Embracing the Dark Side

Fort Hood: Living with loss

Jenna Baddeley — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:45:02 +0000

The Fort Hood community has suffered well-publicized losses in the recent shooting that left thirteen people dead. What is perhaps less obvious is that most members of that community live with unpublicized life-altering losses, both threatened and actual, every day.

My research team and I took several trips to Fort Hood last year. We were testing whether an expressive writing intervention - writing about one's deepest thoughts and feelings about an emotional upheaval - could be part of helping military couples adjust to life together after the soldier's return home from deployment. For more information about our results, see the article featuring our study in October's issue of the Monitor on Psychology.

Our participants turned in their writing samples at the end of the study. Their writing testified to how disorienting deployments, especially repeated deployments, can be. Soldiers fight abroad for over a year at a time, return home for a year, then deploy again, and the cycle repeats. While soldiers are in Iraq or Afghanistan, many undergo significantly traumatic experiences. When they return home, many feel that they are no longer the person they used to be. They may be quicker to anger, more vigilant to threatening sounds in the environment, more easily upset, less affectionate. Meanwhile, the spouse has, of necessity, taken on all the responsibilities of maintaining a home, and has often grown more independent in the soldier's absence. Both spouses have difficulty understanding who the other has become. Soldiers are often absent for milestones in their children's lives: first words, first steps, first days at school. It is no wonder that so many feel like strangers in their own home when they return.

Our participants often wrote that each succeeding deployment was harder, not easier. In many ways, deployments aren't a stressor that people get used to managing; they are an upheaval that results in more losses each time. If soldiers to rebuild what they have lost - the close connection to family, the interdependence with their spouses, the faith in a benevolent world - they do so with the heartbreaking knowledge that another loss is just around the corner. One of our participants said it poignantly: "I fear that I will become close to my family just to be torn away again."

Army life is an enormous challenge - all of our participants could agree on that. Many of the soldiers - and spouses as well - expressed well-earned pride in their endurance through the struggles of their separations and reunions. The sacrifices our soldiers and their families make for us are deeper than most of us grasp, even with imagination and effort. A compounding tragedy on their home ground is beyond even that. We honor their strength and their personal sacrifices. We owe them more than we can repay.

Relationship break-ups: truths, distortions, and negative emotions

Jenna Baddeley — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:51:25 +0000

Break-ups feel bad for a very good reason: it is in our nature to form attachment bonds with our partners - bonds that resemble in intensity those we made with our parents. When those bonds break, it hurts.

One particular kind of breakup is the subject of this post: the breakup in which one person wants to end the relationship, but the other person doesn't. This kind of break-up has a special painfulness to it, because one person gets their heart broken and the other has to live with hurting someone they really care about, in addition to being in pain from the separation themselves.

Breakups raise primal negative feelings: guilt, sadness, anger, and fear. It can be hard anyone to experience these feelings without wanting to stop them or control them or manage them in some way. When people try to manage their emotions, one of the first things they do is try to figure out the cause of these feelings so they can predict or control them in the future. The person who is being broken up with may either blame themselves ("what did I do wrong?") or they blame the partner who broke up with them ("how could you hurt me like this?"). Typically, both types of blame are attempts to escape from the real issue, which is how much anger, hurt, or despair one is currently feeling. Typically, these types of blame are also distortions of the truth.

Blaming oneself is a distortion. It is worth remembering that relationships' longevity and happiness are about the dynamic or fit between two people, not about the inherent worth of either party. Our culture glorifies relationships and many people assume that being in a relationship is a sign of desirability or worth, and conversely, being single is a sign of undesirability and worthlessness. In my experience, being in a relationship or being married have very little to do with either desirability or worth.

Blaming one's partner is a distortion. Couples therapist John Gottman has observed that in every relationship disagreement, there are two valid points of view, not just one. This truth goes even broader. Indeed, every relationship is really two relationships. In other words, the relationship can feel very different to one partner than it feels to the other. This means that the relationship that one person was really excited about ("how could you break up with me? Things were so good!"), did not necessarily feel exciting to the other person. Often, the person doing the breaking up felt fundamentally dissatisfied with the relationship. The truth is, if you are the person who is being broken up with, you deserve someone who will love you without being fundamentally dissatisfied with what you offer. The person who broke up with you cannot fill that role, and by breaking up with you, they are freeing you to find someone who can.

Everything I Need to Know, I Learned from Improv

Jenna Baddeley — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 08:40:54 +0000

I took an improv comedy class recently to add more fun and spontaneity to my life, and I got lots of those things, but I wasn't expecting it to feel so much like therapy. In a way, though, improv is just like play therapy for adults. It provides valuable counter-conditioning to help people face not just the pressures of performing spontaneous comedy in front of other people, but the pressures of of life in general. Here are some of the lessons every improvisor is taught, and every person should know.

Don't perform; just have fun - perhaps the first lesson of improv is this: stop trying to perform and start playing. When you embrace the moment in play rather than try to control and plan as you would in performing, you're less self-conscious, you have more fun, you're more responsive to others and easier for others to respond to.

Embrace failure - beginning improvisors are taught to take "failure bows" - deep bows accompanied by a proud declaration, "I failed!" when they get that feeling of "oh geez, I screwed up". Maybe you didn't respond quickly enough, your mind went blank, whatever. When anyone takes a failure bow, the rest of the class claps and cheers. Everyone aims for at least one failure bow per class. When we're not so afraid of failing in improv or life, we take setbacks with more grace. Plus, failures make for good comedy both on and off stage.

Say "yes, and", not "yes, but" - one of the key principles of good improv is to build on what your fellow improvisors have given you. It's about taking what another improvisor has said and adding to it creatively. Want a way to get along better with other people? "Yes, and" creates better conversations: you validate what the other person says and then add something new. Want to get along better with life? I think of "yes, and" in the broadest sense as saying "yes" to what life brings you - the good, the bad, the indifferent - and building on what's already there. This is especially important in dealing with life's big and little frustrations and disappointments. Saying "yes, and" implies an acceptance of the reality and a willingness to take the next step.

Forget kindergarten. I learned everything I needed to know in life from improv class.

Junk Mail: A Mental Health Hazard?

Jenna Baddeley — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 04:42:04 +0000

Junk mail. I love to hate it. Responsible for the harvesting of lots of trees each year and the contribution of lots of junk to our landfills, it's a hazard to the nation's environmental health. It's also a hazard to our collective mental health. With traffic jams, computer glitches, and other daily hassles, we have enough daily stressors to keep us on our toes. The accumulation of little stressors can send people over the deep end -- and junk mail is just such a stressor. When our mail boxes are full of bills and junk mail and nothing else because everyone who cares about us either calls or emails rather than sending snail mail, going to the mail box is a deeply unrewarding, annoying experience.

The people who have the most trouble with this are individuals with a hoarding problem, an estimated 5% of the population. Hoarding -- the excessive acquisition of or failure to discard objects of seemingly little value such that one's living spaces become hard to use -- is linked to different psychological issues. It's linked to depression (lack of motivation to do anything, such that even throwing away junk mail is a big big task, overwhelming) and anxiety (such that the idea of discarding junk mail becomes completely overwhelming -- "what if there's something in one of those junk mail flyers that I need to know? I can't possibly throw that away without reading all of it")... and for these people, junk mail is more that a small daily irritation. It's a big daily irritation which can consume hours each day.

For the rest of us, someone has come up with some creative ideas for having fun with junk mail. Perhaps these are worth trying when such mail next darkens your doorstep.

Self-esteem: a zero-sum game?

Jenna Baddeley — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 05:40:28 +0000

Many commentators have criticized the self-esteem movement that swept the country and especially the schools during the 1980s. People find varied reasons to hate the self-esteem movement. For example, some have argued that self-esteem is not correlated with valued outcomes like good behavior and academic achievement, so it made no sense to teach it in schools. Others have argued that the methods used to teach self-esteem either did not work (i.e., having children repeat "I love me" or "I'm special" did not actually produce self-esteem) or were likely to backfire (specifically, empty praise may do more harm than good, making recipients less resilient to criticism). Some have gone so far as to say that the self-esteem movement may have produced a generation of entitled and narcissistic adults.

There is another problem that the commentators have not, to my knowledge, considered. Namely, the idea that everyone could have high self-esteem may be flawed from the beginning. A. H. Maslow took self-esteem as synonymous with (self-perceived) dominance. A close look at the widely-used measure of self-esteem, the Rosenberg self-esteem scale, shows that it taps one's perceived place in the social hierarchy. It assesses a person's perceptions of his or her own worth relative to the worth of others when it asks for level of agreement with such statements as "I am able to do things as well as most other people" and "I feel that I am a person of worth, at least the equal of others."

Dominance hierarchies are present in all kinds of animal species, from apes and dogs to fish and birds. They are certainly also present in human societies. Evolutionary psychologists would argue that dominance hierarchies make societies function efficiently. If you believe that self-esteem is basically the same thing as dominance, you would have to agree that it would be just as impossible for everyone to have high self-esteem just as it would be for everyone to take dominant social roles.

If we can't build high self-esteem in everyone, what can we do? We might look to build more of self-esteem's quieter sister, self-acceptance. Self-acceptance is less about how one compares with others and more about how one feels about oneself. The term "self-acceptance" might feel like the equivalent of passive resignation to one's lot in life, giving up the hope of self-improvement, but that isn't what I mean at all. By self-acceptance, I mean dealing compassionately with the self through successes and failures alike. Such self-acceptance may be essential to growth, and unlike self-esteem, it is not a zero-sum game.

How to help a depressed friend (and when to stop trying): part 2

Jenna Baddeley — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:08:55 +0000

Depressed people can be acutely hopeless and hard to console, making friendships difficult. Below are some of my thoughts about what friends can do for a depressed person and how friends can maintain appropriate friendship boundaries with the depressed person in their lives.

Validate the pain and move on. We know that distraction is actually good for depressed people, and rumination - going over the same negative feelings over and over - only encourages further depression. This is not to say that you should ignore your depressed friend's proclamations of sadness and misery. On the contrary: validation, listening, and acceptance are helpful, as is encouraging them to also do something other than wallow in their own misery.

Set boundaries. Depressed people may be acutely sensitive to rejection, and you may feel guilty if you try to set boundaries. Don't feel guilty. Think about what your boundaries are, and respect them. For example, are you o.k. with listening to the depressed person talk about their miserable life for 10 minutes, but not 1 hour? That's totally reasonable. Telling the person that you can only talk about their misery for a certain amount of time (10 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, whatever you feel is reasonable), and that you will then need to change the subject, is appropriate. This should be something that they respect.

Expect reciprocity. Does the person reciprocate your help and care? Note that this may be difficult when the person is in an acute depression. People in the thick of a depression can be a bit self-centered, preoccupied with their own suffering. However, this is not an excuse for not honoring the friendship by at least trying to come through for another person. Even if the friend is too depressed to reciprocate now, a history of reciprocity and the expectation of future reciprocity is important. It is important to hold friends to the standard of reciprocity, or the relationship is no longer a friendship between peers, but something more like a therapeutic relationship or a caregiving relationship.

Ask them what they need, and tell them how you are willing to help. What does the person want? What does he or she want from you? How has the person responded to your previous attempts to help? Has the person responded graciously? Do not do more than you are willing to do. It won't do you any good to end up resenting the person and it won't do them any good to feel like you are only being their friend because you feel sorry for them.

Don't try to be the person's therapist. If the depressed person needs someone to call in distress in the wee hours of the morning during the time when you need to get your sleep, talks about committing suicide, or has been stuck in the same bad place for months or years on end, they should consult a therapist for professional help.

Concluding thoughts. Depression is among the hardest of hard times, and friends provide an invaluable source of social support and distraction for a depressed person. However, if your depressed friend consistently violates your boundaries or makes you feel guilty about them, and consistently fails to reciprocate or at least appreciate your care and support, then it may not be a healthy friendship for either party.

How to help a depressed friend (and when to stop trying): part 1

Jenna Baddeley — Sat, 16 May 2009 16:09:12 +0000

Severely depressed people are different from most the rest of us in one important way: they fundamentally believe that they are worthless people and that their lives are hopeless.

Hopelessness poses a problem not just for the depressed person, but for his friends as well. For most of us, when we hear a friend telling us that his life is hopeless, our knee-jerk reaction is to disagree with him. It is perfectly apparent to us that there are things that he can look forward to. Perhaps if we point out these things to him, he would remember them and feel better.

But that is not what happens. Instead, he ignores what we have said or gets frustrated with us for failing to understanding what he has been trying to tell us: nothing good will ever happen for him. The more we argue and question, the more and more evidence he provides to support his case. The only thing that will make him feel heard is for us to acknowledge his incredible sadness and hopelessness, and if such acknowledgement is to be genuine, it requires us to empathize with his feelings - to actually inhabit them, for a little while, ourselves.

Empathizing in this way is emotionally difficult, of course, and so is the feeling that our friend is not listening to our perfectly well-reasoned arguments about what he has to look forward to. Yet for our dear friends, we may be willing to hear and, to the best of our ability, empathize. What happens to a friendship, though, when every encounter is a submersion in our friend's depths of despair with no evident progress? To say the least, this is enough to wear anyone out. Yet this is our friend we are talking about, and we want to be there for him, especially when his misery is chasing everyone else away. When do we let go?

Valentines from the ones who’ve hurt us: a matter of pain or hope?

Jenna Baddeley — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:34:26 +0000

One of my clients, who has given me permission to write about her as long as identifying details are removed, is a single woman in her mid to late thirties. For her whole life, she has cherished the goals of being a wife and mother. Although she is in treatment with me primarily for compulsive hoarding, we also monitor her depression. She often tells me about how sad she is that she is still single. When I first started working with her, she had not even had a date in the last 10 years. That changed when she got reacquainted with a friend from her college days on one of the social networking sites online. They sent each other email messages, they began texting and talking on the phone, he invited her to visit him over a long weekend, and she bought an airplane ticket and took the trip.

She came back into town after that trip flush with excitement. Her mood was the best I had ever seen it and she had high hopes for a future with her new man. Yet the days passed and she heard from him only sporadically. He sometimes returned phone calls and email messages. Often, though, he did not. She went through a long, difficult process of reaching the conclusion that he wasn't that interested in pursuing a relationship.

Then one session she opened her mail to find a Valentine's day card from him that promised her that said she'd "always have a special valentine in [his city]". She was stunned, her sadness and ruminations reawakened. Why would he send such a valentine's card when he wouldn't return phone calls? Why hadn't things worked out better between them? Why didn't he want to come visit her?

Hoarding treatment is a lot about letting go of stuff you don't need. Depression treatment is often about distraction from painful and pointless ruminations. Because the card seemed to bring up so much sadness and rumination, I asked her: can you let it go? I thought back to times when I had been romantically rejected in the past, and how sometimes the best thing for me to do was to reclaim my emotional life, to take charge again by cleansing my environment of reminders of the person who had caused me pain.

But this wasn't the way that my client saw it. She scoffed at my suggestion, and kept the card. She later told me, "I thought it was so funny when you suggested that I throw away that Valentine's day card. That card is the last thing I would throw away." I realized then that I had completely misunderstood the card's symbolic value. For her, the card did bring to mind the rejection, but it also carried a powerful message of acceptance. It told her that someone, for however short a time, could find her desirable. It helps keep her hope alive. And that is a message that is worth hanging onto.

Is optimism cheap?

Jenna Baddeley — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:03:41 +0000

I have long believed that our optimistic spirit is one of the best things we Americans have going for us. In the midst of hard times, we are able to sustain the belief that things will be better again one day. As I have pointed out in previous postings, though, the problem with our almost reflexive preference for happiness is that we ignore, disown, and deride suffering and people who suffer.

Cornel West has talked about American optimism as "cheap" because it exists in ignorance of the suffering of oppressed people of all kinds. He distinguishes this from his own "blues-inflicted hope" in the potential for good in people. West has said that empathy takes courage, and he's right. To empathize with someone who is in pain is to inflict pain on oneself. Unless one is willing to do that, one's optimism may always be cheap.

The laziness myth

Jenna Baddeley — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:21:13 +0000

Human beings have a deep-seated need to grow and learn throughout their lives. Meaningful work fulfills that basic need to learn and grow. Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers discusses the characteristics of meaningful work: it is complex, it offers autonomy, and there is a relationship between effort and reward. Are some people inherently lazy, or are they simply non-productive when the work that they are being asked to do is not meaningful, and is therefore poorly suited to help them meet their basic needs?

If laziness does exist, what are the criteria that define it? If a person with a high-powered, high-paying job comes home each day and lies on the couch for an hour or two to watch TV, is that person lazy? Or is he simply caring for himself by taking a well-deserved break? What about someone who lies on the couch all day? Is there anyone who does this out of laziness, or would we instead be concerned that such a person is clinically depressed?

Too often, casual observers mistakenly attribute laziness to people who have mental illnesses like depression or anxiety disorders that impair their ability to work and be active. A person with compulsive hoarding, for example, is not "lazy" about cleaning or organizing their home. For a person with compulsive hoarding, throwing away a paper cup may be dreadfully difficult and stressful. For such a person, throwing away five cups may require immense courage and hard work - it would certainly not be a task for the truly lazy.

We attribute laziness to people when they have failed to do specific tasks that we value. We typically do not label people lazy when we have stopped to consider the fuller range of their activity and motivations. If we value the person, we would more likely attribute the absence of productive behavior to the competing needs and motivations that they must have to do other things, e.g., to relax or to do something other than the task that we wanted them to do.

Often, the people that we label as lazy are folks who are on the margins of the working world, like homeless people or low-wage workers. Labeling people "lazy" is a way of deeming them as morally unacceptable (sloth is a deadly sin) and deserving of their low status. If we call someone lazy, we do it to dismiss them, not to understand them.