An Open Letter to Parents: After a School Shooting

By Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW

One of the most horrifying events has happened. Your child attends a school where there has been a shooting. Someone is dead. Someone else is responsible. Within this awful reality, you and your child are navigating the emotions of fear, anger, loss and trying to find a path forward.

This letter is to help you as a parent be as supportive and emotionally available as possible so that your child can feel safer and function better.

In the wake of trauma, it is normal to feel terrified, exhausted, furious and even numb, or as if nothing is real.

Imagine that a traumatic event is like a surge of electricity and that this surge pops the circuit of our mind’s normal ability to process reality.

You can expect the following behaviors from your child: they may regress in independence. They may want you to make them food or even cuddle them the way you did when they were younger. It is normal and helpful for your child to receive extra love, care, and declarations of support. If your child wants to sleep on the floor of your bedroom, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do right now.

Alternately, they might also pull back, shut down and even direct their anger at you for expressing concern. If this happens, try not to take it personally and instead imagine that they are telling you through their behavior, “Right now I need to avoid or release pent up distress about the event.”

They may have a greater need to be in touch with other classmates and friends at this time. While you can maintain whatever rules you already have regarding screen time and social media access, you may consider liberalizing those rules for the next three weeks by allowing your child to text, Snap and Discord more frequently to process their experience with others.

Your child may have a harder time attending to school work, and may neglect homework or studying. Teachers understand that in the wake of school shootings, it is harder to focus and learn. You can reach out to your child’s teacher to make accommodations if necessary.

It is normal for your child to want to talk about what they heard/felt/and are thinking about now. If you have difficulty listening to your child talk about this event, consider getting help for yourself and/or making sure your child has a trusted adult to talk about it with.

If your child seems extra sleepy that is normal as well, but if they are neglecting to eat, shower or they are staying in bed all day, that would be a strong indicator that they need additional help and could benefit from talking to a therapist.

Additionally if they cannot sleep and this does not resolve within a few days, they may need additional support.

Above all, remember that help is available and neither you nor your child should have to navigate this scary and traumatic time alone.

Road To Relationship

I’m so excited to announce a new monthly class I’m offering with two of my favorite humans in the world: Road to Relationship will be an educational group for personal-growth minded singles who are not fully satisfied with their online dating experiences. We will be talking about communication skills, setting boundaries, appropriate expectations, etc…

Check this out https://roadtorelationship.com/ and if you know anyone who might be interested and lives in the Seattle area, please forward this to them!

Thank you!

Tanya Ruckstuhl

Half-Assed Project Completion

By Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW

(I would insert a photo of the newly repainted furniture here–but I’m too lazy. You’re just going to have to imagine it. It’s dark brown).

I have a friend who refinishes furniture as a hobby. She and her husband go to rural antique stores and buy beat-up wooden furniture and bring them home and sand them down and stain and seal them. Her therapy office has gorgeous antiques that glow a golden polyurethane light.

My office, meanwhile, has Craigslist finds that I’ve tucked in higgledy-piggledy that are replete with water stains and scratches.

Every once in a while, I notice how beat up my furniture looks and hatch a plot. I will empty my bookcase and side table, bring them home and sand and re-stain them. But the thing is, I never actually do anything about it.  My book case is an unwieldy China hutch that has heavy glass doors that do not come out and last time it was moved, the guy I bought it from nearly lost a hand when the glass door swung over and slammed into it.

This past month I’ve been reading “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things” by Randy Frost and Gail Steketee. It’s about hoarding, anxiety, perfectionism and obsessive-compulsive disorder and this book has motivated me to be more half-assed in my approach to non-consequential tasks.  Much of hoarding can be understood as avoidance of making decisions due to fear of imperfection/regret.  If you can think through options like “if I miss this thing, I can buy another on Amazon and have it within 48 hours—and get even a better version of it,” or “even if I make the wrong decision about this, it’s no big deal,” you might find it easier to edit, or like me, decide to try to do something you are not excellent at.  

None of my clients really care about my furniture. If they did, they wouldn’t be my clients because my furniture is—well– ratty. So, the condition of the furniture hasn’t affected my work life (which would be consequential), but it bums me out because it looks bad. Taking my new anti-perfectionist commitment to half-assery to heart, this evening I simply brought the refinishing supplies to the office. I sanded, wiped with rags, and stained just the tops of the breakfront and the side table, ignoring all the other sides. I spilled a little wood stain on the carpet and in spite of wearing gloves, managed to get some of the stain on my hands. That’s okay. All in all, the whole thing took about ten minutes to gather supplies at home, ten minutes to do the work at the office, and another five minutes to throw out the roller brush and put away the sanding and painting supplies afterwards. The finished product would make anyone with legitimate furniture refinishing skills (or OCD) cringe and shudder, but for my purposes, it’s great: the furniture looks better, it was easy to do, and most important of all; it’s done, aka not taking up space in my brain anymore.

This summer I embrace H.A.P.C. or Half-Assed Project-Completion whenever possible! I hope you will join me and relish in your own triumph over procrastination!

Redundancy Redux

Photo by Dan Gold on Pexels.com

by Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW

I recently flew internationally and noticed a few things. First of all, the redundancy. Redundancy is not a bad thing. We have two lungs and two livers and two eyes and two ears, all in case one fails/is damaged. Engineers design for redundancy so that if one safety feature fails, another can take over.

But redundancy is annoying and extremely time consuming. To fly: first show proof of negative Covid test and vaccination and identification at the departure point at check in. Then show identification and have our bodies and carry-ons x-rayed to go through security to get to the gate. Then, show our identification and ticket to get on the plane. At disembarkation, show identification, proof of negative Covid test, have luggage checked and provide declarations of what we are bringing in or back. All of this adds about another six hours to travel time. But it’s for safety. Each of these individual steps are to ensure that the traveler is safe for the airline employees and fellow travelers to be around. They are not infected or carrying dangerous weapons or contraband.

Our brains have two systems that constantly scan for safety and make the TSA look like slackers.  They are the limbic system and the amygdala, and they have one question that reverberates in all novel situations: Am I in danger? These parts reside in our hindbrain, the old brain, the part that was around when we lived in tribes and met up with other tribes in order to trade and/or mate and/or raid and/or murder one another.  Opportunity and danger have always been twinned together.

I’ve been an eager observer and cheerleader of the Me-Too movement and its goal to increase the safety and justice for my kind: girls and women. I am an unapologetic feminist. Females are physically smaller than males. We are less strong. We are less violence prone. Each person’s safety is every person’s responsibility. The vulnerable require and deserve special protections if we want to earn the claim of being a civilized society.

But I’ve been concerned, as a mother of males, as a lover of humankind, as someone who holds fairness as my apex value, how there is now a primitive tendency to frame all uncomfortable or awkward sexual situations as the result of predatory male behavior.

Young people are dumb, dumb, dumb. Literally, as in the old English word dumb, meaning “temporarily unable to speak.” They don’t know how to ask for what they want, identify their emotional needs, set boundaries, to say yes or no in a clear and consistent manner, give or receive honest and constructive feedback, because…they don’t know.  And they have to develop self-awareness and figure out how to communicate these important bits of information by bumbling around, just like we all do.

This lack of ability to speak up effects all genders, and blaming one gender for every mis-attunement is outright unfair. It’s just as toxic as blaming rape victims for looking attractive, or asylum-seeking political refugees for being illegals.

I think we need a greater redundancy system around sexual consent. Especially because boys first and primary exposure to adult sex is via online porn. Porn is expectation poison because it depicts penetration-focused, male-dominance, clitorally ignorant sex that is exactly the opposite of mutually pleasuring, consensual physical contact. Female porn stars are actors. They are pretending to enjoy it. Just like any other actor they are paid to pretend. Entertainment is not reality. Those radio love songs about perfection and adoration don’t depict an actual relationship. Freddy Kruger is not real. King Kong doesn’t exist. And porn is insidiously fake.

Young people need to be willing to ask permission before touching, to ask before progressing from one type of touch to another, and to ask questions like “what feels good to you?” so that sexual exploration is safe and consensual. This also removes the pressure from one party (usually the male) to somehow psychically know what the other party (usually the female) wants. Remember, young people are dumb!  They need extra words between them, and extra time to find their own truth.

All of adulthood is a master class in balancing one’s personal agenda against the validity and importance of other people’s agenda. Our boss, our kids, our spouse, our pets, our friends, and our various community commitments all have agendas for our time and activities.  What we want or need is not always in harmony with these other sources of demands.

We navigate these tensions via communication.  We acknowledge when we can’t fulfill a commitment we have made. We apologize when we disappoint someone who relies on us. We figure out when to end a relationship with an overly needy or demanding person. We suck it up and do what is asked of us when that seems like the important or appropriate thing to do. We take care of our own needs even when it’s inconvenient for the people around us.

I propose more words, more checking in, more time spent planning before acting on sexual impulse. Redundancy shouldn’t just be for fuddy-duddy engineers or bureaucrats or organs. We need consent redundancy.

Dog Lessons

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

by Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW

Today I am writing about dogs. I used to have this sweet, traumatized rescue dog named Odie. We got Odie when the twins were eight years old. We had prepared for months, watching Caesar Milan dog training videos and discussing principles of behavior training, the importance of exercise and how to use treats to reward good behavior and ignore bad behavior to extinguish it according to the principles of operant conditioning. I felt well prepared to use my graduate school education and earnestly thought my state certification as a child mental health specialist would apply neatly to dog parenting.

Odie came from a home where he had been so neglected that when he first joined us, he couldn’t walk around the block without sounding like he was having an asthma attack. He licked the fur on the tops of his paws clean off. He licked the glass of the backdoor until his salvia etched it into a permanently cloudy surface.

Whenever someone came over or I talked on the phone, he would rocket out the doggie door into the backyard and leap up repeatedly against the door and bark as if the hounds of hell were on his tail.

When company came over, he would take out his girlfriend/dog bed and vigorously hump it in the middle of the gathering.  Having been neutered did nothing to deter his motivation.

I did all I could think of to help Odie become a better-behaved dog. I got him a variety of treats. Sprayed bitter apple spray on the back door. Held and petted and walked him daily. Tried picking him up when he was misbehaving, as well as leaving him alone, as well as putting him in time out in another room, as well as distracting him with toys.

I wish this were a story where my persistence and patience resulted in the eradication of these whacked out behaviors, but it is not. Instead, I changed. I became less distressed when he came back in through the doggie door with saliva streaming down his chin. I learned to leave the room when I made or received a phone call so the person on the other end wouldn’t have to worry that we were beating our dog. I learned to take less personally his pillow humping during social gatherings. Odie taught me high strung, traumatized dogs don’t necessarily get better.

This spring, Odie was killed by Coyotes. It happened early in the morning, before I woke up. I found his collar and a significant amount of blood in the backyard, and later found his skull under a sage bush.

There is a mathematical equation that equals the exact amount of time each of us gets on earth, but no one knows the value of any of the variables. It’s only when their time is up that we know how much time we had with our human and non-human beloveds.

Hedonic adaptation is the psychological term that describes the common tragedy of developing a tolerance for, and then subsequently ignoring, every single familiar source of joy in our lives. We forget to notice the beauty of the garden, the sweetness of ice cream, the scent of our child’s scalp, the warmth of our spouse’s sleeping body. It takes conscious effort to fight the development of immunity to joy.

Dogs never develop hedonic adaptation. They eat their treats with gusto every single time. They greet us with total focused enthusiasm. Odie, as crazy as he was, celebrated each family member with sniffs and licks and tail wags and demands for belly scratching. He had terrible breath and was banned from dog gatherings and destroyed the back door and was still the sweetest, most loving creature. Flawed is not unlovable.

Flowers

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW

Spring is a special time in the Pacific Northwest. It starts with the puffy white cherry blossoms in late February. Then in March the pink magnolia trees bloom and from April on there is a riot of color: red tulips, yellow daffodils, fuchsia camellias, orange rhododendrons, pink azaleas and purple irises. Every empty patch of dirt is overrun with pretty little blue forget-me-nots. Now, even if the skies are gray the ground is a festival of color. We get more and more sunny days. Everyone’s mood lightens.

It seems like spring is the makeup kiss nature offers us for fighting through the darkness of winter.  During the dark, cold months its easy to forget this beauty is on its way.   

Spring comes regardless of our ability to anticipate it.  And so too the overbaked dryness of summer, the wet and windy autumn, and the dark, chilly winter.

American culture is obsessed with the good-time parts of life. Vapid reality shows feature small-minded hotties who have youth, beauty, fame—all the short lived, spring-like parts of existence. (no offense to the flowers—I’d take the companionship of a peony over a Kardashian any day).

The thing about spring is it cannot go on forever. Flowers are plants in heat, spring is a reproductive cycle that costs all the plant’s energy to put on this fancy show once a year. After flowering, the plant must rest and put energy into photosynthesis, growth and roots.

It is natural to delight in the parts of life that are bright and beautiful. We just need to remember that flowers, beauty and youth are all part of a cycle that includes dormancy, decay and death.  What goes on below the surface, at the root level is what ultimately determines the health and longevity of plants and people.

Hold Fast

By Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW

It is mid-February and the nonmigratory hummingbirds have lost all their natural food sources.  I make nectar and fill the feeders, feeling sorry for the little guys.  They are tiny and live outside in the cold and have no food.  The skies are gray, the air is frigid, and the news a continual cycle of body counts and doom. Even the trees looked depressed with their mossy bare branches scratching the sky.  Covid seems to have lasted for fifty years and we now have new variants to worry about. Youth suicide up. Employment is down.  

And things are about to get better. We have two and soon will have three vaccines. Spring is coming. Those naked tree branches have tiny buds that will burst into leaves and flowers. The sun will come out. The spring flowers will bloom: daffodils, tulips and crocuses.

If you are despairing, take a deep breath and wait. Remember what you look forward to and imagine what it’s like to enjoy it.

If you are depressed, remember that practicing gratitude—even if you don’t feel like it—especially when you don’t feel like it—helps. Always.

Get outside and move.  Clean up a messy part of your house/room/garage/car. Play some saucy music and dance. Read a wonderful novel by your favorite author. Take a bath. Learn how to do something on YouTube. Solve one small problem you have been avoiding.

During the best of times, this part of the year in this part of the world sucks donkey butt. This year the donkey butt-ness is especially awful. Just remember: it’s about to get better. Don’t give up. We are in this together, even while physically apart. And soon we will be able to gather together–friends and family–and tell stories of our survival. Hold fast.

Phases of Healing

Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW

Back in the late 60’s, Swiss psychiatrist and kick ass trail blazer Elisabeth Kubler Ross developed the five stages of grief through her work with terminally ill patients coming to terms with their own death. Those phases have since been applied to everything from death to divorce to disappointment. The five phases are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. This framework for sorrow helps normalize and make some sense of the pain of loss.

In my work with trauma survivors, I’ve also noticed recurring patterns of healing.  The first phase is Rigidity and Anger. These are folks who need things just exactly so in their lives. They are often highly productive but not personable. Trauma survivors in this phase usually have more projects than friendships. They are usually workaholics because they don’t trust anyone else’s contributions. They often drop out of therapy because they are not ready for the vulnerability of being seen or having any part of their thinking or behavior challenged.

When the strategy of avoiding feeling by staying busy no longer works due to exhaustion or becoming healthy enough to start feeling the pain left by childhood trauma, trauma survivors enter the Anxiety Free Fall phase. In Anxiety Free Fall there is tremendous fear about future events, personal safety, loved ones, medical and economic vulnerability. They are downright creative in coming up with things to worry about!  They face a constant feeling of looming and inescapable disaster. People in anxiety free fall often seek therapy to relieve the discomfort from finally feeling.

Then comes the hardest phase: Shame and Self-Hatred. Just as rigidity/anger functions as an armor protecting survivors from the anxiety free fall, anxiety is a distraction (ironically a protection) against the underlying pattern of shame and self-hatred.

Why do abused or neglected children learn to hate themselves? First, let’s look at the world at large. Unlike an American courtroom where you are innocent until proven guilty, in the world at large you (and me, and everyone) are irrelevant until proven useful, or interesting, or attractive in some way. Strangers might care about others from of the goodness of their hearts, out of general care for the welfare of our fellow wo(man), but these strangers don’t actually know you enough to care about you personally. The focus of our caring starts with those we know the best, and moves out in concentric circles of distance. We feel the most investment in the wellbeing of those who we personally feel connected to.

This pattern of tribalism is okay as long as everyone is born into a household where they are flat out adored just for showing up on the planet. In a reasonably healthy family, each and every baby is the best thing that ever existed. Every child is a source of delight and wonder. This experience of being precious, worthy, special, smart and beautiful in one’s family is the counterbalance to the world at large, which says “you don’t matter until you prove your value.”

In families that are deeply unhealthy, babies are not adored. Children are a burden. And they are told this in a number of ways: rough handling, resentful or bored facial expressions, lack of touch, ignoring, screaming, pinching, hitting, etc.

An un-adored baby in a world of prove-your-worth is filled with a sense of emptiness and insecurity. There’s no tap root of knowing “I’m special” inside that person to counterbalance the world’s apathy.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that we can all move towards the phase of Healing. Just as the deepest wounds are inflicted relationally–by the very people who are supposed to take care of us–the deepest healing also comes this way. In a healthy love relationship, people develop a sense of personal value. They discover that they matter to another person, and that allows them to matter to themselves. This is a slow process because it’s a total change in personal identity.  Evidence of healing is both internal and behavioral:  they take less dangerous risks but more emotional risks. They take breaks from work, protect time to sleep, eat vegetables.  As they discover that they are lovable even while being imperfect, they stop hyper focusing on their own and other people’s flaws. (Which reminds me of the perfect bumper sticker I saw this week: “Proud parent of a great kid who can occasionally be an asshole and that’s okay”)

In a healthy relationship—which can be love, friendship, therapy or any combination of the three–we can reprogram our sense of value from “nothing” to “special.” Not everyone will feel this way about us. In fact, most of them won’t give us a second thought. Because they don’t know us well enough to have an opinion.  Pop culture aside, we cannot and do not need to impress everyone. We just need to *adore* ourselves, and hopefully, have a few other folks in our lives who join our fan club, as we also join theirs.

What To Do When There’s Nothing To Do

by Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW

Photo by Artem Beliaikin on Pexels.com

Here in Washington state, our governor just clamped down restrictions to slow the spread of the Corona virus and prevent deaths. In this strange time, we must minimize contact with the outside world. Our winter rituals have changed. No longer do we gather in extended family and friend groups around a table filled with communal food. No longer do we lighten the dark, chilly days with the warmth of our tribe.

Collectively we are in the wilderness, looking for ways to find comfort and remember: even the longest winter ends.  And then comes spring. We are left hoping. Hoping a decent vaccine will be made. Hoping our world will return to some semblance of safe-enough. Hoping to return to our offices and schools. Hoping we can once again take up our petty concerns and stop tracking projected body counts.

When my twins were born, premature and medically fragile, I looked forward to the day I could get mad at them for stupid things: leaving socks on the floor, refusing broccoli.  Trivial annoyance meant they were safe, and I longed to be free of the terror of their deaths.  (I got my wish. So. Many. Piles. Of. Objects…So. Much. Food. Pickiness.)

We don’t think about irritation as evidence of good luck, but guess what people in real crisis are not doing? They are not thinking about who owes them a text back or how many weeds in their own yard came from the neighbor’s non-gardening.

There are some deep healing opportunities within this Covid restriction time. We live in a cornucopia of distractions: the news, Netflix, pasta, Paris, Amazon, beer, books, pot, porn, gambling, virtual farming, cat collecting, this world offers distraction 24/7.

With Covid getting worse, some of those distractions are no longer available. Loss of distractions is uncomfortable at first. What do we do with ourselves? With our time? We can comfort ourselves by doubling down on the ones that are still in our grasp. Numbing out with food and television was already a national pastime before Covid, and it’s only become more common.

Or we can try something else. With the television off and phone down, there is an opportunity to sit alone in the company of our own consciousness. Try this. Take stock of what you notice, feel, and think.

In this moment I’m sitting in my sweet little backyard office. The space heater is noisy. The amber light bulbs above my desk cast a weak ring of light. It’s still dark out, and the shapes of the tree branches shade the sky. I’m tired but also proud of myself for waking up early. I’ve been wrestling with non-writing, trying and failing to become more productive. I wish I craved writing like I crave coffee. But I don’t. I regret this.

If you want to grow emotionally, to be more resilient and kinder there is a simple way. All we have to do, in any given moment, is to notice and then tolerate whatever feelings arise. The good feeling ones and the bad feeling ones have this in common: They won’t last forever. A moment of irritation will turn into a moment of gratitude and then we might feel hungry. Or bored. Or overwhelmed. Or sad. Or playful. Or focused. Or inspired.

Today I’m going to try and tolerate feelings, one moment at a time.

The Right Amount of Responsibility

By Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW

Many of the good people I see had really rough childhoods. Their psychological diagnosis is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.  PTSD usually manifests in symptoms such as flashbacks, pervasive anxiety, an exaggerated startle response, dislike of surprises, controlling behavior and a sense of coming danger, as if they are always bracing for the other shoe to drop. The public has heard of PTSD, so the label provides trauma survivors an explanation of some of their behaviors and struggles.

But today, I want to go deeper into the effects of trauma. Let’s talk about self-blame. First, some basic developmental information: all kids think their parents are gods. Because the adults taking care of them have so much more power, life experience, understanding and agency then they do, children believe they control the world. And in a small way they do: they control (most of) the child’s world. I remember having a conversation with my son when he was four years old.

“Mommy, I want you to make it stop raining.”

“I can’t do that. I can’t control the weather.”

“Mommy just give it your best.”

“Sweetie. I can’t make it start or stop raining.”

“You can! You’re not even trying!” (starts crying in frustration).

Children believe their caretakers know everything and can do anything. Parents are the absolute compass for children, ever pointing in the “right” direction. So, when caretakers beat them, ignore them or sexually abuse them, the children blame themselves for causing it to happen. They think “it’s because I’m bad.”

And the perpetrators of abuse also add to this mistaken belief. They say things like,

                “You were asking for it.”

                “It’s your fault.”

                “You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

Self-blame is a perfectly reasonable survival mechanism for a young and dependent creature living in a dangerous family. It keeps the world in order. Parents remain gods. It allows them to believe change is possible: if this happens because I’m bad, well I can always change. Self-blame protects abused/neglected children from despair. It keeps them submissive and obedient to their parent/abusers, so more likely to survive and get some emotional needs met. In a dangerous childhood, self-blame makes a ton of sense.

News flash: it’s false. It never was and never could be the child’s fault that they are abused or ignored.  Even though this belief system helped children survive lousy childhoods, it’s toxic to maintain in adulthood. Self-blame keeps trauma survivors committed to partners who are dishonest or unreliable, or who consistently berate and devalue them.  It keeps them working long hours for withholding bosses.  It makes it extremely difficult for them to set boundaries and follow through with consequences when other people trounce those boundaries. Self-blame is a false belief that needs to be grown out of, as soon as safety is attainable.

On the other end of the problematic coping style, there are those who refuse to take personal responsibility. Entitlement issues are also forged in childhood. Parents who don’t feel proud of themselves convey a religious-type worship of external accomplishments and accolades to their children. These kids grow up thinking they must become Nobel laureates or supermodels or Russel Wilson in order to be lovable. Because the mark of acceptability is so lofty, they never make it.  Then they feel inferior, and hide it by pretending to be blameless and perfect. Because that is what they had to pretend to be in order to feel approved of as a child.

When entitled folks screw up, they can’t take responsibility.  This is a problem because accepting reasonable responsibility is just as important as not taking over-responsibility.

It means admitting mistakes, apologizing WIITHOUT qualification, and understanding that one’s own comfort and convenience is of equal value to others. It means playing by the rules and not thinking of oneself as special or deserving extra cookies.  People who cannot take personal responsibility often partner with…. those who take too much!  It’s a perfect, gnarly marriage of entitlement to codependence.  

We are all in this world trying to heal the wounds of our childhoods.  The good and bad news is: if you struggle, you are not special.  We all share this story of personal growth and joy and pain.