Feeling Your Feelings

I've been away from this blog for awhile. This is both good and bad. It's bad because I have things to say and I want to track my psychological and physical life in this space. It's good because the reason is that I've finally gotten back to writing a book I've been working on for nearly two years. During times of great stress, I've found that I can't write creatively, and this blog has been there as a way of dealing with some of the demons, both internally and externally.

There's a lot about a person that she may or may not put out there for public consumption because of the risks involved in such disclosure. I'm not afraid of being judged as I believe most judgement flows from the insecurities of the judge and has nothing to do with the person being evaluated. Mainly, I'm impatient with being misunderstood and the burden I place upon myself when it comes to how to make myself clearly known.

I mentioned in a previous post about a dream that I've had a series of revelations about life since coming to America and many of them have occurred in the past month. This burst of revelation follows a change in how I've been managing my emotional life. It's very difficult to explain because it is similar to telling someone who is blind what it is like to see or trying to explain with words what a food tastes like when no such food exists in the area that someone else lives in. Nonetheless, I can't track my life here unless I try and risk failure, and fail I likely will.

I read an article in the New York Times yesterday about grief and how the theory that there are stages has been very destructive to those who are dealing with grief. One of the reasons for this is that people feel that they have failed if their emotions aren't unfolding according to plan. One of the commenters on this article even said that she was told by her therapist that she was being indulgent by not getting over her feelings.

This therapist is not alone in her opinion that people should "get over" their issues and not feel the feelings that they do. Since I've been depressed for long periods of time, and I know how people's eyes avert or they start to fidget uncomfortably when the topic comes up. It's not unusual for someone to ask me how I am, and for me to look at them and smile when I say, "Terrible." I do this because of the conflicting impulses that I have in this situation. I want to be honest, but I also know that they really do not want me to be honest. So, I tell the truth and temper it with a social reaction that they may be comforted by. This ends up with them thinking that I'm kidding when I'm not.

One of the things that is clear to me since coming "home" has been the inability of people to tolerate emotions, particularly negative ones, in other people. This manifests in a multitude of ways including fidgety behavior, changing of the topic, minimizing of the weight of ones situation/feelings, denial of the right to possess such feelings, and recommending that one "chooses" how one feels. I've seen enough articles on how happiness is a choice linked to on Facebook to fill a terabyte drive.

The reason that people do this is not that they want you to be happy. That is what they tell themselves. They think that they're helping you stop wallowing, offering advice that will make you feel better, or trying to provide context that will modify your perspective. What they tell themselves is what they need to manage the cognitive dissonance they feel about pushing your needs away so that they won't have to endure the discomfort they feel when confronted with them. They can't bear your pain and want it to go away. They also want to be good people who "help" you. They reconcile this with rationalizations, but it comes down to not being able to tolerate feelings, especially strong or negative ones.

At one point, I reached a realization that we all do this internally as well as externally. We can't sit with other people's pain because we also refuse to sit with our own pain. How often have you told yourself to "get over it" or "I shouldn't feel this way" or "I'm being silly/sentimental/stupid" for feeling things. This sense that we should stop our feelings is no surprise because, if others tell us not to feel our feelings enough, we will learn to tell ourselves to stop feeling them as well.

The problem with censoring your feelings or telling yourself you're not entitled to them is that it creates stress. There is a rubber band effect that shoots back at you when you aren't looking. You might be angry, frustrated, antsy, etc. in situations that are relatively benign. You also then start inflicting your intolerance on others because their feelings dredge up what you're trying so hard to suppress. It creates a huge mess.

At one point, some time around Christmas, I decided to stop doing that to myself. My husband and I attended a re-enactment of the birth of Christ at a local church. During the performance, a woman sang hymns with the fullness of emotion that she felt. If you allowed it, you could see that she felt truly inspired by her faith. The state of her rapture, as reflected in her song, was powerful, and I felt it because I allowed myself to be there with her in that moment. I didn't try to distract myself by looking at a cell phone or yammering nonsense to my husband. I didn't look away at something else or pretend that this was just a performance with fake energy pushing the words out. I let myself be there with her and I cried, and I didn't try to hide how I felt from the other people there for fear that they'd witness me feeling some feelings and be embarrassed on my behalf.

That woman was followed by a young woman whose mother had died two years earlier (when she was 16) and she spoke passionately about how her faith and the church had sustained her. I cried when she spoke, too, as I was also "with" her in her passion and gratitude. It was a beautiful thing to be a part of the experience these people had. Their faith really brought them something meaningful. Even if their faith was not mine, I could fully inhabit and appreciate that.

Since that time, I've tried to stop pushing my feelings back and to engage with the world more fully on an emotional level. I walked to a memorial for veterans and instead of objectifying the experience, I inhabited the full emotional impact of it. Those names were people. Someone loved them very much and hurt horribly when they died. Their families remembered them and wanted them remembered. I was there with them in that memory and grief, and I cried as I walked around the memorial.

Being there with yourself and others emotionally is not an easy thing, but it has cleared some roadblocks for me in living life in America. In Japan, people were always suppressing feelings of all sorts, but, in America, they only suppress some of them. You can be mad, but you can't be sad. You can be happy, but you can't be passionately so. You can be smirky and skeptical, but you can't have the rapture of belief. There's a flood of emotion all around me, but most of it is inauthentic and transmuted into what can best be categorized as "aggressive" emotions (because those are "strong" and therefore "okay"). I shut myself off from a lot of things because of this, but mainly I lost any sense of connection to people in my efforts to objectify them for my own emotional safety.

I have had a sense of what can only be called "enlightenment" since I started this exercise in being fully present with people and experiences emotionally. I hesitate to use that word because it sounds lofty and oddly religious. However, not pushing back against my feelings when they come up has been liberating and has changed my dreams and my sense of how I navigate life. It's okay if I want to cry. It's okay if I'm feeling sad. It's okay if I'm incredibly happy because the phone rings and it's my husband who I've spoken to thousands of times yet he still makes me delighted when he calls. And if other people don't like those things, if they can't sit with them, that's their problem.

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.

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.

"You Are Amazing"

I once listened to a TED talk about marketing. Before I get too far, let me say that I don't usually listen to TED talks because I regard them as the Cliff's Notes of lectures. I think that they are compressed bits of information designed for people with short attention spans who grew up channel flipping and surfing the web such that they can't handle a well-crafted real lecture. All of that being said, sometimes I'll watch a TED talk if the subject is one of limited interest to me on the whole, but covers a particular aspect of a topic that is of greater interest.

In this talk, the topic was about how a message is more effectively conveyed to consumers. There was discussion of how one type of ad worked better than another. For instance, does a poster that says that people dispose of X number of tons of litter each year which costs X number of dollars to clean up work better or does a poster showing a famous athlete tossing his trash in a can stop more people from littering? The answer is the latter because people are more influenced when they are told that other people are doing something than when they are informed about consequences.

This little tidbit was just part of the talk, but it highlights something which I already knew. That is the fact that messages are carefully crafted by marketers in order to optimize their influence over you. The way you are  managed is not an accident. Someone has carefully considered the message and optimized its delivery for maximum manipulation.

I thought about this several days ago when I made a rare trip to a theater to watch a movie ("Interstellar"). The movie was, as is so often the case, preceded by a sequence of ads and trailers. One of the ads was an animated short meant to get people to turn off their cell phones while watching the movie. It did not ask people to be considerate of other patrons. It did not talk about how disruptive cell phone use can be during a movie. It showed how cool it was and the animation, which was little red balls bouncing all over the places with faces on them, was energetic and hip. At the end of this short, presumably after convincing the audience to turn off their phones because it's the cool thing to do, the narrator said with great enthusiasm, "You are amazing."

When I was in Japan, most of these sorts of messages were offered in terms of, "Let's not disturb other people," or "Let's be polite to one another." In America, the message caters not to empathy and consideration toward others, but the vanity of the listener. Turn off your cell phone because it's the cool thing to do. Do it because it will mean you're "amazing".

The fact that this message is crafted to appeal to the narcissism and self-centeredness of American people made me sad. We care so little for others that asking us to do things in their interest is deemed too ineffective so we have to compliment them on their greatness in doing what is asked. What is more, saying that someone is "amazing" for turning off a cell phone smacks of rewarding people for doing next to nothing. It feels a lot like the whole "everyone who shows up gets a prize" situation that is becoming more and more present among young people today. We tell people they are great for doing nothing. We reward them for nothing.

This was not the America that I grew up in, but the one that developed while I was gone. I'm not some curmudgeon waxing poetic about the good old days because I don't think the old days were necessarily good, but I am alarmed at how self-centered people have become and how it's so natural that narcissism as a psychological problem has nearly been wiped off the map. When everyone is a narcissist, it is no longer a concern. It is a character trait common to this culture that is pandered to rather than discouraged.

Repeating it doesn't make it truer

My husband and I have an acquaintance who he met through one of his former graduate school classmates. He was her boyfriend at the time that he first crossed my husband's path and is currently her fiance. At my first meeting with the boyfriend, I accidentally embarrassed him and he has carried a little grudge ever since.

The nature of that mistake was that we were all sitting in a bar at a social gathering during the first month of my husband's first year at his school. The girlfriend set up this informal little to-do, and we went largely so my husband could make some social connections at this early stage. I had previously met the girlfriend, so I knew her slightly from a potluck held about a week earlier. I figured that an easy way to relate to him was through his relationship with her so I asked how they met. He said it was at a party full of people and he saw her from across the room. I asked what I thought was a reasonable follow-up question given the situation and that was, "What drew you to her in particular?"

This question stymied him. He seemed dumbstruck for an answer and I'd just come off of years of teaching English in which I'd dealt with students who were often at a loss for words because they couldn't express themselves, so I tried to "help" by asking if it was this or that about her (attitude, style or whatever). He continued to be confused and then, after "thinking" for awhile, he switched to an ad hominem attack and said something like, 'you know the problem with you psychology types is you think about "why" too much instead of just taking things as they are.' At that point, I dropped my line of questioning on this issue, and it was hardly a probing attack. It was one question and a few suggestions and then he got defensive.

Fast forward a year and a half or so and my husband is having a conversation with someone else who felt that I had an aggressive way of carrying on a discussion. In her case, she had a point as we were debating a political point and she was being an idiot about it (the short version of it is that she suggested that vandalizing public advertising was somehow going to help undermine the effects of white privilege). The girlfriend from the previous scenario got caught up in this and remarked that, "Oh yeah, she (meaning me) is like that." She meant that I was too tenacious and she said that based on my (well-meaning) attempts to make conversation with her boyfriend from a very long time ago.

What I took away from this was that the boyfriend was more than embarrassed by his inability to come up with what attracted him to his girlfriend. He was humiliated and it stung enough for him to make a big deal out of it such that the girlfriend made this remark about a brief exchange from nearly two years previously. This told me something more than I'd already speculated on. One thing was that my guess is that he could have answered the question, but the answer was too embarrassing (like he saw her wearing a corset with her big boobs heaved up - she designs them and does wear them from time to time). The other was that he is deeply insecure and hates to feel as if he's been somehow been bested. This was not my intent on either count, but I think that is how he felt.

Fast forward to a graduation party for my husband's graduate school class and both girlfriend and insecure boyfriend are there. Given my knowledge of how fragile his ego is, I planned to be extra careful about whatever I said to him and planned to avoid any questioning of any kind. When we arrived, most of the seats were taken and people needed to sit on the ground. Boyfriend was sitting in one chair and his girlfriend in another. I told my husband to take the remaining one because he had had to stand a lot during the graduation ceremonial activities and I was sitting.

The boyfriend offered me his seat and I accepted it. My husband made a joke and asked him if he gave up the seat to me because of "Jewish guilt" (the boyfriend told us he was Jewish). Since I was concerned that someone with such a fragile ego would be offended by this, I cut in and said, "I'm sure it is just an act of courtesy." The boyfriend then went on to say that courtesy was a way for people of superior intelligence to make those of lesser mental capacity feel comfortable. He essentially insulted us by saying he was being kind because we were dumber than him. Of course, I let this go as I saw this as yet another manifestation of his insecurity. My husband assumed it was his way of making a cutting joke.

After that party, the boyfriend asked my husband to friend him on Facebook, but he did not ask me. This did not insult me, but given the fact that he knows each of us equally well, the message was clear. He was snubbing me intentionally because he was still smarting from the initial exchange. Occasionally, my husband has read a comment here and there by the boyfriend because they are of interest for the way in which they reflect his issues. One of the recurring themes he has demonstrated is his condescension and his talk of being a "gentleman" or exercising "courtesy" toward people. He always speaks of it in a manner which asserts that a "gentleman" does such things for those who are less than him in some fashion or another.

Clearly, this man is far from a "gentleman" and lacks any real sense of what courtesy is. Such things are not mere hollow demonstrations, but they bring along with them a genuine intent to make people comfortable and declarations of the inferiority of the people you are exercising said courtesy toward vitiates the authenticity of the supposedly kind actions. Yet, this man not infrequently frames himself as a gentleman. He keeps saying it and I wonder if he believes that announcing who he believes he is somehow means that we should accept him as what he identifies as instead of what he demonstrates himself to be. He behaves like a rude, smug, and supercilious jerk while proclaiming himself kind and courteous.

One thing that I have noticed in America is that people have a sense of who they are. They "identify" as something or other and they feel it necessary to proclaim that identity repeatedly to the world.  There is a sense that the world doesn't get to decide for itself based on who you show yourself to be through your words and actions, but you get to choose a label and force it upon people. If they refuse to accept your self-determined identity, even when it is opposition to your behavior, then they are the ones who are in error.

This need to proclaim oneself as this, that, or the other is a manifestation of insecurity about ones sense of self. It is very much as if the people who make such proclamations, whether they come via Facebook status messages, tattoos, or personal dress style, are trying to convince you of something that they themselves are not the least bit secure about. Such messages scream "I'm totally insecure about who I am and how I'm seen so validate my self-image!" They, of course, don't even realize that they're broadcasting a psychological issue - a neuroses - for all with a perceptive mind to hear.

It's my opinion that Americans are especially prone to this sort of thing because there is no strong sense of identity common among us. Also, people are indoctrinated into the notion that being "an  individual" is important so there is a need to distinguish oneself as different from others in order to confirm ones individuality. The funny thing is that, the more people proclaim who they are, the more they become just like everyone else who isn't secure enough in their sense of self to just "be" who they are and let those around them reach their own conclusions. This need to force their self-image onto others unites them into an insecure tribe rather than divides them into individuals. I daresay that it is rarer to find someone who just "is" and allows people around them to decide for themselves than it is to find people who feel the need to bray, broadcast, and overtly advertise who they want you to think they are. These sorts of proclamations make such people part of the crowd, not stand-out individuals.

My husband is a very tolerant person and tends to be more sanguine about people's behavioral and psychological quirks than me. However, recently, even he got tired of the neurotic posting that this guy was broadcasting on Facebook and hid his feed. It wasn't that he was so pompous. It wasn't that he was so insecure. It was the fact that he couldn't see how he was coming across to others. This sad lack of self-awareness and awareness of how others see him was just more than my husband wanted to deal with intermittently. Frankly, I feel the same way. People don't get to weave their own reality and then hold up the tapestry in front of me and insist I accept that picture of them rather than the reality that is so clearly behind it. I get tired of people's issues being in my face and I especially am tired of being told repeatedly and obnoxiously who someone believes they are rather than being permitted to make up my own mind.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.