Category: Uncategorized
Not So Fast
I’m not sure I have anything useful to add when it comes to discussing the extra-marital affairs of Tiger Woods. The whole wide world has been writing and talking about him, and I will say I am now officially bored. (I’d rather talk about actor Meredith Baxter, Alex Keaton’s “Mom” on sit-com Family Ties, who disclosed the same day Tiger came clean, that she is now officially out as a lesbian. She was afraid to talk on national TV, but did it anyway with Matt Lauer on the Today Show. It turns out she got overshadowed in the media by Tiger’s failures, and I’ll bet she is glad, glad, glad!)
Three observations about affairs, though:
1. Affairs are not about sex. They’re about chronic anxiety, and people taking that anxious energy out of the marriage (triangling), creating a new relationship that they believe can soothe or contain their emotional muddy water. Affairs don’t and can’t.
2. It’s very difficult to repair a marriage after a partner stomps all over the intimacy. And that is because affairs are secrets. Intimacy is about clarity, vulnerability and emotional trust; it dies with secrets. Getting that trust back is something only about 50% of the couples who seek therapy after affairs achieve.
3. Affairs are a bit like emotional barometers; they often indicate that a couple’s emotional system is stressed and broken. Each partner owns a part of that problem. While the “fault” lies with the one who does the cheating, the repair must come from each partner, looking at his/her own emotional life, and working on the parts they can improve.
We live in a culture that so distorts sexuality it is used to sell everything from cars to bath soap, phones to teen music videos. Why are we so surprised when someone who makes his living by that media culture acts out sexually? We have a part in Tiger’s mess. And it’s not just that we have put him on a pedestal and are dying to watch him fall. We have made this sexualized culture, and this is how many people in it dysfunction.
Instincts and Drives: Powerful Stuff
Human beings regularly ignore the fact that we are mammals: warm-blooded, live-birthing animals who share a lot of DNA with beings as diverse as chimpanzees and elephants.
When it comes to thinking, we win, hands down. At least, most of the time. But we often forget how deeply we are designed to do certain things, like eat, sleep, defend, or mate.
The deer in this photo is dead. It killed itself by head-butting a 640 lb. bronze elk statue in a Wisconsin backyard. In the rutting season, deer will defend territory, attempting to secure mating rights and sending the less powerful males on to other acreage.
I post it because I found it an astonishing image. Mammals, driven by the powerful brain chemicals of hormones, will do a lot of strange things. Like head-butting a statue to death.
Research proves again and again that human beings underestimate the power of instinct and arousal on their own behavior. This one fact of mammalian biology may help us understand why we keep doing what we do, despite our own good intentions: eat more than we should; pressure another into sexual activity despite our more clear-headed promises; start fights when cooler heads should prevail; rest or play when we should work.
It’s not quite the Animal Kingdom in our heads, but at times, it can come close. How does remembering that you have powerful animal instincts change, concern or alert you to your own humanity? It’s worth pondering. (I’ve been wondering about people with brain or thought disorders, and whether they can truly be held accountable for some of their most anti-social behaviors…)
Wherever your conclusions about instincts and arousal patterns, thinking is the one thing you have going for you that this unfortunate, driven deer did not.
Photo Credit: Mark Brye, via La Crosse (WI) Tribune
Secondary Trauma
Lord, have mercy.
We have endured another mass shooting in our nation, this time on a military base. It will take time to sort out the details of this horrible crime, but we are impatient to know: was this an act of terrorism? The shooter is a Muslim, and some have reported that he shouted to Allah as he fired his weapons. There will be a good deal to learn of this man in the weeks ahead.
Of great interest to me: he is a psychiatrist who worked with soldiers suffering with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Mental health professionals of all kinds who regularly work with trauma survivors often find that hour after hour of listening to people recount horror is traumatizing. Without regular and systematic debriefing of their own work, therapists lose their own resilience and begin to suffer a secondary PTSD. They begin to show symptoms of chronic anxiety, restlessness, easy startle reflex, difficulty sleeping, intrusive images of trauma, and hypervigilance in the same way soldiers returning from battle can.
I wonder if this doctor, whose healing work helped soldiers return to their lives after battle, was waging a private battle of his own with nightmares, fears and overwhelming anxiety. Would he have been able or willing to share that suffering with others in the military? How are these fears linked to his natural anxieties about being deployed to the battle zone? Are there systems in place to have therapists working in PTSD debrief and consult with others about their cases and experiences?
Helping others recover mental health is not work for the faint of heart and mind. The very best healers understand that they are naturally effected by what they hear, and need help for their own pain. Perhaps this tragedy will highlight the continuing true costs of war: that the horrors of destroying others in battle don’t stop at a nation’s border. War is hell, and it exacts a toll far wider than we can imagine.
Oh God: hear our prayer.