My Grammy likes to tell the story of when my second brother was born. My middle brother and I were staying with her, and my dad called to announce my mom had a little boy. Grammy told me this, and according to legend, I pouted, proclaiming that I had really wanted a sister. Trying to cheer me up, she told me "But now you're special because you're the only girl!" to which I retorted "I would have been special anyway!"
Anyone who knows me knows I have fantastic relationships with my brothers, and that I also have female cousins who are very much like sisters to me. But still, I never had anyone I could actually refer to as "my sister."
Then when I was almost 30, my middle brother decided that friendship with a special girl wasn't enough. They began dating and married within a year, and I suddenly had someone I could call "sister." In talking about her, the words "my sister" rolled off my tongue so easy that I typically drop "-in-law". But the title is nothing compared to actually having this woman in my life. She is full of kindness and has a wicked sense of humor. She sees my brother for everything he is and loves him senselessly (but still laughs about his quirks with me). She gave me my beautiful niece Ruth, and supported me so much in those first weeks with my daughter.
This past summer, that youngest brother I'd wished was a sister proposed to a girl he'd been dating only a few months. We were all a little surprised, but very happy. She sees him for him, but has this loving respect for him that was missing in past relationships. She loves his giving nature without taking advantage of it. She has eagerly plunged into getting to know the family. As a bonus, she and my husband have already formed a mock-sibling-rivalry friendship. Our sibling group was never going to be totally complete until the youngest found his match, and now she is here.
Both of these special women grew up with only sisters, so having my husband and whichever brother they aren't marrying is more novel for them, but to me, they are each a special gift I have waited my whole life for!
Friday, November 11, 2016
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
Would someone please tell me
How I am supposed to explain to my child someday that when she was 2 months old, we elected a president who sees her as an object because of her gender, and believes her to be sub human because of part of her racial heritage?
This isn't ok.
This isn't ok.
Monday, March 28, 2016
"What's your secret?"
Last summer, we had been hoping to start a family and had been unsuccessful thus far. There were some things with me that weren't going quite regularly and I began to believe that was part of the problem, so I saw the appropriate kind of doctor, and sure enough she diagnosed me with (thankfully fairly mild) PCOS. One of the other symptoms of PCOS is extreme difficulty losing weight, which was pretty validating considering all the work I'd put in to shed the 20 pounds of graduate school weight to no avail.
Doc put me on some medication (metformin, used kind of off-label) to help make things regular again. I'm one of those people that seem to always end up with the side effects that there's only a 15% chance of, but thankfully, the only side effect for me was welcome: most of the graduate school weight came off within a couple months! There was more than zero effort on my part otherwise, but I didn't starve or go crazy with exercise.
Over time, I have developed different attitudes and values for my life, and within the last several years, I have made a decision to put less emphasis on appearance and specifically body size. I think my inability to shed the extra weight helped me here. I put emphasis on living a healthy and balanced life and realized that much about my appearance was not in my control, so I turned my attention elsewhere.
It shouldn't have been surprising when coworkers and friends noticed I was wearing clothes a size or two smaller. "What have you been doing?" they asked. "What's your secret?"
Oddly enough, this attention that I once would have reveled in was still a little flattering, but due to my attitude changes, I kind of wanted to de-emphasize the weight loss. Plus, in truth, I hadn't worked that hard for the changes. So I often reply "I'm on medication for something else, but it's helped me lose a few pounds too!" I guess I have a fear that people will think it's something that's really important to me or that I've really focused on. Don't get me wrong, it's nice to fit into my older clothes and sizes again, but it's kind of like finding a $50 on the sidewalk. Nice, but not life-changing.
Plus, the real reason for taking the medication has been something different. So since mid-January, when people have asked me "What's your secret?" what I've really wanted to say is this:
Doc put me on some medication (metformin, used kind of off-label) to help make things regular again. I'm one of those people that seem to always end up with the side effects that there's only a 15% chance of, but thankfully, the only side effect for me was welcome: most of the graduate school weight came off within a couple months! There was more than zero effort on my part otherwise, but I didn't starve or go crazy with exercise.
Over time, I have developed different attitudes and values for my life, and within the last several years, I have made a decision to put less emphasis on appearance and specifically body size. I think my inability to shed the extra weight helped me here. I put emphasis on living a healthy and balanced life and realized that much about my appearance was not in my control, so I turned my attention elsewhere.
It shouldn't have been surprising when coworkers and friends noticed I was wearing clothes a size or two smaller. "What have you been doing?" they asked. "What's your secret?"
Oddly enough, this attention that I once would have reveled in was still a little flattering, but due to my attitude changes, I kind of wanted to de-emphasize the weight loss. Plus, in truth, I hadn't worked that hard for the changes. So I often reply "I'm on medication for something else, but it's helped me lose a few pounds too!" I guess I have a fear that people will think it's something that's really important to me or that I've really focused on. Don't get me wrong, it's nice to fit into my older clothes and sizes again, but it's kind of like finding a $50 on the sidewalk. Nice, but not life-changing.
Plus, the real reason for taking the medication has been something different. So since mid-January, when people have asked me "What's your secret?" what I've really wanted to say is this:
Little "Benny" or "Bernice" will be joining our family this coming football season!
"The LORD has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy." Psalm 126:3
Saturday, December 5, 2015
Detox!
I'm going to admit I love social media! I became a social worker and therapist largely because I'm curious about other people and like to know what's behind the curtain. Social media affords me the opportunity to peek behind many curtains, and see what's going on with others.
Smartphones offer this availability 24/7. On my lunch break. During halftime. In the middle of the night when I wake up. Which is awesome, except that if I'm trying to attend to 800 people, I'm missing the ones right in front of me.
I signed up for Facebook in November 2004, during my first term at OSU. Since that time, the longest I've ever gone without checking it was the 2 weeks in 2005 I was in Germany.
So, I decided to try an experiment. I decided I wanted to put forth more effort this Advent into making it truly a preparation for the coming of the Christ Child. What better distraction to eliminate than Facebook.
I put up a post about it on the evening of 12/4, and changed my profile picture to let folks know how to contact me if necessary. The rest of this blog post will serve as a log of what my Facebook detox is like.
12/5: I wake up feeling smug and proud for having deleted the Facebook app from my phone last night. I simultaneously experience a strong urge to check how many "likes" my last post received. I realize I'm contemplating this as I am struggling to even move toward getting out of bed.
12/6: After a 5k in the morning, it's a lazy sunday. I'm looking for excuses to log in out of boredom, but successfully resist. I had assumed I'd have serious FOMO by this point, but so far all my urges have simply been related to boredom. We'll see how it goes tomorrow when I return to work!
12/12: Had a bit of withdrawal, maybe? I don't feel especially anxious or constantly pining to check facebook, but when I think about looking at it and seeing peoples' holiday related posts and whatnot, I do get curious and experience urges to check it all out. Still successfully resisting.
12/13: I was reading a buzzfeed article, and saw a link to what I thought was another article... but it was a Facebook page. I clicked away, but not until I saw that I had SEVENTY TWO notifications. I mean, it's only been 8 days, and I haven't been on so it can't be replies and likes to recent comments and updates! This seems unusual, but I'm sure it's good commentary about just how much we interact this way!
12/15: Ohmygosh. So many things I want to post on Facebook today.
-IN LIKE FLINT!!! I made it into my fantasy league playoffs!! First stop: playing my second cousin Charles. I'm undefeated against him so far, for 2 seasons. I'm not sure if that's a good thing. JUST WIN BABY!! Shivakamini Somakandarkram!!!!
-I've been registered independent since 2005. Today, I registered as a Republican for one reason: vote in the primaries for whoever has the best chance to defeat Trump.
-As such, I'm watching the GOP debate. Surprisingly, my favorite is Jeb Bush, however, he seems to be the most moderate so that's not that surprising. If this were SNL's Celebrity Jeopardy, Carson would be French Stuart ("Threeve...") and Trump would be Turd Ferguson ("Heh. It's a funny name.").
12/16: Urge of the day: Checking to see how many notifications I have! Successfully resisted. Giving into that kind of temptation is a slippery slope. I am kind of starting to have FOMO. Whose big news am I missing out on? Trying to re center and be more present to those around me. Why is this getting harder instead of easier???
12/22: Now this is getting easier. Maybe it's because things have been so busy. I have a vague sense of missing what's going on in the world of facebook, and am realizing I'm often using it as a main source of local/national/world news update. Maybe I should start seeking out the news on my own. In any case, I actually don't necessarily feel that my life is all that much better without facebook, nor do I think it's worse. We'll find out in what ways these things change on or after Christmas when I log back in! To be honest, I feel pretty proud of myself for resisting so far.
Smartphones offer this availability 24/7. On my lunch break. During halftime. In the middle of the night when I wake up. Which is awesome, except that if I'm trying to attend to 800 people, I'm missing the ones right in front of me.
I signed up for Facebook in November 2004, during my first term at OSU. Since that time, the longest I've ever gone without checking it was the 2 weeks in 2005 I was in Germany.
So, I decided to try an experiment. I decided I wanted to put forth more effort this Advent into making it truly a preparation for the coming of the Christ Child. What better distraction to eliminate than Facebook.
I put up a post about it on the evening of 12/4, and changed my profile picture to let folks know how to contact me if necessary. The rest of this blog post will serve as a log of what my Facebook detox is like.
12/5: I wake up feeling smug and proud for having deleted the Facebook app from my phone last night. I simultaneously experience a strong urge to check how many "likes" my last post received. I realize I'm contemplating this as I am struggling to even move toward getting out of bed.
12/6: After a 5k in the morning, it's a lazy sunday. I'm looking for excuses to log in out of boredom, but successfully resist. I had assumed I'd have serious FOMO by this point, but so far all my urges have simply been related to boredom. We'll see how it goes tomorrow when I return to work!
12/12: Had a bit of withdrawal, maybe? I don't feel especially anxious or constantly pining to check facebook, but when I think about looking at it and seeing peoples' holiday related posts and whatnot, I do get curious and experience urges to check it all out. Still successfully resisting.
12/13: I was reading a buzzfeed article, and saw a link to what I thought was another article... but it was a Facebook page. I clicked away, but not until I saw that I had SEVENTY TWO notifications. I mean, it's only been 8 days, and I haven't been on so it can't be replies and likes to recent comments and updates! This seems unusual, but I'm sure it's good commentary about just how much we interact this way!
12/15: Ohmygosh. So many things I want to post on Facebook today.
-IN LIKE FLINT!!! I made it into my fantasy league playoffs!! First stop: playing my second cousin Charles. I'm undefeated against him so far, for 2 seasons. I'm not sure if that's a good thing. JUST WIN BABY!! Shivakamini Somakandarkram!!!!
-I've been registered independent since 2005. Today, I registered as a Republican for one reason: vote in the primaries for whoever has the best chance to defeat Trump.
-As such, I'm watching the GOP debate. Surprisingly, my favorite is Jeb Bush, however, he seems to be the most moderate so that's not that surprising. If this were SNL's Celebrity Jeopardy, Carson would be French Stuart ("Threeve...") and Trump would be Turd Ferguson ("Heh. It's a funny name.").
12/16: Urge of the day: Checking to see how many notifications I have! Successfully resisted. Giving into that kind of temptation is a slippery slope. I am kind of starting to have FOMO. Whose big news am I missing out on? Trying to re center and be more present to those around me. Why is this getting harder instead of easier???
12/22: Now this is getting easier. Maybe it's because things have been so busy. I have a vague sense of missing what's going on in the world of facebook, and am realizing I'm often using it as a main source of local/national/world news update. Maybe I should start seeking out the news on my own. In any case, I actually don't necessarily feel that my life is all that much better without facebook, nor do I think it's worse. We'll find out in what ways these things change on or after Christmas when I log back in! To be honest, I feel pretty proud of myself for resisting so far.
Saturday, November 28, 2015
Enough
Growing up, I think that my teachers used to think I was "most likely to succeed." There was usually a kid or two in my class, at least, smarter than me, but I was more motivated. Indeed, I might be the only person from my small grade school class with a Bachelor's degree.
This may seem like an advantage, but it kind of made me stick out like a sore thumb. I had a tendency to be kind of a teacher's pet, but it was a role I hated and tried to reject where I could. My grade school was so tiny--one class for every grade, and 13 people in my 8th grade graduating class. I did not fit in well and high school was such a welcome relief.
By the time I got to high school, I think I had conditioned myself not to stand out, to just fit in. And I did, I found a large group of like-minded girls, I joined the swim team, I was liked well enough by most people when I interacted with them, just not particularly noticed. I say this mainly in terms of academic performance. I took some advanced classes and got decent enough grades, but I never pushed myself. A's and B's were good enough. And I liked it that way. I was happy. I actually mostly really enjoyed high school.
Not standing out, I think, meant I didn't get a whole lot of attention from boys, and attention from boys was something I definitely wanted. For a short period, I had a boyfriend from the next town over, and he was, and is, a nice guy. He eventually broke up with me, seemingly out of the blue, for a reason I didn't understand. I since have come to think that I was just his "Natalie," minus the Krav Maga/aggressiveness. (If you aren't a HIMYM fan, you should be, but I'll help you out by pointing you to the wikipedia article about the episode I'm talking about here.) But I had always felt he was out of my league, there were actually a couple girls from his school who hated me for being with him, so at the time I just figured I wasn't pretty or skinny enough for him. I wasn't even mad, just sad, resigned. In retrospect, this was an unfair thing to think about him, he's a good guy, I just thought about it in a very egocentric way.
Unfortunately, I think toward the end of my high school career and leading into my 2 years in community college, my strategy of not standing out started to work against me. In the first place, it was a completely unconscious strategy, plus I think it also seeped into areas of my life other than academics. I had conditioned myself to be liked at all costs, at the expense of ever standing out. However, I had other interpretations of my lack of male attention. A few things were at play here: First, I had believed that I was a little overweight since I was a child. By "since I was a child" I mean like...4 or 5. When I was very young, it kind of amused me, if I remember correctly. I felt bigger and more grown-up than my peers. However, around age ten, when I started to develop earlier than my peers, it started to become distressing.
Now, I was certainly never a 10 or anything close to it, but when I look back on pictures in high school, I was actually cute enough. I don't think anyone looked at me and saw "chubby" but that's definitely what I saw, as I think many teen girls do. I blamed my failure to land the much-desired boyfriend/male attention on this apparent chubbiness/unsightliness.
By the time I got to my junior year of college, I could do no more at a community college and I transferred to OSU. I attended a barbecue the first night I moved into my new cooperative house, but the next day I didn't eat anything all day. I befriended my next door neighbor, with whom I had a brief and miserable relationship that first term, and he got me into going to the gym with him. Soon I was eating very little and going to the gym very much. I lost over 20 pounds in my first 2 months at college. I started really liking the way I looked but came pretty obsessed with maintaining it, since after I ended the relationship with the neighbor, I still wasn't really getting the attention I wanted from the opposite sex. I was always striving to lose that next 5 pounds, thinking that would really be the ticket, I'd be thin enough, and then the guys would start noticing me. Eventually, as you can imagine, this took a rough toll on my health. That February, I made myself so sick that I passed out--twice--while showering one day. This scared the heck out of me so I called my parents and asked them to come get me. I spent about 6 days at their place, in bed, drinking gatorade and eating frozen yogurt. It was a critical event that led to a turning point in my behavior over the next several following months, but it would take years for my mindset to follow suit. The good news is that after coming through that, I think I see myself more clearly and I have a much more balanced attitude about body image. In fairness, I also got married and my husband has a lot to do with my change in attitude about body image.
After the short-lived boyfriend in college, I went through a pretty significant dry spell in the romantic department. There was the brief...thing...with the guy who was in seminary studying to be a priest who called me two to three times per day and confessed his "love" for me while drunk one time (and subsequently denied it the next morning), but it was pretty stupid of me to get involved with that in the first place. I was still in the process of figuring out how to eat normally again, but in retrospect, I was probably in a more stable place in life than he was at the time.
I started off a real career in a job I was too mentally young for, and it made me grow up pretty fast with no lack of growing pains. There were a lot of worries about getting fired and having it ruin my chances of getting into grad school, and therefore my future in my dream job (private practice counseling) forever. To deal with this, and to deal with the fact that I still wasn't getting any male attention (and felt like I had missed my "window" of finding someone in college) I drank a lot on the weekends. In my mind, I was just having "fun" with friends, but when friends started confronting me the morning after to tell me that it worried them when I would be blacked-out sobbing about what a "horrible" caseworker I was, and that maybe I should look into some counseling, I started realizing that I might be trying to escape from my emotions.
I have journals filled from times I sat in front of adoration, begging God to find me a husband. One time, I did a 9-day novena where I tried to seriously consider religious life to be sure I wasn't missing my calling, even though that's not remotely what I wanted. During that time I managed to (again) get nearly black-out drunk at a Halloween party and kiss a 19 year old named Melvin. I was 23, but in my defense he looked older. (Maybe it was the beer goggles.) (I was pretty horrified when I realized that "I graduated in 2006" meant from high school.) I decided not to count that day in my novena so I guess it actually went for 10 days.
I was getting better at my job and finding my confidence, and yet, I started to worry that my career was going to be my vocation and that I was going to always be alone. I started making really silly bargains with God, like if he just sent me a nice Catholic husband that I would be happy and never ask for anything again. I didn't put it in those words, but that was basically the spirit of it.
At the same time, toward the end of 2008, I got this idea that maybe I was going to just be single for the rest of my life and that the best thing I could do would be to find a way to accept it and be happy with it. So I started thinking about what I would want out of life. My best friend turned to the internet to find love. I was lying on her bed while she was looking through CatholicMatch.com, and she said "Oooh, this one's perfect!" Bored with the whole idea, I said "Oh, message him then." She said "No, not perfect for me, perfect for YOU." I stood up and walked over, and looked at this profile she was showing me. He was an engineer (money, CHECK!) who had studied at OSU (Beaver, CHECK!), and he was in a wetsuit holding up a kayak (outdoorsy, CHECK!). He was also a "7/7" (agreed with 7 core Catholic teachings), SUPERCHECK.
Based on this one guy, I paid a month's subscription fee, created a whole profile, and sent him a message.
He never messaged me back.
As it turns out, I was supposed to sign up for CatholicMatch, but not for Kayak Boy. (Whose name I cannot for the life of me remember, nor is it important.)
A few days into 2009, some random guy took a quiz/survey/thingy I had on my profile, with playful and intriguing answers. I checked his profile...good looking, ambitious, and a 7/7! Great! Except...he lived WHERE? Yeah, not moving to Illinois. After a little bit of (unusually bold for me, since I was assuming this would never work) flirting, I basically told him "Well, this has been fun but I want to be upfront that I'm never permanently moving away from Oregon. Have fun!" He turned around to announce that he felt no need to permanently stay in Illinois and was open to other options. He finished up graduate school in the coming months and started telling me he was applying for jobs in Oregon.
We were not officially in a relationship at this point. After a good 10 years of twistedly convincing myself that the lack of male attention meant that I was unworthy of it, it took some coaxing on Zach's part to un-convince me. Believe me, I didn't make it easy. He worked for it. But after the better part of a year, we finally met in person which confirmed what he'd let himself believe for a while and what I'd opened my eyes to over the preceding months: this was meant to be.
My prayers turned from the bargain of "Find me a husband, God!" to "Help him find a job here so we can actually be together!" Our relationship was quite long-distance for about a year and a half before that happened. In less than a year after he moved out, we were engaged, and then we got married.
Meanwhile, I finished graduate school and my career took off. I've worked hard but I've also found some lucky breaks. I have a full-time job that I love, and I have a side project working for a private group practice, which is everything I'd always hoped it would be. Over time, all these things I've desperately wanted and begun to believe I wouldn't have, have started to come true.
So the rhyme goes, "first comes love, then comes marriage then comes..." and you know how the rest goes. And what's funny is that after bargaining with God that I wouldn't ask him for anything more if I could just have a nice Catholic husband, it turns out I'm being the stereotype of a woman. I feel a little as though I would never feel satisfied if I wasn't able to have babies. And as it happens, I'm not as in control of that as I'd like to be. This past summer I was noticing that there were some things happening in my body that just weren't right, and when I talked them over with a doctor, she gave me a diagnosis of PCOS. Luckily this is treatable (doc thinks my case is actually especially mild), and I'm already on some medication for it. It's not fertility medication, perse, it's more of an attempt to help my body heal itself so I can be more fertile on my own. All side effects have been pleasant and welcome so far. (The shedding of most of my "grad school weight" has been key among them! An addendum to that: the body image struggles are so far behind me that this is just "nice," not "life-consuming.")
Still, I'm not pregnant yet, and every facebook announcement is starting to feel like my female friends are getting pregnant at me. I went to the grocery store the other day and the checkout girl kept complaining about pregnancy symptoms. I was barely holding back tears, I wanted to tell her to stop complaining and be grateful her body isn't broken like mine.
Most women with PCOS get pregnant eventually, but given that I'm over 31 and a half, "eventually" doesn't seem soon enough. I want more than one baby. I ideally want 3, and I'm starting to feel as though I've run out of time to do so, even though I know mathematically speaking that's not entirely true. Still, there are definitely people who struggle with fertility and never get there. In my brain, I'm already at the point where I'll never get there, and I'm mentally preparing for a life of childlessness, when I still have several years to make this work. What should give me hope is all the times I've believed God did not want me to have what I wanted to have, and then I got it anyway, in a way that was perfect. How my mind is choosing to think about this instead is that I've used up all my wishes. That I have so much when so many have so little, and I will just have to deal with not having babies. It makes me want to throw something at God and say "What do you want? I'll give up my career and live under a bridge. That doesn't matter, I want to trade that one in for a baby."
I really have no great way to end this post. I have a really wonderful life with a great family, great job, and doting husband. I am having a hard time loving and missing some little people who don't exist yet, and whom I'm not sure ever will, and watching other people get to that point in life. I see how happy it makes them, and I also know that raising kids is really hard, which must mean that it's really, really worth it. And I just want it too.
This may seem like an advantage, but it kind of made me stick out like a sore thumb. I had a tendency to be kind of a teacher's pet, but it was a role I hated and tried to reject where I could. My grade school was so tiny--one class for every grade, and 13 people in my 8th grade graduating class. I did not fit in well and high school was such a welcome relief.
By the time I got to high school, I think I had conditioned myself not to stand out, to just fit in. And I did, I found a large group of like-minded girls, I joined the swim team, I was liked well enough by most people when I interacted with them, just not particularly noticed. I say this mainly in terms of academic performance. I took some advanced classes and got decent enough grades, but I never pushed myself. A's and B's were good enough. And I liked it that way. I was happy. I actually mostly really enjoyed high school.
Not standing out, I think, meant I didn't get a whole lot of attention from boys, and attention from boys was something I definitely wanted. For a short period, I had a boyfriend from the next town over, and he was, and is, a nice guy. He eventually broke up with me, seemingly out of the blue, for a reason I didn't understand. I since have come to think that I was just his "Natalie," minus the Krav Maga/aggressiveness. (If you aren't a HIMYM fan, you should be, but I'll help you out by pointing you to the wikipedia article about the episode I'm talking about here.) But I had always felt he was out of my league, there were actually a couple girls from his school who hated me for being with him, so at the time I just figured I wasn't pretty or skinny enough for him. I wasn't even mad, just sad, resigned. In retrospect, this was an unfair thing to think about him, he's a good guy, I just thought about it in a very egocentric way.
Unfortunately, I think toward the end of my high school career and leading into my 2 years in community college, my strategy of not standing out started to work against me. In the first place, it was a completely unconscious strategy, plus I think it also seeped into areas of my life other than academics. I had conditioned myself to be liked at all costs, at the expense of ever standing out. However, I had other interpretations of my lack of male attention. A few things were at play here: First, I had believed that I was a little overweight since I was a child. By "since I was a child" I mean like...4 or 5. When I was very young, it kind of amused me, if I remember correctly. I felt bigger and more grown-up than my peers. However, around age ten, when I started to develop earlier than my peers, it started to become distressing.
Now, I was certainly never a 10 or anything close to it, but when I look back on pictures in high school, I was actually cute enough. I don't think anyone looked at me and saw "chubby" but that's definitely what I saw, as I think many teen girls do. I blamed my failure to land the much-desired boyfriend/male attention on this apparent chubbiness/unsightliness.
By the time I got to my junior year of college, I could do no more at a community college and I transferred to OSU. I attended a barbecue the first night I moved into my new cooperative house, but the next day I didn't eat anything all day. I befriended my next door neighbor, with whom I had a brief and miserable relationship that first term, and he got me into going to the gym with him. Soon I was eating very little and going to the gym very much. I lost over 20 pounds in my first 2 months at college. I started really liking the way I looked but came pretty obsessed with maintaining it, since after I ended the relationship with the neighbor, I still wasn't really getting the attention I wanted from the opposite sex. I was always striving to lose that next 5 pounds, thinking that would really be the ticket, I'd be thin enough, and then the guys would start noticing me. Eventually, as you can imagine, this took a rough toll on my health. That February, I made myself so sick that I passed out--twice--while showering one day. This scared the heck out of me so I called my parents and asked them to come get me. I spent about 6 days at their place, in bed, drinking gatorade and eating frozen yogurt. It was a critical event that led to a turning point in my behavior over the next several following months, but it would take years for my mindset to follow suit. The good news is that after coming through that, I think I see myself more clearly and I have a much more balanced attitude about body image. In fairness, I also got married and my husband has a lot to do with my change in attitude about body image.
After the short-lived boyfriend in college, I went through a pretty significant dry spell in the romantic department. There was the brief...thing...with the guy who was in seminary studying to be a priest who called me two to three times per day and confessed his "love" for me while drunk one time (and subsequently denied it the next morning), but it was pretty stupid of me to get involved with that in the first place. I was still in the process of figuring out how to eat normally again, but in retrospect, I was probably in a more stable place in life than he was at the time.
I started off a real career in a job I was too mentally young for, and it made me grow up pretty fast with no lack of growing pains. There were a lot of worries about getting fired and having it ruin my chances of getting into grad school, and therefore my future in my dream job (private practice counseling) forever. To deal with this, and to deal with the fact that I still wasn't getting any male attention (and felt like I had missed my "window" of finding someone in college) I drank a lot on the weekends. In my mind, I was just having "fun" with friends, but when friends started confronting me the morning after to tell me that it worried them when I would be blacked-out sobbing about what a "horrible" caseworker I was, and that maybe I should look into some counseling, I started realizing that I might be trying to escape from my emotions.
I have journals filled from times I sat in front of adoration, begging God to find me a husband. One time, I did a 9-day novena where I tried to seriously consider religious life to be sure I wasn't missing my calling, even though that's not remotely what I wanted. During that time I managed to (again) get nearly black-out drunk at a Halloween party and kiss a 19 year old named Melvin. I was 23, but in my defense he looked older. (Maybe it was the beer goggles.) (I was pretty horrified when I realized that "I graduated in 2006" meant from high school.) I decided not to count that day in my novena so I guess it actually went for 10 days.
I was getting better at my job and finding my confidence, and yet, I started to worry that my career was going to be my vocation and that I was going to always be alone. I started making really silly bargains with God, like if he just sent me a nice Catholic husband that I would be happy and never ask for anything again. I didn't put it in those words, but that was basically the spirit of it.
At the same time, toward the end of 2008, I got this idea that maybe I was going to just be single for the rest of my life and that the best thing I could do would be to find a way to accept it and be happy with it. So I started thinking about what I would want out of life. My best friend turned to the internet to find love. I was lying on her bed while she was looking through CatholicMatch.com, and she said "Oooh, this one's perfect!" Bored with the whole idea, I said "Oh, message him then." She said "No, not perfect for me, perfect for YOU." I stood up and walked over, and looked at this profile she was showing me. He was an engineer (money, CHECK!) who had studied at OSU (Beaver, CHECK!), and he was in a wetsuit holding up a kayak (outdoorsy, CHECK!). He was also a "7/7" (agreed with 7 core Catholic teachings), SUPERCHECK.
Based on this one guy, I paid a month's subscription fee, created a whole profile, and sent him a message.
He never messaged me back.
As it turns out, I was supposed to sign up for CatholicMatch, but not for Kayak Boy. (Whose name I cannot for the life of me remember, nor is it important.)
A few days into 2009, some random guy took a quiz/survey/thingy I had on my profile, with playful and intriguing answers. I checked his profile...good looking, ambitious, and a 7/7! Great! Except...he lived WHERE? Yeah, not moving to Illinois. After a little bit of (unusually bold for me, since I was assuming this would never work) flirting, I basically told him "Well, this has been fun but I want to be upfront that I'm never permanently moving away from Oregon. Have fun!" He turned around to announce that he felt no need to permanently stay in Illinois and was open to other options. He finished up graduate school in the coming months and started telling me he was applying for jobs in Oregon.
We were not officially in a relationship at this point. After a good 10 years of twistedly convincing myself that the lack of male attention meant that I was unworthy of it, it took some coaxing on Zach's part to un-convince me. Believe me, I didn't make it easy. He worked for it. But after the better part of a year, we finally met in person which confirmed what he'd let himself believe for a while and what I'd opened my eyes to over the preceding months: this was meant to be.
My prayers turned from the bargain of "Find me a husband, God!" to "Help him find a job here so we can actually be together!" Our relationship was quite long-distance for about a year and a half before that happened. In less than a year after he moved out, we were engaged, and then we got married.
Meanwhile, I finished graduate school and my career took off. I've worked hard but I've also found some lucky breaks. I have a full-time job that I love, and I have a side project working for a private group practice, which is everything I'd always hoped it would be. Over time, all these things I've desperately wanted and begun to believe I wouldn't have, have started to come true.
So the rhyme goes, "first comes love, then comes marriage then comes..." and you know how the rest goes. And what's funny is that after bargaining with God that I wouldn't ask him for anything more if I could just have a nice Catholic husband, it turns out I'm being the stereotype of a woman. I feel a little as though I would never feel satisfied if I wasn't able to have babies. And as it happens, I'm not as in control of that as I'd like to be. This past summer I was noticing that there were some things happening in my body that just weren't right, and when I talked them over with a doctor, she gave me a diagnosis of PCOS. Luckily this is treatable (doc thinks my case is actually especially mild), and I'm already on some medication for it. It's not fertility medication, perse, it's more of an attempt to help my body heal itself so I can be more fertile on my own. All side effects have been pleasant and welcome so far. (The shedding of most of my "grad school weight" has been key among them! An addendum to that: the body image struggles are so far behind me that this is just "nice," not "life-consuming.")
Still, I'm not pregnant yet, and every facebook announcement is starting to feel like my female friends are getting pregnant at me. I went to the grocery store the other day and the checkout girl kept complaining about pregnancy symptoms. I was barely holding back tears, I wanted to tell her to stop complaining and be grateful her body isn't broken like mine.
Most women with PCOS get pregnant eventually, but given that I'm over 31 and a half, "eventually" doesn't seem soon enough. I want more than one baby. I ideally want 3, and I'm starting to feel as though I've run out of time to do so, even though I know mathematically speaking that's not entirely true. Still, there are definitely people who struggle with fertility and never get there. In my brain, I'm already at the point where I'll never get there, and I'm mentally preparing for a life of childlessness, when I still have several years to make this work. What should give me hope is all the times I've believed God did not want me to have what I wanted to have, and then I got it anyway, in a way that was perfect. How my mind is choosing to think about this instead is that I've used up all my wishes. That I have so much when so many have so little, and I will just have to deal with not having babies. It makes me want to throw something at God and say "What do you want? I'll give up my career and live under a bridge. That doesn't matter, I want to trade that one in for a baby."
I really have no great way to end this post. I have a really wonderful life with a great family, great job, and doting husband. I am having a hard time loving and missing some little people who don't exist yet, and whom I'm not sure ever will, and watching other people get to that point in life. I see how happy it makes them, and I also know that raising kids is really hard, which must mean that it's really, really worth it. And I just want it too.
Sunday, October 4, 2015
I have seen the enemy, and it is us.
Recap: A horrifying tragedy happened in my home state this past week, on a community college campus. A shooter opened fire on campus leaving 9 others dead and many more injured\
Then more tragedy ensued when (predictably) everyone in Oregon (perhaps slight exaggeration) began nasty infighting which was unnecessarily rigid, refused to listen, and perplexingly, all seemingly focused on the idea that their one solution was correct.
What is really weird about that last part is that no suggestion I have heard is mutually exclusive toward other points of view. I don't know why we have this idea that a problem this complex has a really simple solution, but it is crazy.
The polarized viewpoints lead to no solutions happening, no action being taken. This is not like other political issues in which two sides actually want a different outcome. If you read no other part of this post, please read the following line, as it is really important:
WE ALL WANT THE SAME THING WHICH IS FOR THE SCARY MASS SHOOTINGS TO STOP.
This will never happen until we decide it is worth working together with people we normally oppose. Listen carefully to me: If you refuse to hear out your fellow man, I sure hope you are ok with having blood on your hands. If we can't start working together, this trend will continue and get worse.
You will lose NOTHING if you stop one time to listen to someone else's ideas on this subject without spending that time formulating a response in your head. You ONLY stand to gain. What are you afraid of? That they will change your mind? If that's the case, you may want to re-think your position.
The rest of this post will be divided into three different major parts, all with sub-parts. Here is an outline to help you avoid any boring parts you don't care about.
A. Discussion of major proposed solutions
1. Gun control or not
2. Improved mental health care
3. Empathy/improved care for others/community
B. Factors Which Predict Violence, as understood by someone who works with a bunch of risk-focused psychologists (but is not personally a psychologist, so this is professionally absorbed and applied knowledge).
C. Concluding Statements.
Ok, buckle up because here we go.
A. Discussion of major proposed solutions
There seems to be a weird argument going on about gun control vs. improved mental health care, with a third party chiming in and saying it all boils down to loving each other more. Spoiler alert: this is part of my conclusion, but why aren't we looking at MORE THAN ONE SOLUTION. We could do them all. At the same time. Really, we could, America. We're cool like that.
1. Gun Control vs. We Should All Have Guns
So, I had some opinions about this that were based on assumptions and hunches, and fully admitted that I knew little about how much access to guns contributed to violence. The republicans and democrats will tell you different things but they each have agendas so I wasn't willing to listen to any of their statistics/spins on their statistics. And I know Wikipedia isn't the #1 most reliable source ever, but it is a good place to find information that can't be polarized too far one way, plus it's a great place to get lots of stats.
I started out by comparing each state's or district's rate of gun murder to their rate of gun ownership. I didn't do this in the most statistically illuminating way. I scored each state/district (hereby just referred to as "state") by rate of gun murders, giving 51 to the state with the highest rate, 1 the state with the lowest rate. Then I did the same thing with gun ownership. I even made a super unsophisticated graph of it which may not make much sense to others (plus it's kind of clunky) but I'd be happy to show it to others if you're interested.
The results were disappointingly very inconclusive. Supporting the side that controlling gun ownership increases gun violence was Washington DC. DC ranked the highest among rate of gun murders, and lowest among gun ownership, and there was also Alaska which ranked very high in gun ownership and very low in gun murders.
On the flip side, we have Hawaii which is both low in gun ownership and gun murders, and Mississippi and Louisiana, which both rank high in gun ownership and high in gun murders.
Looking over the list of states, I'm noticing some regional trends. In the south, there tends to be high gun ownership and high gun murder. In very sparse states (Alaska, Wyoming, the Dakotas) there tends to be both high gun ownership and low gun murder. In more laid-back places like Colorado, Washington, New Hampshire, Hawaii, there tends to be low gun ownership and low gun murder. And in densely populated states with very busy and fast paced cities such as DC, Delaware, New York, Florida, Illinois, there tends to be low gun ownership but high gun murder.
What this suggests to me is that the answer to how we regulate gun ownership must be much more nuanced than "yes" or "no," and the answer needs to be localized to the local culture. If you live in rural Alaska, you need a gun to protect yourself from wild animals--to suggest otherwise is honestly pretty crazy. On the flip side, to suggest we need to bring more guns to Hawaii to make Hawaii safer is equally crazy. Do we need to encourage more gun ownership in places like DC, and less gun ownership in places like Louisiana? Those suggestions don't really sound right to me either. Am I proposing that we need to leave things how they are? NO. I'm proposing we need to bring in some cultural anthropologists/sociologists to look at how guns are part of local cultures and how people can own guns safely, because I do not believe there is a one size fits all answer here.
*I would be happy to talk about knife control when we face an epidemic of mass stabbings. So far I haven't heard any. If I'm just totally in the dark about this awful epidemic, please let me know.
2. Improve Mental Health Care
A MOST IMPORTANT POINT: Sufferers of mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than they are to act violently. Sometimes being mentally ill can lead to violent behavior, but in the vast majority of cases it does not.
I hear this usually thrown out as a real solution, but I do sometimes hear it as an attempt to deflect from needing to look at how we own guns. I don't want to lump people together, but I do know lots of people who support gun rights who also do not typically support additional funding for this kind of thing. As someone who expended thousands of dollars and several years of my life to become a mental health professional, I wonder sometimes if these people think I should be volunteering all my time instead of making a living ;). Good mental health care comes with a monetary price, because it is something that has value for society at large, so I just want to be clear about that.
I usually hear 3 diagnoses discussed as possible reasons for violence, and though there are more, I am going to focus on short descriptions of each of these, as well as what it can take to treat them, just so we are aware of what it means to invest in better care for each. (To my fellow mental health professionals, I am trying to give cliffnotes versions here, so I am probably not going to elaborate a lot more, but if I have facts wrong, please chime in and help me out.)
a. Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is characterized by psychotic symptoms. They are usually categorized into positive (adding something to your presentation) and negative (taking something from you) symptoms. Positive symptoms are things like hallucinations (perceiving something that isn't there) and delusions (beliefs that continue to be held despite lack of evidence/existence of evidence to the contrary). Negative symptoms are things like withdrawl from social relationships, lack of talking. An extreme example would be catatonia. Some cases of schizophrenia can be treated fairly well by medications. Some require heavier medications with worse side effects, so they require a lot of monitoring to ensure that the person stays healthy and complies with the medication. Sometimes extreme, few cases never respond well enough to restore functioning, and the person requires care and may never be able to maintain in an independent living situation. Most people with schizophrenia are not dangerous, but some hear malicious voices that tell them to do awful things, and threaten to harm the sufferer's loved ones if they do not comply. In addition, sometimes street drugs can feel soothing to people with schizophrenia, but they exacerbate symptoms and risk for dangerousness.
For someone with a severe case of the illness, treatment likely comes at the tune of several thousand dollars per month. If they are in the community, between housing in a group home plus medication and other treatments like CBT for Psychosis, I am going to hazard a guess of at least $4,000/month. If they are hospitalized at Oregon State Hospital, it is somewhere in the neighborhood of $25,000 per month. Month, not year. I am so in favor of better treatment for people with this illness, but if you are going to make this claim, I want you to look at the price tag. That does not even include costs of researching better treatment.
b. Autism
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder. It primarily effects social development, recognition of social cues, and understanding that other people have the same emotions that they do. There are no cures and no medications that get at the heart of the disorder. Care often involves skills training and lifelong support, though many higher-functioning cases of autism live independent and virtually undetected in society.
In several mass shootings in recent years, the shooter's actions have been attributed to autism (formerly known as asperger's, but the phrasology is changing). I have yet to hear of a case where this was 100% confirmed. People with autism may sometimes be prone to frustrated outbursts which can be violent, but it's not quite so planned and premeditated.
That said, it is absolutely possible that someone with autism may become obsessed with committing a violent act, especially after being subject to social rejection, and I totally support research efforts that move toward helping people with this disorder integrate better into society. (P.S. research trials are not cheap. I don't know an exact price tag, and I have every faith that your google skills are as good as mine.)
c. "Being a psychopath" aka Psychopathy aka Antisocial Personality Disorder
Say it with me: "Being a psychopath is very different from experiencing psychosis." We defined psychosis above as experiencing hallucinations and delusions. Basically the only thing psychosis and psychopathy have in common is that they both start with the same 5 letters.
Psychopathy is the outstanding quality of someone with Antisocial Personality Disorder, now abbreviated to ASPD. Research is increasingly demonstrating that there is something different about the brain of someone with ASPD, specifically the part that allows feelings of empathy. They have dramatically fewer emotions than your neurotypical person, and are motivated by different things because consequences that deter most of us (feeling shame for one) do not deter someone with ASPD. The disorder is more common than people realize, partially because many people with this disorder learn to act as if they do have an average amount of emotions.
For people with ASPD, life is a constant question of whether the methods of getting what one wants are worth the potential consequences. They are masters of understanding risks, as defined by their own priorities. Therefore, if someone decides that, say, notoriety, is worth the loss of their own life, then realizing that shooting up a school may cost them their life is a fair trade for them, on balance.
There are no medications known to treat this disorder. The only treatment we know about is properly motivating someone with ASPD to behave in pro-social ways, and having safeguards to prevent them from acting in ways we don't want them to. And, as with the other disorders, more research to see whether there is, indeed, more that we can do. Bottom line, while research may eventually find an effective treatment for ASPD, right now "improving the mental health system" in hopes that people with ASPD will cease with their antisocial behavior is completely unrealistic.
One last note on this topic: Other mental health conditions can contribute to violence too, including PTSD, Bipolar Disorder, and others, and they are all also expensive and time intensive to treat.
3. Empathy
This line of reasoning suggests that we live in a very isolated society anymore and don't even know our neighbors. That reaching out to others and connecting with them as humans can reduce their risk of violence. That becoming involved with a high-risk kid can make him or her a low-risk kid.
This is all correct. I don't really see how anyone could argue against it. So...first of all...do it! :) (I can do so much more in this area myself.)
Secondly, STOP decrying anti-bullying programs in schools! And/OR, implement pro-empathy programs in schools! Maybe we will never fully stop bullies, but we can make progress and we can change lives of at least a good portion of the bullied AND the bulliers. Maybe kids learn from adversity, but many of the kids who are being bullied (and who are bullies) already experience significant adversity. Plus, bullying is not the only type of adversity a kid could experience, but it could be one of the more impacting ones.
Thirdly, this can be done in conjunction with examining our use of guns and our mental health care system.
B. Factors Which Predict Violence
There are so many of these. I work two jobs, and my husband, friends, and family like to spend time with me on occasion too, so I am not going to go through every one. I am going to lump some into groups, and quite honestly, even then I'm not going to discuss each one. For more information, I suggest using your local library. Or Google. There's Google. (Just be sure to check the source; if it comes from a news site, it's probably got an agenda. Anything that sounds psychology-ish is probably a better bet.)
1. As a child, difficulty meeting behavioral expectations in school. Of note, having brought a weapon to school previously, though I am assuming this means intentionally with thoughts of harming others, not "I live in a rural area, go hunting on the weekends, and forgot to take my hunting rifle out of the bed of my truck."
2. Past violent behavior, including violent outbursts/tantrums, harming others, harming animals, bullying (oh goodness, can't we please stop writing off our modern kids as pansies and actually look at this?), a pattern of violent threats when angry, firesetting.
3. Recent experience of humiliation, loss, or rejection/poor peer relations/being socioeconomically disadvantaged (see the importance of using empathy??)
4. Past suicide attempts (see: supporting better mental health care)
5. Preoccupation with weapons or explosives (this is a researched risk factor for violence. But we don't need to examine the ways in which we own guns? Guns count as weapons, right? Look, I'm not saying that nobody should ever have them, but I just don't see how we get around examining this as a real issue.)
6. Low neighborhood attachment and community involvement (EMPATHY!!)
7. Access to guns or weapons. In isolation, this is not so much of a risk factor. BUT IT CONTRIBUTES. This is supported by psychological research. It's not really up for debate that this does contribute to risk, and we need to take a deeper look at how to proceed.
8. Poor home environment growing up. (Oh goodness...empathy...we need to re-discover community!!)
C. Concluding Statements
If you have good suggestions about how to reduce these horrifying, deadly attacks, please be prepared to discuss with the people around you in an intelligent and informed manner, and more importantly...
Remember that you have two ears but only one mouth. So listen more than you speak.
AND...
The
solution
is
multifaceted.
This is not either/or, and it never will be.
Please engage in a civil manner. If you cannot, step away from the keyboard, and come back after you have taken a time out.
If you cannot collaborate YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM.
Then more tragedy ensued when (predictably) everyone in Oregon (perhaps slight exaggeration) began nasty infighting which was unnecessarily rigid, refused to listen, and perplexingly, all seemingly focused on the idea that their one solution was correct.
What is really weird about that last part is that no suggestion I have heard is mutually exclusive toward other points of view. I don't know why we have this idea that a problem this complex has a really simple solution, but it is crazy.
The polarized viewpoints lead to no solutions happening, no action being taken. This is not like other political issues in which two sides actually want a different outcome. If you read no other part of this post, please read the following line, as it is really important:
WE ALL WANT THE SAME THING WHICH IS FOR THE SCARY MASS SHOOTINGS TO STOP.
This will never happen until we decide it is worth working together with people we normally oppose. Listen carefully to me: If you refuse to hear out your fellow man, I sure hope you are ok with having blood on your hands. If we can't start working together, this trend will continue and get worse.
You will lose NOTHING if you stop one time to listen to someone else's ideas on this subject without spending that time formulating a response in your head. You ONLY stand to gain. What are you afraid of? That they will change your mind? If that's the case, you may want to re-think your position.
The rest of this post will be divided into three different major parts, all with sub-parts. Here is an outline to help you avoid any boring parts you don't care about.
A. Discussion of major proposed solutions
1. Gun control or not
2. Improved mental health care
3. Empathy/improved care for others/community
B. Factors Which Predict Violence, as understood by someone who works with a bunch of risk-focused psychologists (but is not personally a psychologist, so this is professionally absorbed and applied knowledge).
C. Concluding Statements.
Ok, buckle up because here we go.
A. Discussion of major proposed solutions
There seems to be a weird argument going on about gun control vs. improved mental health care, with a third party chiming in and saying it all boils down to loving each other more. Spoiler alert: this is part of my conclusion, but why aren't we looking at MORE THAN ONE SOLUTION. We could do them all. At the same time. Really, we could, America. We're cool like that.
1. Gun Control vs. We Should All Have Guns
So, I had some opinions about this that were based on assumptions and hunches, and fully admitted that I knew little about how much access to guns contributed to violence. The republicans and democrats will tell you different things but they each have agendas so I wasn't willing to listen to any of their statistics/spins on their statistics. And I know Wikipedia isn't the #1 most reliable source ever, but it is a good place to find information that can't be polarized too far one way, plus it's a great place to get lots of stats.
I started out by comparing each state's or district's rate of gun murder to their rate of gun ownership. I didn't do this in the most statistically illuminating way. I scored each state/district (hereby just referred to as "state") by rate of gun murders, giving 51 to the state with the highest rate, 1 the state with the lowest rate. Then I did the same thing with gun ownership. I even made a super unsophisticated graph of it which may not make much sense to others (plus it's kind of clunky) but I'd be happy to show it to others if you're interested.
The results were disappointingly very inconclusive. Supporting the side that controlling gun ownership increases gun violence was Washington DC. DC ranked the highest among rate of gun murders, and lowest among gun ownership, and there was also Alaska which ranked very high in gun ownership and very low in gun murders.
On the flip side, we have Hawaii which is both low in gun ownership and gun murders, and Mississippi and Louisiana, which both rank high in gun ownership and high in gun murders.
Looking over the list of states, I'm noticing some regional trends. In the south, there tends to be high gun ownership and high gun murder. In very sparse states (Alaska, Wyoming, the Dakotas) there tends to be both high gun ownership and low gun murder. In more laid-back places like Colorado, Washington, New Hampshire, Hawaii, there tends to be low gun ownership and low gun murder. And in densely populated states with very busy and fast paced cities such as DC, Delaware, New York, Florida, Illinois, there tends to be low gun ownership but high gun murder.
What this suggests to me is that the answer to how we regulate gun ownership must be much more nuanced than "yes" or "no," and the answer needs to be localized to the local culture. If you live in rural Alaska, you need a gun to protect yourself from wild animals--to suggest otherwise is honestly pretty crazy. On the flip side, to suggest we need to bring more guns to Hawaii to make Hawaii safer is equally crazy. Do we need to encourage more gun ownership in places like DC, and less gun ownership in places like Louisiana? Those suggestions don't really sound right to me either. Am I proposing that we need to leave things how they are? NO. I'm proposing we need to bring in some cultural anthropologists/sociologists to look at how guns are part of local cultures and how people can own guns safely, because I do not believe there is a one size fits all answer here.
*I would be happy to talk about knife control when we face an epidemic of mass stabbings. So far I haven't heard any. If I'm just totally in the dark about this awful epidemic, please let me know.
2. Improve Mental Health Care
A MOST IMPORTANT POINT: Sufferers of mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than they are to act violently. Sometimes being mentally ill can lead to violent behavior, but in the vast majority of cases it does not.
I hear this usually thrown out as a real solution, but I do sometimes hear it as an attempt to deflect from needing to look at how we own guns. I don't want to lump people together, but I do know lots of people who support gun rights who also do not typically support additional funding for this kind of thing. As someone who expended thousands of dollars and several years of my life to become a mental health professional, I wonder sometimes if these people think I should be volunteering all my time instead of making a living ;). Good mental health care comes with a monetary price, because it is something that has value for society at large, so I just want to be clear about that.
I usually hear 3 diagnoses discussed as possible reasons for violence, and though there are more, I am going to focus on short descriptions of each of these, as well as what it can take to treat them, just so we are aware of what it means to invest in better care for each. (To my fellow mental health professionals, I am trying to give cliffnotes versions here, so I am probably not going to elaborate a lot more, but if I have facts wrong, please chime in and help me out.)
a. Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is characterized by psychotic symptoms. They are usually categorized into positive (adding something to your presentation) and negative (taking something from you) symptoms. Positive symptoms are things like hallucinations (perceiving something that isn't there) and delusions (beliefs that continue to be held despite lack of evidence/existence of evidence to the contrary). Negative symptoms are things like withdrawl from social relationships, lack of talking. An extreme example would be catatonia. Some cases of schizophrenia can be treated fairly well by medications. Some require heavier medications with worse side effects, so they require a lot of monitoring to ensure that the person stays healthy and complies with the medication. Sometimes extreme, few cases never respond well enough to restore functioning, and the person requires care and may never be able to maintain in an independent living situation. Most people with schizophrenia are not dangerous, but some hear malicious voices that tell them to do awful things, and threaten to harm the sufferer's loved ones if they do not comply. In addition, sometimes street drugs can feel soothing to people with schizophrenia, but they exacerbate symptoms and risk for dangerousness.
For someone with a severe case of the illness, treatment likely comes at the tune of several thousand dollars per month. If they are in the community, between housing in a group home plus medication and other treatments like CBT for Psychosis, I am going to hazard a guess of at least $4,000/month. If they are hospitalized at Oregon State Hospital, it is somewhere in the neighborhood of $25,000 per month. Month, not year. I am so in favor of better treatment for people with this illness, but if you are going to make this claim, I want you to look at the price tag. That does not even include costs of researching better treatment.
b. Autism
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder. It primarily effects social development, recognition of social cues, and understanding that other people have the same emotions that they do. There are no cures and no medications that get at the heart of the disorder. Care often involves skills training and lifelong support, though many higher-functioning cases of autism live independent and virtually undetected in society.
In several mass shootings in recent years, the shooter's actions have been attributed to autism (formerly known as asperger's, but the phrasology is changing). I have yet to hear of a case where this was 100% confirmed. People with autism may sometimes be prone to frustrated outbursts which can be violent, but it's not quite so planned and premeditated.
That said, it is absolutely possible that someone with autism may become obsessed with committing a violent act, especially after being subject to social rejection, and I totally support research efforts that move toward helping people with this disorder integrate better into society. (P.S. research trials are not cheap. I don't know an exact price tag, and I have every faith that your google skills are as good as mine.)
c. "Being a psychopath" aka Psychopathy aka Antisocial Personality Disorder
Say it with me: "Being a psychopath is very different from experiencing psychosis." We defined psychosis above as experiencing hallucinations and delusions. Basically the only thing psychosis and psychopathy have in common is that they both start with the same 5 letters.
Psychopathy is the outstanding quality of someone with Antisocial Personality Disorder, now abbreviated to ASPD. Research is increasingly demonstrating that there is something different about the brain of someone with ASPD, specifically the part that allows feelings of empathy. They have dramatically fewer emotions than your neurotypical person, and are motivated by different things because consequences that deter most of us (feeling shame for one) do not deter someone with ASPD. The disorder is more common than people realize, partially because many people with this disorder learn to act as if they do have an average amount of emotions.
For people with ASPD, life is a constant question of whether the methods of getting what one wants are worth the potential consequences. They are masters of understanding risks, as defined by their own priorities. Therefore, if someone decides that, say, notoriety, is worth the loss of their own life, then realizing that shooting up a school may cost them their life is a fair trade for them, on balance.
There are no medications known to treat this disorder. The only treatment we know about is properly motivating someone with ASPD to behave in pro-social ways, and having safeguards to prevent them from acting in ways we don't want them to. And, as with the other disorders, more research to see whether there is, indeed, more that we can do. Bottom line, while research may eventually find an effective treatment for ASPD, right now "improving the mental health system" in hopes that people with ASPD will cease with their antisocial behavior is completely unrealistic.
One last note on this topic: Other mental health conditions can contribute to violence too, including PTSD, Bipolar Disorder, and others, and they are all also expensive and time intensive to treat.
3. Empathy
This line of reasoning suggests that we live in a very isolated society anymore and don't even know our neighbors. That reaching out to others and connecting with them as humans can reduce their risk of violence. That becoming involved with a high-risk kid can make him or her a low-risk kid.
This is all correct. I don't really see how anyone could argue against it. So...first of all...do it! :) (I can do so much more in this area myself.)
Secondly, STOP decrying anti-bullying programs in schools! And/OR, implement pro-empathy programs in schools! Maybe we will never fully stop bullies, but we can make progress and we can change lives of at least a good portion of the bullied AND the bulliers. Maybe kids learn from adversity, but many of the kids who are being bullied (and who are bullies) already experience significant adversity. Plus, bullying is not the only type of adversity a kid could experience, but it could be one of the more impacting ones.
Thirdly, this can be done in conjunction with examining our use of guns and our mental health care system.
B. Factors Which Predict Violence
There are so many of these. I work two jobs, and my husband, friends, and family like to spend time with me on occasion too, so I am not going to go through every one. I am going to lump some into groups, and quite honestly, even then I'm not going to discuss each one. For more information, I suggest using your local library. Or Google. There's Google. (Just be sure to check the source; if it comes from a news site, it's probably got an agenda. Anything that sounds psychology-ish is probably a better bet.)
1. As a child, difficulty meeting behavioral expectations in school. Of note, having brought a weapon to school previously, though I am assuming this means intentionally with thoughts of harming others, not "I live in a rural area, go hunting on the weekends, and forgot to take my hunting rifle out of the bed of my truck."
2. Past violent behavior, including violent outbursts/tantrums, harming others, harming animals, bullying (oh goodness, can't we please stop writing off our modern kids as pansies and actually look at this?), a pattern of violent threats when angry, firesetting.
3. Recent experience of humiliation, loss, or rejection/poor peer relations/being socioeconomically disadvantaged (see the importance of using empathy??)
4. Past suicide attempts (see: supporting better mental health care)
5. Preoccupation with weapons or explosives (this is a researched risk factor for violence. But we don't need to examine the ways in which we own guns? Guns count as weapons, right? Look, I'm not saying that nobody should ever have them, but I just don't see how we get around examining this as a real issue.)
6. Low neighborhood attachment and community involvement (EMPATHY!!)
7. Access to guns or weapons. In isolation, this is not so much of a risk factor. BUT IT CONTRIBUTES. This is supported by psychological research. It's not really up for debate that this does contribute to risk, and we need to take a deeper look at how to proceed.
8. Poor home environment growing up. (Oh goodness...empathy...we need to re-discover community!!)
C. Concluding Statements
If you have good suggestions about how to reduce these horrifying, deadly attacks, please be prepared to discuss with the people around you in an intelligent and informed manner, and more importantly...
Remember that you have two ears but only one mouth. So listen more than you speak.
AND...
The
solution
is
multifaceted.
This is not either/or, and it never will be.
Please engage in a civil manner. If you cannot, step away from the keyboard, and come back after you have taken a time out.
If you cannot collaborate YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM.
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Let Down
My first full time job out of college was with Child Welfare. Because I was hired in a bigger county, they had a couple of units designed specifically with Child Welfare rookies in mind, where the new workers could start with lower caseloads and get more attention and training. Because they were sister units, we sought advice and help from the supervisors of both. Overall, I really respected and looked up to my supervisor. But I also couldn't help but look up to the supervisor of the sister unit as well. He had worked in Child Welfare a long time, and had a gentle, but hilariously sarcastic, personality. He was kind and patient and grandfatherly, and gave great advice on how to keep children safe.
A couple of years after I left that office, the kind, patient, grandfatherly supervisor, who had given so much great advice that had stuck with me, was indicted by the federal government for distributing child pornography.
Hearts broke all over that office, and all over the state, as he had worked in many offices. There was denial, there was confusion, and none of the details were released, as you might expect. However, the fact that some of his colleagues who loved him the most accepted the situation and ultimately believed he was guilty led most of us to accept the same, at least eventually.
Those of us who had spent time under his tutelage felt understandably conflicted about what to do with the wisdom we felt we gained from him. There were varying thoughts about us, but eventually most of us could come to a place where we felt that even though this supervisor, this mentor had committed unspeakably evil acts, that this doesn't mean that his ideas, his insight (which were in direct conflict with his behavior), were worthless. They may have been ideas and insight we gained from this person, but that was because they made sense in the context of our own values. They were worth keeping.
Everyone has role models that will let them down. Some of these "let downs" will be of the "people are imperfect" variety, and some of them will be shattering. If you haven't been shattered, it is likely that it will happen at some point. It might make you question what you learned from that person, and it will be up to you to separate the wisdom from the person.
I have never watched 19 Kids and Counting, but I understand that in the past couple of weeks some scandal has come to light. I understand that many fans of the show share values with those expressed by the family. I understand that the family are devout Christians. I also consider myself a devout Christian.
As a Christian, it feels hard when a major leader (or public figure of varying types) fails hard. I feel defensive because I worry that the individual's activity will be interpreted as an inherent value of the belief system.
That's simply not true. People who do outrageously awful things fall in all categories of people: rich, poor, Christians, Muslims, atheists, social workers, accountants, Americans, people in far away countries...all over. However, people who do outrageously wonderful things also fall into those categories. Someone's actions do not negate an entire belief or value system.
In the case of the 19 Kids family, what I understand is that the kid molested several children during his young adolescence, among them were siblings. He did come forth and tell his parents, who, in my opinion, failed to fully remedy the situation. They did more than nothing, but less than enough. Having the kid talk to a family friend and go away for 3 months simply isn't enough to fully understand the underlying reasons for why he did what he did, and what needed to be done to keep him from such behavior again. You simply cannot treat a huge issue like this in-house; there is too much bias, even if you try not to be biased. (It is for this reason that professional counselors cannot treat family members and friends; they are too close to the situation to be objective.)
I am just hoping that not too many of my fellow Christians feel they have to somehow "soften" the actions of a famous Christian, in order to profess the same values that the famous person professed. I do not disagree with the family's devotion to their faith, but I do disagree with an inadequate response to a serious crime.
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