Optimistic Nihilism
Page 32
Even less sensitive of us, someone takes a risk and shares a story of acute emotional distress, and we respond similarly:
Mary:
“I’m sorry I haven’t called in a while. I’ve been pretty depressed since Rover died. It’s weird: I’m lonely, but I don’t have the energy to get together with my friends.”
Bob:
“Yeah, I hear ya’ … I’m still not over my Fluffy myself. But instead of withdrawing, I find myself going out too much! Seems like I’ve been drinking more than ever, and I’m in some sort of rut.”
I used to pretend that maneuvers such as this were somehow empathic, that sharing a similar experience of my own was somehow soothing to the person who started the conversation. But now I believe it’s often self-centered. Instead of exploring the other person’s distress with her, we use it as an opportunity to vent our own frustrations. And, at the same time, we’re backing away from the uncomfortable position in which we find ourselves, that is, someone needing us to tend to them. Sure, some of the content of the conversation suggests it is deep and personable, but it’s actually kinda superficial, a ping-pong match of sorts—indeed, there can be something almost competitive about it. I realize now this isn’t what Mary needs. She needs Bob to say something more like:
Bob:
“I’m so sorry! Rover was wonderful; I know y’all were close. It sounds really disorienting, to know what you need to do to feel better, but to be unable to do that. Do you want to get together and mope with me later? I’ll drive and buy, if you’ll let me take you out.”
This response is more empathic because Bob makes it clear he heard Mary and he conveys that he’s aware she probably has more to say than her first line. He doesn’t use her moment as an invitation to get attention for his own distress. Instead, he returns the conversation to her, inviting her to say more. He does what he can to make it as easy as possible for Mary to say “yes” about getting together, realizing that she probably needs to but doesn’t feel like it. And sure, later, when they mope together over dinner and brewskis, he can bring up his dead Fluffy.
The more courage it takes Mary to share her inner experience, the more significant Bob’s insensitive reaction becomes. And the more it hurts Mary when Bob invalidates her, the more it suggests she was invalidated as a child. If Mary’s parents had validated her well during childhood—producing a healthy validated brain in adulthood—she is more likely to see that Bob isn’t the answer right now. She’ll move on, and maybe share her experience with Dana instead.
However, if Mary was invalidated often growing up and now has an adult brain that is wired for insecurity, she is much more likely to be sensitive to Bob’s comments and feel disoriented as a result of the failed interaction. She may wonder, consciously or subconsciously: “Am I overreacting? Was it appropriate for me to even tell Bob about Rover? He’s not helping! I just can’t be soothed … or maybe I don’t deserve to be … No one understands me … they never have.” I used to scoff at the notion that adult pain often stems from unresolved childhood pain, but I don’t anymore. That shit’s real, man. Stuff hurts not just because it hurts now, but also because it hurt back then. Yes, our adult experiences often tap our childhood ones, both pleasures and pains.
Frustrated and worse off than when she started, Mary goes to a bar. She gets drunk and laid because she needs to be touched … but then wakes up the next morning in some strange apartment, feeling more disoriented than ever. Tugging cigarette butts from her hair and wiping mascara dingleberries from her eyes, she surveys the room, realizing for the first time that her homme du jour is a skanky, Jersey Shore-type, way too young for her, even if he had been perfect otherwise. He’s currently comatose, face down, a gigantic tribal tattoo between his muscular, sunburned shoulders. Another tattoo—text of some sort—is uncomfortably placed in the lower of his back, just above his silk boxer-briefs. She doesn’t dare read it, already resenting his seed inside of her more than she can hardly endure. The sounds of someone else fucking are making it through the wall from the next room. Mary cringes, then spies her own panties hanging off the corner of the aquarium right next to the bed where she’s been sleeping all night. There are no fish—only some kind of fucking lizard in there! It’s so big! Who has such a thing for a pet?!
You think I’m goofin’ around, but I’m serious! If you don’t want your daughter to end up as an impulsive one-night stander, you better learn how to pay healthy attention to her when she’s little! That’s how that ball gets rollin’. Next thing you know, panties danglin’ from some douchebag’s iguana cage, pullin’ cigarette butts and bottle caps from her hair.
Even another way to invalidate another’s distress is to reflexively offer advice. Staying with the deceased pet example, we often say something like “Rover died? Oh … well, you should get another dog! There are so many to adopt—you can rescue one from a shelter; Rover would be happy.”
Getting another pet in the wake of just losing one is not a lot different than going to a bar and getting laid. But this is the American Way. We don’t like to suffer, we don’t like to see suffering, and we don’t like to talk about it. We’d rather sweep it under the rug and replace it, sometimes before anyone even notices.
Michael Hollander again:
The real shame here is that [one’s] advice might be right on the money. [But,] For whatever the reason—maybe it’s a design flaw—people are more willing to accept advice after they feel they’ve been understood.7
Patients often tell Michael in therapy, “the advice was pretty good, but the timing was terrible.”8 I see! We don’t know exactly why—perhaps it is indeed a design flaw—but yes, a person in emotional pain needs that pain to be acknowledged and experienced before they can move on and benefit from advice, regardless of how valuable that advice is. Pain needs to be felt, to run its course. Only then can one begin to address the more practical issues of coping. Feel first, then cope. Let’s just call it a design flaw.
As I hope you suspect, this all takes a lot of practice. Once you begin to train yourself to not respond with advice, for example, you may find yourself instead imposing your own interpretations and hypotheses regarding what others are telling you—while they’re in the process of trying to tell you theirs. For example, Jerry up there may have approached Daniel about Douglas more like this:
Jerry:
“Man, I’m not looking forward to running into Douglas. There’s something about him that bothers me. It’s hard for me to put my finger on—-
Daniel:
“Ahhhh, yeah, he talks too much about himself; he doesn’t know when to shut-up!”
Jerry:
“Well, yeah, but there’s something else—
Daniel:
“Is it that way he always interrupts you when you’re trying to talk?”
In theory, interrupting someone to finish his thought for him might work, if you get his thought right. Sure, he might feel that you have the capacity to see his side of the story, although he may remain annoyed that you interrupted him and didn’t let him speak for himself. But, in the also likely event that you don’t verbalize his concern accurately while interrupting him, you just create more distance and isolate him.
Instead, postpone the interpretations until the speaker feels heard. Let them tell you; don’t think you’re a fancy psychologist because you’ve got it all figured out. The irony is that being a good psychologist is more about listening first and then asking good questions than it is about figuring stuff out for patients and just telling them. If you do figure out an issue, you don’t have to specify it yourself: You can ask even more questions to help the speaker come to the realization on his own! In counseling, as with emotional validation proper, we need to “Think ‘mirror’ and not ‘mind reader.’”9
Before we switch gears and finish up, we have to acknowledge that there are limits to the validating process—there is such a thing as being reckless about it. To illustrate with an extreme example, we don’t validate the
paranoid delusions of psychotic patients. Now, we can validate their feelings of fear associated with the delusion, but we have to be careful not to validate the delusion per se. We can assert that it would indeed be frightening if the FBI was following us, but we simply find it hard to believe that they are. Of course, we encounter similar but less extreme instances outside of the state hospital. Sometimes our friends really are misperceiving reality, and relentlessly validating their experience without challenging their perceptions may not be productive in the long run. But we can challenge them with sensitivity. “Gentle confrontation,” I like to call it.
Also, some people really can be too demanding for comfort. My lecture was not intended to encourage you to advertise every feeling you have in every context. That’s called “dramatic,” or clinically, histrionic. Don’t do that, either; it’s annoying as crap. As with most things, moderation is key. People who cope with their neediness by excessively demanding attention will only push others away, perpetuating the cycle of neediness.
I gather that the acknowledgment and expression of suffering are more acceptable in some countries outside of the U.S.A. While on internship at a state hospital, I was moved by a story that our Nepalese psychiatrist told one day during our weekly psychopharmacology brown-bag seminar. I apologize, Nepal, if I butcher the story, but I believe I can recount the essence fairly accurately. He explained that following a death in his community, the family of the deceased was essentially locked up together in a single-room dwelling in which they had to remain together for a period of several days. Communication between the grieving and the outside world was not permitted. It was just you and your loved ones, along with the conspicuous absence of the deceased.
The apparent goal of this seemingly peculiar arrangement was to permit—perhaps more like force—the grieving parties to indeed grieve, thoroughly and without reservation. Without television, telephones, or tele-anything else, the persons in the dwelling are not distracted and have little choice but to process, privately and together, what has transpired. I’m not sure how these must have unfolded in Nepal, but it’s interesting to imagine how they might in America. I wonder if the average American could even endure such a thing! Sure, we have funerals, but I always sense that the energy in American funerals is spent trying to deny that the person is actually gone, as opposed to just soaking it in, like they apparently do in some places in Nepal.
More subtly, following a therapy session with an adolescent recently, I was briefing his mother on her son’s progress. She herself was upset about something unrelated, disclosing through tears that her brother was dying from cancer. Mom was from Italy, where much of her family, including the ailing brother, continued to live. She was obviously distressed because she was separated from them, but the distress was compounded, she explained, because she felt emotionally constricted and isolated in America. Back in Italy, I learned, it is much more acceptable to discuss one’s emotional distress with others. But here, she felt it was inappropriate, like she was asking too much. It makes me so sad to even type that.
And, as usual, we don’t have to contemplate the extreme circumstances of death and funerals to see how suffering is shunned here. An acquaintance of mine, Joanna Barbera, is a charismatic and talented songstress here in Austin. We were chatting recently after one of her shows, and she seemed a little uncomfortable because of recent comments—that apparently felt, at least a little, like criticism—that her music is “sad.” At some point, I tried to comfort her: It’s not your responsibility to make the world feel good. In fact, if people get sad at your music, you didn’t do that to them; you just catalyzed their contact with a sadness they brought to your show. Same goes for books like this one. I suspect many people would feel sad at times while reading it. But I’m not making you sad. Don’t blame me or Joanna; blame the cosmos. We’re just describing the way things seem to us. If it makes you sad, then you probably agree, on some level.
And again, when did feeling sad become so wrong? Paradoxically, if we just give ourselves permission to be sad, it eventually feels better than when we try to cope by suppressing the sadness. Otherwise, we psychologists believe that the meta-emotions, that is, the sadness and/or anxiety—if not shame—that we feel about our primary sadness or anxiety makes matters even worse. And the irony is that these emotions-about-emotions are not even necessary. Western culture forces them upon us, not Nature. We should just be sad sometimes, as God intended, without having to feel guilty for feeling that way.
* * *
1 Linehan, M. M. (1993). Skills training manual for treating borderline personality disorder. New York: Guilford. The info I’m discussing comes from the introductory pages 2-4.
2 Carey, B. (2011, June 23). Expert on mental illness reveals her own fight. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/health/23lives.html
3 Hollander, M. (2008). Helping teens who cut (p. 71). New York: Guilford.
4 Shapiro, D. (1965). Neurotic styles (p. 126-127). New York: Basic Books.
5 Ibid., p. 123.
6 Ibid., p. 120.
7 Helping Teens Who Cut, p. 53.
8 Ibid., p. 54.
9 Ibid., p. 141.
Notes
THE NOTES BELOW include elaborations and more complete citations in reference to the epigraphs throughout this book (that is, the quotations that introduce each chapter, as well as those in the introductory text of the book).
INTRODUCTION
Neider, C. (Ed.). (2000). The autobiography of Mark Twain (pp. 326-327). New York: Perennial Classics. Twain’s autobiography was published posthumously, by his design: “The very reason that I speak from the grave is that I want the satisfaction of sometimes saying everything that is in me instead of bottling the pleasantest of it up for home consumption” (ibid., p. 326).
Rawlings, G. B. (Ed. & Trans.). (2009). Pascal’s pensées; or, thoughts on religion (p. 36 and p. 7). Charleston, SC: Bibliolife. (Original work published 1670). The Pensées is an unfinished, somewhat unorganized collection of notes that Pascal wrote towards the end of his life “in the intervals of painful and prostrating illness” (ibid., p.4). I’ve taken the liberty to combine two non-adjacent pensées, but I feel this is appropriate, given the disorganized nature of the work and the apparent congruence between the two.
CHAPTER 1
Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death (p. 50). New York: The Free Press.
CHAPTER 2
The quote is popularly attributed to Alfred Hitchcock, but I haven’t been able to find the precise source. Also note that a popular variation states “the bang” instead of “a bang.” See, for example, the Academy’s Facebook post on August 13, 2014, celebrating his birthday. I don’t know which way it’s supposed to be, but I prefer “a.”
CHAPTER 3
All Bible quotes in this book are from the New American Standard Bible, Reference Edition. (1975). Chicago: Moody Press. I still own the very same Bible I read growing up, and it still gets a lot of use.
CHAPTER 4
Meyers, J. (2000). Edgar Allen Poe: His life and legacy (p. 89). New York: Cooper Square Press.
Maugham, S. (2004). The painted veil (p. 172). New York: Vintage International.
Of course, the title of this chapter is the famous line from: Hendrix, J. (1967). Are you experienced? [Recorded by The Jimi Hendrix Experience]. On Are you experienced? [Vinyl record]. London: Track Records.
CHAPTER 5
Washington, H. A. (Ed.). (1854). The writings of Thomas Jefferson (v. 7, book 2, p. 284). Washington, DC: Taylor & Maury. Retrieved via Google books, http://books.google.com
CHAPTER 6
Muir, M. & George, R. (Writers). (1990). You can’t bring me down. [Suicidal Tendencies]. On Lights … Camera … Revolution! US: Epic.
CHAPTER 7
The Denial of Death, p. 282-283.
CHAPTER 8
Lucretius. (2007). Lucretius, from de rerum natura (On the nature of things). (W. H. Brown, Trans.). In C. Hitchens (Ed.),
The portable atheist: Essential readings for the nonbeliever (p. 2). US: Da Capo Press.
CHAPTER 9
Camus, A. (1989). The stranger (M. Ward, Trans.; p. 69). New York: Vintage International. (Original work published 1942).
CHAPTER 10
Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith (p. 78-79). New York: W. W. Norton.
CHAPTER 11
de Mello, A. (1988). One minute wisdom (p. 103). New York: Image Books.
APPENDIX
Watts, A. (2000). Still the mind (p. 43). Novato, CA: New World Library.
Acknowledgements
THANKS SO MUCH, FRIENDS, for reading drafts or portions of my book and being gentle but compelling with your criticisms: Madison “Smeller” Lowry, Lewis “Pops” Hussing, Matthew D. Arnold, Lee E. Davis, his excellent parents “Izzy” and Walt Davis, Aaron “Wally” Wallace, Steve Ilardi, Lance Myers, Jessieca Melendez, and “Battlestar Gailactica” Gresham.
And you too, Donald “Grumpa” Skrabanek, now resting in peace. After you were done, you told me that you believe in more of a “cycle of life.” You were vague but passed away soon thereafter, before we had a chance to talk about it, just a few days before your youngest daughter’s wedding. We had the wedding anyway; I like to think that’s what you were talking about.
Spencer and Brittan: You are my family. If it wasn’t for you, your sanctuaries, and your camaraderie, I really may have stepped off some sort of deep end.
Thanks, too, Mom and Dad. It’s obviously been rough at times but, all said and done, I’m glad y’all made me happen.
Hook ’em!
About the Author
David is a licensed clinical psychologist in Austin, Texas specializing in forensic evaluation (juvenile probation, competency to stand trial, and the insanity defense). His formal education is from the University of Texas at Austin (B.A., Psychology; M.A., Neuroscience) and the University of Kansas (Ph.D., Clinical Psychology). While at Kansas, David earned the Irving-Handelsman Graduate Student Award for teaching introductory psychology courses and statistics. More recently, he has taught forensic psychology at St. Edward’s University in Austin. When not working, he likes being outdoors, spending time with friends, barbecuing, cycling/jogging, spectating sports, and watching boring foreign movies.