A dysfunctional marriage, in poetry

Influenced by Charles Bukowski....

MOM AND DAD AND MARRIAGE AND KIDS

A marriage — a painful silence.
An isolated, somewhat schizoid mom,
And an angry, temperamental dad,
Who married each other trying to solve some old psychological puzzle,
But stopped trying after very long,
Perhaps not even conscious of the puzzle at hand, or in mind.
Instead, they burrowed into and intensified
Their old psychological roles and stances,
Topping that
With old conservative Midwestern religious values and stereotypes
About sexuality and gender roles.
After three boys and a miscarriage
They took a child-raising break.
(Not that either was doing much to raise those they already had.)
Then, after a move
With an attempted geographic cure for their unconscious puzzles perhaps not enough,
They started on baby-making again,
Or at least did nothing to prevent it.
Nine months later, without any choice in the matter,
Out I popped.
I want my money back.

— Oct. 27, 2009

Junk food equals heroin in addiction

At least it does for lab rats. The more they consumed, the more they needed to consume to get the same pleasure feeling.

After just five days on the junk food diet, rats showed “profound reductions” in the sensitivity of their brains’ pleasure centers, suggesting that the animals quickly became habituated to the food. As a result, the rats ate more food to get the same amount of pleasure. Just as heroin addicts require more and more of the drug to feel good, rats needed more and more of the junk food. “They lose control,” Kenny says. “This is the hallmark of addiction.”

The effects lasted for days afterward.

Solitary, secretive, scared and shabby

I substitute "scared," for alliteration, for the "Solitary, secretive, timid & shabby" I heard earlier today in an online chatroom. Great description, sadly, of an end-state alcoholic drinker or addicted drug user.

Some more thoughts on sex and Internet pornography

This is not just about sexual acting out... i.e., inappropriately acting sexually on actual sexual feelings. That said, it's not just "acting out" as a process addiction, either, although it certainly is that in part.

Certainly, with a new job right now, it's in part about anxiety still here, anger still at losing my old job, anger at the way my old company was managed, anger about the state of the newspaper industry, anger about not being able to get a reasonable job back in Dallas and more.

But, there's one ogther factor involved.

Beyond Jung, there probably is some legitimate study of sexual splitting as part of our repressed selves, and I've started doing a bit of that with Nathaniel Branden.

And, I started realizing, or picking up on an old past thread, of how much I envied women being women. I don't think I'm a woman trapped in a male body, nor is the envy level high enough to want reassignment surgery.

But, in a number of ways, especially coming from a conservative family and religion background that "assigned" traditional, stereotyped roles to women, I recognized that I, as a person who feared the testosterone, anger and competition of stereotyped masculinity and felt beat down by it, that, I was jealous of the "passiveness" that stereotyped women could in some ways, seemingly enjoy, while working a backdoor, quasi-assertiveness angle as well.

And, short of male violence, nowhere did that seem more true than in sexual relations. And, now, part of me wonders if I'm not jealous of the pornstars and centerfolds, or the real women cammers, working that type of assertiveness.

A serious look at anxiety

The NYTimes mag has a long story, focused on the work of Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan, of much of our current knowledge about anxiety.

Moving, new job and other anxieties

It's been a while since I wrote anything here.

Well, after two months of unemployment, I found a new job, and decided to take it. It's still in newspaper journalism, but I had to leave Dallas for Odessa, Texas. And, unlike three years ago, when I last lost my job, it (with the hindsight of that case) seems unlikely that I will get back to Dallas. (Yes, part of me has wanted to move on anyway, but I'd like somewhere further west yet, I think, if I'm going to sacrifice all the things I like[d] about Big D.)

I am also adjusting to night hours as a copy editor at an AM daily newspaper. That's been more difficult than straight job adjustment. I think I am fighting a low grade dysthymia as well as anxiety.

The first week here, I had no problems with acting out. I was too emotionally and physically tired. Since then, I am at about the level I was before I moved, though no worse.

On the plus side, though at times it may have added to short-term anxiety or dysthymia, I have increased my journaling, especially my structured journaling from Nathaniel Branden. And, I've learned more about just how much buried anger I have, and where some of it hides.

Conditional-love parenting doesn’t work, Dr. Phil

Showing Dr. Phil and others, who oppose Carl Rogers’ ideas, quite wrong, studies show that conditional-love parenting produces, in essence, conditional self-esteem in children.

I think there’s a lot to this story.

This ties directly to some of the work of Nathaniel Branden, father of the self-esteem movement. (The movement behind things like Character Counts, ultimately, and NOT the father of the false self-esteem movement of never confronting a child and giving everybody in class an A.)

This should also have implications for teachers, especially in younger grades.

And, to the degree support on the job, etc., can be more unconditional vs. less unconditional, I daresay it has connections to management, etc.

Emotional dissonance

We hear so much talk in the modern world about "cognitive dissonance," where you're sure such-and-such is the case/fact/answer but society/peer group/family or whomever work to change mind.

Well, why don't we hear more about the parallel, "emotional dissonance"?

Especially in families, how often is the phrase, "You wouldn't really feel that way if..." - or something similar - used?

And, how often have people been tempted to drink/use, or actually did so in the past, over such "emotional dissonance"?

I may throw out more thoughts on this in days and weeks ahead; I'd like to hear from others.


For some of us, emotional dissonance, perhaps along with cognitive dissonance, may have begun in childhood. (Tim, the dissonance comes from analogy with music; the "outside" will "tell" you or me to think or feel one way when you know that's not what you actually think or feel; two different beliefs feelings, in dissonance.)

Personal experience: Being upset, and dad saying, "I'll give you something to cry about." Or, on both cognitive and emotional sides, the minister father telling me (pre-teen, still very "concrete" thinker) to lie for him on the phone, even if an adult lie.

Then, particularly here in America, you have a society that strives for forced happy endings, and sweeps unhappy ones under the rug, like the high school football player paralyzed in practice who does NOT walk again.

And, perhaps that's another deal with "the other sobriety guys": their "promises" of things such as the claim that fear of economic uncertainly will leave us. Like other such emotionally-pushed belief systems, it sets one up for dissonance. What if I still have that fear? Then, can I no longer be "happy, joyous and free"? Beyond still being fearful, should I be guilt-tripping?

Frankly, beyond addiction and sobriety, I wonder if this isn't part of the reason for the increase of depression and anxiety in the modern world.

The placebo effect strengthens

Some would-be new antidepressants can't get to market because they can't pass
clinical trials. They can't pass clinical trials because the placebo effect is
getting stronger.

No, it's not less effective drugs, and it's not just anti-Ds or anxiety drugs,
either. Non-psychotropics are having the same problem in a few instances, and
it's clear that, yes, the placebo effect is getting stronger.

And, that it varies in different parts of the U.S., and in different parts of
the world. And, that beyond just being given a pill, things like pill dosage
frequency and even COLOR of the pill are causative factors.

The full story is here.

Resilience vs (?) dissociation

Well, it is now two weeks since I moved to Odessa, Texas, 350 miles west from Dallas, to take a job on the copy desk of the Odessa American, a seven-day daily.

The political atmosphere here is not my cup of tea, and, if I had had to move out here, I wish at least it would be on the Midland side, with a touch more in the way of culture, shopping, etc. But, it's not.

I got a congratulations today on my one sobriety e-mail list about my resilience.

Is it resilience, or a side effect/flip side of the coin "gift" of dissociation, at least in part? I think it's the latter, as I still feel like I sleepwalk through life at times, and this is one of them.

Yes, this "resilience" by another name may be helping me right now. But, its original cause wasn't worth the price; even without that original cause, being this dissociative probably isn't worth it, overall.

That said, at least it's not the dissociation level of a decade ago.