Thursday, October 30, 2014

Making me into someone I don't want to be

I recently read an article about noise that bleeds through apartments in Japan. The story talked about how piano playing in particular is an enormous problem because of the vibratory sounds traveling through floors, ceilings, and walls and how disruptive they are to other tenants. You can not only hear these sounds, but you can feel them so doing things like using ear plugs or playing other sounds to mask them is not especially helpful. The story talked about how this sound pollution was so maddening that a man murdered a woman and her daughter who lived in the apartment below him because of the noise.

This is on my mind because I live above an old couple who apparently have hearing issues and need to listen to their television at bombastic levels in order to hear it. What is more, their sound system is incredibly "bassy". That means that the loud noises are sending not only sounds, but vibrations up through the floor. I can feel it when my feet rest on the floor. I can sometimes even feel it through the sofa/bed when I sit on it.

I had noisy neighbors in Japan, but I lived on the ground floor. Sometimes there would be stomping around or slamming of doors. Not infrequently, I would also hear people dropping heavy objects on the ground. It sounded like they were hefting concrete blocks and dumping them to the ground. I also had a couple of old people who lived about 10 feet from my living room window who would stand outside and have super loud conversations about nothing in particular for about a half hour quite frequently. None of that is as bad as what I'm dealing with now.

I didn't appreciate how tolerable the intermittent noisy experiences were until I started living above people who play their T.V. with a loud and heavy bass for extended periods of time. What is worse than their doing it in the daytime is that they also were doing it at night for some time. For months, we tolerated it because they'd eventually lay off around 11:15 to 11:45. When they started extending it to after midnight and nearly 1:00 am, we asked them nicely to stop doing it, but they said it was not them. They protested that their T.V. was not that loud so it must have been coming from another unit.

Initially, I believed them; when I complained to the property manager, I told him that they said it was not them so we'd have to track down the culprit with the loud, late television viewing. It became clear, however, that they were enormous liars and eventually the property manager walked by late at night and could hear their T.V. He told them to use headphones and to cut it out.

For awhile, they settled down, but in the past several weeks they've been ramping up the volume during the day and dragging the clock later into the night and earlier into the morning. In the past two weeks, they've had it on and loud before 8:00 am and after 11:00 pm. Our contract says that people are supposed to be quiet after 10:00 pm and I'd wager before 9:00 am (I haven't checked that end). These people seem to be limit-testing us and I hate it. In fact, I hate them. I hate them so much that I wish one of those ancient people would shuffle off the mortal coil each time I feel my floor vibrating and hear their bassy T.V. blaring. They're liars and they're selfish and rude. They know they're disturbing us with their behavior, but they do not care about anyone but themselves.

The thing is that I don't want to be the sort of person who hates others. I definitely don't want to wish that two useless wastes of oxygen who seem to exist to do little more than watch T.V. and potter around with plants in front of our building would just end my suffering by ending their useless existence to spare me from having to be a complainer and to suffer the physical and emotional difficulties their behavior imposes on me. These people, by showing a great lack of consideration and limit-testing my tolerance, are making me into a person that I don't want to be. They're making me petty, angry, and intolerant. And by lying about their behavior rather than asking for my understanding and reaching some sort of compromise (like allowing me to come down and adjust the sound on their set so it is loud, but not vibrating), they close the door on any sort of amicable arrangement.

One could say that I need to learn to be more tolerant, but my body has a say in this. Being exposed to loud sounds and unpleasant vibrations coursing through your body is like being in a room where someone is dragging fingernails on a blackboard. The nervous system of human beings was not designed to tolerate that on a regular basis. It's the reason that man in Japan murdered people who kept playing piano. It drives people crazy to be subjected to that. While I'm very, very far from flying into a murderous rage, I am often gritting my teeth and wondering what sort of small animal needs to die in order for God to step in and smite their deaf asses (or at least make their sound system lose its robust bass control).

I know that people often don't mean to upset others with their actions. In fact, most of the time, they are just being incredibly selfish, but it's not like these people can't pursue other options, especially late at night. Wearing headphones is not out of the question, though it isn't as convenient as blasting your T.V. and drooling while sitting unencumbered on the sofa. They just clearly do not want to do anything that mitigates the discomfort their behavior causes us and they have no problem with making my husband and I suffer for their convenience.

The thing that bothers me most is that I don't want to be the sort of person I'm turning into. I call and complain repeatedly to the property manager. I have complained to them directly which I also don't like to do. I feel myself filling with tension and eventually anger when I hear and feel their noise. I've been trying to manage my reactions using cognitive techniques (relaxing, reframing, mindfulness), but it is honestly exhausting me to tolerate this on a regular basis. This really isn't about my lack of patience or understanding. It's about their lack of consideration.

I want to be a good, kind, and tolerant person. I want to be the kind of person who understands that old people have issues that make them do things which are disruptive to others. There are all of these good things that I want to be, but I can't be because what I'm feeling in my body is like being subjected to Chinese water torture. I can't be as good a good person as I'd like to be when I live near people who are selfish, dishonest, and callous toward my feelings and interests. It's hard to respect people who clearly do not respect me.

Book: Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

About 10 years ago, I decided that it was time to rearrange the furniture in my apartment. This was something that I'd done many times before in my life - sometimes as often as once a year. Often, these efforts included mass movements of very heavy objects and it was something I'd always done alone. This wasn't because others (such as my husband) were unwilling to help, but rather because I preferred to have total control over the space. Also, the apartment was tiny and the chances of getting in each other's way were huge.

That particular time was more dramatic than some others as the plan was to move about 2/3 of my bedroom furniture into the living room and vice versa. I had to empty all of the shelving and then move the shelves. What is more, I had to do it all in one day because I was tutoring privately in my home and the rooms needed to be prepared for a visit from a student the following day.

I'd moved about half of the furniture and my belongings around when I hit a wall that I'd never hit before. I was so tired that I started to struggle to carry on. I had to rest and rest I did, but I also had to carry on. By the end, I was so incredibly exhausted that I could barely move. I'd never had that sort of experience before while doing one of my almost annual rearrangements. This was a limit that I'd never come up against before.

People think of aging as getting wrinkles, developing diseases so you have to take medications, becoming enfeebled, etc., but what aging really is is a series of limits placed upon you. I hit mine in my early 40's. It took me so by surprise that I was shocked when I couldn't do something I'd always done. It had never occurred to me that a task I'd done so many times would be beyond my grasp due to my own bodily limitations, and I was someone who was well-versed in bodily limitations up to that point due to weight issues and back pain. This was a whole other animal. It was about a loss, not something that I'd struggled with or could be traced to injury. It was a loss that happened because years were passing by.

This year I turned 50 and these issues have only gotten worse. Fatigue in particular stalks my life and sometimes it is hard to function. I'm sure some of my issues are brought on by depression. I may even have some form of chronic fatigue syndrome or adrenal fatigue. However, I'm sure part of it is just about age. Getting older means you just can't do as much no matter how much you may want to or how hard you try. You're in an ever shrinking circle of capability. This is in direct opposition to your youth and young adulthood in which you are in an ever growing sphere of possibility. It's a sobering place to be, and American culture does not do a very good job of preparing you for this. With talk of pushing yourself beyond your limits and being capable of anything if you try hard enough, the message in the U.S. is one of more, more, more, not less. No one ever says that your potential will at one point be limited or that you can't accomplish everything you want no matter how hard you try. If such messages had been out there, I may not have been quite so surprised that I was 40 and couldn't move two rooms of heavy furniture around by myself in an eight-hour period of time.

Atul Gawande's book, Being Mortal, is about death and dying, but it also contains several subtler messages about life and aging. One of the Star Trek series mentioned something about how we face death being as important as how we face life, and I think that is part of his unintended message as well. I realize that people don't like to think about death and probably believe a book about dying and how it is handled (or mishandled) in America at present sounds like one big trip to Bummer-ville. The strange thing is that this book is anything but depressing and is strangely comforting.

The good thing about the sense the book carries is that it's not Pollyanna-ish, over-the-rainbow, or airy fairy in the sense it conveys. It's very down-to-earth and practical, yet sensitive and humanistic. It illustrates what we do to people who are dying because we think that living is more important than the quality of the time they have left. Without going through any sort of recommendations or process descriptions, it provides a guide for not only dying as well as possible, but living as well as you can.

As someone who is currently struggling with a variety of limits due to depression, aging, and stress, I came away with a central message that I think anyone who is in that shrinking sphere of opportunity stage of life can benefit from. That message is that we should strive for the best possible day today. We don't need to have a perfect one. We don't need to focus on long-term plans or goals when we are in a state of pain and difficulty getting through the day. We just have the best day we can given our limits and circumstances. The focus is on what is possible, not reaching far afield with all of the risks that entails.

For a book about death and dying, this was a book that made me feel surprisingly good about life. It made me feel more prepared for my own eventual experience with dying (and we're all going to have one). It also gave me a better sense of how to deal with my present rather than constantly feel that I am failing for not doing better than I am in life. Finally, it also solidified something that I've felt before about medical intervention with those who face terminal illnesses. That is, we often prolong the time we have by gutting the quality of that time. If you are human, this book is worth reading.

Monday, October 27, 2014

Hi-Ho

There was a teacher at my university who literally changed the course of my life. I don't want to go into the details, because this is already going to be a long post, but I can say that she was responsible for giving me a sense of self-worth and value such that I was able to achieve things which I am sure I would not have otherwise achieved. The path she helped me find my way onto lead to the life I have now and it is a life that I believe has been extraordinary in many ways. Most of all, I'm certain that I never would have found or had the relationship with my husband that I have without her influence because the person I was before she came into my life could never have acted in a way that would have secured a partnership with such an extraordinary person.

Today, I was searching for this professor's phone number and e-mail address so that I could use her as a reference on a volunteer application. I don't have many American contacts after having lived in Japan for over two decades so I had to dig deep into the past to locate people who could vouch for me. During my search for this information, I stumbled across a site devoted to student ratings of teachers at my alma mater. I'd like to say that I was stunned that she was the lowest rated professor in the psychology department, but I am not shocked at all.

The reason that this bad rating didn't surprise me was that people were whining about her teaching even back when I was taking her classes from 1984-1986. Her classes were tough and her assignments demanding. However, she worked hard and was an excellent teacher. I remembered things that I learned from her nearly 20 years ago because what she required actually educated me rather than required me to regurgitate for tests and then forget.

The main problem with her classes beyond the fact that she made you work and prove that you had learned things was that she operated from the mindset of a very smart person and she had a quirky personality. It is very difficult for people who are quite intelligent to operate in a manner that conveys information clearly to people who are less educated than themselves. It doesn't help that she is a professor who is married to another professor and they both are very clever people.

I have learned from personal experience that two intellectuals cohabitating and communicating on a regular basis tends to only heighten the disparity between the level of  their discourse and that of those around them. In fact, it is an issue that my husband and I are battling in our lives at present. We are both very smart people who read a lot, have an interest in expanding our knowledge, and talk to each other frequently about what we learn and believe. Our level of discourse can get very lofty and removed from that of other people. We have to make an effort to operate at a simpler level for those who are younger, less educated, and less experienced in this sort of talking. There is a risk that we will be incomprehensible at best, and considered snobbish and intentionally talking above others at worst.

Fortunately, both my husband and I were language teachers in Japan and we know how to find the listeners level, provided that the level is clear. I've made the mistake of talking to his former graduate school acquaintances as if they were people who actually learned something at a post-graduate level. Most of them did not really study much and the academic rigor of his graduate school was on the laughable side. That's my way of saying that they couldn't understand me or him when we talked about the sort of things they should have learned in the classes they shared.

At any rate, I think that my former professor, and her husband who also works at the same university, may lack the ability to modulate the level of their discourse and that is, at least in part, a reason for the complaints of their students. That's only a piece of it, however. The larger bit of it is that the students are lazy, dim, or just taking the class to get credit and therefore lacking in commitment. I do not consider myself a genius (and I'd bet my I.Q. wouldn't test at super high levels), but I did very well in her classes because I attended all of them, paid attention, read the books, and wrote the papers slowly rather than trying to rush them at the last minute. I am aware, however, that not everyone who takes a class was willing or able to devote the attention required.

After reading the reviews of my former teacher and her husband - reviews which ranked them as 2.5 and 2.6 out of 5 respectively - I wondered more about something which has been on my mind in the last few years because of the way things have been for my husband and me. There is a book called Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut which is about two genius twins who everyone thinks are mentally disabled in some fashion. They speak in their own language and come across as utterly stupid to everyone, but they communicate with one another at a high level which others simply cannot access.

In the book, Vonnegut frequently punctuates his paragraphs with the words "hi-ho". I've thought of that book as my husband and I have grown more and more incomprehensible to others. I've considered that we are becoming more and more like the twins in his story all of the time. We spend so much time together and operate at a specific level discussing atypical topics that we continue to move further and further away from others. We are not trying to do so. It just so happens that this is what we enjoy. It is where we are at now in our lives and we just keep getting further along in our intellectual interests. The problem is that there is no going back to simplicity once you've found complexity.

I wonder if my former teacher and her husband with their bad ratings and student complaints about how they don't communicate what they want clearly are in the same boat and don't even know it. Are they also moving further away because their association with one another is carrying them further afield? I cannot know for certain, but I do know that people develop their own language when they spend most of their time together. It doesn't have to be a series of incomprehensible grunts and sounds like the twins in Vonnegut's story. Sometimes it can be topics and vocabulary that are lofty and specialized that get used so frequently between partners that they seem mundane, but are actually very far removed from the average discourse of people in the world at large. I guess I will never know.

Hi-ho.

Monday, October 20, 2014

Why I love psychology, but will probably never be a therapist

My mother has suffered from a variety of emotional issues throughout her entire life. Among her problems were depression and severe mood swings. Though she has never been diagnosed (at least not that I know of), she has many of the characteristics of someone with dysthymia and some of those of someone with borderline personality disorder. She has extremely weak distress tolerance, lies frequently and transparently (often in the service of attempting to convince others that she is correct or to support the validity of another lie), and expects others to be responsible for her moods. She also once accidentally overdosed on painkillers at one point and nearly died.

Despite having all of these issues, my mother has received very little in the way of therapy in her life. It's not that she hasn't had opportunities. There was a brief time when she saw a counselor about her profound unhappiness in her life, but she discontinued seeing him/her because "it wasn't helping."

I don't know what my mother said to her therapist. I do know what people tend to want from both therapists and advice columnists. In fact, one of those things is so pervasive that it has been incorporated into the training that therapists receive. That is validation of their feelings. No matter what you feel, a therapist is supposed to validate it in some way. If you are angry because your husband forgot to pick up milk at the store for the 100th time, then the counselor is trained to say, "I can see where that is frustrating".

The therapist says this even if your husband forgets things because he's a medical intern doing back-to-back shifts and is exhausted all of the time. He says this even though you're selfish and demanding and utterly lacking in empathy for the circumstances around the forgetful behavior because your feelings need to be validated. He says this because you can't help people unless they feel you empathize with them because they won't come back unless you validate whatever they feel. I should hasten to add that validation of feelings is not the same as validation of actions or logic. The counselor says he can see why you feel the way you feel, but he may not think a reasonable person would feel that way. Unfortunately, clients don't necessarily understand that a validation of their feelings is not the same as a validation of their logic or actions. In fact, they often think they are one and the same.

The second thing that everyone wants from a therapist is to be told what they want to hear. If they go there to get help with a specific problem, they often want a concrete answer. They don't want just any old answer, or even a good one. They want the one which conforms to their worldview and meets them in their comfort zone. When my mother said that my father's alcoholism made her unhappy, she likely wanted the therapist to tell her how to get him to stop drinking. Chances are that he/she told her that she could not control anyone else, but would have to learn how to change her responses to his behavior instead. My mother has never wanted to control or change her reactions. She has always,  always, wanted others to change to conform to her preferred way of doing things. I don't know why she stopped going to therapy, but I'd wager a large sum of money (and I'm not a gambling type) on the likelihood that she complained and was told that she needed to change rather than trying to convince others to do so.

People often want change, but they don't want to do the things which lead to change. They want to lose weight, but they don't want to change how they eat. They want to be fit, but they don't want to exercise. They want to be rich, but they don't want to work harder. They want better jobs, but they don't want to acquire the types of skills or education that will get them that type of work. They want to be happy, but they don't want to think deeply about what that really means and requires. They want achieving all they desire to be somehow within the boundaries of what is comfortable for them and it is their expectation that the counselor has some sort of magic wand to make that happen.

The bottom line is that people are often not saying, but are indicating, a particular question. That question is, 'How can I get what I want without doing things I don't want to do?' This is, by and large, what therapists are dealing with and the biggest reason why I don't want to be one. I don't have any easy answers. I don't want to sit with people who are looking for them and see the looks on their faces when I tell them in a nice and validating way that their fantasies aren't coming true, there isn't a place over the rainbow, there is no glass slipper or princess or prince charming, and they can't live forever. There isn't some magic handshake that will stop the world from being a place full of self-centered and selfish jerks who think only about themselves so that you can be a more satisfied selfish and self-centered jerk who only thinks about herself without any interference from the needs and issues of others.

I should make one thing clear. In general, I don't think people have to change or improve their lives. I don't care if someone drinks, smokes, or is overweight. I don't care if they don't want to have sex with their partner or work at a dead-end job. None of that is my business, but if you're a therapist and people with issues come to you for answers to such problems because they're unhappy, then it becomes your business (quite literally). I also have nothing but sympathy and empathy for those who can't change for whatever reason. I've been in that boat for much of my life. My issue is with people who go to counselors looking for a type of answer that doesn't exist and then believe that the therapist has failed him or her because of that grim reality, not that people have issues and lack the energy or psychological wellspring from which to combat their problems.

Quite often, I feel that there are answers to every person's problem. Often, those are answers they can't pursue. For example, a person who suffers from chronic back pain may benefit from more exercise, but the benefits are in the long run and the pain they have to endure to reap any benefits may be too overbearing to tolerate. The answer is there, but unreachable. However, there are also answers that people refuse to pursue because they don't like the price tag that comes along with them. Recently, I read a blog that I've followed casually for quite some time which brought this home to me and was the motivation for this post.

This particular blog, which I will not link to here as I don't want to embarrass anyone or start any ridiculous blog wars, is written by a woman who has been trying to lose weight for many years. She has serious issues with her relationship with food and, based on her copious blog entries, it's clear she has emotional, compulsive, and binge-eating issues. She went to an eating disorder therapist who recommended that she take steps to normalize her relationship with food by learning to embrace all types of food and exercise moderation and portion control. This is actually an integral part of stopping the cycle of food obsession and abusing food for comfort that many people with her particular problems possess. Placing food out of bounds, seeing it as an adversary rather than a source of sensory pleasure and sustenance, and restricting your intake are part of what creates the disordered relationship. The first step is repairing perceptions by stopping the actions that created the distortions.

This woman wrote that the therapist told her something she really did not want to hear and then went on to refute the value of this approach. She didn't do this because she doesn't want to solve her problem. She did it because this behavior is outside of her comfort zone and the perimeter of that zone was put in place by another priority - losing weight. She doesn't want to repair her relationship with food if she can't lose weight in the process. The price of fixing her eating disorder is too high, particularly in the short term and she refuses to seriously entertain the notion that the short-term risk may carry long-term benefits (i.e., that curing the disorder will ultimately give her better control over her intake and result in the desired weight loss).

This woman did what I think many people in therapy do. They have an issue, seek an answer, and then dismiss the answer when it's not the one they wanted to hear. She says that she wants to fix her disorder, but she doesn't want to risk gaining weight in the process or failing to lose more. What she needs is a doctor who forces her to stay on a strict diet and berates her until she's thin as that is actually her priority - a priority which is incompatible with her desire to deal with her relationship with food. You don't go to an eating disorder specialist to lose weight. You do it to fix your mental health problem.

Some people choose to see therapists and work on their issues. These are the people who often populate the re-enacted case studies that people who are studying psychology are shown in order for them to believe it is an orderly process in which clients are cooperative in their own healing process. The reality is far from that. Clients resist. They drop out of therapy. They refuse to discuss the roots of issues or to see themselves or others for who they are. They waste time in sessions talking about things which are not on point.  I know some people can and are helped, but most are just looking for magic, and I don't have any to give. Despite everything I know and all I'm capable of in regards to being a therapist, I know that I don't have what people really want because it doesn't exist in many cases.

Saturday, October 18, 2014

I Choose to Be Scared

I would like to preface this by saying that I don't know exactly how most other people approach life. I can say that I think I know how they seem to from my highly subjective, limited, and incomplete vantage point. It often seems to me that people tend to operate entirely from within their comfort zone when they are acting of their own volition. It is only when they are pressured by either obligation or a strong desire to experience something positive that they cannot otherwise obtain that they will do something which is intimidating for them.

My conclusions about this may be way off base, but it really does seem that most people stay within bounds most of the time. There are, of course, some people who adventurous, gregarious, and quite bold who can bound off into the world blithely sampling new and bizarre food, jumping into conversations with strangers, and putting their bodies into harmful and embarrassing situations. Those people seem to navigate the world with ease and to not care about the outcomes as long as they are embracing novelty. I used to envy those people. I'd like to say that now I am one of them, but that would be far from the truth.

The truth is that I have been pushing myself for many years to do things which are quite a bit out of the way of my comfort zone. Right now - this thing I'm doing here - writing from behind some generic anonymous name? That is my most comfortable spot. I've spent more years here than people can imagine. In fact, this behavior pre-dates the internet and goes back to my days as a voracious pen paller who wrote more than 20 correspondents at time from the security of her childhood bedroom. Those people knew my name and address, but they were too far away to see me or come to where I lived. In those days, even when you were "known", you were essentially anonymous. I've been doing this since I was 12 years old.

I've spent my life ducking in and out of my comfort zone. I'd push myself out there and pull back in and hide depending on how I was feeling about my body and my life. Having grown up super fat in an era when people weren't fat (yes, I know, it's hard to believe there was a time when there was only one fat kid in the each class, but there was and she was me), I often had to hide because of the humiliation of being out where I could be seen, bullied, ridiculed, and judged. My courage depended on who I was with, whether I was in a loss or gain cycle in my weight, and what I was doing.

For the last 5 or so years, I've been in an extreme cycle of putting myself out there and doing things that are scary, potentially embarrassing, and stressful. Given my lack of physical grace, anything quasi-athletic that I do in public makes me think twice, but I've been swimming (a truly terrifying initial experience and still one that makes me self-conscious every time I do it), played ping pong, and thrown a frisbee in the park with my husband. I've also tried to jog with him a few times, but my weak and degraded joints have made that something I could not do.

For people who have not grown up or spent a large chunk of their lives being subjected to humiliation due to the appearance (and sub-par performance) of their bodies, these may sound like trivial exercises. However, I grew up being sneered at, laughed at, and degraded in every loathsome P.E. class I was forced to take. The idea of physical activity under the watchful eyes of other people is more than a little scary for me, but I do it anyway. I face my fear until I stop being scared. Sometimes, it takes a short time. Sometimes, it takes a long time.

Even in situations in which I am quite adept, there is often the specter of rejection, failure, and being ostracized. This is particularly so in cases in which I am a newcomer or an outlier - a condition that I have been living in nearly full-time since returning to the U.S. after 23 years in Japan and moving to a place where I know virtually no one. Everyone is new. Every situation is new. In most cases, they know each other and I don't know them or, at least, they have something in common that I don't share with them. Sometimes, I have a great deal in common with them, but they refuse to acknowledge it, so it always seems to be hard to manage.

Recently, I finally pursued an avenue for meeting new people that I had been talking about doing (to my husband) for quite some time. Our local library has an "ESL Club" which meets every Wednesday morning for 90 minutes. Given my previous experience teaching English for 23 years, it would seem to be an ideal and easy outlet for meeting new people. While it is certainly the case that I am adept at managing to talk to English students, it is still a little scary walking into a room filled with people who have known each other for months and have a way of working and managing which is familiar to them, but not known to me.

I've gone to these gatherings three times, and each time, I have to will myself to go back again. I don't have to do it. I'm not even sure that the experience has been particularly gratifying to me, though it has been interesting (I will write more specifically about these experiences later). I still feel like an outlier and am still uncomfortable around the people who I don't know well or at all, but all seem to know each other. Nonetheless, I push myself to go because I am uncomfortable and until that discomfort goes away, I won't be able to know whether my need to push myself is the discomfort with being "new" or if it's a sincere reflection of a lack of fulfillment with the experience. I would not want to confuse the two and deny myself an opportunity for something unique and enjoyable.

I realize that consistently putting myself into situations which are uncomfortable for me to some extent may make those on the outside - those who stay in their little hidey-holes with their nicely padded comfort zones - think that I'm one of those people who goes out there and doesn't bat an eye at being among strangers, going into places in which I don't "fit in", or doing new things. I am not one of those people. I'm scared and I desire security. It costs me something energetically and psychologically every time I do such things. I often feel stressed and exhausted after such experiences to varying degrees.

Realizing that this is something that I do so often and openly that it may make those who are less "adventurous" think I'm someone I'm not made me think of something I never would have otherwise considered. Those other people out there? Those ones who seem to jump unto the breach, into the fray, or off the cliffs? Maybe they aren't so blithe about it after all. Maybe it's hard for some (or nearly all) of them, too. Maybe, just maybe, they are tired and stressed as well, but they, like me, value growth so much that they're willing to do these things anyway. If so, their situation deserves to be credited as possessing the psychological complexity that it has rather than written off as something that is "easy" for them, but "hard" for me and "impossible" for those who don't pursue such volitional experiences.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

The (Wo)Man Who Knew Too Much

Throughout not small amount of my relationship with my husband, I have had a problem making him understand something that has been the case for me for as long as I can remember. I know what people are thinking. I can predict what they are very likely to do. I can read their emotional reactions to nearly anything and discern their attitudes. I do all of this within minutes, sometimes seconds, of meeting them.

My ability to do this has only gotten "worse" over the years. That is, it's gotten faster and more accurate, but I have a record of my predicting the future for one of my childhood friends when I was in my early 20's. I told her that I knew she'd marry young, poorly, and because of an unplanned pregnancy. This was when she was still in high school and I was in my early years of college. Sure enough, three years later, she did all of those things.

That sort of prognosticating isn't as granular as what I tend to do more often these days. I can tell if someone is lying, their degree of self-awareness, confidence, seductive nature, aggression levels, and intelligence from a glance or two. This is not magic, but the result of an instant calculation of a person based on a plethora of signs that we can all see, but tend not to think twice about. No one signal is sufficient to tell you a larger character trait, but a few are more telling than others.

For many years, I would meet someone and tell my husband that so-and-so felt this or that or likely would do this or that in the future. His reaction was, 'You can't know that.' If he was not told something explicitly from the involved party, he wouldn't believe me, especially if what I said flew in the face of a preferred explanation or perspective on the party we were talking about.

The process that I was using was something that was invisible to me. My husband has explained it as being like someone who can do math calculations at lightning speed in their heads, but can't explain how they do them to a teacher. I couldn't "show my work." I knew I was right, but I couldn't explain why.

After years of this sort of difficulty, I finally decided that I needed to find a way to break the process down so that my husband would assign more credibility to what I was saying. While I was very often correct, he still found it hard to believe me when I couldn't explain things. I learned to deconstruct the elements in order to make him see that this wasn't wild speculation based on some prejudice or desire to see a person in a particular way playing out.

For instance, I could read a woman's general attitude toward the world as being open, seductive, or aggressive based on how she walked. Women who were more seductive and looking to gain attention were more likely to swing their hips when they walked. Women who were more defensive or aggressive were likely to swing their shoulders. Those who were more open and neither trying to draw in attention or encourage people to back off tended to be more equal in both of these motions. These were not deterministic, but coupled with other factors (facial expression, eye contact, how the hands were held, etc.), my degree of accuracy in "reading" someone was very high.

I've spend much of the last several years deconstructing and teaching my husband how to read people. Since he is working toward becoming a licensed therapist, this not only is good for our relationship as he has come to believe me now that he knows more fully where my predictions come from, but it will also help him in his career. It has been an immense relief to me that he no longer questions what I say to any great extent. That is not to say he never questions me in any way about anything, but he knows that what I speculate on and the degree of accuracy that I possess are related to something measurable and not merely my whims. It is a skill that can be taught and learned. He does question, and quite reasonably so, the probability of my predictions being true. This is actually rather "fun" to speculate on and I will often assert my certainty with percentages. Since he's a fan of numbers, he likes this way of solidifying how sure I am.

This psychological reading ability is one that I'm sure palm readers and fake psychics have known for eons. I'm told that my ability to do this may relate to being "hyper-vigilant", a state that I may have acquired in childhood due to the horrific and constant bullying and emotional and verbal abuse I endured both inside and outside the home. I don't like the term "hyper-vigilant" because it evokes an image of someone who sits on the edge of her chair watching intently, attending carefully to everything around her. I don't try to see what I see. In fact, it was such a transparent process for so long that I wasn't even aware that I was doing it. I just "knew". I wasn't trying, but my abilities are likely rooted in trying since childhood to read intent, personality, etc. and to escape or mitigate harm.

In the past three years, I've become more and more involved in consuming documentaries and non-fiction books. Unsurprisingly, they are often about various aspects of humanity including psychology and human biology. You can, if you pay attention, often tell if someone is suffering or enduring a health issue. Doctors do this all of the time. They see a shuffling walk or the way someone doesn't fully lift an arm while doing a task. They see someone lean on the post with the pedestrian crossing light button while they wait to cross. They see a lump here or there on a body or a discoloration of the skin.

All of the content that I've been reading lately has only expanded my ability to "read" people into newer and deeper levels. Today, I was doing a volunteer job that I started three weeks ago (and will write about soon) when I noticed the way in which one of the women, someone in her mid 30's to early 40's by all appearances, tended to sit and walk in a slightly hunch-shouldered manner. I realized that she had exhibited this posture since our first meeting. Today, it suddenly occurred to me that she probably has ankylosing spondylitis in its early stages. The fact that this is likely and that I recognized it disturbed me greatly.

The truth is that I have gotten no joy whatsoever from any of my perceptual capabilities and I do not feel that I am in any way "gifted" or superior to others. In fact, I have often likened my ability to a horrible scene in a pretty awful 60's version of "The Man with X-Ray Eyes" in which he is driven mad at the end because he can see through everything. The final scene of the movie has him going into a church in his madness and the church-goers start chanting "pluck (it) out" encouraging him to pluck out his offending eyes and give himself peace (around 15:45 in the linked video clip). The message is that it is better to be blind than to see too much. This is actually truer than many people know.

Knowing too much about people too fast has become an incredible burden for me. I don't want to know that someone is likely being beaten by a significant other, was sexually abused as a child, or has a degenerative disease. I don't want to know they are likely to fail at their career, or worse, harm other people as they do it badly and destructively. I don't want to know that someone is smug and superior because he or she is incredibly insecure underneath it all.

I don't want to know too much, especially from people who I see for a moment and never see again in some cases. It's a way of being too involved in their emotional lives and it can be overwhelming and painful, especially when the messages are so often sadness, anger, pain, defiance, and rejection. To me, people are wearing too much on the outside all of the time and I just don't want to be a part of it sometimes.Today, when I realized this new person I met likely suffers a painful and debilitating disease, it just made me feel as if I suddenly had invaded her privacy and knew too much about her past, present, and future. I know too much too fast, but there is nothing I can do about it.

Thursday, October 9, 2014

A Stolen Life

Since my early college days, I have been an enormous fan of Bette Davis. Sure, she made some clunkers, especially in her later years when she started to do ugly and strange horror films and much later when she was a novelty casting choice, but her early movies always offered something special in my estimation. One of the movies that she made on the trip down from the highest points of her career was called "A Stolen Life".

This movie was produced by Ms. Davis, who often fought with the studio heads who had her under contract for better projects. She never really developed much even after she had the power to do so, and this movie was an inauspicious start. The concept is a take on "The Prince and the Pauper," and Ms. Davis was neither the first nor the last to take the idea of twins and have one replace the other. In the case of this particular movie, one twin married the man that the other twin was in love with. When the married sister dies in a boating accident, the other takes over her life so that she can be with the man she'd always loved. I'd like to say hijinks ensue, but the movie is far darker than that.

This movie has popped into my head on occasion since returning from my 23 years of living in Japan and returning to America. It's important to note, in order to make my situation more clearly understood, that I studied psychology in university and worked as a counselor for two years before marrying my husband - before meeting him for part of my time in the counseling job. I have always had a passion for the topic and have studied it continuously throughout my life. It is equally important to note that my husband has a Bachelor's degree in business with a specialization in finance.

During the years that we were in Japan, I was a teacher, but psychology is not something that stands aside. It applies to nearly everything that one can do and helped me in my work as well as understanding the dynamics of Japanese culture. My husband initially had little more than a cursory interest in psychology, but, as the years wore on, he was drawn more and more to the idea of being a counselor.

One of the things about our teaching was that it wasn't unusual for the lesson to have a tone which was not so different from therapy. Japanese people were free from the oppressive nature of their culture - a culture in which showing feelings is looked down upon and opinion expression is dangerous. In English, and in the presence of a non-Japanese person, they could and would often let things fly that they'd never tell anyone else. I found that I spent as much time showing compassion, support, and understanding as well as helping people cope with their distress as dealing with English in no small number of cases. The same was true for my husband. By the time we'd left Japan, more than a few students had told each of us that we were more like therapists to them than teachers.

Though I have a hunger for psychological study, I am less certain that my future career path will follow that of being a therapist. It's not that I don't have the skills or lack a desire to help people. It's more about a sense of knowing too well about the futility in some cases. I worked with seriously ill people and I grew up around people with neuroses. There are things you can and can't do to help, and I'm not sure that I would be happy to go about my life living in that narrow band of effectiveness. I'm, perhaps, not temperamentally suited. My husband, on the other hand, is.

Since our return, my husband has completed graduate school with a Masters in Psychology. I took two classes with him. Both of them were selected because they were more hardcore in terms of their academic focus and less experiential in content. The two classes were Psychopharmacology and Substance Abuse. As someone who has always had an interest in the role the brain plays in behavior, these were both going to be up my alley. Neither, unfortunately, were particularly challenging for me given how much study I already had under my belt, but I was happy to be able to take classes with my husband as well as form a better understanding of the friendships he'd struck up with his classmates. Those friendships are what led me to thinking about "A Stolen Life."

My husband's friends knew him before they knew me. They had heard about his background, but didn't really think about it much. When I entered the picture, various conversations made it clear that they felt that I was the one horning in on his territory. That is, they often seemed to regard my knowledge and interest in psychology as a failure on my part to develop my own interests and treated my intellectual prowess on such topics as inferior to theirs and his. It may seem egotistical to say it, but none of them could hold a candle to what I knew before I even set foot back in the U.S., and not one of them made much headway by going to a graduate school which largely focused on training people to be therapists, not in academic knowledge of psychology.

I've come to be quite annoyed that people are looking at me as if I'm a pathetic also-ran who can't form her own interests or develop her own separate life. I'm the one who has always been in the field. I'm the one who got my husband interested in it. I'm the one who finds the great books on such topics and asks him to read them, but when our mutual friends read my words about them on Facebook and later read his a few months after mine, he's the one they reply to about the book. They act as if he found it and I read it because of him, not the other way around.

Some part of me feels as if my life was "stolen" in a strange way. I have and have had this passion, and, at the risk of sounding childish, I had it first. That isn't the important part of this. I don't really care who is first. I care about being treated as somehow empty and second-rate by people who have formed an inaccurate opinion of me based on the order in which they got to know us. No matter what they are told, they can't see me as a whole person because they assume I stole his passion due to some lack of my own ego integrity. I was not some empty vessel leeching off of his interests. I transformed his interests, but I feel like I simply cannot be seen as a whole being by these people.

Of course, the solution is to find better friends. I need to find people who know me first and can see me as an individual without their need to form some sort of clique with my husband operating on the inside and me on the outside. That is precisely what I'm starting to do, and I've lost no small amount of respect for those who continue to regard me as a pale copy of him because of their need to see me in a diminished fashion - a need that I'm sure is fueled by their sense of "specialness" and arrogance at having gone to the same graduate school.

Monday, October 6, 2014

Book: It Was Me All Along by Andie Mitchell

One of my friends from college studied "Communications" as her major. Early in my days, I also actually considered pursuing that major because I told some sort of counselor at the school my interests and it was suggested that it might be a good fit for me. Though I did not declare a major, I prepared to follow the path that was being recommended by going out with my mother and purchasing an expensive SLR camera. Though it was the cheapest camera of its type, a "Chinon", it still cost about $240. In 1982, that was an enormous amount of money to pay for anything, but my mother encouraged me to buy it because she took my student loan debt about as seriously as her own debts. That is, she saw it as essentially pennies from heaven.

That manual SLR camera stayed with me for many years and I never really learned to use it properly. Though I'd taken a photography class in high school and I'd been taught all about F-stops and lighting conditions, I had retained nearly none of the sophisticated information necessary to coax a great image out of such a camera. In fact, I couldn't even coax a focused image out of it. More than 20 years later, I gave it away to the boss at my job at the time. He actually knew what to do with such things and accepted it despite its antique nature.

The truth is that I never really understood what studying Communications was about. In the middle of my sophomore year, I chose psychology and have never looked back or regretted it. My friend who actually studied Communications seemed to mainly work at radio stations as a result of her choice. She spent some time at the college station and later had a part-time job at a Boston station while she worked full-time as a nanny. She could never really break into anything in media with her degree and worked for a time at a factory that makes medical equipment after finishing her nanny stint. Currently, she teaches immigrant children by distance methods and is preoccupied with grammar and writing. These are the only parts of her major which have factored into her current work.

I probably would have been a good fit for Communications based mainly on my love of writing. However, I have learned that people who study things like journalism or Communications are taught a particular way to write. My writing almost certainly would have been reshaped to fit certain parameters had I studied it. I think that there is an edge and a style that is filed off when you are taught to write for papers, magazines, or other media. My way of writing was once described as "crafty". That means that I sling words together in a somewhat artistic way, or at least in a way that shows more personality.

The reason that I'm talking about all of this in regards to the book I'm talking about today is that Andie Mitchell studied Communications and it shows in her writing style. She writes in a straightforward way that is easy to read and cogent. Unfortunately, she also writes without attitude or personality. This is counteracted in large part by the fact that she's generally very self-aware, self-reflective, and revealing. While her words do not betray intimacy, her content shows plenty.

My asserting that her writing is not stylized is not a criticism, but rather an observation. I've had some experiences with writers who are all style and no or little substance. They wow you with how they say things rather than what they're saying. Ms. Mitchell, by and large, is luring you with what she's saying rather than how she is saying it.

It Was Me All Along is mostly about Ms. Mitchell's short life and the role that weight plays in it. I have an incredible amount of overlap with her life in many ways (poverty, alcoholic father, obesity and weight struggles - losses and gains). She has some important things for people to know and understand about how distorted relationships with food evolve and the complexity of repairing them. In a world that loves nothing more than to talk about "will power" and views excess eating as overindulgence in pleasurable experience, she has an important point to share. That point is, and I know it well, that eating for those with serious problems don't eat out of a love of food, but suffering. They often eat to the point of pain. It's not, "This is so good that I can't stop," but rather "I don't feel good about my life so I can't stop."

The book is on the shorter side and is a quick and easy read. While Ms. Mitchell is talking about her pain, growth, and personal relationship difficulties, she breezes along. Things stall out a bit toward the end as she seems to run out of relevant material or fail to fashion what she has experienced to fit the overall theme of her book. There is a chapter in particular that feels out of place and it could have found a better position had it been shorter and more focused and a certain conclusion reached on her part that tied it into her self-image and weight talk. While not everything in a person's life has to be about a central theme in a memoir, you can't spend 90% of it that way and then joyride into other territory and expect the reader to wonder what you're doing taking that particular detour.

Though the book loses steam in the last three or so chapters, the fact that it does so is a good reflection of a fact of life. That fact is that we learn and grow a great deal more from struggling and suffering than we do through success and joy. The reason that the end of the book runs out of steam is that Ms. Mitchell is living in a "happy ending" at present. She's a successful food writer and blogger and has maintained her weight loss and health. I'm truly happy for her success, but this does make the end of her book feel more like she's twirling in front of the mirror showing how great she and her life are now that she's thin. The message starts to feel much more like she has found all the answers than continues to explore questions, though she asserts that she does not. The tone of her writing post-weight-loss comes across as the same dogmatic messages your read from many weight loss bloggers, though she is a lot less preachy.

This sense of completion in her life lessens both the impact of the majority of the book and undermines the depth of compassion with which the reader has been regarding her throughout the experience of sharing her life. My positive image of her went terribly south after she broke up with her depressed and unemployed long-term boyfriend who stood behind her (and financed her) when she was the one struggling. There is a part of the book where she says things between them often became about 'me, me, me'. It turned out in the end that it was still all about her and I could not help but speculate that the break-up would not have occurred had she stayed very fat or not found her dream job. I still think this is still a worthwhile read, but it's better to brace yourself for the hollow feeling you'll experience near the end.

Saturday, October 4, 2014

A Dream: October 4, 2014

Context: Last night, I read a review of a T.V. comedy series on the AV club which included Martin Short in its cast. Also, last night my husband told me a small detail about his childhood (that he liked to watch game shows when he was home sick from school and liked a particular show which he found on YouTube and we watched it).

The Dream: I don't know where I was, but the sense I got of the setting was that it was generally supposed to be my home (though it was not where I am living now). I was married, but not to my husband. In fact, I had somehow forgotten that I was married to a younger version of Martin Short. He looked like he did while dressed as a human in the T.V. mini-series "Merlin". That is, he had very blue eyes and blond hair (though shorter than in the show) - about as "dashing" as Martin Short can look.

I don't remember much about the dream except the end in which I realize that I don't know my "husband" (Martin Short) very well at all because I spend all of my time thinking about and learning about the man who is my real husband now. I feel that I've done my dream husband a disservice by not devoting attention to him and focusing on my real husband (though in the dream, he is not my husband at all - just a man who I'm drawn irresistibly to). Despite this realization and a momentary commitment (expressed internally to myself - not explicitly to anyone else in the dream), the moment that my real husband comes into the dream, I go over to him immediately and start cuddling with him.

Analysis: I believe that Martin Short entered the dream only as a placeholder based on my reading his name so very recently in the aforementioned article. My (real) husband in now way ever suffers any sort of neglect. In fact, if he suffers anything, it is an overabundance of attention and I know him extremely well. In fact, I frequently ask him to tell me something about himself that I don't already know. I'm not asking for secrets (we have no secrets from one another), but just some tidbit from his past that he may not have thought to mention.

I believe there are two possible paths of interpretation. One is that some part of me felt that I didn't really know my husband as thoroughly as I thought because he told me something new. This seems a somewhat shallow interpretation, but it is possible as a partial one. The deeper interpretation is that there is something that I'm not exploring in my life or digging too deeply in because I am too distracted by something that I find so much more attractive.

The main problem with the second interpretation is that I'm currently at a complete loss as to what such an issue might be. The distraction could very well be my husband. At present, much of our lives revolve around his interests rather than mine for various reasons. That being said, I don't have any interests which I am neglecting or putting off in favor of attending to his. I write. I read. I learn new things. I recently started volunteering at the local library to be an ESL partner for non-native speakers. I pursue what I want to pursue and never feel that my interests compete with his. I do accept that it is possible that my unconscious mind knows and wants to convey something that my conscious mind does not, but I could not pinpoint what that might be at this time.

Interpretation Confidence Scale Rating: Not knowing husband well interpretation: 4 (I have no sense that I don't deeply know my husband. It would have to be an idea which lacks depth and is built entirely around the recent nature of the new information.) Something about my life that I'm not getting into deeply in favor of attending to my husband's interests: 7

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Six Arils

This morning, as I was harvesting the seed-like fruit (arils) of a pomegranate, I thought of the Greek myth of Persephone. In the simplified story that I heard as a child, she was kidnapped by Hades and taken to the underworld. She was told that she could leave if she ate nothing while she was there. However, because she ate six pomegranate seeds, she would have to spend half of her days in the underworld and half on earth. This was an explanation for why it was warm and verdant for half of the year and dying and cold during the other half. Her presence caused things to grow. Her absence caused them to wither.

Persephone ate only six seeds. As I painstakingly removed the arils from my fruit, I thought about how one could decide to eat so few because of the effort of removing them. I also recalled that I had seen plastic containers of ready-to-eat arils in the local supermarket. For a much higher price, you don't have to go to any effort and can have a plethora of fruit. If Persephone had lived in the modern ate, let's just say that our winters would be about two years long as she could effortlessly shovel handfuls of them into her face.

When I see plastic containers of prepared fruit or vegetables, I think about a lot of things. First, I realize that there are people out there for whom money is less valuable than time. I also know that these are the same people who have moderate to high amounts of road rage as they rush home after work and display enormous impatience with anything that slows them down. When they get home, they often use that time to putz around on the internet, text people, or watch T.V. They value that time, but they don't do anything valuable with it.

The whole idea behind offering ready-to-eat "fresh" food is that it will compel people who otherwise wouldn't go to the hassle of spending a few minutes preparing it. It may get them to eat more healthily than they otherwise would. In my parents' days, and before that, this was accomplished with canned fruit and vegetables. Packaged "fresh" produce is a step up, though it's still not as good as dealing with it yourself.

I thought about the reduced nutrition when I put my arils, which I'd harvested using a method in which you take apart the pomegranate under water in a bowl, in a strainer to get as much water off of them as possible. If there is too much moisture, the chances that they'll get musty or moldy is increased so it's good to get them somewhat dryer. In the past, I've found they can get a little funky very quickly if you're not careful. If the arils are sold in plastic sealed containers in stores, there must be something mixed in to treat them so they don't go bad for awhile. Whatever that is, it's probably in small enough amounts that it doesn't have to be listed (like a minor and weak bleach solution), but it's also probably not good for you.

Mainly though, I thought about how buying our food as we do removes us from the process of preparation and discourages us from ever learning how to do things for ourselves. One of my friends once posted on Facebook that she wanted a quick and easy dinner. I recommended she have an egg with some avocado. She reminded me that she doesn't like eggs, a situation which is informed largely by her irrational fear that one day she'll crack one open and a half-formed baby chick will be inside, and informed me that she doesn't know how to slice avocado. I, once again and with just as much futility, assured my friend that the eggs you buy in markets are not fertilized and told her how easy it is to slice avocado once you learn the technique.

My friend didn't heed what I said about either the eggs or avocados. She didn't believe what I said about the former and couldn't be bothered with the latter. If she had had a long history of food preparation, cutting and slicing an avocado would have seemed a trivial exercise. With little in the way of deep cooking experience, it seemed by comparison to just buying something pre-made to be a huge and troublesome to manage.

Some time ago, I read pieces about several people who worked on developing a "soylent" formula for food. Essentially, they wanted to make a mix of nutrients that would provide all of the necessary calories and macro and micro nutrients to just guzzle down. The idea behind this was to chuck out all of the "hassle" of shopping and preparing for food and just ingest a powder mixed with water for sustenance. At present, I think people value the taste of food enough that they aren't ready to go quite so far as to drink a sludge of prepared nutrients, but they are more than ready to exchange freshness for convenience.

Finally, I have concerns about people losing track of how much they eat when things are served to them ready-to-eat. After I finish digging through the flesh of my pomegranate, I have some idea of exactly how many arils come in one fruit. The same goes for a peach or an apple. When I do it myself, I can conceptualize portions. If you buy a container of prepared fruit, you have no idea how many pieces it represents. It becomes far easier to overeat, and, yes, you can eat too much fresh fruit. It's good for you, but there are a lot of calories in fruit as well. They are good calories, but you can lose a sense of how  to balance your diet when you're buying a quantity of pre-cut slices. 

I'm not a food Luddite, mind you. Though I rarely buy cut and peeled fruit (and frankly find the idea kind of awful as I think it's got to be drying out or chemically treated), I do buy some frozen food on occasion like mashed squash and I pick up bags of broccoli florets at Costco (removed from their stems). Usually, I buy these things when I'm in exhausted or feeling sick or am using these things for a specific end which doesn't necessarily require the freshest produce (like making broccoli soup). There is a place for ready-to-eat produce, but I don't think it should be the main or only way of consuming such food.