June 2, 2023

Learning “The Tricks of the Trade”: How a Therapist Gains Confidence

Therapists are born with the capacity to become confident but have only that possibility when they begin seeing patients as a part of their training. The trainees watch videos of their work, listen to changes in their voice, and observe their own body language, as well as a client’s movements, subtle changes of expression, and tone of voice. These budding psychologists receive guidance regarding when to speak, when to remain quiet, and whether a topic is ripe for attention or still too tender to touch.

Any and all of these considerations play a part in how the treatment process moves forward, if indeed it progresses at all.

Learning your craft is painstaking and painful. Your supervisors describe every weakness and strength. They should. The best of them challenge you to make yourself into what you must become to serve your clients. Your human flaws are dissected and examined. Left untreated, the new professional will inflict them onto and into the people he promised to care for.

It isn’t easy. It shouldn’t be easy. But it helps you become the best you can be, someone who is worthy of trust and an individual who accumulates wisdom if it is in you to learn what the human soul consists of — the light and the dark of it.

If you are as conscientious as you should be, you will take your failures and successes home at the start of your career. Yes, a counselor must learn to keep a therapeutic distance and protect himself from complete identification with the client’s suffering. Your best work cannot cause your own emotional collapse, but you must not be indifferent.

The whole enterprise of psychotherapy is a tightrope walk.

There are no shortcuts; if you are doing your job, you must keep up with the literature in your field of expertise. You are expected to be an expert, but that requires you to grow as the body of knowledge in your area grows. No one will pay you for this; no one will applaud this. It is your responsibility.

Funny, but one of the best comments on excellence in any field comes from a famous baseball pitcher, Vernon Law:

Some people are so busy
learning the tricks of the trade
that they never learn the trade.

I recently discussed that trade with Wynne Leon and Dr. Victoria Atkinson for their podcast, Sharing the Heart of the Matter:

Episode 20: The Art of the Interview with Dr. Gerald Stein on Anchor.

During our conversation, we talked about some of the things I learned and how I came to learn them during sessions with my clients, interviewing members of the Chicago Symphony for its Oral History Project, and working as an expert witness. I also described my understanding of the human tendency to render simplistic judgments of others. Finally, Wynne Leon and Dr. Atkinson asked me about matters of the heart involving a psychiatrist I knew, Dr. Jerry Katz, and my father.

Those matters of the heart fit the focus of Sharing the Heart of the Matter.

I hope you will listen: Episode 20: The Art of the Interview with Dr. Gerald Stein on Anchor.

==========

The photo of A Session with a Psychotherapist is the work of Mike Renlund. It was sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

May 23, 2023

Waiting for Your Love’s Return

Before the idea of sex captured you, what did you wait for? It was the stuff of children, you included, crossing out the calendar’s Sundays and Mondays leading to birthdays, holidays, and visits to the amusement park.

The anticipation of gifts filled the time, coupled with the unimaginable prospect of 365 more days until the celebration came back for an encore performance.

Expectations made one irritable, restless, and eager, like a race runner on the starting blocks and ready to go.

Despite awareness of the long delay, the concrete, oversized bricks of time stuck to their slow slog toward whatever fulfillment lay ahead.

As I grew up, other matters became worth knowing, meaningful and necessary in a very different way.

The knowledge of how I arrived in this world was among them.

I asked my dad; of course.

Yes, the sex question.

He responded:

I planted the seed.

That’s a quote, by the way. Four words. Fake news of a sort carrying an indecipherable truth. 

Thrown by the answer, I pictured corn and beans and all sorts of vegetables grown by farmers. Did a family farmer produce me too? I thought my dad worked at the Post Office!

Did his children arrive in the mail, sent with a spear of asparagus?

It took me a while to recover from this confusion, delaying my sexual development by a decade.

Love came, but I also learned about how it can disappear.

Affairs of the heart sometimes grow stale with routine. Just as the psychologist tries to make each session new, the passion of the early days of romance demands renewal. It is best sustained when the couple works to keep the enchantment fresh, a bliss that makes us smile.

My folks didn’t have that problem. They knew what it meant to be separated.

They experienced an interrupted honeymoon phase of their relationship when my father was drafted into the army after less than three years of marriage. Two and a half years passed before his return from the war in Europe.

Dad made a recording for my mother while away, and his recorded voice aches with tenderness and desire. His letters, too, carried those emotions.

He rushed from the dock when he returned with a boatload of troops from France to New York City. His first call was to her, the one.

Such stories of war, waiting, and reunion repeat the tale of Odysseus, the inventor of the Trojan Horse. After ten years of fighting to breach the walls of Troy, it took him another ten to reach his kingdom of Ithica and his wife, Penelope.

She remained faithful, putting off the pursuit of many suitors for her affection and riches.

Milton Stein told me about his own Odyssey in 1986, 40 years after he heard Jeanette Stein’s telephonic voice, his speech breaking with a wave of feeling as overwhelming and alive as it had been on March 6, 1946 — as alive as they prayed he would be.

He had waited for her in every sense, every part of him, as did she wait for him.

Most of us have homecomings of one fashion or another, seeing again those friends or relatives we missed. Sometimes it is our hometown or country itself we have longed for.

Do we know how much we miss anything — until we miss it; how much we love anyone until we are separated and in doubt?

The time we hold our breath has its way with us unless we transform it and squeeze tight the foreshadowed vision that makes us wait. Whether for Christmas, the amusement park, our family of origin, or an endlessly delayed reunion with the love of our life, we hope for this, we live for this: the never-guaranteed next time.

Just as a gifted therapist works to defeat the routine to which weekly meetings are susceptible, we all have the opportunity to make life’s fleeting moments special.

Learn patience, and bridge the terrible time and distance while dreaming of the gifts those efforts reward. They will fuel your ardency and gratitude.

My dad never gave me a clear answer to my childhood question of how I came to be.

I didn’t realize he would do better much later.

The tears in his eyes in 1986 told me all there is to know about love.

May 21, 2023

The “Zoom” Effect and Other Thoughts on Social Isolation

 

I’m worried about Zoom. I understand how marvelous it is, but still …

To the good, it enabled the miracle of COVID-free work during the worst of the pandemic. Today your employer remains 2000 miles away without requiring your relocation. Zoom also permits a (sort of) face-to-face friendship with someone you never met and might never meet.

Yet I am worried about Zoom and its unintended maiming of people skills. In the Information Age, we have lost personal contact with our human brethren, and Zoom furthers that disappearing act. I fear for our youth, who have known no other way of being and shall be less equipped to manage outside of the dimensions of a rented apartment.

If you are physically shut in and shut out of the world of trees and grass, this video service is a blessing. That said, standing alone or nearly alone, especially for a person who hasn’t overcome his people-to-people discomfort in the real world, Zoom is a permanent bandaid preventing the fulfillment of yearning even on summer’s most inviting days.

A peek-a-boo computer life is then nearly all of your life.

Next stop, the Age of Alienation and Loneliness.

——-

How did those of us who lived in the B.Z. era (before Zoom) overcome awkwardness and find comfort? What rite of passage led to success in business and social situations? 

All the tutorials were free. Right there in school, the playground, the ball field, the church, the office, or the dance studio. Others were around you, talking, laughing, working, and looking at you.

Eyeball to eyeball and close at hand.

——-

We need social experience and someone to touch. You can enjoy many things on Zoom but can’t purchase the satisfaction of shaking hands and holding hands. You can’t hug on Zoom, kiss, or reach for a tissue to wipe away another’s tears. Nor will two bodies become one, attaching, embracing, and obliterating the solitary nature of life, our one-bodied universal predicament.

I’ll grant you pets provide close-by companionship. A dog, for example, offers tactile warmth, tenderness, and an enthusiastic greeting. He initiates his version of tongued affection, wetness to the max. Thereby, man’s best friend achieves an element of the touch we need — up to a point.

No matter how much the animal gives of his earnest devotion, he remains an unknowing creature, unable to comprehend our lives as can a partner who possesses the heart’s secrets.

Zoom was preceded by other inventions separating one person from another. Before automobiles, one might have walked to the bus stop and chatted with strangers. You cannot reveal your soul while dodging traffic in a car empty of intimates.

Before home air conditioning arrived in the 1950s, hot days brought people onto the stoops of their buildings to avoid being boiled by the hallucinogenic heat inside. Fred and Joe would talk about baseball, work, and their oldest children’s achievements or troubles. And, if the night was a muggy one, public parks delivered a sleeping destination where one encountered other sweltering souls. The experience was shared.

Friendships that might have arisen from daily routines and sidewalk meetings now take dedicated effort. No one’s fault, but the world has changed. Zoom is one more step.

——-

The shy and the anxious, already prone to avoidance, take heart in the virtual life of such inventions, the life of almost but not quite real faces and voices. 

The more of us who take to the ease of the safe place in our home space, the fewer who find the necessity to befriend a fellow man.

Yesterday’s opportunities to learn about making contact and finding romance have been discarded. Or perhaps they are to be found in unread novels of times past, collecting dust on a closet shelf. Big cities chill the stranger with anonymity and indifference. Few look and smile in the citified rush and cell phone distraction. A potential love of your life or new best friend ambles past, and you don’t even know it.

Hesitancy about spending time within the peopled world is reasonable. Crime and the lingering danger of COVID are enough to make us pause. But safety is a relative thing. You still have yourself to contend with, including the loneliness and depression you bring as the entry fee to the dark night of your soul.

Drugs, too, find a way inside your flat despite the doors you choose to lock.

A May 2022 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimates that the number of working age Americans (25 to 54 years old) with substance use disorders has risen by 23% since pre-pandemic, to 27 million. A figure that’s about one in six of people who were employed around the time of the study. It’s caused a 9% to 26% drop in labor force participation that Karen Kopecky, one of the authors of the report, says continues today.

But there is more:

The drug recovery firm Sierra Tucson concluded from a November 2021 survey that about 20% of US workers admitted to using recreational drugs while working remotely, and also to being under the influence during virtual meetings. Digital recovery clinic Quit Genius found in August 2022 that one in five believe that substance use has affected their work performance, also according to a survey.

Is this self-medication? Perhaps. Social isolation has done harm.

Life demands much of us. Therapists are oversupplied with calls from good people challenged by current conditions, some of which were created to improve life. Zoom has given the gift of such improvements, but it is a knife cutting both ways. At its best, it connects the unconnected. But, if you are able-bodied, beware. It starts by slicing off your bottom half and freezes the rest of you in place — a hiding place.

Yes, our world holds dangers — plenty of them. But opportunity too. I would take a chance with the human race if I were you. Zoom’s tv show is a counterfeit. Close, but not near enough to touch.

Once upon a time, long before Zoom, I was you. Since I wanted friendship,  the old-fashioned way of presenting myself was the only option. Things got better because I rolled the dice and took the one road that would take me there, potholes and all.

Nostalgia, you say? Just a bit. But most people are decent and still walk the earth. Here’s hoping you meet a few off-screen — and smile.

==========

The top image is Conversation, featuring a photo of Sithembele Mbete in 2020. It is followed by a snapshot called Wedding Hugs by Braden Kowitz from 2007. The canine picture entitled Pretty Please is the work of Sheila Sund. All three of these were sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

The final image is a cropped version of Gustav Klimt’s Death and Life from Wikiart.org.

The Zoom Effect

May 14, 2023

About Love and Hate, and the Joy-filled Love of Children

My grandson got married, but I wasn’t invited.

Amazing, isn’t it? All I did was show him love and buy him things. OK, he just turned four years old, and his parents weren’t invited either. Nor, from what I hear, were the parents of the bride.

I’ve seen photos of him holding hands with his “wife,” even in preschool.

Shameless!

Who knows what they do when no one is around?

But if this is how love starts, I approve. Fill your hearts full, children, because life will drain them, too — then, with luck, refill them again. Kind of like going to the gas or petrol station.

As to anger, let me say a little about that.

Anger is like a multi-blade knife with blades sharpened to a keen edge, mindless of who it cuts and capable of slicing both ways.

Where does such intense dislike come from?

First comes love, then rejection, then reaction to the dismissal from the life of another. A whisper saying you’re fired, no matter how delicate the voice.

Or, perhaps the starting point of antagonism is a failure to win respect, approval, and acknowledgment. Loathing can grow from the absence of caring parents or the simple difficulty of achieving success, however you define it.

Therapists have all heard the conventional wisdom that depression is anger turned inward. Don’t forget, however, that anger can result from disappointment in life turned outward.

We live in a competitive world, including competition for mates. Someday these two kids will seek consolation for a broken heart.

Someone will say, “Oh, you are better off without him,” or “He isn’t right for you,” but such statements rarely console.

Neither do they provide solace when the words are, “Oh, you are better off without that job — it wasn’t right for you.” Of course, both the young ones are far from the job market.

As we witness a world with more than its share of anger beyond romantic and professional disappointment, many of us are triggered by something less tender than lost love.

Some feel displaced from their spot in the world, their previous role as a worthy breadwinner, or as a person known for giving good advice and helping a neighbor fix his car.

Populist politicians and their allies play on this sense of injury, fomenting anger upon anger like a giant test tube full of bile with daily inflammatory statements, addictive but strangely validating.

Yeah! He gets it. It’s not my fault. I’ve been screwed! It’s THOSE people. They don’t look like us, don’t believe in our god, and steal our birthright.

My grandson and the love of his life don’t know about any of this. They only know about respect, affection, friends, and toys. Maybe an occasional “enemy,” meaning a minor league bully or two, but nothing serious.

We all want love, don’t we? We all hope for applause, a job that pays well enough, status, and an appreciative mate. We all hope to be well thought of, praised, and admired by those to whom we are close. 

In a different world perhaps this wouldn’t be much to ask for, but these days we are too often replacement parts that have been replaced.

Confronting a sense of disappointment in life, too many hunger to pay back those they think are responsible. They only need a model and some encouragement. When all the guys are whining, somehow whining is OK, not as shameful as it used to be.

Still, we search for someone loveable. If politics enters that pursuit, it can be contaminated by opinions that tend to be unloving.

We are not as companionable as we were a few years back. Now we grind our teeth or laugh at the ones “ruining” our country, whoever they are, however preposterous the claim.

We lack the innocence of my grandson and his companion. Indeed, when she was ill and away from school for a week, he missed her and worried about her, dear boy.

Lucky for them, they are not on the internet, an occasionally monstrous place. Many of our interactions with fellow humans come electronically, where plenty of anonymous hatred can be found.

Despite all its wonders, metaphorical bombs are easily thrown by those who are literally out of sight.

If one imbibes the toxic message of anger now widely distributed, I doubt one will become more tender or charming. The four-year-olds have innate wisdom and sweetness, qualities not characteristic of those addicted to TV’s political anger-fests.

Nor will the Rageaholics have much reason to approach those of different races, nationalities, ethnicities, or religions, perhaps even those who pray to no god.

Trust me — one of them might be “the one.” Or, at least, a friend not so different from you as you thought.

We live in a time of loneliness, the anonymity of cities, and the solitary pursuit of “being your own person,” however worthwhile that may be.

Though the small ones don’t know it yet, the time of our lives walks and whistles quickly past the clock, especially if one desires to be loved.

Companionship begins with a decision to pursue it, knowing armorless vulnerability places the heart at risk. The kids haven’t learned that yet, either.

Bless them.

The second decision is this one, made by a wise man over 2500 years ago:

I don’t have time to hate people who hate me because I am too busy loving people who love me.*

An ancient Chinese man said this, but the kids I’m talking about live it.

============

*Laozi, also known as Lau Tzu (the “Old Master”) born in 604 B.C.

The top image is a 1957 photo of Two Children Holding Hands by Irvin Peithman, sourced from Wikiart.com. 

May 14, 2023

Of Love, Hate and the Love-filled Joy of Children

My grandson got married, but I wasn’t invited.

Amazing, isn’t it? All I did was show him love and buy him things. OK, he just turned four years old, and his parents weren’t invited either. Nor, from what I hear, were the parents of the bride.

I’ve seen photos of him holding hands with his “wife,” even in preschool.

Shameless!

Who knows what they do when no one is around?

But if this is how love starts, I approve. Fill your hearts full, children, because life will drain them, too — then, with luck, refill them again. Kind of like going to the gas or petrol station.

As to anger, let me say a little about that.

Anger is like a multi-blade knife with blades sharpened to a keen edge, mindless of who it cuts and capable of slicing both ways.

Where does such intense dislike come from?

First comes love, then rejection, then reaction to the dismissal from the life of another. A whisper saying you’re fired, no matter how delicate the voice.

Or, perhaps the starting point of antagonism is a failure to win respect, approval, and acknowledgment. Loathing can grow from the absence of caring parents or the simple difficulty of achieving success, however you define it.

Therapists have all heard the conventional wisdom that depression is anger turned inward. Don’t forget, however, that anger can result from disappointment in life turned outward.

We live in a competitive world, including competition for mates. Someday these two kids will seek consolation for a broken heart.

Someone will say, “Oh, you are better off without him,” or “He isn’t right for you,” but such statements rarely console.

Neither do they provide solace when the words are, “Oh, you are better off without that job — it wasn’t right for you.” Of course, both the young ones are far from the job market.

As we witness a world with more than its share of anger beyond romantic and professional disappointment, many of us are triggered by something less tender than lost love.

Some feel displaced from their spot in the world, their previous role as a worthy breadwinner, or as a person known for giving good advice and helping a neighbor fix his car.

Populist politicians and their allies play on this sense of injury, fomenting anger upon anger like a giant test tube full of bile with daily inflammatory statements, addictive but strangely validating.

Yeah! He gets it. It’s not my fault. I’ve been screwed! It’s THOSE people. They don’t look like us, don’t believe in our god, and steal our birthright.

My grandson and the love of his life don’t know about any of this. They only know about respect, affection, friends, and toys. Maybe an occasional “enemy,” meaning a minor league bully or two, but nothing serious.

We all want love, don’t we? We all hope for applause, a job that pays well enough, status, and an appreciative mate. We all hope to be well thought of, praised, and admired by those to whom we are close. 

In a different world perhaps this wouldn’t be much to ask for, but these days we are too often replacement parts that have been replaced.

Confronting a sense of disappointment in life, too many hunger to pay back those they think are responsible. They only need a model and some encouragement. When all the guys are whining, somehow whining is OK, not as shameful as it used to be.

Still, we search for someone loveable. If politics enters that pursuit, it can be contaminated by opinions that tend to be unloving.

We are not as companionable as we were a few years back. Now we grind our teeth or laugh at the ones “ruining” our country, whoever they are, however preposterous the claim.

We lack the innocence of my grandson and his companion. Indeed, when she was ill and away from school for a week, he missed her and worried about her, dear boy.

Lucky for them, they are not on the internet, an occasionally monstrous place. Many of our interactions with fellow humans come electronically, where plenty of anonymous hatred can be found.

Despite all its wonders, metaphorical bombs are easily thrown by those who are literally out of sight.

If one imbibes the toxic message of anger now widely distributed, I doubt one will become more tender or charming. The four-year-olds have innate wisdom and sweetness, qualities not characteristic of those addicted to TV’s political anger-fests.

Nor will the Rageaholics have much reason to approach those of different races, nationalities, ethnicities, or religions, perhaps even those who pray to no god.

Trust me — one of them might be “the one.” Or, at least, a friend not so different from you as you thought.

We live in a time of loneliness, the anonymity of cities, and the solitary pursuit of “being your own person,” however worthwhile that may be.

Though the small ones don’t know it yet, the time of our lives walks and whistles quickly past the clock, especially if one desires to be loved.

Companionship begins with a decision to pursue it, knowing armorless vulnerability places the heart at risk. The kids haven’t learned that yet, either.

Bless them.

The second decision is this one, made by a wise man over 2500 years ago:

I don’t have time to hate people who hate me because I am too busy loving people who love me.*

An ancient Chinese man said this, but the kids I’m talking about live it.

————-

*Laozi, also known as Lau Tzu (the “Old Master”) born in 604 B.C.

The first image is a 1957 photo of Two Children Holding Hands by Irvin Peithman, sourced from Wikiart.com. 

May 7, 2023

When There is Nothing More to Say to Your Lover

At a certain point, there is nothing more to say. You can repeat yourself, of course, but if you have not been heard the first thousand times, the next 250 probably won’t matter anyway.

They will grind up your insides and do the same to the one who is tired of your pleas, complaints, and sadness. The logic and reasons you spray at him are like the water in a hose over grass already drenched, changing nothing.

You live together. That’s the sad thing. You are touch starved amid thousands of opportunities for touch. You used to try. Now you’ve given up, but still, the topic arises. The one you are with doesn’t listen but interrupts while you ask why. He gives no answers and doesn’t seem to have them.

He looks at you, hears you, and has no idea what you are talking about.

The man lives in a world of books and television, work and buddies, small bets on football, and hobbies. The rest of the world, the life you shared, the youthful passion — all that was — is unremembered and unthought. Oh yeah, it was like that, wasn’t it? It all happened in the time of cavemen, a now-distant epoch that seems to have vanished. I’m not a caveman, he says. Is that who you want? Uhhhh…

But he’s an excellent provider; there’s that. And a swell father and you do your part more than ever. Taking care of the social end of the family, helping with homework, and much more.

Does that matter, or is it assumed, you wonder? He never says.

Your integrity falls into the category of qualities taken for granted. You would never cheat anyone, never lie, never be unfaithful. You are honorable, though sometimes unkind when the frustration and loneliness, the craving can’t be ignored.

He won’t go to marital therapy. His life satisfies him.

Sometimes you feel like a male honey bee — very strange since you are female. But the male — the drone — mates and then dies. At times you sense you are dying inside.

How was it for you? You asked the insect. You wanted to know.

Let’s just say we drones mate once for less than five seconds. Heard enough?

The tiny fellow expired before he could say more.

Yet you love him, the man in your life, and know he loves you — in his way. You have grown out of sync.

Was Tolstoy right when he wrote about families in Anna Karenina?

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Nobody’s fault. It’s nobody’s fault, you tell yourself. I shouldn’t complain, you say; look at all that is fine. But, just to check things out, you speak to your dearest friend. 

For the first time, to anyone.

You want her assurance that your life is good, even though there are things it lacks in the department of the heart. So you speak, and when you finish…

You: Everything is ok, right?

(Silence).

Right?

(More silence).

RIGHT?

More silence, then…

AHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

—————————-

Both paintings are works of Joan (pronounced Juan) Miro. The first is The Escape Ladder (1940). The second is  Persons Haunted by a Bird (1938).

April 29, 2023

What Would You Give Up To Make a Relationship Work?

Can you have everything in a relationship? For those who can, if it lasts well beyond the honeymoon, you deserve more than applause. Cheers and hugs all around. 

For all other satisfied twosomes, your mate will fall short of scoring 100%, and so will you.

Perhaps those who succeed in living with the imperfect are the couples we should praise. They will work for their happiness, including the effort to recognize what should be changed and what can be lived with — accepted without recrimination.

Given that, try to peer through the springtime bloom of new encounters, those glorious moments of newborn bliss. Here is a two-sided list of qualities in your present or future lover to consider waiting for, insisting upon, or setting aside.

Which of these do you want? Name the items you can’t live without. Perhaps make a separate list of the qualities sure to bring unhappiness and discontent.

Evaluate for yourself the benefits and the costs.

  • Does your mate give you the freedom you want or try to limit you?
  • Are his parents wonderful to you and each other? Study the model he’s had for how relationships work. That might be your future.
  • If the one you love doesn’t modify some of his characteristics, would you be able to accept that? Which might be deal-breakers?
  • Is he playful, unsmiling, or both?
  • Does he treat people with kindness, including acquaintances and strangers, regardless of rank? Does he display generosity of attitude and temperament?
  • How much unsolicited judgment and criticism is sent your way?

  • Are necessary and sincere apologies offered? Will this individual then reflect upon himself and change, trying not to repeat the errors? There will be errors, you know.
  • Sexual compatibility, anyone?
  • Are you in-sync and accepting of his hobbies, friends, money management, musical affections, sports, and fitness? How about pets, travel, and hopes for the future? If you assume rather than search for the answers to what the other is like, you might be wrong.
  • How self-aware is your romantic partner? Many people believe they know themselves despite enormous blindspots. If the intimate friend cannot now recognize his dark side, you may find yourself in the dark.
  • Do you agree about taking chances versus choosing the safe path? Do your preferences for deliberation or speed and patience or impatience match?
  • What about sharing a sense of humor?
  •  Have the two of you created a workable division of housekeeping, managing finances, doing the laundry, and other life tasks? Do you coincide in terms of tidiness and messiness?
  • Is he sensitive to you? Does he listen and provide comfort or point to solutions you didn’t request when you desire an attentive ear and consolation?
  • Are differences resolved with words, careful listening, compromise, apology, change, and recovery without blinding rage? Do your hands touch in tenderness?
  • Will the spouse defend you with family, friends, and children?
  • Consider learning about his history of friends and lovers. If he hasn’t made them last, why not? He might not see any pattern, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
  • Would he discuss such a list of questions as this and honor the reasons for the request?
  • Do you share a vision of childrearing?
  • Are you attractive to each other and satisfyingly attentive to scent, attire, and appearance?
  • What about lies, towering or tiny, deceit, and fidelity?
  • How do you mesh in being direct or indirect, confident, and assertive?
  • Where do you stand on religious faith or its absence? Is the other accepting of any difference in this domain? Does he fathom why the two of you might not agree and accept it?
  • Are your ideas respected?

  • Couples often say they were first drawn together by the fun and the physical in the early stages of their relationship. Is there anything else that recommends the other now?
  • Does he expect you to read his mind or tell you about his dissatisfaction?
  • Will he fix his eyes on yours and love the soul beneath the beauty, recognizing what makes you unique and that which is necessary to fill your heart?
  • While reading this list and considering concerns about your partner, have you recognized them in yourself?
  • Does he know you as you wish to be known? Have you shown him who you are?

Any questioning of this sort could go on. Add whatever you wish.

Such queries are often not answerable by asking your lover but by shared interaction, observing him, and looking in the mirror at yourself.

I suspect that if we lived until the end of time, most of us wouldn’t be listing our accomplishments. I’m guessing the money we earned, the episodic urgency of vacuuming the rug and thinking of our best vacation wouldn’t matter much.

We’d think instead of love — or better — embrace it and the ones we care about. What else justifies our gratitude more than all the other good fortune we might have had, the trophies and awards we’d won or lost, and status high or low?

Sharing our hearts in generosity, protection, respect, laughter, and kindness, would be the most telling source of fulfillment, even in exciting and successful lives. So it seems to me. After all…

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” *

=========================

*The words of William Bruce Cameron, 1963, not Einstein, as often assumed.

The top photo is Sunrise Coming into Miami in November 2022 by Laura Hedien, with her permission: Laura Hedien Official Website. 

It is followed by two works by Mark Rothko. The first is No. 13, White and Red on Yellow, 1958, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The second is Untitled, No. 11, 1963 from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

I have chosen these paintings because the late works of Rothko can be best appreciated if you take some time to look at them.

I’d suggest you begin with the large, fluffy white, gray, and yellow rectangle in the first Rothko mural. Focus on the center and wait. You won’t have to wait long.

You will find this work of art changing its qualities the longer you do. So do people, including those you love or hope to love.

April 23, 2023

How Much Do You Think You Will Change in Ten Years?

Ask a 28-year-old if he is mature; he will likely say yes. At a certain point in life, we believe we have learned most of the essential lessons. One can imagine our personalities are formed, and our values are secure. They will endure.

Nope.

Three psychologists published an important paper (describing six experimental studies employing psychological tests) focusing on our illusions regarding the degree to which time will reshape us.

For example, they asked 28-year-olds how much they believed they would change in the next ten years. In contrast, they asked a group aged 38 how much they had changed in the last decade. The groups were similar but for their ages.

When they compared the two, the first bunch predicted they would alter a modest amount. However, the older segment recognized they’d shifted more than expected in the identical period.

The experimenters looked at individuals between 18 and 68, obtaining the same results. The study included over 19,000 subjects.

Quidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson claimed this is an illusion to which humanity is subject. Indeed, they called their paper “The End of History Illusion.” We think of ourselves as fixed in place as we are, a more or less permanent version of the one who goes by our name. The big transformations in our life exist as a remembered past, so we think.

What does this tell us?

The strawberry ice cream you love today might be cast aside down the road.

More seriously, we can tap memory to capture the extent of previous modifications to our nature but ignore or forget such knowledge when considering the rest of the journey.

Given that the findings point to underestimating the metamorphosis over the horizon, they may result from not wishing to consider what the unknowable tomorrow might bring.

Fear of change applies to a segment of life experience for many of us.

Consider this as well. If you make unexpected changes in values, preferences, or personality, the same might be true of friends, lovers, or others. Such an idea anticipates a precarious existence without a clear path to make oneself ready for it.

If one expects the coming incarnation of each of us to be like the present (except for minor personal shifts), our plans shall be off the mark. But how can we do better when we lack a crystal ball?

Every human soul can try to control his behavior, education, and decisions for now, but not for the person he will become. The bucket list items of today need to be fulfilled while they still matter.

By the time you retire, you could be someone whose interests and tastes have traded places with those of the new guy, whoever he is.

Even so, humans are adaptable. They adjust to the prevailing conditions and move toward a set point — a built-in grade of life satisfaction. At a practical level, life’s ups diminish after their moment of buoyancy, while the downs hit the floor, and we usually bounce back to some approximation of where we started.

Though we underestimate the manner and scope of our change, we are created to last through whatever those differences amount to.

Since the image in the mirror, inside and out, won’t be the same for long, perhaps the best advice is this:

We are all in transit. Use the time to improve, repair the world, enjoy the moment, and make the most of it.

———-

The authors of the paper mentioned in this essay were Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson. It was published in the January 4, 2013 edition of Science, Volume 339, Issue 6115.

Both of the above images are the work of Laura Hedien, with her kind permission: Laura Hedien Official Website. The first is the Chicago River, from the end of December 2022. The second is an Antarctic Sunset, photographed in November 2022.

April 16, 2023

Love after Love

The title may confuse you. Perhaps one should emphasize the word after. Another way would be to say it is love after loss — after heartbreak, after someone says, “Not you. Someone else perhaps, but not you.” 

They mean it even when they don’t say it, or so you believe.

You know what such abandonment is — among life’s most miserable, desperate, devitalizing events.

Life-sucking, soul crushing.

And yet, Derek Walcott, the late Nobel Prize-winning poet, would have told you there is another who you have forgotten and should turn to.

Yourself — to love yourself.

Walcott knew. He knew what rejection created in its object. You have no value or not enough. Even without explanation, you wonder. “Did I do something? Was I not bright, wealthy, beautiful enough, not handsome?”

“Inconsiderate, perhaps, or cruel.”

“Was I too old, too immature, unfunny?”

The questions go on endlessly until time, your friend, helps you heal. But Walcott offers more. A poetic guide to assist in your own healing. The reader is the actress Helen Bonham Carter. The second reading is by David Whyte.

Read, and when in discontent, remember the final line.

Love after Love

Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

April 9, 2023

To Love in Spite of Everything

Most of us have stories about our parents. When I get together with my brothers, we always call up funny incidents or their witty sayings.

The folks have been gone over 20 years, and I can assure you not all the events were rosy. These days, however, at a more than two-decade distance, we don’t care much about our old complaints.

Like water against the rock, they have been worn away.

Had you asked me about my early years a few decades back, I wouldn’t have spoken as often about the fun times as the dark ones.

They grew up in the Great Depression, and nothing about the economic survival of the Fabians (Jeanette Stein’s family) and Milton Stein’s home in the same period was easy. Nor did their parents win childrearing awards.

I was a therapist to people who still carried the psychological wounds of childhood. My understanding of their experiences sometimes grew out of my own youth. 

A number of my patients wished for different parents, a desire I never thought about but could grasp from the stories these women and men told me.

That raises questions.

Did you long for alternative guardians? Do you believe such a solution could have saved them from each other? Would it, at least, have prevented a portion of the emotional injury you incurred?

Of course, almost all of our caretakers did considerate things dumped in the same garbage can with the bad ones worth erasing.

What else would have lodged in the discard pile if the wish became real?

All your school friends, including a magnificent classmate met in fourth grade and held close to the present day. The games you enjoyed, especially those you won.

Remember too, the people who recognized the lovely voice you possessed, how fine your drawing was, and the teachers who displayed kindness or demanded more academic effort until finally, you gave it.

You’d never have encountered the next-door neighbor who played catch with you because he knew you missed your dad and the kindly owner of the corner candy store. He called you “son” and shared baseball stories. 

Don’t forget another adult who saw the goodness in you when the folks at home turned away in disgust.

In this imaginary vanishing of the elders, your first love departs, too, along with all the joyous, light, romantic dates with others.

These and 1000 other experiences — absent from your life.

Well, I hear you saying your life would have been even better with an alternative Mother and Father designed for each other and you.

Perhaps, but you’ve forgotten one missing ingredient to that superior life.

You.

I’m speaking of your life itself because if the same imperfect pair hadn’t made love when they did, you’d never have been born. Imagine a different growing sperm/egg couple taking your place on the bridge to the world.

Your parents gave you life, a chance, even if the winning ticket didn’t seem worth the paper it was printed on. Since you are reading this, it means you’ve found value in the time and the opportunity.

Much as we curse the darkness, the door exists to seek the light.

Do you doubt this? Read or listen to the thoughtful short poem by Sharon Olds, I Go Back to May 1937.

If the author’s apparent autobiographical details are her own, she describes how she invented a way to manage despite her parents.

There are many ways of overcoming.

Take one.

==========

The top image is Georges Braque’s Still Life with Ace of Hearts, 1914.

The first recitation of the poem includes the text as read by Guy Mulinder. His version allows you to read along with him or turn off the sound and read silently.

The second, by John Lithgow, is also very fine.