Thursday, April 17, 2025

 Thursday, April 17, 2025

    I woke up this morning in my too-often-usual agitated state. My nightmare is people who insist they are the only ones who know everything.  I had a situation where I asked someone for something I wanted, stating my reason for wanting it. They finally gave me something that addressed my request, because they realized what my ‘real’ concern was.  They said no to my original request because they deemed my reason ‘irrational’ and said yes when they came up with a ‘rational ‘ reason for my request.  How’s that for gaslighting?  I don’t care who the person is who’s asking, from my point of view, the decision should only be based on “I can do it” or” I want to do it” versus “I can’t do it/ I don’t want to do it.”  That’s what it all boils down to.  

  I can hear you arguing, there’s more involved. Yes and no. There’s certainly more involved if someone threatens me. Someone holds a gun to my head demanding something from me, money or sex, I don’t want to cooperate, but will because I don’t want to be shot. If an addicted family member pleads with me to give money for drugs, do I say yes or no? There’s what I want to do and what I can do.  If I have the money, should I give it? That’s the ‘can’ aspect.  Do I want to give them money, knowing they will go out to buy drugs?  I guess that many people in this position are torn.  Our heads and our hearts do battle with each other.  Judgment in this situation is appropriate. Judgment is appropriate when someone is doing something harmful to themselves or others.  Addicts self-harm and often harm others.  But what’s the right call? It’s not that easy. Whatever we do, don’t justify it.  We do it because we want to.

   I learned not to judge the reasonableness of others’ actions in my sophomore year in college.  I attended a talk; I think the presenter was a minister. He told the story of a college professor in an Asian Indian College. One year, he had a student yell out in the middle of class. Naturally, he ordered him to leave.  The student did the same thing two more times. The school had a rule that missing three classes three times was grounds for expulsion. The professor marveled at the student’s irrational behavior, concluding the student was mentally ill.

   Many years later, he stayed in a hotel in Switzerland. When he went to pay his bill, he was told it had been covered by the manager.  He asked to speak to the man. It was the student he had thrown out of his class many years ago. The student had behaved that way not because he was mentally unbalanced but because he didn’t want to go to college. His father had forced him to go. The man wanted to go to the family hotel business. With the help of this professor, he got his way.  The minister's message was, never assume someone else’s behavior is irrational just because it doesn’t make sense to you.  I’ve carried that message with me for the rest of my life.

   What does being irrational even mean? For most of us, it means behaving in ways we don’t understand. There’s also the definition of being guided by strong emotions.   A mother fiercely defending her child from a dog attack is irrational, meaning she is strongly guided by emotions. Is there something ‘irrational’ about that behavior in a bad way? My guess is the answer is a universal no.  We’re back to what irrational means to us: it doesn’t make sense to me. 

   If we have to forego the wonderful defense of rationality versus irrationality, how do we set our boundaries?  We’re back to  “I can” / “I want to,” or “I can’t”/ I don’t want to,” clearly demarking our boundaries without involving the larger world of abstraction.

   I had a session with Shelly, my therapist/life coach, today. Very interesting. In the past, I had many therapists who were antagonistic toward me, considering me a total mess. Now, I have two I have to convince I need help in ways they don’t consider a problem.  The things that upset me sound reasonable to them. Knowing that I’m an empath, someone who can read the minds and feelings of others, they think of me as better than people who only want to know their own thoughts.  I’m with Ben Franklin: “Everything in moderation.” There’s no one way that’s better than the other. 

    I consider myself overly reactive.  At eighteen, I saw that I shared the tendency with my mother and swore I would never have children and subject them to what I had been subjected to. I’ve spent the rest of my life trying not to be that person. As I recovered over the years, I would marvel at how something that had triggered me in the past now triggered only a minimal or no response.  I don’t mean I didn’t ‘act out.” I mean, I had no internal response. That’s what I wanted to work for.  Living life like a burn victim, sensitive to every touch, as my mother lived, was not for me. I tried to change not only for my own sake, but also because I thought my mother’s behavior was immoral. She had no regard for her impact on others. 

   I wound up arguing with both Rob and Shelly this week about my reactivity. Rob argued it wasn’t pathological. I agreed, but it was dysfunctional. Shelly argued that I was that way because I was an empath, someone who could feel what others felt. I argued that my responses were infantile. Wow! That rang a bell.  

   I have described others as infantile in their responses. I have family members whom I see that way, my mother for one, and two others that come to mind. If they don’t get their way, they find it intolerable. 

    The thought I had that made a difference was that if the reaction is infantile, the trauma happened in infancy.  I know that was true for my mom. That brought about a significant change in my strategy. When I respond to a trigger in my adult state, it’s usually verbal. When I consider my experience from an infantile perspective, the view is different. An infant lies there helplessly, utterly dependent on the care of others.  If that care isn’t cautious of the infant's nervous system, it can be damaging.  I was my mother’s first. All first-time mothers in our culture approach motherhood with apprehension. With the second, they’re good to go. They’ve been there, done it, and no one died.  My mother approached all tasks with alarm even when my sister and I were adolescents. I had to think what she was like when I was a newborn.  Besides that, she never held either me or my sister the way you expect a mother to hold her child. She never allowed herself to take pleasure in bonding. She thought there was something wrong with that. Go figure!

   Vipassana, a form of Buddhist meditation, teaches us not to think about our problems or emotions, not to categorize anything, but to maintain our focus on our physical sensations in every part of our body. We’re instructed to focus on a small section of our foot until we feel a change in the sensation, then methodically move from one small spot to the next over our whole body, watching for changes in sensation.  

   I had been feeling vibrating sensations within my body for about a month.  I assumed I was becoming highly sensitive.  It was an annoying sensation. There wasn’t an emotion attached to it.  I wasn’t upset; I just marveled at the feeling. I chose to focus on the sensation in relation to my infant state, vibrating with my fear and my mother’s fears. It made a difference. Let’s see what the long-term impact will be.  Hopefully, it will be good.

    I never strived to be one of those folks who appeared on a Maury Povich show with people who talked calmly about abusive situations. I know those folks were reactive, but in a different way from me.  There used to be only two recognized responses to fear: fight and flight.  A third was added to the list: freeze, staying with the F pattern. (In the 1980s, when I audited a neuroscience class at Princeton University, there were the Four F’s on basic human responses: fight, flight, feed, and sex. No one is talking about feed and sex anymore. The focus is all on fear responses.)  The folks on the Povich show were reactive, but it manifested in different ways. Several of my students suffer from the freeze response when new material is introduced. Their brains freeze, and they can’t comprehend what is being said.  

   Fourth-grade LG is one of them.  I considered it tremendous progress when he didn’t go into freeze response but into a flight response.  Instead of curling up and shutting down, he would get up and walk around.  Then he progressed to the point where he could identify his fear. 

   We had a breakthrough today. We reviewed addition and subtraction with 6-digit numbers with regrouping. No problem. How did he feel about talking about multiplication?  He could handle talking about the multiplication facts, but not multiplying a 2-digit number by a 1-digit number.  

   I told him he didn’t have to do anything but watch. He couldn’t sit still. He was on the move. He found another seat in a spinning chair. I led him through the visualization to release some of the fear. That did something until I went back to modeling the multiplication problem. He shifted in the chair. I saw him doing something with his hand. What was he doing? Drawing. He said it helped calm him.  I said that it would be good if it helped him stay calm while learning, but it doesn’t. 

   Then I told him to grip the arms of the chair and not move, and to breathe. He compulsively drew. I would tell him to stop, but he grabbed for the pencil again. Then, he threw the pen across the room out of temptation. That was very brave of him.

   I told him we all had to deal with fear, fear of failure, fear of rejection, oh so many fears.  I’m sure I’d told him this was something all humans had to deal with, not just him.  I’m sure I told him that before, but he heard it differently this time.  I also told him that every time he moved, driven by fear, he was telling his body that he had something to be afraid of.  He had to resist moving. 

   This isn’t some weird strategy for dealing with fear that I made up; the Buddha is the one behind this. This is what Vipassana meditation is about. 

    LG did it. He gripped and didn’t move. I asked if I could put a line under the multiplication problem. Yes. Could I multiply the first number in the problem? Yes. Could I multiply the second number in the problem? Yes.  He looked calm. He was ready for this exercise. I could never have done this with him even a few months ago.  I hoped today’s exercise would have some long-lasting benefits. We’ll see.