Category Archives: soap box

Disorder

There is a book called the DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, I think they are using version IV now, working on five.  The book lists symptoms and describes  the gradated spectrum of each diverse, specific, and sometimes subtle, mental disorder.  

Among these are the perfect statistical descriptions of each of the several distinct types that make up the editorial board of the American Psychiatric Association– brilliant and nervous,  dour and paranoid, voluble and smiling but filled with unspeakable rage, intense, taciturn but almost completely quiescent.  Those who twitch and those who smile fiercely, with one eye twitching slightly from time to time.  The trained observer may catch the occasional micro-expression showing the primal will to violence, but, for the most part, the editorial board of the DSM looks like a high-level group of accomplished professionals.

And it is.   I drop this all casually, though, of course, it’s a cliche: the crazy psychiatrist.  But the authors of the DSM, the book that categorizes every insurable mental disorder, are a select breed of psychiatrist, true experts, standing at a rare vantage point, on the defining edge, that hair’s breadth between normalcy and disorder.  

Diagnostic:  their diagnostic checklists of symptoms will decide what mental disorder you suffer from, please answer the following questions.   Are you ever sad?  Do you ever have bad dreams?  Do you become sexually aroused at odd times?   Do you like to shake your leg rhythmically for long periods of time?    A code is issued for each customized disorder and the psychiatrist  prescribes, and a pharmacist dispenses, the suggested drugs, according to the scientific recommendations of pharmaceutical industry expert psychiatrists.   Because a code number has been submitted with this claim, everyone along the line will be paid well for the patented medication to make this poor bastard function better.

Except that sometimes the poor bastard functions well, medication or no, and at other times not so well.   These mood fluctuations are a symptom of our condition here, buffeted by the pressurized demands of the world around us.  I’m just saying– a person who is freaking out might do better resting in a quiet room with soft music than strapped to a gurney, people screaming, lights flashing, men with guns, as the sedation is administered.

On the other hand, I’m no psychiatrist.

DSM-IV DSM-IV.jpg

Other Priorities

It was Monday and massive Hurricane Sandy was poised to make landfall at around 8 pm.  At 7:15 pm I received the following email:

subject:  Club Behavior and Discipline

Dear Afterschool Club Instructors:

Behavioral issues have come up in a few of the clubs, so I wanted to share with you what parents received regarding disruptive behavior at the onset of the program. Although we haven’t been removing disruptive kids from clubs, as you can see below, if a child is repeatedly disruptive in your club, you are to send them to me in the office where they are to spend the remainder of the club time and their parents will be notified. Please keep my cell phone number (below) handy and either call me or have your assistant call me.

We recommend that you set up behavior expectations, e.g. sitting and listening, no wrestling, no yelling, at the beginning of your club and explain what the consequences will be if a child fails to behave as they would in class. Clearly articulating your expectations and the consequences if they do not behave properly will help the children understand later when they are being reprimanded.

WHAT IF MY CHILD IS DISRUPTIVE DURING THE CLUB?
We will not tolerate children who are disruptive or disrespectful to teachers, assistants, and/or other
children. The first time a child is disrespectful or disruptive, they will be removed from their club
and must spend the remainder of the club time in the office with our Club Coordinator, and their
parents will be notified. A second occurrence will result in the child being prohibited from attending
their club for the remainder of the semester with NO refund of fees.

Children MUST respect ALL SCHOOL AND CLUB EQUIPMENT. Any willful destruction of 
property will result in a child being prohibited from continuing with a club with parents liable for the
cost of damages.

On a related note, we are a team in the meeting/dismissal room #205. Of course you are expected to keep order of your club members, but if you witness ANY children, even if they are not in your club, yelling, running around, jumping on furniture or anything of the like, please use your authority to step in. Thanks!

That someone was composing this note about reprimands and authority as a destructive storm was moving in would seem to speak for itself.   Oddly, this email was not sent to me by the glaring bald headed man who strode into the noisy room where the children wait for their parents at 5:00 after 8 hours in school.  This man was clearly unhappy that kids were blowing off steam by making such a racket.  The email was probably written at his request.

We knew each other at once, with the quickest of glances, the way any random mongoose and any equally random cobra instantly know each other.  He was the most important man in the building and I was a man playing music in the corner with another adult while children shrieked,  a man who did not break off his conversation to recognize the clear fact of this imperious man’s importance.  

In my defense, I’d never seen the man before.   In his defense, guys like me…. well, there’s really no defense necessary there.   This is a fellow who makes the rules, who demands excellence, not nuanced excuses.

America builds prisons, passes laws, makes threats and wars to insure that people who do not respect our institutions are punished accordingly.   We do not reward failure.  Many believe the best president for our troubled nation is a successful businessman, not some Harvard educated lawyer who sees the endless complexity of major problems and is clever at making speeches.  The bottom line is the bottom line and the successful businessman’s Harvard law degree has nothing to do with it.

On the other hand, if children are treated with respect, and the program is designed to insure that they are engaged, and content, the likelihood that we need to threaten, reprimand or punish them is greatly reduced.

On the other hand, look around, there are many examples.   If you randomly prohibit certain drugs and impose long jail sentences for infractions, there’s a lot of money to be made by certain people along with a lot of pain for the masses of imprisoned users of the randomly prohibited drugs, not to mention victims of organized crime’s drug trade-related violence.   Nothing wrong with money, my friends, even if the war against certain drugs is an arbitrary, ridiculous, expensive and increasingly deadly failure.  

The attitude, of course:  as for people who hate our freedom, I tell you what, there’s no reason to have any mercy on their freedom-hating souls.

Still, I can’t help thinking that smart people can work together to design and implement things better than this system we have.  I understand that most smart people have other priorities, but, call me a dreamer.  There has got to be at least one better way forward than this.

It’s in the delivery

It’s in the Delivery

 

Back when I had a sense of humor, this was intuitive.   A slight pause, a turn of the head, the tone of voice, a small gesture of face or hands to set off the moment right before the laugh.   There’s probably no way it can be taught, people we know are either funny or say “I suck at telling jokes.”

I was reminded of this recently watching somebody coach somebody else on how to read a line so it would be funny.   The line was OK, I thought to myself, but if you have to coach somebody on how to deliver it to make it as funny as you wrote it, maybe the line should have been written better in the first place.  This is a touchy subject and I didn’t touch it, although I got my greasy fingerprints all over it just now.   Vhoops.

But delivery doesn’t just go for jokes.  Skillful delivery is crucial in getting any message across.  People, as a rule, don’t give a rat’s ass about anything that’s not already on their mind.   We are a self-involved species.  So how a thing is delivered to us will decide whether we hear it or not.  Also how the message will make you feel to receive it.  Compare:

I don’t mean to bring you down, and a lot of people, I know, have been doggin’ you and criticizing where they should either be quiet or praising you, but I couldn’t help thinking that your last post, even though it was pretty good, I mean, I thought it was good, well…. a lot of people could say it was kind of preachy and superior.  I’m just telling you this so you won’t think these people are right, I didn’t find it very preachy and superior, only a little bit, and it really didn’t bother me that much.

and

I like your recent post.  You’re surely aware that some could be put off by what they will consider preachiness or superiority, but for my money– preach away, my brother.  As for the more priggish in the congregation, let the dead bury themselves.  In fact, I’ve got shovels in the trunk.

Then again, what the hell am I doing here, preaching to the choir?

The Internalized Victimizer

He drew himself a line in the sand and dared himself to cross it.  “Do it, this time, you fucking loser,” he snarled as his toe dug the line.  He couldn’t cross the line he dared himself to cross.  He stared at it, finally drew himself back and cried.  “The same old story,” he said to himself, “the eternal fucking loser…” and he struck himself about the face and head, and cried some more.

That voice was not his voice, not the voice he hears paddling his kayak or gliding on the back of Lew’s glider at 5,000 feet, or even rolling on his bike, the autumn night damp against his face.  The voice he hears when he is soaring is not that punishing, unremitting voice.  That sour voice belongs to the internalized victimizer.  Spit that shit out, man, it’s no good for you.  

Heed the words of your favorite preacher, for God’s sake.

Good Punchline in Torture Debate

Not that I often need a diversion or digression to get me following a random string, but a friend sent me an article the other day about US government use of torture, prohibited by decree of Barack Obama in one of the first acts of his presidency.   The author opined that as president Mitt Romney was likely to rescind that decree.  There was a link to an article about SERE training (see first line of yesterday’s post for link) and the US government’s perverse relationship to the torture it rightly condemns when barbaric enemies employ it.

I sent the link to that article to my friend and we shared reactions to it.   He wrote that he was aware that as soon as the acetylene torch came out he’d tell them everything.   We seemed to agree on most points.   Then, after a long and stressful day, I got an email from him with that old chestnut, the ticking time bomb scenario.   He said use of torture was not such a clear moral issue when your loved ones were on the verge of death and the prisoner in the chair likely knew how to stop it– but wasn’t talking.  In that case, he said, there is an arguable duty to use any means necessary to save your loved ones, including the worst tortures you can think of.

I reacted with a good measure of horror, and arguments, and I slapped at the hypothetical that American advocates of torture had recently used over and over to justify the torture of many innocent men, people they called “detainees” and kept in secret “black sites” or on an American military base in Cuba that they lawyered up to claim was not, therefore, subject to U.S. and International laws.  

This torture in my name, although the torture was legally redefined in a secret internal memo and defended as merely “enhanced interrogation”, and marketed as necessary to protect us from terrorists who’d planted countless ticking time bombs, has been one of the most galling aspects of the rise of the “neo-Con” partisan in American politics.  That most of the people tortured, these “worst of the worst”, had later been released as innocent is another fact that makes me wanna holler.

My friend, a skilled lawyer, hit back on each of my points, then made this point, toward the end of his gamely fighting email:

Me: Your conclusion would seem to be that if there’s a time bomb ticking, or if you believe strongly enough that there is, everyone should probably be tortured, just in case one of them knows something you would come to regret not torturing them to find out.

Him: There you go again. Screw the fucking time bomb. Why not just torture everyone and get it the fuck over with. There, I said it. Somebody had to.

I’d thought he was at least half (if not 90%) joking, so I’d ended my previous with this:

But I think you may be pulling my shackled leg in a stress position while pouring ice water on me as my balls are given a mild shock from a car battery.

 Him:  Wait your turn.

When I wrote back, my will and spirit finally broken, I told him: You win, torture away.

Him:  I am, my friend, I am.

PTSD

I read this in an excellent article by a graduate of the SERE program, the Cold War-inspired torture institute set up to try to train American servicemen to resist inhumanly brutal interrogation and brainwashing techniques (SERE later formed the blueprint for the “enhanced interrogation” –tortures — Dick Cheney, John Yoo and David Addington were so enthusiastic about):

post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a disease characterized by, among other things, an addiction to the reliving of powerful memories, memories that habitually traumatize and re-traumatize the mind until, in the worst cases, it becomes impossible to live without the chemical rush the memories provide.

This reminded me of the study a brilliant, and disturbed, classmate of mine in Law School told me about.  Scientists studied the brains of people who had been abused as children and found there were significant physical changes in the brains of these people, now adults.  Being traumatized and re-traumatized, living in a hostile environment where you are powerless, frequently punished for infractions of brutal, arbitrary, impossible to know rules, changes your brain, literally.

I’m not putting this all together for you correctly now, and I must toddle off to sleep, have to be up early to attend a workshop about getting blood from corporate stones.  I’ll reorganize it better tomorrow evening.  But for now, when I wonder about my own debilitating moods, the odd actions of people I’ve known for years, self-destructive or strangely gruff behavior, and grimness, this traumatizing and re-traumatizing gives me an insight, or the glimmer of one.

Stay tuned.

Creativity

Warning: this is a mild bummer, forced up like a synthetic hairball; it contains little of the spontaneity it seeks to evoke

The pursuit of creativity (he begins pedantically) might sound like a frivolous add-on for somebody who already has enough and might want to enrich some downtime.  I could be drinking my own Kool-aid, but to me creativity is essential to just about everything.  Creativity is the life force, what makes our lives here possible in the first place, and as rich as they can be, no matter how otherwise poor, after that.

Why bother to invent a new way to say things when the old ones are tried and true, fine and dandy?  Because we need to, cleverness is a net gain, like a laugh, the difference between a grim march and a healthy hike.  Why do we laugh?  If I have to ‘splain it, Lucy, it won’t be funny.  We laugh because we hear something comically unexpected, or see something that surprises us and makes us lose it.  If the moment hadn’t been spun that way, by someone creating it just right, we’d still be yawning.

Creativity is a moment of grace that refreshes and restores the creator and the beneficiary of the creation, the aerialist spinning amazingly from one trapeze to another rather than plummeting to splat like a pumpkin as the crowd shudders.

Creativity is a moment of faith, taking a chance to do something new with belief in success.  It’s done with a freedom we might not otherwise see in our day.  

Lack of creativity makes us wince, someone trying to be original by imitating something many others have already done trying to be original.  Or when the attempt misfires like, for example, a mildly embarrassing moment from yesterday’s nice chat with an old friend.  This guy is very funny, and it struck me, toward the end of a serious talk, that we hadn’t had a single laugh, which is rare for a conversation with him.  The subjects we talked about had been serious, we were both concentrating hard.  My mind was sluggish trying to shift gears as I was reminded by something he said of a certain joke.  I asked him if he’d heard the one about…. and I dick-fingeredly handled the joke by the punchline to jog his memory.

“No,” he said with a smile.  I could hear over the phone that the same smile was there a few moments later, along with a slightly surreal laugh, as he acted like the punchline I’d already told him had been a surprise.  He created a little reaction to distract us both from the embarrassment of my moment of anti-creativity.

But how about the person somewhere down south who first described someone’s clumsy attempt to do something as being “dick-fingered”?

Supremely creative.  If you think about it, even for a hot little moment, you will realize I am right to extoll its importance.  Now go forth, be fruitful and multiply yourself, and have a nice day.

The Illusion of A World

What draws the helpless addict to the internet?  The illusion of a world, input, output, putt putt, the illusion of an interactive world community.  Hindu and Buddhist texts refer to the world we perceive with our senses as Maya, the veil this hectic universe of noise, show and desire wears.  So the internet is a play within a play, carried out on the vast virtual stage of liquid cyberspace.   Every kid’s dreams can sail on that sea, take a step back, all the dreams together are less than the breath of a single ant.

“You are addicted to the internet,” says Sekhnet, not without some justification.   I look around at the available options and come running back here, where there is no demand on me but to focus my thoughts, if I like.   And to dial back my expectation of anyone actually giving a rat’s tutu.

In the real world you’d be well-advised to stay busy, bub.   That’s all I’m saying.  There’s a reason many people are workaholics, looking your own life in the face can be terrifying.   Could lead you to question things you’re better off not questioning, dwelling on things better left alone.  Such dwelling could lead to self-revelations that will cause major tremors in your life, could shake the whole structure of it to pieces.  Stay busy, my friends, that’s my advice.

“That’s not your advice,” a voice knowing better says.

My advice is don’t ask me for advice, is what I say.   My advice is to look at your fears and figure out something productive to do about them.  Which is very easy for me to say, wrestling with the lethargic anaconda of my own terrors.  If you’re getting your ass kicked, find a way to get out of the room, that’s all I’m saying.  Which is easy for me to say, no active monsters in my life at the moment, except for the fear of a difficult dream I’m trying to make real turning out to be another illusion, another dead end. 

I suppose anyone in a tough spot can rationalize their situation in a similar way: this difficult waking dream, OK,  this nightmare, can be turned around by a miracle.  Miracles happen every day.  The bad guy gets hit by lightning, the pure soul wins the lottery.  OK, if not by a miracle, by changing my view of it– making this alchemy part of my daily spiritual practice, let me say.  If I can change the way I view the battle I’m locked in I can turn it to my advantage, somehow, it becomes spiritual work, to accommodate myself to a merciless world of suffering and stop thinking about better and worse, stop heaping puny human value judgments on a situation that is not susceptible to such things.  And, anyway, is it not entirely possible that a bit of unexpected mercy will come my way, I’m not a bad person, there’s nothing bad about staying in a tough spot and …. what am I nattering about?

I can’t shake the damnable expectation that I am not the only one who gives a rat’s ass about any of this.

Bullying

In answer to the unasked question, I don’t know the answer.  If you consent to be bullied, participate in the cruel and grotesque dance of it, what advice can compel as much as the terrifying, all-consuming tango of that?

There are many situations where we are powerless, or virtually so.   In other situations, though the choice may appear very scary, there are life-affirming choices within our power to select.

Easier said than done, I suppose.

The Right to Rage

You have the right to rage, but there is a price you must be willing to pay.  You might think the rage itself is price enough, but you would be fucking wrong.

A mother, say, may rage at her child.   In the moment nobody is fast enough or strong enough to prevent the attack, certainly not the kid.   The enraged woman might have a right to her rage, a lawyer could argue, but if she takes a bottle and skulls her kid she has a right to be taken to the police station and sent over to the Laughing Academy for observation.

My father had been treated to this kind of tough love as a very young boy.  This kind of tough love may be more properly called hatred.  It leaves only betrayal and rage behind in the child who, instead of being protected by his mother, was beaten by her.  “A face only a mother could love,” has a bitter ring to someone who was brutalized by his own mother.

My father, to his credit, rarely lashed out with his hands to hit my sister and me.  It was the tongue, sharp as a bullwhip, that he lashed out with.  I won’t describe the torrent of hate speech that often foamed out of his mouth.  I understand it now, but, shit…

It is not unusual for children, watching one parent rage and the other cower, to make the obvious mistake:  the raging one is strong, the cowering one weak.  It is not weakness to cower and not strength to scream and threaten, or lash out.   I’ve seen many situations where a kid winds up emulating the style of the parent they identify as strong.   These situations are always sickening.

My father was very smart, and a gifted arguer.  He taught me the Socratic Method years before I heard of it.  A series of logical questions, with answers beyond dispute, leading to a conclusion, also beyond dispute.  I did some ju-jitsu on him one day on line at a wedding buffet in a bistro on Metropolitan Avenue.

“You’ve said many times that physical violence and verbal violence are exactly the same in the harm they do to the victim,” I said, piling some shrimp on my plate.

“Yes,” he said, swallowing, dignified, ready to rumble.  He already knew where we were going.

“So all the verbal violence around the kitchen table directed at A___ and me was the same as if you’d been beating on us?”  I asked, pulling a celery heart out of ice.

“That’s right,” he said, not avoiding it now.

“So would you say A___ and I were victims of child abuse?” I asked him, moving the Queen behind the Rook, and the celery heart behind the shrimp.

“Yes,” he said, “I would have to say that you were.”

The thing I remember most about this exchange, which took place more than twenty years ago, is the angry look my sister shot me over the old man’s shoulder.  She was mad on his behalf, her identification with the strong parent was greater than her realization of the damage he’d done to her.

You have the right to rage, everyone does.  But for the love of God, don’t do it.