Gates and Obama lack common sense

After my divorce, my kids met my gf’s little Yorkshire Terriers for the first time. One of them got nervous and snapped at my daughter. He did not bite her and there was no injury. My daughter told my ex-wife on the phone that evening. We we went to bed and at about 10 pm I awoke to banging on my door. I thought it was my ex-wife so I didn’t answer right away. She had a temper and I had reason to be nervous without going into our history. I was looking out the window for her car. I saw a police car instead. An  angry female cop said it was the police and that I had to open the door. I opened the door and she was pissed as she had been there awhile. She had been called to check on my kids to make sure they weren’t injured. She was very rude to me in my apartment.  It was humiliating to be treated that way in front of my kids.  I didn’t want to get in trouble, and frankly, it seemed like she was itching for me to react. I did not.  I didn’t get far trying to explain my delay in answering the door. She obviously didn’t care and thought she had me figured out already, it seemed. She was not there to listen, but to take charge and to make sure I was aware that she was in charge every second she was there.   Thankfully for me,  my ‘cooler head prevailed’, to quote Obama.  I knew I would lose in that situation, and I wasn’t going to put me or my kids through that.

Nothing particularly remarkable about it.

Probably thousands of people every week in America feel that the police are rude or even perhaps baiting them to react so they can arrest them. Most Americans , if they are sober, don’t take the bait. Most Americans are pretty smart that way.

Apparently, Professor Gates lacks this common sense. He has educated himself right out of having to need common sense. In addition, he has  a friend in the President of the United States, who also decided that it would be a good idea to call a Cambridge cop’s actions ’stupid’ right after admitting he didn’t have all the facts in the case. Obama looked real calm and cool when he said those words, but they were incendiary words. He wasn’t sitting in a bar chatting with his buddies, for God’s sake,  as words in such a context would be harmless, but giving a press conference as the President of the United States. Our President. Officer Crowley’s President.  

 No common sense awards will be forthcoming for Obama here, as far as I can tell.

And that worries me, Obama’s lack of common sense, much less than whether or not  Crowley was the bigger prick that day, and secretly hates black people.

Most Americans know how to survive cops when they act in ways that offend us, but we may not survive this President if he keeps speaking so impetuously.  He certainly isn’t inspiring any police officers to behave more professionally, though he may be starting a trend for the populace to become even mouthier with the police.

Forgiveness is a fuck you sandwich

As a therapist, I meet a lot of people that have been severely abused – physically, emotionally, sexually. They are often  angry.  I talk with them about how their anger kept them alert to danger during their abuse, and how it helped them get clarity about the fact that they weren’t being bad, the abuser was being bad. Their anger was a gift. It kept them alive, and it kept them sane. Similar things  can be said for other emergency emotions they may still carry, such as anxiety, or just chronic numbness.

But these emotions have a cost over time. They really wear people out – often leading to depression. These folks want relief from these emotions. As a result the concept of forgiveness usually comes up in our conversations.  I almost never have to bring it up. Some of them are religious. Others had the  notion of forgiveness mentioned to them by a loved one.

As you can imagine, just the idea of forgiving often pisses them off more.

My stance with this is that a lot of times forgiveness begins with a fuck you and a proverbial kick in the balls. You can’t forgive someone while they are hurting you, and often the emotional pain is still going on years later. Anger will probably always need to be at least part of a healthy response to coping with memories of the abuser.

What I see though, when I am talking to these victims, are heroes. T0 survive these situations people have to have all manner of admirable qualities: courage, cleverness, patience, intelligence, and forbearance. ( ie. it is often INTELLIGENT not to fight back so you can survive or avoid injury)  They fought these private wars and had no ticker tape parade. I want to give them one. I want them to see what I see. But I can only see it because I am not so emotional about what happened.

This is the only reason to forgive abuse that I can come up with. The process of f0rgiveness also often ends with a fuck you and a  proverbial kick in the balls resulting in some psychological distance from the abuser so the victim can actually see their own heroism as survivors of attacks on their bodies and souls.  Sometimes, they can  see the good  and strong and intelligent stuff they were made of while being abused, even in the most humiliating of situations, and the good stuff they are still made of now.

The fuck you’s are layered throughout the process, thus the sandwich metaphor.

The forgiveness is the mere realization of who the real star of the show was and is - who really matters. The abuser is appropriately relegated to exactly the place in the victim’s life they have earned - void of power or influence -  just someone who failed.

Entitlement toxicity

 

Carl Semmelroth ‘interpreted’

From birth, most of us are surrounded by a multitude of things we didn’t earn or arrange. Examples include the air we breathe, care we are given, food, and the concern of others.

It is difficult to understand why all this is happening.

We are apt to assume it is because we deserve their concern and attention.

We deserve it all just for existing.

We don’t easily see that what we receive is given to us as a gift.

Instead of an attitude of gratitude, we develop a self-important attitude of entitlement.

In this state, we will just not except a gift.

Everything must be deserved or it must be paid for.

The giver is left with a sense of emptiness.

Self-importance results in you becoming preoccupied with what others think of you to make sure they recognize your entitlements.

This constant vigilance of others turns you into a “nervous nellie” until someone fails to recognize those entitlements, at which point you are apt get angry and attack or withdraw.

Self-importance turns you into a performer, always on stage, very self-concious.

A useful question to ask yourself: 

         Do I want to attend to others view of me, or would I rather concentrate on what I am doing?

Do  you need some motivation to concentrate on what you are doing?

Do you want the antidote to being a self-important nervous nellie always on the verge of attacking or withdrawing from others?

Here it is :

Focus on what you want.

Discern what you want and concentrate on it.

Easy… right?

Not for the self-important.

You can start though by noticing the many things you get that you want without earning them.

Maybe the feeling of gratitude will spring up. Maybe not. For now, just notice. You can’t force it, just like you can’t compel generosity.  That’s all the advice I can give.

Feel proud when you earn what you want.

You’re building your self-esteem.

Self-esteem assures you that you have the ability to deal with whatever occurs in your life with confidence and grace.

Read this if you are in a hurry

Everyone recalls the invoking of the force in George Lucas’ Star Wars films. There was you regular ordinary force, and then there was the dark side of the force. The latter involved getting caught up in one’s feelings, particularly angry ones. The former resulted from this yoda-like receptiveness to the force’s possible existence and utility even though it seemed impossible initially that such a passive invitation to something so intangible could result in achieving ones desires.

We have a force in our mind that is more commonly referred to as the will. Semmelroth writes that “your will is the center in your mind that can initiate action. See it as a gentle and patient, but also persistent and intelligent, agent for action. Whatever the problem you face, you will be better off when you use your volition to initiate problem solving behavior along with the expectation that the problem will  be solved that way, instead of pushing. “

Using our will to force things is sort of the mental equivalent of stuttering, the will is the first syllable initiating effort and if you keep harping on that first syllable, your going to lack direction and breadth of vision in you effort. When willing is made into an effort to control, it is merely an exercise in anger.  Willing something really a soft smooth activity in and of itself.  In contrast ….  will , will, will, will , will, will, will ….. and you’ll see that your activity, look and feel like hurry.

All hurry is anger.

Don’t think so? Watch people’s expressions when they are in a hurry. Or try interrupting someone in a hurry.

Semmelroth:

An excellent place to begin the task of replacing willpower with intelligent and competent will is in everyday hurrying through tasks. You begin by slowing down when you are hurrying. You may say, “But suppose I need to or want to get something done quickly.” To be quick is different  than to hurry.

>if you wish to speed up and you have a higher gear that you can comfortably shift into, do it.

>if you don’t have a higher gear, don’t hurry. Instead, look for a more efficient technique for doing the task. Then practice it.

>shoot for a pace that gives you a sense of competence.

In the effort to do something about your anger, no other thing will bring you more peace than governing your “motor” to run at a comfortable pace.

Read that last sentence very,  very slowly – take a second at least between each word.

(DAM) Decisive Action Mindset – Anger’s only Antidote

A lot of anger problems come from our habit of keeping our anger warm. If feelings are not under our voluntary control, and anger is a feeling, then when anger happens, its intensity will be worse and potentially more destructive if we are already slightly angry due to the routine sort of thinking we are doing. But can we control our thinking so that we can reduce our risk of anger quickly ramping up from an already warm base? I think a lot of of our thoughts are linked to our feelings and actually reinforce those feelings,  so we don’t have as much direct control over thoughts as we might ‘think’.  I think we can learn to put the brakes on certain thoughts though by learning to recognize them so when  they pop up later we can ‘give pause’ to the moment and in that pause shift focus to a decision to ‘reject or accept a proposal for action’ that we make to ourselves associated with that thought. Thoughts that already have momentum due to their link to a feeling require decisive measures for you to even have the option to slow or stop that momentum.

Ask yourself, when angry,

Have I lost control of something?

Often , when you ask yourself this question, you realize you never had control over it in the first place. For example, if your spouse or parent says something you preceive as unfair criticism,  and you feel angry, did you lose over what they think or say? You actually never had control over what they think or say. You lost control over what you think when the anger arose involuntarily. Your thoughts were rolling along peacefully enough, you hear a criticism, and you feel angry and you lose that relatively peaceful stream of thought you had. You want it back. You want control of your thoughts. If they kept thinking that critical stuff, and you felt in complete control of your thoughts, you wouldn’t have lost control of anything. 

Do you want control of your thoughts?

Yes.

How?

  Well, as I said, thoughts are largely involuntary, so you can’t control them either, just like you can’t control your critic’s thoughts.

So what can you do?

Try this: Notice how each thought  that arises points to an action on your part, if at all. If it only points to action you’d like the other party to take, go to the next thought. Keep evaluating each thought in terms of the actions it points to you taking.  Multiple action options will arise that you can accept or reject. Let them keep rolling. It will feel pretty natural even though my writing about it makes it sound complicated.   Eventually you will see yourself doing something that makes you feel good and meets your standards for yourself. You will feel more in control because you will be focusing on the only thing you can control  –  what you  do. 

This works because when you are angry your body wants you to take action and use some of that adrenaline. The only way to respond to your own anger is with an action mindset. Anger will fight you doing anything else. As soon as you start focusing on your thinking, or their thinking, or their action, your body will be fighting it and wanting to take it  action of its own.  But if you don’t use that energy to decisively present all the action options to yourself than  you will pick a default action and it will usually be a less than optimal.

Here is a personal example of me doing this. It follows a critical comment I heard from someome I care about:

 I could sit here.  No. That feels like giving in.

 I could say something. No. I don’t know what to say. I’ll say something that will make it worse.

I could say nothing. No, I have to do something though .

I could leave. No, that solves nothing.

 I could get a drink of water. Yes. But then what?

I could walk over to the person.  No, not yet.

I could listen to the person. Yes. I walk over and listen. I show I am not afraid and am not going to just let this go.

I could really work hard to understand the person. I am not agreeing with them. Just really trying to understand. I am not showing fear. I am not agreeing to change anything I do. I am not being intimidated.  

I could look at them while they talk. This shows respect and self-confidence.

I could ask questions so I could learn more about what they think. This shows respect, concern, interest, and I have agreed to nothing.

The original propositions for action in the example are pretty primitive but I gradually gain control over myself by telling myself decisively no until my proposals for action get better in terms of their fit with what is going to be effective and comfortable with me.

How to be decisive about being decisive

My ideas here are all well and good, perhaps satisfying to think about and even ponder doing. But I don’t really think I have really answered the question about how you can get yourself to become the decisive person that will most certainly help you cut through anger and lethargy and all the rest.

I think an author named Michael Loboeuf, Ph.D. answers the question in his book titled: The Greatest Management Principle in the World.  Here it is:

THE THINGS THAT GET REWARDED GET DONE

If we do things there is always some reward involved for us. If we do not see any reward associated with an action, we will not do it. Period. It is a law of human nature. You can try challenging it and I bet I will always be able to show you how this law applies every time.

Some actions have intrinsic rewards, that is, it is the feeling we get from doing it that is at least as rewarding as the result of the action.

Planning, or outlining your decisions for a day or week or year, is not intrinsically rewarding for must of us. I think it is because we don’t reward ourselves for being decisive. If being decisive is defined by our committment to rejecting or accepting a proposal we hear from ourselves or others – it  is going to provoke some emotionality. What if you regret it? What if it is ‘wrong’? It feels so final, even though many decisions are reversible. So we don’t make decisions in order to avoid these negative feelings, but in doing so we stray from the manageable world of action which adds to us becoming more internally focused on our  unmanageable feelings. The consequence is the augmented negative  emotionality that we meant to avoid by not being decisive in the first place. It is a vicious circle.   

How do you break this cycle?   REWARD

Before you make a decision, plan on how you are going to reward yourself just for making the decision. The decision may be to reject a course of action, which should be rewarded as readily as accepting a course of action. Knowing you have some pleasure ahead of you can mitigate the negative emotionality that is inevitably associated with making a decision. Unfortunately, what we do instead is reward ourselves for not making a decision. We live in maybe land.  We have nothing else to do, since we haven’t made any  decisions, so we fall into doing something pleasurable, in other words,  we reward ourselves for being indecisive.

So the next time you are wondering what you should be doing, take a break from that course of thinking, and ask youself how you are going to reward yourself for rejecting or accepting a proposal from yourself for a course of action. It could be a small or a large reward. It doesn’t matter.

For example, before you decide to make a to-do list for yourself for tomorrow, commit to rewarding yourself in some way for accepting or rejecting the proposal to make the list. Do not give yourself this reward until you accept or reject the proposal. What will the reward be? What do you like to do?   There are a wealth of rewards out there, and you can always reverse your decision and reward yourself again for the reversal, so you can’t lose here.   No rush to action, just making decisions. I’ll run through the process myself:

Will I come  with a to-do list for tomorrow? No. I am not sure when I can do it.

Without commiting to doing it, can you decide on a time to do it? Yes – 1:15 PM

Will I come up with a to- do list for tomorrow? No. I don’t know what Reena is planning.

Without commiting to doing it, can you get an idea of what Reena is doing? Yes. I’ll get up and ask her now.

Will I come up with a to-do list for tomorrow? No. I don’t have a notebook chosen to do it.

Without commiting to doing it, can you go find a notebook that will work? Yes

Will I come up with a to-do list for tomorrow?  yes

Reward -  5 minutes rest on the couch with or without TV  for ech decision. I made 7 decisions. I could take 35 minutes. I ended up only needing 10 minutes.  I actually rested for 5 of those minutes after the first ‘no’.

And yes, I did make the to-do list

Your ‘to do nothing’ list

Most of us are familiar with and have used a ‘to do’ list. In the spirit of my last post, you also ought to have a ‘to do nothing’ list. It is meant to work in conjunction with the ‘to do’ list, and is no less important. And it is really fun to make a ‘to do nothing’ list. It might involve committing to doing nothing for 30 seconds after a certain task or ‘behavior’. It just makes all the difference to being able to step into ‘voluntary living’, to quote Semmelroth’s term.

You end up smelling the proverbial roses more often, while enhancing your effectiveness.

Go figure that would be the case.

The bibilical story of David and Goliath is instructive in what I am trying to get across – that’ll be next.

Now I am going to do nothing though.

How to be calm and decisive

 The way to cut through hyper and hypo arousal is by making a habit of being decisive.  Decisions get us to action, and as Semmelroth said,  only action can be managed directly, not emotion. If you can directly control action, you will feel much more in control than if you focus on something you can’t control – emotion. Nontheless,  decisions to take action are preceded by emotion and that emotion is fed by what painful or pleasurable thing we are seeing that could happen as a result of various choices that are in front of us. There is no way to get away from emotions, yet they needn’t be debilitating emotions that render you ineffective.   This can be achieved by  commiting to seeing the pain before  having to go through the pain. The emotion  associated with seeing the pain will be significant but you at least have some distance from it because it is happening NOW.  If you see the future pain, but commit to making some decision to reduce your chances of experiencing pain that pain directly, than seeing the  pain in order to inform your decision becomes a wise and not so unsettling prospect.   Unfortunately many people go too far and create a habit of anticipating pain without following it up with a  a firm decision,  and become chronically anxious or angry.  What they need to do is become decisive around the factors that will contribute to the pain and see just enough pain to  sharpen their focus on implementation of those decisions that will reduce the pain. Even if they are the ‘wrong’ decisions, the focused action and feeling of control will reduce  emotionality and increase calm rationality so that the chance of realizing the ‘wrongness’ of the decision is more likely to happen sooner than if you merely focus on the pain or on some distraction from the pain.  You can then more quickly change the decision and get busy implementating again in a better direction. The decision can even be to delay a particular action, and this can be as useful as taking immediate action, as long as the delay has a time limit.  Often seeing pain is overwhelming, and we need to take a break in order to rejuvenate.  You can even spend that delay eating potato chips and watching TV as long as you using the delay as a means to rejuvenate for a set time before you refocus on the pain and making a decision. However,  if you are just distracting yourself and have no set time to refocus in this way, you are going to be ineffective and risk getting addicted to your distractions.

So here are some steps if you are hypo or hyper aroused, even if ownly slightly:

1)See the pain – dig into it. “What is going to hurt? What else? What else?”

2) Commit to a decision to act to reduce the pain you saw.

3) Include enough decisions to  ’rest and distract ‘  for rejuvenation purposes within  a time limit if you are overwhelmed by looking at the pain.

Voluntary living

I am going to use some direct quotes from Semmelroth’s book that actually are in one of the last chapters, but it makes a point from which we can build a foundation for dealing with hyper and hypo arousal. It talks about anger specifically, but I will try to expand the discussion to to other emotions eventually.

You cannot wade in the river of anger without being sucked in by the undertow of the loss of freedom.  It is an outright logical impossibility to try to force yourself  or someone else to do something and have the resulting behavior occur voluntarily. Participation in the exercise of force and threats of force can have only one of two results: either involuntary compliance or involuntary resistance.

Remember- ‘force’ can be the smallest thing, like a vanishing smile. It is pretty tempting to think you don’t use force that much on yourself or others. Semmelroth clarifies that.

Unfortunately, you cannot always avoid people who threaten you in an attempt to control you. A mugger can only be dealt with by resistance, if possible, or by compliance if necessary. But most attempts to control you can be avoided if you don’t feel you need or want something from the person attempting them. Other people most often employ threats (not always explicit)  that amount to withholding things (including ‘things’ like courtesy and kindness) they think you have some need or claim of.

So how do you develop the ability not to ‘feel you want or need something’ from someone who is making an attempt to control you?

You can’t control what you feel directly. Semmelroth writes, “Emotional responses need not be managed. They do need to be starved of fuel when they interfere with your life.  If you feed your dread ( or whatever emotion) by making your dread the problem to be solved before you act, you have changed the task from getting something done to how you feel about it.  ”

Hmmm. Getting something done. Like what? What do you want? That is not so easy to know as it may seem. Access to the knowledge  of what we want  can easily be drowned out by hyper and hypoarousal. The reason for this is that often we decided what we want at some point in the past.  The feeling of desire that preceded that decision is much more subtle in the present moment – post decision. The more subtle  feeling of desire is not strong enough by itself to push away our anger or fear or sadness.   At our best, we know the  experience of desiring something, having made a decision to get it, and being able to keep our focus on the achievement of that thing despite distractions such as emotions. 

Consider a bball player who has an important shot to make under these circumstances:  the  fans are screaming, the ref just made a questionable call, you’ve missed your last 5 shots, and your ankle hurts. Where does your focus need to be? The shot – the ball, your hands, your feet, your fingers, the basket.  You decided a long time ago that when you take a shot your desire is for it to go in. That decision was made and has never changed. The felt sense that you want to make the shot is ‘obvious’ and  extraneous to succeeding.   You are actually more likely to miss if you get caught up in a desperate desire to make it.  In addition, all the other wants in that moment must be ’starved’ – the desire for the fans to shut up, the ref to be fair and reliable, your past self to have done better, and your ankle not to hurt. Those are problems of thwarted desire that you may choose to address later.

So decisions are important to not feeling that you want or need something from someone who is attempting to control you. You need to find a way to keep those decisions fresh in your mind. You can’t rely on the desire that preceded those decisions and may linger with greatly diminished intensity afterwards to prompt you to remember. So how do we find a way to have easy access to those decisions that reflect our highest standards and deepest desires? How? How? I don’t know off that bat, but I’ll get to it in another post.

 

Hypoarousal – Taking your proverbial ball and going home

Hypoarousal is a physiological state where your body slows down. Hypoaroused states include the feelings of sadness, irritability, and low grade nervousness. I think all of them involve a sense that one has lost and can’t reverse it by going into a hyperaroused state. The default position is to slow down one’s body in order to at least conserve energy. Think of the lioness you see on wilddlife programs that excitedly anticipates being able to get her prey. She tries to chase it down but as soon as she realizes that she will not not be able too, she stops and slowly walks away. She doesn’t remain in a hyperaroused state and run around all agaitated because she lost her prey, she shifts immediately to conserving energy, which is important since she isn’t eating anytime soon. She lost, so it is time to conserve what she has. Think of the child who keeps getting frustrated that he can’t win playing with the bigger neighborhood kids, so he picks up his ball and walks home, cutting his losses. He’s either sad and crying, irritable and muttering to himself, or nervous about being lonely.

Sadness is the awareness that our bodies are preparing to survive a period of deprivation. It involves a focus on the past and what has been lost. Irritability is more  focused on how bad one feels right now about the loss, while low grade nervousness focuses more on what might happen in the future as a result of the loss.    Irritability and nervousness  are the hypoaroused versions of anger and fear.

We are not calm at these times or at peace. Our bodies are forcefully shutting down. It doesn’t feel good. Our thoughts at these times tend to exaggerate the loss and/or impending deprivation. Hypoarousal also has a social purpose in that it tends to provoke concern and action in our allies, and sometimes mercy in our adversaries. We show our need to  the former, and remove all sense of threat to the latter. We might also get finished off by our adversary, but generally our chances are better than if we had continued along the path of hyperarousal, where we’d probably lose anyways and likely inspire more extreme wrath.

Just like hyperaroused states, hypoaroused ones are involuntary. Once again, it is the tendency to indulge in it that creates problems. Mercy once from an adversary might be reconsidered a short time later. Allies moved by compassion might grow weary of helping not to mention question your value as an ally.

So it comes back to back to finding a way to get yourself into a good space emotionally, where you are alert and decisive,   yet calm and flexible.