How to Change the World

by Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW

Photo by Fabian Reitmeier on Pexels.com

A sense of personal agency—that powerful feeling of having the ability to make your life mostly the way you want it—is a historically unprecedented capacity for women and a luxury that largely belongs mainly to the privileged (Caucasian cis-gender) citizens of the western world.

Context acknowledged, most of my readers are those genetically and geographically and gender-identifying (ha! Try saying that five times in a row, fast!) fortunate Americans, so you have massive capacity for personal agency, but may not quite know it.

What does personal agency have to do with mental health?  Only everything! If you feel you can point yourself in the direction you want to go—make a new friend, finish your degree, negotiate a raise, adopt fifteen stray cats,—then you can figure out a strategy to get there—strike up a conversation with your neighbor, research university programs designed for working adults, make a list of job accomplishments and ask for a meeting with your boss, invest in an industrial sized bag of kitty litter.

Without personal agency, life is just happening to us. We are at the mercy of the economy, the whims of our boss, the vicissitudes of life.  Like children awaiting dinner and hoping for pasta, we have wants but are passive, and passivity equals powerless.

Girls in particular are raised to deny their needs. In order to be ladylike and nurturing, we are taught to take care of everyone else first and then (only if there is time) to attend to ourselves. Boys meanwhile, are taught to “shake it off” when they are physically injured and shamed “don’t be a baby” when they are emotional. Girls are raised to accommodate everyone except themselves, and boys are raised to dominate everyone including themselves.  It’s crappy social programming resulting in massive, unresolved pain and the compulsive need to escape it.

This creates a society of men and women who are completely estranged from their authentic selves, from the internal voice that knows our deepest needs and wants, and therefore has no power to fulfill them.  This estrangement and the resulting feelings of emptiness creates enormous resentment and insatiability.

It’s why we have major obesity epidemic in our country: because unmet needs show up in crooked ways and calories are comforting when you work twelve hours a day or stuff your pain down because your life fits like a too-small pair of shoes. Its why pot shops are becoming as common as coffee shops here in the Seattle landscape: because if you are hurting and don’t know how to make the pain stop, you just want to distract yourself from the pain. It’s why so many people can’t hang out alone without a television on in the background or a phone screen in their hand. Distraction is easier than taking responsibility for changing your life, but folks: Taking responsibility is a LOT more powerful, interesting and liberating.

The only way out of this mess is taking time to get to know yourself. There are a million ways to go about it: meditation, journaling, time alone in nature, reflection time over coffee, any creative practice, building things, moving slowly in silence, stillness. You need just three ingredients: curiosity, solitude and quiet. Curiosity is like an opening into the possible, it’s a deeply spiritual state. And we can’t enter into a state of curiosity about ourselves in the midst of other people or distractions of any form.

As we move through autumn, with its slower pace and gorgeous foliage, I wish for you dear reader, protected time to get in touch with yourself so that you can find out what you need deep down, below the incessant and noisy surface wants. Try saying “no” to a few demands on your calendar, and reinvest that time into yourself. Take a candle-lit bath. Go for a slow walk in a beautiful setting.

I wish you great patience with your wants and needs, and faith in your own secret strength and power.  I wish you to exercise your personal agency to make your life a beautiful, sturdy, comfortable fit.

 

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.

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.

 

The Wisdom of Polonius (To Thine Own Self Be True)…in a campy sort of way

camp fire (Photo credit: ilkerender)

Tanya Ruckstuhl-Valenti LICSW, MSW

 

I recently had the opportunity to rediscover my non-love of camping. It seems like every couple years stories I hear from friends and clients alike paint a bucolic picture of camping which entails roaring fires, invigorating hikes, peaceful water and affordable vacationing.  I forget all I know of my hatred of commuting to flush toilets and sad little water pressure and lukewarm showers.  I enter a fugue-like, dissociative state in which I forget that I am the kind of vacationer who wants high thread count and spa services and a gourmet restaurant and I start perusing the Washington state park website like a..well like a camper.

A few weeks back I was stricken with this sudden-onset camp amnesia and took my kids to the KOA in Lynden for a wholesome family camping experience.  I was so proud I remembered even to bring a bucket of firewood for the aforementioned roaring fire.  I took air mattresses and an air mattress pumper thingy with brand new batteries in it.  We arrived, and I set up the tent which involved setting it up wrong in three different directions (rain fly=one way) before finally hitting upon the last possible, finally correct way.  This might call a harbinger.  But sadly I am stubborn and slow to learn.

Hours later, after taking us out for dinner, (cheating I know!) we returned to the camp site and began what may possibly be the highest number of kitchen safety matches ever struck in the history of mankind to an unsuccessful fire.  I used tightly rolled paper.  I set up the wood in the appropriate tee-pee pattern.  It just didn’t catch and burn.  Not the first time and not the fifty thousandth time.  We sat in the quickly cooling temperature, coveting our neighbor’s roaring fires.  I considered asking for lighter fluid but was suddenly overcome by—aack!—a rare attack of shyness.

Instead we retired to our roomy, appropriately erected tent and laid upon once-inflated mattresses which over the course of the night deflated just enough to remind our backsides of the hardness of the earth, the existence of small rocks and the mystical proportions time seems to achieve, magically stretching into endlessness during nighttime hours spent in physical discomfort.  But not right away.  First we had the special treat of hearing the screams of every overly tired child up past their bedtime, as well as the blare of the television in the RV across the way.  Not to mention the roaring laughter of the drunken group of people far too old to still get drunk without needing some serious twelve step action.

The next morning I realized I had not even planned for coffee, believing that somehow the café would be open at the crack of dawn, when I was, but alas it was not.  We left a day early, went go karting and water sliding and air bazooka bazooka-ing and I taught the kids how to play pool horribly.  It all turned out to be fun once the camping element was removed.

I made amends to myself the following week with a real vacation, at a luxury resort with the aforementioned amenities, plus pool and hot tub.  I once heard a great bit of wisdom on Oprah.  “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”  To this I now add my own addendum:  “When you know who you are, believe you.”

The Complication Factor

By Tanya Ruckstuhl-Valenti LICSW

It all started out so simple in theory.  I never went to Disneyland as a kid, so naturally I wanted the experience of a wildly overpriced amusement park that required four plane tickets, a hotel suite, and twice daily restaurant meals to be part of their childhood. 

I explained to my kids that this year we would forgo their birthday party and fly to California instead and go to the most exciting place on earth.  They looked at me with alarm and superstition as if I had just announced, “Now we shall stir fry the cat and eat him for dinner.”

                “How about we skip Disney and just have the birthday party?”  Benji proposed. 

                “No, no!” I said, “This is for YOU, much more special than a mere party.”  I stopped myself from saying:  This is an iconic childhood experience! 

                “But we would rather have a party,” said Jonah. 

                “That’s because you don’t know how special Disneyland is!”  I said.  Never mind that I don’t know either, never having gone… 

They dug in and I relented. 

“Okay, we can have a party too, but only at our house, just a play date with cake.  And you can only invite eight children each.  This will be just a simple, nothing fancy birthday party.”

Oh, my naivety! 

                What followed were vigorous negotiations involving a stunning number of details and politics of small child parenthood:  So now in addition to Disneyland, there is the party at our house which at its most basic level requires snacks, cake, beverage, candy and getting plastic junk for those infernal goodie bags that are the demise of eco-footprints everywhere (I tried to suggest just putting cash in a bag and again got the “my mom wants to cook and eat the cat” look).   There are family friends whose children must be invited because, frankly, I love the moms, but those kids unfortunately are not the “cool” (read: future truant) boys that my own wee ones favor.  Okay, and separate from Disneyland and the birthday party, there are the treats that must be procured for the classroom, cleared with the teacher, and food-allergies that must be considered.  And the pre-birthday party school treats must be different:  One of the boys favors cupcakes and the other chocolate chip cookies.  And this list doesn’t even touch birthday gift shopping and wrapping. 

In short, this business of birthday celebration stresses me out.  In my mind’s eye it looks like a walk in the park on a sunny day.  In reality it is a snarl of to-do lists; endless errand-running, cleaning, preparing and party-disaster-averting. 

All this is to say that even semi-self-aware psychotherapists can fail to learn from their experience.  I’m just hoping that Disney offers us all the fun we crave with none of the responsibility.