The Genius of Anger

By Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW

When I was a kid I loved magnifying glasses. They seemed like a magical portal to a secret world: like Alice in Wonderland drinking the elixir which made her shrink and grow, magnifying glasses changed everything. Ants went from simple black specks to armored warriors.  Grass became a complex, mysterious world of sharp edges and shadows. Sunlight went from general brightness to burning laser. I yearned to someday own an old fashioned, wooden handled magnifying glass.

I’ve come to think of anger as a type of magnifying glass. If that sounds random (and it probably does) bear with me. Anger offers—demands–we pay attention to our core values. We get angry when we believe that something or someone is threatening our core values. Anger magnifies our emotion to get us to pay attention to and protect our values.

Now there are folks out there who get mad at everything and everyone: the weatherman for predicting rain, the government for collecting taxes, the neighbor for taking too long to pull in their trashcans. To these folks I’d say get therapy (but not me, I don’t enjoy your kind). They also are responding to a perceived threat to their value system but like a rescue dog who bites when frightened, they lack the emotional wellbeing to tell when they should and should not feel safe.

I’m addressing this blog to the vast majority of us who are not constantly (and tediously!) angry, but who struggle with recognizing anger as a useful tool in navigating relationships.  Typically, we feel angry when we feel duped, taken advantage of, disrespected, or mistreated in some way. Likewise, we feel angry when these things happen to someone we care about. Anger holds in its flaming heart the certain knowledge that we are WORTH something, that we are precious and worth protecting. Healthy anger is the safeguard of self-esteem.

Seen through this lens, anger is a useful reaction to a threat to the safety of connection between people. Anger is fuel propelling us with courage to stand up for ourselves, to set boundaries, to name the thing that we cannot and should not ignore. Anger is a wicked cool sword that cuts through the bullshit of pandering and placating to show us our own raw truths.

Skillful communication of anger protects relationships by protecting boundaries. If I don’t allow myself to be mistreated, I can stay safely connected. If I let myself be mistreated I either have to give up my safety or I have to sever the relationship. Anger is the opposite of apathy, and apathy is the opposite of love. Anger and love are inextricably wound into all of the relationships we treasure because every deep, long term connection involves imperfect people. All of us make mistakes, have blind spots and character flaws, lack complete understanding and inevitably fail one another at different times.

So if you want love in your life, be prepared to sometimes be pissed off. Be prepared to piss off the ones you love. Allow the experience to slow you down, just like a magnifying glass in the hands of a curious kid. Anger springs from your deepest values and offers lessons about areas of yourself that you need to refine: your expectations, your boundaries, your capacity to hang in there and stay respectful. It teaches you how to meet the world without being a doormat. Anger gives insight into your own code of fairness. When you or the ones you love are angry, don’t run away, but rather magnify the moment. Be prepared to listen and to speak your truth.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

My Needs Are Too Much

by Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW

I think most of us have this secret fear lurking in our core: that our needs are too much for the people around us. That our unvarnished self is a black hole of emptiness and nothing can fill us up. We hide our fear of emptiness/neediness in a variety of ways: by developing hyper-independence, or engaging in excessive care-taking of others, or by dissociating with food/alcohol/television/Facebook/tasks.

To understand where this near-universal fear comes from it helps to know two things:

One, the brain is a meaning-maker. It makes meaning by recognizing patterns and generalizing those patterns out to arrive at conclusions to help us navigate life. One major pattern we learn is simple cause and effect tracking: If I do X, Y will happen. This cause and effect pattern-recognition is half the battle of functioning in a given environment.  For example: If Harry consistently gets to work late (X), he will lose his job (Y). If I rinse my dishes before putting them in the sink (X), it’s easier to clean them (Y).

Two, just because a pattern is true at one point in time doesn’t make it true in present time. Therein lies 98% of the work of therapy.

If you were born into a compromised environment such as a family system where addiction or mental illness or poverty or disability affected the adult’s capacity to care for you, than your needs were too much.  At that time, and in that family system of diminished capacity, a growing child’s constant need for food, love, shelter, attention, explanation, comfort, sanitation, structure, stimulation, and consideration is too much for the parent(s) to meet. The parent, ashamed at their failure to meet the demands of this needy being grows angry at the child for putting them in this position and blames the child. The adults convert their own failure into blame and send the message to the child: Your needs are too much. The child’s meaning making looks like this: If I have needs (x), I make my mother angry (Y). The child then starts to hide his needs, first from his mother and ultimately from himself.

Of course we all have needs, and our adult selves need the very same things that our child selves needed. Some of those needs we can now meet directly (food, shelter, sanitation, structure) while others still must be met via relationship (love, attention, comfort, consideration).

If we are still in that child habit of hiding our needs from ourselves, we don’t know it’s okay to have needs and we don’t know what we really want. We may think we want a Rolex watch or watch ten hours of Netflix.

Here’s a handy way of telling if we are meeting a need or blotting ourselves out: when we meet a need, it goes away. We return to a state of calm. When we are blotting ourselves out, the need gets quiet for a short period of time and then resumes its shrill driving force.  When blotting out, we vacillate between distracted and restless.  When meeting a need, we feel relief and peace.

My wish for you, dear reader, is that you take the time to know your needs and value yourself enough to meet them.

SAD to Glad: Surviving Seasonal Affective Disorder

Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW

In the gloom of a Seattle January, it’s vital to keep our inner sun ignited. Seasonal Affective Disorder, with its attendant low levels of energy and flattening of enthusiasm, affects many to some degree.

Do you find yourself hitting the snooze button and rolling over? Do you look out the window and scowl?

People in Seattle, we need a whole battalion plan of fun to battle the winter meh’s. What is fun? I’m talking about tiny bits of delight, not the roller coaster of joy. Fun is subjective, subtle and easily attainable.

Visualize Picturing the golden sun in a clear blue sky is uplifting. Imagine a garden in the late spring; recall the delightful riot of blooming peonies and lily-scented hyacinths. Visualization is not just for woo-woos.  I know a clinical social worker working with professional athletes in Chicago. He has injured players picture themselves practicing and playing the game while in their hospital beds. Just by visualizing, these players are able to retain muscle tone and skill level. Think of visualization as the opposite of catastrophic thinking. Instead of using your imagination to freak yourself out, visualization is using your imagination to improve your reality. Conscious use of visualization is effective, free and has no unwanted side effects!

Progress The therapeutic value of a feeling of progress cannot be overstated. Sure we are all aging and the mortality rate is a solid hundred percent, but here you are, alive and able, so do something to make your life even a tiny bit better/prettier/healthier/more interesting. Each winter I repaint bits of the ceiling and walls that are marred. This weekend my boyfriend and I spent half a day making a week’s worth of healthy breakfasts and lunches from scratch to save time and money during the work week. Learning anything is a slam dunk for creating a sense of progress. With the internet, learning has never been so abundantly available. As an example, the DuoLingo app offers free daily language lessons that take just five minutes and allow you to choose from all the major world languages.  I’m currently working on my Spanish and will learn French next. And you don’t need Wi-Fi to learn: Find someone who knows something you don’t and ask them questions.

Travel Depending on destination and level of luxury, travel costs vary from modest to major.  If you can afford it, go to the sun midwinter for a blue sky break. Stay somewhere you can walk outside every day for an hour and get your vitamin D recharged. If that’s too much for your budget, take a weekend getaway with your partner or friends and go somewhere to connect with loved ones and shake up the routine. If you don’t want to commit to a whole weekend, get outside of the city and go east to the mountains for a day of snowshoeing or sledding or skiing.  Take in the beauty of snow blanketing the landscape and feel the refreshing chill of high altitude winter air.

Experience Novelty Anything new and different wakes your brain up and makes you feel alive, which happens to be exactly the opposite of how Seasonal Affective Disorder makes you feel. Think of novelty as the umami flavoring that makes life delicious. Again, we’re talking little bits of newness here, not enter the witness protection program and move across the country. Discover a new show on Netflix or Amazon that makes you laugh, cry or think. Throw a party for a truly ridiculous reason (The Winter Olympics watch party! National Pie Day!). Spend an evening listening to a new album, or internet-stalk your favorite musician and listen to their side bands. Make a paper-mache mask. Take a class that you would have loved as a child.  I’ve taken classes on hip hop dancing, ceramics building, jewelry-making, mosaics, writing, interior decorating, cooking, and painting. Remember adults take recreational classes for fun, not to create an amazingly impressive product, so dump your perfectionism before you go.

Get Physical Attend to the mammalian needs of your body. The basic three are: sleep, exercise and food. It’s easy to have not enough of the first two and then try to make up for feeling lousy with way too much of the third. Make a plan to get to sleep earlier. Block out time on your schedule to get regular, healthy movement. Do a little prep each weekend by making or buying readymade meals for the work week so you can have food that sustains you without inflating you. Drink more water and less everything else liquid. Have sex. Really! Schedule it if need be. Sexual activity increases both self esteem and dopamine.

Finally, consider this general philosophy: Nibble on as many different sources of self care as you can dream up. Consider emotional nutrition akin to dietary needs for variety and enjoyment.

On Sparkly Skull Chandeliers and the Subjective Nature of Reality

Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW, MSW

One of the best things about being a therapist is also one of the best things about being a mom.  This year my teenagers were surprisingly enthusiastic about decorating for Halloween. After several years of their steadily diminishing interest in holiday decor, I had given away the moaning zombie head, the black foam tombstones, the light up snowman, the plywood Santa, and pared down our vast and tacky collection to our favorite things.

But I was wrong because October first, my sons were completely excited about decorating for Halloween.  We set about putting up the giant bat, the blinking bat lights, the sparkly spider, the witch, the Frankenstein treat holder, the rubber rats.  The boys put things in weird places: The “eye of newt potion” bottle was stuck in the door of the fridge, with the condiments. One of them put a giant rubber rat in the linen closet, just far back enough in the shadows to actually freak me out.

This is one thing I love about both parenting and therapy. It’s the delightful surprise of how people think differently. I think of decorations like art. I put them out where they are easy to see and enjoy. Meanwhile, the boys think of them as thematic: eye of newt would be a witch’s condiment, so it goes in the fridge with condiments.  Seeing a rat in a closet is scary, and Halloween is a holiday to scare people.

Years ago, when running a social skills group, participants were developing ground rules for group safety and cohesion. One of the women requested no swear words. She grew up in a religious household and felt uncomfortable with swearing. It was a revelation to me that someone might feel unsafe from salty language. As a result, I had to think about conveying enthusiasm and intensity and spontaneity without swearing which made me a more palatable public speaker.

These separations between how we interpret reality and how others do the same can be incredibly fertile growth areas. Which is therapist-code for “or it can really freakin’ suck.” (See how I didn’t swear there?) As we move into the holiday season my wish for you, dear reader is that you can notice and communicate those differences with compassion both for yourself (we are all works in progress) and others (because ditto).

Shine On You (actually quite) Crazy Diamond

By Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW

I’ve been thinking and talking with clients this week about connection and the importance of developing a tribe of people to get our needs met. For heterosexual men in particular, this is a huge challenge in our society and the lack of it impairs both their own quality of life and the lives of their partners. It’s a challenge because men are raised to compete with each other and to rank themselves hierarchically in regards to desirable and undesirable traits: intelligence, athleticism, attractiveness, charisma, awkwardness, clumsiness, etc…

When people are in competition mode the primary directive is to win and not be weak. This doesn’t lend itself to vulnerable disclosures of self doubt and the reassurance that everyone feels—and is—lacking in some important areas at some times.

Without certain knowledge that the pain of personal weakness is universal, that this very experience leads back to our humanity and (hopefully) the chance to be compassionate, men are cut off from connecting these dots, resulting in their being just a wee bit socially retarded less conscious when compared to women.

Where does male vulnerability go?  It is buried under shame, obscured by addiction, hidden behind unrealistic expectations to find a partner who makes them feel powerful and right all the time. It comes out as anger, blame, inability to apologize, conflict avoidance, contemptuous communication during conflict, and passive aggressive acts towards their partners.

It’s funny because where men are in terms of relationship naiveté is roughly equal to where women are in terms of employment naiveté: because we ladies are more recent arrivals in the world of careers, many women suffer from paralyzing and unrealistic expectation that they can and should find work that is important, well paid, emotionally rewarding, free-time respecting, and that anything less than luminous employment perfection represents a failure on their part to choose well.

I’m suggesting women should learn from men in terms of careers, and men should learn from women in terms of connections. Women have multiple friends and so can choose who to do what with. We don’t expect our intellectual friend to help us hang wall paper.  We don’t expect our athlete friend to join us on a ten day Vipassana meditation retreat. And we don’t expect our men to fit our every facet of interest because that would be ridiculous. Meanwhile, men take jobs expecting to enjoy some aspects of their work and hate others, to get paid and go home and have hobbies in order to have fun.

You are a diamond—multifaceted and incalculably precious. Don’t expect any one person or job to shine light into the whole of you.