960912 — Dear Dr. Joe: My teen-ager is acting strange. He used to be outgoing, but is now almost a hermit in his room-that is, when he's not hanging around with a group of boys I don't approve of. He used to be on the honor roll, but now he's barely passing. I suspect drugs, but he won't let me get him tested. — Worried Single Mom

Dear WSM: There could be other causes, but drug use would be my first guess. Luckily, there are still some rights that haven't been stripped from parents. Whether or not he likes it, you are in control of your son, and the authorities will back you up. Bill Fleharty, Youth Supervisor at Tehama Co. Probation, says that you can make your son get tested, either by your family doctor, or else, if your son really puts up a struggle, by people at Probation, who'll watch him to make sure he does it.

If your son absolutely refuses to do it, you can have him declared out of control, and he will come under the jurisdiction of the courts. You may have to pay court costs, if you are able, but this is a small price to pay compared to his future if he continues on his present path.

Red Bluff HS Counselor Ted Pollster once told me "the most important choice a kid makes in entering high school is who he's going to hang [around] with." Parents, you must know your child's friends and their parents! And you must establish good communication in your family.

 If you have trouble taking charge of your son, try parenting classes by either Barbara Sebastian (see Parents Guidance in the Yellow Pages) or Judy Tarkington at Tehama County Mental Health, both good.

If you have one, talk to your pastor. And if things still don't fall into line, try psychotherapy.

Remember Dr. Joe's three rules of child rearing: supervision, supervision, supervision (with apologies to real estate people). Idle hands are, indeed, the Devil's playground.

[Editor's note: we hope you will write Dr. Busey with both questions and responses to previous questions. Perhaps Ann and Abby could learn something from the modes and morals of Tehama County.]

 

 

960919 — Dear Dr. Joe: My wife and I have differing views on telephone manners. She answers the phone with "Hello," while I say, "Smith's residence." What is your view? — Mr. X, Corning

Dear X: First, I think most phone manners are atrocious, which goes right along with today's manners in general, which are the stuff of The Simpsons instead of The Cleavers or The Nelsons.

One needs to look at the function of manners, why we have them at all. (Even animals have some semblance of manners.)

Manners supply the grease for the inevitable friction of social relations; people are bound sometimes to rub each other the wrong way, and, as any outdoorsman knows, too much unlubricated rubbing starts fires.

The telephone has given people a way to be anonymous, so they often use home manners rather than public manners since they are not held accountable by the social pressure of face-to-face interaction.

Unless your phone number is unlisted and you need the privacy, I think it is most polite to answer "Smith's residence" or "John Smith speaking," rather than just "Hullo!"

But then it is up to the caller to identify himself before saying anything else, such as "This is Pocahontas calling for Mrs. Smith. May I talk to her, please?"

After all, you wouldn't just go up to someone on the street and start asking questions without identifying yourself first. So why should you do the same on the phone?

Also, if you start out being open, the chances are the other party will be less defensive, too, especially if it is someone you don't know very well.

Children (and many adults) need to be trained in how to take a message, especially how to write it down and then read it back to the caller to ascertain it is correct.

You can immediately tell the quality of the household and parenting by the way children answer the phone. Good breeding is a joy to behold. Bad manners are and deserve a hang-up.

 

960926 — Dear Dr. Joe: For those who missed my radio interview with you last Saturday on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD], please give a synopsis. This is especially needed for Vietnam Vets — Dr. William Covi, Sacramento VA.

Dear Dr. Bill: Glad to oblige, though I don't think I can do it the justice that you did. But you're right, it is important, not only for combat veterans, but for anyone who's had a severe life-altering experience, be it rape, kidnapping, or any other situation where one is forced into high stress and must cope with it, think about it, and function continually under it.

Auto accidents don't usually count, for they're over very quickly and one has little, if no, control over them. In combat, on the other hand, one is forced to perform under high stress, even terror, just as kidnapping and many rape victims have to do, also.

According to Dr. Covi's theory, once the continual stress reaches a certain level, pre-programmed learning experiences occur, much as if a switch were flipped to a brand new circuit of behavior.

The person then becomes feral, which means wild, or 'discivilized' (from the Latin for wild animal). Feral people are different from others — not sick, just different.

Just as wild wolves are different from tame dogs, their 'radars' are switched on all the time at high power to warn of danger, and they are either at full alert or full rest, with no intermediate or moderate settings.

This helps to explain why such people often shun sports and other competitive activities. For them, simple competition takes on a life-and-death significance which they'd rather avoid.

In addition to this feral 'otherness' or differentness, PTSD people often experience recurrent memories, floodings of feeling, nightmares, and flashbacks (uncontrolled vivid re-livings).

The different existence level and the troubled mental state often combine to give maladaptive behavior patterns as the feral try to cope with our unferal society.

It's no wonder that so many PTSD people become loners or seek only their own kind.

Fortunately, there is some effective treatment; vets can call the VA for help, and mental health professionals are learning how to treat PTSD for other victims.

 

961003 — Dear Dr. Joe: My wife wants me to help out more at home, to do some housework and take care of the kids. I work long, hard hours and want to relax as much as possible in my time off. So who's right? — Anonymous. (And yes, this was a real question.)

Dear Anon: If your wife works outside the house, then must come home to cook, clean, and take care of the kids, she has a valid gripe and you need to shut off the TV and start helping.

The two of you need to make an honest evaluation of the time you spend at home: how much is contributing to the welfare of the family and how much is hobby, rest, or play time. It seems to me that fairness dictates that each of you have an equal amount of free time just for yourself.

If your wife is cooking and you're fixing your weekend motorcycle, then she's working and you're just puttering. (If you ride the bike to work and need it to run properly, then that's different.)

If she's in bed eating chocolates while you're doing the wash and vacuuming the rug, then maybe she's the lazy one.

The real determinant is whether ones activity is directly related to the economic and psychological health of the family. If it is, then it's work (though some of it hopefully will be pleasurable).

If your family has chosen to have the wife and mother work as a homemaker, then the same rules apply, but it might be harder to calculate the time equivalencies because mothering is not time-limited.

Here, it might be instructive for the two of you two change roles for awhile, if possible. Many husbands are humbled when they have to take complete care of the kids for a day or two, and some wives would do well to walk in their husbands' footsteps.

And, on the subject of working wives, a local accountant (who prefers not to be named) told me that many working wives, were they honestly to calculate all their expenses, would find they're working for a lot less than they think.

By the time you factor in new clothes, occasional restaurant lunches, perhaps a second car (at the real rate of 40-50 cents per mile), a second 7.65% Social Security deduction, child care, a higher tax bracket, and who knows what else, that $8 per hour job might really be just $4 or even $3.

Again, as in all parts of our lives, honest appraisals are vital.

 

961010 — Dear Dr. Joe: I've heard you both on the radio and in person say that you'd like to bring back shame to unwed pregnancies. Isn't that just old-fashioned bigotry? — Friend of the Single Girl

Dear Friend: Wow! Where do you want me to start? And by the way, you left out patriarchal, homophobic, and white male from your list of pejoratives.

I've come to believe the most pressing social problem in America today is the lack of fathers and fathering. David Blankenhorn wrote a book called Fatherless America that addressed these issues, and he was my guest on KBLF. (You can get a tape of that show for a small fee .)

But even before that book was a gleam in David's eye, I was noticing this problem-as were many other people. Liberal Senator Patrick Moynihan got in big trouble for pointing out the high rate of illegitimacy among Blacks.

Now, many years later, the rate for Whites is where it was for Blacks then, and Blacks now have something like a 60-70 percent rate of fatherlessness.

This is a national tragedy. A girl without a father is an inviting target for the young (and old) male sexual predator. Just promise her love and you can have your way.

And by the way, it is the 20- and 30-year-olds who lead the way in impregnating these emotionally wounded, grown-up-too-soon, girl-women who need to be children, not have them.

A boy without a father is even more horrifying. He is prime gang-bait, and without the controlling influence of a closely-bonded older man, he is an accident waiting to happen, a crime waiting to be committed, or a talent wasted without a mentor.

Our society is slowly being predated upon by lawless (fatherless) young males. Turned off by school, their job prospects are nil, and violence is their only avenue to self-esteem and feeling good.

So you bet I want to bring back shame. It was the controlling factor that stopped many a sexual mistake before it started, that made a marriage out of an unplanned pregnancy (not all of these end in divorce), that gave a baby up for adoption and hence a much better chance in the world.

And yes, I know that some fatherless kids fare very well, and I'm happy for that small percent of them that do. But I grieve deeply for the rest of them — and for us.

(continued next week)

 

961017 — (continued from last week) I've had several comments and phone calls about last week's column on the need to bring back shame, or some other controls, over unwed pregnancies that lead to long-term fatherless families.

All were favorable, but what I didn't get was the expected laments: "Why don't you have compassion for single mothers," or "What are you going to do, just cut off their welfare?"

My conservative heart aches for single mothers and their families. In some cases, they make good adjustments and are relatively happy, but all too often they live in poverty and unhappiness.

The no- or low-fee portion of my caseload is usually overbooked with such people, for they need help and cannot afford it.

The stresses are monumental. Just look at women who plan their lives so they can be stay-at-home moms as their husbands work outside. With the best of all worlds, they are stressed to the max.

Even more so with the mom who cannot fill her cupboard, even with food stamps, who must try to find a doctor to take MediCare, who must buck the welfare lines and starve the last days of each month waiting for new benefits.

(I've had both welfare recipients and welfare workers tell me how dehumanizing the welfare experience can be. Each can tell horror stories about the other .)

What, you say, would I have these women do, cross their legs? Yes, that's a start.

Too much of sex is looking for love in the wrong places, or the release of frustration, or the aftermath of drugs. As a matter of fact, I routinely counsel women (and men) to avoid physical intimacy until they are married, or at least engaged with a firm date set for the wedding.

In this day and age, it sounds old fashioned and harsh. But it works. Ladies, if you want to see what a man is made of, then raise your standards and don't sell yourself cheaply. Tell him you don't believe in sex before marriage.

If he even bothers to call again, you might find what you're really looking for, deep down.

Readers, have compassion for those who have made mistakes, and help them overcome them. But don't let society encourage those same mistakes over and over, generation unto generation.

 

961024 — Dear Dr. Joe: My wife and I are agonizing over what to do about my mother. Now that my father and his influence have passed away, she clearly favors my brother, his wife, and his children. For example, she ignored my wife's and kids' birthdays this year (though she remembered all my brother's family), and she's made a point of inviting his family to Arizona for Christmas, but not mine. My wife says, "Write her off, she's history," but I find this hard to do. After all, she is family, and my kids don't have any more grandparents or aunts or uncles. — Concerned in Corning.

Dear Concerned: I tend to side with your wife. I think that if it were just I, with no family, that I would try hard to overlook my mother's shunning of me. But when it concerns my own family, they come first.

I'm not sure I'd want to subject my wife and kids to the sort of subtle and not-so-subtle barbs and thorns such a person exudes.

Certainly, she is acting out her own pain and displeasure at something, perhaps some slight, real or imagined, that she thinks you or your family have given her.

If you haven't already tried, it wouldn't hurt to approach her directly about her displeasure. It might even pay to visit her and go with her to a counselor for a session or two.

But if she still keeps it up, I'd let her know in no uncertain terms that her behavior is unacceptable, and that if she didn't change, you'd cease all contact.

Although she might not ever get the message, make sure you tell her your actions are not punishment, but simply a way of protecting your own family.

Then, go about finding a substitute family. As you know, I favor church/temple/fellowship as a way of finding good people who can be perhaps more "true family" than ones flesh and blood.

Find another family or two that has no grandparents or close relatives and cultivate them. (My own "true family" is in the Bay Area, where six or seven families have met together for Christmas, Easter, July 4th, and Thanksgiving going on 20 years (25 years for three of us, and 30 for two of us).

As you can see, I don't hold for blood family over everything. What do you readers think?

 

961031 — Dear Dr. Joe: Several weeks ago you wrote about pre-marital sex and said that it was OK if a firm date for a wedding had been set. As a Christian mother, I must protest. God's standards are not to be compromised. — A Mom.

Dear Mom: You and I agree about God's standards, but not all (and perhaps not many) of the readers are orthodox Christians.

I was trying to give a rationale for abstinence that does not cite God as the source so that non-believers or other-believers could see the common sense in postponing sex until marriage (or, until a firm commitment is made).

During the 70s, the argument was made by many psychologists and other professionals that a trial run at marriage was a better plan than waiting. After all, they argued, one could find out if there were sexual incompatibility before it was too late.

(Now we can see the folly of that type of thinking as it's been found that people who lived together (with sex) before marriage divorce more readily than those who waited. And even the divorced agree that for the most part, divorce is not a good thing.)

More than one person has argued that those pontificating professionals were merely self-serving because they needed to rationalize their own sexual excesses.

Author E. Michael Jones (a former radio guest) wrote a book called Degenerate Moderns, in which he argues that intellectual Modernity, which he equates with post-Christianity, posits its theories merely to justify the sexual appetites of its apostles.

He cites Freud's long-time affair with his sister-in-law and Picasso's many affairs which reflect in his styles of painting.

Sexual intercourse opens doors in a relationship that can never be closed, and intimacy that comes too fast, too soon, can blow a fledgling relationship out of the water. Most people cannot handle the vulnerability of instant intimacy, so they unconsciously sabotage the new relationship.

Or, they build the relationship out of sex — and not much else.

Courtship (a forgotten art) should be a gradual lowering of defenses to avoid this overwhelming of the personality and to build a relationship on the solid ground of respect, not the shifting sands of all-too-fickle passion.

The hallmark of maturity is the ability to postpone gratification.

 

961114 — Dear Readers: My apologies to those of you who looked in vain for this column last week.

On Wednesday morning I suddenly gasped and realized I had totally forgotten to prepare it; the irony was, I had a great question, too. (You'll probably read about it here next week; it's on sexual harrassment in the workplace.)

I called Tehama Trader editor Ed Fogde and caught myself starting to make a lame excuse, something about the election and a late night throwing me off.

But then my old Army training took over. ("Yes, sir! No, sir! No excuse, sir!") I really had no excuse. So, I just said, "Ed, I blew it." As always, he was gracious.

 I'm embarrassed that I even started to make an excuse. All of us blow it once in a while, and the mature person just admits it and goes on. Someday I'll get there....

I've had too many failures in this area, but a great success was when, in San Francisco, I had a patient drive all the way up from Fresno only to have me forget all about him as I was running an errand.

When I got back just before the start of the next hour and saw him waiting in the driveway, my stomach sank to the soles of my feet. Not knowing what else to do, I just blurted out, "I messed up. Your next session's on me — if you even want to come back."

Five years later, at the end of a successful long-term treatment, he told me that I had said the only possible thing to keep him from seeking help elsewhere.

"When you admitted you were human, I knew I could eventually trust you," he said. That trust set him free.

A wise man once define maturity as the ability to learn from ones mistakes. This, of course, presupposes that one makes mistakes, and, of course, we all do. After all, why, in most professions, do we call it practice?

A favorite story of mine (I think I saw it in The Reader's Digest) concerned Pablo Casals, the world-renowned cellist.

In his mid-90s, he was practicing four hours a day! "Master," asked an admirer, "why do you practice so much at your age?"

"Because," came the answer with a twinkle in his eye, "I think I'm finally starting to get somewhere." What a great lesson!

 

961121 — Dear Dr. Joe: I finally got a good job, not an easy trick for this area, but there's this guy at work who keeps following me around wanting to talk. I tried to tell him I'm not interested (he's not my type, even if he weren't so pushy), but he's started to call me at home. I'm scared that if I make waves, I'll lose my job, and he's a bit spooky, too. What if he won't let me alone? — Helpless at Work.

Dear HW: First of all, you're not helpless, so get out of that mindset. That is how a victim feels, and in doing so, she emits all sorts of cues, like fear or skittishness, that keep the predator coming.

(Remember, the wolf culls out the young and the weak from the herd. He leaves the strong alone, especially those who look like they might be able to harm him.)

Report this immediately to your superior at work. And, if you think there's even the slightest reason your immediate superior won't take action, go to a high-level official at the company.

Believe me, they will be very happy you came to them. Sexual harassment lawsuits are very costly and are being won with increasing frequency.

(If you report harassment and they don't help you, you might end up owning the company!)

And make no mistake, this is sexual harassment. Now, there's nothing wrong with a guy showing a gal interest at work, especially if it's done tastefully and without any psychological force or coercion.

Many a solid marriage has started at the work place by good-natured flirting which is reciprocated.

The key here is reciprocation. Any man will tell you, if he be honest, that the woman controls the relationship, at least at the beginning of courtship.

 One sees this in nature, too, where the female must be receptive, and must exhibit it, in order for the male to advance further.

Unfortunately, in an ironic turn of events, all-too-often the nicer guys are too scared to read the cues (assuming the gal knows how to subtly show her interest).

So the nice guys don't approach close enough, and the insensitive ones fill the void. They tend to read positive cues where there are none or misread negative cues.

They need an "attitude adjustment," which can usually be delivered by the boss or someone with power over the harasser.

(Next week: But he won't quit!)

 

961128 — Harassing into Stalking: Last week, we talked about ways to discourage sexual harassment on the job (or at school, etc.).

But what if he doesn't quit? (And it usually is a man doing it.) It doesn't take too much to progress from harassment to stalking.

According to material faxed to me by Sgt. Wiley of the Red Bluff Police Dept., stalking is thus defined by the Calif. Penal Code:

 "Any person who willfully, maliciously, and repeatedly follows or harasses another person and who makes a credible threat with the intent to place that person in reasonable fear for his or her safety, or the safety of his or her immediate family."

Stalkers prey on every age group, even school children. And crazy as it seems, victims, even the smartest, often feel responsible.

According to Roe Roberts, Director of Alternatives to Violence (528-0226) if someone thinks she's being harassed or stalked, she should contact Alternatives to Violence (Domestic Crisis Services also has similar services).

There, people who have experience, often hard-won at personal cost, with harassers, stalkers, and other crud-balls can help prepare temporary restraining orders and other legal devices to help bring some sanity back to your life.

Roe faxed me Fact Sheet #14 from the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse at the Center for Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego.

It details the California law against stalking and gives background material. Then it lists a number of tips victims can use, such as having private (not USPS) post office boxes, Caller ID, avoiding calling 800 and 900 numbers, avoiding using your middle initial, not using your home address when subscribing to magazines, and keeping a detailed log of the stalker's actions.

But it really frosts me that one has to go to such lengths. My daughter's only four, but when I project what might happen 10, 15, or 20 years from now, I can work up a good heat.

My first impulse is that I, or a hireling, would stalk the stalker and "talk some sense into him."

 Of course it's dangerous, for who knows what such a person might do. Also, any court official or law officer will tell you not to take the law in your own hands for a variety of good reasons.

So what would you do?

 

961205 — Dear Dr. Joe: I recently had surgery for breast cancer, and Thank God, it went well. I am in a support group and feel well taken care of. My problem is not my own reaction to my disease and disfigurement, but others' reactions. Some of my old friends just seem to have faded away. If I see them at the grocery or at church, they just seem to keep their distance. It's like they're avoiding me but not admitting to themselves that's what they're doing. How does one get them to stop doing it? — Patty the Pariah

Dear Pariah Patty: My first thought is to take the bull by the horns, so to speak. The next time a friend sort of ducks back behind the produce counter, go right up to her and say, "I've missed seeing you. How are you?"

If she seems comfortable enough to talk, carry on a conversation and let her know how valuable her friendship has been. (Though don't guilt-trip her.)

Most people go through their own psychological changes when a close friend or loved one gets seriously ill.

It calls into question our own mortality and frailness, and most of us have unresolved issues with that. (When we finally get that sick or frail — that's when we'll do the psychological work on those issues. And by the way, hospices really help us do that.)

Also, we may be afraid of how we'll react around the sick friend: will we get upset or scared? will we find we don't feel as deeply we thought we might (calling into question the depth of the friendship)?

The remedy for most of us is to confront our fears and go visit our friends who are sick or hurting. We should talk to them about our feelings, and then listen to theirs.

And if they don't want to talk about feelings, then honor that request and just gossip a spell. People who are sick feel alienated from normal human beings, and what they really need is deep, soul-to-soul contact with us.

To the person lying in the hospital bed, or home in a wheelchair, the 15-minute visit from an old friend might make their whole day.

After all, you can count the holes in the acoustical tile ceiling only so many times. . . .

 

961212 — Dear Dr. Joe: My daughter has always been able to talk to me about anything. Now she has had several bad marriages, and one more is going on the rocks. How could this happen when her father and I have raised her properly? Also, now she is calling me all the time and I'm starting to resent it, though I feel too guilty to tell her to stop. — Corning Mother

Dear Corning Mom: Let's start with the phone calls. It seems you're "enabling" her, which is fancy talk for what we call "co-dependent" behavior (check out all the fancy buzz words we use).

Co-dependent means ones life and identity are so thoroughly mixed-up with another's that the first's input is needed — no, required — for the second to live his life and make his decisions. In turn, the second's input gives back to the first something he apparently feels he can't live without.

 So, two people are hooked together in a way that is not pleasing to either, yet neither can see any way out. The classic co-dependency joke: when you are dying, the other person's life, not yours, flashes in front or your eyes.

Here, it might be that you've unwittingly helped set it up where your daughter feels she cannot function without your input. (Of course, this may not be the case, but let me make a teaching point.)

The way out of this mess is to stop talking with her so much and refuse to give her advice. She has to make it on her own, and if she keeps draining off her sadness and anger on you, without really getting rid of it, she'll never make her own decisions and learn to stand up for herself. So, she'll keep stumbling.

Recommend she get to psychotherapy or counseling. If she can't afford private sessions, have her call Tehama Co. Mental Health or the Family Service Agency. Sometimes Greenville Rancheria helps.

Then, limit your calls to and from her, perhaps to 3 or 4 a day, with a 5-10 minute maximum on each. You can tell her when she calls, "I'll have to get off the phone in 10 minutes," so when the time comes, you can remind her you have to go. Then hang up.

This is a tough-love type approach; unless she stands on her own, she'll drag you down, too.

How could this kettle of fish have happened when she was raised "properly"? Tune in next week.

 

961219 — (Continued from last week: how can a child who was raised "properly" get into so much trouble that "tough love" seems the only option?)

First of all, what does one mean by proper? For some, it means there is no leeway from a strict set of guidelines. For others, it means lots of love and little discipline. For me, it means a synergy of warmth and limits, the latter because of the former.

(Nowhere in my many years of psychology studies have I ever heard of love defined other than as an emotion. Yet in the Bible, love is a verb, an action that has to do with sacrifices of one for another.)

Psychologist Diana Baumrind has written of three styles of child rearing: authoritarian, laissez-faire, and authoritative.

Authoritarian parents value rules and adherence to them above all else. Their children are usually well-behaved — and stifled, though they can do an about face and act out against authority in an apparent show of total freedom (though it is no such thing).

Laissez-faire parents think any rules are totally stifling, so their children are without the guidance of absolutes. Although seemingly footloose and fancy free, such children are often anxious at the core and may act out their anger at being cast adrift in a valueless sea.

A good book about this phenomenon is by Midge Decter and is entitled, if my memory serves me, Liberal Parents, Radical Kids.

Here, the anger of non-parented or a-parented children rises to destroy the society in which they grew up.

Authoritative parents set firm rules that relax as the child shows he can handle the world about him.

Many parents are in later years reaping what they sowed. The lament of a parent that her child does not keep in contact can mean that the child was only too glad to be able to get away from home.

In general, kids from a warm, loving home stay in touch, no matter where their lives take them.

But, not all behavior is totally determined by prior psychological circumstances. Children also have free will, and some, for reasons that often seem, and probably are, totally inexplicable, screw up their lives royally.

Some sons just decide to become prodigal, and all we can do is pray that they repent and return.

 

961226 — Dear Dr. Joe: I've heard that business for shrinks picks up during the holidays. What's your take on that? — Curious Charles

Dear C.C.: I've never noticed a big upswing in my own clientele over the holidays, but it seems to be a truism that such happens, probably more to public clinics than to private practitioners.

I certainly remember many years when I was alone and how hard the holidays could be, especially since most of my friends had their own families.

On Christmas Day, for example, I could make it until about 5 p.m., at which time I'd seen so much of my God-children and others that my own loneliness kicked into overdrive and I had to leave before I got totally depressed.

Luckily, most of my friends had been through the same feelings, themselves, so no one gave me grief about leaving or tried to force me to stay (through guilt).

I think the biggest need for those who dread the holidays is to be able to take care of themselves in the best way possible.

For some, that means being around a lot of people all the time. For others, it may mean being alone, or just with a few friends.

Taking yourself out to a nice meal and a fun movie can chase the blues, too, as can a nice fire and a book, or a hot bath.

 Religious services can make you feel lonelier, but that's only if you don't participate whole-heartedly. Also, most churches have some sort of social time after services.

My absolute best advice to avoid being lonely is to volunteer somewhere. Volunteering, giving from your heart, is the quickest way I know to fill yourself to overflowing. Since others' needs become paramount, you don't have time to be sad or lonely.

The happiest people I know have the heart of a servant. To paraphrase the Good Book, if you want to be first, strive to be last.

After all, the King of Kings washed other people's feet, a dirty, smelly job usually relegated to the lowest-seniority slave.

Try the Salvation Army or the Lord's Table (which serves hot food to the homeless). The Vineyard Church is also in the forefront of service, as is Sacred Heart, the Red Bluff Catholic parish.

Remember, holiday originally meant holy day. As an orthodox believing Christian friend of mine once said, "No one is ever lonely if he truly knows Jesus."

 

970102 — A Paean to The County

At this change of the years, I realize I have passed the 5-year mark living in Tehama County —only 45 years left before I’m not a newcomer.

How many times have I heard, from both people in the Bay Area and locally, “But why Red Bluff?”

My reasons have not changed since my wife and I decided to end our tenure there: mine, 25 years of a San Francisco office with home in Marin County (and brief stays in the Presidio with the Army, in Menlo Park, and in the City); hers, a lifetime in the East Bay.

We knew we had to escape the Bay Area. I was tired of the Bay Area psychological mentality, the traffice was horrific, and we wanted to start a family.

We started looking in Mariposa during the worst fog on record in the Central Valley. So, we traveled north on Highway 89 and visited all the foothill towns.

We soon decided we wanted flat land (after all, our house in San Rafael was on a 30-degree slope, which made weed-eating a pain).

So we started looking an hour from San Francisco. Everywhere, the prices were outrageous and people said, “You should have come here two years ago.”

Vacaville turned out to be a commuter city for both San Francisco and Sacramento. Napa and Sonoma were expensively out of the question. Davis was ultra-liberal.

The U.S. 101 corridor is a commute to San Francisco even up past Santa Rosa, and then the road gets bad.

Since I was going to overlap my practices for several years, I needed a good, safe route to San Francisco, and Interstate 5 to the north seemed the best bet.

We looked at Chico, and then Redding, but both were too super-saturated with shrinks and seemed too big for us. (My wife had lived on farmland in Danville, and I had grown up in a town the size of Los Molinos.)

Finally, we decided to drive up to Red Bluff. Taking Antelope west across the river, we saw the twin spires of Sacred Heart and the old movie theater. It actually looked like a town, not some spread-out suburban amoeba.

We ate at the Golden Corral and actually saw a family praying before their meal. That cinced it, except for one thing — so we took a trip up here in the middle of July.

 

970109 — A Paean to The County

At this change of the years, I realize I have passed the 5-year mark living in Tehama County —only 45 years left before I’m not an upstart newcomer.

How many times have I heard, from both people in the Bay Area and locally, “But why Red Bluff?”

My reasons have not changed since my wife and I decided to end our tenure there: mine, 25 years of a San Francisco office with home in Marin County (and brief stays in the Presidio with the Army, in Menlo Park, and in the City); hers, a lifetime in the East Bay.

We knew we had to escape the Bay Area. I was tired of the San Francisco/Berkeley psychological mentality, the traffic was horrific, and we wanted to start a family.

We started looking at places an hour from San Francisco. But everywhere, prices were outrageous and people said, “You should have come here two years ago.”

Vacaville turned out to be a commuter city for both San Francisco and Sacramento. Napa and Sonoma were expensively out of the question. Davis was ultra-liberal.

The U.S. 101 corridor is bumper-to-bumper all the way to San Francisco, even up past Santa Rosa, and then the road gets two-laned.

Since I was going to overlap my practices for several years, I needed a good, safe route to San Francisco, and Interstate 5 to the north seemed the best bet.

We looked at Chico, and then Redding, but both were too super-saturated with shrinks and seemed too big for us. (My wife had lived on farmland in Danville, and I had grown up in a tiny Illinois farm town.)

Finally, we decided to drive up to Red Bluff. Taking Antelope west across the river, we saw the twin spires of Sacred Heart and the marquee of the movie theater. It actually looked like a town, not some spread-out suburban amoeba.

The county was small, but it had all the amenities. One did not have to wait all day at the DMV, and there was a good hospital. Here, one could be part of a community.

We ate at the Golden Corral and actually saw a family praying before their meal. That cinched it, except for one thing—so we took a trip up here at the end of July and survived—even liked—the heat.

Our first afternoon here, after the movers had left, we spent more time talking to our neighbors than the preceding 5 years in San Rafael. That, in itself, justified our move.

 

970116 — Dear Dr. Joe: What actually is “counseling” as opposed to ”psychotherapy,” who does it, and how do you find a good practitioner? —Judy from Red Bluff.

Dear Judy: Technically, counseling means to advise, whereas psychotherapy, in the original Freudian sense, never gave advice, but rather helped the patient probe his own psychological blind spots to see clearly enough to make his own decisions (though sometimes, and Woody Allen comes to mind, many years of treatment seem to add to a person’s neurosis).

But counseling and psychotherapy shade into each other so much that the difference is almost meaningless. Counseling has the connotation of being a lighter, less sophisticated form of treatment.

Indeed, some purists claim that it is not even treatment. And the more powerfully-licensed groups (such as psychiatrists and psychologists), have sometimes gotten laws passed to prevent less-powerful groups (such as marriage and family counselors) from using the term psychotherapy to describe their work.

As an aside, the whole mental health field is, as any human endeavor, a microcosm of the human condition (frailty, foibles, fatuity —in other words, pride and ego).

MDs are at the top of the pecking order, followed by the PhDs, the PsyDs, the MAs and MSs, and then the BAs and BSs. What really counts is the respective political power, in terms of contributions, of these respective groups. This determines the power of their licenses, and hence the amount of their income.

But I digress. After 30 years at this endeavor, I’ve found that the higher degrees might give a partial indication of higher competence. But in what’s known as the art and science of psychotherapy, the personal characteristics and the basic belief systems of the therapists are much more important factors.

I've known RNs (psychiatric nurses) and LCSWs (licensed clinical social workers) who are so good that MDs (psychiatrists) go to them. My own training therapist, the best body-therapist I found in the Bay Area, was a DC (chiropractor).

I know I've rambled, but I just had to get this off my chest. Such catharsis (or purging) is good for the soul and a basic tenet of much, though not all, psychotherapy.

In the coming weeks, I’ll address the various parts of Judy’s letter.

 

970123 — From last week: psychotherapy, counseling, practitioners, etc.

Continuing: The kinds of professionals who can legally do counseling are profuse (and that doesn’t even count the so-called “pirate therapists” who operate without a license because they call what they do something other than therapy).

At the top of the pecking order are the psychiatrists, who are MDs or DOs that have specialized in psychiatry. They spend four years in medical school, then a year of internship, then at least three years in a psychiatric residency.

If they can pass stringent tests, they become Board Certified, and if they’re eligible to take the test but haven’t yet (or haven’t passed it), they’re Board Eligible.

Some psychiatrists like to think that since they have longer training, they’re more able to handle all kinds of mental problems and should be in charge of everything.

To some extent, that may be true, but some psychologists like to counter that “a psychiatrist is a doctor who studies medicine, but doesn’t practice it, yet practices psychology without studying it.”

Because of their medical training, psychiatrists can prescribe medications and supervise electro-convulsive therapy (electroshock).

Psychologists are countering with a movement to get prescription privileges for themselves. The psychiatrists are up in arms over this, forecasting dire consequences of letting inadequately-trained people play with poisonous substances (medications).

What’s really at stake is economic turf, for the ability to prescribe gives a huge percentage increase in income.

(This doesn’t affect me too much, for by the time this comes to pass, I’ll probably be retired. Also, the family doctors and psychiatrists in this area have good working relationships with local therapists.)

Somewhat sorrowfully, the explosion of knowledge in the sciences has not only increased the amount of time a professional must spend in school, it has decreased the range of study across areas.

Since doctors of yore didn’t have huge texts of biochemistry and pharmacology, they studied a lot more philosophy, literature, and arts; hence, their education was broader.

With increasing specialization, our focus has narrowed so much that we study life, not living—the human animal, not the person.

 (to be continued next week)

 

970130 — Continuing: Last week, I talked about psychiatrists (MDs) and just touched on psychologists.

To call oneself a psychologist in the marketplace, one must be a Licensed Psychologist (the psychologists’ lobby has seen to that). That means a PhD or a PsyD (a newer degree, Doctor of Psychology, with less emphasis on classical education, foreign languages, and research).

There are some people in the north state who have PhDs in Clinical Psychology but have never taken the stringent exams to become licensed as a psychologist. Instead, they are careful not to call themselves psychologists, but hope you’ll infer that because of their degree (which may or may not be from a reputable school).

Most psychologists have four years of college and then four or five years of graduate school, plus a year’s internship. They are not allowed to work alone in private practice until they have two years supervised experience, one of which must be post-doctoral.

Like other mental health professionals, psychologists come in all shapes, sizes, sexes, colors, religions, and theoretical orientations. Their claim to fame, in bygone years, was an expertise in testing, in psychological assessment.

This is still one area in which most other mental health professions don’t have much training, but like other things, that is slowly changing.

After all, if it does not take an absolute genius to prescribe medications, then it does not take one to read a Rorschach (the “ink blot” test, the one with all the “crazy pictures”).

There are also Educational Psychologists with EdDs who work with schools and learning (though some can become Licensed Psychologists and treat patients).

School Psychologists generally have an MS or MA in psychology and work in schools, not out in private practice.

Private practitioners at the Masters level include Social Workers and MFCCs. More than Psychologists, Social Workers have an identity crisis with their degrees, for many social service jobs requiring just a BA have a job designation as “social worker.”

In the mental health field, Social Worker means an MSW, a Masters in Social Work, and even then, licensing requires much more.

 (to be continued next week)

 

970206 — From last week: psychotherapy, counseling, practitioners, etc.

Continuing: Last week, I talked about psychologists and just touched on MSWs and MFCCs.

Licensed Clinical Social Workers have a Masters degree in Social Work (MSW) plus advanced training and testing that allows them to work independently.

Originally, Social Workers dealt with social problems in living, placements, adoptions, and the like. They didn’t do therapy.

In the rigid caste system of the hospital, the lowest psychiatrist was paid more than the highest psychologist, and the lowest psychologist was paid more than the highest social worker.

It is still somewhat that way in the physician-controlled hospitals, but out in the real world, talent is allowed to rise to the top.

Tehama County's health chief is Carl Havener, MSW. I know Social Workers in San Francisco who make top dollar, and the ones we have up here are quite good.

In psychotherapy, the person, much more than the degree, is what counts in successful treatment. And in general, the more experience a person has, the more competent he is. Formal training is fine, up to a point, but we all know those with a plethora of schooling who have the bedside manner of a snake. . . .

The other Masters-level psychotherapists are MFCCs, which stands for Marriage, Family, and Child Counselor. This field was created about 25 years ago as much more a practitioner than a scholarly profession. (After all, doctor does mean teacher.)

MFCCs originally only needed a Master's degree after a BA, which meant one could take English in college, then go to a diploma mill for one year of touchy-feely courses, then get a degree and pass an easy test. (I knew people like that back in the Bay Area.)

Now, the requirements are quite stringent, rising to two years of post-graduate study, two full years of post-master’s experience, and a hard test to pass.

Psychiatric Nurses, RNs who have Masters Degrees and specialize in psychology, can also practice privately, as can various religious counselors, who usually don’t need state licenses. (I often tell people to try their pastor, first.)

 But if you take away nothing else, know that if you seek help, the person and his/her values are more important than the degree.

 

970213 — Dear Dr. Joe: I think my husband has a gambling problem and needs help. I want to save the marriage, for there won’t be any money left if he doesn’t stop. What should I do? — “Roxie at the Ranch.”

Dear Roxie: I went to the Internet (http://www.netramp.net/guy/20quest.html) to get Gamblers Anonymous 20 Questions:

1. Did you ever lose time from work due to gambling? 2. Has gambling ever made your home life unhappy? 3. Did gambling affect your reputation? 4. Have you ever felt remorse after gambling? 5. Did you ever gamble to get money with which to pay debts or otherwise solve financial difficulties?

6. Did gambling cause a decrease in your ambition or efficiency? 7. After losing, did you feel you must return as soon as possible and win back your losses? 8. After a win, did you have a strong urge to return and win more? 9. Did you often gamble until your last dollar was gone? 10. Did you ever borrow to finance your gambling?

11. Have you ever sold anything to finance gambling? 12. Were you reluctant to use gambling money for normal expenditures? 13. Did gambling make you careless of yourself or your family? 14. Do you ever gamble longer than you had planned? 15. Do you ever gamble to escape worry and trouble?

16. Have you ever committed or considered committing an illegal act to finance gambling? 17. Does gambling cause you to have difficulty sleeping? 18. Do arguments, disappointments, or frustrations cause you to gamble? 19. Do you have an urge to celebrate any good fortune by a few hours of gambling? 20. Have you ever considered self-destruction as a result of your gambling [i.e., killing yourself to pay for gambling debts].

Whew, what a list! One can contact Gamblers Anonymous at 800 522-4700 to get information and find a chapter near you.

The first step, Roxie, is to try to get your husband to read these 20 questions and answer them truthfully. Of course, he may not, and it may only start another argument.

If so, then the next step is your pastor/preacher/priest/rabbi. (I’ll have some quotes next week from local pastors of all breeds.)

If that doesn’t work, then try a marriage counselor, and if that doesn’t work, you might have to head for a lawyer or legal aid.

 

970220 — Gambling, cont.: Last week, I gave 20 questions from Gamblers Anonymous to help you realize if gambling were a problem to you and yours.

In the interim, I called and talked to people from many different religious persuasions about how their faiths treated gambling.

In general, all faith systems say that too much of anything is not good (or is sinful), and some of the so-called “stricter” faiths frown on any sort of gambling.

Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses don’t allow it, and gambling, per se, is not a big part of Jewish culture. Roman Catholics, of course, are famous for their bingo as a way of congregating people. Yet, too much gambling is a problem most priests rail against, too.

Retired Pastor Lynn Pace was quite adamant in his belief that gambling is a disease. When asked if $5 a week on the Lotto were sinful, he snorted: “It’s not sinful if you can afford it and it doesn’t take away from your family, but I think it’s sorta stupid.” Oops, I thought.

Pastor Pace, as have many other pastors, priests, rabbis, bishops, doctors, therapists, et cetera, sees people getting thoroughly hooked on wanting something for nothing.

In that sense, it’s a disease (though the whole notion of non-microbe conditions being “diseases” is problematical).

One of my ex-patients called me to remind me that he had once been very hooked on gambling. “I played the horses,” he said, “and the scary thing is, I never lost.”

He went on to say that what he meant was that no matter how much he literally lost, he never considered it to be an actual loss — perhaps just a “temporary setback,” but not a real loss.

Then, when everything crashed down around him and he had to declare bankruptcy and his wife almost left him, he finally had to confess he had a real problem.

“You can’t believe how good it felt when I finally had to say it,” he told me. (So do a lot of people.)

I, myself, wish gambling weren’t legalized and were hence held to a minimum. We’re becoming a national of gambler, and our national character is very, very tarnished. Also, I could save $5 per month.

Do you know there is a 9-member national gambling commission that the President and Rep. Gephart have literally loaded with gambling advocates. Have we come to the point where something for nothing feeds our spiritual hunger?

 

970227 — Dear Dr. Joe: Please discuss the concept of creative denial. — Former Patient.

Dear Former: Thanks for the input; I’m assuming that you were helped by this formulation.

Creative Denial is a concept that I think I originated, though with so many years of so much reading and talking, I probably read or heard it somewhere and fooled myself into thinking I was the first.

Denial is one of the most primitive psychological defenses, a structure of the mind erected to protect the ego (the self, the self-concept, the “I”).

(A primitive defense occurs in children or in regressed, or perhaps psychotic, adults. It’s not psychologically very complicated.)

Denial basically means just that, a denial of reality. I remember seeing a young girl during rounds in a hospital many years ago. She had survived a car crash in which she had seen her parents die.

She was talking cheerfully about her parents coming to see her and what they would do together when she got out of the hospital. When gently reminded her parents were dead, she stated emphatically, “You’re wrong,” and continued her prattling.

I never saw her again, so I’m not sure how she came to terms with their deaths. But at that time, the reality was so horrifying that she had to protect herself from it.

If she were still denying 25 years later, we might call her psychotic, for she undoubtedly would be having trouble with reality.

Creative Denial is a conscious process whereby we will ourselves to deny the reality of something so we can avoid discomfort but not distort our lives. (Psychosis is a type of distortion.)

We use creative denial when we're going 55 down Highway 99-E and a semi-trailer comes at us just two or three feet away. Or when we’re taking off in a jet.

If we continually focussed on the reality of the close danger, we'd dissolve in a puddle of fear and distress. Instead, we choose not to think of it.

Some theorists would call this suppression, as opposed to repression or denial. But it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that there are times when we have to not think about something, to purposefully put it out of our minds.

Marriages recovering from affairs (after confessions and forgiveness) must use this, as must anyone prone to obsessions.

 

970306 — Dear Dr. Joe: My son just broke up with what he thought was the love of his life, who dropped him for a good-looking guy who has absolutely nothing going for him except the mirror. He pines and mopes all the time. How can I convince him there are more fish in the sea? — Paynes Creek Mom.

Dear PC Mom: Ah, but does that bring back bittersweet memories! I remember at least twice being so smitten and overwhelmed, and then dropped from thousands of feet onto concrete.

It took me about six months each time to bounce back, which is just about the time one expects when grieving a big loss, such as death.

In a sense, losing a big relationship is much like a death, and the grieving process is much the same.

DABDA. That’s the acronym for the steps of grieving: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

Most people go through all the steps, but there’s no set formula for how long or how deep the steps are, or whether they have to come in order (though they usually do).

Denial — that it hasn’t happened. Anger — that the loved object has left. It can be irrational, as in a death, or rational, as when you’re jilted or jerked around.

Bargaining — sort of magical thinking, as “If I just go to church, God will bring her back,” or “Once he’s seen I’ve changed, he’ll come back.” Depression — self-explanatory: life loses its meaning.

Acceptance — when you’ve finally realize that life must go on, even though you may have a sad memory.

As the song says, “Without a hurt, the heart is hollow.” (“Try to Remember” from The Fantastiks)

Once the grieving process is fulfilled, fish magically start appearing. I don’t trust fish that show up during the first parts, for these are usually rebound relationships or manipulations to try to get at the offending party.

Fish come no matter what the age. After my mother died, my father lived in a retirement community; at 80, he got a younger girlfriend of 67. They spent mornings on the phone planning their evening, then, as always, ate dinner, had a highball, and played gin.

I’d never seen him happier, and I noticed there all sorts of widowed elderly folks behaving like teenagers in love, just moving slower, without the sexual frenzy.

 

970313 — Dear Dr. Joe: I’ve been on my new job for over a year, and I think I’m being discriminated against, perhaps because I’m not part of the Old Boys’ Network, or perhaps because I’m a woman doing what was traditionally men’s work. What do I do? — “Rosie the Riveter”

Dear RR: Ethnocentrism is alive and well and living in Paris, as well as New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, New Delhi, and Red Bluff.

Ethnos is the Greek word for a people or a nation, and centrism means “centered.” To be ethnocentric is to believe your group is better than others.

The Sioux called themselves the “human beings,” while others were lesser. Jews have the Gentiles and goyim, Yankees have the wetbacks, Hispanics have the gringos—and as the song goes, “Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch, and I don’t like anybody very much. . . .”

Cliques invariably form in any organization, some along party lines, some along sexist lines, some along longevity, etc. etc. etc.

No matter how hard you try to be fair and neutral, someone somewhere won’t like your style. Sometimes people don’t like you because you’re fair and neutral.

(Psychologist Wilhelm Reich talked about the “emotional plague,” which means that some people just hate “goodness.” He gives the book, Billy Budd, as a good example. More on this phenomenon at another time. . . .)

But now to your problem at hand, your perception of being singled out for mistreatment and discrimination.

Whenever one senses this is happening, he should start documenting incidents, including names, dates, times, and witnesses. Write it all down in a book you keep at home in a secure place.

Then, once you think a pattern has emerged, transfer your workbook into a concise argument (attorneys call these things briefs, even though they usually aren’t).

Give an opening statement of what you think is wrong, then list each argument in your favor, then present a paragraph expounding each point. Finally, summarize.

After you've made several rough drafts, look closely at the final one. If you think your arguments are convincing, take your paper to a state employment official or to an attorney who specializes in employment. The time and money you spend will be well worth it.

 

970320 — Dear Dr. Joe: Help! Every time I go to my doctor I get tongue-tied and feel he is just lecturing to me and then pushing me out the door. I never get my questions answered, but he’s a good doctor who I don’t want to give up. — Patty Patient

Dear PP: First of all, let’s not put all the blame on your doc. Most physicians I know are quite concerned about their patients’ total health, though, of course, there are always some with “the bedside manner of a brown snake” (as one tangy elderly lady once told me).

Many of the more newly trained docs take courses in learning to listen to patients, both to the salient presenting problems, and to the oft-hidden reasons underneath the office visit.

(It’s been estimated that from 50-70% of general office visits aren’t needed, and this is one of the arguments we psychotherapists use to plead our case to insurance companies: Good psychotherapy cuts down on other medical costs.)

Of course, the doctor with the good bedside manner is an effective psychotherapist, as well. Some are just born to it, others must train themselves. Some just don’t have it but manage to survive in practice, anyway.

Some doctors schedule appointments too close together (perhaps trying to make more money or just give more services). If enough people griped enough about having to wait too long — or else took their business elsewhere — then maybe those docs would get the message and loosen up.

But there’s another side, too. Docs must take emergency patients, and some must even deliver babies. (If so, then their office policies should clearly state that to prospective patients.)

And some people just don’t bother to show for appointments without phoning or canceling. But back to the question.

I suggest you take a pen and paper to your appointment, along with a list of previously-prepared questions. If the doc sidesteps an issue, then pin him (or her) down. If there’s a word you don’t understand, ask him to spell it so you can look it up later. Then do so.

Most doctors I know welcome this approach, for it means you’re becoming responsible for your own health. Of course, if you do it to embarrass the doc or get at him, then he naturally will react in kind.

But if your motives are good, the response will probably be so, also.

 

970327 — The Meaning of Easter: With apologies to local pastors, I’d like to make an apology (in the theological sense) for my own faith.

I am a “born-again” Christian, but I don’t bring this to my work other than it being a part of me. (I don’t require my patients to believe in anything, and I help them clarify their own religious views only if such will help their treatment, which it often does.)

My understanding of orthodox Christianity incorporates five fundamentals of the faith: (1) Creation: that God made the universe, us included, and that His creation (and creatures) are always separate and disparate from the Creator. We cannot be a part of God.

(2) Providence: that unlike the Deists, I believe God is currently active in His creation. God is not dead, nor did He go on vacation.

(3) Original Sin: the sin of Adam (and Eve) was to disobey God and try to become like Him, or even part of Him. Their fall from grace ensured mankind would be born with a sinful nature, i.e., man’s compass will always drift off course if he tries to get his bearings on his own, without an Absolute Guide.

It’s not that we’re born good and must be taught to be bad, but quite the opposite. This is what most modern liberals cannot swallow.

(4) Redemption: Jesus Christ, both man and God at the same time, came to redeem mankind by his own propitiatory (look it up) blood sacrifice. His death was a momentary splitting away from God, which was the terrible price he paid for us. But by paying that price, He redeemed anyone—anyone—who would truly believe in Him.

(5) Revelation: (a) General Revelation, as explained by Paul in Romans, is God showing Himself to us by His handiwork in the world. (b) Special Revelation is the God-breathed, divinely-inspired and human-written Holy Scriptures.

Easter, then, signifies God’s giving us another chance. (Christ is sometimes called the Second Adam.) By believing, we are freed from the Penalty of sin (eternal death), freed from the Power of sin (as one “walks the walk” of sanctification, growing more “Christ-like”), and freed from the Presence of sin—not in this “fallen,” sinful world, but in the one to come.

 

970403 — Dear Dr. Joe: Here’s a quick one. What’s the difference between neurosis and psychosis? And is one more dangerous than the other? — Los Molinos gal.

Dear LMG: This is perhaps not as simple as it sounds, but I’ll try to make it so, anyway.

As a wise man once said, there are internal and external problems. The external problems are called life and the internal problems are called neuroses [plural of neurosis]. Psychosis is when one is out of touch with conventional reality.

By definition, neurosis means abnormal condition of the nerves (from the Greek neuron, meaning string, sinew and osis, meaning process, often abnormal).

In standard depth-psychology theory (à la Freud, Jung, etc.) neurosis is an internal suffering caused by excess anxiety, which itself is the warning signal that strongly-repressed, intense feelings are trying to break through to the surface.

If the feelings can break through without scaring the tar out of the person, then “cure” is obtained. But for most of us, we still repress some of our feelings.

If there are no psychological defenses against the anxiety, then we have an anxiety neurosis, or panic state, or various phobias such as agoraphobia (literally, fear of the market place or any open place).

Some people like to make very fancy names for all kinds of phobias, but this is probably a neurosis in itself, if not just intellectual arrogance. (Shrink­dom is full of such.)

When the anxiety is “bound up,” psychological defenses occur, such as repression (hiding a thought deep in the unconscious mind), reaction formation (doing or feeling the opposite of what is really felt underneath), or projection (finding the mote in someone else’s eye and overlooking the plank in yours).

All this takes a lot of mental energy (and physical energy as well). Hence, neurotic people tend to be long-suffering and often complaining rather than doing something about their complaining. It's hard for them to live with themselves or with others (for example, Woody Allen and his problems, both in real life and in film).

In fairness, all of us have unresolved internal problems, so we’re all neurotic to some extent. But some are surely more so than others, and it’s no picnic for them.

(continued next week)

 

970410 — From last week: (What’s the difference between neurosis and psychosis? And is one more dangerous than the other?)

Another old joke with some sense of truth: a neurotic person builds castles in the clouds; a psychotic person lives in them.

Neurotic people tend to be sufferers (and I don’t mean that unkindly). In most, if not all cases, their problems arose from incomplete bonding or less-than-adequate attachment to the original love object.

Wow! How’s that for psychiatric gobbledygook. Buzz, buzz, buzz them words!

What that means is, they weren’t loved deeply and fully enough. This is one of my theoretical gripes with day care, for it’s rare that anyone will love your child as much as you, yourself.

As Urie Brofenbrenner, a Cornel Univ. psychologist has said, every child needs to feel prized, to know that one person in the world thinks he is the cat’s meow.

(In case you take umbrage at my use of he instead of he/she or the alternating he and she, know that I follow the old rules of English composition, whereby the masculine third person is used inclusively — buzz, buzz — to mean both genders, unless stated otherwise.)

But, somehow, in this imperfect (dare I say fallen) world, no one gets enough love, and even if you are the perfect loving parent, your child doesn’t always accept it.

So we can't just go blaming the parents without looking at other things, as well.

This is not to say, however, that some parents are just so unable to love that they raise kids who are lucky not to be psychotic, let alone neurotic or anti-social.

When parents cannot or will not respond to the hurt and pain in their children that just comes from living, those children will stuff that pain and become neurotic, or fight that pain and be anti-social.

As another wag has said, its not what you do to a child that makes him neurotic, it’s how you prevent his natural responses. (Next week, what causes emotion-stuffing.)

 

970417 — From last week: (What’s the difference between neurosis and psychosis? And is one more dangerous than the other?)

Emotion stuffing is another name for repression or suppression. (Repression generally means an unconscious—out of awareness—process of forgetting, while suppression is an act of will, of consciously putting something out of your mind.)

Emotional expression is both a means of communication, externally, and a way of balancing brain functions, internally. The emotional part of the brain, the paleocortex and limbic system, lies in-between the higher brain, the thinking cortex, and the lower brain, the automotatic, regulatory part.

Some call this the tripartite brain, with human, mammalian, and lower animal functions, respectively. (Note that emotions are mammalian; as any animal lover knows, mammals have emotional lives, but not snakes or toads.)

Emotional expression is a natural part of our lives, and if we don’t express naturally-occurring feelings, pressure builds up. (Often, my patients will talk about The Pressure, with capital letters.)

Using what we call a “hydraulic model,” we think of the pressure having to find an outlet, and that outlet can be neurotic symptoms such as I discussed last week.

Sometimes, people can stuff emotions and seemingly not suffer much, if any harm. But for most of us, damage will be done and it will come back to haunt us later on in life.

(Just think of all the problems one who’s been sexually molested as a child has when married and/or trying to form a sexual relationship. Or the person who’s been browbeaten all his life and now must show initiative on the job.)

It’s not uncommon to find people who’ve not cried for 30 years and who, when given the proper conditions, can finally let go like full-lunged babies—although doing such usually is quite scary.

Neurosis, then, can be equated with the lack of genuine emotional expression (to distinguish it from those who express too much emotionality, inappropriately, and are neurotic from the other side of the coin, the so-called “hysterics.”

The way out of neurosis is to learn to express feelings fully and appropriately, and to change ones life to situations that honor and accept human emotions.

 

970424 — Ongoing: (What’s the difference between neurosis and psychosis? And is one more dangerous than the other?)

Psychosis is usually what people mean when they say mental illness. Psychosis literally means, from the Greek, a disease or abnormal condition of the mind or the soul.

In psychosis, a person loses touch with conventional reality, and/or his mind fragments and becomes disconnected.

Most theorists today believe that the psychoses have a physical basis, either from a genetic predisposition interacting with environmental stress (see the newest issue of U.S. News & World Report), or from a chemical or substance that gets in the body (like drugs).

Being blindly drunk is a toxic psychosis, where a poison, too much alcohol, creates a psychotic state. Getting the toxin out of the system usually gets things back to normal—most of the time.

But more and more, we’re seeing drugs, such as methamphetamine, which alter the brain chemistry and seem to make long-term effects that may take a year or more off the drug to get the person back to normal, with sometimes no return ticket available.

The two biggest categories of non-drug-induced psychosis are Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder (the old manic-depressive).

Schizophrenia, from the Greek “split mind,” is more a condition of slitting off from reality, of retreating into a fantasy world.

The classical definition of this disorder is known as the “4 A’s”: problems with thought associations (putting ideas together that don’t make sense or are outright bizarre), with affect (the fancy word for feelings, which often are blunted or inappropriate), with ambivalence (simultaneous attraction/repulsion), and with autism (excessive escape into ones own fantasy world).

By far, most schizophrenic people are harmless, but if stressed and pushed too far, a few can lose their controls and act impulsively.

Luckily, newer medications help the brain rebalance a chemical (a neurotransmitter) called dopamine, and many schizophrenic people can live close-to-normal lives.

(We have local meetings of the Alliance for the Mentally Ill. See the Daily News or call me for the phone number.)

(next week, Bipolar Disorder)

 

This is the Recreation Issue (5/9) of the Tehama Trader Plus, and those who know me will not be surprised that I first went to the dictionary, for language is a uniquely human ability, and the etymology, or root of language can tell us a lot.

(Etymology = etymon, neuter of etymos, true; + logos, words.)

Recreation is pretty easy: re, again, + creation, to bring forth, to grow, to produce. It’s often conjoined with relaxation, from the Latin laxus, loose or slack. That’s how we get R and R.

So, one needs to “get loose again” and produce something, usually a fresh state of mind and a willingness to again tackle the vagaries and vicissitudes of living in a body that constantly grows older.

(No matter how young my state of mind maintains itself, I can’t avoid looking in the mirror or feeling the aches after racketball.)

Relaxation doesn’t have to be exercise, though as is known by better men (and women) than I, the cool-down after a good workout is a luscious feeling, just like “breaking the wall” and releasing endorphins when doing aerobics.

Most people don’t get nearly enough exercise and end up like the old clunker that one drives around town and never takes out on the freeway. Hence, tubes rust out, pistons stick, and all-to-often a major overhaul is needed.

I often tell depressed people that if they’d just walk half an hour per day, they’d feel a lot better.

(Most of them cannot bring themselves to do that, for their depression is rooted in something deeper than a mere lack of exercise. Were it only so simple as that!)

But walking is a start (along with plenty of water). The real trick is to use the Philosopher’s Stone to turn exercise into recreation, at least for those who need more movement in their lives.

For those who don’t, recreation can be just about anything one wants, so long as it leaves one refreshed, renewed, relaxed, and all those other re’s.

But above all, it should be fun. Enjoyment nurtures the soul, and a nurtured soul respects and cares for the body it inhabits.

Beware the dour fellow who recreates like a trooper yet cannot have any fun doing it. Avoid him like the plague, for just as his body probably doesn’t have an ounce of fat, neither does his soul.

And after all, a little fat is what gives flavor to things.

 

970501 — Ongoing: (What’s the difference between neurosis and psychosis? And is one more dangerous than the other?)

Bipolar Disorder is the other big category of psychosis besides schizophrenia. Bipolar is the new word for the old Manic-Depressive Disorder.

Actually, Bipolar Disorder is a subset of Mood Disorders, which include Major Depression, Dysthymia (the old Depressive Neurosis), Bipolar I Disorder and Bipolar II Disorder.

Wow! What a mouthful!

What it means is that instead of having a disorder of thinking, such as schizophrenia, some people have a disorder of mood, and the intensity of such a disorder may lead to psychosis, being out of touch with reality.

Major Depression is just that, BIG depression, where the person sinks so low he sometimes literally cannot eat or sleep right. Some people with this disorder can be suicidal, too.

(As an aside, if someone you know is thinking of killing himself, always take it seriously. Call a private counselor or Tehama County Mental Health. It’s better to be safe than sorry.

Also, if a person has been suicidal and then suddenly becomes cheerful, that can be a most dangerous sign, for it can mean he has finally decided to kill himself. So the pressure’s off and he feels good because the decision’s made.)

Bipolar Disorder can be manic, depressive, or cyclical, which means first one, then the other. There are many gradations in between, too.

Manic means revved, high, tweaking, whatever words you wish to put to someone who goes for days at a time without coming down to sleep. (This is much like a person on methamphetamine, a chemical mania.)

One young lady of epic proportions walked from one end of a valley town to the other, completely nude, happy as a lark. Someone finally called the police (after she’d finished her jaunt).

She told me she’d never felt better in her life, till she crashed into a long depression, only to rise again. This is the cyclical type, and she was psychotic in that she was out of touch with reality—she could have been raped or abducted, but she never thought about it.

Luckily, there are a variety of medications to help control this.

 

970508 — Ongoing: (the last of 6 columns on mental illness.)

Medications are wonder drugs, but not panaceas. Minor tranquilizers, such as Librium and Valium, helped people with the vagaries of life many years ago. But of course, Valium, the wonder drug, was found to be quite addictive with lots of side effects.

Now for the minor mental health situations (which don’t always seem minor to the patient), we have safer medications with fewer side effects, such as Prozac, Paxil, Serzone, Xanax, and Buspar.

Only the druggists know, and they’re not telling how many people in this town take Paxil or it’s cousins. I’ll bet it’s an extremely high percentage, perhaps close to 20% or more.

For the more major conditions, it’s fashionable nowadays to talk about chemical imbalance, whatever that is. (I say that because, like nervous breakdown, it’s a lay term that doesn’t have much meaning to the professional.)

Probably what most people mean by chemical imbalance is a slight genetic problem, either congenital or later-developing, that changes the condition or amount of neurotransmitters, those chemical messengers in the brain.

Such conditions may well be like late-onset diabetes, where the body finally reacts to stress and/or some genetic message and stops making a required substance.

It’s now assumed that schizophrenia comes from lack of, or an imbalance of the neurotransmitter called dopamine. This is because medications that seem to fix the dopamine problem are found to aid schizophrenia symptoms.

But as anyone who’s close with schizophrenic persons knows, the medication is not a cure, but a palliative. The condition is still there, just under more control.

Lithium salts have helped manic-depressive people for a long time, but these meds are physiologically active and potentially unsafe.

Someone found that certain medications for seizures, such as Depakote, helped such patients, who by this time are known as people with Bipolar I disorder.

But no one knows exactly why, just that they do help. The problem is the mind/brain dichotomy. Is the mind nothing more than a bunch of chemicals causing neurons to fire in patterns?

Or are we much more than that?

 

970515 — Dear Dr. Joe: I’ve heard you speak disparagingly about managed care and HMOs. They do save me a lot of money, so they can’t be all that bad. Please comment and be balanced. — Gal Who’s Shopping for Medical Insurance.

Dear Gal Who: HMOs, or Health Management Organizations, are modeled on the Kaiser systems in California.

The basic idea of an HMO is that by good management, medical costs are kept down. And to some extent, that’s true.

But to the jaundiced eye (and mea culpa) the savings on treatment are all-too-often eaten up by administrative costs, by management salaries, by advertising, and by paring down patient care.

The HMO side would say that more people can now get treatment because they can afford it.

The anti-HMO side would point to the laws now in place that prevent HMOs from rewarding primary care physicians with pay bonuses for not referring patients on for more costly tests and care.

(True, in this day and age, many docs practice defensive medicine, for rare is the doctor who is not at least threatened with a lawsuit during his career. And cutting down the defense can save money.)

The mere fact that many HMOs tried to bribe primary care doctors impugns their professed motives of thinking about the patient first.

HMO execs love to say that docs will always want to give good care, no matter how much their profits are cut.

This is meant to put docs on the defensive, for what doc wants to say publicly that he will give care of less quality if he is paid less?

Yet how many of you would work as hard if your pay were cut by 10-30 percent? At the least, you might lose some interest.

On the other hand, medical insurance, the original handmaiden of physicians, insured that medical care was compensated above the true market value (what people would pay out of their own pocket).

Not many docs starve, but I like to ask HMO types how much money they make. (It’s rumored that Foundation Health’s CEO gets more than $7 million.)

But back to basics: you get what you pay for, and if you pay less, you’ll get less in terms of inconvenience, loss of choice, and reduced levels of care (usually still safe).

(more on this next week)

 

970522 — Managed Care and HMOs, continued: Yes, Managed Care does save some money for the consumer, but the price one pays is loss of freedom over choice of doctors and treatment.

One company just sent me a notice that they’re putting out a new product (for that’s how they see health care) which is an HMO that lets you see whatever doctor you wish without a primary doctor referral. So, they are responding to consumer pressure, but I’ll want to know how much they pay us.

Psychologists are fewer and have a lesser lobby than physicians, so we always get our payments cut first, and some HMOs cut them so much that I, for one, either have stopped taking those patients or else have had to severely limit how many I take (for they now have unwittingly become “low fee,” high-overhead patients).

Let me give some examples from the HMO that covers county employees, Foundation Health. The most egregious one was when I got a call from a physician in Redding, who wanted me to see a patient in crisis who was suicidal.

I got the call on the weekend and saw the person that same weekend (for crises take preference over family time). The doctor’s office got the necessary referral paperwork to me two days later.

When I filed for payment I was denied because the date of referral was not prior to the date of treatment (even though the referral had been by phone). I was told somewhat haughtily, “You must have a referral before you see the patient.”

Well, I finally found out I could appeal, and after having to write a long letter, several months later I was paid 1/4 of my regular fee. (This HMO only allows me 1/2 my usual fee, with the patient having to pay 1/2 of that.)

The patient never paid his share. So, I got 1/4 of my regular fee for working on a Sunday, but since I needed several hours of paperwork to get paid, I actually got $25 for 3 hours of my professional time. (My overhead runs $35-40/hour.)

This same HMO is famous for sending back incomplete paperwork, like the time I should have added a two-digit number to a patient’s SSN. (They could have looked it up on their computer and just added it, themselves, but they sent it back as “incomplete.”)

I’ll be glad to print reprisals or defenses by this HMO or others.

(more on this next week)

 

970529 — Managed Care and HMOs, continued: One of the problems with HMOs as opposed to PPOs [preferred provider organizations] is that you cannot always choose the particular doctor you want.

Some very good, competent docs and therapists choose to work for the lesser money offered by HMOs in exchange for a steady flow of patients (and sometimes horrendous paperwork). But some people of, shall we say, lesser talent can end up on the provider lists.

I heard of one outfit that brought in a group of lesser-trained and lower-degreed personnel to undercut the journeyman professionals who refused to work for lesser pay.

All this is perfectly legal, but you can bet the slick promotional ads of the managed care businesses will not tell you this. Instead, they’ll trumpet that all their people are “qualified,” which means licensed and therefore at least a minimum of competence.

Again, it’s up to you to scope out who’s more than just competent. This isn’t easy, but you can ask around or even ask the doctor’s or therapist’s office to send you a résumé (or curriculum vitae).

If you’re lucky enough to know a professional in the community, you might discreetly ask him or her.

One gal I know was impressed by a fairly cheap dental care package on an HMO until I had her call to find out which dentists were enrolled in the plan.

Then she discovered that she’d have to go to Redding. I pointed out that driving a 60-mile round trip at a true cost of perhaps 40 cents/mile would add $24 to every visit.

Another gal living in Cottonwood wanted to see me, but her primary doctor was in Redding, and he could only refer her to a therapist who was on a list for the Redding area (where the allowed fee is only 60% of my normal fee).

If she used a Red Bluff primary doctor, the same insurance would pay for my services at a rate higher than in Redding, but she’d have to change her primary doctor, a man who’s known her family forever.

These are the choices of managed care and HMOs. Your dollar will go farther, to a point, but the quality is not always what you want. In general, in health care as in other things, you tend to get what you pay for.

Remember this when you sign up for an insurance plan. Or, if you belong to a group, get involved with their selection of a plan.

 

970605 — Dear Dr. Joe: I read your column on phone manners several months back [Sep. 9]. How do you handle those dinner-time hucksters who want to sell you long-distance services? ­— Rancher Ted.

Dear R.T.: First of all, I try to remember that these people, obnoxious as they may be, are still just trying to earn a living.

They are not the ones making big bucks, but merely the callers sitting in “boiler rooms” dailing from endless mailing lists and reading their pitches from 3 x 5 cards.

They call at dinner hour because that’s when their research tells them you’re most likely to answer. And using time-honored sales techniques, they try to draw you into the conversation and open you up to make a sale.

Of course, with my name, it’s usually mispronounced: “Is this Joseph Buss-see?” “No,” I reply, “this is Joe Byoo-see.”

“Well, Mr. Byoo-see,” goes the oleaginous (a great word) voice, “how are you this evening?”

At this point, I know exactly what is going on, so rather than let them draw me into a conversation from which it is hard to escape — except by agreeing to buy something or by being a completely nasty guy — I cut to the chase.

“What are you selling?”

There are usually several seconds of silence, for now they’re on the defensive and must try to come back and regain control.

Some are good. There was one guy who said, “It’s free? Don’t you even want to know what’s being given away?”

He was taken aback when I politely said, “No, I don’t. Nothing’s free except God’s grace.”

If you start witnessing to them, they’ll exit stage right very quickly, but I usually simply say, “I really don’t want what you have to offer, but I’ve made cold calls before, and I wish you Good Hunting.”

At this point, the standard response is a light laugh and thanks as I politely hang up on them.

The main point is not to let them get you involved in the sales pitch so that your good nature is being used against you. And this can be done nicely most of the time, so long as you take control.

I’d really like to hear from some of you on how you deal with such people, for this is one more blight on the dinner hour of America.

(next week, phone scams)

 

970612 — (Phone solicitors and scams, cont.) Last week, we talked about not letting phone solicitors get the upper hand by taking control of the conversation and asking you questions that your good nature keeps you continuing to answer.

If they get you to blow up and slam down the phone, it can ruin the whole evening not only for you, but for those around you.

Or if they get you to hang on and finally agree to a sale out of desperation, you’ll feel awful, too.

So, the best thing is to be polite, and firm, and not let them get started on you in the first place.

One of the biggest scams sweeping the country depends on your being nice and continuing to talk.

It goes something like this: you get a phone call, or perhaps better yet, a message on your machine that in halting English tells you there’s been some sort of emergency, or some sort of problem, or even some sort of great deal.

You’re asked to call back a number with a strange area code, such as 809. Then, you connect with someone who talks in very halting English, who just can’t seem to get you to understand, but yet keeps you on the phone for quite a long time as you try to clear things up.

What you’ve just done is call a foreign country and rack up a huge phone bill on that foreign phone exchange. The crooks either own that exchange or are in cahoots with it in some way.

Through agreements among the world’s phone companies, your local company charges you for the call and pays the toll fee to the foreign phone exchange. Since the foreign company is not under U.S. control, you cannot get them for fraud.

You’re stuck with paying the charges of an extended long-distance phone call at inflated rates.

The way out of this is simple. If you get some sort of emergency or prize-winning call in halting English, either asking you to call back or to accept a collect call, simply write down the number and hang up. Then call your local phone company and find out where the unfamiliar area code is located.

Then call the operator, get a supervisor, and ask for help in ascertaining the authenticity of the call.

One final rule of thumb: never agree to give to any charity over the phone. (more on this next week)

 

970619 — (Phone charities, cont.) In the last several weeks, we talked about not letting phone solicitors get the upper hand and of long-distance phone scams.

This week, I have some thoughts about those who take aim at our eleemosynary natures (a 6-cylinder word meaning charity).

I have much sympathy to those worthy groups who try to raise money. (However, school kids selling candy to neighbors for 50% of the profit is stretching it a bit.)

Most of us have favorite charities in which we’re “true believers,” a code word for insufferable. And getting people to part with their shekels is not easy.

So, somewhere down the line, people started using the phone, which, before caller-ID, was a conveniently anonymous way to put the screws on the mark’s self-concept as a nice, and giving, person.

Then, like so many social services, selling got professionalized. People who like selling found they could make money, good money, by contracting with charities.

Under pressure to raise funds, the charities were often more interested in results than in manners. The old bottom line.

My pet peeve is the guy who talks to you as if he knows you, all chummy, complete with a friend in common. He’ll even send someone right over to pick up your cash or check, and he can get a bit pushy if you say you’d rather mail it.

What he doesn’t tell you is how much he makes from this. So, I’ve developed this response: “I’m sorry, but at our place we don’t make pledges over the phone. Send something in the mail that shows what percentage we give is actually going to the organization, and we’ll seriously consider giving.” Click!

Web site info: I’m excited, for I just installed my new web site, www.drjoe.com. Check it out and give me feedback. As I was preparing it, I visited the Red Bluff site www.tehama.net/redbluff, It is really tasty and full of good info about the town, about activities going on, about the Chamber of Commerce, about the high school.

If you know who’s responsible (the webmaster, in the argot), let me know so I can give kudos.

 

970626 — This week’s question came in the form of a long phone consultation with a family from out of state. I’m forthwith paraphrasing it:

Dear Dr. Joe: Our daughter is almost 20 and will not obey us at all. She goes to college on us but won’t show us her report card

 She comes and goes as she pleases and refuses to help with the housework. She seems to think it’s her right to use our car, which she does so much that we are just about ready to buy one for her.

She had a nice boyfriend, but then went to a party and found another one. Now, she’s playing one against the other and wants us to help her lie and fib to keep them both on the hook.

We’re both college educated and regular churchgoers. Husband has a high-paying job that keeps him away a lot, and Wife has gone back to professional work after this last child finished high school.

Obviously, we’re doing something wrong, or else we wouldn’t be paying for this long-distance psychological consultation. As we said in the 60s, lay it on us.

Dear Parents: It’ll be hard to convince some readers that I didn’t make this up.

Even the best of parents can get snookered. As I said to you on the phone, if I can get “three hots and a cot,” not have to work for it, get a car, not have to answer for my school work that you pay for, and get you to out and out lie to protect me — if you’ll give all this away, where do I sign up?

You’re doing this young lady an extreme disservice. Life outside your home is not like this, and unless you intend to let her stay until she’s 40 or until you pass on, you’ve gotta act now.

In the real world, actions have consequences. The two of you have to draw up a list of rules she’s to follow if you’re going to support her, and then you need to tell her (not ask her) to get with it, now!

If she doesn’t, show her the door and change the locks. Then read Luke 15:11 ff. in the Good Book.

Web site info: Phyllis Avilla-Turner over at Rape Crisis Intervention, a friend of mine from the Tehama Co. Child Abuse Prevention Council, called to say that the Red Bluff web site was mastered by her son-in-law, CPT Gerry Gray of the RB Fire Dept., along with his wife (her daughter), Kristin. Navigate over and check it out at www.tehama.net/redbluff.

 

970703 — Dear Dr. Joe: A friend of mine says that some people are just born to be victims, that they stay that way their entire lives. What’s your take on that? — Another Joe.

Dear A.J.: Those of us old enough to remember Al Capp’s Li’l Abner might reminisce on Joe Bxptlxt, or whatever his name was, the little character with a black rain cloud always over his head.

But cartoon characters aside, I know several people right here in Tehama County that are living proof you don’t have to remain a victim forever, even if you were one for quite a while.

It’s quite interesting to note that as these people gained strength, they held their heads up higher, and the straighter they stood, the less they were victimized.

People who are beaten down assume a special posture (head down, scurrying, shoulders hunched) that broadcasts a rhythm and “vibes,” if you will, that they are weak and exploitable.

It’s part of human nature to exploit not just something weaker, but something so weak and groveling that it almost reaches out to us with a call to action.

 Check your impulses the next time you see an extremely groveling dog. You might find yourself so disgusted that you almost want to go up and kick it.

(Then check your impulses when you see a snarling Rottweiler. When you know you’ll have to pay a price, you’ll probably hesitate.)

Couples can get in a situation where one of the partners gives in so completely to the dominant one that the dominant one starts feeling contempt.

This makes the compliant one give in even more, which makes the exploiter even more contemptuous, sometimes violent.

Breaking the cycle changes the balance of power. “When I decided I wasn’t going to be a victim any more,” one gal said, “my ex didn’t know what to do, so he left and has never bothered me again.”

There’s a whole school of thought called “victimology,” which studies how people get to be victims and how they can stop playing that role. It’s fascinating.

So, to finally answer, people are not born victims, they learn to be them (though sometimes unwillingly and unwittingly). And people can learn not to be victims, too.

Being too nice is sometimes a poor adaptive response to anger.

 

970710 — Dear Parents: It’s summertime, and where are your kids?

I went to the movies over the weekend (Men in Black is very clever, though were I consulted, I would have had the hero hold the Erase-o-Matic up to the eyes of the audience in the very last scene.)

While there and seeing all the kids, I reflected upon one of the favorite ruses told me by local teens and preteens, both boys and girls.

You get your parents to drive you (and maybe a friend) to the movies. You buy your tickets, go on inside, and turn to wave gayly good-bye to your parents as you ascertain they’re driving away.

That done, you slip out the front door (or, if the alarm on the back door’s not working, that’s the preferred route). Then it’s over to the party you heard about, the one with sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll.

Patry until the movie’s almost out. Quickly, get presentable and high-tail it back to the theater and stand at the back of the lobby.

Then, when mom drives up, you jump in the car and chatter away about the movie (which you’ve heard about from your friends).

This is a variation on a theme that many of us used on our own parents, and maybe even the ancient Greek kids did the same. (Hey, Dad, Dionysius and I really liked Medea, and I don’t know anything about these bits of golden sheep wool on the chariot floor.)

The problem is, today’s kids face pressures we couldn’t have imagined in our wildest dreams: designer drugs, filth on recordings, and a rash of venereal diseases, let alone a general loosening of the social and moral strictures and structures that kept us from growing up too soon.

With apologies to Mickey Chapin and the real-estate gang, my three rules of child rearing are, again: (1) supervision, (2) supervision, and (3) supervision.

A supervised kid is a loved kid, and although he’ll scream and shout on the outside that he doesn’t want all the rules, he’s very thankful on the inside. (Teenagers, like the rest of us, have to save face.)

So, as you take them to the movies, mention that you’ve talked to the manager, who’ll let you come inside to check on things every once in a while. Gulp! No, love!

 

970717 — Dear Dr. Joe: How about a “sermon” on toilet manners, especially for men and boys? — Tired of Wiping Up in Red Bluff

Dear Tired WURB: The fancy word for Number One is micturition, from Latin for urinate. (Yes, even the Romans did it. We all do it. In fact, if we don’t do it, we’re in big trouble and will soon die.)

I happen to think young boys should be taught “micturition manners” as soon as they are out of diapers. There is nothing so obnoxious as to enter a bathroom that has been sprayed at random by non-caring males.

Public rest rooms can often gag a horse, but many are the boys who will treat your own (and by inference, their own) bathrooms with grand indifference.

A neighbor kid from down the street once was pulling weeds and asked to use the bathroom. I went in about an hour later and found no one ever taught him to lift the seat, or even to hit the general area..

I went out to get him, and as nicely as I could, made him get moist tissue and wipe all the splatters on the bowl, seat, and floor.

I’m not sure he ever got the point that it is just plain nice to clean up ones messes, that if no one bothered to clean up after himself, we’d all live amidst filth.

Women perhaps don’t realize that peculiarities of anatomy, the fullness of the bladder, pelvic tenseness, and the fit of clothes are all factors that insure that no two eliminations procedures will be identical in precision.

Even the best of men cannot always hit the mark all the time. And when he doesn’t, a man should clean up his mess.

Some public bathrooms are now sporting both a toilet bowl and a small urinal, and I wonder why homes don’t have them, too. I guess we’re too squeamish, but I’d rather see that than the floor stains.

(Of course, there are some guys who’d miss those, too.)

Also, I see nothing wrong, or feminine, or “wussy” in teaching young boys to sit down when micturating, especially if they are habitual bad aimers or are so young they cannot control things well.

How we control ourselves in private presages our public behavior.

 

970724 — Dear Readers: This will be a bifurcated, disjointed column for I have something serious to say, then something lighthearted.

First, the gravamen against many of today’s youth: they don’t know how to work, and who do you think taught them that?

Have you tried to find a teenager or pre-teen to work consistently and conscientiously, even for a decent (for a kid) wage?

They’re there, but they’re hard to come by, and people who’ve found them guard their names as closely as good baby-sitters.

What’s happened to us, as a nation, that we’ve developed a bunch of kids who don’t know how to work? Yes, knowing how to work.

You have to be taught the value of working, of not only earning your keep, but also feeling good about being productive, no matter whether it’s brain surgery or digging a ditch in a straight line.

Modeling is perhaps the most powerful form of learning, and if mom and dad (if he’s even around) don’t feel like working much, then sis and junior will follow suit.

It’s not unusual to have your doorbell rung at 6 p.m. on Saturday night by a couple of kids who “want work” so they can go to the movies at 7 p.m.

As a nation, we’re in trouble.

On the lighthearted side: I’ve given kudos before to the Red Bluff/Tehama County website at www.tehama.net/redbluff . I surfed over there the other night, and they’ve spruced it up more bodaciously.

The descriptions of Red Bluff and Tehama County were so tasty that one almost wants to move here. (Like many a recent transplant, or environmentalist, now that I’m here, let’s keep everyone else out.)

However, there was one glaring error. At least I hope it’s in error, or else Bill Poole of the CHP will be kept busy and the webmaster might be lawyerbait (just kidding).

At the start of the page, it says the driving time to Sacramento is 90 minutes! (That’s ninety.) Well, let’s do some simple algebra.

The distance to Sacramento, via a liberal estimate, is 138 miles. And Distance = Rate x Time, which makes Rate = Distance/Time.

Rate = 138 miles/1.5 hours = 92 mph. Even for most of us who push it to go to Sacramento, 92 mph is pushing it just a wee bit much.

Kids, make your parents use algebra to figure what the time traveled would be at the legal limit.

 

970731 — Last week, I harped and railed at the lack of Work Ethic among today’s youth. I’m on my soapbox, again, with some qualifiers.

The qualifiers are those high school kids who are headed out to college knowing how to work, how to study, how to plan ahead.

One of the biggest hallmarks of maturity is the ability to postpone gratification. In classic psychology experiments, usually along Piagetian lines (for you intellects out there), children of pre-concrete thinking, about 5 or so, were compared with well-developed concrete thinkers, about 10 or so.

Concrete here doesn’t mean cement heads, but rather, a type of thinking that is not abstract, not “what if,” but “what is” at various levels of sophistication.

To the proverb, “A stitch in time saves nine,” the concrete thinker might say, “If you take one stitch right now, you won’t have to fix things with nine stitches later.”

An abstract thinker would jump up a level to generalize, “Doing it now provides all sorts of benefits.”

The children were offered one candy bar now, or two candy bars if they would wait a certain period of time, say, one or two days.

The younger, less mature children wanted it now (sorta like Marin County, which has the money to get it all now and the neurosis rate to support multitudinous shrinks of all ilks).

But the older, more mature children were willing to wait, to postpone gratification, to get a bigger reward in the future.

Back in the age of dinosaurs, when I went to high school (‘55-’59), it was common for a father to give his son the choice of going to college or getting a new car.

The snazzy wheels got the girls, at least the ones who wanted it all now (and often got more than they bargained for 3/4 of a year later).

We don’t have to program the Work Ethic into those successful teenagers. They already have it, most likely because their parents instilled it in them.

But what do we do with those children whose parents could care less, or who are so stressed and overburdened that they cannot respond, even though they know well what is right, what is mature.

That is the $64, or $64,000, or $64 billion dollar question.

 

970807 — Dear Dr. Joe: What’s your view about parents, especially fathers, wrestling with their kids? — Not-so-Gorgeous George in Gerber.

Dear Not-So: Perhaps those Bay Area bumper stickers should have read, “Have you Rassled a Kid Today?” (Of course, my favorite all time sticker says, “Hurry up and hire a teenager while he still knows it all.” I sure did back then.)

Physical contact seems to be more and more a lost art. And I don’t mean an occasional peck on the check, a pat on the lower cheek, or the light punch on the arm.

As I’ve said numerous times before, it’s nigh impossible to spoil a child of six months, or even a year, by picking him up too often, by kissing him to often, by holding him skin-to-skin.

Now I don’t mean the so-called “bad touches.” Those are touches where the perpetrator is taking something from the child to sate his own desires.

I mean where the adult is so brimming over with affection that he gives without qualification to the child and does not take — even though he gets a lot in return.

(Again, note that I’m old fashioned and use the standard masculine to stand for both genders. I just hate to say he/she, or alternate the he’s and she’s in a sentence.)

(Also, I’m not talking about unconditional love. I’ll write about that sometime, but suffice it to say that only God and Carl Rogers claimed to have unconditional love; one of them is dead.)

Years ago, Ashley Montague wrote a book called Touching, which is a classic in its field.

The biggest organ in our body is our skin. Children who are not touched enough probably don’t develop certain brain cells or connections, and it seems to them as if there’s a bottomless pit of need which they search to fill, in vain, their entire lives, always looking for love in all the wrong places. . .

I think that by being held, touched, cuddled, caressed, smootched, massaged, kneaded, stroked, and kissed, a child feels satiety and learns how to obtain and feel it by not chasing it.

I’m willing to bet that we’ll find the immune system is stimulated by touch, too. After all, mother’s milk and colostrum are almost always accompanied by touch.

When I see an untouched child, I can count on future business.

 

970821 — (More from last week).

Whew! I finally got my computer up and running thanks to a yeoman’s effort from Ross Computers and about 20 hours of my time (4 actually to do it, and 16 to remember how to do the final 4).

Luckily for me, I had backed up the entire 2+ Gigabytes, and out of about 15,000 files, I lost less than 10, none of them vital.

Moral: always back up your data, and don’t open strange-looking e-mail. I’ve heard that AOL has a way to scan e-mail for virus bombs, and I’ll let you know what I find.

Also, last week after writing on the scatological trends in movies, I went to see Air Bud, about the dog who can shoot baskets.

Although definitely a “formula movie,” it was quite refreshing. Just towards the end, I started thinking how there had not been a “crotch shot,” when then it happened: a young tough on the basketball court got hit there by the ball, which was pushed by the dog.

It wasn’t funny, as in a joke shot, but why did it even have to be there? Why, Michael Eisner?

Also, the previews for this movie showed a space scenario where two people are hooked together in space suits by an umbilical cord.

And of course, one of them has intestinal gas, so that a huge aneurysm is seen to pass on the cord from one suit to the other. The victim tries to stop it, like one squeezes a hose, but he is unable and must show requisite disgust.

It’s ambivalent. One part of me wanted to laugh, for bathroom humor does have it’s place. But methinks the place for it should be the bathroom, and not out in public.

So, I finally so a movie that, although “formula” for it’s ecological greenness, was still lovely.

Fly Away Home is about a young teenager who teaches geese to follow an ultralight aircraft that she learns to pilot. It was, as my friend Tal would say, “humanizing” rather than “dehumanizing.”

Still, there were the requisite few curses and expletives that could have been deleted.

But in spite of that, I was mesmerized (being an old pilot, myself). I was so enthralled that I sat all the way through the end of the credits, only to find that this “true story” was not true at all, but merely fiction based on true research!

 

970828 — Dear Dr. Joe: I read your article on the movie “Fly Away Home” and want to totally alleviate [the impression you gave] that the inspiration is limited to a fictional movie relying on no more than “true research.” — JB via e-mail

Dear JB: I did not mean to convey the impression that the inspiration was thus limited.

For me, the irony was that after I became very involved with the film and its human and animal characters, and after the epilogue stated that the geese returned to the girl’s front doorstep, the fine print at the end of the credits stated the story was fictitious.

I mean, I was hooked, involved. I was ready to try to find Amy and invite her on my radio show. And then I was told she doesn’t exist.

I’m not down-playing the wonder of the man-goose interaction. I’ve read great essays from glider pilots who circled for hours with a raptor as wingman (just as porpoises pace a ship, another thrilling sight, one I’ve experienced).

I just don’t like the idea that my feelings were manipulated.

Had the film begun with a disclaimer, or had it not stated all the geese returned to her farm, I doubt I would have felt so ripped off.

You said you saw a TV documentary about the original research, and you waxed eloquent about the scientist’s efforts to restore a modicum of “primevality.”

I have no quarrel with that, and I encourage readers to rent this film, Fly Away Home, and see for yourselves. (Also, get The Search for Bobby Fisher. Both are dynamite.)

And while on the subject of reader feedback, one father told me his daughter was thankful for the column on preserving virginity, which gave her strength to “just say no” to a pressuring boyfriend.

Another was happy about the bare-bones theology of Easter. And still another mentioned how much he agreed with the idea of copious amounts of physical contact between fathers and young sons.

Several spoke consoling and comforting words about the recent viral attack on my computer. (Even “Thirsty’s” kidding was kind, as was my favorite Wobbly’s.)

But one person, with whom I’d had a consulting professional relationship, left me a sardonic voice message I’ll answer next week.

 

970904 — (Reader feedback, cont.) At the end of last week’s column, I mentioned a person with whom I’d had a consultative relationship, a person who is sans doubt brilliant.

This person took me to task by leaving a sardonic message on my machine that claimed that since I had written in this column it was (fallen) human nature to want to kick or mistreat the obsequious, fawning dog, I therefore felt that way about everyone who came to me for some sort of help and necessarily put themselves in a one-down, or “lesser-than,” position.

Now many might dismiss such a call as the angry ravings of someone who was deliciously wreaking verbal revenge for perceived wrongs, real or imagined.

But in my business, one always has to look at feedback, process it through conscious and (hopefully) formerly unconscious layers, and then add the resultant material to the personal databank out of which every seasoned counselor draws.

This personal databank is best developed through long, intense personal therapy or “analysis.”

Perhaps sorrowfully, it’s not a requirement for licensure that every therapist have had his own training therapy/analysis.

To be a psychoanalyst, one is required to have what’s called a “training analysis,” which can last years. And up until recently, the physician lobby made it necessary to have an M.D. degree in order to be considered a full-fledged psychoanalyst.

(This barrier was finally overcome when it was pointed out that two of Freud’s biggest disciples, Erik Erickson and daughter Anna Freud, had not been physicians. Oops!)

I, myself, had a very long analysis in Reichian Therapy, which is in-depth probing of personality through the body, as well as the mind.

But no one is perfectly healthy, and we all continue, or should continue, to mature until we die. I guess my message, my bias, on this is to beware any counselor who hasn’t had at least several years of intense, personal psychotherapy.

And even this doesn’t guarantee competence. To choose a counselor or therapist, one needs to look at the type of person and the kind of life that person leads.

Do I look down on my patients? I don’t think I do, but I’ll always check that out in myself. Otherwise, my practice would evaporate.

 

970911 — Dear Dr. Joe: Why do kids run away? — Sad Mama in Corning.

Dear SMC: Wow, what an open-ended question! In most cases (and notice I don’t say all), we follow a principle so simple that primitive organisms do it.

An amoeba will move toward food and away from poison (positive and negative chemotaxis).

People are much the same way. We go toward what we perceive is the good payoff and avoid the bad.

Kids who run away, in general, aren’t getting enough positive strokes at home, so they strike out for supposedly greener pastures. It’s very rare that a happy, contented child will want to leave.

And even if they do live far away after they’re grown, they’ll naturally want to keep in touch, for one returns to the always-full table.

And of course, I’m not just talking about food, or clothes, or economic goodies. There are kids who seem to have everything who take off and run away.

It’s love, that intangible thing that lets someone know someone else cares for them. And love can even be strict.

The kids who have tight boundaries about their behavior often know it’s the love of the parent that keeps the rules in force.

(And yes, there are parents who go too far, who are uptight about everything, who are martinets. Perhaps kids from too-strict parents run away more than those from too-loose parents, but there are plenty of both.)

Another way to say it is that “love” is a verb, not a noun. Warm fuzzies are nice, but they’re only the result of caretaking behavior, some of which isn’t “nice.”

Spanking is not nice. Neither is making the child do homework. Having to eat broccoli for dinner instead of ice cream is definitely not nice, and keeping your child at home, bored, on Saturday evening is not nice. The Good Book says that there is no greater love than laying your life down for someone, a prospect not especially high on anyone’s pleasure list.

So to get back to the question, most kids run because there’s not enough decent, solid stimuli keeping them occupied at home and school, because they can get what they see as pleasure more easily elsewhere, and because they’re rebelling against rules not leavened with caring.

 

970918 — Dear Dr. Joe: Why do we cry? — a Current Patient.

Dear CurPat: You’re asking me to amplify what we touched on briefly the other day, when you agreed to take your answer “in the press,” so to speak.

Yours is a deeper inquiry into the standard set of questions so often asked shrinks: “I’ve already cried. Why do I need to cry more? What good does it do?”

My standard answer is, “You’re right. Crying never solved a thing. But it clears you out so you can.”

Here is my toilet-bowl theory of crying: We call know the purpose of toilets — to get rid of waste from the body. If the waste built up too long, we would die of poisoning. (Just ask Dr. Jim Fawcett what happens if you don’t micturate regularly.)

Likewise, if we don’t cry, at least once in a while, we die a slow death of the spirit. (As the song says from The Fantastiks, “Without a hurt, the heart is hollow.” And remember the shortest verse in the Bible.)

So, I call crying “the kidney of the soul.” As docs speak of the “clearing” function of the kidneys, I talk of the “clearing” function of crying.

A toilet builds up a “head” of pressure in the tank, which is then released all at once to flush down the waste in a torrent of water.

What happens if the flapper valve has a pinhole leak? Literally gallons of water can trickle from the tank into the bowl, without flushing.

It takes full pressure to make a complete flush. Likewise, those who trickle their tears rather than sobbing fully, like a baby, will not experience the relief they need to overcome sadness.

When you can sob openly and fully, you’ll discharge sadness (and sometimes anger) and experience a cleansing, a feeling of relief/release.

One summer vacation long ago, when living by myself, I sank into a torporific depression whereby I stayed in bed three full days.

Finally, using a trick I’d learned, I was able to cry. Once the dam burst, I sobbed for 30 minutes.

Then I suddenly felt a burst of energy, cleaned myself up, and found it easy to leave the house and seek friends, depression all gone.

Interestingly, there was a study long ago that analyzed the chemical composition of tears. The irritant tears from onions lacked the stress hormones found in sadness tears.

Crying literally removes stress.

 

970925 — On Chronic Pain: This past week I attended a conference in Las Vegas held by the American Association of Pain Management [AAPM].

Over 1,000 practitioners of varying stripes and degrees taught, learned, argued, and conferred about the causes, and even meanings, of chronic pain.

I’ve never been to such a “nondenominational” conference, where no degrees were listed on name tags so you couldn’t immediately tell if the wearer were a chiropractor, physician, physical therapist, massage therapist, nurse, family counselor, dentist, social worker, podiatrist, pharmacist, anesthetist, or shrink.

The president of the AAPM is a nurse, unheard of in the old days.

One doctor talked of “natural” healing and almost sounded as if he were a shill for Prevention magazine. His was one of the most popular talks, and he made sense.

Perhaps the overriding ethos of the assembled body was that pain can be treated by many techniques, is often not treated aggressively enough, and is hence not a good reason to hasten death.

(Dr. Death, Jack Kevorkian, was definitely not welcome here.)

It was again confirmed that psychotherapy is a mainstay in the arsenal against pain, for people in pain get anxious and depressed, which feeds back into more pain.

Hypnosis, visualization, imagery, and other mind-body techniques of psychologists are widely used.

I was prepared to fight for religious values in all of this, but I was pleasantly surprised to find no talk of “spirit guides” or other occult phenomena.

Perhaps most disheartening for me was to find several physicians who are, I believe, being hounded by their respective licensing boards for prescribing opiates (morphine and other narcotics) in larger than usual doses — although the usual doses usually aren’t strong enough.

By being so down on drugs (and often rightfully so), we’ve thrown the proverbial baby out with the bath water. The epitome of this is when a dying lady cannot get pain-canceling doses of narcotics because she might become addicted.

Addiction seems to be a quite different thing than mere dependence upon medications for pain killing. People are addicted to getting “high,” to avoid psychological, not physical pain. And the two are different.

 

971002 — Dear Dr. Joe: I recently saw a TV show about people, often younger women, cutting on themselves with knives, razors, scissors, and the like. What is this? And why does it happen? — Mr. Sad in RB

Dear Mr. Sad: I know it’s got to have a fancy word, probably something from Greek or Latin, but I never learned it.

Medicine and psychology often do that, sometimes to set themselves apart from mere laymen, sometimes for shorthand, and sometimes to quench an intellectual thirst.

(There’s even probably an arcane word for making easy words arcane, but again, I don’t know it. Since my old buddy Rocky Beach died, I know of no one who’ll find it for me.)

The Behaviorists, or surface psychologist, would say that every behavior has a reward, so just look for the reward for cutting. Perhaps it’s attention, or the thrill at getting back at someone, or even getting to be treated by that cute doc at the ER.

But it’s hard for me to think of the anxiety and pain that goes with such cutting as merely a reward.

I, myself, am a Depth Psychologist, which means I look beneath the surface for underlying motives.

My experience with this is not great, but over 30 years I’ve seen a number of people, usually girls, who’ve done this.

Those who work in mental wards see it more frequently. Often, it used to be merely classified as suicide attempts, perhaps just clumsy ones.

But I don’t think that really explains it well. I do think there are a lot of “secondary gains” that come from this, like the attention one gets, how it upsets the family, and so forth.

Family Therapists would see this as an attempt by the Identified Patient (the one, often the healthiest, who expressed the symptoms of a very dysfunctional family). And this might often be the case.

But inside the person, inside the psyche, I believe the most basic reason is the person feels an incredible pressure and cannot find ways to express, to release this pressure.

Hence, cutting is not only a symbolic way to let things out, it also causes pain, which allows at least some yelling and crying (though it may be internally strangulated).

For me, the “cure” is to allow the feeling to escape, though it may mean changing the family to allow it.

I’ve invited a lady doc who wrote a book on this to be on KBLF soon.

 

971009 — On Expletives & Pejoratives: I recently was party to a conversation at a dinner table where several parents had just returned from taking their kids to a soccer game.

One father was incensed that the players, all girls, were using language that made him blush.

“Isn’t there a rule against that?” I asked naïvely.

“Yeah,” he replied with a sardonic snort, “but the referees were all 14-year-olds. They’re supposed to tell a cursing coach to hush up cursing players?”

The other father felt stuck, too, for he is a man prone to action. He wanted to step into the field and stop the whole game, no matter what people said. (And he’s big enough to do it.) But his daughter begged him not to ruin her whole existence.

So there they were, left to deal with life in the 90s. Oh, &$#@!!!

My own daughter is five, and when my wife took her to an individual sports training function, another young girl was telling her buddies to “Shut up, or I’ll kick your butt.”

Here, at least, the adult in charge made the diminutive perpetrator do some push-ups. (I would have preferred Tide’s In, Dirt’s Out.)

What is it that makes young ‘uns, or anyone, curse and swear? Or to put it another way, what’s the function of swearing, the payoff?

My first thought is that a quick outburst releases tension. But why make it a word? An “Oooo!” or “Aghhh!” could do the same thing.

But a word adds some sort of meaning, or perhaps attributes the cause of the problem, or it’s resolution, to someone else (as in “G.D. it!”)

Words are also social vehicles, and cursing, such as that at soccer, is a social act designed to affect one’s relationship with others.

It probably makes youngsters feel more grown up. It may confer social status, such that he who cusses the most is cock of the walk, so to speak.

 And it makes the curser feel superior to the cursee, be it person or object. If I blow my putt for a birdie and curse loud enough, it lets everyone know that I really am very good and ordinarily would have made it.

Expletive: A word or phrase that is profane (literally “outside the temple”), vulgar, or obscene (offensive or repulsive). Pejorative: to disparage, belittle, tend to make worse.

The amount one curses is inversely proportional to his creativity and IQ.

 

971016 — This column is based on my own question: Why don’t some people not only not keep appointments, but not even call to cancel?

In the past two weeks I’ve had several apparently new patients be “no shows,” cancellations without any notice or calls afterwards.

Now I don’t charge anyone who cancels a first appointment like I do on-going patients who play hookey, but I’m sorely tempted. . . .

In on-going treatment, people often begin to unearth unpleasant material (thoughts, dreams, associations, etc.) that scares them. So, to avoid dealing with it, some people find amazingly creative ways to skip their sessions.

Some of these are out-and-out lies and tall tales. For example, the same person who “just couldn’t arrange transportation” can often readily find ways to run to the store to get cigarettes or to go to the theater.

Now this is not to invalidate the many times that some people just cannot, really and truly, find a ride, or times when the car really is in the shop, or had a wreck.

But when a person is getting close to some unpleasant memories, or had a series of disturbing dreams, or is locked in a battle for control of the therapy (another avoidance) — then a missed session starts taking on a different meaning.

Sometimes, the missing of a session is unconscious and people are amazed at themselves to see why.

One man had been coming for over a year, every week at the same time and day, and then all of a sudden he “just forgot.”

It didn’t take long for him to realize that his slip of the mind was really a Freudian Slip. And when pressed about his inner life, it was soon apparent a big conflict about his dating life, or lack thereof, was ready to burst forth.

But I digress. Why is it that some people just don’t have, or care to show, manners and courtesy?

Maybe you are scared about going to the doctor’s office. Or maybe you decided you just couldn’t afford it. Or maybe you found someone else.

In any case, the decent thing to do is to ‘fess up and call to cancel the appointment. I make it a point not to third-degree new patients about their reasons for not coming. And most docs I know do the same.

But remember, our discourtesies often cause others inconveniences.

 

971023 — Dear Dr. Joe: I read something about a new controversial treatment for anorexia somewhere in Canada. What gives? — Mother in Red Bluff.

Dear MIRB: I, too, read about the woman who has a private treatment facility in British Columbia. It was in a recent U. S. News & World Reports, which I had just discarded.

However, since I still have a child in diapers and the magazine was somewhere in the trash can, my dedication to science and this column did not reach far enough for me to reach far enough in to find it.

Like many, I read a lot—sometimes scanning, sometimes perusing, often remembering. And I usually know where to find something. (If I had enough time on the Internet, I’m sure the material is there, too.)

Basically, this woman with a French name owns and runs the treatment center. She had two daughters of her own with anorexia, and when she could not find adequate treatment for them, she did it herself.

She did such a good job that both her daughters recovered and are now helping her help more women.

I say women, because anorexia nervosa, a disorder where people literally starve themselves to concentration-camp dimensions, is found mainly in younger women.

(Karen Carpenter, the singer with the husky-honey voice, died from the aftereffects of this condition. Her self-enforced starvation had put so much strain on her body chemistry that her heart just gave out, even though she was starting to recover from the condition.)

I say “condition” rather than “disease,” for there is no known disease entity or organism or gene that seems to cause anorexia.

There are a plethora of theories about eating disorders, from deep psychological conflicts over sexuality and body image to more-surface “learned behaviors” to blaming societal stigmata against obesity.

What the gal in B.C. does is give a whole lot of love and attention to these anorexic girls. They are surrounded by caring counselors at all times, and their environment is tightly controlled. It seems to work.

What’s sort of fun for me is to hear the outrage from “experts” (whose own track records are not so good) who complain this women has no degrees and bad theory.

Maybe so. Maybe it’s just another passing fad, but face it, grapitis sourus affects health workers, too.

 

971030 — Dear Dr. Joe: Do you have strong opinions on Halloween? — T or T.

Dear T or T: Those lawyers in the audience know why I was careful to leave the spaces in your pseudonym just as they were. . . .

Yes, I do, and they’re getting stronger every year. At the risk of being a complete curmudgeon, and even worse, risking the wrath of Ol’ Roy, Thursty, and the Leprechaun, I maintain that Halloween is starting to outpace Christmas.

I’m not completely bonkers. I have fond memories from my own childhood Halloweens, and one time I even attended a San Francisco Halloween event, The Erotic Exotic Ball, or whatever they call it (I forget).

(Some friends and I thought we’d be titillated because of the hype in all the papers. It was b-o-r-i-n-g, I’m glad to say.)

I don’t mind the little folks dressing up and running around safe neighborhoods getting treats, though I’ve often thought it was a conspiracy perpetuated by dentists.

(One family I know passed out religious tracts and are now completely avoided each Halloween.)

Seeing the little ones dressed up is heartwarming, though answering the door to barely disguised, potentially threatening teenagers is not.

One teenager I know, a guy whose attempt to be part of the hard-core skater crowd is belied by good grades, refused to take my suggestion seriously.

I told him that I knew a costume sure to astonish his parents and make his friends run in panic. All he had to do was dress up in a coat and tie. . . .

My church group, as well as many others, are starting to have “harvest parties” on Halloween, with any dress-up limited to historical and religious figures. It’s satisfying.

As most of you know, Halloween is a contraction for “All Hallow Even,” meaning the evening before All Saints Day. And, as happens a lot in Christianity, pagan practices were syncretized with fertility rites marking seasonal changes.

Similar to Mardi Gras, the time just before the holy day (holiday) has become an outlet for non-holy behavior, as if it is “getting it out of ones system.” As if that is needed!

But the outlet now seems an inlet, and Halloween is anything but a religious holiday, which fits modernists and other anti-religionists.

Next week: on witches and such

 

971106 — Last week, I concluded by saying I would write something about witches, or wicca, as popularizers would have it.

My source for this is the SCP Journal, Vol. 16:3, 1991, “Witchcraft: from the dark ages to the new ages.” SCP stands for Spiritual Counterfeits Project, a conservative Christian think tank in Berk­eley, of all places. For information or reprints, call (510) 540-0300.

SCP was founded in the 70s by counterculture drop-outs, people who had been in the occult, the New Age, various cults — and then dropped out of their droppings out to become born-again Christians.

I’m on the Board of Directors, so I’m hardly unbiased.

I helped edit this particular issue, which was written by Brooks Alexander, SCP’s founder and a man who first dropped out of law school, dropped all sorts of drugs, and then dropped out of heavy-duty shamanism. He’s been there, done that.

This issue on witchcraft talks about modern, New-Age witchcraft and old-style occultism.

Modern witches would have you believe that their Craft is simply the Ancient Religion that has survived Christianity’s attempt to debauch it.

This article deflates that idea by showing the “ancient craft” is really quite new, popularized by some feminist (male and female) writers, including Margot Adler, daughter of the famous psychiatrist and PBS’s resident witch.

These writers believe that long ago, the world was run by women until the evil men took over and screwed things up. So now, it is time for women to get power and put the world back into the same order of 4,000 years ago, the Golden Age of Matriarchy.

Witchcraft is now allied with pantheism, modern “spirituality,” ecology, and peace movements.

This is a far cry from the Indo-Tibetan yogis and magicians, as well as other New World sorcerers, who have also claimed to fly through the air, kill at a distance, control demons and ghosts.

Most modern witches probably don’t know what they’re getting into besides a little fertility hanky pank. The spiritual legacy of the occult is infinitely more than “light weight.”

The Bible, in Deuteronomy 18, warns strongly against the occult, for good reason — such powers and spirits are real and are dangerous.

 

971113 — Dear Dr. Joe: Would you say some words about the Frosty Morgan tragedy? — Red Bluff Mom.

Dear RB Mom: Probably the greatest grief mankind bears is that of a mother for her dead child.

Fathers may grieve for the real reason of lost love or the symbolic reason of discontinued genes . But mothers grieve for that true part of themselves torn asunder, as if the womb had suddenly been emptied.

(For those who don’t know, Frosty Morgan was a 14-year-old girl who was stuck by a hit-and-run pickup truck on West Walnut Street near Baker Road. She died without regaining consciousness, and her funeral was held yesterday.

(Donations to help her mother with expenses can be sent to the Frosty Morgan Fund, c/o Tehama Bank, 237 South Main St., Red Bluff.)

Grieving was first studied in this modern era by Swiss Psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who later became convinced of past-lives, after-lives, channeling spirits, etc.

Regardless of her later interests, her earlier work is fruitful for doing what’s today called “grief work.”

Kübler-Ross identified a “grief cycle” that usually occurs:

1. Denial: the shock is so great that reality is literally denied. Younger children often do this completely, adults to a lesser extent.

2. Anger: the hurt causes us to lash out, to blame whatever and whomever’s available.

3. Bargaining: such as, “Oh, God, if you just bring him back, I’ll do such-and-such.”

4. Depression: when all the energy, all the fight has gone out of the griever and left him with ennui, a sense of purposelessness.

5. Acceptance: when healing has taken place, when the energy returns and even joy can sometimes happen.

Does the hurt ever completely go away? Probably not, but the sting eventually does, and the dull ache can recede into a deeply-held place of bittersweet tenderness.

In the song “Try to Remember” there is this line: “Deep in December it’s nice to remember, Although we know the snow may follow; Deep in December it’s nice to remember, Without a hurt, the heart is hollow.”

If we didn’t have our hurts and sadness, we’d not be human, but instead be pure intellectual monstrosities, cold and uncaring.

What a horrible way to live!

 

971120 — Dear Dr. Joe: Is there such a think as being “tone deaf”? — Can’t Sing a Lick in South County.

Dear CSLSC: I think such a condition would be really rare, and in truth, in all my readings, I’ve never seen a scientific analysis of this so-called phenomenon, though maybe a speech therapist or music professor could help me.

Being truly “tone deaf” would mean one couldn’t tell one tone from another, and if so, it would be indeed a form of deafness.

(It’s supposed to be “hearing impairment” under new politically correct guidelines, though the last partially-deaf patient I had corrected me with a chuckle that he was not impaired, he was “rather deef.”)

A truly tone deaf individual would not be able to appreciate, or discern, music at all. Not only could he not sing “Jingle Bells,” but also he couldn’t tell whether that or “Greensleeves” were playing.

He probably could discern heavy metal or other so-called music from the effect the decibels had on his body, but he couldn’t name the tunes.

Many of those who jokingly, or seriously, call themselves tone deaf were ridiculed as youngsters when they tried to sing and hence declined to spend the time to learn how.

Yes, learn. Very few people have the so-called perfect pitch. Most have to work rather hard to hear the correct pitch, and then modify the muscles in the voice box (larynx) and tell when their own voice tone matches the one their ears hear.

Good singing, like any skill, takes much work and practice. If you haven’t learned that, then you won’t be able to pass it on to your children.

Almost no kid likes to practice, to do the repetitive work needed to realize a skill, be it music, art, math, or other intellectual endeavors.

Perhaps more kids are able to practice the motor skills needed for sports, but true dedication, such as the practice regime 49er Jerry Rice does, is rare. Which is why good athletes are rare, and hence paid highly.

(Pavarotti’s not paid chicken feed, either, nor are successful rock groups, who may not be very cultured but still practice a lot.)

So, most “tone deafness” can be cured by hard work and dedication, as just about any voice teacher can tell you (and there are some good ones right here in Tehama County).

 

971127 — FOREWORD: any person or business wishing to donate to the Messiah Project, which presents Handel’s masterwork on Sun. & Mon., Dec. 14 & 15, at 7:00 at the 1st Church of God (at Luther and Jackson), please call Faith or Ron Bennett at 385-1022. Your help is needed, from $5 to $50 (or $500).

A POEM FOR THANKSGIVING WEEKEND: Five Kernels of Corn, by Hezekiah Butterworth:

“‘Twas the year of the famine in Plymouth of old,

The ice and the snow from the thatched roofs had rolled;

Through the warm purple skies steered the geese o’er the seas,

And the woodpeckers tapped in the clocks of the trees;

And the boughs on the slopes to the south winds lay bare,

And dreaming of summer, the buds swelled in the air.

The pale Pilgrims welcomed each reddening morn;

There were left but for rations Five Kernels of Corn!

   Five Kernels of Corn!

   Five Kernels of Corn!

But to Bradford a feast were Five Kernels of Corn!”

The above poem was e-mailed me by a friend, Elizabeth Dillon of Glen Ellen, who is a historian and teacher in American Christian History.

Betsy continued that the Pilgrims sailed from Southampton on the Mayflower on Sep. 16, 1620, and dropped anchor at what is now Provincetown on November 21, 1620, where they started to explore.

On Dec. 21, they marched into land that they deemed to be good for a settlement and named it New Plymouth.

In Spring, they planted their fields and were rewarded with a bountiful harvest. The governor decreed a festival of thanksgiving, the first one.

That was 1621, but the period of prosperity was not to last. The colony was beset by famine for most of the next two years, and one of the earliest experiments in Communism thus proved a failure.

(Once people were allowed to succeed or fail by their own devices, production soared, of course.)

But in April, 1622, the daily ration for each person was — you guessed it — five kernels of corn.

Thanksgiving started as a religious holiday, and hopefully, most of you kept it that way.

There are some readers who are anti-God. One wonders to whom, or to what, they give thanks. . . .

 

971204 — Dear Dr. Joe: I hear a lot about how we should all have unconditional love. I don’t seem to have it toward my children. What’s wrong with me? — Paynes Creek Papa.

Dear PCP: I heard about this all through my graduate school days and beyond, especially when people were ga-ga over psychologist Carl Rogers, the man who brought us such psychological buzz words as Unconditional Positive Regard, authenticity, transparency, etc. etc.

Let me state from the get-go that I think it’s impossible for any mere mortal to have unconditional love.

If you prefer the evolutionary view, then we haven’t evolved to that level yet, though the people who think they have can get mighty angry at those people who don’t show unconditional love — catch the irony?

(Support peace or I’ll kill you. Tolerate everything except those who don’t tolerate everything.)

If, like I, you prefer a non-evolutionary view, such as my orthodox Christian one, then mankind is born with a built-in flaw that keeps us from being divine

 (This is the doctrine of Original Sin, which I think of as “compass drift,” which means our moral pointers continually move away from the true course and must be “slaved,” if you will, to an external absolute, such as —dare I say it? — God.)

So, try as hard as we can, we’re going to put conditions on our love, even if they’re just tiny ones.

Ask any loving mother if there are times she gets angry or frustrated and wishes her child would act or be better, more “civilized.” (Or wishes she’d put out the child on the curb and sent the trash to bed.)

Whoops, there’s a condition.

Unconditional love is a good goal toward which to strive, but thinking you must have it is setting yourself up for monumental failure — and hence more anger and frustration.

Better, I think, to realize your limitations, apologize to your loved ones (child or adult) when you stray from your usual perfection, and don’t set yourself up for certain defeat.

 

971211 — ARTISTIC TREATS: see the Nutcracker at the Performing Arts Center at Red Bluff High School this Fri. or Sat. night at 7, or Sun. matinee at 2; buy tickets at the door, or better, at the QRC dance supply store out on Antelope Blvd. near the bus station and Scooters BP Cafe.

Hear Handel’s Messiah with a real orchestra, 60 trained voices, fantastic soloists, great acoustics, and an even greater Subject — enough to make even the agnostic’s soul sing (once he admits he has one) — at the 1st Church of God, Luther/Jackson, 7 p.m. this Sunday and Monday.

I KNOW I LEFT SOME OUT, so check your papers and the local radio. There’s a lot going on this time of year, and I’m gushing enthusiasm for our local talent.

I’m fond of quoting Agatha Christie’s Miss Marpole, who said that her small village was a microcosm for the world outside.

So be it with Tehama County. Not only do we have the scandal, power struggles, and even sleaze of the big cities (it’s just that here, you can’t be so anonymous), we also have the culture, the talent, the people seeking higher, ethereal things.

Go to the very creative web page for Red Bluff & Tehama County at www.tehama.net/redbluff and see for yourself. My Chinese friends from San Francisco, who now come up (hopefully) each year at Round-Up weekend, were amazed at the goings-on described in this web page.

And by the way, to those who feel lonely at this time of year — and I’ve been there myself many a time — make sure you check out this web page, or this paper or the other ones, or the radio station, or the bulletin boards.

Go to the events. Try to find a friend to go along, but if you cannot, go alone and mingle at least a bit.

And to you people who host these events, know that many people use them not only for gratification of their internal muses, but also for connecting with their fellow man.

So arrange your events with a social hour, with coffee and cookies, after (or even before) the performance. Help people mingle. Why not advertise a number where shut-ins or others can call to get a ride to the event? And why not either make an announcement or assign an area where people wanting rides home can congregate afterwards?

 

971218 — Dear Dr. Joe: I know you do hypnosis, and I know you say you are religious. I thought the two didn’t mix, or at least weren’t supposed to. What gives? — West of Towner.

Dear WOT: At least some conservative, orthodox Christians are put off by hypnosis and don’t want anything to do with it, even for pain management.

I’ve had patients say they wanted to talk to their pastors, and I encourage that (always). Sometimes their pastors tell them not to participate in hypnosis, and although I don’t agree, I certainly respect their choice.

Usually, they are referring, or have been referred, to Deuteronomy 18, where verses 10-11 say:

“There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead.” [NKJ]

The first prohibition seems to rule out fire-walker Tony Robbins, and “sorcerer” has direct roots to pharmakon, from whence we get pharmacy, and may well mean mind-altering drugs like pot and LSD.

Some might even interpret that to mean nicotine and caffeine.

But back to hypnosis, which comes from the Greek “to sleep.”

I don’t believe that hypnosis per se is antithetical to Scripture. (How could I, when I believe in both of them, though in the former only with some reservations.)

Hypnosis is merely the ability to focus ones mind intensely.

Remember when you were staring out a window and your mother called? You heard her in the background but were so lost in your reverie you couldn’t pull yourself away.

That’s a form of self-hypnosis. A famous training film shows a woman receiving a Caesarian section while all the time singing childhood songs and having no anesthetic. She merely could focus on the songs and thus put the pain in the background.

Perhaps even those who meditate on Scripture sometimes put themselves in this state of consciousness.

The problem arises when someone, maybe the subject or maybe the hypnotist, asks the person to open up his mind to outside influences.

Kindergarten teachers, sometimes inadvertently, request students to contact spirit guides. This is an occult practice of the ancient shamans.

(more on this after Christmas)

 

971224 — Some Questions Recently Asked by Patients and my answers —

What do you think of the current craze of “Gigapets”?

Not much, although that’s my grown-up view. Lots of children get them because they’re relatively cheap and sort of a status symbol or totem to show one belongs. For those who don’t know, these are the electronic “pets” that beep when you must feed them, take them out, etc.

I even know of one family where the father was in charge of the Gigapet for a day. (He’s a great guy and had fun doing it.)

These devices fall into the same category as pet rocks, hula hoops, Cabbage Patch dolls, and the like. They are basically harmless gimmicks that cost parents money and make some lucky inventor literally millions (I wish it were I).

However, when the hype goes on that the Gigapet will replace a real animal, I wonder how much comfort it will be when a child has a really bad day, when the world is lousy.

Will the incessant electronic beeps really replace a warm nose, fuzzy hair, and a real live dog or cat to whom you can spill your soul and who probably does really listen?

Do you approve of toy guns?

Let me put my bias out front: I’m a Life Member of the NRA (though I don’t always agree with them).

My own 3-year-old son is going through a cowboy phase and drags around his 6-shooter and rifle while wearing his hat and his homemade chaps and vest. (We draw the line by not allowing a fake can of Copenhagen.)

A former liberal feminist Berkeley mom wrote several years ago that she had staunchly denied guns entrance to her home, but that when she looked out back and saw her children using their thumbs and forefingers as guns, she surrendered.

I’m not sure how much laser or Uzi-type toys are “worse” than the old 6-gun. On the one hand, I’m not fond of all the violence. On the other hand, most children know that they are playing, that it’s not real.

On the third hand, my thoughts go back to Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, where he posited the Russian secret police never could have gained their horrendous potency if the citizenry had been armed.

And in The Lessons of History, the Durants say, paraphrased: “Woe to that civilization that doesn’t teach its children to be soldiers.”

Disarmament in an unrepentant world brings slaughter and slavery.

 

Christmas ‘97 Special Edition — With my apologies to those who know oh-so-much-more than I, here are my somewhat random thoughts about Christmas based on my understanding of orthodox theology.

The biggest gift of Christmas is God’s giving mankind a second chance. Jesus is sometimes referred to as “the second Adam.”

What this means is the first Adam screwed things up (and he blamed it on Eve, who blamed the Serpent). This screw-up, trying to be “as God,” is the Original Sin. (No, it’s not sex, as so many think.)

Original Sin, the “fall” from grace, was disobeying God, and the punishment (see Genesis) lays out the pain and burden of being a sinner in a fallen world. T’ain’t nice.

The Sin of Adam doomed us to live in a very imperfect world.

Now this sin was so great that the only way it could be expiated, and God propitiated, was for God, Himself, to take the punishment.

(What more punishment could mankind take? We were already thrown out of the Garden, we were already living without Grace.)

So God came in the flesh (the Incarnation) in the form of a dualistic being, both man and God at the same time: the Christ (kristos, the anointed one).

Because He was sinless, Jesus Christ could be the perfect sacrifice (and when one reads of Easter, it shows how Christ took on Sin and was thus torn apart from the presence of God, experiencing death — total alienation).

So, Christmas is a time of happiness, and sadness, and unbelievable joy in the knowledge that by merely believing, one can escape the “wages of sin,” which is death, permanent alienation in the life to come.

We’ve done a lot to degrade Christmas from a Holy Day to a mere holiday, and too often we give gifts to assuage longing in ourselves.

Outside the Nativity in the Bible, my favorite Christmas stories are The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry and The Littlest Angel by Charles Tazewell. And the “Dulce Domum” chapter from Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows warms the heart well.

Tell me your favorite stories and why, and I’ll include them in my column just preceding Christmas.

 

971231 — More on hypnosis, as promised the week before Christmas —

Some kindergarten teachers have gotten into hot water by having their children lie down and fantasize a relaxing scene, like a sunlit meadow.

Next, the children are told something like this: “look at the beautiful scene, and if you look closely way at the back, you’ll see someone starting to walk toward you. See this person come toward you, look at his (or her) face, hear him speak to you. He is your friend and will help you.”

Now perhaps some teachers have just heard of this at a convention or in a book. After all, if the children are relaxed, and if they seem to be helped by this “friend,” what’s the harm? And only right-wing Christian fascists will get upset at it.

If you are a complete Naturalist (or Materialist), meaning you don’t believe in any reality other than our physical one, then you probably would have no reason to be upset.

But if you believe in God, which presupposes you believe in a spiritual, or super- [meaning above] natural reality, then you might have reason to question the procedure.

For this is the way shamans and others find their “spirit guides,” who, if you’re an orthodox Christian, Muslim, or Jew, are not at all the friendly, helpful beings they make themselves out to be. Far from it.

Spirit guides put their believer in touch with other realities and allow, often unintentionally, another Driver to sit behind your steering wheel.

While most instructors are probably innocent, unaware of all this, there are at least some teachers who are not.

Bottom line: if your child has been exposed to this, he has been under the influence of a religious practice.

The same thing was quashed in the 70s when Transcendental Meditation, which was being spread in the schools as “healthful relaxation,” was exposed as a religious practice.

As was shown in a court case, the mantras, the foreign-sounding words that one chants repeatedly to clear one’s mind, are the names of Hindu deities. So TM devotees are actually calling on deities in an often unwitting devotional.

The so-called New Age, from Jung, to Joseph Campbell, to Deepak Chopra, is nothing but age-old Hindu beliefs and practices. If that’s what you want, then go for it. If not, then beware. (I’ll get off my soapbox and back to hypnosis proper next week.)

 

980108 — The last on hypnosis (for now): To me, hypnosis is like the proverbial sharp knife, which is good in the hands of a surgeon and evil in the hands of a murderer.

I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water because some people use a tool to get untoward results or to manipulate others.

Speaking of manipulation, it’s commonly assumed in hypnosis, the hypnotist “controls” the subject. In general, this is false; the subject is controlled only so much as he wants or allows himself to be.

Those who go up before a stage hypnotist, say, to bark like dogs, have at their core an ache to perform or to exhibit themselves (which is not of itself sick or bad).

If you were asked under hypnosis to do something against your will or your morals, you’d probably wake right up (and hopefully punch the hypnotist in the nose — and then claim to the judge that you did it because of post-hypnotic suggestion . . . heh heh heh).

Post-hypnotic suggestion, the implanting of an idea in the subconscious, can work. This is the basis for some people being able to stop smoking, stop bingeing, or start doing a desirable thing.

And it probably can aid in extreme cases of brainwashing, like in The Manchurian Candidate or the Patty Hearst case. Here, the personality is broken down by brutal, dehumanizing methods, like boot camp taken to, and beyond, the limits.

If I didn’t brutalize you, the only way I could probably get you to do my bidding would be by trickery, perhaps by getting you to think you were playacting Lincoln’s assassination with a stage-prop gun and then giving you a real one with live ammo.

We used to think brainwashing didn’t work, or then only worked with those of weak character. After all, a “real American soldier” wouldn’t give in to the enemy.

But of course, that was assuming the enemy followed the Geneva Convention in war. Now we know better. Just about everyone has a breaking point, a “Room 101” (from Orwell’s novel, 1984).

Hypnotizability was formerly thought the weakness of dumb, curvaceous blonds. Now we know it is often a skill, an ability to focus, to tune out extraneous noise. It may well be a sign of intelligence.

 

980115 — Dear Dr. Joe: What’s your take on the Recovered Memory report from British Psychiatrists just recently published? — J. in Red Bluff.

Dear J.: You’re referring, of course, to the article just published in Red Bluff’s lesser-circulation newspaper stating that a Royal College of Psychiatrists’s inquiry has “concluded that any memory recovered through hypnosis, dream inter­pretation, or regression therapy is almost certainly false.”

“Recovered memories,” per se, has been a fad in psychotherapy for the past 5-10 years. This means there has been much ballyhoo about it: papers written, workshops given, books published, reputations made, practices filled, etc. etc. etc.

Recent fads have been “adult children of alcoholics,” “ battered women,” and “childhood survivors of sexual abuse.” Before that, we had Ge­­stalt Therapy, anger groups, I’m OK You’re OK, and even nude marathon groups (3 days in a row).

Having been in the psychology scene in San Francisco from 1966 to 1995, I feel like I’ve seen it all (though that’s an impossibility).

Something’s being a fad doesn’t necessarily invalidate it. It just means that much attention is paid to it, at least temporarily. Often, solid knowledge is gained during and after the fad has waned.

It’s interesting that the British psychiatrists (the top dogs of mental health status wise) speak out against recovered memories. In general, the higher the degree (PhD or MD), the less likely one is to believe, or to do studies, in such things.

Perhaps the more years of formal education you have, the more skeptical you become because the more you realize how limited your knowledge is. Perhaps.

Recovered memories are (supposedly) the mind’s recording of events so traumatic that the event is pushed out of, repressed from, memory, only to turn up later under a technique designed to facilitate recall.

In one recent (infamous case), a daughter, having recovered a memory of sexual abuse, sued her father, which led to his firing and her mother’s divorcing the man.

Later, the man sued the marriage counselor and psychiatrist who, he claimed, instigated the “ruse” his daughter came to believe.

He won that case, but the jury’s still out. More on this next week.

 

980122 — More thoughts on “Recovered Memories”: last week I talked of a general skepticism from the doctoral crowd about so-called recovered memories.

But it’s important to note that being skeptical should not mean totally rejecting any and all evidence.

After last week’s column, one of my patients spontaneously recovered an early memory of childhood sexual play with an older child who probably took advantage of my patient, at least to the extent a 10-year-old can do such to a 6-year-old.

This “recovery” took place during a heightened emotional state. The theory behind this is called the State-specific Theory of Memory, and it goes something like this:

We tend to encode, or store, memories according to our emotional state at the time of the thing to be remembered. And we most easily recall the event during an emotional state similar to when we stored it.

For example, the guy who hides a bottle when drunk has a hard time finding it when sober. But once he’s again drunk, it magically turns up.

So, if we store a memory under high emotional stress, we’re most likely to recover it when we’re back in the same level of emotionality.

Sometimes we remember what happened, but don’t have the full emotional component of the memory until we hit that emotional state. It’s said that most victims of abuse always remember what happened, but not with all the feelings attached.

Back to my patient’s memory. Was this a true “recovered memory,” one that was totally hidden?

Or was it a memory that could have been easily recovered by doing a complete sexual history, which primes the pump?

And was the memory “real,” as in having actually happened, or was it “only in the mind,” which is nevertheless very real to the believer?

Psychotherapeutically speaking, it doesn’t make much difference. What is important is the full outpouring of heretofore blocked emotion.

The danger comes if someone acts on the recovered memory as if it were real — bringing lawsuits, wrecking family relationships, etc.

What’s “real” in a therapy session is very different from what’s “real” in a court of law. And well it should be, when someone else’s life and well-being depend on something as intangible and ever-shifting as memory. More on that next week.

 

980129 — More on memory (in general): the study of memory used to be relegated to part of a chapter in an intro­ to psychology textbook or else to an horrible upper level course that was boring to all except the supernerds.

Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a Stanford Ph.D. up in Washington, changed all that. She did the impossible—she made memory sexy (or at least very popular and even lucrative).

Through her studies in memory, which were translated to the courtroom, she skewered a sacred cow of the legal profession (who love to skewer psychology, so what comes around, goes around, etc. etc.).

Dr. Loftus showed that far from being the unimpeachable ironclad truth of all time, eyewitness testimony is actually quite fallible, quite prone to distortion and change.

Dr. Stephen Ceci of Cornell Univ. has done amazing work with children, and this is very important since memories of children are shown to be quite susceptible to influence from authority figures.

To paraphrase a study, some students had their class interrupted by a clowning person who wore a green shirt. Then, at different times in the months to come, the teacher talked about the funny guy in the red shirt.

Many months later, most of the children, when asked, said the guy’s shirt was—you guessed it—red.

What does this have to say about the child who is grilled by police or therapists until he says that Mr. X really did abuse him. Some of the famous cases turn your stomach when you read the transcripts of questioning.

And of course, kids can be talked out of, as well as into, changing their minds. It might well depend on who gets to them first and who has the most influence.

Memory is not burned into our brains (though chemical changes probably do account for the transfer from short- to long-term memory).

When we remember something, it’s as if a holograph is immediately reconstructed out of thin air (or out of grey matter, in this case). This holograph is subject to many different influences and is often malleable.

It’s like a 32-track tape recorder where any or all of the tracks can be erased, rerecorded, distorted, stay the same, or any combination thereof. And to us, the replay is authentic.

Next week, memory tips, mnemonic devices, and memory modes.

 

Special Home Improvement Edition ’98 Home Improvement is the topic of this Tehama Trader Plus mailer, and in writing for it, my first thoughts are about home.

“Home is where the heart is,” says the poet. Home is ones resting place, ones starting place, ones ending place. It’s where one feels the most comfortable, where the roots are.

When my elderly father found out his slow-growing cancer was getting ready to “take him home,” he had me fly to Tucson to take him back to Illinois.

It was unspoken, but he chose to die in the same local area in which he was born. Comin’ home. . . .

My concern today is that many homes don’t provide much solace, much comfort, much warmth.

And I don’t mean materially, for I know plenty of proud-but-poor folks whose children may grow up and be successful, but always choose to come home for the holidays, for the anniversaries, for the birthdays.

Show me a place where the kids, even adolescents, congregate with parents present, and I’ll most likely show you a home that doesn’t need much improvement.

One of the first things to do to increase warmth is to validate, a fancy word meaning, “I see you. I hear what you say. You count. You’re a pretty special person.”

When we’re validated, we feel the glow inside. And we tend to validate right back. When everyone feels that he counts, he relaxes and gets happy, and this feeling spreads infectiously.

In other words, to validate means to acknowledge the other person.

At the Tehama Local Development Corporation banquet in February, I talked to a person whose business had been nominated for an award. The award when to another.

“I don’t care,” he said, “it was an honor to be nominated, to be recognized by my peers. They all know how hard it is to run a business and how hard I’ve worked.”

He was ecstatic just to be validated, not necessarily to win.

So, too, we need to recognize how hard we all work to be part of a family, no matter what role we play.

“Hey, your a great kid! What a good job you did! Great meal, mom! Thanks for being here, Dad.”

This is real home improvement.

 

980205 — Still more on memory — Back when I had one, every time I filled my waterbed, I couldn’t find the special fitting needed to hook the hose to the bathroom faucet.

So, I would go buy one. When done, I would look for the logical place to store it, and when I finally picked a good spot, I’d find 3 or 4 of the same fittings from prior fillings.)

This is an example of memory that is state-specific not so much to the state of emotion, but to the state of the task. There probably was a lot of kinesthetic/tactile memory involved: moving and touching.

According to my wife, I have the “den from heck.” (This is a family paper, after all.) It’s the biggest mess you ever saw — piles upon piles upon shelves upon shelves.

Yet I can find something fairly easily. (My younger helper, Rebekah, says her room’s the same. I always knew she was a genius.)

Here again, a memory of movement is at work. Not only do I remember in my mind where I placed something, but my body seems to know just where to turn, how high to lift my arm, just how much to extend my hand. Like Michael Jordan.

We remember in various sensory modalities: visual, audio, verbal, gustatory (taste), olfactory (smell) muscular, positional, tactile.

Perhaps best way to place something firmy into your long-term memory (which means that reverberating nerve circuits are somehow translated into chemical changes), is to use several modalities at once.

Students must do a lot of memorizing, which is necessary to store the various academic tools and building blocks where they can be accessed readily.

The most successful way to study for a test is to outline the material (both lecture and notes) by writing it down, then memorize the outline.

Then, try to write the outline from memory, saying it to yourself as you do so until you can correctly reproduce the entire thing three times.

This gets your eyes (visual), your ears (auditory), your voice box (verbal), and your hand and fingers (kinesthetic) all working in concert and all contributing to the memory.

This is what I did in those college courses in which I excelled — and what I didn’t in those I punted. I can still almost write some of the outlines 35 years later. Hard work pays.

Next week, mnemonic devices.

 

980212 — The end of memory — The last several columns have been on memory, and I’ll end this series with mnemonic devices.

Mnemonic (nuh-mahn’-ik) is from the Greek word for memory, and someone needs to tell me why the Greeks put an apparently unneeded M in front of this word.

A mnemonic device is a trick of the mind that helps one to remember something. Big-time memory courses that cost big bucks rely heavily on this concept.

A waiter somewhere back east (Kansas City, perhaps) also makes big bucks, since he can remember the entire orders of a party of 15 or 20, and people come from miles around to try to trip him up, fail, and then tip him big time.

Other phenomenal feats of memory are usually explained by their purveyors as being based on mnemonic devices, too.

A buddy in college mastered German and French vocabulary and clued me in to his memory process, which is the same old trick.

He’d make associations to the thing to be remembered. The weirder and the more crazy the association, the easier it was to remember.

Here are two of his creations. The German word for “development” is die Entwicklung (ent-vic’-loong). For him, this meant that at the end of the candle’s wick, the lights went out so you could develop film.

Die Unterstützung (unter-stootz’-oong) means “support,” and for him, this meant a jock strap — you decipher the rest of it.

Mr. Fish who has puckered lips is easy, as might be Mr. White, the black man, Mr. Black, the whitey, or Green, the new guy.

Miss Oglethorpe might prove daunting at first, until you figured that Jim Thorpe, the famous football hero, probably oogled her once.

Another type of mnemonic device is etymology (from Greek, the true sense of words), the study of word roots and derivatives. (This is not the same as entomology, the study of insects, which comes from the word entomon, meaning “cut in two,” with reference to segmented bodies. Also, ent is like ant.)

Here, knowing the roots of words is a good device for remembering the words and improving ones vocabulary. There are some good books on Greek and Latin derivatives, and remember old faithful, The Reader’s Digest word-power features.

 

980219 — A continual lament: “There’s no good men (or women) left out there, especially in Tehama County. All the good ones are taken.”

My reply: “Balderdash and Buttermilk. There’s plenty of good ones left, even in Tehama County. You just haven’t found them.”

There are several reasons why not. Perhaps you’re “looking for love in all the wrong places.” Night spots are where the action is, if you’re looking for non-permanent lust..

But usually, such couplings lead, if anything, to a relationship of convenience, not of commitment.

At gatherings for night life among singles (and perhaps among some couples, as well), most people are quite uptight and are wearing masks of defense (hence the drinking).

What connects, then, are the masks, while the real people underneath remain lonely.

Good, wholesome activity is the best place to meet someone, for there the masks gradually come off and people are themselves, not their ideas of who they’re supposed to be.

Church and classes are two of the best places to meet others (though if you go to either with the express purpose of meeting someone, you’ll probably be wearing your mask).

Social activities such as square or folk dancing, crafts, card games, or club activities are much less threatening than hold-em-close grindings masquerading as dancing.

But the biggest reason you’re not connecting is most likely that you don’t know what to look for, since your own perceptual glasses may need a new prescription.

One gal I knew gave the same old lament about no guys around. I asked her who she thought was the type of guy “together enough” to satisfy her.

She mentioned Johnny X, and again lamented that he was taken.

“But,” I said to her, “I knew him a long time ago, before he was married and had kids. He was just like these guys you’re spurning ‘cause they’re not mature enough.”

“You’re looking for the finished product, but the product gets finished only after a number of years of a successful relationship. You have to learn to look for the raw material.”

It took her a lot of work to change her own attitudes, and hence her own perceptual astigmatism.

But she finally found a guy she never would have picked before, a guy who actually loved her and wanted to put her first, not himself.

 

980226 — How can you possibly want to bring back sanctions against illegitimacy? That’s hurting the child, the innocent victim!

This was asked me during a dinner conversation with a stranger, and I must admit it took me aback.

There’s enough Liberal left in me that I have almost a knee-jerk reaction at not wanting to hurt what seem to be innocent victims.

 By the Great Wave of Caring that effused during the 60s, society became the scapegoat of all man’s ills. No one deserved to hurt, and if they did, society was to assuage the pain.

It was hard not to buy this line, since it was drummed into you all during schooling, from kindergarten through graduate school.

We Liberals (I could say that then) felt anointed, as Thomas Sowell says, to fix things. Our brain power and ultra-concern would truly save the day, the whales, the world.

The so-called Sexual Revolution suckered girls into acting like guys, only to find that they paid the price as girls, not as guys.

Girls, not guys, got the babies, the abortions, the pelvic inflammatory diseases, the blocked tubes, the cervical cancer, the infertility.

It’s no mystery why one of the biggest supporters of Ms. magazine and the National Organization of Women was Hugh Heffner’s Playboy Foundation.

Yes, the new woman would pay for her own meal, have her own ride, not ask for any commitment, initiate sex on the first date, and take care of all the birth control.

How convenient for the adherent to the Playboy Philosophy.

Of course, with all the sex, there were bound to be more pregnancies. And with male responsibility having been taken away, more and more men became sperm donors, not dads.

As more single-parent families resulted from divorce, the stigma went out of non-marriage pregnancy.

Yet how many single moms can honestly say they never wished they had a responsible father around? (Our culture is doing it’s best to destroy the ones who’re left.)

Yes, the child without a legal (or common-law) father is innocent of wrongdoing, and to call attention to his plight is to stigmatize him.

But for him not to have a father, or at least a close father figure, is in many, if not most cases, a far greater pain and handicap. The stigma of illegitimacy could be one way to help reverse this pernicious trend.

 

980305 — More on illegitimacy . . . .

Feedback from last week’s column was mixed, with some saying I was way too hard on non-married moms. (Note how we don’t say “unwed” anymore.)

Nonsense. I have the utmost respect for most of the women who find themselves single moms, and I often go out of my way for them.

I say “most” because there are some who want to go it alone, who don’t realize (until it’s too late) how vital it is for a child to have both a mother and a father.

Interestingly, a friend of mine once said it is no accident that in general, women are more liberal than men.

After all, he pointed out, a mom’s job is to make sure resources are equally spread among her brood, whereas a father’s job is to interface his children with the world, where everything is not equal, where skill and merit bring higher successes.

He thinks the difference may be hormonal, perhaps the nurturing of progesterone/prolactin vs. the competition of testosterone.

(He continued that in politics, liberal men are often overshadowed by stronger wives: to wit, Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, FDR and Eleanor, Bill and Hillary.

Conservative men often seem to be more noticeable than their wives, who often assume more domestic duties: to wit, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Dick and Pat Nixon, Ike and Mamie.)

I think children need both influences in their lives; they need mothering and fathering by women and men, respectively, and when they get both by just one person, it’s just not the same.

David Blankenhorn’s book, Fatherless America, calls the dearth of fathers America’s most pressing social problem, and I agree.

Therefore, I’d like to find ways to reduce the number of fatherless children, and primary prevention should include putting social pressure against out-of-wedlock births.

With newer DNA testing, it should be easier to prove paternity, and if these casual fathers were forced to support their offspring or else rot in a non-air-conditioned, TV-less jail cell, maybe the word would get around quickly: just say no.

 

980312 — Attention Culture Lovers: our local “Messiah Project” will perform Handel’s Messiah, parts II and III, at the 1st Church of God on Sat., Apr. 4, at 7 p.m. and Sun., Apr. 5, at 2 p.m. Soar your soul!

To support via donations, call Faith or Ron Bennett at 385-1022.

And speaking of music, here’s a question that I frequently encounter: How much should you push a child to practice the ______?

I’m going to give my non-professional-musician advice, then ask some of our gifted local music teachers (we have many) to share their thoughts for next week’s column.

My daughter, Kate, is enrolled in gymnastics at our local center (and they do an excellent job). When trying to learn cartwheels, she was unable to do them right away, so she cried and pouted and said they were stupid and she was never going to go back to that mean old teacher.

Yet at home, I noticed she was still trying to do them when we weren’t looking. So, we started praising her whenever she came close to doing one halfway correctly.

Eager for the praise, she practiced and practiced and practiced until the technique started to come to her. All the time we’d say, “Kate, that’s great, now do just one more.”

The exercise buffs in the audience will appreciate the “just one more” mantra, as will anyone who excels in a skill of any sort.

How many guitarists struggled and struggled with a bridge chord, until one day it just “came” to them?

And how many violinists, or trombonists, struggled with making their hand perform the regular, rhythmic motion required to produce vibrato?

I think we need to push our children until they get over at least one or two humps of learning (or beyond plateaus, as the experts say).

Then, once they’ve achieved at least a rudimentary skill, we need to help them enjoy it, have fun at it, get the rewards of hard work.

If, after going through several of these cycles, they are still unhappy and struggling with learning more of the skill, then perhaps it’s not worth it — unless, of course, we’re pushing them to do it for our own personal satisfaction, our ego trip..

If we have fun, children will, too.

 

980319 — Attention Culture Lovers: our local “Messiah Project” will perform Handel’s Messiah, parts II and III, at the 1st Church of God on Sat., Apr. 4, at 7 p.m. and Sun., Apr. 5, at 2 p.m. Soar your soul!

To support via donations, call Faith or Ron Bennett at 385-1022.

Last week’s question was, “How much should you push a child to practice, say, a musical instrument?”

My conclusion was that one should push a child far enough for him to find out if he has a skill worth developing, but not push him so far that he is discouraged and loses all sense of excitement and originality.

It reminds me of famous experiments trying to get kids to brush their teeth. If the presentation were not scary enough, the kids weren’t motivated to brush. But if it were too scary, then the kids totally denied it all and still didn’t brush. One needed to find the middle ground, the “optimal level of arousal.”

I asked a number of local music teachers to criticize my conclusions in light of their many, many years of teaching music.

Faith Bennett said that “Piano music is not instant — just add water and stir. Piano music is note by note, measure by measure, till the fingers are trained.”

She said her mother pushed her to play the piano because “I know there is music in you, daughter.”

Faith is glad her mother pushed, but she doesn’t recommend that for everyone, of course.

She concluded that what needs to happen is that children have to learn how to work, how to stick to it, how not to just pick the easy parts, but to master the hardest parts.

And of course, the most powerful form of learning is modeling. If parents work hard, so will their kids. Monkey see, monkey do.

Carolyn Burkhardt likes to encourage rather than push, though she’s not adverse to playing something again and again and again.

For her, patience is the prime virtue in teaching children. She cites the story of the man with a small boy in the market checkout line who kept saying, “Patience, Charles.”

When commended on the behavior of his son, who all thought was named Charles, the man said, “No, you’ve got it wrong. I’m Charles.”

Next week, Judi Richins’s ideas.

 

980326 — Attention Culture Lovers: our local “Messiah Project” will perform Handel’s Messiah, parts II and III, at the 1st Church of God on Sat., Apr. 4, at 7 p.m. and Sun., Apr. 5, at 2 p.m. Soar your soul!

To support via donations, call Faith or Ron Bennett at 385-1022.

The last two weeks have focused on how to get a child (or yourself) to stick with it long enough to learn a skill, and how much to force things.

Music teachers Faith Bennett and Carolyn Burkhardt gave ideas last week, and this time, it’s music teacher Judi Richins’s turn.

Judi says that “most every child will quit a discipline, such as piano study, at some point if given that option. . . . so it’s not much how to push, but rather how can we be creative and consistent parents.

“If a parent wants to use something like piano practice as a discipline so the child may learn the value of sticking to something complex and rather difficult, I think the parent must decide that for the child.

“It must be decided at a young age and adhered to if one wants to see that child grow through challenges and come out shining. . . .

“If you want your child to learn a discipline, you’d better be ready to do what that takes, because I guarantee he’ll go through stages that will put you to the test.

“The parent decides that the child needs to brush his teeth, eat, sleep, and go to school each day, so to implement a daily practice doesn’t have to be any more ‘pushy’ than anything else a parent decides is necessary for the child’s mental, physical, or emotional well-being.”

She concludes that our society places a very low value on the arts, and I tend to agree. We’ve vulgarized the arts (from the word meaning “common”), so instead of using art to lift people up, we’ve allowed so-called artists to drag art down, often to septic-tank level.

As a final note to this series, a mother told me that she recently forced her child to take a sport over his father’s objections.

The boy had been eager to try out — until a close friend decided not to try out. So our boy refused to attend the first practice, but over the dad’s objections, his mom made him go.

The result? “He loved it,” she said. Here is a case where “forcing” worked because mom knew her boy very well. (He was a bit anxious.)

 

980402 — Attention Culture Lovers: our local “Messiah Project” will perform Handel’s Messiah, parts II and III, at the 1st Church of God on Sat., Apr. 4, at 7 p.m. and Sun., Apr. 5, at 2 p.m. Soar your soul!

To support via donations, call Faith or Ron Bennett at 385-1022.

This week’s question is a compilation from numerous people to whom I’ve given counsel: “I went to church (or a club, or a class) several times, but I never did feel comfortable, so I quit. How long does one have to go before one feels OK?”

My glib answer: at least 6 months. My more reasoned answer: more than 26 weeks. My psychobabble answer: until you have dropped your defenses enough to let people get to know you for who you are.

Most of us have not only our private selves, but also our public selves. We don’t want people to see our flaws, to know that we’re merely weak human beings.

After all, we reason, they look like they’re solid and well put-together, and if I show weakness, I’ll never be liked or accepted.

This, of course, puts up a wall of falseness that often reinforces the others’ walls of falseness. Everyone gets so involved in putting on his own act that each forgets he is doing just that, acting a part.

The Greek word hypocrite literally means “actor,” one who plays a part. (And as an aside, I like to counter people who say, “I won’t go to church because it’s filled with too many hypocrites.” My response: “Well, that’s true, but we’re all hypocrites at heart, and at least these people are trying to do something about it.”)

If you go to your church (or club) often enough and also have connection with those people outside of the formal events, you’ll eventually get to know them for who they really are when all of you drop your façades.

And the more one drops his façade, the more authentic, the more personable, he becomes. And in a spiral, synergetic effect, the more real those about him become, which makes him become even more real.

The “Dinners for 8” and “Progressive Desserts” are great ways to see people outside the formal ceremonies, just as are choir practice, book studies, and breakfasts.

Get involved in your organization at this level, and I guarantee that within 183 days you’ll start to feel like you really belong.

“Be yourself,” your mom correctly said, “and people will like you.”

 

980409 — Dear Dr. Joe: What’s your opinion about the recent PBS special questioning who Jesus “really was”? — Richard in Red Bluff.

Dear RRB: My first thought is “What’s new?”— either with the question or with PBS. After all, refutations of Jesus have been around the earth as long as He was, and PBS will never be mistaken for the Christian Broadcasting Network.

It is de rigueur these days for the media to question the authenticity of Jesus Christ around Eastertime.

(As an aside, when’s the last time you heard the basic tenets of Judaism being questioned close to Yom Kippur, or those of Islam being questioned close to Ramadan?)

The biggest guns are trained on the basic tenets of Christianity. If self-proclaimed (and self-righteous) scholars can persuade others to deny primarily the Resurrection, and perhaps the Virgin Birth, then Christianity has essentially been emasculated and turned into the Neo-Christianity of the Social Gospel taught by so many “mainline” theologians.

Simply put, the Social Gospel says Jesus was a nice man who took ancient wisdom and popularized it, who showed people how to treat their fellows nicely and to have tolerance for all and everything — except the idea of sin (disobeying God).

The Social Gospel preaches that Jesus (not the Christ) told the crowd around the woman caught in adultery, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Of course, none did.

The Social Gospel conveniently forgets, or denies, that Christ next said to the woman, “Go thou and sin no more.” Sin!?!

The culmination of the Social Gospel is Liberation Theology, prevalent in Latin America (and U.S. colleges), which blends/syncretizes atheistic Marxism with Christianity so that “social justice” (read redistribution of wealth) will prevail.

The rise of the Social Gospel is probably the fault of too-complacent Comfortable Christians, who forgot that James said, “Without works, faith is dead.”

(Which, by the way, does not mean that good works are required for salvation, only that true salvation will of itself spawn good works. Check out the ecumenical “Lord’s Table” in Red Bluff, whereby the poor are fed. Why not volunteer?)

Standard, orthodox Christianity says Jesus is God incarnate. Modern groups like the Jesus Seminar, deny that. (More about them next week.)

 

980416 — (Easter Revised, cont., #2 of 3)

The “Jesus Seminar,” headquartered in Sonoma, CA, has a real knack for making headlines, especially around Easter and Christmas.

Most of what I’ve learned about them is from the Spiritual Counterfeits Project [SCP] in Berkeley, a theologically conservative Christian think-tank on whose Board of Directors I’ve served for a decade.

The Jesus Seminar is (in)famous for voting, with pink, gray, and black tokens, on whether Jesus actually said what’s attributed to Him in the Bible. (Pink for Yes, gray for Maybe, black for No.)

According to them, Jesus truly said about 20% of what is quoted in the Bible. The rest was added by disciples who wanted Jesus to be much more than he “really” was.

It goes without saying that the Jesus Seminar is full of theologians (those who study God, not necessarily Believers) who aren’t orthodox, believing Christians, but rather are deists, atheists, or neo-Christians.

(Deists cannot gainsay a Creator God, but think He wound up the universe like a clock, then went away. Atheists say there is no god, and neo-Christians think of Jesus as just a good teacher, not God incarnate.)

The buzzwords, “The Quest for the Historical Jesus,” translate to mean Jesus was real in history, as a man, but not real in a supernatural sense, as part of the triune Godhead.

The Jesus Seminar is the culmination of a type of modernistic (or post-modernistic) theology, originating in Germany, calling itself “higher criticism.” (No lack of chutzpah in them.)

This literary school has engendered to two types of criticism. The first, form criticism, tries to ascertain if biblical writings conform to the style of other writings of the same time period, like Olde and new English.

The second, redactive criticism, tries to determine the biases of the people who edited the original text. Editing can be as non-intrusive as correcting spelling and grammar, or as transmuting as changing the entire meaning of things.

For example, the Jesus Seminar would agree that Jesus did not, Himself (my capital H, not theirs), say He was the Son of God. It was His disciples who changed this around to what they wanted it to be.

(From John Moore in SCP Journal 20:3-4, pp 24ff. Write SCP at POB 4308, Berkeley, CA, 94704, or see the web site: www.scp-inc.org. )

 

980423 — Dear Dr. Joe: What’s behind the double slaying over in the Cabernet Apartments in Antelope? It sure sounds like jealousy.— From a number of people.

Dear NOP: I’m not privy to the police reports, and I never met any of the parties involved, either personally or professionally.

All I know is what I’ve read in the papers, but I can give you my ideas about extreme jealousy, which, on the surface at least, seems to have played a big part in the tragedy.

Jealousy is an all-too-human mental state that gives rise to intense anger and aggression. It’s more than just human, too, for observe two dogs, each with a bone, trying to get the other’s morsel. . . .

Evolutionary biologists and psychologists would probably say that their possessiveness has survival value, that the dog who get the most bones wins the struggle for survival.

Likewise, jealousy is seen as hard-wired into humans (via the “miracle of evolution”) to help one set of genes maintain and procreate itself over another set of competing genes.

(The nice thing about having just genes and no soul is that your genes are merely automatons who don’t have to answer to any nosy Creator.)

Jealousy and envy are sometimes defined as wanting what another person has, whereby covetousness is not only wanting what another has, but also wanting that other person not to have it.

“If I can’t have her, then you can’t have her, either.”

Given the opening caveats, this would be my best guess about the motives for killing the young man.

As for the young woman, my best guess would be that something, probably a withdrawal of affection, triggered an intense, uncontrolled rage that may have been smoldering for some time in perhaps a quiet person.

And it may have been done with similar logic: “If I can’t have you, then no one else will, either.”

Most of us don’t live too far from the edge over which that young man stepped. Many of us are closer to rage than we realize.

I see it perhaps monthly, but Alternatives to Violence sees it daily. Human passion can flare out of control and overcome reason.©

 The miracle is that most of us stop and control ourselves before the extreme act is committed in reality.

(Easter Revised, Part 3 of 3, will run next week).

 

980430 — (Easter Revised, cont., #3 of 3)

The Jesus Seminar’s final general rule of evidence is to “Beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you.” These are telling words.

The Jesus Seminar is made up, of course, of theologians who don’t think Jesus was particularly, if at all, divine, and they set out to prove it.

They have two main categories of guidelines they use: (1) Seven Pillars of Scholarly Wisdom, and (2) Rules of Evidence.

Seven Pillars — boy, does that sound lofty. But what they’ve actually done is find seven reasons to justify thinking the way they do, and then label them so high-falutin’ that no one dare question how, or why, they came up with the seven.

Pillar One is the belief in a “historical Jesus” as separate from Jesus of the Gospels. This allows them to say, “Yes, Virginia, there really was a man called Jesus, but he was just a man (and therefore not divine).”

A man I respect recently wrote to take me to task for suggesting the PBS programs were somehow not up to snuff. He said that nowhere in it did they question Jesus’s divinity.

I reply they didn’t really have to, for the code words, “Historical Jesus,” speak against divinity.

(Yet I will dutifully watch it again and apologize if I stand corrected. Also, I’ll print his letter, if he gives permission, so we can dialogue.)

Pillar 5 attacks Albert Schweitzer and separates Jesus from eschatology (fancy word for “end times”). Pillar 6 just says there’s a difference between oral and print cultures, which is basically true, except that these are code words for saying the oral tradition was not up to snuff — or in other words, that Jesus’s disciples had convenient memory lapses and fanciful imaginations therein.

Pillar 7 presumes the Gospels are false until proven true — which is a presupposition that the Gospels were merely written by fallible men who could easily have made “mistakes.”

But this is hardly the stuff of Divine Revelation, which is understood by most believing Christians to be how God used men to write the Bible.

The Seven Pillars seems to me the antithesis of the first of the Twelve Labors of Hercules. (Hint: stables)

The Jesus Seminar doesn’t practice what it preaches: they’ve found a Jesus entirely congenial to them.

(From John Moore in SCP Journal 20:3-4, pp 24ff. Write SCP at POB 4308, Berkeley, CA, 94704, or see the web site: www.scp-inc.org. )

 

May ’98 Special Recreation Edition A somewhat arcane, but theoretically important psychiatrist, Wilhelm Reich, started most of his books with this epigram:

Love, work, and knowledge are the wellsprings of our life. They should also govern it.

This added something to the old “lieben und arbeiten” couplet (German for love and work) put forth by Freud and the boys (and a couple of girls, too).

Most people who come for treatment have either one or the other area dysfunctional. Either their love life is screwed up, or their work life is lousy. But at least one area is going OK, and that makes it somewhat easier to tolerate the problems in the other.

And of course, some poor souls have both their work and love lives in a mess, and this makes things much more serious.

But how about the people who apparently have both areas humming smoothly: their primary, and secondary, relationships are fulfilling, and their work is pleasing and productive.

If they don’t have a love of knowledge, Reich would say they don’t approach true psychological health. And I would agree.

Of course, if one finds people with both love and work lives intact, there usually is a love of knowledge there, as well.

And I don’t just mean book learning — sometimes far from it. A guy who hunts wild pigs or turkeys, or a gal who flies gliders, are both interacting with their environment in ways that express their competence.

I guess what I’m saying is that recreation is more than simply relaxation, that the guy who goes fishing and sleeps with his pole in the water is relaxing and re-charging (usually), but is also not getting all he can from the experience.

(Note: I’m not putting down, or “dissing” the sleeper. I’m merely suggesting that those who enter into their activity at more than a superficial level probably get more enjoyment in the long run.)

One of the complaints I sometimes get from patients is that “there’s nothing to do in Tehama County.” This is a perceptual problem, for one can be lonely in the city, too.

Peruse this paper to see how many recreational opportunities we have right here in Tehama.

 

980507 — Lessons from a Church Dinner

I went to a church dinner Saturday night and learned a thing or two. The dinner was in honor of the church’s senior citizens, and in addition to finest-china place settings, potted violets, and background music by a pianist who might well have been potted, a group of ladies had home cooked a succulent meal worthy of high-class caterers.

Serving the elder crew were a coterie of mid-lifers and, perhaps best of all, a gaggle of well-dressed, well-mannered teenaged waiters and waitresses (triple ugh on those calling them waitpersons).

One of the teenagers learned a hard lesson that night. A function that youngster had planned on attending Friday night had been postponed until Saturday evening.

Naturally, the youngster wanted to go to the more exciting function, and not go to serve tables of oldsters. But the youngster’s father would not let the teenager out of the food-serving commitment, which had been made several weeks earlier.

How many fathers (or mothers) do you know who would hold a child to such a commitment (and know that the value of keeping that obligation far overshadows whatever shallow bit of fun the other activity would have provided)?

If you can answer, “a lot,” then your hanging with the right crew. If your answer is otherwise, you’d better look into a mirror and reestablish your priorities — and your friends.

I didn’t ask this budding adult how much fun the table waiting was, but from my vantage point at the Old 88, it seemed good times were had by all.

The other eye-opener came from an oldster who rarely, if ever, goes out away from home. This person really had a lot of fun — as sparkling eyes and a lilting voice showed.

Frail as this senior was, enervation was replaced by innervation and I had to hustle to keep up with this person’s voluntary hustle and bustle in cleaning up afterwards.

“I don’t get out much, anymore,” I was informed. “Ever since _______ died I don’t go anywhere, and my child lives way down south. Truly, I often don’t care if I live or die.”

What a confession! And how come we are we letting them feel this way, they who should be our most honored and revered citizens?

(By the way, my wife, Patricia, was the impresario for the evening.)

 

980514 — Dear Dr. Joe: I’ve heard a lot about something called “self-actualization,” that it’s something you have to have to be considered “healthy.” What is it? — Curious Far-Out in the Foothills.

Dear Far-Out: It all depends who’s doing the considering. Remember, those in power get to make the rules, and the ruling power in psychology for the last century have been the Humanists, those people who think there are no absolutes, that all is relative, that all is “natural” (with no bothersome supernatural entities such as God).

Perhaps the inventor, but for sure the popularizer of self-actualization was psychologist Abraham Maslow, who listed an “hierarchy of needs,” which every beginning psychology student learns:

Physiological needs, Safety needs, Love needs, Self-esteem needs, and Self-Actualization needs.

(The entire area of “needs” is one swirling in deep theoretical controversy having to do with such esoteric areas as “drive-reduction theory,” “optimal levels of tension,” and the like.

On the less theoretical and more political level, wishes become wants, which become needs, which become rights, which become legislated.)

Back to Maslow: Physiological needs are the lowest level of the hierarchy, or pyramid, meaning they have to be satisfied before higher needs can be adequately met.

And it makes sense. What good is love or self-esteem if one cannot breathe, or is dehydrated, or is starving?

Safety needs come next, for how can one adequately love or feel good about oneself if the wolf is continuously at the door. (And of course, one doesn’t have to have all the lower levels’ needs met before working on the higher levels’ — just most of ‘em.)

Once you’re fed, safe, and loved, you start dealing with the need to feel good about who you are and what you do. Self-esteem is the darling of many Humanists and New Agers, and at least a few years ago, we even had a Self-Esteem Czar in Sacramento making over $100,000.

Then, once all those needs are met, one can self-actualize, “be all that one can be” (with apologies to the U.S. Army). This is not a bad idea, except many people try to bypass the other four levels of needs and make a mockery of the entire process.

Next week: losing or finding “it.”

 

980521 — This week’s column was supposed to be “losing or finding it.” Instead, it’s on “remembering it.”

The It we ought to remember is Memorial Day, or at least what passes for a reasonable facsimile thereof these days.

Memorial Day used to come on May 31 (or was it May 30?), rain or shine, on whatever day it was.

It was rather like a lottery, for if it came on Sunday, for example, shops would be closed, anyway, so there wasn’t an extra holiday. Shucks!

And school was already out back then in the 50s in central Illinois, so you didn’t get a school holiday, either. If you were a farmer, you might take half a day off to see the parade, then get back to plowing the corn.

In our small town, the size of Los Molinos, we always had a parade headed by the high school marching band in their (our) heavy wool Maroon uniforms which made one sweat in the dead of winter, let alone on an almost-summer day that could be quite hot and humid.

There were always a few horses in the parade, so picking one’s way around the droppings in white shoes became quite an art, especially carrying a sousaphone or bass drum.

Whether or not in reality the band sounded good, or even on-key, it always brought tears to the eyes of the onlookers, many of whom had lost loved ones in both World Wars.

Led by the color guard, the band was followed by the Boy and Girl Scouts, plus whoever else wanted to join the parade that day.

Beginning at the old cannon near the bandstand in the park, the procession proceeded four blocks down Center Street, past the library, to the school buses waiting at the high school.

Then we drove the two miles to Oak Hill cemetery, where the band played our National Anthem, old WWI veteran Hugh Keyes read “In Flanders Field” in a quavering voice, the honor guard fired a three-round salute, and the band’s best cornet player struggled with “Taps.”

Then the Boy and Girl Scouts ran hither and yon placing small bouquets on the veterans’ graves, which were marked with small flags.

Finally, the buses loaded up and headed back to town, where most of us stayed glued to the radio to hear the Indianapolis 500.

How sweet it was, back when the whole community remembered.

See you at Monday’s services?

 

980528 — Still More on Memorial Day

Yes, I went to the Memorial Day services at Oak Hill Cemetery on Monday, May 25. I would rather it had been on May 30, the real Memorial Day, not the Free Monday used to extend the weekend, as Supervisor Barbara McIver pointed out so well and so wryly.

Kudos for her nicely done address. And thanks to Ray Burkhart for assuring me that the correct day is, and should be, May 30, not May 31.

The entire morning was salubrious to the soul. Entering the cemetery, one walked down the Avenue of Flags and began to feel the wellings and stirrings of gratitude for the veterans resting there.

Throughout the area, small American flags marked graves of veterans, whether singly or in the rows-upon- rows at the back. Walking and looking, one was set to pondering imponderables about existence.

Here and there were families honoring the plots where sometimes many generations lay. And some slowly moving surivors mourned loved ones so recently lost.

The Red Bluff Community Band sounded almost professional, and the Color Guard smartly posted the colors in front of people who still remember to take off their hats and hold their hands over their hearts as the flag goes by.

First, Rose Marie Hammer, then the Community Christian School Student Choir had to make do with a balky amplifier. But the Community Baptist choir had enough voices to obviate the need.

From the back, a Color Guard member saw a woman standing tiredly with her children and commandeered a chair for her.

It was a small gesture, but done so purposefully and almost unconsciously that this remnant of long-gone chivalry seemed somehow to revive the aura of yesteryear.

Throughout, I wondered, “Where are all the people?” The crowd was so small. Then I heard someone say it was the best crowd in a long time!

How can we fill the cemetery to overflowing next year? How can we slow down the peacetime forgetfulness that almost seems a precursor to the next big conflict?

The best memory of the day — a lady looked at the crowd and asked a grizzeled veteran, “who’s here that’s important?”

“The ones in the ground, ma’am.”

Amen to that!

 

980604 — Congratulations to the new owners/managers of KBLF, represented by long-time North Valley media personality Cal Hunter, formerly of Channel 7 News.

(Finally, Self-actualization continued, and ended):

Frank Sinatra recently found out whether God is real, and though I am not particularly a fan of his singing style, one song stands out to me.

It is also the song featured at the end, during the credits, of George of the Jungle, when the chess-playing ape dons a Vegas blue-sequined suit to belt out, “I Did It My Way.”

The song is vintage Sinatra and is diagnostic of our times.

I used to get tears in my eyes when I heard it, and I imagined I were good enough to perform it before a vast audience, who would give wild adoration as I showed them I was truly self-actualized. (Though self-aggrandized is more like it.)

This is the problem with self-actualization: when you try to get it, you don’t have it, and vice versa.

Besides, there is an even greater fly in the ointment: the Self. Modern psychology, and closely following it, modern religion, have engendered a Cult of the Self, from the conservative types who want self-wealth and total individuality to the liberal types who cover their selfishness with apparent good deeds.

I get a kick out of philanthropists who are lionized as “not blowing their own horns” as their minions and hagio­gra­­phers (worshipful biographers) blow it for them loudly.

One might say the ultimate Pharisee is the one who has someone else rattle his money in the coin box after he demurely appears to donate silently.

Another song of the “My Way” ilk is “I Gotta Be Me,” which is, when you think of it, the mantra of 70s encounter groups and weekend marathons when people suddenly found “it” at est-like seminars that blended Marine boot camp with offshore hidden bank accounts.

No one ever could say what the “it” was, but once you found “it,” you were in a club with others who had found “it.” The Emperor’s New Clothes certainly comes to mind.

In the New Age (ancient Hinduism), the self is purposely lost to merge with “the Infinite.”

For Christians, the Self is not lost, merely subordinated to others. Their song? “I did it Thy way.”

For me, this is true actualization.

 

980611 — Congratulations to all the recent graduates at whatever level (from Kindergarten up through advanced degrees). May you always be “not good enough.”

“Not good enough” was the most coveted grade one could get in the English department of the university where I did my undergraduate work (DePauw U., Greencastle, IN).

This school had a reputation for journalism, for several graduates founded Dow Jones and the Wall St. Journal. They also founded Sigma Delta Chi, the journalism fraternity.

My first college class, ever, was beginning English composition, which met at 8:00 a.m. on a Monday back in September, 1959. Since our teacher-to-be had suddenly died the week before, we were confronted with his replacement: the former head of the department, a professor emeritus (i.e., retired) who had gone to Korea as a missionary, had returned, and was just aching to get at young Freshmen with her red pen.

“Harummph!,” she harummphed at us. “All you girls will write about love, and all you boys will write about sports. And no one will probably get more than a D.”

Fine words to hear at your absolutely first-ever college class. I was ready to pack it in and make the three-hour journey home.

We wrote an essay per week; always, a rough draft preceded the final one. By departmental rules, one misspeling was an automatic C, and two gave the dreded F.

Because this was in the days of the dinosaurs when there were no computers or spell-checkers, we wrote with open dictionaries on our laps and used Eatons Corrasable Bond paper, which “erases like a gentleman,” our professor informed us.

My first grade, of course, was an F, and there were so many red marks on the paper I thought she had bled through the skin on her hand by writing so much.

We had to attend mandatory conferences with her, where she explained her red marks and then made us rewrite the rough draft.

Her tutelage having taken hold, we actually looked forward, as she had predicted, to getting red marks. (We even learned to use the nominative absolute, as above.)

 Even worse, she was also correct about red marks. I felt cheated when my paper came back relatively clean.

(continued next week)

 

980618 — (Not Good Enough, cont.)

My freshman English composition teacher made us write, rewrite, and rewrite some more. A quarter century later, I would never dream of writing something important — or usually anything at all — without at least two or three drafts.

Even more legendary than her sea of red (correction marks) on our papers were her trips to the library. Briefcase in hand and singular little cap on her head, she perkily approached that building, and those in the know shuddered.

Someone was going to be caught committing the P-sin: plagiarism.

Nothing was more grievous, more heinous, or more egregious. (She always told us that groups of three were “more elegant.”)

In today’s climate of moral relativity, it’s entirely possible — nay, perhaps even likely — that many college graduates have never heard of the word, plagiarism.

In case you’re a recent grad, it means to steal the intellectual creation of someone else, to pass off another’s ideas as if they were your own — the epitome of cheating.

It used to be that committing so venal a sin automatically brought an “F” in the course, or perhaps even expulsion from school.

When our beloved teacher (and she grew thus in our eyes) smelled even the vaguest hint of plagiarism, she was off to the kill like a shark smelling chum miles away.

She would stay in the library for hours, days, months until she found the source, however arcane and reclusive.

Then she would emerge triumphant, the wriggling sinner on her hook.

The only time we knew her to fail was when one daring guy wrote a paper “so good that I’m reading it to you aloud” — as we suppressed our amazement and mirth.

The cad had copied it word for word from The Reader’s Digest, the one publication she hated with a passion (for it condensed books) and therefore would never read.

That guy is probably president of a major news network by now, but he only showed that even saints can have Achilles heels of clay.

This lady was the most important, and arguably the best teacher I ever had. Her highest grade was “Not Good Enough,” meaning one could always improve even the best of efforts. I once even earned one!

 

980625 — Know a child at summer camp who needs a letter to help chase away the homesick blues? Here’s a generic Camp Letter:

Dear _______. Hope you are having __ fun __ a great time __ a miserable existence at _________.

__ I __ your dad and I __ your mom and I __ the whole family __ the dog __ the cat __ the goldfish __ everyone but ________  __ miss you wildly __ feel lonely without you __ feel finally there’s some quiet in the house __ forgot to tell you your ticket there was one way.

Every day, __ I __ we look at your room and feel __ sorry __ elated that you’ll finally, at long last, have someone else __ suggesting you __ helping you __ forcing you to __ make your bed __ pickup up your clothes __ turn out the lights at a decent hour __ share your finest thoughts and feelings.

Hope you are having fun with __ volleyball __ the slimy swimming hole __ camp chow __ poison oak __ smelly latrines and coarse toilet paper __ forced afternoon naps __ sunburn __ campfire ghost stories.

Don’t worry about us being here working while you’re out there having fun. __________ got a broken arm and tailbone, but the doctor says they will heal nicely with several years’ bed rest. We’ve quarantined the __ smallpox __ cootie __ head lice outbreak within your bathroom, so it hasn’t spread.

The fire in the kitchen was contained after it destroyed your bedroom, but look at the bright side — at last it’s clean. And please don’t worry much at all about the __ swimming pool __ trampoline __ car. We can always get another one sometime when _____________ gets a new job.

Since you left, we yielded to a sudden urge to __ visit Disneyland __ white-water raft on the Colorado __ see the Giants play and tour the town __ go to MarineWorld.

However, in order to do so, we had to sell your __ mountain bike __ best skateboard __ computer __ baseball card collection __ Barbie Doll collection. We hope you don’t mind. After all, we sacrificed to put you in camp. (But please don’t feel too guilty about __ Gramps __ Sissy __ your dog starving. We can always get another one.)

Hope the food poisoning goes away soon. And don’t worry, the weather forecast up there was only for scattered tornadoes.

 

July ’98 Special Back to School Edition Recently, I had the distinct pleasure of addressing a summer class by RBUHS counselor Pep Roa, a pod of teenagers training to be peer counselors, students to whom other students can come for direction, referral, or just a sympathetic ear.

During the questions, I was asked about college and even further education. So I got on my soap box and told them: (1) my major criterion for knowing someone is educated, and (2) the most important attribute of being a student (which, hopefully, is forever).

My first inkling about being truly educated came when, as a graduate student, I was assigned a reading, a famous 5-page article on the differences, as scientifically defined, between anxiety and fear.

It took me several hours to digest that small article, and I still ruminate on it from time to time over 30 years later. (I don’t think I’ll ever understand it completely.)

That article was one of perhaps ten in that journal, and the bound volume held eleven other journals, a year’s worth. There were approximately twenty such volumes on the shelf, and there were at least six shelves in that section, and perhaps six sections to a row.

There were at least 50 rows on that floor, and the library had seven floors. Kits, kats, wives, sacks, how many hours within the stacks?

3 hrs./article x 10 articles/mo. x 12 mo./yr. x 20 volumes/shelf x 6 shelves/section x 6 sections/row x 50 rows/floor x 7 floors. Whew!

That’s 90,720,000 hours, or 3,780,000 days, or 10,349.08 years (365.25 days).

And that’s all reading time, without potty breaks, food, or sleep.

So, when one begins to realize how absolutely little he knows, he is just starting to become educated. The more you know how little you know, the more educated you are.

Now for the most important attribute of being a student. When teaching college or graduate school, I used to throw a big word or concept at the class and wait to see if anyone asked for help.

Usually, no one knew it, but no one was brave enough to admit it. Then we would have basic training in education, which is simply to raise ones hand and say, “I don’t get it. Would you please help me?”

When you are brave (and smart) enough to do this, the others will heave a huge sigh of relief.

 

980702 — Dear Dr. Joe: Why this love affairs with July 4th?

This was asked me by a patient who saw I was taking time off around July 4th and realized that like Christmas and Easter, I always celebrate Independence Day.

Above all, I consider July 4th a religious holiday. (In support of this, see the radio “teaser” for Dave Racer at the end of this column.)

The “bible” of our secular nation is the Constitution, and the seminal document for that is the Declaration of Independence.

Written by Thomas Jefferson, famous as a deist (God made the world and stood back, not meddling in things) and a flirter with Christianity, the Declaration declares that we are endowed by our Creator (capitals in the original) with certain inalienable rights.

And among these, of course, are the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

This country, then, was founded on the presupposition that God, not a king or a legislature, gave us rights that cannot be taken away.

Contrast this to Russia’s constitution, where the state is the giver of rights, or to the various U.N. charters and treaties, where the same idea is expressed as God is kicked out.

In those infamous documents, any rights we have been given can be taken away by the “state” (or the “global state”) almost at whim.

So America, a secular country, was founded upon, and so far is still based upon, religious convictions that are, in the main, Christian. If we allow that foundation to be eroded, the edifice above will crumble.

(Read The Light and the Glory by Peter Marshall, or Defending the Declaration by Gary Amos.)

The Bible’s book of Ephesians says we are in a war of spiritual principalities. Using this lens for interpretation, one can readily see the fight for religious belief in this country: the Secularists (or Humanists) vs. the Monotheists (one -god religions: observant Jews, committed orthodox Christians and offshoots, Islam and its offshoots.)

That’s the real reason behind, and the danger of, groups like the ACLU, who appear to fight for rights but are really fighting for non-God socialism (look at Roger Baldwin, who founded it, and look at the current members, their “faiths,” and their entire agenda).

Let’s keep the 4th religious!

 

980709 — Dear Dr. Joe: I heard you use the term “harmless flirting,” and since I’ve just been dumped via this “harmless” action, I’d like you to explain what you mean. — Crying in Cottonwood

Dear C.C.: First of all, I’m sorry you got hurt, and I encourage you to cry as much as you can to get rid of all the pain. You’ll probably go through a grieving process for several months (depending on how long your relationship was), and then you’ll start to rebuild.

Offhand, it sounds as if yours were a relationship of convenience rather than one of commitment, at least for the other party. But that’s another day, another column.

What I mean by “harmless flirting” is an action, or interaction, where one person tells another, or both tell each other, by words or actions, that the other is a nice, attractive, desirable person.

At the first notch, this merely gives the other person nothing more than a message of having been “validated,” having been perceived as attractive. At the first notch, it usually is harmless and makes the other person feel good: “Oh, you look nice today.” “You’re really good at that.” “Your wife is lucky.”

Most of us know that a true compliment can make our day, can bring us up when we’re down.

The problem, of course, is the motivation behind the flirting. For those people who are secure within themselves, it is possible to give a compliment to someone from the opposite sex and not mean anything else, nor want anything more than a brief moment of friendly contact.

Perhaps it’d be best not even to call this action “flirting,” though I tend to look at things on a continuum, from one extreme to another. Thus, I would see even a small insult as being at the lesser extreme of the continuum of anger.

If the heart of the flirter, his motivation, wants more than a simple, passing compliment, then the plot thickens considerably.

How many women have had their dates flirt intensely with the waitress (and vice versa, too)?

How many, usually women, have felt unwanted advances in the workplace by wannabe Lotharios?

So, if you sense it’s rising above the first notch, then the gun’s probably loaded and injury’s possible.

 

980716 — Dear Dr. Joe: Why don’t you do some columns about child abuse prevention? — members of the Tehama Co. Child Abuse Prevention Council (to which I belong).

Dear TCCAPC Members: First, some lowdown on the council, itself. It is made up of representatives from county agencies, from private businesses, such as Family and Child Care Providers, plus anyone else (such as I) who wishes to show up and be put to work for civic projects.

There are members from Child Protective Services [CPS], from Victims of Crime [VOC, also known as Victim Witness], from Public Health, from the Dept. of Education, from Calif. Dept. of Forestry [CDF], from Rape Crisis, and from other agencies too numerous to mention (which means I’m sure I forgot someone and I’ll be hearing about it).

Det. Jim Ainsworth from the RBPD acts as coordinator, and personnel from the Sheriff’s Dept. and Corning PD also attend.

The Council is charged with marshalling community effort to help prevent Child Abuse, and this is done mainly through education.

Every year, the Council produces the Children’s Faire on the weekend after the Round-Up (in April).

This “baby” of member Barbara Loucks is a primary way of letting people in the community know the tremendous amount of resources available to people who have kids, who work with kids, and who work to protect kids.

A new event, the Student Art Auction, sponsored by the California Parks Department, helps raise money for the Council. The 2nd Annual Student Art Auction will be held next spring.

In the hopper are plans for public service ads and training workshops for local providers, police, and professionals (the 3 Ps?)

The TCCAPC meets the first Friday of every month at 7 a.m. (yes, seven in the morning) in the conference room at Red Bluff City Hall (just right of the police desk).

We need able (and not so able) bodies, people who want to help and to get involved. You don’t have to be certifiably crazy to get up so early in the morning, but if you need such certification, I’ll be glad to oblige at no charge. . . .

 

980723 — On Volunteering

Last week I told of the Tehama Co. Child Abuse Prevention Council, to which I belong, and its need for volunteers from the “civilian” segment of the county (i.e., other than social agencies, county departments, peace officers, etc.).

We have a large Middle Aged population (65 and older), many of whom are retired, and many of whom already volunteer much of their time and talents.

We need more volunteering to a variety of causes, not only from this age group, but from younger groups, as well.

Now I’m not asking hard-working parents to take time away from their families, though there is some volunteering that can blend family and social needs, such as scouting, youth sports, youth music, etc.

Teenagers can hasten their maturity by volunteering their time to good causes, and older folks who have lost the zest for life can restore meaning and purpose.

It’s been documented that retired folks who are active in body, mind, and interests retain both their faculties and health longer than those who aren’t.

If Grandpa would get down on his knees to shoot marbles, and lose them, he’d actually gain them.

If Aunt Ethyl is sitting around moping about the loss of Uncle Festus, getting outside of her house, and outside of herself, could out-Prozac Prozac.

(From a psychological point of view, one way of defining depression is that it’s a loss of rewarding stimuli, the Eeyore Effect, if you will.)

When it gets right down to it, many people are just plain scared about putting themselves out there among strangers.

But if you work hard alongside others, there won’t be any strangers by the time you’re done.

So conversely, you people who are already volunteering, when you see newcomers arriving to help, go out of your way to make them feel welcome and included. (And I rather imagine this is the rule rather than the exception.)

The two “smaller,” daily newspapers in Tehama County are full of notices about volunteering opportunities. And if told of them, I’ll be glad to publicize others via the radio or this column.

 

980730 — Dear Dr. Joe: I just caught the tail end of the radio show on stalking. What were the main points, and where can I get the book? — Been There out at the Ranch.

Dear Been There (and hopefully not Done That): CPT Robert Snow from the Indianapolis PD wrote Stopping a Stalker: a Cop’s Guide to Making the System Work for You, by Plenum Books, NY, available from book stores, from www.amazon.com, or from 800 221-9369.

You can also get information on stalking from www.soshelp.org.

And by the way, Det. Jim Ainsworth from the Red Bluff PD and Sgt. Ralph Schmidt from the Corning PD were discussants who acquitted themselves admirably.

If you want a taped copy of the show (for a small fee), call me.

Stalking occurs in all socio-economic levels, and mainly in men. A stalker is someone who can’t take “no” for an answer gone haywire — so much so that this obsession/compulsion rules their lives.

Psychologically, stalkers need their victims to fulfill the void in themselves so they’ll feel powerful and worthwhile. When the victim decides to leave, this void becomes super-painfully obvious.

Hence, the stalker often can go to extremely great lengths to try to maintain contact with, and power over, the victim. Stalking and abuse are twins, maybe even identical.

All states finally have laws against stalking. There are federal statues, as well.

The first thing to do if you think you are being stalked is to report it to the authorities. Then, keep good records of the stalker’s behavior and get witnesses of his actions whenever possible.

Often, warnings by police, a temporary restraining order, or maybe even an arrest, can stop the stalker who has something to lose (like his reputation, his job, etc.).

But sometimes, the obsession (thinking) and compulsion (behavior) are so strong that literally nothing seems to stop the stalker.

If this happens, there are two choices: move away and hide, or get the authorities to put him in jail. Then you’ll be safe, at least a while — until he gets out.

Actually, there are other choices, too, such as going on the offensive, or arming yourself. But these can be very dangerous to you.

 

980806 — Dear Dr. Joe: I recently brought my elderly parent here to live with me, but the parent got sick.

Then, when I went to put this parent into a sheltered living environment which would cost money, I found my parent had been lying to me (perhaps for many, many years) and had no resources at all.

Now, over this parent’s strong objections, I may have to put this parent into a nursing home on welfare (for I have no funds, let alone excess money).

This parent, and even some other members of the family, are saying it is my responsibility to take care of the parent. What do you say? — Emotionally Exhausted Child.

Dear EEC: Wow, I’m exhausted from reading this and imagining what you’re going through.

How much do we owe our parents? Should we always Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother? What role should society play in all this? These are not easy questions.

In a “high-context” society with strict social rules, such as Japan, it goes without question that one must honor, take care of, and perhaps revere ones parents, even if they are harpies, banshees, or just plain pains in the sitz-place.

In “low-context” societies such as ours, where codes of behaviors are spelled out in laws rather than in unwritten social “mores,” we’ve “progressed” toward having the Nanny State take care of everyone, like it or not.

I believe that whenever possible, children should go fairly far out of their way to take care of their parents. After all, who was changing whose diapers not so very long ago.

But if the tables are turned, and we’re being the child-now-parent to the parent-now-child, then I think that just as it was long ago, the caretaker can, and should, demand compliance with certain rules of behavior, such as not lying, being unkempt, becoming verbally abusive, and so forth.

To me, Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother means God wants us to honor and respect the parent-child bond, and marriage, and to place child-rearing under parental, not priestly or state, control.

Honor Fatherhood and Motherhood, but you don’t owe personal allegiance to a reprobate.

 

980813 — Dear Dr. Joe: How can you charge so much? Where’s your conscience? — Irate Caller.

Dear I.C.: It wasn’t proper for me to lecture you on economics, especially when you needed help. But you turned down referral to the reduced-fee agencies in the county, all of which do good work and have well-trained people.

They can reduce their fees because public monies or private charity subsidizes their expenses.

What you get in the private sector (often) is more experience, more privacy, and more convenience (my patients can call me anytime, and my office phone rings in my home).

Now I am not starving, but neither do I live in a big house on the river. Some people make the mistake of taking my published charges, multiplying by 40 or 50 hours per week, and then multiplying again by 52 weeks per year.

They don’t understand that many insurance companies lower my rates, that my schedule is not always full, and that I sometimes take vacations or go to conferences.

They don’t understand that gross receipts (not counting bad debts or 10-15% charity work) are the monies taken in before expenses.

Expenses? Rent, power, heating/cooling, office furniture, computers, printers, faxes, copiers, malpractice insurance, office insurance, disability insurance, worker’s comp insurance (if there are employees), salary and payroll taxes, accountants, stamps, stationery, soap, towels, toilet paper, etc., etc.

A conference for courses required to renew a license can cost a thousand dollars, and while it may be tax-deductible, this means that the final, out-of-pocket cost is still 70 or 75 per cent of the total bill. No agency pays my way or pays for my lost income from not working.

Retirement benefits come out of the gross receipts, as do health insurance, sick leave, transportation, legal advice, and advertising.

I often tell young therapists that they’ll be better off financially if they work for a clinic or agency, and we have good ones right here.

Still, I like the freedom and responsibility of it all — so I’m not griping, just telling it how it is.

 

980820 — A Community Experience

On Monday I had occasion to feel my heart saddened and my spirits lifted at the same time.

I attended the funeral services for Cory Bagshaw, the son of my racketball buddy, Dennis, also a former radio show guest representing the Red Bluff Fire Department.

I’ve never seen the First Church of God so full. One wondered if the crowd were over the fire depart­ment’s limit, and if so, who would have the guts to tell some people to leave. It seemed as if the whole department were there.

Cory was active in the Vineyard Fellowship, as is his mother, and it seemed as it that entire congregation were there.

Both parents are active and well known in the community, and their friends are legion, as were Cory’s friends from church and school.

As I looked around and felt the sadness emanating from the assembled group, I couldn’t help thinking how fortunate we are to live in a place small enough to have a sense of community.

This sense of community allows us to care for, and take care of, each other — sometimes in distant ways, but at other times of grief or crisis, in very personal ways.

Witness the way people reached out for the bereaved, and for each other. It makes us think hard about our own lives and relationships.

In a paradoxical way, a funeral is a celebration of life, for we pay respects to life by observing its passing. If we don’t care about life, why care about death?

If we lived in the random universe that the diehard evolutionist would have us believe, caring would be only the device to make sure our genes win out.

Pastor Igarta’s sensitive and well-done message made me think about another thing. Sometimes people say, “Oh, I just wish I had said ______,” or “I wish I had done more of ______,” or “if only I had ______.” If only . . . .

I think no one ever really does enough, or says enough, or shows enough how much he loves another. I think it’s impossible, for we’re all quite fallible (“fallen,” if you’re Christian) people.

But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try, and perhaps the main message of funerals is to bring it home to us how precious — how holy — life really is. Amen.

 

980827 — Caw, Caw, Caw

Last week, I ate a little crow, the feathers of which are good for routing out hubris in ones system.

I was asked to address Rotary at Willows, and wanting to see if our southern neighbors really had installed flush toilets and dial phones, I made the trek.

Interestingly, an imaginary line from the podium to the back of the room seemed a continuum of political leanings, for the front appeared to think excess population and over-zealous anti-spankers were the root of our ills, while the far back seemed to defend Clinton’s private life and loves.

But the comment that stopped me came after I had been extolling the virtues of the wonderful 50s (albeit with atom-bomb civil defense commercials) and had then suggested that a great deal of today’s news is quite biased, even from the wire services.

From the back a youngster of 35 spoke up. “The wonderful 50s you praised,” he challenged just a tad sarcastically, “how do you know the news was accurate then?”

What can you do when someone hoists you on your own petard? I said it was a good question, and I had to think about it. And so I did all the way back to Civilization.

In contrast to today, the 50s were indeed much calmer. We all know the major school problems back then: chewing gum, passing notes, and running in the halls.

But the 50s were also a time when our naïveté —perhaps from wanting to put the horrors of WWII behind us — made us just all too gullible.

We watched in rapt admiration as whiz kids answered every part of the $64,000 question. (One even used a mysteriously available uke to sing “Me and My Shadow.”) They just couldn’t be cheating.

And Uncle Walter Cronkite, still an icon to local columnists, was the most trusted man in America. Only later would we find him to be just as polished an establishment mouthpiece as JFK or Bill Moyers.

 Cronkite publicly espoused unilateral disarmament, and today, his “personal” letter blasts conservative churches to raise money for the ultra-liberal, neo-Christian National Council of Churches.

So caw, caw, caw. (Burp!)

 

980903 — Dear Dr. Joe: My doctor left some time ago, and I’ve been having all sorts of strong feelings I can’t quite describe. I’m sad one minute, angry the next. What gives? — Unhappy in the County

Dear Unhappy: Methinks you’re suffering from transference reaction (which used to be called a “neurosis”). And not too many medical doctors, other than psychiatrists, know much about it, which I think is a failing of many medical, dental, chiropractic, or even veterinary schools.

Relationships can be either “symmetrical” or “complementary” (not “complimentary”). Symmetrical means the power is equal, such as two generals, or two privates, with the same date-of-rank.

Complementary means the power is unequal, that one person has more power, or prestige, in the relationship, such as a general vs. a private, or even a minor supervisor over a worker.

Interesting things happen when those roles get confused or deliberately broken, but that’s another column, perhaps next week.

The relationship between two patients, or two doctors, is symmetrical, but the relationship between patient and doctor is almost always complementary (unless he’s treating his mother . . .).

When a relationship is complementary, a power differential is set up, and each side often “projects” real or distorted ideas/feelings.

The correct psychological terms are “transference” and “counter-transference.” The patient “transfers” feelings which were formerly directed toward an earlier authority figure, often the same-sexed parent.

The doctor, boss, or leader can react back to those transferred feelings with his own unresolved issues about authority relationships.

These feelings happen continuously between doctors and their patients. Most of the time there is nothing very neurotic about them, even if the parties involved aren’t really sure what’s happening.

But sometimes, the feelings are very intense and hidden, so that when one person changes things, such as moving away, the other person reacts with strong feelings, sometimes irrational, that can come to the surface “out of nowhere.”

 

980910 — Obeisance to Red Bluff

A week ago my family and I attended a family camp at Mt. Hermon, a well-known Christian retreat up in the redwoods near Felton, nine miles from Santa Cruz.

(Anyone wishing information about this fine experience please feel free to contact me. My wife and I will probably have an open house for it in several months.)

When we asked the staff if anyone had heard of Red Bluff, we got a strange reaction: they threw their hands up in the air and hollered, “Red Bluff!” Naturally, we (which included Dr. Frank Upshaw and his wife, Ginger) were curious.

According to Camp Director Roger Williams, a young lady from Red Bluff came on staff some time ago. And, when there was a staff meeting where people had to introduce themselves, this young lady became a bit shy.

She said who she was, but when it came time to say from whence she came, she evidently became a bit flustered and threw her hands up in the air over her head just as she said, “Red Bluff.”

 The audience broke up laughing, and a new tradition was born: now, any time the hallowed words are spoken amongst the staff, people throw up their hands.

( If I hadn’t been caught up in the religious spirit of the place, I would have liked to have found a staffer with both hands full of coffee or papers and then announce to him my home town.)

I’d like to think the hands-raising was done not in worship, which is for God, but rather just a cut below that — in obeisance, in rapt obedience to that place which is, as the radio commentator says, the very heart of the civilized world..

By the way, the young lady has recovered from her stage fright and is now a journeyman baker at Mt. Hermon. In fact, for the adults-only dinner she made a fabulous walnut and olive bread (for several hundred people) that had the whole dining room enthralled.

For the record, her name is Jennifer Buehler, the daughter of Bernard and Jean Buehler, and she’s doing quite well, thank you.

Another young lady on the summer staff was Jessica Byrd, the daughter of Jan and Douglass Byrd

How fun to go away from home and be so nicely reminded of it!

 

980917 — Dear Dr. Joe: I’ve been living with a man for three years and it goes along OK until I bring up the subject of marriage. When he hears this, he complains that his first marriage didn’t work, so why should he try again. My 6-year-old seems to take all of this OK, but I’m up in my 30s and am not sure I want to wait for him to make up his mind. What’s your advice? — Concerned Mama in Corning.

Dear Concerned Mama: First of all, it sure sounds like you’d like to tie the knot, but he doesn’t want to be tied down.

I agree with Dr. Joyce Brothers, who in a book years ago told a similar woman that she was being used, that her youth, vitality, sex appeal, and all the other things we often associate with being young were being consumed by her boyfriend, who gave actually nothing in return, though from the girl’s point of view, in order to maintain her dignity, she had to pretend that she got at least something from it.

All too often, when there is no strong commitment such as marriage, it’s all to easy for someone just to walk out. And some men will walk out to get a younger lover, whose youth they can again consume until it gets used up, too.

What gets me is how easy it is for these guys to find a woman, often a girl who has stars in her eyes and thinks her love will change this Ramblin’ Man.

Now sometimes, a couple just agree not to get married, and both seem to adjust to it. Although I don’t agree with this from a religious standpoint, I cannot say it is all that bad psychologically, especially if there are no children involved.

And sometimes, the couple is just too petrified to get married. The record from my practice was a couple in the Bay Area who cohabited for 11 years. She even had her own apartment so that when her Midwestern parents came to visit, she could scurry back there to pretend she was being chaste.

With a lot of coaxing and hand-holding, they got married and found it much more pleasing than their prior arrangement. But the gal had passed the age of child bearing and had to deal with grief over barrenness, “Hannah’s syndrome.”

But when one person wants permanence and the other doesn’t, it’s a recipe for trouble and heartbreak down the road. (More next week.)

 

980924 — Messiah time again. The Red Bluff Messiah Project is looking for some good voices to help sing Handel’s masterpiece this Yuletide. If you enjoy learning beautiful-but-difficult compositions, can read music at least somewhat, and can stay on pitch, then come join us at 3-5 p.m. this and every Sunday onward at the Methodist Church on David Avenue. Singing this music will transform you. . . .

Continued from Last Week

Courtship should be the time when people find out about each other, about what that other person is really like over the long run.

Today, courtship is usually over after the second date (or whenever the couple starts having sex).

Once sexual activity is initiated, a door is opened in the relationship that can never be closed. (Young children who are sexually abused often become sexual active before their time, with a resultant loss of true bonding ability.)

We’ve become a society of either Teflon or super-glue relationships. With the help of premature sex, bonding with the partner either doesn’t happen, or else is super quick, super strong, and super dysfunctional.

I prefer Carpenter’s Glue, which, as every woodworker knows, is a slow-setting adhesive that lets you correct your mistakes before you clamp it down for permanence.

Carpenter’s Glue relationships avoid “bodily fluids,” for such change them into Super Glue ones.

An interesting movie 25 years ago was Birds Do It, Bees Do It, a documentary about animal mating habits. In one scene, two chameleons were shown mating. First, they chewed on each other’s belly, then they gradually moved upward, becoming more gentle, until they were nuzzling each other’s mouth.

The voice-over then said, “In this species, courtship is a systematic lowering of defenses.”

Actually, in almost all “higher” species such is the case, and it ought to happen most of all in man, where our intellectual defenses are so formidable and our emotions so complex. Go figure.

 

981001 — Dear Dr. Joe: What is the placebo effect, and does it really work? And wouldn’t using it be somewhat unethical? — Mr. Curious

Dear Mr. C.: Placebo (pluh-SEE-bo) is from Latin and means “I shall please.” Basically, it is an inactive, non-harmful substance that is given to a patient to “trick” him into thinking he is getting a real, potent medicine that will make him better.

Since the patient expects to get better, he often does.

When I was a kid, our small 1,500-soul town finally got our own doctor, an immigrant from “Lit-oo-AY-knee-a,” Dr. X.

Dr. X wrought miracles in the community. Heretofore, we all had to travel 45 minutes to see a doc, and everyone complained of the trip. The cure rate was abysmal, even for colds.

Dr. X examined you, commiserated while smoking a cigarette, and then gave you a shot. And you got better. Almost always.

“Hey,” you’d yell across the street to a coughing friend. “You been to see Dr. X?”

“Sure did.”

“Get a shot?”

“Sure did.”

“Feeling better?”

“Sure am.”

Dr. X used to give me a shot, then call me back to his inner sanctum and say, “Now Joe. Maybe we should talk about the birds and the bees.”

“Sure, Doc,” I’d say. “What do you need to know?” At 15, I was old enough to know the joke, but young enough, back then, to know not really much outside the unbare basics of sex — and that even though you might want it, it was just something you didn’t do.

Doc later told me that half his shots were penicillin, the other half sterile saline solution, a placebo.

When the patients got their expected shot, even of salt water, they began to feel better. So old Doc really knew a lot about healing, what we now call psycho-neuro-immunology (that the mind and body interact, literally).

Was Doc unethical to trick patients that way. Not to us.

 

991008 — Dear Dr. Joe: Just how much meaning do dreams really have? — Sleepless in Cottonwood

Dear Sleepless: Near the end of his life, Freud is alleged to have said, “I only learned two things, which every nursemaid knows — that children have sex lives and that dreams have meaning.

As to the first, at the turn of the century children were thought by educated city folks to be sexless until adolescence. (More on this another time.)

As to the second, depth psychology (Freud, Jung, Reich, etc.) assumed that the human psyche is like an iceberg, with the most important 9/10 under water (in the so-called unconscious, or out-of-awareness mind).

Hence, Freud found that dreams have meanings, usually disguised or transformed meanings dealing with unconscious conflicts.

One young lady I treated had a martinet for a father, a genuine general in the Armed Services. It was apparent she had bridled under his stern upbringing, but she couldn’t admit to actual anger.

Then one night she had a dream in which she piloted a bomber, leading a wing of bombers, which dropped atom bombs on her father’s camp.

She couldn’t deny this dream, so she was finally forced to confront the volcano of rage that at last erupted (and let her deal with her father in a very different way).

Of course, the Bible preempted Freud. Just look at Joseph’s interpretations (in Genesis). And nature religions, as well as Eastern esoteric ones, put much meaning in dream symbolism.

The Behaviorists (Skinner and his rats and disciples) called the mind the “black box,” that which couldn’t be opened or studied objectively. So to them, dreams aren’t ascribed any particular meaning or importance, except as pieces of behavior to predict and control via reinforcement or extinction..

(next week, biological theories)

 

981015 — (continued)

Last week, I talked about the psychological theories of dreams. There are also biological theories.

First off, dreaming seems to be a biological necessity. We humans seem to dream four to five times a night in 90-minute cycles of deep sleep and light sleep.

During the light sleep we have rapid eye movements (REM) which seem to occur as we dream. When we experimentally take away the REM (dream) sleep, we can get very grouchy and “wiggy.”

If deprived of REM sleep for several nights, we tend to make up for it with extra REM sleep in the next several nights.

All this leads some theorists to postulate that dreaming is nothing but random neuro-electrical discharges in the lower part of the brain, sort of a self-correcting or safety-release device to make the brain function more smoothly.

The most radical of these theorists would hold that dreams never have any psychological meaning, that they are always snippets of random activity, much as if one cut sections from many video tapes and then edited them together haphazardly whenever the bin got too full of the random, unused segments.

One wonders how these people handle Joseph’s dreams in Genesis — if they even believe such a “non-scientific” document could be true.

One also wonders how they handle their own dreams, for it’s been my experience that just about everyone, once in a while, has what I call a “blockbuster” dream, like the henpecked (or should I say cowed) man who dreamt of a giant cow coming down a playground slide to crush him with her udder — the night after his wife left him for a “more endowed man.”

I favor the idea that, since the brain is a meaning-making organ, dreams are undischarged emotional states that reverberate in the brain as the higher parts try to make meaning of it all.

Dreams thus indicate our attempts to complete our emotions.

 

981022 — Dear Dr. Joe: My husband and I are divorcing (he has a younger girlfriend). Our children, young adults, won’t speak to him, so they give me messages for him. He demands that I give them his messages. I can’t just let my children not have contact with their father, can I? But it tears me up each time I do it. Help. — Mom Up North.

Dear MUN: You’re so busy throwing yourself in front of the bullets you could find work as a sieve. Why do you have to be the sacrificial lamb? Instead, let it be the old goat. If he tries to put the blame back on you, don’t take it.

I suggest you get pen and paper and write the following to both your wayward mate and the kids:

Dear V, W, X, & Y,

We all know that V has left me and is living with Miss Z, who might well become his new wife.

Up to now, I have been the go-between since you V, the father, and you W, X, & Y, the children, are not speaking to each other directly. I’ve been taking the burden of everyone’s hard feelings.

But I’m doing it no longer.

V, here are each of the children’s address, phone number, and e-mail. Children, here is your father’s work number, home number, work and home addresses, and e-mail.

From now on, if you give me a message for the other, I will not deliver it. Or if you are talking to me about the other, I will stop the conversation.

Communicate directly to each other, please. (Signed)

You probably will be sweating buckets by the time you write such a letter and mail it. It’s no easy thing to break such a habit pattern where you have been, in a sense, “co-dependent,” living everyone’s life for them.

Of maybe it’s more precise to say that you’ve been so afraid of the bad feelings underneath the surface that you draw them all off onto yourself, like a martyr.

Yeah, your kids are going to be mad, so let their anger go where it belongs, to your ex. And yeah, he’s going to pull his old pattern of trying to shunt the blame off on you and then get angry at you so he can avoid his own guilt.

Stand up for yourself. Hubby’s a big boy who’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar and needs to accept all the consequences.

Then move on with your life.

 

981029 — Three Major Holidays

Imagine my surprise when I heard a media blurb about “the three major holidays” coming up at the end of the year.

Naturally, I assumed Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Veterans Day — three holidays whose dates were so sacred they never suffered the ignominy of being Mondayized.

Well, I got two of the three right. Veterans’ Day (with the apostrophe correctly after the “s”) has been spooked out by Halloween.

Halloween a major holiday! What a statement about our culture. It should scare a sane person.

Hallow e[v]en[ing] is, of course, the evening before All Saints’ Day, and it should be the start of a real Sabbath, not a Black Sabbath.

Perhaps, in a way, Halloween became a brew of boisterousness because it was the day (or night) before a Holy Day, like Mardi Gras. Or maybe it was paradoxically celebrated, like St. Patrick’s Day.

(I’ve heard St. Patrick wrestled a demon to a draw, such that 364 days belong to St. Paddy and only one day to the demon: March 17.)

In any case, I’m saddened that the mildly celebrated Halloween of 50 years ago has become a top money-getter and out-polls our nation’s veterans, about whom many of us have all but forgotten. I fear this signals a weakness of resolve and fortitude, a spiritual decay that leaves our nation all too vulnerable to root rot and systemic cancer.

One wonders which came first, the gross commercialization of Halloween or the resurrection of pagan religions such as Wicca, the supposedly benign witchcraft. As the Good Book says, “For the love of money is a root of all [kinds of] evil (1 Tim. 1:6).”

Go to a video, grocery, or department store and see the videos purveyed to our kiddies: Halloween, Tales from the Crypt, Evil Dead, Child’s Play, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Friday the 13th, et cetera ad maleficum et nauseum.

We’re poisoning our own well.

 

981105 — Dear Dr. Joe: My teenager is driving me crazy. He has to be the best at everything, and he works non-stop throughout the day and much of the night doing schoolwork, church work, volunteer work, music, activities, and you name it. I think something is wrong. Do you? — A Mom.

Dear Mom: Driving is certainly the word here, for your son indeed seems “driven,” meaning a compulsive attempt to reach some sort of goal or goals.

But on the other hand, is this so bad? Many teenagers are very active and are putting their tremendous energy into culturally creative things (rather than culturally destructive things such as sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll).

Perhaps you should be glad your son’s energy is to the former and not the latter. Many teenagers form goals and carry them through with what seems religious fervor.

But after all, it takes such fervor to be a doctor, a lawyer, a preacher, or even a shrink. If you don’t have a running start when you reach the big hill, your engine will sputter and perhaps give out half way up

Now, having said all this, it still seems as if your son is trying to prove himself too much.

One way to gauge this is to see if he can relax, can unwind, can just let go and have some fun (though his idea of fun might be more organized and goal-directed than other children’s, so be prepared).

If he just cannot “get loose” at least a little bit, then he probably is avoiding demons more than just marching to the tune of a different drummer.

And what might these demons be? One guess would be that somewhere along the line, he got the message that he wouldn’t be accepted, or loved, unless he were more than perfect.

Or maybe he figured that being good in many things was a way to win love or social acceptance.

You might have given this message unwittingly, or he might have mis­perceived and misinterpreted it all by his creative self.

In any case, the way out of the dilemma is to let him know he is loved independent of his performance in any area or arena.

So at times when he is not working diligently, sneak up, give him a hug, and tell him he’s a neat kid just for being himself.

 

981112 — Dear Dr. Joe: Tell us about that book on your desk. — A Whole Bunch of Your Patients

Dear Whole Bunch: You really want me to spread the word, don’t you? OK, here goes.

Many, if not all, patients give it the once-over when they enter my main room. Many, if not all, know immediately if there is something new, or misplaced, or if one of my fish has died (again!).

I have a messy desk. My wife and I go round and round about it. She thinks it makes me look slovenly. I think it makes me look intelekshul and well-eddycated.

Tossed casually on top of the big mess this last week was a black book with a haunting picture of a foot soldier on the cover.

Almost everyone noticed it, looked more closely (the classic “double take”), and wanted to know more about a book whose title is: On Killing.

LTC Grossman was first an airborne sergeant, then a ranger officer, and, upon retirement after 20 years, a counselor and psychologist who’s taught at West Point.

He combines history, psychology, and the military science and has done a ground-breaking work on what causes people to kill — or more accurately, what so often prevents them from doing it.

He notes that the effective fire rate in WWII was about 20%, meaning of the men actually in combat, only 20% fired for effect (actually tried to kill the enemy) while the others didn’t fire at all, or else fired over the heads of the enemy.