Things I Want to Say to My Girls

Sometimes, I wonder if we don’t all have an innate form of ‘locked in’ syndrome… of experiencing life from the inside of our heads that feels normal to us, and we never think of sharing with other people…

Twice, recently, I’ve experienced moments of ‘oh, doesn’t everyone do/know that?’

The first was in doing some research about neurology and psychology and the effects and power of mindfulness meditation (weird direction, I’ll grant you, but you just never know what kinds of wonders you’ll find when you look…)

Insula: it’s a part of your (and my) brain that is active in perceiving the body’s internal experience, and is highly attuned to empathy. It is said that people with highly-developed (that is, in neuroplasticity speak, often-used) insula are not only highly empathic with others, but highly self-aware: they can feel what’s going on in their own bodies, including their shifting moods and tension or relaxation and one of the markers for high level insula function is being aware of their on heart beating.

Cue the double-take..

Ask around a bit.

Isn’t that ordinary? Don’t you always feel your heart beating?

That was surprise number one.

The second one I stumbled upon while re-reading Dan Baker’s lovely (I highly recommend it) What Happy People Know. He refers obliquely to one of the sources of happiness in life being about choice, specifically being aware of our personal choices regarding not only our lives, but also what we’re good at and value. It reads:

Why am I so sure that’s who I am? Because that’s exactly whom I chose to be. I put tremendous effort into making these choices. I eliminated many other possibilities and poured my heart into the ones that fit me best.

Which got me thinking about the multiple talents and abilities I am aware of having (that old self-awareness thingy again) and have no intention or interest in using or developing further, or, perhaps more relevant to the title of this piece as you’ll see in a moment I hope, earning money from… For example, whenever the option to sell things (home party kinds of things) comes up, which is virtually every time I attend one and someone notices that I’m good at retaining all kinds of information and chatting up the benefits, etc… Yes, I know, but I still also know that I’m not willing to do what I know it takes to be successful in that business and I have no interest in participating in it –no, really, not even for the potential for vast amounts of money. I get it, I’m weird.

But what I just realized I’m not sure I ever told my girls –because it’s one of those ‘doesn’t everyone know this?’ – is

you don’t have to do what you’re good at just because you’re good at it

You are good at so many things, you can pick the one(s) that you want to use, not only the ones other people notice or that other people value, and certainly not all of them if you don’t wanna…

Just sayin’ … ‘cause you may not have noticed…

 

Addiction and Choice

 

Recommended reading: Addiction, a disorder of choice, by Gene M. Heyman …

When we subject children to anti-drug propaganda* we may be taking for granted a few propositions that have not been established outside the ‘my pappy tol’ me so’ and ‘some dude in a pub said’ frames.

As Heyman’s thesis valiantly proves, addiction is absolutely a voluntary choice and is absolutely not a disease.

I’ll summarize the argument for the second claim first, because it’s so universally accepted today. If alcoholism, smoking, heavy drug use and oxycodone abuse were diseases, it would not be possible to ‘quit.’ Not with a change of attitude, not with rehab and not with meetings –all of which can and do end addiction in real life. More than 80% of heavy, chronic drug users quit on their own, by choice, most of them before they’re 30 (they also typically start at 18.) If the disease model made sense, then MS and diabetes could be ‘quit’ with the help of rehab or meetings, which is a ridiculous suggestion.

On to the voluntary choice aspect. Because a lot of the research on the subject tends to be done by economists, rather than mothers of 14-year-old boys, they often take it as read that people do not voluntarily choose self-destructive options. Anyone who has ever seen Jackass or its many imitators can snort at that idea. Clearly, people do, rather more often than most parents are comfortable, make choices that are not in the best interest of anyone, including themselves.

What’s going on?

It turns out that one other things economists get wrong is the frame in which the decisions are being made. Economists look at ‘market baskets’ –like a collection of possible spending choices for someone’s discretionary income, and see that overall people tend to make reasonably sensible choices: the ‘best interest’ model. Yet people have rationally pointed out that there are a great many people who are bankrupt –or being evicted for non-payment of rent, with big screen tvs and smartphones—that rather argues against the theory. The frame economists use, in Heyman’s terminology, is a global framework for decision making, and it does tend away from self-destructive and toward best interest. In drug use, this means that when someone frames the ‘will I use cocaine now?’ question in terms of ‘is this the best use of the next $150 and 4 hours of my time, considering my life goals?’ the answer is very, very different from a ‘local’ viewpoint.

The local view is ‘will I suffer through the craving now?’ In short-term decision-making, people will very often make self-destructive and even openly suicidal choices. In my post about lacking resources (Anti-Resourceful), I described one such devastating decision from my hometown. It is not irrational, from a ‘this moment’s pleasure’ standpoint, to use drugs instead of living through withdrawal.

So, to drug education

What do we tell the children, and what ‘works’ for avoiding hard core drug addiction?

As much as we don’t really believe it will work (hence the propaganda*) the answer is: The Truth.

The truth includes the fact that drugs use money, energy, resources and time in a way that does not get anyone closer to their personal goals in life. It’s uncommon knowledge, but you only get to spend this dollar, this bit of energy and this minute once.

The truth includes the fact that most people who experiment with drugs have their own very good reasons for not becoming habitual users, and it’s probably worth forty minutes of your life to figure out what yours are.

The truth includes the fact that there are many potentially-devastating side effects from most potent drugs, and in spite of the fact that the odds of ending up with any or all of them are really pretty small, without the drug use the odds are much nearer to zero.

The truth includes the fact that drug use has some real attractions that are genuinely hard to beat with anything else in the world, but none of those eradicate any of the other truths, including the fact that quitting is filled with suffering, often for a good long time.

The truth includes the fact that the majority of successful people look down on both the effects and the users of mood-altering substances particularly when the use can no longer be easily contained to non-productive hours, or when the urge to use spills out into criminal and anti-social behaviour. All people need the respect and goodwill of their friends and neighbours and while you’ll certainly be popular with your dealer/supplier and your buddy users, you will also certainly be restricting your social circle dramatically.

Do we have to get into dire threats and fictional statistics? I don’t think so. In fact, it would be ever so much better if we didn’t.

___

* Propaganda defined: amplified, simplified and vilified info-tainment designed to coerce underlings into believing whatever overlings have determined to be ‘best’ for them, regardless of any accuracy of statements…

Bad News: You Won’t Find Out

In conversation with a dear friend yesterday, I premembered … (premembered is a word a friend’s kid invented, that means something like ‘later, I’m going to remember this way of explaining something I’ve kind of known for a long time’) … something about education and its inherent flaws.

I had been talking about a conversation (meta!) that I’d had earlier, in which there was discussion about how silly it is that the school system doesn’t teach people anything they really need to know: like how to be a good parent … or how to learn things for your own reasons on your own, or how to think, or be an enlightened human being. That’s when I premembered:

You usually won’t find out what it is you need to know until after you needed to know it.

This applies to most work, and most parenting.

To ‘Make Sure’

 

Ran across a great ‘zen’ quote while stumbling yesterday:

Let go… or be dragged

Then, it came up in a conversation about ‘making sure’ –with teenagers.

‘Making sure’ is probably the most alluring, and least effective, form of security a parent can seek.

No parent wants to face the reality of the terrors of freeing a child to the world. As possibly-Phyllis Diller said:

having a child is giving your heart permission to walk around by itself for the rest of your life

Parenting is terrifying, and letting go is even more terrifying. It’s hard to do when a two-year-old wants to wear all their favourite clothes at once…

… without thinking about what they’re allowed to do with a computer.

When a 15-year-old struggles for independence and liberty, it’s not easier to let go. It’s particularly not easier than it would have been when the child was three. But that’s water under the bridge and time can’t flow backwards.

But ‘making sure’ has a synonym. That is: ‘making a mess.’

Trying to control the thoughts, feelings, goals and preferences of a child (especially a teenage child) is pretty much guaranteed to get messy. Some kids can withstand a lot of it, without it affecting who they are, or what they choose, very much… but those kids are rare (and it’s inherently disrespectful to them, too… they just don’t mind so much that their parents are.)

For most kids, the lack of faith in them that this ‘making sure’ demonstrates does real damage to their stability. They react in ways that are surprising even to them: they vandalize things, they sneak out at night, they make cavalier choices with their lives and bodies, they check-out of things they once cared about, they disconnect from the people they need…

Yes, trusting that the world is a safe-enough place for our precious teens is hard. Trust anyhow.

Yes, trusting teens out in the world is hard. Trust anyhow.

Yes, trusting that we’ve been ‘good enough’ parents to this point, so our kids will be able to cope (and maybe even thrive) is hard. Trust anyhow.

Yes, letting go is hard. Let go anyhow.

Let go… or be dragged.

Building a Brain

When I was a new mom, I was learning about neural networks and how memory and learning work in a biomechanical sense. Did you know that every time a newborn has an experience that ‘works’ –they get milk, they get to be close to mom, they get clean, they get sleep—their brains are building synapses? Those are links between neurons that will eventually make neural pathways.

One of the fun pieces of brain development science that has been discovered is that the more you do a thing, the faster and more automatically your brain will replicate the thing. It’s not just ‘training your arm’ to throw a ball, it’s training your brain to build strong neural pathways so ‘throwing a ball’ becomes a high-speed highway of connections that make throwing a ball an act completed without confusion, thought, decisions or concentration.

For newborns, this means that if snuggling this way, and suckling this way results in a warm, fully belly, they are likely to do it again. And tomorrow, they’ll do it again and again and again. Every success strengthens the pathway. So, while the first time they tried it, it was pleasant… and a neural path was ‘walked’ through the grey matter… it’s the fifth or seventieth ‘walk’ down the same pathway that has made it visible as a track.

Initially, the synaptic ‘walk’ might be confusing and hard to retrace (poor little confused baby trying to figure out how to latch on again at 3 days old) but every single success makes the pathway stronger. Stronger pathways make for more-skilled brains…

Practice doesn’t make perfect… but it does make brains more complex.

Evil in the News–and parenting fears

Lots of fodder for the ‘what if I screw it up’ fears, of late… between drug addicts eating other people to narcissists killing kittens and people for fun and fame… what lovely texture to give to a parent’s nightmares of ‘how bad it can go wrong.’

I will never suggest that the fears are irrational: clearly, these charming individuals exist, and clearly at some point they had parents.

Whatever could go so  wrong that the adult product is so much of a mess?

In a lecture given by Dr. Gordon Neufeld, he describes a cultural problem that most people are not even aware is a problem –the generation of children who are not being invited into the generation of adults. While it’s new (he speculates 1960s) and radically different from all that’s come before, it’s already something that most parents feel is normal. How quickly social change becomes normal is astonishing. Two generations, and a completely new way of being in the world is ordinary and old. Today, it’s perfectly ordinary to assume the children will be happier among ‘their own kind’ and routine advice that adults ensure they have child-free time to themselves, to do the real things of real life, uninterrupted by the inconveniences and irrelevancies of childhood.

I noticed a long time ago that the people who spent the most time away from their children during the week were the same people with long lists of babysitters and child-only activities for the evenings and weekends and school breaks –something about not being around children most of the day seems to destroy a parent’s confidence? willingness? ability? their naturally-bonded desire to spend time with their children.

Dr. Neufeld’s point is that these are children growing up attached to their peers –they look to their peers for ‘how to be people’ and are virtually uninfluencable by the adults who a mere half century ago would have been the guiding stars of their lives, who they strove to be like and to be accepted by.

Today, when the charming youngsters, like Luka Magnotta and Karla Homolka are learning from each other’s company ‘how to be human,’ you can readily see what the core problem is.

It’s long been known that factors like unwantedness (just the fact that a child was unexpected and unwanted), single parenthood, unwed mothers, absentee fathers, poverty … it’s long been known that these are linked in much higher numbers to anti-social youths, and violent crime.

Today, we have ‘nice families’ producing the monsters of tomorrow, within stable and often wealthy wedlock, where the children were often not only wanted but sought after with tens of thousands of dollars worth of fertility treatments and international adoptions… and the chain that links these kids with the poor, inner-city teenage mothers of the past is peer attachment.

The child born of a 16 year old mother is not guaranteed to be raised without attachment to the adults in the world, in fact, that child may have far more stable collection of caring adults who stay close and care deeply about how the child lives than many children who move from suburb to suburb, with upwardly mobile (wealthy) parents –and a long chain of strangers providing daycare and education and sports coaching for the vast majority of their days.

Children need to know that they are cared for by the important adults in their world –parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents–so that their primary concern as they grow up is that they fit in with them, not whether or not they ‘fit in’ with kids like Karla and Luka…

Relationships with Humans

 

Relationships with humans are hard.

I’ve been having interesting conversations with folks about teens, rebellion and the ‘need’ (experts tell us it’s a need, so it must be, right?) for children to butt heads with their parents in order to leave the nest.

I’ve written about this before, but today I’m thinking about it from a slightly different angle… in a conversation about ‘normal teens,’ in response to this:

Some children really DO need to "butt heads to leave".

I said this:

In the same way that people who are genuinely frightened (the result of a break-in, or even a physical attack) start arguing when they don’t know what else to do with their fear, people who are leaving or on the verge of being left will often lash out, because they simply don’t know how to handle the fears or the overwhelming feelings that come with large life changes.

I’ve lived in a navy family my whole life, first as the daughter of a sailor, and later married to one (still). I am experienced in the leavings (and returns) of loved ones… and I’m familiar with the dysfunctional and the enlightened ways of handling both.

Dysfunctional is what is considered the norm: depression, lashing out, infidelity, worry, ptsd, insomnia, ocd… the list goes on and on. But however ordinary and common those responses are, they’re hardly enlightened or even helpful. They are simply what people do with overwhelmingly large emotions when they don’t know what else to do.

It’s not surprising that people don’t know what to do –culturally, we don’t know what to do, we have few models of more enlightened or mature responses, and few teachers who could pass that information on. If I had a nickel for every time someone said to me, ‘I could never cope with my partner leaving’ or ‘how do you manage?’ I’d have a room full of nickels. And, it took me a long time to stumble across healthier ways of handling it.

Children leaving home brings up the same kinds of overwhelm, for themselves and their parents –and their friends, and their siblings… and we end up with the Freshman 15 (kids who eat to displace their feelings when they’re at college the first year) and Empty Nest Syndrome (for parents who can’t sit through long-distance ads without bursting into tears), et cetera.

There are two keys, I found, to understand comings and goings:

1. worry and,

2. control

There are two primary reasons people mind so much, life transitions of this kind: they don’t know what’s going to happen, and they don’t like feeling out of control of what’s going to happen. So they worry –that’s personal and internal stress that just adds to the real issues in their world—and they seek to control what they can reach, which is generally the other people close by. [I think it’s hilarious how rarely most people think of themselves when they’re looking around for something to control.]

Now, how to avoid and minimize both of those is a completely other post for another day, but that’s the core of it: children who express an apparent need to butt heads are picking #2. Parents who become depressed, teary or insomniac are using #1. Lashing out and ocd are #2. PTSD is #1.

Handling comings and goings with equanimity is hard:

• it’s hard to lean into the pain of separations, to know that the pain is not just okay, but perfect
• it’s hard to open a lifestyle up when someone comes home after the heartspace they had lived in has healed

Neither are anywhere near as hard as the results of lashing out, butting heads, depression… et cetera.