Holiday Season is Mixed

'Tis the Holiday Season again, as we all know.

We are less than two weeks away from the Solstice, at which time we will begin to get our light returned to us on this side of the globe.  It is spending its allotted time down on the Southern Hemisphere right now.

Last week, to kick off the holiday season, David Brooks, the esteemed columnist of the NY Times wrote a piece explaining why it is not good for anyone to commit suicide.  A cheery topic, and I'm not quite sure why he picked it, except that some statistics came out showing that suicide rate around the world seem to be increasing.

Mr. Brooks said it's a bad idea because most people who attempt suicide and somehow fail, later to report that they are able to reach a point at which they are happy to be alive.  Also, he said, suicide is selfish, and it hurts the people who are still alive.  This is often, although not always, true also.

Now, I'm not for suicide, except perhaps if you (perhaps me) get old, are in great pain, can hardly remember who you are, and have no chance of improvement except to take huge amounts of drugs which will made your pain less but your awarenes of self negligible.

I have spent lots of time convincing people to stay alive another day or two, just to see if they feel better, or see some other option.  I generally feel that we all will be dead for a really long time, and that we are only alive for a short time, so we should see what happens with the time we have.

But I appreciate that some people spend the time they have in misery and desperation, and despite the wisdom of others, it often feels like the stress, the pain, the losses, the agony, just isn't worth hanging around for.

I spent an hour with Alice (not her real name, and not the exact details) last week.

She is now almost sixty, and looks about eighty.  Her pain began as soon as her mother decided that Alice looked too much like her father.  Soon after Alice's birth her mother stopped liking the father, and Alice along with him.  Because of this resemblance, the mother rejected Alice.  She would beat her, demean her, scream at her and lock her in a room.  The mother did this to half of her six children. The other half she favored.

Alice survived because of an aunt and her older sister who both tried to protect her.  But her life was never smooth.  When she was fourteen her brother brought some of his friends home so they could rape her.  She broke three of her brother's ribs with a candle stick, and sent one of his friends' to the hospital with a concussion.  That got her into a "girls' school.'

Her one real love relationship died of an overdose.  Her other attempts to be with a man were much less than successful.  These relationships were often violent.  Alice was in many fights, had many rages when she almost killed someone, and was often badly beaten herself.

From the ages of 17 to 53 she drank very heavily.  Then she stopped.

Now she is calmer, sober, but alone and in great pain.  Her father has been dead a long time but her mother, almost ninety live on, with a sister, and still swears at Alice.  Alice and that sister are the only two of the six who are still alive. Two died of cancer, one in a motorcycle accident and one was murdered.

Now Alice needs a new hip. She walks with great difficulty. Her wrists are so bad that she can't open her car door without a great deal of pain.  She is probably brain damaged a bit from all the fights and alcohol.  Every joint hurts.  She trusts no one.

She said that she often wishes she was dead.  She won't kill herself because,... because that's not what she does.  She is a survivor.

So we talk about what we can try to do to make her life a bit better.  She isn't religious.  She didn't think God was on her side.  She doesn't believe in love.  She hardly believes in "like."
But when she takes a couple of Percocets, she can get comfortable enough to be curious about what will happen next.

I hope your holidays bring you closer to someone who you can like and trust.

a new part of the problem

It is snowing again.  The rest of today's appointments are cancelled, and all of tomorrows are crossed off already.  I have not been kept away from work for two days in a row since 1978.  This will be a winter to remember.  Until next year.  It seems pretty clear that theses "hundred year storms" now happen almost every year.

Still there are those who will say that industrial production and energy sources have nothing to do with it. I guess it depends upon who is writing your pay-check.

But before the snow began I had the unenviable task of meeting with one of my patients.  It was difficult because this fellow has endured some of the troubles of Job.  He had been married and had two children with a charming woman, but much of the time she was out-of control.  She often drank heavily, and when she did she acted out in many other ways, sometimes leaving the family, and vanishing for a week at a time.  Sometimes her diappearances would end with a call from a hospital.  He would take her home, and nothing would be explained.  Sometimes some guy would call, just to see if she was OK.

About eight years ago, her luck ran out, and she died in an emergency room of a brain hemorrhage.  This left my patient with two children, the oldest was eight.

But I began treatment with this man in October of this year, two months after the oldest boy committed suicide. 

It is never easy to deal with parents who lose a child.  That is not the natural order of things. At best it leaves gaping hole that can only be thinly sealed over, at worst it can be fatal to the parents.

Awful as it is when something tragic happens by accident or illness it is worse when a child does it to himself. I have had to deal with this twice before in my long career.  One was somewhat easy to understand as the boy had been psychotic several times, and he had often done bizarre things which were unexplainable outside of his head.  The other was completely incomprehensible, as the young person seemed popular, happy, and reasonable.  Dealing with the grieving parents; all of whom were single parents at the time, can be pretty grueling, as there is nothing  anyone can really do to bring about a desired result.  It is already to late for that.

In this case the man had realized that his son was struggling. He knew that the boy had always felt like an outsider; he had actually mentioned it.  He had brought him to a therapist a couple of years ago, but the boy didn't really open up.  The father was pretty sure that his son had struggled with his sexuality, but he couldn't get him to talk about it.  The young man had few friends. He was clearly anxious in social situations, and avoided them if he could, even with the family. He had been a good student and seemed to like school.  He hardly ever missed a day. But more and more, he stayed by himself.

In this session though, this man brought up a point that I don't think would have been as important twenty or thirty years ago.  He said that he knew from his own experiences, and he could see from his son, that life today is very, very competitive.  It never seems to stop. It is true at work, in sports, at school, and even among friends.  Outside of a family, there are very few really supportive networks in this country.  Even churches are competitive.

This man had stayed out of work for a couple of years after his wife died, and he found that in order to get a job he had to not only compete with others for the job, but compete with others in his own company who had the same position (in sales and marketing) as he did. Trust and cooperation were talked about, but they put you at a disadvantage if they were actually practiced.  Everyone seemed to understand that.

He feels that this hyper-competitiveness was part of what made his son just give up.  He felt that the boy never had the confidence or the social skill to push himself through all of those situations that were constantly confronting him.  Competition in school, or to make friends, or to run track, or to get a job, or even among friends playing video games.; it was always about beating someone, pushing someone out of the way, or looking for an advantage.  If you couldn't do that, you would get knocked over and trampled upon, and then blamed for not being strong enough.

It runs rampant through my practice these days.  I see people who are unemployed, and feel invisible because no one even acknowledges their calls or emails. People who are employed are being pressured to work harder to keep their jobs or they will be easily replaced.  People with vital positions at businesses  feel a great deal of pressure to meet deadlines, to beat the competition, to keep their company in businesses.

President Obama talked about the need for America to create and innovate.  It's because the world has changed.  Many basic jobs are now unnecessary. They have been replaced by technology.  Farming, manufacturing, constructing, even selling, were things that people did for centuries in order to keep the world running.  They are all done now, but by machines of some type, and they need only 5 to 10% of the people to get them done.

It is much harder to just find a job, do it well, take care of yourself and your family, and live a life.  There is much more competition for much fewer spots, and the competition is not just from those around you, it's global.  Someone in India can pick up that phone, write a piece of software, and even read an X-Ray just as well as you. Robots weld cars, mix medicines, answer phones, take tolls, guard buildings, run trains, and do it better than people.

Many people are very scared.  And if you are hesitant and fragile to begin with, it could seem like too much, as it was, tragically, for this young man.

I believe that we live in a more difficult age than we realize.  Most people don't even acknowledge the problem yet.  I believe some of today's political craziness is the result of people who are aware of what is happening, and fear it so much that they need to work hard to deny its existence.

That makes arriving at a solution, or many different solutions, even more difficult.

We have to find new ways of living together on this planet.  The current ways are leading to a greater concentration of wealth and power than any time since feudalism.  It is not a healthy situation, nor one that can be peacefully sustained.  Much of Egypt's current uprising was the result of very high unemployment among it's young adults.



It will be fascinating to see how they deal with that problem.

Sometimes the Extremes are Real

I deal with a lot of shit that goes on in people's lives: illness, trauma, loss, loneliness, conflict, stress, and more things that don't really fall into categories,  just the amazing things that people mange to do to each other. Most of that stuff gets worse over time, as it continually takes up more space in people's minds.

But sometimes awful things happen out side of their mind; just plain awful things that they then have to deal with.  Most often it happens to people who already have had awful things happen to them.

This week's example is Marla, a woman I have been seeing for a long time.  I began a few years a go with Marla because she had a terrible drinking problem.  Her family, who helped create the problem by having a mother who would often promise her that she would amount to nothing, and a father who would occasionally get drunk and try to fondle her.

Marla found that when she drank she didn't feel so bad.  Her parents, realizing she had a problem with alcohol, responding by going to court and taking custody of her son.  They presented a huge, elaborately exaggerated case, mostly so they could get the child support checks that came for the boy.  Marla was send out to find her own way to sobriety and self-reliance.

Once away from her family however, Marla has begun to do quite well.  She has been sober for two years and she is now back in college, doing well.  Fighting to maintain her low self-esteem she tells me that she knows she is not smart, but she has this quirky thing she does:  If she reads the books and goes to class, she does very well on tests.  She can't explain it.

Having grown up learning to distrust the people whom you should be able to trust the most, it is not surprising that she has few friends and generally stays away from people.  But, over time she met a guy at her all night job, and they became involved. This relationship was in-place when I met her, and it had been going on for years. He seemed to be genuinely caring and committed to her, despite his being married to someone else, and the father to children whom he also cared about.  But when Marla was upset he would call me to alert me, or he would bring her to my office when he felt she was in danger of becoming too depressed and isolated.

After years of this, this man, whom we shall call Harvey, began to have an increasing amount of trouble in his own family.  His affair with Marla had been known and tolerated, but as his kids grew-up the tensions with them and the rest of the family, and probably others, all seemed to mount.  Harvey had once called me but we agreed that since I was Marla's therapist it would be better if he had his own. So I never knew the real details of the stress he was under.

Two weeks ago Marla came to my office, and after talking about her visits with her son she became even more silent then usual.  When pushed, she said she had heard from Harvey and he had said that it seemed a good time for them to not see each other for a while.  She said that when she questioned him, he then said he was just having a bad day, and things would be fine.  But she had not heard from him for four days now and didn't know if she should call him.  She knew he was stressed out and she didn't want to bother him, and make his life even more difficult.

Yesterday Marla showed up, a day before he scheduled appointment.  The appointment I was waiting for  was late so Marla came in, sat down and stared at the floor. "You're not going to believe this."she said.
"Harvey is dead. He was dead last week, that's why he never called.  He was dead three hours after I spoke to him."

"How did he die?"

No one is saying. My son is the one who found it in the paper.  The obituary only said that he died suddenly.

That can mean all kinds of things.  It certainly makes one wonder, but I don't actually know.

Marla said that she knew his father had died early of a heart attack.  Maybe that was it.

Maybe.

Marla left the office.  She said she was going for a long walk.  She has been known to walk twenty- seven miles to deal with her depression.

She called in today to say she was OK.  Going to walk in the other direction.