gap.  Prone to giving children as much space and as much intimacy as they oddly indicate they need works best for me, communicates respect and understanding. We had no problems, during these past ten days, with the exception of dangerous open drawers and cabinets, as well as an occasional toilet that needed attention.

One night I'm putting the littlest-on- legs to sleep, following the routine, one that mirrors the routine I had with his mother. Either young parents have some type of subliminal unconscious memory, or people in their thirties really do remember the original bedtime drill. Ours works like this:

dinner,
bath,
pajamas,
books in bed, a story,
a prayer,
eyes closed.

The dim light from the hallway makes it hard to read, but is a soporific. The little guy tires early, but that doesn't mean he wants to sleep.

I stay.  Meaning, just because the routine ends doesn't mean it is time to go. I read my own book or nap, play Scrabble on my phone, check Facebook.  I use this time in the dark to plan the next  day, too, or obsess about my problems, stretch, do leg lifts at the end of his bed.  He trusts that I will stay with him. He wants me to stay with him. He has won this war, the Stay With Me War.  We even have a song, one sung a hundred years ago, passed on to future generations.

Stay with me.
Don't go away.
Stay with me.
HaShem (God) Please stay!
Stay with me.
Don't go away.
Stay with me. Please stay.

Fairly simple, and children of all ages seem to get it. The tune is from Damn Yankees, pretty sure. Can't remember which original song.

Quite contrary to the Ferber method, isn't it, this way to get kids to sleep. It is at odds, even, to the ghost method discussed elsewhere in this blog.  Ferber (and I haven't read the best seller, wish I wrote it, having used it so many years ago) upon hearsay seems to recommend that at a certain age perhaps whenever a baby has object constancy,* you let the kid "cry it out" in a crib.

They don't usually head-bang, babies, and if they do, need rescuing. Crying it out merely express consternation at being alone. Adults do it, too. And when they realize there is no one coming to save the day, we all give up and go to sleep. We can flex our muscles very young, however, given that chance, as babies who have to deal with being alone, abandoned, and probably, because they are pre-verbal, mostly, in that first year, somehow forget the ordeal. Their little bodies, minds, remember however, and bedtime gets easier with every passing test.

This is great when they are captive, in cribs. When they appear in the family room and interrupt your show, their legs many inches longer, some of us feel they can be treated as ghosts. One partner says to the other,

 "I hear a ghost."

 And the other partner declares,

 "Well, if we ignore ghosts they go back to bed. If we pay attention to them then they won't go to bed. They will stay up and annoy us. So let's pay NO attention to this ghost. Pretend he's not there."  

This worked for me and FD and none of our offspring ever actually feared ghosts, so it kills two birds with one stone.

Makes sense, assuming no china is broken. At that age, Stay With Me is over, is counter-indicated, assuming a parent has done an emotional check in during those hours before the kids go to sleep, has heard a recap of the day, attended the child, really listened, did fake it, allotted Special Time, somehow banning other children, interruptions, from the airspace.

Ghost is another game of Hide and Seek, really, except the seeker won't play. But between, say, 9 months and 4 years, it is all about staying with the little tykes in their beds, or in the same room, and it can be for a long time, up to 90 minutes, crazy as that seems, two 90834's as we think of time in the therapy biz, quite a commitment. It probably only works for a therapist if she doesn't mind a longer day, or merely likes to relax in the dark, doze off to the sound of a pre-schooler complaining, chattering.  I've always liked this time, took no calls. And stayed.

Have the cup of water ready.

So here I am, in deep Routine with my grandson, only four years old, a sliver of my age, not statistically significant, waiting to see who falls asleep first.

Then, one night, while stretching to leave, the bed creaks too loudly. He opens his eyes, recognizes me, knows full well what is going on. He waves at me, dismissing me with his little hand, then closes his eyes again, as if to say,

 "You can go now."  

But I stayed.

therapydoc

* object constancy-- knowing someone, something, exists even if it isn't visible.  The Piaget test is a ball rolling under the sofa, whether or not the infant attempts to retrieve it.

Breasts and Other "Things"

Sorry, no pictures today.

(1)  Breasts first, naturally

I'm waiting outside for my ride one beautiful morning, and a woman dressed in black exits the building.  I catch a glimpse of her prominent chest as she passes by, and can't help but wonder if she wears black often to avoid attention to her more obvious features.

Men, I'm told, fantasize about breasts, revere them, and women do, too. Some also stare, jeer, and comment unnecessarily.

Some less-than-proud breast owners wish to reduce them, hot and inconvenient as they are, a source of back pain, the subject of much conversation, jest. Who can blame a woman for wanting to reduce?

It isn't the type of thing that dominates my thoughts, and even as a pre-teen, as other girls began to "blossom" and I lagged behind, it didn't bother me. My body image wasn't wonderful (most of us haven't a wonderful body image at any age) but it wasn't bad, that young bod, and got me where I needed to go. People seemed to like me, and when that is the case, most other things don't matter so much, depending upon the degree of most other things. So I don't remember dwelling on these diminutive aspects of myself.

But girls who develop fast and furiously do think about them, initially, perhaps, with pride in what they are given, the design, the substance. Later, however, they might become mortified and annoyed, especially if anyone paws at them, especially if they suffered childhood sexual abuse, not that large-breasted adolescents are more or less at risk.

There's a song by Argent that might help us here, Hold your Head Up. (It is embedded in a second post because I couldn't figure out how to add it to this one.)

Hold your head up, hold your head up, hold your head high. 

Doing that, holding our heads up, we thrust back our shoulders. And when we thrust back our shoulders, we thrust forward those parts in front that for some shall not be mentioned, and for others merit alternative names.

And yet not liking one's breasts, a disrespect of a kind, is a not just a minor body ego sabotage, but an extreme ego sabotage. Because if we can't hold our heads up, fearful of negative attention, our self-esteem is compromised, we are hiding, and hiding implies shame. We aren't helping how we appear to others, either, don't seem proud or confident. Not if we don't hold our heads up. So breast reduction can be essential to healthy living.

I was introduced to breast enhancement, the opposite pole on the redesign-your-body-part continuum, as a therapeutic issue, when a patient (others have followed) considered the procedure and thought the decision important enough to talk about with a mental health professional.

Before making that fateful, painful choice, as part of a decision-making therapy we go over the whys and the why-nots.

I'm finding that a woman who walks in thinking she wants bigger or shapelier breasts will walk out convinced it is a good idea, even more so if she is sure it is someone else who wants them. Women are quite sure that this will make them more attractive (someone has done a good job at this sale, often an older sister or mother) and heaven knows, nothing is more important at the moment.  As a therapeutic issue, it is rich, worthy of three visits minimum prior to making a decision to add hard plastic to an otherwise soft, malleable body part.

An even more intriguing phenomenon, one that goes in the why not basket, is that men have brought this up in therapy, too, men who are taken with particular women, but don't like the enhanced breasts, who don't think harder is better, don't appreciate a less natural form of female breast. They are disappointed when they realize this is what they will have to have and to hold for many years to come--  enhanced, but not exactly better, breasts.

And we can tell, I am told, that once we are onto this, even when a woman is dressed, for she undergoes the pain and suffering to look good in clothes, ironically enough, just as one can see when someone has had a "nose job".

FD, our resident physician tells me that when he sees two breasts, he sees two potential lawsuits.

(2) Anthony Weiner and Sexting

The National Organization of Women wants Anthony Weiner to withdraw from the gubernatorial race.  After all, he promised he would stop sexting and it has come to our attention that he has not.

One need not be a feminist to feel disappointment and even outrage following a leader's exposure as one who is caught sexting, literally with his pants down. Political hopeful Weiner continued to send erotic messages by phone, and they weren't to Mrs. Weiner, rather to better endowed women (it is likely) who saw him as a source of fulfillment of their own exploitative objectives, a source of jobs, likely, and desperate (we see them in this light) to engage in job interviews in this fashion.

Mr. and Mrs. Weiner were supposedly having marital problems at the time. He sexted under the name Carlos Danger, a handle that is fast becoming a hugely popular Facebook alias. (Thanks S.A., or Carlos, for that tip).

Mrs. Weiner is telling the press that she is standing by him. Conan jokes that this means standing over the computer as he "works".

David Letterman advises that before a public figure sexts,  he should ask himself ten questions, the most important:

"What could possibly go wrong?"

What's up with sexting, anyway?

Is it a reflection of a fabulous body ego, pride in a particular part, whichever the part may be, a type of narcissism that begs flattery? It would seem so!  A good body ego, not bad. Not looking for a reduction or an enhancement, just showing off. I enhance this all on my own. Look at me!

And yet, when we're asking for attention, Look at me! it is a sign that we need attention, not that we are psychologically strong and independent, mature, evolved, capable of seeing, focusing upon others. We're not finding our sense of self-satisfaction from within, we still need others to validate us.

Not that we ever won't need validation, but there are degrees of need. The whole point of praising, complimenting intentionally, at times to an extreme, especially while parenting, albeit modified to reflect reality, is that so many of us desperately need it, didn't get enough growing up. One who is sexting is communicating this:

  Ah, so this is one thing that I excel at-- I have a very nice whachamacallit. Let me show you. Is this not fine?

Oy vey.

The sociological impetus for the behavior, the cultural context, is that we are an age of anything goes. There is an old Cole Porter song, Anything Goes, about the roaring twenties that plays in my head on occasion.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking now heaven knows, anything goes. 

How I love that song. Anything goes means that truly, nobody cares what we do. And if they are judging, if they do care, there are enough of us who don't to balance the judgement. Having the freedom to do what we want, to make our own determination of what is right for us, real freedom, independence, is a wonderful feeling, and we have the right to the degree that the law allows, no small detail.

Expressing ourselves, living our own values, is what makes us the most interesting of all creations. It is hugely empowering, being human.

Not that we aren't judged by someone, and that won't feel good. Here I worry that I am judged at this moment for even writing about breasts, penises. We live in a country, most of us live in countries, with puritanical roots, a reason that people are outraged, why they care when their political representatives show the more savage sides of themselves.  Yet, the moral majority may not even be a majority anymore, and sex therapies thrive, meaning interest in sex thrives, better sex, more sex.

Does sexting enhance a sexual relationship? Someone will have to study it.  As instant porn, not love, and it enhances something.

The feminist perspective is that porn objectifies, takes away what makes us three dimensional, with thoughts, feelings, accomplishments, strips is of human, dignity. Arousal via objectification is not love; there is no heart, no allegiance in the act. It is all in the body. Much like seeing, wanting, then eating the perfect pizza. The pizza disappears when it is over.

Maybe we just don't want to know that our leaders gorge on anything, whether or not that is fair.Too much information.

therapydoc

Argent - Hold Your Head Up

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.

therapydoc

*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)..:

Outsmarting Anger

First a Story

It doesn't help that between patients this morning, my mother tells me that she's still sick.  It started Saturday, a bug, nothing terribly serious. She looked gray yesterday with make-up.

In anticipation that she might be unable to eat today, before pedaling off to the office at 8:00 a.m. I stopped by her apartment to check her pulse and drop off breakfast, lemonade and jello. That's all any of us get in our family when we have symptoms of gastroenteritis, ala FD's expertise.  It's worked for us forever.

Mom is out cold when I get there early in the morning. After all, no place to go, except maybe the ER, and she doesn't appear to need that. Four various combinations of patient family members at the office later, it is time to check on her again.

Chicago Bike Path June 2013 Spring

How do we interpret the events so far?

I'm stressed, although keeping my cool, not hurrying or riding recklessly to get to the patient.  In my town, although it is considered a biker's town (read flat), if you don't ride cautiously you won't ride for long.

And it is a beautiful day, even at noon when it is ordinarily hot and humid in July. Miraculously, yesterday's humidity is gone and there is a lovely breeze coming from the lake.  I feel that superiority only people who ride bikes can feel-- it doesn't get any better. Runners and sailors feel it, too.

Then guilt sets in for enjoying myself, and I wonder whether or not I love my mother enough.  Shouldn't I  be worried about her falling in the bathroom?

How is it that we humans can feel two very different things simultaneously, worry and happy.  Worry, I posit, is the intellectual feeling of that particular moment. Happy is more sentient, the emotional or physical feeling at the time. We don't get that many great-weather-days in Chicago, so happy overrides worried.

Most of my ride is through parkland on paved paths. Mayor Daley, before Rahm Emanuel succeeded him, made sure bike riders, power walkers, buggy pushers, toddlers on Big Wheels, and he himself, a bicycling enthusiast, could traverse several miles without stopping at a traffic light. .

But once out of the park my last city mile is all traffic, and I have to be more careful, the Sunday drivers are out. Not that there aren't bike paths on the city streets, there are, so technically there should be no problem. Blocking a bike path warrants a steep hundred and fifty dollar fine. Even more, $500 and up, $2000, rumor has it, for those who (a) don't look before they open their car doors or (b) engage in the sport of picking off bike-riders this way. We are a sports town.

So imagine my surprise (not really) that the rules are violated. The first car that blocks my way sends me into traffic, but gets a pass. A few blocks later, a Chevy driver, his elbow hanging out of the driver's window, cell phone attached to his ear, hears me assert,

"You might get a big fine parking in the bike lane."

I'm not exactly a citizen-police type, and in more sane, less stressful moment would never have done this. Blogging about it, btw, one way of working it out. Ours is something like my exchange with the dog people in the park, the ones who used to let their dogs run loose. See that ecosystem post).  The Chevy driver, as I peak at him and ride off, isn't an elegant guy. His belly is hanging over his jeans and his tee-shirt is covered in sweat. Blurting to him is a mistake, we'll see.

He sneers at me as I pass,

"Shut up." A nasty guttural tone. 

I ride off, look back as he shouts the "B" word at me.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day in the neighborhood, won't you be mine.

The crazy thing is that I even considered turning around to explain myself, wanted to tell him that this in his best interest, respecting the law.  But now I have to worry that he may vengefully come after me, veer into my space, knock off that little old lady on her way to take care of an even older little old lady.

I worried so much that I found myself looking back to the point of disorientation, danger, and at one point hopped onto the sidewalk, yes, a violation.

What you need to know:

Outsmarting Anger- Joseph Shrand, Leigh Devine

Occasionally we talk self-help here. It can't just all be about me.  Dr. Joseph Shrand and Leigh Devine, MS, authors of the lovely little book, Outsmarting Anger, might use the story as a teaching example. They would tactfully suggest that I sublimate anger, surely a character trait that will sabotage my sanguine nature in the end.  One day I will blow up for nothing, or displace my anger toward the wrong person, someone who did nothing wrong except maybe be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Oh! That is what happened, although we might not call my suggestion to respect the bike lane a technical blow-up.

The doctors would be right, probably. But I'm too out of touch with my anger to say.

Anger, we learn from Outsmarting Anger, is the emotion that follows a threat. A threat is someone or something that might compromise our resources, residence, or relationships.  For this lesson alone, the book is on a Number One recommendation for anger management connoisseurs, and who isn't one.

The fellow in the dirty tee, by swearing, threatened my sense of safety, and my resources (the road). I feared for my life, too, my relationship with me.  As you know, fear, an arousal emotion, is a close relative of anger. Shrand and Levine explain how the two connect.  Unconsciously or consciously we fear a potential loss based upon our sensory perception. Then we recognize (cognate) the threat in the form of the other's anger. We respond to protect ourselves in the best way we know how, in kind, with anger.

What else do the Harvard researchers tell us about anger?

Those who can't control theirs have a somewhat immature prefrontal cortex. This makes sense to me, for I've always told my addict patients the same thing, those who can't resist the impulse to use substances, eat too much, gamble, or have lots and lots of sex, little else on the brain.  In those moments of caving to the urge we use a primitive part of the brain, the one that isn't thinking, that operates on auto. Like a dog to a piece of meat.

Stop and think, is the intervention. See yourself as a homo sapien before beginning another cocaine binge. It really, really wasn't fun coming off of it the last time.  But memory for addicts is like memory to women who want to get pregnant again. Not bad the last time, was it, that labor and delivery! A walk in the park.

If our problems with anger are all about an immature prefrontal cortex, how can we hasten its maturity? (This interpretation of scientific findings is rudimentary, but who can stop?!)

Think of another mantra around here, that adults who hate themselves but want to change, should take heart. Adults are quite capable of quick change, more capable than children who may not yet have the biological maturity to abstract, save and review. We have the physiology in place, only need to flex our muscles, establish lasting connections between the brain and the extremities.

Not so fast.

The subtitle of Outsmarting Anger, 7 Strategies for Defusing Our Most Dangerous Emotion refers to a deceptively simple but very useful 7-step treatment plan:

recognize rage, envision envy, sense suspicion, project peace, engage in empathy, and communicate clearly (I tried!).

This sounds simple, but if any of this were simple then we wouldn't have to worry, would we, about people shouting expletives from car windows, wouldn't have to feel that anxiety, disruption, that lingering upset that is bundled with anger, and for some of us fear, for the rest of the day.

We don't have bumper stickers on bicycles, but if we did, life would be so much more fun.

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