The Null Hypothesis

One of the first things that I was taught when I started studying science at a higher level (in junior high school) was a lay man's explanation of the null hypothesis. The teacher wanted us to construct a hypothesis and test it, but wanted to make sure that we didn't make one which was asserting that something didn't exist. The real explanation of the null hypothesis is more complex, but the simplistic version is that you can't prove something does not exist. You can support the idea that it does exist or has a relationship with something else, but you can't prove a negative.

If you think about this, it makes perfect sense. It is impossible to test and rule out every possible relationship between two things/concepts/etc. This is one of the reasons why science and religion don't play nice together. You can't prove God doesn't exist and scientists have little interest in proving that said entity does exist, particularly when the only means of doing so is to make indirect inferences between natural phenomena and a hazily defined deity.

To give a less emotionally loaded and concrete example, let's say that my hypothesis is that there are no unicorns on earth. Unless I can search every single place on earth simultaneously including any hidden spaces and show that there are no unicorns, then I can't prove that there are none. I can, however, say that there is no evidence of them. I can attempt to prove that they do exist by looking for forensic evidence (rainbow poop, bones, discarded horns, etc.), but I can't prove that they don't exist. While the conclusion to a hypothesis that they exist is essentially the same as they one that asserts that they don't exist, the bottom line is that basic scientific method suggest that you don't look to prove non-existence as it is impossible to do so credibly.

I'm offering a refresher on this topic because it relates to a conversation that I had over dinner with my father-in-law, a man who often picks at research and claims to be a person of science. We were talking about intoxication, and when I use that word, I don't mean simply consuming alcohol. I use it to mean the ingestion of any substance in order to alter ones emotional or cognitive state and am including intoxication by cannabis. Since my father-in-law has a history of intermittent use of marijuana (including a stint in which he grew his own), this is something that he has a vested interest in validating.

Before I get any further, I should assert that I have never been intoxicated through the use of any substance because I have never consumed anything which has a known consequence of changing my emotional or cognitive state. You might be able to count caffeine from soda, coffee, or tea, but my consumption of those items is incredibly modest. I drink one cup of coffee in the morning, cut in half with almond milk, and another similarly diluted cup in the afternoon most days. I drink two cups of tea most days, but sometimes none at all. I drink one to two cans of diet soda, but not only or always caffeinated ones. Sometimes, it'd ginger ale or root beer. Sometimes, I don't drink any at all. I have never gotten an energy boost or buzz from the beverages I drink, and I've never touched an energy drink.
I don't have any moral issues with modest consumption of substances because one likes the taste of something. My husband drinks one drink of some sort each day; he sometimes has a single small bottle or beer or a mixed drink with rum. He has never gotten drunk and extremely rarely consumes more than one drink. His personality does not change, though he never drives after even a small amount of alcohol consumption as we both know that even one beer can affect the ability to perform critical tasks.
While I don't have any moral issues with substance use, I do have some other problems with it. My father is an alcoholic, so I know what it is like to be around someone who is intoxicated.
The primary one is that I don't like how intoxication changes people's personalities. They become mean, stupid, lazy, childish, slow, etc. If someone wants to get high and sit in a room alone, I don't care, but I don't want to be around someone who isn't fully present with me when they are talking to me. I should add that I don't want them to be in that state in a way which cannot be altered on a moment's notice. Someone can be watching T.V. or using the internet and not be "present" with me, but that can change in a second if needed. They can change the focus of their attention or turn off the device. It doesn't work like that with substance-induced intoxication. You can't simply change on a dime.

The other issue that I have with a lot of substance use is that many people use it instead of developing real coping mechanisms. The answer to boredom, anxiety, depression, etc. becomes consumption of a substance. My sister-in-law's youngest son has been using cannabis for so long that he has developed a philosophy of, 'If I'm home, I might as well be high.' He doesn't have any other concrete mechanism to turn to to make him feel better in whatever way he needs to feel better because he's never had to trouble himself. His use of substances started at a relatively young age and now it's just what he uses all of the time. He's not even troubled. He's mainly using it to moderate boredom/enhance how he spends his free time. The problem is that he does it so much and that he is, from all external appearances, on a road to strong addiction that he won't be able to break free from when he finishes college and has to be more present in daily life. I'm not worried about this, mind you, as he is not my responsibility, but his mother is concerned.

Now that I've made my position clear, I will say that the reason my sister-in-law's son was using from such a young age was that their family history was one in which substance use was viewed as inevitable, innocuous, and "normal". My discussion with my father-in-law over dinner ended up being one in which my take threatened all of these notions so he gave a very irrational and unscientific explanation. My basic assertion for why I have never tried substances is that I don't know when I use one if I will be the type of person who is prone to addiction. With my family history, I view it as a not insignificant risk. With my depression, I view it as an even greater risk as any substance which may instantly ameliorate my suffering would be very hard to resist. My feeling is that there is that the risk of becoming addicted is not worth the sating of curiosity or the temporary and false emotional elation that sometimes accompanies such substance use.

My father-in-law's argument for this was that we might be addicted to anything once we try it, including sex. My answer to that is that we have a drive for some behaviors. That is, there are biochemical processes in our bodies that compel us to act on certain impulses. Drives include eating, sleeping, and sex. We are compelled through processes related to survival to do these things and suffer various types of distress if we don't act on them. Men get erections without bidding them to come. Your stomach hurts if it is empty. You can't resist nodding off if you deprive yourself of sleep for too long. These are manifestations of the processes fueling human drives.

When I talked about drives, my father-in-law said, "you don't know that we don't have a drive to get high." I said that, I do indeed know that we lack such a drive. There is absolutely no evidence that humans have a biochemical process that compels them to become intoxicated. He insisted that I couldn't know that, but I have studied psychology and human biochemistry for 30 years. I'm no expert, but I haven't once run across a study, theory, or experiment which suggests a "drive to get high." And, as my husband pointed out on our drive home, not only is there no evidence that we have a drive to become intoxicated, it would go against the grain of evolution and survival. If we ever had such a drive, those who acted on it would likely have been more susceptible to predators, less likely to tend to their needs, and more likely to waste time and energy seeking out intoxicants. There is a reason that tribal cultures use substances for ritual rather than recreation. They can't afford for everyone to be getting hepped up on goofballs all of the time.

My father-in-law, obviously losing ground, blurted out that there was no evidence that we don't possess such a drive. Um, well, yeah, because you can't prove non-existence. My husband said, "I thought you couldn't prove a negative." I mentioned additionally that this is the problem with religion and proving God is/is not real. My father-in-law then changed the subject.

This situation annoyed me because my father-in-law is incredibly pedantic about studies. He won't believe them unless he vets them, and speaks as if he is strict about science, but then he totally tosses science out the window when he needs to validate a lifestyle choice. I realized that this is what happens when you toss a question into the narrative that a person uses to construct his notions of what is "normal". No matter what their asserted orientation is vis a vis "science", it all goes out the window when it doesn't fit the preferred worldview.

Stupid Facebook Arguments

I post a lot of silly thoughts on Facebook because I want to amuse people rather than simply talk about my day. I'm not afraid of being wrong nor am I afraid of making a fool of myself. One way you learn is by making mistakes.

Unfortunately, there will always be people who have sufficiently low self-esteem that they cop an attitude if they believe they "catch" you in making an erroneous assertion. I try not to do that, though I'm sure I have come across poorly in such cases as well. Such is the weakness of on-line communication, especially that designed to embrace brevity. In fact, I often wonder how many people bother to click the "see more" link when I write longer posts. My guess is very few.

Yesterday, I remembered something that happened while I was taking a graduate psychopharmacology class at my husband's school and making a presentation on depression. We (my husband and I did the presentation together) were talking about treatment and medication. One of the medicines that is commonly prescribed is an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor). This drug keeps the brain juices that you are deficient in that are possibly causing your depression dancing in the synaptic gaps longer.

A fellow, known for his lateness, self-centeredness, and general disruptiveness in order to bring attention to himself, raised his hand and said that SSRIs were shown to create suicidal ideation in users. I said, and the teacher supported this assertion, that the people who took the drug were depressed and it was impossible to know if the drugs caused it or if they would have had them anyway. As a depressed person, I can say I've had plenty of thoughts of suicide. Generally, they were escape fantasies and I would not have acted upon them. In moments of misery, you can turn to them like a comfy blanket. No matter how bad it gets, there is always this one way out.

This guy wasn't happy that I wasn't on board with his attitude that the drug made things worse instead of better for people with depression. I don't know if they create suicidal thoughts or simply sometimes fail to inhibit the depression which causes one to turn to them. I was simply unwilling to conclude that they cause them.

Yesterday, for some reason, I remembered this exchange from about two years ago and thought about how they'd test for this issue. It occurred to me that the only way to do that would be to do something dangerous and unethical. That would be to give SSRIs to people who were not depressed and see if it made them suicidal. My understanding of drug tests based on whatever journal articles I've read in psychological documents is that the most common way to test them is to get a bunch of people suffering from an illness, give some of them a new drug, some of them an old drug (sometimes), and some of them a placebo. I had never read that drugs (except possibly OTC drugs) were given to people who were healthy to see how it affected them and I've read a fair amount.

I posted my thoughts on Facebook and a Canadian woman who I met through blogging (and who lives in Japan) rather flatly and with what I perceived to be a tone of "you're so stupid, how could you not know this," said that SSRIs were tested on healthy people. I granted that I did not know the data, but that, to me, that seemed akin to giving insulin to people with diabetes. It shocked me that this might be the case. That is not only because I'd never heard of it before, but because there are possible long-term consequences to giving medication that messes with neurotransmitters to people who don't need them. For one thing, any neurotransmitter that plays around between your neurons for a longer time may create more receptors on the neuron. In essence, it makes your neuron "hungrier" for a bigger "meal" of that neurotransmitter now that it's had a chance for a bigger taste. You can take people who are fine and mess them up for good as, once those receptors are formed, they never go away and they may need more serotonin than their body previously produced. Since SSRIs are long-term drugs (they often need to be taken for weeks to get any effect), you wouldn't just take them for a short time in a test situation and stop or the test would be useless as a comparison of the reaction of a healthy population to an unhealthy population.

To me, it makes very little sense to test all drugs, and particularly ones which target very specific problems, on healthy people as they aren't the population that it will be interacting with. What could be discerned from it? It's possible that side effects could be seen, but those same effects would be seen in unhealthy populations as well. Besides messing up the bodies of a healthy person, I could see no reason to test on healthy subjects. It's one thing to test aspirin. It's another to test an SSRI or a drug that affects dopamine (like Parkinson's disease drugs). It seems insanely unethical and of extremely dubious value. It's also a violation of the Hippocratic oath.

This woman misread what I said about it being a shock to me as umbrage at the unethical nature of such tests and got snarky with me. I repeated that I did not know the data, but would appreciate a link in order to educate myself. I was sincere about this. If this is the practice and the studies I've read fail to mention it (not bloody likely), I'd like to know. She ignored the request at first and smugly said, "now you know," as if her saying it made it true to which I replied that I'd still appreciate a link. She finally gave me links, but not to any studies of SSRIs that said they tested on a healthy population. She linked to a general site and three studies which did not describe the testing conditions at all. Either she was too lazy to provide concrete support or she didn't have it. I was not impressed, but I simply said, "thank you" in reply to the links and let the matter drop.

 I still don't discount the possibility that I somehow missed this testing practice. I also don't discount the possibility that the testing conditions are different in Canada or other countries than the U.S. and this woman was speaking as a Canadian with the knowledge she gained there. I also know that disadvantaged populations (prisoners, poor students, poor people) are used at times as guinea pigs and accept or take potentially harmful drugs in exchange for cash. I just never heard of it for SSRIs.

This exchange illustrates one of the things about stupid Facebook exchanges which annoys me and I'm sure others as well. Part of the problem is the tone and degradation in civility. This woman needed to be "right". I didn't need to be "right", but I wasn't going to take her word for it because this is how stupid things become "truths". It's why Snopes exists - people pass around stories long enough for others to believe they're facts. I genuinely wanted to learn something new, if indeed there was something to be learned. What was more frustrating was that she smugly acted as if she was "educating" me, but then when I asked for that education, she either got lazy and provided sloppy links or found out she was wrong and couldn't produce the goods and pretended what she offered was sufficient.

In the end, though I thanked her for the links and let it drop, my husband, who also was skeptical, commented on the lack of substance of the links. He also couldn't believe what she said made any sense. Of course, life doesn't always make sense and companies often don't behave ethically. However, in this case, unless I get pointed at some studies which explain their methodology clearly and say they tested a specific SSRI on a healthy population, I'll remain skeptical that what she said was true.

5-HTP

At some point within the last week, I had a situation which I have had many times since returning to the U.S. I was at a breaking point emotionally and I told my husband that I just didn't feel like I could continue as I have been any longer. This was the culmination of my diminished psychological resources as a result of all of the stress, changes, and difficulty I've experienced since leaving Japan, an overall sense of hopelessness coupled with no strong sense of what is to come in the future (not concrete goals, dreams, or expectations), my own particular nature based on the damage I've incurred throughout an extremely hard life emotionally (especially in the first 20 years), and the more immediate issue that I'd been having with noisy neighbors. I have felt for some time that I'm long overdue for a break from the constant upheaval in my life and the drain on my psychological resources, but no such reprieve seems to be coming. It does often seen that there is one thing after another and my resilience, which was never great to begin with, is constantly a well that is repeatedly drained dry.

After this most recent bout of tears and feeling overwhelmed, my husband, who is doing his internship now as a therapist, told me that, if I were a client instead of his wife, he'd recommend that I consider taking anti-depressants. Taking medication for emotional problems is something that I have resisted for my entire life. There are many reasons for this. One is that I worked with seriously mentally ill people and saw what happened to them when they took such medications. Another is that I'm not someone who ingests medications lightly. I know from my understanding of human biology that many of them are toxic and processed by the liver as poisons. They are not "good for you", though they can be good at alleviating symptoms or protecting the body from further damage when its systems are imbalanced due to degradation, damage, or unlucky genes.

Mood-related medications in particular "scare" me because they can often have a sledgehammer effect. You can end up unlike yourself. You can also end up with terrible side effects. There can be a slingshot effect over time as well as dependence which is hard to break in some cases. Benzodiazepines, which are often prescribed for anxiety, can become enormously difficult to free oneself of once they are taken.

I'm 50, and after about 30 years of resisting any medical intervention for depression, I told me husband that I'd consider it seriously if he could find a psychiatrist for me to see. That is a reflection of how at the end of my rope I am. I have managed for many years in large part through the application of my orderly mind - I use behavioral techniques and try to build up my capacity to cope over a long period of time. This is a very difficult thing to do, and I could only do it in the past because I had just enough inner resolve to do it. That resolve, which like California, seems to be in drought status is just not there anymore.

About five days ago, my husband and I were driving to Costco and it occurred to me that they sold St. John's Wort at one point. I mentioned that we could buy that supplement in the hopes that it might do me some good in the interim between this point of distress and seeing someone who could assess me and consider prescribing medication. When we got there, we scanned the supplements section and found that they no longer carried it. They did, however, carry SAM-e and 5-HTP. Like St. John's Wort, these are both non-prescription supplements believed (but not proven) to help people who are suffering from depression.

I had received a free sample bottle of SAM-e last year and it didn't really do anything for me so I had no interest in trying it. The more intriguing option was 5-HTP for a couple of reasons. First of all, I knew that it was a chemical precursor of serotonin, the neurotransmitter that is often manipulated by stronger anti-depressant drugs in order to help people with depression or anxiety. Second, it was pretty economical. For $20, I could have a 75-day supply. Third, I hadn't tried it before so there was at least hope that it might have a positive effect.

The first day after I took 5-HTP, I had a short time of what can be described as "mellowness". It's probably what most people feel like when they are genuinely relaxed and a feeling I only tend to experience in the day or two preceding a cold when my whole body seems to just lay down its arms and say, "Yay, we'll have no choice but to rest now!" That's actually a good feeling and a reason I'm sometimes happy to catch a cold - that feeling was so rare.

During the five days that I have taken 5-HTP, I have experience between a half hour and an hour of that feeling within a few hours of taking it. It seems to be having at least that impact on me. It also sometimes makes me a little tired, but the truth is that I've been suffering from crushing fatigue at times and this is nothing compared to that. In fact, it's a nice mellow tired which doesn't make me want to lie down or sleep. It makes me feel lazy, which is something else that I never generally feel. My husband has remarked that he wishes I could just "relax". This sort of tired puts me in a place in which I feel fine doing that. In fact, I feel good about just doing nothing during this relatively short time (again, usually a half hour to an hour).

The second day that I took 5-HTP, I experienced my first (and so far only) side effect. When I was looking at my computer screen, everything took on a "high definition" look. The whites were super bright and strangely soft. The text looked crisper and the contrast between the words and white screen was sharper. I figured that it may be some change in my cheap display so I looked at my husband's laptop and it looked the same. The Christmas lights, when turned on, also had a brighter, softer look to them.

Some online searches revealed that this sometimes happens, along with a plethora of other side effects which are more uncomfortable and mitigate the value for some people like feeling sleepy/overly tired, upset stomach, and fogginess. Since some prescription drugs have similar effects, it's no shock that 5-HTP could have them as well.

When I read negative experiences, I have no doubt that they are all real. However, for me, so far, things have been going well. This morning, I woke up and told my husband that I felt better than I have in a very long time. It may be coincidence. It might even be the placebo effect (though I doubt it since the mood changes are concrete and distinct and I'm hyper-aware of my body and moods from years of tracking them in an attempt to manage both). I could also just be in some sort of cyclical upswing in my moods for the time being and that coincided with my starting to take 5-HTP.

I don't want to be misleading. I don't think 5-HTP was a miracle cure for me. I think that it was enough to take my depleted reserve and add a few cups to it such that all of the other things that I'm doing on top of taking this supplement are having more effect. In essence, I've been doing the therapy, and now I've also got some sort of "medication" to help it work more effectively.

I'm not sure if this will last. I hope it does. The body has a way of acclimating to medication or supplements. It will only continue to work (if indeed it works at all - which I think it does, but I can't "prove" it) if my brain had some inability to produce or properly metabolize serotonin and the added boost to 5-HTP righted a "wrong". It will only continue to work if my brain doesn't figure out that it's getting more of something it used to do by itself and decide to get lazy and stop doing what it used to do (which brains are inclined to do). At any rate, for now, given the terrible state I was in not too long ago, I'll take this and be grateful rather than worry about the future.

Thanksgiving 2014

While I was living in Japan, my husband and I didn't always celebrate Thanksgiving. If we happened to have the day off, we would arrange to buy a turkey from an importer (turkeys are not commonly consumed in Japan and can't be purchased in regular stores). Most of the time, we just didn't bother as we preferred to save the expensive turkey for Christmas. Though we had to work most of the time on Christmas day as well (as it is not a national holiday in Japan), we would often arrange to celebrate the nearest day off before or after the holiday.

It wasn't until we came back to America that we really returned to Thanksgiving as a traditional holiday. I can't remember what we did the first year after returning, but I think we bought our own turkey and I cooked it. It was a small celebration and, obviously, not memorable.

The second Thanksgiving was spent at my sister-in-law's home. She and her husband host a big dinner every year and invite some of their friends and family. They didn't ask us to come the first year because we didn't really mesh with them at that point. I think they didn't really feel comfortable with us until later and they had their routine in place from the more than two decades in which we were in another country and had nothing to do with them.

This year is our third Thanksgiving in America and things between my sister-in-law and I have grown much closer in the past year. She has come to visit several times and usually stays for many hours (rarely fewer than four, often as long as six) and we talk about things which are quite deep and personal. So, this year was the first time that we felt like we really belonged with their family to a fair extent.

I know that people often tell Thanksgiving stories as if they were always full of family fights and animosity. I have to say that this past holiday seemed to pass without drama. In fact, I thought it was a lot of fun. The group included my sister-in-law, her husband, her two college-age sons, a long-time friend of the family and his girlfriend, my father-in-law, my husband, and me.

My sister-in-law's husband came from a family which built a fair bit of affluence and, when his father died, they inherited some beautiful silver and porcelain pieces which they use on special occasions. They set a lovely table and the husband is a great cook. He makes a gorgeous turkey, superior stuffing, and gravy that his kid's can't praise enough. The meal was excellent and full of varied traditional delights. One of the reasons that I prefer to go to their place rather than make my own Thanksgiving meal (something that I did for many years even in Japan) is that it isn't worthwhile to make a lot of dishes for two people, especially when my husband doesn't care for stuffing or sweet potatoes. I'd be making certain dishes for just one person (white mashed potatoes for him, sweet for me, stuffing for me, but not him, etc.).

After the meal, I noticed that my sister-in-law's husband eventually went into their living room and sat in front of his PC. That was no big deal to me as he's retired to that space in the past when I've carried out short visits. He's social enough, but he's also a bit of a geek. I assumed that he was exhausted after all of the effort that went into the occasion. An e-mail message from my sister-in-law informed me otherwise the following day.

It seems that her husband was incredibly stressed out because he was in the unfortunate position of being seated next to my father-in-law. My father-in-law could get a series of posts about his character if I ever chose to go into it all, but I'll try to just offer a brief description here. He is 77, selfish, self-involved, and hard of hearing, especially in one ear. He loves to be the center of attention, but his social skills mainly consist of talking about banal matters of interest only to him. He is actually a very intelligent person and capable of speaking about matters of depth, but he lives such a small life with little intellectual curiosity that he tends to not bring up any weighty topics of his own accord.

Sitting next to my father-in-law is a sufficiently tedious experience that my husband made sure last year to put himself between the two of us. He essentially took the bullet so I wouldn't have to. There was a reason for this beyond the self-centered smalltalk. My father-in-law had had a childish fit over some small thing last year and yelled at my husband the moment we walked into his home after going through some exhausting moving of our furniture and whatnot into our new apartment. We had been coming off of several weeks of incredible stress and pressure trying to find a place at all and my husband was super sick with bronchitis all the while starting his internship as a therapist. The pettiness of the reason for the attack had me not answering the phone when my father-in-law called for over a year. I just didn't want to deal with him alone.

At any rate, my sister-in-law's husband was seated on the "bad ear" side of my father-in-law while her husband's friend and his girlfriend were on the other side of said father-in-law. The father-in-law kept talking over the husband when he tried to converse with his guests and seemingly ignored him when he spoke directly to him. I witnessed my sister-in-law's husband try four times to talk to him and be blithely ignored or go unheard. I suggested he tap his shoulder and that seemed to work.

Even all of this may have been overlooked except that my sister-in-law and her husband live in attached housing with my father-in-law. Starting about six or seven years ago, my mother-in-law started to steeply decline because she suffered from a form of dementia which is similar to Parkinson's disease. During that time, my father-in-law increasingly relied on his daughter for help without expressing much gratitude and he has always taken his family for granted while providing very little in the way of support for them when they are in need. My sister-in-law once said, "He has always been selfish and stingy," and that sums it up pretty well. There's much more to tell on this front, but I will move along and cover that at a later time.

With the long history of being unhelpful and selfish as well as the father-in-law's increasing obtrusiveness, my sister-in-law's husband has grown less patient with everything. My sister-in-law said that there was an incident after Thanksgiving in which her dad came over to their house to borrow butter and he stood in front of the open refrigerator and asked where it was. The husband said, "We keep it close to the sun," and "It's in the oven." This response was offered because my father-in-law is so lazy that he doesn't take any time to think or look. He just asks his daughter to think and look for him. It's not that he is so absent-minded (though he has gotten more forgetful, of course). He's just accustomed to someone doing everything for him (as his wife did for many years until she grew too ill to meticulously care for him and dote on his every wish and need).

I should note that there was a little incident of this type of thing while I was there on Thanksgiving. My sister-in-law needed foil to wrap up leftovers for us and she asked her dad to get it from the pantry. He walked into the pantry. Looked in one spot and one spot only (directly in front of him on the shelves) and said he couldn't find it. I went in and actually looked around and found it on top of the dryer that was under the shelving. It was right on top. You just had to scan the space quickly to see it, but he just looks where he thinks it might be and gives up. She puts up with this nearly every day, sometimes up to six times per day.

At any rate, I thought this was a great and drama-free holiday, but it turned out that it was incredibly bile-raising for my sister-in-law's husband. To his credit, he didn't act out on his anger and frustration. He just walked away and tried to calm down. Under the circumstances, I thought that was really the best possible choice and I imagine that, if that's the most drama a person is going to witness at a family gathering, then I got off super easy. My sister-in-law's husband, unfortunately, did not.

Hypervigilance

In a previous post, I mentioned that I didn't like the word "hypervigilant" because it sounds like a person is on alert every moment. It evokes the image of a soldier scanning the horizon with intense scrutiny for enemies, ready to react at the smallest sign of invasion. Because of my sense of the word, I have generally rejected it as a description of myself. It turns out that I was wrong. I am hypervigilant.

For those who don't know this word, it often applies to people who are much more sensitive than average, read meaning into small things, and tend to spin out theories and ideas about things to an extent that others may not. A lot of people would tag them as "over sensitive", thin-skinned, and too easily "worked up" about little things. They would also be people who may get hung up on some small comment or action and take it very personally.

I've spent many years changing myself so that I am less of all of the qualities mentioned in the previous paragraph. In fact, I've spent quite some time trying to build emotional Teflon. One of the ways that I've done this is to accept myself for who I am and to gain as close to total self-awareness as possible. I know I take things seriously and that bugs people. I know that I can come across as harsh and intellectual and that can be off-putting. I know that the way in which I embrace complexity and can often "win" arguments or debates by making more points (due to my education and reasoning) annoys people. I know I'm fat, have a big nose, and my skin is drooping and wrinkly. I'm okay with all of these things because I know me and accept me now. Note that "accepting" myself is not the same as being 100% happy. I continue to try to improve, but I no longer experience self-loathing about points that I wish were different and I no longer take offense if people "attack" me or note these points. It took a lot of work, but here I am. You can't attack me with these facts if I don't find them unacceptable truths about myself.

With all of that being said, I'm still hyper-vigilant. I don't dissect every word someone utters to see if I'm being insulted or ruminate on whether people are trying to tell me something in a round-about way. Part of the reason for this is that I know what people are doing without having to wring my hands and perform an internal debate. It's not something that involves much process anymore. When an acquaintance of mine who was an acupuncturist who I accidentally pissed off told me that he thought all of my stress registered in my stomach, I knew he was doing that to try and hurt me by letting me know he noticed that I was fat. I didn't have to analyze it. I knew. However, it didn't matter because it's now a Teflon area of my psyche. Insult understood. Insult ineffective. Move along.

I've done some research on hypervigilance as a result of my misophonia (which is getting better thanks to various behavioral techniques - it's not over, but it's improving pretty quickly). I learned that people who have it often develop it because they grew up in "unsafe environments". I grew up verbally abused at home, in public, and in school. I was bullied, often quite badly, everyday for most of my life between the ages of 10-20. If it wasn't my mother shrieking and telling me I was a horrible person for not safe-guarding her emotions at every moment, it was kids taunting me at school or on the bus. If it wasn't kids laughing at my bulky clumsiness, it was a gym teacher who smirked as I struggled to cross a balance beam (surely, a sadistic device) without falling off. Once I crossed the threshold to puberty, it was men and boys screaming insults from their cars at me.

I grew up feeling completely unprotected by everyone around me. The bus driver didn't stop kids from taunting me during the 90 minutes of time I spent on his conveyance each day. My mother didn't stop making me feel as if it was my fault that everything that upset her happened and that made me a terrible person. My teachers didn't stop kids from making fun of me. There was not one person who protected me when I was growing up. Is it any wonder that I wanted to kill myself when I was 15 and put a gun to my head? Obviously, I was too scared to pull the trigger.

Living in that environment is what cultivated my ability to "read" people rapidly and fairly accurately. If you are constantly under siege, you learn to find a way to survive. To reduce the chances that I'd be harmed, I had to detect the signs of attack. The better I could read a crinkle in the corner of an eye or the change in the set of a jaw, the faster I could get out of harm's way. Friends who weren't really friends or kindness that was a mask for an act of cruelty could be determined with tone of voice or the set of the brow. My mother's moods and whether she was interested in lashing out at me could be picked up by tone of voice or volume. I didn't have to wait for her to reach the point of frustration. I could see it coming from the start and escape in some cases before she built up a head of steam.

These days, I'm not walking around in a state of fear, but I realized that I still have all of my hypervigilant abilities. I read people and situations fast because I can't not see what I see. I had so much practice that it is a transparent and automatic behavior now. And, as I said before, I don't necessarily enjoy it.

However, I realize now that the reason that I wouldn't want to live without these skills is because I'm afraid not to have them. They continue to be a form of protection against a world that I will never trust because the only one who protects me is me. There is only one person that I am safe with and that is my husband. That is the legacy of the bullying and bad upbringing that I endured. No amount of understanding or awareness will strip me of these feelings. I can't simply "get over it" now that I'm free of the environment because this is how my brain has been wired through years of experience. While I may have escaped the neuroses, I'll never lose the hypervigilance and the skills that came with it.

The Real "Rape Culture"

A yearbook photo of my cousin. R.I.P., Roxanne.

When I was 15 years old, my mother told me that something terrible had happened to one of my relatives. She told me that my second cousin had been found dead in a creek bed. Later, we were told that there was evidence that she had been raped and murdered. The police deemed it a suicide and let the case go cold. Twenty-two years later, a man made a death bed confession and said that he had been the one who killed her. The rape aspect was covered up by asserting that the relationship between the victim and her killer was "unclear".

This was my first experience with the idea of rape. My cousin was the same age as me when she was killed. I remember being shocked at the fact that someone would want to have sex with someone so young. I was pretty naive and I didn't know about things like pedophiles and pederasts. It was also 1979 when it happened and rock stars could openly "date" very young women in their early to late teens without anyone batting an eye.

While I can, thankfully, say that I was never raped, I was non-invasively molested when I was 6 or so years old. A teenage boy lured me up to his room while my parents were visiting his parents. He was wearing blue jeans under which he had an erection. He grabbed me and held me on his lap while he banged his covered penis into my covered vagina until I squirmed free and escaped. I was also propositioned by a dirty old man who was a drinking buddy of my father's. He pointed at my pelvic area and asked, "Can I have some of that?" At first, I was confused, and then I was ashamed and humiliated. Both of these experiences occurred while I was alone with the males in question, though not entirely so. The first occurred in the home of my parents' friends while they were downstairs. The second in my own home (in the dining room) while my parents were off doing something outside and imprudently left me alone with that disgusting old pervert.

I didn't tell my parents about either of these experiences. The first time, I had no idea what was happening. I only knew that I didn't like it. The second time, I simply did not want to think about it and my lack of understanding about exactly how perverse this man was made me think I'd somehow gotten it wrong.

These days, with all of the news about women being raped while they are intoxicated, people talk a lot about "rape culture". They speak of an environment in which men (usually) think it is somehow okay to sexually assault women (usually) because they are vulnerable. There is talk about how we must make sure men know that it is "NOT OKAY" to do these things and they need to know they'll be punished. Much is made of this and how we need to stop this mindset which contributes to "rape culture".

Here's the thing. This is not the rape culture we should be directing most of our attention toward. The real rape culture is not in colleges, bars, or frat houses. The biggest circumstances in which rape flourishes are those in which there is isolation, poverty, and a lack of parental oversight or protection due to the types of neglect and ignorance that accompany rural poverty. Because of the focus on rape as an issue for young, affluent (and often white) women, the image most people have of rape is very different from the reality.

Most rapes occur in remote areas in which the rapist can find a victim alone and in circumstances in which crying for help is a useless endeavor. Most rapes occur among people who make $25,000 per year (or less). Most rapes happen because someone isn't paying attention to what is happening to their daughters, sisters, wives, or girlfriends because they are intoxicated, preoccupied, or make an assumption about safety. Most rapes happen in the atmosphere that saw me molested as a little girl and propositioned as a pre-teen. The real rape culture is one in which men know what they are doing is NOT OKAY, but they know that they have the right set of circumstances in which to get away with it. They do it with the knowledge that the chances that they'll pay for it are exceptionally low. This is doubly so because the world, which worries about college rape, is blind to where the bigger problems are occurring.

The overwhelming majority of rapes are not happening to drunken party girls. They are happening to people who are alone and far from help. There's a reason Alaska is the "rape capital of America" and that Native Americans suffer more rapes as a percentage of their population than any other group. It's substance abuse (alcoholism, largely), isolation, and poverty. The Huffington Post posted a list of 50 facts about rape, but failed to include one bit of data about the issue. The word "rural" did not occur anywhere in this long list because nobody gives a damn about the lives of those who exist in remote areas. It's boring and the victims are simply people who are being taken advantage of rather than those who are putting themselves at risk with their actions.

Without the moral ambiguity, there's no argument to be made about "rights" and no privileged environment to argue passionately about. There's just a social problem that emotionally activated people who see themselves as empathetic and involved have no solution for. If they can't talk about it from a position of self-righteousness that allows them to confirm their sense of what a good person they are for being involved in the issue, they have no interest in it. 

The types of people who  believe they are all over social justice are, ironically, extremely worried about the rights of white girls who are affluent enough to go to college to get drunk off their asses and not be assaulted. They'll shout and protest the mentality that allows that sort of thing to happen while remaining utterly ignorant and indifferent to the culture that allowed my cousin to be raped and murdered. Why do they worry so much about the  minority of cases and ignore where far more problems occur? In my opinion, it is that they only care about the part of the problem that they can relate to. They care about the part that affects them or people like them. They talk about social justice, but what they really want is justice for members of their tribe, not the greater number of victims of the real and more common "rape culture".

Misophonia

As my situation with the noisy neighbors with the bassy surroundsound system drags on, I've been working on methods of managing my reactions and changing my thoughts. I've also turned to the copious resources available online to see if they have any ideas that I had not come up with. What I've discovered is that I've actually thought of nearly everything already - which is rather unfortunate. However, I have found that I am not alone, which makes me feel better.

While digging into this issue, I've learned that there is a condition called misophonia and I seem to have it. I wasn't born with it, as some extremely unfortunate people have been, but I appear to be prone to developing it. Misophonia manifests as a hatred of certain sounds. In my case, it is deep, loud, bass noises which vibrate the floor. Even at low levels, it gets on my nerves, though I have to say that it didn't used to and that I've become hyper-vigilant about it as the neighbors have been ramped up the noise and been increasingly disrespectful of those of us living above them.

The site I linked to in the previous paragraph mentions a metaphor that I coincidentally used when talking about what this was wadding up my undies so tightly. This noise is like fingernails on a blackboard. It is nearly impossible to ignore no matter how hard I try. Of course, there is the added difficulty of how not thinking about something or attempting to ignore it tends to focus your attention on it all the more.

I should note that my earliest experience with misophonia was when I was a teenager. I remember my mother sitting on the sofa reading a book and continuously making an annoying little throat clearing noise. I tried to ignore it, but it just got more and more under my skin. I asked my mother why she did it and she said she wasn't making any noise. My father said that she certainly was and she denied it again, but both of us pointed out when she next made this noise. Eventually, I just left the room when she started making this irritating little sound. This early experience is what makes me believe that I'm constitutionally prone to misophonia. At that time, it was easy to get away. Unfortunately, in my present situation, it is far more complicated, so I compiled a list of coping strategies a little over a week ago and mailed it to myself to reference:

I instructed myself to read this list when it starts to ramp up:

1. Push the sound back (imagine physically putting it into the background while pulling focus onto something in the foreground). This is meant to counteract the subjective enlargements of stimuli that is so common.

2. Tell yourself that, while it is annoying, it is not that bad. It could be worse (could be loud rap music or something more frequent).

3. Tell yourself that you can, if necessary, escape it either in the short or long term. You are not trapped even though you may feel that way.

4. Understand that it is random and not personal. No one is trying to hurt you. You are collateral damage. 

5. Create positive stimuli to focus on - watch a video, listen to music, take a walk (if possible), jump on the trampoline

6. Focus on a task. Write. Clean. Read. It may be necessary to listen to a white noise or background sounds to help as these are quiet tasks. Multi-tasking may be most effective. 

7. Understand that you have allies to support you in dealing with this both logistically (property manager) and psychologically (husband).

8. Focus on your body's responses (stomach knotting, heart beating faster, tension filling your face and upper body) and try to relax them or stop these responses consciously. 

9. Sooth using sensations. Hold a debu neko (a stuffed toy cat from japan). Light a candle to create a pleasant scent and focus on the flame. Draw circles in one palm with the other. 

10. Remember that, even if you stay here for now, this situation is a transition, not permanent. Some day, you will move past this. You do not have to tolerate it forever. It is just a temporary experience. 

11. Remember that whatever coping techniques you build to deal with this now will be with you to employ in future difficult situations. Look at this as skill building instead of a test of your limited resolve.

12. Understand that your resolve is limited and it is okay to admit that it is sometimes going to be tapped out. Try to deal with this outcome, should it come to pass, as something that is understandable. It's okay to cry about it. It's okay to self-soothe in some (hopefully non-destructive) fashion.

13. Put the situation in perspective in regards to your entire life. This is a blip in the continuum. What is important is love and growth. What is important is building a life and a character that fits your ideal. Being activated by this is not part of that ideal. Being capable of managing your response is. 

14. Remember that you have survived and endured greater hardships than this for long periods of time. You are more than capable of managing this intrusive issue. 

15. To escape the floor vibrations, jump on the trampoline or lie on the bed (depending on whether you want to move or not). Put your feet up under the desk or rest them on a pillow. 

I have used some of the items on this list in the past week and it has helped, though it doesn't always help. I also downloaded a bunch of nature sounds (rain, waterfalls, rushing rivers, etc.) and spent the better part of a morning saturation listening to it. That was actually pretty exhausting because I had to have it up super loud and the truth is that I have been training myself up until now to deal better with silence than incessant noise. 

There was a time in the past when I was so unhappy with my own thoughts that being alone with them was unbearable. I'd constantly have T.V. on in the background or be doing something. I needed the "white noise" of banal words and thoughts to stop me from thinking negative thoughts or ruminating. I realized this was not a good thing (hence the "orderly mind" business) and trained myself to be okay in the silence and to deal with my thoughts. Now, I feel really resentful that someone else's rude behavior is pushing me back into needing to saturation bomb my senses so I don't hear obnoxious noises, but I'll have to deal with it and realize that this isn't about the same issue as before. 

At any rate, yesterday, I reached a new level in coping which should start some serious movement toward better coping and possible recovery. Up until then, I had to drown out or escape the noises. Now, I'm trying to work with being okay with their presence. The message now is that I can be "okay" when I hear them. I don't have to have an emotional reaction or get frustrated, angry, or upset. I tell myself that they are just sounds and they don't matter. They are part of the tapestry of life and no more or less a part of it than the street noise, birds, and other neighbors sounds that I routinely tune out. I'm not past my reactions, but I'm making progress. 

The only down side to this, and this is not my constructing worry webs or grandiose outcomes, is that I know that if I mellow completely, the neighbors are likely to do what they've been doing for the last nine months. That is, if my husband and I don't complain, they'll gradually start getting louder and then listening more loudly more often then later at night and earlier in the morning. Part of what created this loop of suffering and brought on this misophonia is the anxiety that was built around the patterns of their behavior. That is, the cycle of them being loud, us complaining to the manager, his telling them to cool it, their settling for a little while then getting louder then us complaining again and the cycle repeating. It doesn't help that they have gotten more bold and contemptuous toward us as time has gone by. Their whole attitude has become the equivalent of flipping us the bird.

It is this cycle that has put me where I am today, but I have to look at this from the viewpoint of knowing that they're on thinner ice now than they were before. The property manager has heard them blast it late at night when he comes home from work and he's been in our place and heard it clearly through our floor. While I wouldn't say he's on our side, he knows that our complaints are credible and will always do something about it, at least eventually. I'm going to use that belief to tamp down the part of me that feels out of control sufficiently to send me into a frustrated rage when I hear them playing the T.V. loudly on occasion. It's pretty much all I've got as a barrier against the anxiety when it comes down to this particular aspect of it. 

Incidentally, there is a misophonia scale here. I realize that I was at level 8 on this scale as I imagined doing things like vandalizing their garden or dumping garbage on their doorstep in retaliation. Fortunately, I have been able to walk myself back from that point and am hovering between 5-7 (closer to 5 now). I'm not a bad person, but this situation made me want to do things dramatically out of character for me. There were times when it drove me close to what would be madness for me.

That Volunteer Thing

Two months ago, I decided to finally act on taking a volunteer job that I'd been pondering for quite some time. There had been notices in the local library asking for conversation partners for non-native speakers of English on Wednesday mornings and, given my experience with ESL teaching and curriculum development, it seemed like a good fit. I was looking to use my skills as well as meet new people through this outlet.

When you think about a job of any kind, be it volunteer or paid, you imagine a situation. I thought this was going to be a single native English speaker partnering with a single non-native speaker in order to help him or her improve or practice. The situation was very far from what I envisioned. There was a huge room filled with tables capable of seating up to four people. Two of the tables were pushed together such that a large group sat around each. Usually, this meant there were two native speakers and six non-native speakers per group.

I will admit up front that the organization of the situation did not encourage me. I knew from my experiences in Japan that large groups never functioned as well as smaller ones and I didn't know why they'd choose not to break the groups in half when possible to pair three non-natives with one native. Bigger groups tend to end up with more "listeners" rather than "speakers" and it is harder to manage the conversation. 

This first sessions started with a deadly dull and incredibly tedious video presentation on library software for people who want to learn other languages. It was a half hour long, which is 1/3 of the 90 minutes allotted for the club to operate. Since this was my first time, I wanted to use that time to "read the room". I noticed that most people had pretty much checked out after 10 minutes. Some were shifting in their seats, others were looking at cell phones, and still others were slumping lower and lower as the time dragged on.

In order to justify this useless presentation, the librarians who offered it tried to tell everyone how great and important the software was. This was underscored by the woman who is in charge of the program, Nancy. It was clear that the whole thing went over like a lead balloon, but in order for the organizers to convince themselves that it was important and valuable, they carried on like cheerleaders long after the team had lost dismally to try to convince the spectators that it had really been a great game.

After that fiasco, I shared a group with a woman named "Jean". Jean was a retired school teacher and she approached her group like a bunch of students under her tutelage. She started by asking them to introduce themselves and a quick round of anemic introductions that included only their names and place of origin followed. This was a silly way to introduce people because there were placards in front of each person with their names written on them anyway, but that was the way each of three shared sessions that I had with other volunteers seemed to go.

Jean then asked if they had done anything the previous week. Some people had nothing to say. A few were more outgoing and told a story. One had bought chocolates in Korea (her home country) and gave one to each person. The chocolates had chili pepper in them and everyone - except me - was reluctant to try it. I gamely gave it a shot and said that I used to write a snack blog about foreign food so I was generally okay to try anything. I described the taste and then asked the non-natives if they had noticed that American chocolate was different than that in other countries. I did this to give them a chance to talk about something which could be common ground. Jean hijacked the conversation to say her relatives were originally from Switzerland and the chocolate there was the best then she changed the subject (rather nervously) to something she wanted to speak about. That killed the talk before everyone could comment on something which I had hoped was common ground for each person to speak about.

In Japan, I found that there were certain "universal" experiences through which everyone could share their lives. One of them is food. I found that it was also a "safe" topic that never brought up controversy or bad feelings. Other such topics included holidays, family, work, and education. I could rely on these as connections that everyone could bond over, but Jean had a need to run the show as she likely always had - as a teacher who introduces what she wants to discuss rather than allows the students to carry on.

Jean chose a few random words to write down and ask the students if they understood. She also asked what they thought of the video and none of them liked it. One student never said anything. A few said very little, and a couple tended to dominate while Jean acted like an elementary school teacher to stitch it all together. It wasn't bad. It wasn't great. I finished thinking that the opening video choice displayed a gross lack of understanding of what non-natives wanted to hear about as well as too much of an investment in promoting services and not enough in helping people actually speak English, but I wanted to try again.

At the second session, they opened with an off-the-cuff suggestion that we do a "morning mingle". This was poorly explained and implemented. It was mentioned that we should walk around talking to different people, but it was clear that this was not heard or understood. Shouting vague instructions at native-speaker speed to a large room simply does not work. It's dicey at best even when everyone speaks the language fluently. It's quite ineffective when the people who need to hear the instructions don't.

I ended up spending the entire "mingling" time talking to the same low-English-level Korean woman who locked onto me like a duck imprinting on its mother and wouldn't let me go. She was nice enough, and I could tell she was shy and relieved to have someone who she was comfortable speaking to, but this was nothing like a "mingle".

During a deadly dull meeting after this second session, another volunteer said that she experienced the same problem and that they needed to do something to make sure people changed partners if they were going to use this exercise again. This meeting, incidentally, informed me very clearly that the focus was on what the volunteers wanted to do and needed and not on the needs of the learners. All of the talk seemed to center around what they wanted to do or how they could fill time. Not one person asked or considered what might be good for the learners or seemed to talk about the operation from any perspective other than the library's resources and providing fuel for the volunteers to burn up the minutes in the session.

During this second time I took part, I shared a table with a woman named Shannon who had also taught in Japan. She had lived there for 13 years and ran an English school. I could tell by the way she managed the table that she was more adept at this sort of thing, though she did employ what I'd call some of the more unsophisticated ways of handling a group. She'd break us in pairs so we'd talk to each other. She'd try some of the common tricks of getting people to talk which displayed mechanistic knowledge, but did not betray any sort of subtle reading of the group or members and finding common threads to talk about. She had a good bag of tricks, but it was the stuff that people used after a few years of teaching, and nothing inventive or interesting.

To offer an example of what I'm talking about, a new teacher will use structured materials to conduct a class. For example, he or she will play a game or use a pat question and answer method to get people to talk. An experienced teacher will ask some questions or creatively find what people want to talk about and then expand upon that. I used to do this all of the time with students with very specific interests so we'd cover what they wanted to rather than some arbitrary method. Shannon was fine. She used the arbitrary methods, and it felt a bit rigid, but it was okay.

During the third session, we opened with the "morning mingle" again, but this time they re-explained it and turned the lights off every 10 minutes to indicate that we should switch partners. The sort of half-assed implementation that happened the first time was indicative to me of the amateur thought processes behind how things were being done that I had been noting. Things were being done poorly and corrected later, at least when it was being noted by the volunteers that there was an issue because it bothered them. I was also noticing the things which were not working well from the side of the non-natives.

The dull thuds and loud clunks of what was an issue for the learners was an aspect which no one, but me and, possibly Shannon, was noticing. At one point, I mentioned the large size of the groups to Shannon and asked her if she thought this was for the best. She looked uncomfortable and said that it was Nancy's group and it seemed to be working for her. It was clear that she also felt things could be better, but wasn't going to rock the boat. It turns out she knew better than me in this regard.

I had my worst experience with sharing a session with a woman named Shauley during my third time. She was of Chinese descent, but spoke like a native speaker with a bit of an accent. Her qualification to call herself a native speaker was not in question, but her ability to run a group was pretty bad. She favored the two Chinese people in the group and a woman from France spent most of the time looking bored and unhappy as she was rarely given a chance to speak. It was clear that an elderly woman (one of the two Chinese people) followed the same practice each time and that she always paired with Shauley as Shauley explained that this old woman read her introduction - a long, rambling document about her home town in China - each time. It made the old lady more comfortable, but it was a killer of the energy and conversation at the table, especially as part of the start of the group. It didn't help that she finished reading her page and broke out into loud, heaving sobs because she missed her home so much.

At one point, I tried to introduce a technique to allow the learners to do most of the talking instead of me during my introduction, but Shauley hijacked it and distorted it so that they spoke less and she talked more. Instead of allowing the learners to ask me questions, she asked me questions. I tried to mitigate this by asking on occasion if one of the learners knew the answer. For example, I was asked about the Amish in Pennsylvania because I live there and an Italian woman to my right indicated that she knew who they were after watching a documentary, so I asked her to talk about them instead of me. Even this effort was undone by Shauley as she started answering the question about the Amish herself instead of allowing the Italian woman to do it on her own.

Shauley displayed to the greatest degree a problem that new teachers in Japan had and that every single volunteer there had shown. That is, they are so uncomfortable with a moment of silence or hesitation that they jump in to fill the gap. When you are dealing with non-native speakers, you have to get comfortable with their pauses as they collect their words and express themselves. Most people, especially Americans, have so much discomfort and inner turmoil about pauses that they can't sit with this. I sit with it just fine, and this was one of the reasons students chose me as a teacher. I was not dealing with my internal issues. I was accommodating theirs because I understood that it was hard to speak a second language and they needed time.

In each shared session, dealing with the volunteer's handling of matters was a problem for me. I would try to set the stage for a method through which the non-natives could express themselves, and the native volunteer would grab it and start talking or change the method before everyone had an equal chance to speak. I found this immensely frustrating. I am not used to being in a group of people in a social setting and allowing some to be largely ignored. Even when I tried to draw in the bored and clearly dissatisfied French woman by talking to her about the fact that she mentioned her boyfriend was going to buy a car (as a connection to my hating to drive here), Shauley hijacked that before the French woman could answer beyond a few words and started talking to one of the Chinese women about her driving.

After this third session, I felt very tenuous about going back, but returned for another. This was the first time that I was able to run the show myself as there weren't enough volunteers for me to share a table. I noted that Nancy only decided to move me to a table alone after another volunteer said she didn't think she could do one by herself and she remarked to me, "You can handle one on your own." Yes, I can. This was a concrete reflection of what I'd already perceived again and again. This show was being run for the volunteers, not for the people that they were there to "help".

The opening activity for this time was a golden oldie of the English as a second language game. It's called "find someone who". We used to use it in large groups in Japan all of the time, but we were always careful about the content to make sure that it matched the capability of the participants. We didn't use vocabulary that they couldn't understand. We also explained beforehand that it was for practice in asking questions. The documents for this versatile activity always were structured as such:

Find someone who...

...has been to New York City.
...has eaten fugu.
...has a sister.
(etc.)

The small challenge for the learner is to structure a question like "Have you ever been to New York City?" During the use of this in the ESL club, no one explained the purpose so everyone was walking around saying, "Has been to New York City?" They just read the stems because of the inadequate introduction.

Beyond the poor explanation, the document had clearly been grabbed off an internet site and no one bothered to think about whether or not the words were comprehensible to most people. The first question was "...a jack of all trades." This old-fashioned term is not only out of favor in the modern age, but extremely complex to explain and unlikely to be in the arsenal of words of a non-native speaker. Though we sometimes had to use words that we believed students might not know, we always made an effort to explain those words before the activity. Again and again, the approach in this group was to confuse and then explain (if at all). This is a sloppy approach and it's a bad experience for the learner as not understanding too much makes them stop trying to understand at all. It also makes them feel like they are failing constantly.

After a month of sessions, I planned to give it one more shot before deciding to continue because the fifth one was to occur just before Halloween and there was supposed to be a pumpkin-carving activity. In fact, I was really looking forward to this as I felt that it would be structured around actions rather than be oriented toward the volunteer's needs. Unfortunately, I got sick, and the following week I had already planned to skip because of my husband's birthday. In the interim, I got an e-mail from Nancy saying there was going to be a meeting in which they would discuss whether or not they should break the groups into levels (beginner, intermediate, advanced).

She asked for my feedback about the levels, and I gave it. I gave it mentioning a lot of the problems I'd noticed and how they'd impact separation into levels. In particular, my concern was that the "beginners" (who she mentioned in her message that no one wanted to work with) would require far more preparation and structure than any other group. I also mentioned that, if this was social thing, it was better to leave them mixed. If it was a learning thing, then they needed to break them up.  I also talked about the group size and how it tended to be a bigger issue for lower levels (as higher level students dominated) and that generally the whole thing wouldn't work unless the volunteers were trained to manage the time without any insecurity about how they'd fill it. (Note: I didn't use the word "insecurity", but tried to be "nice" about how I said everything. I may have failed in that regard, but I really tried.)

I mentioned a lot of things, and I should note that, after the first session, Nancy told me that even if I only came once, she wanted my critical feedback. I came four times, and when I gave some of that critical feedback, I could tell by her response that she wasn't happy about what I'd said. She essentially blew off every concern, justified every choice they were making, and dismissed my difference in opinion as the reflection of someone who'd primarily done ESL in business and didn't understand what they were doing there. She did this all as nicely as possible, but I could tell that, while she asked for critical appraisal, what she really wanted was mostly validation of what they were doing. She said quite clearly that she didn't think I understood what they were doing and had hoped she could talk to me later after I had properly comprehended their program.

It is true that my experiences were primarily with business in Japan. I even noted that I understood that they were dealing with volunteers so it was different. However, I think it's not uncommon for volunteers to receive training and these ones were getting none. Not one of those people knew what they were doing and the whole situation smacked of people who were well-intentioned, but largely throwing things at a wall and waiting to see what stuck. What was worse was that they were only viewing success through the lens of what worked for the volunteers. No one had a clue about what it was like on the other side for the non-natives. In fact, until I mentioned this point to Nancy, I don't think it even occurred to anyone to even think about that aspect of the situation and I'm pretty sure right now that Nancy won't think twice about what I said now that I'm gone.

Had Nancy received my comments less defensively, I may have returned and even offered training had they wanted it. I have copious experience training people to teach English and a huge bag of techniques to share. However, it may surprise no one that I decided I was done. It's not because I wasn't being "heard" by people who knew far less than I did. It was because I already was tired of costarring in an amateur hour when I am a pro. Sharing sessions with people who are unskilled was already close to unbearable for me. Sitting with them as they thwarted my efforts to help the learners so that they could talk more themselves is just something I wasn't prepared to keep doing. It was simply too frustrating.

The thing is, I'm sure no one will really miss me. This is a free service and I'm sure most of the non-natives in that room have had experience paying high fees for what they were getting there for nothing. The population of the area I currently reside in is so diverse and filled with people who are here temporarily while spouses work on various contracts that there is a large supply of people who will take what they can get as long as they don't have to pay for it. There's also the fact that those who are learning a language rarely possess the capacity to evaluate an experience qualitatively. If you have only ever eaten consumer level cheap candy, you have no idea that expensive, quality candy tastes much better. They have to have had excellent experiences to realize that what they're getting isn't "good".

The question of whether or not I stayed or left was really about only me. The learners weren't going to be or feel deprived. Nancy and the other volunteers weren't going to care that much as they would certainly continue to pat themselves on the back and see success even when neither was warranted. The big question was what I was going to "lose" or gain by going. What I was going to lose was something I did value, and that was meeting new people from various cultures and having the potential to get to know them. Unfortunately, unless I managed a group alone (not a high probability or something I could control), I found that I couldn't get to know anyone because of how the other volunteer directed the verbal traffic. The frustration to enjoyment ratio was just too high, so I decided it was best to stop. I wrote to Nancy and told her that I wouldn't be continuing due to personal issues (true, but vague). I didn't complain or mention how disillusioned I was. That's not really her problem to deal with. It's mine.

In the end, I am glad that I did this volunteer stint. The biggest reason is that I don't like it when I say I will do something and I simply never do it. There are often logistical reasons why I don't get to things. For example, I wanted to join Toastmasters, but they're too far away to travel to conveniently at the correct time. This ESL club business was at a library within a ten-minute walk of my apartment so there was nothing in my way except me. I'm also glad because it reinforced something that I already knew and, even though it's not a "happy" conclusion, it did provide clarity.

That is, I am as outside of American culture now as I was outside of Japanese culture there. I'm an outsider in my native culture even after two and a half years back. This experience somehow crystallized that and made me feel more "okay" with the difficulties I'm having. I'm just really not like other Americans and integration is probably not going to happen (ever). I'm too educated and intellectual. My sense of self is not based in enough trivial external interests (T.V., sports teams, etc.). I seek and enjoy complexity rather than simplicity of thought and understanding. I'm too sensitive and worldly relative to the average person. I am capable of taking too many perspectives.

It was the last one that killed the volunteer experience for me. I didn't operate from the perspective of the volunteers. I operated from that of the learners, and I just couldn't live with the fact that the 12-16 people who ran the situation were the priority instead of the 60-80 who they were there to help. In the end, what I realized was that the majority (the native speakers - mostly white people) couldn't adopt the perspective of the minorities they were serving. Having lived for many years as a minority, I could. This will always make me an outlier. I'm okay with that in general, but it does make it harder for me to do this sort of work, particularly when I'm not being paid to put up with it.

How to build a bad obsession in just one week

The name of this blog is not a clever, off-the-cuff choice. It was very deliberately chosen to illustrate the way I tend to operate. I've worked over the years to be very disciplined in my thought processes and especially in my emotional reactivity. What that means in plain English is that I spend no small number of years being controlled by my temper and anxiety and that I've employed various techniques to corral my impulses and break those stallions.

At the root of the desire to do this was a need to end the suffering I endured as a result of my propensity for anxiety and anger. I don't know if I congenitally was like this, but I am certain that my upbringing created or exacerbated a lot of it. My mother's emotional abuse and my father's alcoholism and the chaos and uncertainty surrounding these problems made me prone to a lot of psychological issues including compulsive eating, depression, and anxiety. To varying degrees, I have managed to distance myself from all of these things. However, in times of stress and difficulty, they move closer to me and I am at risk of falling deep into these wells.

Recently, the issues with my noisy neighbors (detailed perhaps a bit too often in this blog's short life) have brought back an anxiety-based tendency that I experienced more in the distant past. One of the good things about having a disciplined mind and experience managing your thoughts and emotions is that you can change over time with great effort. One of the not so good things is that you can also change back to your destructive ways, often with less effort and more rapidly.

In the span of a week, I've grown nearly obsessed with the noise my neighbors are making. Any hint of overhearing their T.V., even at what I would have considered before to be reasonable background levels, sends me into a state of anger and tension. I'll sit around fearing this reaction. I've managed to whip myself into a frenzy about this and have been having intrusive thoughts about it and am ruminating on it. I have had to overtly and consciously derail myself from this destructive sequence time and again over the past week and it has been exhausting.

How did I manage to become so overwhelmed by this in a short span of time? There are a lot of possible reasons. One is that this situation is a microcosm for my entire experience in America since returning from 23 years of living in Japan. It has all of the elements that have frustrated me so deeply. The neighbors are rude, selfish, careless, entitled, and take it as their right to do what they want at my expense. What is more, they are actually breaking a rule of our rent contract - no noise that disturbs other tenants - and still refuse to stop. I think part of what I'm so wrapped up in this is that I'm fighting the bigger battle of my frustration and anger at everything about America that has let me down. If I were winning, it would probably not be something I'd get so worked up about. The best I can say at present is that we're at a stalemate and I have every expectation that I'll start "losing" again as they'll slowly return to form.

Another reason for this is that my life here is so much "smaller" than my life was in Japan. I spend a lot of time in my apartment pursuing my own interests and dealing with household responsibilities (all of which I take care of since my husband is working super hard as an intern at present). I've tried to branch out in many ways, but have found it difficult and frustrating for a variety of reasons, no small number of them linked to the aforementioned American character issues in the previous paragraph.

My sister-in-law once told me about an experience with my father-in-law that she had in which he saw a paint blister on the side of his RV and a variation in the color of the paint job after he removed a retractable awning from the side. He was worked up beyond reason about these matters and she just couldn't see what the big deal was since her father is hardly someone who is preoccupied with appearances. The way he keeps his house both internally and externally reflects his lax habits and overall laziness. I told her that the reason was likely that he didn't have enough to keep him busy and that he focused more on tiny things because his world was small. I think there is an element of that in my being so engrossed in the noise situation with my neighbors.

Into all of this mix, we can add the fact that one's state of being influences perception. In a study that I read recently, researchers found that thirsty people saw water glasses as being further away than people who were not thirsty. We more commonly experience this when we feel that the first mile is shorter than the last one when we walk a long, long way. How we feel at present affects how we perceive stimuli. That means that the more upset I am about the noise, the more likely it is that I feel it is louder.

It's also likely that the lifestyle my husband and I lead make this issue more remarkable for us. We live quietly. That is, it is rare for us to turn on the T.V. or music. There is no constantly babbling technological brook to obscure the booming bass sounds emanating from below us. If we were similarly trying to drown out the world, we could blot out some of their aural waterfall with a babbling brook of our own. Though I could choose to start listening to something to help with this, it is unfortunate that the very act of changing your lifestyle to not notice something will make you notice it more. You'll know you're only doing it because of a problem and not because you enjoy it. It only serves as a reminder of the problem you want to get away from.

I realize part of the problem with the neighbors is them. Their behavior has been inconsiderate and rude to the point of overt hostility; they once turned the T.V. up even louder after I asked them to turn it down. My sense of powerlessness in this situation is also playing a part. People who fear no consequences (which they apparently did not and may not still) and have no concern for others will not change their behavior. However, part of the problem is also me and what I'm making this into and I need to stop and readjust my thinking.

Unfortunately, part of the reason I'm so fast at building up a frenzy about this is that the time is ripe for it based on my experiences in the U.S., but also that I'm actually pretty damn good at training my mind. Since this was a slippery slope for me in terms of a propensity to be anxious or angry, it was a fast trip down there once I started wiring my brain for this sort of obsessiveness. Getting back up that mountain is a long, hard slog with slippery patches. I'm struggling to climb up and out, but I frequently slip back.

I have an entire list of cognitive techniques to help me work through this and it helps. I'm actually very good at structuring self-induced CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy). I'm less good at follow-through and implementation, but I'm working at it. One thing that helped was that, for some time yesterday, I spent some time mentally where I want to be. That is, in a non-obsessed state in which I had the proper perspective on how out of character this all is for me (at least in my present state) and how out of proportion my reactions are getting. I spent some time "sane" as it were and I could use that as a reference point.

Yesterday, I told my husband that this was like I was in a space with two adjoining rooms. In one room, I was "Sane Orderly Mind" (SOM) and, in the other, I was "Crazy Orderly Mind" (COM). It felt like COM was constantly dragging SOM into that room and trying to keep her there. Every time I've felt the pull of obsession, it has helped me to visualize this and refuse to be pulled in. My list of coping strategies will be the weapons I use against COM in order to fight her and empower SOM.

My husband has also been instrumental in my coping with this. He couldn't stop me from rapidly weaving an anxiety web as I descended into a sort of madness, but he can hold my hand and encourage me while I try to climb back out again. I need this more than I can say because I've been through a lot emotionally since returning to America and my capacity to tolerate has been tapped out for years now. I'm constantly running on fumes in this regard and he's the difference between my giving up in a crying heap of feeling overwhelmed and continuing to fight back is his support and understanding.

It has also helped to blog about the process. I've found that it helps to have this outlet as a focus for the energy generated by these experiences as well as a focus. I banged out three posts in a row because I needed something to do other than obsess. That helped as well (and it's on my CBT list). Watch this space to see how successful I am. I'm sure it'll all play out here.