Category Archives: musing

TDD (Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria)

At a luncheon recently I mentioned, intending to share my skepticism about the evolving DSM and its 5,000 new categories eligible for lucrative psycho-pharmaceutical medications, Angry Baby Syndrome.  I smirked as I brought up the newly minted diagnosis: Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria, a proposed addition to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), among other things the guide for what insurance will pay for by way of pharmaceuticals.  

One of the strangers at the table, a woman with some professional familiarity with these matters, immediately nodded knowingly.  “Yes, it’s a real condition, there are some babies who just start off angry,” she informed us and the conversation drifted quickly from where I was trying to steer it.  In truth, though I am opinionated, I had no real interest in steering this particular conversation, I was merely stroking one of my pet peeves– the madness and brutality of runaway capitalism.  I worked on my vegan lunch plate, smiling neutrally as I chewed, and let my mind drift in and out of the talk around me.

I’d read a great article, given to me by my friend the now retired judge, about the meteoric rise of mental illness diagnoses.  The article was a review of several books on the boom in psychopharmacology, I’ll find it for you.  A long review, but fascinating, well-written and worth a read.  Marcia Angell begins:

It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades.  Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created.  

(click here to read the article)

I can’t help thinking of TDD, Angry Baby Syndrome, in the context of a story my parents told, and believed, until the end of their lives, a myth I always took pains to demythologize.  At ten weeks old I became red and rigid, my little fists clenched, with a look of rage on my face that no amount of concerned staring or direct questioning from my frightened parents could wipe away.  With great anxiety, they rushed me to the pediatrician.  The good doctor took one look at me, began to laugh and said: “this child is having a temper tantrum!  I’ve never seen it in a baby so young, but this is definitely one angry baby!”  I recall thinking “fuck you, doc.  I’ll live to laugh at your fucking anger some day, you articulate, quack prick.  Just wait until I can talk, assbite.”  By ten months old, according to my proud mother, I was talking, though neither at ten months nor at any time after that did I bother to track the cavalier pediatrician down.

The point of this story to me was always that rather than figure out why their child was so unhappy as to be having a temper tantrum, the two young parents took comfort from the quack’s diagnosis that the kid was just irrationally enraged.  The expert confirmed my parents’ fear that their baby was just one of those born pricks– adversarial, angry, vindictive, challenging, defiant, hating all authority.  Who knew a ten week old could have the worldview to make all these judgments?   I have to believe it helped set the course of my adversarial childhood, this expert’s glib diagnosis that did not extend past a relieved chuckle.  He concluded, essentially, that this baby suffered from nothing more than being an enraged little asshole.  Kind of funny, in a way, no?

I always thought a good doctor might have felt the kid’s little fists– said to the parents, “I’ll be damned, even though it’s August, feel how cold this little guy’s hands are… maybe he’s pissed off because nobody has made sure he’s warm enough.”  Indeed, my mother reported that I always immediately calmed down whenever she gave me a warm bath, but of course, it was impossible to carry around the baby bathtub full of warm water to bathe me whenever I started becoming irrationally enraged.  

But my point in writing this is not to wonder whether TDD with Dysphoria is not a perfectly good diagnosis (why not give a pill to a young child who is just an irrationally angry bastard all the time?) or to muse about whether or not that pediatrician 57 years ago did anyone any favors, or to belatedly defend my, admittedly, infantile behavior.   

I replaced a roll of toilet paper backwards just now.  I noticed it and calmly removed the roll, reversed it, snapped it back into place.  This struck me as a great moment.  The calm fixing of a minor problem was unaccompanied by any sort of snarl, curse word, smirk, clucking of the tongue.  I still fly into a Tourretic rage when I’m leaving the house in a hurry and my ear buds are violently yanked out of my ears as the cord whips around a doorknob, or the long horn bicycle handlebars.  Part of my rage is at the randomness, seeming cruelty and absolute regularity with which these little delaying things always seem to happen, as though the universe is giving me the finger when I most need its silent cooperation.  But with today’s toilet paper tragedy, I was happy to notice myself fixing a minor problem as calmly as the Buddha.  

I took a breath and thought about the progress I’ve made from that vicious little ten week old I once was, the raging TDD poster baby.  It made me think of my father’s terrible temper, and his insistence, until right before the end, when he smartly reversed himself, that people are what they are programmed to be, by genetics and upbringing.  He always dismissed as delusional the idea that one can consciously change this programming.  My dad’s reflex, when a mistake was made by himself or anyone else, was to become instantly enraged.  I spent decades being mad at myself when I did something careless, or stupid, things that earthlings do all the time.

Follow if you can: you are snipping the ends off string beans, nipping the stem off and a bit of the tip on the other end. In one bowl the prepped beans that will be steamed or sauteed, in another the ends you will be discarding.  One after another, bing, bing, bing, the stems into the little metal bowl, string beans into the strainer.  Then, bip! stem into the string beans, whole string bean into the bowl of ends.  One would expect, at most, a little smile and head shake, a plucking out of the stem, an extraction of the string bean, and quickly restoring them to their desired places.   It would be hard for many people to understand the reflex to a paroxysm of rage when the stem gets flipped into the wrong bowl, but it is there for some.

Did my father have his face whipped all through his early childhood, and the angry course of his life irremediably stamped on his little soul, because he had undiagnosed TDD?  Did his mother, an insane little bitch, as far as I can make out, suffer from untreated TDD?  Is the reflex to be enraged carried in the DNA?  If this reflex is then reinforced by infallible repetition, can the programming to react this way be undone by mere mindfulness and a desire to not react with rage to every frustration, no matter how minor?  

Let us not underestimate the practice of mindfulness, working in tandem with a strong enough desire to change a painful reflex.   I’ve been trying to apply this principle to my dealings with others, with some success.  I have remained fairly mild in situations that would have provoked me to major unmildness before.  Imagine my delight to find myself the recipient of this forgiving gentleness in the moment of realizing how maddeningly idiotic my placement of that roll of toilet paper had been.  Noticing these small, valuable steps is a great gift we can give ourselves.

Or, an old reflex suggests, the wishful thinking of a fucking idiot.  Though I think not, whatever my father or a respected doctor might have once said to the contrary.

Hanging By A Spider Web

True, the string a spider shoots out is plenty strong, still, it’s a little bracing to be suspended in this life by something as thin and almost invisible as that.   Cornell West, a man with a penchant for cadence and rhyme, called his recent book Hope on A Tightrope.   Similar image– we are, for an hour or a hundred years, by grace, moving forward, or backwards, or quivering in place, or asleep– but in a precarious situation where a single false step might be our last.

Unlike others I know, I never wake up sweating, my heart pounding in my throat, thinking of ending it all before the pounding can kill me.   I don’t recall the last time I felt so depressed that I didn’t want to get out of bed.   That said, going forward cheerfully and confidently in every moment is not always possible.

I saw an interview by Bill Moyers yesterday with the author of a book describing the real-life zombie apocalypse we are living through now in our thoroughly marketized culture, a world where obscene wealth is seen as victory and everything else the work of fungible parasitic takers.  If obscene wealth is the only crown of victory in a competitive market society, and everyone else is a loser, and if losers are despicable in their craving for ‘entitlements’ when the only people actually entitled to entitlements are the super wealthy, and if the media hammers this destructive narrative home around the clock– you have one option, if you buy all that (and virtually everyone must on some level, since it is the dominant story shouted over and over): walk the streets with your arms out going “nyahhhh– nghhhh— nnnnnnnn…..” and looking for a live human to bite into.

I have to get to work now, but I hesitate, semi-paralyzed, questioning my judgment.  Yes, I have dreamed, planned, designed and am carrying out a program that works largely as I designed it.   But a series of larger and more formidable yeses stands in my way:   yes, I have no marketing plan, yes, I have not branded or packaged the program, yes, I have not created a winning ad to sell it, yes, I have not made of it an easily scalable commodity that can be sold over and over, yes, I have not funded it, yes, I have not recruited a single brilliant person to help in any meaningful way, etc.

Fortunately for me, since I don’t live in an actual democracy but in a cynical marketplace filled with false idols, since I am surrounded mainly by stressed out, distracted, treadmill thumping zombies, I can sojourn in my own head where my beliefs, as they must, sustain me while I hang from this almost invisible thread, thinner than a spider’s.  Now, to let out a yell like Tarzan and swing into action!

Only Human

We mess up, our plans go awry, comments meant to be light and funny sometimes fall badly, shattering into sharp pieces in the awkwardness they produce.  Our best plans, our smartest theories, turn out to be less brilliant than we thought.

When angry at someone it is easy to reduce them to the sum of their aggravating faults, forget that they are frail humans to whom a certain degree of self-blindness and hypocrisy is as natural as walking on two legs.   If they hurt us once, shame on them.   If they hurt us again and again, in extreme cases we are driven to become the leader of our nation and unleash a vast coordinated killing campaign.  Bombs, missiles, machine guns, flame throwers, burning chemicals dropped from the sky, torture and endless detention, relentless pursuit of enemy and friend of enemy alike, collateral damage be damned.  A slightly less insane approach is to accumulate billions of dollars and build beautiful houses for ourselves every place that we like, and to scream that we are victims of a holocaust if anyone speaks of taxing us fairly.  And there are less and less insane ways to deal with hurt all the way down to the saintly one of quickly forgiving all who mistreat us.  If someone hurts you and apologizes, it is a good practice to accept the apology and move on.  If someone hurts you and steadfastly refuses to allow that they’ve behaved badly, that’s a trickier situation.

Outside, in raging winter winds bringing single digit wind-chill, if the radio is to be believed, overly loud speakers somewhere nearby, perhaps on the campus of the college a few hundred feet from here, blared an auto-tuned hip hop number that was mildly annoying.  As I tried to gather my thoughts with the recorded drum pounding, “I Love Music” by the O’Jays made a cameo and I thought of the irony, the random, unintended ingenuity, of using one of a person’s favorite songs as a bludgeon upside the head.  Now it is just a kick drum, bap! BAP! bap! bap!, and a small voice wailing like a baby who’s been punched by an insane parent or guardian.  Somebody’s idea of a groovy time over there, no doubt.

Where the line is between overlooking a friend’s occasional bad mood and swallowing abusive behavior is sometimes hard to say in the individual case.   The case can always be made that the other person is only human, and sometimes humans slip up, do hurtful things.  Hell, humans organize lynch mobs, scream with veins popping on their necks and faces and are not satisfied until someone is mutilated.  Humans, it must be said, also rush into burning buildings to rescue small frightened animals.

One of the great personal dilemmas is to stay in a posture of forgiveness toward friends and family, while not tolerating abusive patterns that are sometimes subtle and dangerous.  They are dangerous precisely because they are subtle, easily denied and made to appear as figments of your oversensitive imagination rather than concrete hurtful actions done in a thoughtless or cruel way.  The subtle hurtful behaviors are easily justified, satisfyingly employed as small, sharp whips, to lash sensitive places on the face while telling the injured party that they are insane.   The beauty part?  Insane people often do believe innocent behaviors to be subtle, dangerous, hurtful, used as small, sharp whips to lash sensitive places on the face while the whipper puts on the most innocent of faces and tells them they are insane to feel that way.

Accepting Criticism

An emotionally intelligent person, concerned with effectively communicating with others, is interested in people’s reactions and takes them into consideration.  

What is clear to the person speaking, or writing, or pitching, or drawing, or singing, may not be clear to the people she is directing it to.  A person who would communicate well must be attuned to intelligent comments, as well as cluelessness, and the opinions of people who may be saying what they are out of an undigested mixture of helpfulness, envy, anger, confusion, ambivalence, distraction and so forth.  Many of these comments will be useful in helping to refine communication.

Even those who blurt out, ten seconds into a thirty second rough sketch, why the thing fails as a whole, may have a good point.  The only thing, it is sometimes hard, even for the person who graciously accepts suggestions and easily revises accordingly, not to snarl when this helpful approach is the only approach encountered.

How To Crush An Idealist

There are many ways, but this one is elegant in its simplicity.  It may be more fun to find one niggling detail, (detail unimportant, in fact, the pettier the better), grip it tightly in bulldog jaws and keep pulling at the idealist, but I think this one is better.  Less is more.  

Do nothing, say nothing.  No matter what the idealist says or accomplishes, remain quiet.

This way the idealist is left to wonder if anybody is home, and the sneaking feeling that nobody’s home will crush that sucker faster than a steamroller flattening the coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon.

There’s no place like home

I’ve got to be quick, because there is not enough air in here and I’m told it’s beautiful outside and I need to stretch the legs and breathe.  I am just thinking about the games we learn as kids and how much deliberate and focused attention and hard work it takes to unlearn the bad ones.

It’s a tiring story, but my father was a tormented soul.   Great, dark sense of humor, but essentially a well-defended fortress against all potential invaders.  Everyone was included in this category.   If I had a problem being raised by someone like this, it was not something he was obliged to concern himself with.   That was his position for our long, difficult relationship, his answer to every attempt on my part to have him lower the bridge so I could cross the moat: I was the one with the problem, not him.  A position he apologized for quite sincerely hours before he died.

He gave me the gift of belatedly acknowledging that my painful childhood was largely the fault of an adult incapable of being a better parent.   He acknowledged that I was right to be hurt and saluted, for the first time, my many attempts over the years to improve the relationship.

While he was alive and on his feet, however, he’d fight to the death any suggestion that on his deathbed he’d have the regrets that could be so easily seen by anyone who wasn’t him.

Neutrality as kick in the pants

Though there are circumstances where neutrality is a virtue, such as when a person in a black robe is applying the blunt instrument of the law to a vicious conflict, there are many others where neutrality is a hard sidekick to the crotch.

One need only think of Switzerland’s puckish neutrality– we are fair, we are decent, we don’t take sides– standing suavely and stoically aside as Mr. Hitler did his very best to wipe out millions of people he hated.

The neutrality I’m thinking of is on a more personal level.   When seeking comfort from a friend, say the confirmation that you are right to feel aggrieved, for example, if you receive a neutral response, it will not comfort you.  It will ring, in the way these things do, and leave the unpleasant melody hideously repeating, never to be resolved — maybe I really am a jerk to feel hurt by that?   The confirmation from a loved one that you are right to be hurt is worth 1,000 Switzerlands brokering deals with scrupulous fairness between Nazis and those who hate Nazis.

Plus, sixty years later, you won’t likely learn of the neutral party’s complicity in war crimes, stolen art treasures and the laundering of loot plundered from people sent to their deaths by a regime that, arguably, by the logic of neutrality, is no different from the one fighting it.

The enduring injuries of childhood

Some, I imagine, did not receive traumatizing injuries during their upbringing.  I would like to meet and talk to someone who didn’t some day.   Most people I know, in a candid moment, will describe self-hatred, shame, rage, humiliation, terror, depression and several other shades of pain they don’t deserve   My father, at 80, on his death bed, admitted for the first time how the brutality he’d endured as a child had doomed him to live in a black and white world, holding off rooms full of potential abusers wherever he went, instead of using his great gifts to bring more color into the world.

No tears for us, please.  Like the fact that we all die, that injuries we suffered as young children endure is no mystery, nor anything to get tearful about.  How do we face the fact of our eventual deaths?  Outside of not thinking about it, by living as well as we can.   How do we endure the enduring hurts of childhood, even as adults, even as tough people who would rather kick somebody’s ass than admit how much we hurt?  That is hard work and does not yield to a simple answer.

We pay careful attention, think unhurriedly, use our words to describe things as clearly as we can.  We model the way we want others to treat us.  We do not do to others what we hate done to ourselves.  We consciously work to do better, to replace an angry reflex with a kind gesture.   It’s not easy, or, even, it must be admitted, in some cases, even  possible.  People may be too damaged, too bitter, crazy, anxious, desperate, invested in the needs of their egos or their justifiable rage to even imagine another way to live their lives.  Imagining a better way to live is the first step, like imagining anything is the first step to anything different.

No time at the moment to do anything but the best I can.  And wish strength to you to do the same.

Bigfooted By A Billionaire

Imagine getting to sit down with a magnate in your field, someone who can open any door, introduce you to the people you need to meet.   A man who loves ideas tells you he likes your idea very much and wants to help.  Only trouble is, there’s a stretch limo waiting for him downstairs, you may have seen it on your way in.   It was sent for him by his former intern, now, at age 26, about to become a very, very wealthy man.  Touching that the kid would send the limo for his old mentor, he was a teenager when he worked for the magnate for free.  A brilliant kid, a great kid.  Anyway, not to waste time– and I promise you a full meeting at a later date– but in four minutes or so, fill me in.

So you fill him in.  And as it’s your idea, and you know every detail of it intimately, and you’re a bright kid yourself, you are able to bring it to life to this guy who loves a great idea.  His eyes shine like the eyes of a kid in a candy store as you talk.  He asks an intelligent question, you give a snappy, succinct answer.  A few laughs are laughed.  It is with regret he stands, on the fourth intrusion by his secretary, and shakes your hand. “We’ll do the full meeting soon,” he says with warmth, and then is on his way down to the limo.

You later read about the sale, it’s all over the news.  The young man, David Karp, 26, has sold Tumblr for 1.1 billion dollars. Sitting next to him on the dais, the man you were just talking to.  It’s an amazing world.  

But that all happened in April, why are you thinking about it now?

Sending a Severed Head by email

Honestly (not really), I wonder what’s wrong with me sometimes.  

I ponder the lack of response I often get and never stop to consider that what I think of as a delightful six second animated snapshot of true friendship and whimsy may actually be a grisly severed head.  

Errors in judgment and misguided thinking happen all the time.  Look at the otherwise highly intelligent people who believe barbaric, destructive things and spend millions to convince others of these repugnant beliefs.  

So I suppose I should be philosophical at the virtually unanimous aghast silence that met this latest emailed monstrosity.  One brings it on oneself when one appoints oneself a spokesman for friendship and creativity in a world that commodifies everything, most especially time.

You be the judge:  http://vinebox.co/u/wsEcbPUF5lE/wdsh1bQVTUo

Maren's monster