Musings On Living

In the midst of this chaos, I’d like to reiterate that we all have an internal identity “ME” and an interconnected identity “WE”.

In the midst of all this tragedy it seems one side emphasizes one aspect more than the other. The truth of humanity is these two identities connect with an AND statement not an OR statement. I am ME and I’m a part of WE.

Systemic, deep seated issues like racism, chauvinism, bigotry, tribalism, trauma, etc. have deep and lasting impacts on our fellow humans. This stuff matters and it hurts others, creates trauma (which changes brain structure) and affects their perspectives of ME and WE. It is through compassion first that we help others to grow. It is only after we learn to be relational that we can influence others. All else is fear and punishment driven and while this may change behavior, it can damage the soul. In short, this is the sort of relationship that is not FOR and WITH you on your journey. When we experience connections that are FOR and WITH us, we open ourselves up to improvement and transformation.

Now, there is another side to this. I am responsible for ME. Every teenager goes through this process of figuring this out. Yes, the adolescent can blame mom, dad or the like but somewhere in maturing, the teen, or more realistically young adult, must work a process that’s helps him or her grow into a healthy human. We all fail miserably at this from time to time but we need to continue getting back up, learning and growing from the failure, and improve. Being connected to a healthy group of WE helps to push this process forward.

Learned helplessness is a trait that happens in all mammals, people included, but was first observed in dogs (poor dogs). Scientists would shock the dogs randomly so that no matter what the dog did, it couldn’t influence getting away from the pain and the dog would just give up. Haven’t we all experienced this at sometime in our lives? I sure have. Some of us get more shocks than others from society because we look a certain way, talk a certain way, dress a certain way, are attracted to others differently, etc. This is an undeniable truth and many give up and fall into all manners of coping. But the cool thing about the dogs that lie there helpless even when all shocks were taken away is that they are not always helpless. When the scientists would put another dog in the cage, that did not learn helplessness, that dog would just jump right out. It modeled a path of hope and reframed the cage/shock experience for the helpless dog into an empowered state and, over time, the helpless dog would learn to jump out as well...it learned to engage its agency once again. This happens all of the time with people in various avenues of life, most clearly in addiction recovery. We learn to live well when we connect to others who help us learn how to navigate life differently and take back our control. I call it learned hopefulness.

It’s a tough time to live. My guess it’s always been a tough time to live because life is comprised of suffering. What makes us human is when WE work together to connect and grow through the process. We take responsibility for our growth and maturity, we recognize that others have had their “shocks”, and we have compassion and empathy for each other and strive towards helping each other grow and improve. So much gets in the way of this, most of all fear and shame. But love casts out both.

I wish we all could just have a big do-over and go back to being kids who played together and had fun without all the social narrative and experiential wiring that skews us all. Interestingly, studies show we can through mindful experience and connection.

Talk to most people who work with people struggling with addictions and the notion of powerlessness comes up with pronounced regularity.  If you don't admit you are powerless then you are in denial and you will not recover. This is the foundational assertion for all 12 Step based programs addressing problems with addictive behavior.   Certain medical researchers seem to align around this notion by citing differences in brain structure pertaining to various gray matter and white matter areas in the Default Mode Network (DMN).  Addicts just can't not and they need to acknowledge this so that they can begin to change.

This begs the question of what powerless even means and, even further, it begs the question of what an addiction is.  Let's start with powerlessness.

People can choose to attend a meeting instead of heading to the bar.  Does that represent powerlessness or is that a self-empowered approach to change?

Often times I wonder if the notion of powerlessness was really meant to represent acceptance, acceptance that the choices I made, circumstances that happened, trauma and memories experienced, habituated self-talk engaged, social groups choices made (including isolation), and my psychological disposition have all woven together to form a present state of me that hasn't been working well, not in active addiction certainly and maybe not all that well outside of active addiction too.  In a sense, I need to accept the reality that how things have been working hasn't been working.  But in this case, acceptance of what is is not powerlessness.  Millions upon millions have proven that a process of change can take hold.  Choices can be made to seek help, to go to meetings, to change circumstances, live with a different purpose, etc.

Habits encode into our DMN and are characterized by automaticity.  Through practice and repetition what was once choice becomes automatic.  This can be both the gift and the curse of life.  Habits take up less energy than decisions that require our Task Processing Network (TPN) to make executive decisions and this can make life better when the habits are targeted toward that which connects us to a meaningful purpose.  But bad habits become the bane of our existence or perhaps the thorn in one's side that the apostle Paul laments.  Perhaps, what we are powerless over is the fact that we've built our habits to their current state of being in our minds.  Habituated thinking happens faster than executive thinking which is why so many label their "alcoholic or addict" minds and say that their first thought is wrong.  In reality, this has little to do with being an alcoholic or addict but rather simply being a human with a habituated pattern of thinking.

But are we powerless to change our habits?  The evidence is quite clear that the answer is no.  We can change our habits. To be clear, its not easy, but it is certainly do-able, as anyone who's ever given up smoking can attest.  Great books on the subject are Atomic Habits and Good Habits, Bad habits which are currently out now.

Many industry leaders (including Tom Horvath) have said that addiction is an extreme form of habit. Marc Lewis speaks to the nature of the learning process when discussing the Biology of Desire.

So, how do I change my bad habits?

First, I need to become aware of them.  Social groups are great places to uncover our bad habits.  If I have a habit pattern of picking my nose at home, I might not generate awareness about the habit (43% of our daily activities are out of our awareness).  But, if you put me in a work environment around other executives, I'll become quite aware quickly and there will be a strong social influence towards changing that habit (social influence can be quite powerful).  Honestly, I think this is one of the reasons for the success of recovery groups like SMART or 12 Steps.  We help each other see when we are picking our noses (hopefully metaphorically).

Second, I need to be aware of my purpose and values.  Does this habit align with what I truly value and how I want to live my life?  Understanding purpose helps to prioritize habits that are useful vs. those that are detrimental.  From this, I identify new habits that I'd like and old habits that I'd like to eliminate.

Third, I build in active practices to wire in a new habit that replaces the old.  Neurons that fire together wire together.  This means building habits requires repetition as it is the firing together over and over again that strengthens the wiring connection (automaticity).  Neurons that fire apart wire apart.  This is a gift toward old habits as when they are not used, the strength of the habit decreases.  I am self-empowered to actively design and tailor my life to help wire in good habits and wire out bad habits.  It’s a never-ending process but one that, when done effectively, snowballs as little habit upon little habit stacks into a life lived with automaticity toward well being.  I can't do them all at once and I can't do them in one sitting, but they can get better over time and practice.

Last, I am compassionate with myself as this process is not easy and I do not always do it well.  It is a learning process and such a process implicitly includes some level of failure.  I reorient myself with a growth mindset to know that I am getting better and if I fall, I get back up and acknowledge that the only true failure is staying down.

There are many tools that SMART outlines that address components of changing our lives.  The Hierarchy of Values tool helps us to prioritize and helps give us our answer to the question of "Why?" when things get tough.  In many ways, when we get to the D - dispute portion of the ABC model, what we are really trying to do is change habituated patterns of thinking so that our new B is useful or a good habit of thinking.  The social component of doing these things together with others helps us to become aware, to have hope and to push forward.

Mindfulness helps to rewire the brain by creating awareness of habituated thinking and engaging non-judgmental practices to begin the process of rewiring the architecture of the DMN.   Attachment focused therapy helps us to rewire insecure attachment patterns and relationship styles which likely became habituated through experience and repetition into our attachment styles (and God knows that relationships have always been a big key to issues/triggers with problematic addictive behavior).

Not an Axe Murderer…

To be clear, much of what I’m about to say is conjecture as no formal diagnosis been made, to my knowledge. It’s educated conjecture given much research on the subject and trying to make sense of what happened and why.

We’ve been divorced now for 8 years but there has been an amazing amount of conflict over the past 5 related to our children. It takes two to have conflict so I’m fully aware that I’ve played a role via my choices, level of awareness and responses over this time period. It’s been one helluva learning process.

What happens when a couple comes together where one person is highly sensitized to perceptions of rejection and the other has limited access, at best, to empathy? Fireworks…that’s what happens…fireworks…and suffering and hurt and mixed messages and confusion and anxiety, especially once the romance fades.

Shame plays a front and center role in anyone who has struggled with addictive behavior. It is not until toxic shame is healed that most truly recover and grow into a mature person. This was me. I struggled with the notion of being worthwhile or good enough for most of my life. There are many reasons for this but it was this shame button that was the catalyst for acting out / coping with toxic thoughts and feelings of rejection and worthlessness. I’m glad to say that this shame has been healed in me but, damn, what a process. I looked to find in another person the love that I simply had not internalized yet for myself.

And that person couldn’t be what I needed her to be. Couldn’t is a much less painful way for remembering the past as opposed to wouldn’t, which is what I thought for most of the marriage and after. Wouldn’t exacerbates shame. Couldn’t, well that reframes the issue.

For the longest time, I thought the problem was me and me alone. Bad Sam. If only I was better then I’d receive empathy, love and compassion, then I’d be okay.

Then, as I started to grow and recover, I noticed things that I overlooked before. Once my proverbial side of the street was cleaned up, I became able to see more of what the other side looked like. Or Biblically, after the log was removed from my eye, I could see more clearly the speck that was in hers (probably bigger than a speck).

For the longest time I labeled my ex a covert narcissist. I interpreted so many of our experiences as gaslighting and I had literally a third of a book highlighted on the subject with behaviors experienced in relationship. There was plenty of traumatic experiences in her upbringing that created a dismissive avoidant attachment orientation and it is the avoidant, in the extreme, which makes the narcissist. I started with a low / no contact orientation with her as legal matters escalated. I was no longer going to be labeled something which I’m not and I wasn’t going to walk on eggshells around this person anymore. I reasoned that I’m going to model for my children what having a spine looks like and how to stand up to a bully.

Then my daughter “came out a trans” and it changed everything. She has an ADHD diagnosis which is strongly connected to gender dysphoria. So I started doing the research.

For many girls, ADHD is the misdiagnosis or the co-occurring diagnosis for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), especially the mild version which most know as high functioning autism or Aspergers. In fact, the two are so related that many believe the next version of the DSM will combine ADHD and ASD into the same category. But in girls, ASD doesn’t look like it does in boys and this has caused under-diagnosis of the disorder in women. The issues with connecting socially, missing cues, sensory issues, obsessions, seeking to intellectualize social norms into rules, the genetic implications, etc. all came into focus with my daughter.

And it was at this point that I realized that those same issues have been prevalent in her mother, her maternal aunt, and her maternal grandmother. And my heart dropped.

Women with ADHD/ASD often form rigid, rules-based approaches to life to compensate for the lack of cognitive empathy that exists in the moment. Cognitive empathy is being able to pick up on the social cues and feeling states in the moment whereas affective empathy is whether a person actually cares. The sociopath has high cognitive empathy and low affective empathy. The ASD person is inverted, lacking in the moment cognitive empathy but caring deeply after the fact. Since they care, they try to come up with rules that will make everything alright. Be polite, be disciplined, have structure, don’t vary. Some experts have called anorexia a form of female Aspergers...connecting over control and rigidity over food as a means to control the disconnect between these two forms of empathy.

And I broke her rules. I broke her rules big time. I was trying to see in some sense whether she loved me for me, the person who was growing but not there yet. But rules define their ability to love not to see the person for who he is and is becoming. It’s not in the current wiring of their minds.

And so…fireworks. Undiagnosed ASD is the likely cause of many suffering or broken relationships. If I could have reframed this from the start maybe the fiery darts I experienced would have been more like NERF darts. That would have taken a secure base on my part to get to so maybe this all needed to transpire like this, for our growth.

Maybe she wasn’t gaslighting intentionally. Maybe she was. There is nothing to say that covert narcissism and ASD are mutually exclusive. But now, what this has done for me, is free my mind and heart from a perspective of her as more ego-centered and vindictive to something where the wiring just isn’t there. So, the realization that maybe I married an Asperger has been the freeing gift…to let go, move on and understand the rules of engagement for the future. She is not evil, she simply is not wired the way I assumed she would be.

I was at my parents’ house last weekend and spent quite a bit of time watching my nephew navigate the novelty of learning to stand and walk. Incredible joy fills the hearts of family members when they watch the process of learning, growing, finding stability and walking for the latest addition to the family. Big smiles exude when standing happens and when steps are taken (for both adults and the child).

I paid particular attention to this process because, quite often, I refer to the process of recovery from a problematic addictive behavior (including substance use) as the equivalent of “learning to walk” in the world without, or at least with a changed orientation toward, the problem behavior. Many are learning how to navigate the world without a drink or a drug or a bet or a website or a toxic relationship or the like.

As I watched the process of my nephew standing, falling, getting back up and figuring out how to stand and walk, I watched with curiosity as parents and grandparents encouraged him in his process. At no point in time did they say he had a chronic, relapsing brain condition and shame him by putting the label “Crawler” or “Non-Walker” on his identity. They knew that he’d succeed eventually, even if it took 1,000 times to figure out.

The problem with recovery is that other people get hurt by the "falls" of the person struggling whereas the child learning to walk gets 1,000s of opportunities to figure it out. Why is this? Because a child learning to walk doesn’t hurt the parent’s sense of self. Addiction is not the same. In fact, it is often due, in part, to the learned models of the unreliability of parents, caretakers, and others that set the foundations for addictions to emerge. When others are experienced as unreliable, unsafe and lacking the tools to encourage growth and maturity, individuals create relationships with other things…safer more reliable things...like a drink or drug or behavior or fantasy. And when this happens, repeatedly over time, addictions emerge as forms of learned behavior that become surrogates for relationships with others.

I can envision Nora Volkow doing fMRI scans of children who walk and don’t walk and taking the averages of where their brains light up and don’t on the scans to suggest that there are structural differences in the two groups. As Marc Lewis might respond, “Of course there are differences because learning changes brain structure and there are obvious differences between those children that have learned vs. those that haven’t."

Some children never learn to walk (and we are quite concerned with those instances) but most do. Some children learn to walk quickly and some take a while but almost all figure it out eventually with repetition, encouragement, and practice. The same is true of recovery from addictions. Yes, brain changes have occurred due to what has been learned and what has been repeated in the past, often influenced by a particular person’s neurobiological make-up. Habit patterns get wired in. Children often create the habit pattern of crawling before walking and the neural activities associated with crawling get wired in. But the child does not stay stuck at just crawling, new activities can be learned, like walking, through practice, failure, repetition, and persistence.

The same is true of addiction recovery. Habits have been wired in (for some…severely wired in). Brain scans may show deficits in different areas of brain function but the brain is not stuck at that level. Neuroplasticity exists and can help the person in recovery to create new connections, new habits, new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving that are more meaningful, useful and life-giving. The data shows quite substantially that the overwhelming majority of people who struggle with problematic addictive behavior mature and outgrow the behavior (with and without help). They learn what works and doesn’t in their lives and they change. The process is rarely linear and often includes numerous times “falling down” followed by getting back up, learning and adjusting.

That said if a person is continually told he or she has a chronic, relapsing brain condition because of the existence of previous habits, behaviors, feelings, thoughts, attachment issues, etc., why do we not apply the same reasoning to the child learning to walk? The child falls countless times and the nature of the condition is one in which the child will continue to fall…countless times…until things click and the child is walking and then running (much to the chagrin of tired grandparents everywhere).

The truth is that for the vast majority of people struggling with addictions, they are in the middle of a learning process, of what works and what doesn’t, often in a social context (with self and with others).

On some level, the learning process is not much different than that which we’d hope for Charlie Brown to figure out when Lucy entices him to kick the football. Each time, he builds the fantasy in his head that kicking the football will be so great and because he wants to so bad, he is willing to believe whatever lies Lucy tells him that she will not pull the football away. But she always pulls the football away and Charlie ends up on his back. Addiction recovery looks like Charlie Brown learning that Lucy is not trustworthy and telling her that he doesn’t want to play her game. Perhaps Charlie Brown needs to go hang out with Linus and let Linus hold the football (Linus seems more reliable and less pathological than Lucy anyway). Addiction recovery is, in many ways, a social learning process…a “social learning to walk”, connecting to people and activities that are safe, reliable and life-giving (especially in the longer run).

Today is sure to be an emotional day. Joy and sadness plus a wide variety of other feelings are sure to arise. Saying hello to a new life and goodbye to another.

On the joy side, today we welcome my sister’s son. After a tumultuous pregnancy all has normalized and we are looking forward to welcoming him into this world. I’m excited to watch him grow, learn and become who he is to become and also to see how he will transform my sister and our family. After all, relationships change us...for the better and for the worse.

On the sadness side, I will then attend a memorial for a friend who decided to take his life. He was more of a likable acquaintance to me given our geographic distance but he was near and dear to my close family and friends and there are a number of lingering questions. I don’t know much as to what will be said but my goal is simply to just be present, especially for my loved ones, and to appreciate just how fragile and temporary this life can be. On a more personal note, the slough of despond that brings a person to this place hits close to home so this time is especially sad. Permanent solutions have consequences.

Beginning and ending, all in one day. Life is...a juxtaposition. And holding two distinct yet opposite features of it together is something we mature into more and more. We suffer, of this there is no doubt. But we also rejoice, that’s in there too.

Many are familiar with the story whereby Jesus says to turn the other cheek to the evil person who has slapped you on the right cheek. Interestingly, he also says that if someone is to sue you for your shirt, give them your coat also.

Slapping and suing...we know there is a lawyer involved in there somewhere.

The premise is not to exact revenge but to extend grace when a wrong has occurred.

It’s not an easy creed to live by although a good Mormon (sorry Latter Day Saint - rebranding) friend of mine once asked me, “How many cheeks do you have?” I responded “Four!” and he said, “Well, there you go.”

After all, we are also admonished to love our neighbor as ourselves. The kind of person that continually puts up with getting slapped from the same person is not the sort that loves themselves, unless of course he or she is into that sort of thing. Psychologically speaking, that person falls into a codependent, trauma bonded, or worse type of categorization.

The context for Jesus saying to turn the other cheek was contrast to notions of “an eye for an eye” and “a tooth for a tooth” that most lived by in his day. In negotiation world, the “eye for an eye” strategy is called “tit for tat” and it has been proven time and again to be one of the most effective negotiating strategies for dealing with the same group of people over time, over many interactions. It proves out time and again to be a better strategy than all out escalation (ask the Hatfields and McCoys or consider the notion of mutually assured destruction).

But “turn the other cheek” introduces two potential new types of interactions. The first is the “doormat” approach whereby one always turns the other cheek and becomes the sucker target of so many. But the other approach is called “generous tit for tat” whereby a “tit for tat” strategy is followed but includes the occasional gracious oversight of a wrong committed by the other side. Interestingly, what we perceive as being wronged may not have been intentional or came during a time of stress or unclear thinking from the other side...so “generous tit for tat” allows for the notion of grace to cover injury that may or may not have been so intentional. Yet, if the it happens again then “tit for tat” is enabled or, as the psychologists say, boundaries are put in place...boundaries with consequences.

The “generous tit for tat” strategy ends up being a more successful strategy to follow according to game theorists, especially when the game is near infinite. Translation - if you have to live a good portion of the rest of your life around these same people, interacting over and over, it’s wise to pursue a strategy that provides some gracious cover for slips, mistakes and momentary lapses...but not repeated ones.

A friend once told me as I was learning to snowboard, “Day 1 sucks, you are on your ass all day. Day 2 is pretty much the same. But Day 3, by the end of Day 3 you’ll be able to get down the hill and then you’ll love doing it.”

And he was right.

It has been a teaching lesson that I’ve used with my kids since because the truth of learning how to live life and do things in it that are exciting, different, new, fun, and risky is that we often have to spend our metaphorical Day 1s and Day 2s on our asses. We can’t get to Day 3 without going through Days 1 and 2. It just doesn’t work that way. Whether it’s learning to walk as a toddler, learning to bicycle as a child, learning to be relational/social as a 6th grader, learning to be boyfriend / girlfriend in high school, learning how to learn for college, learning how to appropriately have boundaries with others in adulthood, learning how to endure pain and suffering with age, learning how to mentor others, or learning how to age gracefully and face one’s mortality.

Some of us never get to Day 3 in key areas of our lives. The pain, heartache and despair of failure cripple our attempts. We get stuck on Day 1 or 2 and quit or try to find a shortcut, a shortcut that makes enduring the temporary failure easier in the near term but typically creates more problems in the long run. This is the nature of most addictive behavior.

We create relationships with substances or processes or screens that become a substitute for relationships with healthy people...a more reliable substitute because people...well....they aren’t always that reliable, especially in Day 1 and 2 when learning how to pick people for friendships or business partnerships or marriages.

We give up our dreams because the notion of failure wreaks havoc on our souls and, more importantly, our hearts. We say no to Day 1 and 2 activities because we are not secure in our hearts that no matter how many times we fall, we are still going to be okay. And because of this, we never break through to Day 3.

Sometimes other people in our lives are even feeding our narrative of failure with “you’ll never...”, “you can’t..”, “you won’t...”. These people are not helpful and they themselves have probably given up on Day 1 or 2.

How then does a person break through? By knowing how we work as humans...we are learning creatures and we can adapt. We break through by finding others who have broken through and getting them to help coach us. We break through when we believe that we have a secure base that will allow us the opportunity to fall on our asses and still get up because Day 3 is important. We will grow into who we are to become. We break through when we choose resilience, to keep figuring out how to learn what matters to us. We break through when we realize that we don’t need to be perfect and that falling on our asses can be a bonding, relational experience because all humans fall on their asses...at first. We break through when we stick to it, whatever it is, long enough to for it to click.

The Day 3 lessons of life change and move from independence to interdependence. What’s even more interesting is growing from Day 3 to Year 3 and Decade 3. How a person snowboards to get down a hill on Day 3 is not the same way that one snowboards to get down black diamond slopes. The shift in techniques necessary once again call for a lot of falling on one’s ass.