Author Archives: oinsketta

How exposure to adversity effects the developing child

I’ve known people, my mother was one, who although very intelligent, open to considering new ideas, otherwise insightful, would rather kill you than acknowledge their own anger or the harm that was done to them in childhood.   Literally, repressing enough pain that they looked like they’d rather kill you than admit to being angry enough to smash someone.  

“We never fucking killed anyone, asshole!” they say as a chorus now in my mind, I can see their faces, not relaxed, calm or even, in some cases, recognizable as themselves.  

“‘Face twisted and contorted in hate,'” my sister quotes our father, and we both laugh.  It was a phrase we heard many times over the Rice-a-roni, flank steak and salad at our formica dinner table in Queens.  It was snarled, this peculiar phrase, and stated in exactly those words each time.  A very curious phrase to be repeated verbatim, if you think about it.

 “Twisted AND contorted,” my sister will say, and we’ll both have another chuckle.  But we were not chuckling then, during those terrible battles, nor am I chuckling about it now.  

My sister, working in a terrible school, is afraid to apply to move to a better one.  “It’s a concentration camp but I’m used to it,” she says, “and I don’t want to leave all my friends I’ve cried with for years.”  She agrees it would be better to make new friends she could celebrate with sometimes, instead of just crying and commiserating, but, in spite of being a master teacher, and someone who makes friends easily, she’s afraid to change schools.

“I’ve told your sister a thousand times what a wonderful teacher she is,” said my father on his deathbed, “but no matter how many times I tell her, it makes no difference.”  

“A thousand times?” I ask him.  

“Many, many times,” he says, remembering distinctly the time he told her that, at the assembly at the school where her class performed, and another one, more than one, besides.  To him that was a lot.  “I told her a thousand times,” seems to indicate that.  

“A thousand times,” says my sister with her trademark irony.  Not for nothing did she dub her father the D.U., The Dreaded Unit.  

“You are a whiner,” says an observer.  

“Do you hear me actually whine?” I ask the jury.  On closer inspection I notice the jury is composed of a couple of weatherbeaten mannequins, a decomposing cadaver, three skeletons and a few unidentifiable animals preserved by amateurish taxidermy and propped crudely on the chairs of the jury box.

The judge, for his part, is indescribably horrible.  Good thing this is a jury trial, I think to myself.

NOTES

How does it work? Well, imagine you’re walking in the forest and you see a bear. Immediately, your hypothalamus sends a signal to your pituitary, which sends a signal to your adrenal gland that says, “Release stress hormones! Adrenaline! Cortisol!” And so your heart starts to pound, Your pupils dilate, your airways open up, and you are ready to either fight that bear or run from the bear. And that is wonderful if you’re in a forest and there’s a bear. (Laughter) But the problem is what happens when the bear comes home every night, and this system is activated over and over and over again, and it goes from being adaptive, or life-saving, to maladaptive, or health-damaging. Children are especially sensitive to this repeated stress activation, because their brains and bodies are just developing. High doses of adversity not only affect brain structure and function, they affect the developing immune system, developing hormonal systems, and even the way our DNA is read and transcribed.

Nadine Burke Harris, MD

source

Expectations

“You expect too much, that’s why you get so cruelly disappointed,” he said.

“Perhaps,” she said, “but by expecting nothing, to minimize disappointment and keep alive the dim hope of a pleasant surprise, don’t you also sacrifice standards and ideals?”

“Maybe so, but keeping my expectations low is more realistic than expecting the rare excellent things that are so infrequently delivered,” he said.  

“Mmm,” she said, “it is a lot to expect to be heard, I suppose.  We talk most of the time to hear ourselves talk, because we need to speak, after all, not as a way to thoughtfully mull over what the person we are talking to has expressed.  It’s the way of the world.”  

“My work here is done, sister, you have grasped my essential point.  Until you get in the habit of expecting nothing, you will always be disappointed, given the way of the world, as you say.”  

“Mmm,” she said, “still, isn’t the way of the world also to wage war, to rage when frustrated, to expect the worst will always happen, to justify torture, to accept our powerlessness against any of the many gigantic, ruthless forces arrayed against us?  The way of the world, isn’t the profit of the privileged always bought at the expense of 98% of the world’s inhabitants?  At the price of the destruction of the planet we live on and the extinction of most of its life forms?”  

“My little socialist,” he said, smiling.  “Surely you don’t expect any of this to slow down in our life times.”  

“Nobody expected the end of child labor,” she said.  

“We fixed that by making international business treaties that allow child labor anywhere but here.  Many of our goods are still made by child slaves, and it keeps our prices down, I might add. You feel like paying $2,000 for an iPad made by workers protected by fair pay laws?”  

“Nobody expected the United States to do away with slavery.  Jefferson and Madison, who both owned slaves, were typical of the antislavery visionaries among our Founding Fathers, and yet…”  

“All it took was the bloodiest war in American history and a century of legally winked at lynching, et, voila, a small percentage of formerly enslaved people are now as free as anyone else who has enough money,” he said.  

“You make a good point, but it doesn’t swallow the larger point,” she said.

“You say most of us don’t have conversations where we really take to heart what the other person is saying.  That may be so, in one sense, in your experience.  Yet every day, a million times an hour, these kind of conversations are conducted by salesmen.  Salesmen must be adept and sensitive listeners and respond to what their potential customers want and need.   If a salesman doesn’t speak in a way that… why the look?”  

“What people do to earn their living is not the same as what we do in our most cherished private encounters,” she said.  “A psychiatrist may listen carefully and respond thoughtfully…” she began.  

“Oh, here we go!” he said, louder than before.  

“Why is that so threatening to you?” she asked.  

“Oh, boy!” he said.  “It’s not like we haven’t had this conversation ten or a hundred million times.   I get it, I get it.  I GET IT!”  

“What do you get?” she said.  

“Oh, no,” he said “I’m not going to go there, let’s not and say we did, I know you are but what am I?  Hoo boy, no, no, no.  Not again, never again.  You are singing a one note samba built upon a single note.  What is it with you?  Why, Dolores, why? I mean, really, Dolores, for fuck’s sake.”  

“No,” she said, “you are absolutely right.  Anyway, I brought you the cookies you asked for.  Here you are.  And I will try to get back here to visit you next week.”  

“That’s very nice of you, Dolores,” he said, getting up and taking his long coat off the table.  “Thank you so much for the cookies,” he said, “they look delicious.”  He shrugged into his coat, gave her a hug.  

“Anyway,” he said, “thanks for coming to see me.  It always makes me happy when you find the time.  Once again, you’ve made my day.”  

“And you mine,” she said, smiling happily.   He smiled back and turned to walk down the long, depressing hallway.  

In the elevator he took a long breath and shook his head.  “Some fucking world,” he said to himself, as he pulled up the collar of his coat and headed through the lobby and out into the street to hurry back to the office.

Illuminating Quote

“All violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.”

James Gilligan is a psychiatrist who spent years working with violent inmates and is the author of a series of books on our epidemic of violence.

Looking forward to checking some of these books out.

Untangling Knots — maybe

A few moments spent trying to untangle a knot about some ways people deal with the painful things that happen to them in life.  

For a child raised in an angry home, or a cold home, or in a place where little physical or emotional support is given, the options in adulthood may seem limited.  

The adult can say, as many do:  I turned out OK, all humans have problems, when I stay busy I don’t think about bad things, the past is the past, I’ve made a decent life for myself, people love and depend on me, I may have a temper, and my faults, but I’m basically a good person.  

The adult can say: what was done to me was wrong, no child should have to endure abuse, though millions unfortunately do.   The parents were perhaps incapable of doing better, but damage was done.  On a cellular level, it turns out.   Steps must be taken to acknowledge the harm done, identify it clearly, begin to heal real wounds that were inflicted.  That the infliction of these wounds was largely unintentional does little to mitigate their ongoing harmfulness.

Some adults will be infuriated by adults who take this second approach.   The idea of a person feeling entitled to revisit the wrongs done to them drives them into immediate anger.  They may begin, as my father always did, to reflexively compare any complaint to what they themselves have endured and, in their mind, surmounted.  This reflex short circuits empathy.   The new complaint will always emerge to them as a whine, a cavil, the sniveling of a weakling.  

That there are sniveling weaklings who justify their own failings, even brutality, by their victimhood, there can be no doubt.   Depending on which side you feel more drawn to, the very words I’m typing now could be seen this way.   Of course, unlike the child being hectored while held by the collar, you need not read another word of it, nor consider:  

To many people it seems preferable not to dwell on childhood injury.  To others, it’s a necessity, attempting to understand and overcome the harm and live a more intact life of integrity.  When I get that burning in my lungs during someone’s attempt to bully me, I know exactly why it happens.  Many others are not so “lucky”, or lucky, as the case may be.  

Then again, luck, I suppose, is largely a matter of luck. 

Truth and Reconciliation

Got a supremely annoying phone call from a former old friend.  I don’t know what the point of the call was, except to do the hideous dance one last time.  

In the course of an aggravating conversation he continually justified his unreliability, made oblique references to my over-sensitivity, laughed at one point when I was sputtering slightly to finish a point he’d interrupted a couple of times for shows of peevishness.  He was angry that I wouldn’t grant him it had been nervous laughter and not the passive aggressive enjoyment of a weak and angry person who had succeeded in making his antagonist mad.  How dare I presume he was being passive aggressive, how dare I not let him tell me why he was laughing while I was trying to control my anger!  

He told me I’d been vicious, in writing of his unreliability, characterizing it and him so uncharitably, no matter how hurt or angry I might have been.    “Sometimes writing can be much more vicious than speech,” he pointed out, “and the attempts to sublimate and refine the pain and anger are more damaging than just having out with it.  How hurtful do you suppose those things on the blahg were to me?”

I grant him the truth of that, as I grant him most things.  One thing I don’t grant is being shouted down when I am making a point.

“The first precondition of a meaningful apology is the recognition that the person apologizing has hurt the person he is apologizing to.  It is an acknowledgment of why the other person was hurt, a demonstration of empathy, followed by an admission that the behavior was wrong and some assurance of not repeating the hurtful behavior.   It’s like the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa…”  suddenly I’m cut off by a loud voice.

“That was about murder and a system of brutality!  Nobody was killed or brutalized here!  You have this overblown tendency to make everything like that, everything is Hitler to you,” he thundered pre-emptively dismissing any point I may have been about to make.

I managed to finish my point anyway, though my lungs hurt by the time I was through, and not because I’d been shouting for more than a few seconds to break back in to finish my point.  

It is a funny thing about experiences that smell similar to the childhood abuse I experienced– I feel a certain burning in my lungs whenever I’m near it.

“If you won’t acknowledge how hurtful what you did was, intentionally or not, how important the thing you promised to help me with was to me, how many hours, literally days, elapsed before you even got back to me….”

“I called you seven and a half hours later, how is it my fault you never got that missed call?  Why didn’t you keep calling me when you didn’t hear back?  I had bronchitis!  You wrote vicious things about me on the blahg.  You…”

An imaginary friend winks, tilts his long necked beer bottle to me.

“You would have been much better off forgetting the Ahimsa shit for a minute and just calling this clown and saying what you had to say originally, when he started calling you a couple of days too late, and leaving wheedling voice mails, and calling your girl friend when he couldn’t get an immediate call back from you … it’s kind of funny that he kept referring to your ‘nine days of enraged silence’ toward him, that master of enraged silence.  I like when you counted off that it had actually been more like four or five days.  But you should have just said what you had to say, Dude, in as few words as originally would have sufficed.”

“We’re done.  You’re a cunt.  Been nice.”  

“Clean,” he said, and took a drink.

It’s true, that’s what this call amounted to anyway, with a residing pain in the lungs to show for my sad attempt to stay on the high road, give a stubborn former friend a chance to state his insufficient case for the hundredth time.

“You hanging up on me?  You’re going to fucking hang up on me now?  Hello?  hello?”  I can still hear the peevish fellow justifying himself, clucking about how vicious and unfair I am.  “After all, you’re not the only one with problems, I’m not the only one who doesn’t help you, your constant references to Hitler, no matter the context, are inapt, and what about…’bon voyage’?  ‘bon voyage’?  oh, nice…. hello, hello?”

Mania

Tired, very tired today after succeeding in the frustrating prolonged struggle to get the new website up and running.   That I did it all completely on my own is a source of some pride, though mainly the source of my exhaustion.    

An individual must be rugged, it turns out, if he or she is to work alone over a prolonged period toward a far off goal.

Now that I can embed videos on wehearyou.net directly (see Thanks and Animation pages), I am determined to replace them all.  Although there is an ether gremlin in the mix that causes two of the four to disappear, instead of playing, but only on the masked site…

Determination… hard to tell from mania today.screen cap ether gremlin

Fooling Myself?

The young therapist told me today to add some daily “mastery and pleasure activities” to my daily schedule.  These are fun interludes that remind us of what we love and what we have accomplished.  Apart from not really keeping a daily schedule, I told her as far as a satisfying mastery activity I have this daily writing session that ends with a press of the publish button.  

I am always satisfied and feeling somewhat better when I press the button.  Not that every post is a gem, or even worth more than a cursory glance, some may go to disturbing places, but the exercise of getting the post ready for the “public” is something I’ve mastered.  By the time I hit “post” the writing is as clear and easy to read as I can make it.  At its best this blahg is my higher self giving good counsel to my regular day to day self, reminding me of who I am trying to be, how far I have come, how far I still have to go.

A few weeks ago an old friend wondered why I spend so much time tapping these posts (it’s really less than an hour a day, I would think) and suggested it is far healthier to interact socially than to live in my mind as much as I do these days.  He’s right about the social interaction– this online social universe is actually a nightmare world of mostly disconnection and narcissism.  I explained to him that the illusion of a social life is not why I write here.    A week or two later he read a couple of posts that he admired, that touched him.  He wrote to single them out.  

I gave him the back story of one, Listening, and described the inspiration, a fellow very active on social media who anxiously reads the blahg whenever we have some kind of trouble (this latest round goes back months, including several long, patient, useless discussions about the issues, as with F before the end, and there are several posts related to it).  He was also struck by the one about madness from a few months back, which was also inspired by my faltering friendship with this same chap.  

The night after the second seder, as I waited for sleep to come, I had  a choice: spend an hour figuring out how to send the fellow the precise kiss-off he earned and deserved (a waste of time and energy), or trying to get to the deeper question involved — understand and digest the harm done to me and process my feelings about it.  It is an important exercise, understanding my feelings and getting past the hurt to react as nonviolently as I am able.

Writing made me think about it more deeply, make connections, allowed me to take something positive out of the otherwise distasteful experience.  Looking beyond the personal to the larger principle involved was helpful to me, as was the exercise of making it clear to a reader, and in the process, more clear to myself.  I think the piece could be helpful to others as well in laying out the human issues involved– the damage of not being listened to, the fruitlessness of one-sided relationships for the person on the wrong side.

 
I understand that this fellow was rarely, if ever, listened to, except by me at times.  I appreciate that things are not black and white, that he has fine qualities, a sense of humor, decency and so forth.  Still, individual acts and failures to act, particularly when they come one after another, form a pattern that speaks much louder than promises and conditional apologies.  Hitler had it rough, but if I had a time machine I’d go back and break every bone in his body if I could.   Maybe go back earlier and make sure his dear mother had an abortion.

My friend and I, I hardly needed to remind him, had it rough growing up, but we help when we can and try not to hurt when we can’t help.  We don’t build a fanatical political party and death camps and all that other fucked up shit.  We don’t leave people we care about hanging. To those who can’t help being hurtful, good riddance.

 
Our first duty is to preserve ourselves, an extra challenge for those of us who were forced to learn on our own to become our own protectors.  Sometimes quietly subtracting an unwitting underminer is the most positive thing we can do for ourselves on a given day.  

Black and White Thinking

My father, a lifelong black and white thinker, lamented on his death bed that he had not seen and appreciated all the colors and gradations of human experience.  “I think how much richer my life would have been,” he mused in a voice that was near the end.

I did not at that moment have any feeling besides sympathy for him as he went.  It was one of those times when everything aligned correctly and we were able to finally have the conversation he had never been capable of.  It’s not clear how much of a long-term blessing it was for me, though it felt enormous at the time.  I’m sure it was a blessing to him, to be able to unburden himself to a life-long adversary he’d created, a suddenly former adversary who was now gently helping him go.  

I think of my father first whenever I hear the term Black and White Thinking.  Those words are on a sheet the CBT therapist gave me during the last session.  Ten ways people suffer and ten ways each form of, what is essentially deleterious cognition, can be changed for the better by properly reframing them.  I don’t know how much faith I have in this whole system, though the value of going to this session every week, working myself out of my torpor, seems beyond question.   I face many obstacles in a possibly impossible undertaking I have staked everything on, but I am facing them one at a time again.  Waiting for the mapped redesigned website to load at wehearyou.net so I can return to my marketing and networking efforts.

My father’s black and white thinking arose from the facts of the world he was born into.  His mother hated his father.  She had done her duty with him and eight or nine months later their first child was stillborn.   She lay with him again.   The second child, my father, was a huge baby.  She was a tiny, furious woman.  She cursed him before she even saw him.   Once he could stand she began whipping him in the face for what felt to her like a baby’s defiance.  

I have to get in the shower and down to my session in a moment, but I leave you with this excellent TED talk I heard last night.  It was about the long-term changes in a human mind and body produced by childhood trauma.  The chemicals that are available to us in a moment of danger, things that give you a surge of strength and concentration to fight or flee, constantly flood the child who must be on guard against, say, a whip in the face from mom.   This does damage that is hardwired into the human body.   Listen to this pediatrician.  The talk is fifteen minutes long and well worth your time.

Listening

You have never really been listened to, granted.

I grant you everything.  I grant you the pain of never really ever having been listened to.  It is a primal pain, to feel that when you first spoke, until now, that you have rarely, if ever, been attentively listened to.   Dig it.  Many people, sadly, experience this in life.  It is a trauma that puts a heavy burden on the soul.

I knew a woman who said she loved me, acted very much like she did.   She did very loving things for me, was generous with her love.  I could tell she hurt when I hurt.  She gave me advice sometimes about my life, what she thought I should do to be in less pain.  She told me she was giving me the same advice she had found useful in her life.   When she was dispensing advice she told me she always talked to me the same way she spoke to herself.

I did not doubt this, even as I often resisted some of her advice.  One day, when she tried to insist, I said to her “but sometimes you have talked to yourself and convinced yourself the best thing to do was to put your head in the oven.”  She was quiet.  She had told me of these moments of weakness, the things she had done in desperate moments.  I wasn’t telling her this to make her feel bad, I was reminding her of the difference between us, and how we treat ourselves, to put her advice in perspective.  

“I remind you of this to illustrate as vividly as I can, so you will have no doubt — if someone tried to put my head in an oven I would fight them to the death.   I would never put my own head in an oven.”   Just saying.  She still offered advice from time to time, but I think this perspective stayed with her.

People who care about you will sometimes give you advice, with the best of intentions.  They tell you things meaning very much to help.   They may never have been really listened to themselves.  Many people were not.  They learned as best they could, filled their lives as best they could with the things they needed and never got in life.   They took whatever wisdom they were able to find and they try to share it with you out of concern.   Not all of these people can help you.  In fact, few can actually help you.  

Turns out the thing that probably helps the most is someone listening to you with enough care to hear what you are actually saying.  This kind of listening does not  assume it knows what you are about to say and does not respond to what it thinks you may have said, based on the past.  

Empathy turns out to be the best thing one person can give to another, the best thing we can give ourselves.  It is a question of attention– of asking questions when things are unclear, until you understand.  It is a question of time, being generous with your time to hear what the other person is really concerned about.  In my experience it is almost impossible for  a person who is niggardly with their time or attention to be a valuable friend or even a good person to talk to.

A sufficiently mature person can tolerate being ignored, forgotten, slighted, thought of last, if at all, and can make philosophical accommodations to all these things.  But when a person who claims to care for your well-being does these things, you must not tolerate it.  Care does not include these things.  

So, best to be direct.  I have told you as clearly as I can what hurts me in your actions.  I have told you again.  I have explained it on a third and fourth occasion.  I have given you every fair chance to do better.  You have not done better, you have done worse.  If you have not done worse on purpose, you did it because you were not capable of doing better.  You did not care enough.  I understand your limitations in friendship better than I did before.

You were not taught to care enough, nobody showed you how it should be done.  That is true for many people, no doubt.  It is the rare and blessed person who is shown the way to care for others.  Most of us have to learn it as we go, the best we can.

I am trying hard to be a man of peace, and I succeed more often now than before in my life.   I understand that self-hatred and confusion drive some people to act destructively, to themselves and others.  But understanding the reason for it does not give permission to anyone to act destructively.  Hitler had a horrible childhood, clearly.  But fuck Hitler.

We come in the end to the point where the only question remains:  hand open or hand closed when it bids you peace and go in good health?