Tag Archives: Depression

Anxiety, the Dented Cell Phone and the “Stolen Luggage Incident”

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Dateline: Albuquerque, New Mexico

Stress Management Update

Note: If you are the person who stole my luggage at the Avis rental counter while I ran through the rain to get my car…pox be upon you.

If any of you ever see a smug person with three twelve-cell computer batteries ($200 each), a Samsung tablet power cord and he or she doesn’t seem to own such a device, seven pair of black Olga underwear, a power cord for a Dell Studio for which he or she does not appear to have the matching computer or, say, seven tiny packets of vitamins and fish oil —Please deliver the cursed pox for me.

A message from the first session of the Fall Series on Bowen Family Systems Theory was:“It’s not what happens to you, it’s what happens after‘what happens’.”  Thus, your level of functioning can be determined by noting how well you manage anxiety. In other words, everyone looks good when things are rocking along planned.

And I like to think I would have handled the stolen luggage incident a bit better if the entire communication world was not at war against me. Yes, Time Warner Cable home and office phones still are not working. And, since we live in the hills, cell phone service is sketchy. Put those together and I was not able to contact my special person who usually is willing to take on some of my anxiety.

I called my insurance company hoping to drop some anxiety there, and I was pretty excited when the nicewoman who answered the phone said, “Sure, your umbrella policy will pay for your loss.”  Nice woman then sweetly explained that this
great policy I had would start paying after a $3000.00 deductable. I know, it’s an insurance company, what did I expect?
How much did my functioning change when presented with this stress?

Let’s just say, on a normal day I would never raise my voice to the police. On a normal day I can figure out how to turn off the interior lights in a rental car. Throwing my phone across the car was a new one for me. (I know, ouch, but I’m being honest here. And the thing died every thirty seconds when i was trying to hear directions to the hotel.)

Now the good news. I’m all better now having replaced all toiletries, ordered new batteries, etc. Surely level of functioning can also be measured by how long it takes to recover from cruelty and injustice random unpleasant acts. (Now, I’m assuming we are starting with a cleared slate and those six hours hammering airline ticket agents at London’s Gatwick Airport are off the table.)

And, while you are on alert for a shifty-eyed person with all sorts of cords and batteries and no devices…I have another thief for you to be on the look out for. A few months ago I was operating out of the San Diego Hilton International Branch Office. It was 9:30 p.m. and I’m lounging in my room. Just across Interstate 8 is my favorite California seafood restaurant, King’s Fish House. I’m weighing my options through my tired brain. I’m craving King’s incredible Shrimp and Crab Louie, but I’m already undressed and tucked in. King’s closes at 10:00 p.m., thus, I don’t have time to waver. I was leaving in the morning, so this was my last shot. I dragged my weary self out of bed, re-dressed, got the car, drove to the restaurant, ordered and waited for the Louie.

I return to my hotel room with my big white bag with King’s Fish House on the outside and my favorite salad inside. Alas, when I reached my door, my key wouldn’t work. I was the last room in the hall, rather out of the way. I set my food down and returned to the front desk for a refreshed key.

When I returned to my door, gone maybe three minutes, someone stole my Louie. Stole my dinner. Who does that?

If you spot someone with a King’s Fish House takeout bag and no shrimp shells, pox on him, too.

 

Stress, the “It’s Just Thunder” Incident

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Relationship Stress and the “It’s Just Thunder” Incident

I’m Okay and You’re Okay… as Long as I’m With You–

Dateline: Willie’s Roadhouse, Truck Stop Cafe in Abott, Texas. And, yes, the chicken-fried steaks lap over the edges of the plate.

Note: This entry, along with the next introduce the series: “Las Vegas Mary Grows a Self: Relationship Dependence, A Soap Opera in Four Parts.”

We live in anxious times. Whether the current era is more anxiety-producing than frontier times, I don’t know. What is different is that presently we have much greater access to other people in times of stress.

With magic phones, tablets, computers, most of us can make contact with others instantly. The result?

We don’t learn how to build personal tolerance for anxiety. We don’t learn and we do not model how to simply sit with disappointment, anger, hurt, or even joy. I’m not suggesting a return to dial-up, only noting that in our child-focused times, parents are instantly available both as resources and as supervisors. parents have bought into seeing instant availability as being a good parent and any less as being a neglectful parent.

We don’t rush in taking our childrens’ problems away from them and making them our problems because we want to undercut our children’s resilience. We do it because we love them and want the very best life for them and we are anxious critters.

Real Life Example with Fake Names: Mr. and Mrs. C are in my office to address a serious marital issue. During the session, Mr. C receives a cell phone call. He indicates it’s his childrenm, thus he must answer. He and the caller talk back and forth a few times. Then Mr. C turns to Mrs. C and reports on the fight over the television going on back at home. Mrs. C takes the phone and speaks to each of the three children twice until she senses the battle has been resoved, at least for the moment. Their children, like most, do not live on isolated farms without communication devices, but have strings of numbers to call and neighborhoods loaded with adults glad to help in an emergency. I’m wondering what would have happened had the parents turned off their phones, trusted their children could work out whatever came up, and focused on the issue at hand.

Consider the following dilemma:   It is two in the morning when a loud thunderstorm breaks over the city. A frightened child calls for her mother who shows up immediately. The experience is new to the child, we’d expect her to be anxious.

Mother number one hugs the child and says, “It’s a thunderstorm. You are safe because I am here with you.”

Mother number two hugs the child and says, “It’s a thunderstorm. You are safe because when you are inside a house, thunderstorms are not dangerous. Sure, there’s lightening, and that can be dangerous if you are outside, and loud noise, but that’s all there is to thunderstorms. Did you ever think what would happen to all the animals in the forest if it never stormed?”

Next:  “The Intoxicated Babysitter and the Third Graders.” More on what happens to us as adults if we have not developed the capacity to tolerate anxiety and find our own solutions. Or even try to find our own solutions.

Chameleon. Stress Management Through Changing Colors

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Chameleon, Blending with Environment to Calm Anxiety
Dateline: Chili’s International Branch Office

The Woman Who Didn’t Know If She Liked French Fries went on– from our midnight burgers during my second year of college—to a lifetime of confusion and efforts to find her ‘self’ through other people. And though I tried to mold her myself that fateful night, the WWDKILFF continued to choose only men to form her ‘self’ against. Remember lack of ‘self’ is demonstrated by the inability to define oneself (her), and the inability to leave other people alone and running their own lives (me).

Think of the WWDKILFF as hot wax and men as molds at the ready.

The man she was leaving that fateful night she met at a country club party. He was 17 years older than her, wealthy, worldly, and dashing. WWDKILFF, uncomfortable at the university and not knowing what she wanted to study, became a country club wife. She traded generic beer for martinis and Manhattans, jeans for cocktail dresses, the casual look of poor students for regular visits to the manicurist, the personal trainer, the dermatologist, hair stylist, and personal shopper.

After the cocktail circuit, WWDKILFF returned to college where she met a charismatic protestor who headed up an organization opposing government military expenditures. She quit college again and traded her cocktail ways for old jeans, saggy T-shirts, vegetarianism, and pot. Now vehemently anti-materialistic, she cut ties with her middle-class family. The next time I heard from her she was standing in line at the free clinic in Houston to receive no-cost pills to treat gonorrhea.

Next she met a cowboy. Since I showed horses, she called thinking I’d be delighted with the news that she was learning to ride and rope. She traded her protestor ways for boots, and saddles, expensive beer, T-bone steaks, and thrill rides.

At our tenth high school reunion I learned that the WWDKILFF was now married to a man who sold life insurance and owned his own company. She’d traded her cowboy ways to take care of a big house in the suburbs, two kids, a maid, and twice weekly visits to her psychiatrist.

Stress, Anxiety, and All the Pretty Little Drinks, Part 1

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Stress, Anxiety, and All the Pretty Little Drinks

“Thinking for Yourself” Therapy on Someone Else’s Dime

Dateline: Mi Terra Restaurante, San Antonio.  Davy Crockett died down the street not that many blocks in Fall of the Alamo.  (Played in the latest remake by Billy Bob Thornton who delivered the one good line in the movie.  As the Mexicans held him up to be shot, he shouted, “I gotta warn you, I’m a screamer!” ) The remains of the Alamo dead are in a vault a few blocks at Flores and Commerce in the San Fernando Cathedral.

Group Think versus Thinking for Yourself is a tricky proposition because it is much easier to run with our emotions when we are anxious.

A.E. Houseman:  “Most problems can be solved by three minutes of thought. The difficulty is that thinking is hard, and three minutes is a long time.”

When is thinking for yourself, breaking the mold, merely not taking responsibility for paying your way? What about the free thinker who rants about everyone else selling out to
“the man” but who is perfectly willing for you to pick up every check?

The Stress Multiplying Anxiety-Driven Mind of the Adolescent

What about when we were teens, excusing our over-the-top emotionally driven choices on our valiant effort to grow up and become independent. Of course, what we meant by “independent” was to decide our own curfew.  To our parents, our use of the word “independent” meant we were planning to someday pay our own way in the world. Excited by the thought of a time when they could return to lives of their own, our parents fell for our speeches.

Which is good, because each of us benefits learning the hard way during those years .  (Billy the Kid was only 18 years old when he killed his first man.)  Speaking as a proponent of Bowen theory therapy, the teenager who questions and goofs, is less scary than one who goes all the way through without ever putting his or her opinion to the test. (Did you know that, at one time, the credit card company sent the actual carbon of every use to the cardholder with the statement?  I learned this at the breakfast table when my father pulled one such carbon out of his pocket and asked, “Barbara, you want to tell me what you were doing in Eagle Pass just across the border from Piedras Negras?)

Stress Management…Manana

As I roll yet another fluffy tortilla with queso and mochahete salsa, and contemplate the “thinking for self” dilemma….—Stop what you’re doing just for a moment. Ask yourself, “Why am I hurrying to get to the next thing?  What makes me believe that I will be more able to be happy at some future time than I am able to be happy now?”—

See?  There’s all sorts of therapy, all sorts of ways to calm anxiety.  Okay, back to the mochahete, queso and freeloaders spending someone else’s money and calling their efforts “self defining.”  Oops, too late for the Pretty Little Drinks tale of how the decisions made by a couple of young teens….unsupervised lounging around a pool at the fabulous old Mocambo Hotel in Vera Cruz, Mexico….. with no vision of the future… came back to haunt them.

For now, as I stagger dripping and over-heated down Commerce Street, I’ll call up the breezes of the Pretty Little Drinks afternoon….Leaving the unfortunate tale of consequences till manana.

Who’s In Charge of You?

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Dateline:  San Jose Cabo Hilton Branch International Headquarters.  The “Hotel California” of Eagles fame is just up the road.

What if you made some New Year’s Resolutions that could actually make a difference in your next 365 days?  All this image talk now is to introduce a way of thinking about New Year’s Resolutions. It’ll be fun. You haven’t made these sorts of resolutions before.

Set-up:  How much of your precious resources go to self-defeating attempts to manage anxiety? How much time do you devote to worrying?  Trying to guess the future?  Overdoing?  

How much of your time, energy, and money goes into Pseudo Self (the image we present to the world) and how much goes into Basic Self (the basic beliefs about being human that direct our decisions)?  If this is new, search the site for Pseudo and Basic Self. 

Travel note:  Yes.  The branch office here in paradise is populated by people living the Designer Dream. (See previous post.) How do I know?  We both know it isn’t that hard to tell, but the dead giveaway for me was the preferred method of claiming your chaise.  Aha!  See even the phrase “claiming your chaise” gives the place away. Those of us living the American Delusion and who have siblings…know that a seat is claimed by yelling “Dibs!” and interlopers are dumped out onto the sand. Not so here in paradise.  Around the infinity pools, all along the cliffs over the Sea of Cortes…are chaise lounges with deep cushioned mattresses.  When you choose one, a white clad helper steps up and covers your chaise with a huge towel. You sit down and he brings you a cushion roll for your lumbar region and two more towels. If the weather is coolish…the towels are heated. The unspoken rule is, if you see a magazine, sunglasses, or any evidence that the chaise has been claimed, you are to choose another. 

Why do I suspect my wealth management account is below the average of those sunning around me?  The most common items I see holding chaises?  I-Phones. I-Pads. Blackberrys, and we’re not talking last month’s models.  Probably Hilton should establish a policy designed to limit which hotels can be used to cash in Honors Points.  For example, if you got caught dropping bagels from the buffet into your computer bag, say at the Las Vegas Hilton, you are not allowed to cash in your points at a luxurious resort. I mark my chaise by leaving one of my special person’s philosophy books. I may look a bit out of place in the over-stuffed cargo shorts, but it’s because I’m into Plato and above worrying about details of reality.

“Which is more important? The world, other people, and the you that actually exists? Or the world, other people, and the you, you are responding to?”

How can a person change the world she is responding to? Not easy. Hundreds of publications every month promise that the only way to change what goes on inside our head is to change other people’s reaction to us. Talk about a hopeless theory!  But it does sell magazines. The first self-help book I ever read, I bought in the grocery store as a sixth grader.  It was written by a plastic surgeon who was interested in why women who invested money and risked surgery to improve their faces always gave “improve my self-esteem” as the top reason for the venture.  And, yet, after surgery, with the expected improvements in place…his patients did not report improved self-esteem. This was true even when the surgery had been to correct a disfiguring deformity. So what’s that about? 

This is big. If working yourself into a daily froth toning the body, buying expensive cosmetics, and sacrificing for trendy clothes…like the plastic surgeon’s improved faces…don’t result in improved self esteem?… What now?

Note: Remember the danger of automatic dualistic, either-or thinking. Suggesting that the route to greater self esteem does not result from having an admired body, a better dressed, better coiffed, better detailed body…does not translate into “all these efforts are not worthwhile.” Come on, people, feeling healthy and strong and having nice clothes and lush fine-running cars are good things…a BMW or a size 2 rear are not bad things…just not cures for depression, fear, and anxiety.  If there was a pill I could take and have twiggy arms I’d swallow it right down.  Someone wants to give me a new car…well, I should be home in a few days, just park that baby outside of the left garage.

Why will it be difficult to accept New Year’s Resolutions that could actually make a difference but do not cost anything? Because being happy here…living the dream…is presented as a lifestyle which includes expensive objects…a lifestyle which engenders envy and maybe even insecurities in those who do not have the goods.

Man in my office upset because his fiance has split. “I don’t understand what changed. I told her, we were going to have the perfect marriage. The red BMW convertible and everything!”

Okay, this is noon on the last day of 2010.  So…make a list of all the events you need to worry about and get going…

 

The Wife Who Wouldn’t Stop Picking Pepperoni Off Her Pizza

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Dateline:  American Airlines Flight 813 Austin to Los Angeles.

The Big Lesson:  The Need to Be Right, Part Two…Disagreement can FEEL like SEPARATENESS or Emotional Distance.  Our efforts to prove ourselves right and others wrong, launched to reduce anxiety, end up causing greater anxiety and just what we didn’t want…Emotional Distance….Lovers looking forward to an evening together can disagree over which route to take to a party can end up with staying the night in separate quarters…the opposite of what they both wanted.   

Set-up: The young married couple, both graduate students, came into the University Health Center because their once pleasant evenings together had recently degenerated into arguments and distance.  Asked for an example, the husband offered up the pizza problem. 

One treat affordable on their limited budget was ordering in a pizza a couple of times a week. Sounds like a delightful evening, right?  What could go wrong? 

Here’s the problem as the husband explained it:  “We usually order one large pepperoni.  Then, my wife, who really prefers plain cheese pizza, sits there and picks the pepperoni off her side…which I think is messy and ridiculous.  Why doesn’t she order half pepperoni and half cheese?  The cost would be the same and she wouldn’t have to sit there picking off the pepperoni…I think she doesn’t order a half pepperoni, half cheese because she has a problem being assertive.”  (Oh?  Then this little repeated reasoning helps with the assertiveness problem, right?)

Here’s the problem the way the wife explained it:  “The reason I don’t order a half and half is because I might want some pepperoni one time and I don’t mind picking it off.  I think he gets all bent out of shape because he has impulse problems just like his mother and, since sometimes I don’t eat all of my half, he won’t be able to resist eating what I’ve left…then he’ll start in on how his weight problem is all my fault.”

Now careful…resist the urge to get bogged down trying to figure out who is right and who is wrong. The problem isn’t about who is right and who is wrong.  The problem is the way anxiety is handled.  The problem is, when our always vulnerable Pseudo Self is challenged, we can go crazy.  And our Pseudo Self, built to sway the way others see us, gets “challenged” pretty darn easily.   

Our Pseudo Self doesn’t need a disagreement with our Special Person to go crazy….drivers not doing our biding or airlines switching from tidy foil packs of peanuts to these little packs of cheap pretzels that splatter crap everywhere when you open them…are enough to rattle some people’s Pseudo Self cage.

We are, however, most vulnerable to those closest to us. One feature of better emotional functioning is the capacity to tolerate the choices of those close to us without a rather desperate urge to change them….or at least convince them they are wrong.  If we fail in convincing them they are wrong, our next move is usually to contact someone who we know will agree with us….

If this sounds like your psychotherapist…run.  Because…while bolstering our sagging self by finding agreement…we have distanced from our loved ones and let the urge to rid ourselves of current anxiety control our actions so that even more anxiety awaits. 

Not that some issues shouldn’t be addressed or the world is going all to heck. I complained loudly to the flight attendant about this pretzels boondoggle…I know she can’t do anything about it…but the strangers in my row know I’m no idiot…And I’m not the only one who’s taken all they are going to take from the airlines…Just to prove it, I’m going to survey my fellow passengers on this underhanded substitution of these salty sticks over the protein we travelers so desperately need…I’ll write up my complaint and send it to the CEO of American Airlines…We’ll just see whose right on this peanut-pretzel issue!…So what if I don’t finish the 50 pages of editing I’d planned to wrap up on this flight.  American Airlines is wrong and something must be done about it!

Next:  The Couple Who Counted Ice Cubes.  On Being Right, Part 3

….Then on to The Sunburned Chap in the Fisherman’s Hat Who Moved a Mountain to Prove He Was Right.

Depression: A Serious Moment for the Unlucky in Life

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Dateline:  The Franciscan Restaurant, San Francisco, CA

Today I learned that another person I’d seen in the past gave up and gave in to the promise of escape through substances.   I’d written the following before receiving the news.

At least once a year, I take time to remember the struggles of people for whom every day, every hour is a struggle.  A struggle to keep depression from winning completely.  I know thousands die of hunger every day and slavery exists and people struggle with all sorts health-threatening and life-ending traumas.  But all that being true doesn’t take away the fact that depression is a real thing.  All that doesn’t take away the need to recognize and appreciate the struggles and efforts of those we know who fight the beast.

I’ve had three suicides in my practice and one in my family.  I wasn’t seeing any of the three in my practice at the time of the overdose and the two gunshots, but each of them passed by my way and we’d tried.  I’d fought with them for a while against the darkness.  I’d done the best I knew how and each of them tried much harder.  Each tried every medication, every method, and every wild possibility.

One morning I’ll never forget….In my blithering way I commented to one of the above, “What a great day.  The winter was worth it for a morning like this.”  The sad one said, “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Dr. DeShong.  I don’t see any of what you’re seeing.  And not just this morning.  Not ever.  Or at least not ever that I can remember.”

I remember, too, the pretty student who was repulsed by her own body.  Knowing I attended university basketball games, she asked me, “What do you think about during the play?”  I’m sure my face lit up as I said, “All of it, the big plays, the guys who are really trying, the competition…and I get into the refs when they make lousy calls…“  She let me ramble on, then said.  “What I’m trying to tell you is that when I go to a basketball game all I can think about is the food available at the concessions.  That’s it.  And all my life experiences are the same horrible way.”

All things considered, I’m not sure how well I ever understood what the world looked like to them.  I was blessed to have been born to an incredibly positive mother, one of eight in a Tennessee mountain family.  Once, having just spent a weekend with one of my well-heeled equestrian buddies, I asked my mother if she ever longed for more than she had.  She’d patted my knee and looked at me like I was crazy.  “Oh, no,” she said.  “To have a nice house, this wonderful family, my job as a teacher…if I’d known I’d have all this when I was a kid…wow.”

I remember another moment happening when I was around thirteen.  I’d sat down next to my mother on the couch and noticed the hairs on her calves were about a quarter of an inch long.  “Oh, mother,” I’d wailed. “How can you let yourself go like that?”  She’d put her arm around me and laughed.  “Someday, my dear,” she’d said, “you’ll understand, and things like keeping your legs shaved won’t matter so much.”

I’m lucky to have had the parents I did including their genetics.  But I am not saying if the four I’ve known who’ve suicided had the same mother they wouldn’t have been depressed.  I don’t know all that goes into that kind of depression.  No one does.  I just know that at least once a year…I want to remember and respect how hard they each one tried.  I want to remind myself and whoever will listen…that life is not equally easy to live…and certainly not equally easy to enjoy.