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No, this is not about homosexuality.

Many of you probably noticed that there’s no systematic posting here on Everyone Needs Therapy. And it kills me, too, because this used to be so much fun, always on my mind.  And it still is, but a little less so. A lot less so.

Blogging for me used to work like this:

I’d be hanging around, minding my own business, maybe praying, and a thought, or a news story would catch my attention.  Like yesterday, early morning teev, a reporter zeroes in on a cult in Palmdale, CA.  Someone alerted authorities that cult members intended to carry out a mass suicide.  Police intervene, prevent the slaughter. It is rumored that cult members forwarded messages to their families, maybe tweets, who knows,  messages like

It’s okay. See you in Heaven. Please say goodbye to Gramma.  Feed the cat.

See, that was blogworthy.

You may know that my father’s illness and finally his death, knocked me out of the box this year. Blogging, like a lot of other things, had to be pushed down on the list of things to do.  There was the shlepping him to the hospital, the new furnace, the garage.  You don’t even know about the garage. Now it’s the packing up the house, preparing Mom psychologically to move, and the sadness and crying, mostly mine. And the practice, too, needs time, as well as the other humans who live with me, who used to like my bag lunches. The secret, you know, is the wax paper.  I learned this from FD. Always credit someone who teaches you anything.

The good news is that by not blogging so much I figured out how to stretch my recipe for nine muffins to one that serves twelve.  Food is love, so this is a very good thing.

So it wasn’t all gloom and doom at all this year, especially because the grand-kids visited over the summer and these creatures are most demanding and play a mean game of tennis.  Priorities are priorities. I love all of you, but seriously, none of you are five years old, or even eight, and most of you don’t especially find much joy in a bug.

And yet.  I feel I’ve been dishonest, that I’ve been sneaking around, that I’m a slime, for I have committed several indiscretions.  Perhaps you suspected, and you were right.  Therapydoc has been cheating.

The Story:

Way back when, can’t remember, must have been July 2009,  I purposefully asked readers for suggestions for songs, films, and videos that had themes of sexual harassment and violence.  I needed to learn more about our cultural mindset via culture, art, and music.  Our cultural lens. The academic stuff I know.

You came through brilliantly, by the way, I learned so much, and am so grateful.

It was all to launch a new initiative.  And to do that, in our blog-addicted universe, an initiative needs a blog. So some of you might have noticed that the ENT sidebar therapydoc Tweets directed you to RelationshipWise, specifically http://Relwise.blogspot.com. (a Blogger loyalists to a fault).  The voice of that writer sounded suspiciously like mine.

But as you know, I’m a paranoid Jew, an anxious neurotic when it comes to coming out on the Internet, to just being me, a person with a proper name and street address. As it is, every creak in the house, every construction worker or landscaper outside, is a shout to my hyper-vigilant ears that a home-invader is surely in the house, intends to kill me.

The joke is that as an athlete, a fairly wiry, energetic, fairly caffeinated individual, I do pity the poor bloke that tries. And did I tell you I have a sword? (See comments on the garage sale post). When a young man really did try to rape me in college I forcibly pushed him out of the dorm room with psychotic, panicked muscle, sorry only that he left with no broken anything.

Anyway, the good news is that DaMomma has made me a deal that I cannot refuse.  She will be editing the next three posts on Everyone Needs Therapy. She is an amazing writer, a real writer, and it is certain some of you will appreciate the editing.  I know I sure will.

But I want to continue to work on violence prevention and am asking for your help, not your money. Unless you have this to spare, which is not possible, so what are we talking about.

Anyway.  If you have a minute this week, read some of the posts on the other blog, maybe comment even.  Please Do NOT affectionately or even spitefully refer to me over there as therapydoc or TD. Please.  Best would be to follow me, request emails or whatever it that following really means.  Hey, if you do follow RelationshipWise then you don’t have to even read anything. Just visit once in awhile.  We don’t ask much around here, but at the end of the day, the Jewish mother has to come out.  It’s all I ask, a visit.  A cup of coffee. 

The likelihood is that my anxiety will take over and I’ll take this post down, maybe soon, get back to suicide cults, codependency, and sex (oh, such a good one coming up, seriously– the patient tells me–Dr, you should have recorded our visit last week, the things you said–and I had been thinking exactly the same thing.  They’re there somewhere, what was said.  Not sure where, exactly.  And we’ll have DaMomma, a professional writer, to edit a few things on this blog.  For I am, alas,  just your basic

therapydoc

Go to Source

For those of you who never saw the post below, I brushed it up.  Please let me know if you’re still not receiving the emails from Feedburner, btw.

Go to Source

Old Yiddish Saying:  When things come in threes, it is likely they are blogworthy

 (Yes, I made that up) 

            therapydoc
 

I’m riding my bike to work, pass a woman in her ninth month talking to herself.  Surely she has a Bluetooth in her ear, but from my angle she really looks like she’s talking to herself.

And just last week, as I’m loading groceries into the trunk of my car, the young man parked next to me remarks good-naturedly,

“I swear, I thought you had some kind of mental disorder, talking to yourself like that in the store. I thought, 

Someone should tell her kids! Do they even know!?’

Then I watched you, kind of followed you a bit, and I could see that you were okay, that you had to have been on the phone.”

That’s reassuring.  Not suffering from schizophrenia, on the phone.

When I was a teenager, a mobile phone, or “communicator,” was something that Spock used to reach McCoy, the stuff of science fiction,  the technology of Star Trek.  Off television, however, even to an untrained mental health professional, an animated conversation with an invisible other indicated psychosis.  Something very wrong.

And it was a little scary, seeing that psychosis, for every once in awhile a person is going to see a naked person in the middle of the street, or someone walking, gesticulating wildly who is not on the phone. We are afraid of this because intuitively, we tend to be afraid of what we don’t understand.

The irony is that the person who has the psychotic disorder who is more afraid, more anxious, fearful of invisible dangers, the voices speaking only to them, shrieking, spewing hate and rage, negativity.  And under the influence of fear, like most of us under stress, a person with a severe mental disorder is capable of lashing out, usually to self-protect.

A couple of summers ago, riding home from work,  I caught the eye of a woman walking toward me.  She was on the sidewalk wearing mismatched brightly colored clothing.  (I’m drawn to bright colors like a moth to a light.)  When she sees me looking at her she flashes a ferocious glare; I feel the fire.  Then she spits as far as she can, misses me by a foot. Violent psychic energy, aggression.  Strike first.

Believe me, as soon as I caught that look in her eye, her diagnosis was clear in my head.  I didn’t need a DSM.

A person with mental illness who is lashing out violently is more often than not doing so in self-defense.  She  might even be hearing threatening voices.  Tell everyone or you will die!  Show the world!  Make a difference!  You scum, son of scum, you filthy human!  Show your worth! 

James J. Lee, the gentleman who marched into the Discovery building in Silver Spring, Maryland, last week,  had explosives on his person.  He listed his demands on a blog.  He demanded that the Discovery Channel  agree to changes in its programming, that the station become more environmentally sensitive, more green. He thought humans filthy, babies the ultimate source of destructive pollution, the giraffes, the lions, benign.   From his blog: 

Humans are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around and are wrecking what’s left of the planet with their false morals and breeding culture.

. . .  It is the responsiblity of everyone to preserve the planet they live on by not breeding any more children who will continue their filthy practices. Children represent FUTURE catastrophic pollution whereas their parents are current pollution. NO MORE BABIES! Population growth is a real crisis. Even one child born in the US will use 30 to a thousand times more resources than a Third World child. It’s like a couple are having 30 babies even though it’s just one! If the US goes in this direction maybe other countries will too!

Also, war must be halted. Not because it’s morally wrong, but because of the catastrophic environmental damage modern weapons cause to other creatures. FIND SOLUTIONS JUST LIKE THE BOOK SAYS! Humans are supposed to be inventive. INVENT, DAMN YOU!!

In therapy we might say, You sound angry.

Most of us don’t need a prophet to know that our world is in trouble. The heat wave across these past two months should tell us something.

So back to those threes.  We have:

(1) Me seeing schizophrenia everywhere, or so it seems, like a new psych student who has just learned about different psychotic disorders,

(2)  Blogging about James J. Lee soon after the Discovery Channel lockdown last week, that Mr. Lee probably suffered from Schizophrenia and that students should study his blog, Save the Planet Protest, and the news stories that tells us he was homeless.  Then down came the post before most of you read it, me unwilling to face the criticism of those who are sensitive to the issue of population growth, who asked me to defend my diagnosis on the Prophet of Doom.

and (3) One Thousand White Women, The Journals of May Dodd.

What is One Thousand White Women? It is a novel by Jim Fergus about life in the United States in 1876 (really 1854).  The Cheyenne, determined to make peace with urban sprawl and the pollution of white men, offered Ulysses S. Grant an option for assimilating the red-faced with the pale-faced. 

Suffice it to say that it is a biological solution and I just can’t spoil it for you.  I just started the book, but it is captivating and very funny.  And then there’s this quote!

Little Wolf, the Sweet Medicine Chief , is speaking to a specially appointed commission of Congress on behalf of the Cheyenne:

The People are a small tribe, smaller than either the Sioux or the Arapaho; we have never been numerous because we understand that the earth can only carry a certain number of the People, just as it can only carry a certain number of the bears, the wolves, the elks, the pronghorns, and all the rest of the animals. For if there are too many of any animal, this animal starves until there is the right number again. We would rather be few in number and have enough for everyone to eat, than be too many and all starve.

He goes on to say that for this reason his children must become members of the white man’s tribe, thus offers his modest proposal.

His ideas about population growth, actually, are not all that different from Mr. Lee’s.

So what makes Little Wolf an environmentalist and Mr. Lee a person suffering from schizophrenia, a man who just thought he was an environmentalist?

Little Wolf contains his anger, is very controlled, even when the men on Capital Hill practically throw him and his entourage on a train back west, rejecting his amazing suggestion.  He’s tried to be empathetic, to give the white man the benefit of the doubt.  He is educable, this white man.  An empath, Little Wolf is highly evolved.

The Sweet Medicine Chief reaches out to a culture clearly foreign to him, a people who leave a wake of upheaval and destruction, who ravage fields and the habitat; a people out of touch with the balance of nature, uninterested in learning, particularly.  But capable of empathy and change.

Unfortunately, lose that, lose empathy, lose the ability to intuit the feelings of others, and the desire to change, to look within, to see the enemy inside, rather than blame, and we’re all clueless, out of touch.  Or more to the point, sick.   Like  James J. Lee,  spewing hatred and negativity on his blog in an insular psychotic rage. 

We don’t know if Mr. Lee had been treated for the illness, or even if he heard voices. We don’t know and never will, probably, if anyone told him to call attention to the problem of population growth and the destructive nature of human beings, or not. But he probably had it, 295.30, Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type. A tough disorder to live with.

I know it like I know why the woman spat at me when our eyes locked.

Lee’s website: http://www.savetheplanetprotest.com

And the Discovery Channel, Discovery Communications

therapydoc

Go to Source

Sometimes some of you get a notice that I’ve posted something, only to find that it’s gone.  You visit and see  nothing new.  That’s because I’ve reread whatever it was and decided it wasn’t ready for prime time, so down it goes. 

I appreciate the visit anyway, you should know, and the communication, the questions. 

It happened this week, so even though I should be making someone a lunch, I put up the Garage Sale post below, cleaned it up a little.  Has anyone ever cleaned a sixty year old garage?  It’s not pretty.

therapydoc

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Technically it’s a front yard sale.

My son stops by to see what’s going on, exclaims, “For sure you’re going to blog about this!”


After the smoke clears and I have a little distance, weigh all the risks, the benefits, because who can move without doing that, it seems like a good idea. 

 Once I had a patient who worked for the stock exchange.  Or was it the commodities exchange.  In the pit.  Everything about it, he said, wreaked mania.  The sheer energy, the excitement, the thrill of buy-sell.   Of course, that was when the millennium was new, the economy flourishing.  Now we all feel a little older, slower.

I never knew it, but garage sales are the real American stock market.  It never grabbed me, however, the old furniture, old light fixtures, what people called OPJ, other people’s junk.  Not that the show, The Antique Road Show  couldn’t keep my attention, it did.  But it wasn’t like browsing thrift stores turned me on, and I only bought a few things second hand — winter jackets for the grandsons.  One was for girls, apparently, so that was a huge faux pas.  Some of us need more direction than others.

Like many immigrants who come to this country, my father, after serving in a world war, had to decide what to do with his life if he expected to buy property, support a family, that sort of thing. He started setting up windows in a jewelry shop and thought, How hard is this?  I should own the shop.

And without the Internet to guide him, without a degree in business administration, he and his brother set up a business or three.  They hired someone to fix watches and Dad watched carefully.  The modest idea morphed into a buying and selling obsession.

It is an obsession, I’m learning, one that is not in the DSM, yet millions of people have it.  Most are on Ebay.  They have stores and monikers and merchandise and self-esteem, pride themselves on their packaging, their advertisements, the text of the sale, the pitch.  For now, sales are primarily online. 

Selling online, as even my father could see, is replacing the store.    My father wanted to get into it, selling online, but his illness overcame him.  That and age.  At some point you really do stop retaining new information, even old sober sharpies like my dad. 

So when he passed on he left us a lot of stuff.  Things like china, stoneware.  Random gift plates and jewelry, ID bracelets, new, in cases worth at most, $18 bucks a pop.  Clock radios.  Wallets and lighters.  Cigaret lighters!  Most of the jewelry was neither hisht nor haihr (Yiddish for neither here nor there).  Meaning not very valuable, but it might be. You never know.

Perfect garage sale stock.  Your average buyer at such an event will embrace the prospect and think about the problem for as long as you keep the tables up, as long as you attend to them.

“Do I buy it or not?”  they’re asking themselves.

Real pressure.  I had no idea that putting a few things out to make a couple of bucks for my mom would be so intense!  Each sale so meaningful, so important.  It’s like me at the grocery store.  Do I try the generic?  I want to, I really do, but will it give me a rash?  Is it worth the rash to save a couple of bucks?  Probably not.  But it might be.  (Certainly the generic Pantene is fine.  At least for me.)

The heat at the garage sale, palpable.  Do I buy it or not?  Can I get it for less?  Why won’t she come down.  And everyone calling my name, because I’m the one who sat down with my mother for days, went over the stock with the glass, weighed it, loved it.  All this work to set a fair price.

So it’s the closest thing to a family manic episode, or to being at the stock exchange on cocaine (for it’s quite common, or used to be synonymous, market and cocaine) or to working in a gift shop the week before Xmas.  And obviously, it is grief work. 

It was hot.  Being there was being in the hotbed of America.  The wonderful people of Chicago would have felt it anyway, the heat, 90 degrees in the shade.  This is an annual neighborhood gig, the neighborhood yard sale, and there are twenty-six other yards to pick over.  Why everyone seems to come back to mine is still a big mystery.

Of course there’s much more story here, but it can wait.  Suffice it to say there was jewelry, and the thing that seemed to draw shoppers to the yard was the jewelry.  And Israeli coins.  Why, when we’re in a recession that has affected every one of us in one crazy way or another is jewelry the hot ticket item at a garage sale, well, you tell me.  My hunch is that it is beautiful, and garage sales are synonymous with deals, and beautiful and deal, go together. At least that’s one of the things I learned as a child.

Anyway, this event took some preparation, and you could say it was highly anticipated, we were all pretty pumped, looked forward to hanging out in the hood on a Sunday and divesting of the junk that had moved from my mom’s basement to mine.  Had to get a city permit and everything.  This just felt important.

And we were mobbed.  All day long, the same people kept coming back.  I felt we were old friends by noon.

You’d have thought it was the California gold rush. They’re squinting at things, peering through loops.  If I had sold nothing but jewelry loops, mom would have walked away a rich woman.  They’re weighing little trinkets from one hand to the next. 

“Is it 14K?” Everyone wants to know. “14K? 10K? Any 18K? Can’t you go inside and look for more? You know you have more! This couldn’t be everything from the store!”

How do you tell people, Listen, my grandkids took all the good stuff back with them when they were here for the summer. They might be young, but they’re not stupid. 

“What we have here,” my standard reply, “you have to buy it at your own risk. This isn’t what I do for a living.”

Oy vey! Wrong answer. So what do you do?

Well, when you’re caught off-guard and you’re me, you’re honest, and let’s just say, . . . we’re off.

But let’s not talk about me. What’s really interesting is that there is a garage sale culture, the ecosystem that has passed many of us by.  We can’t do everything, can’t have our hands in everything.  We have to miss, on occasion, an awesome ecosystem or two.

Sometimes people come to therapy and they haven’t got hobbies, haven’t got a social niche or a social system they’re comfortable in, or haven’t  things to do during their discretionary time.  Many people, these days have a lot more of that than they wish they had, discretionary time.  Discovering how to develop an interest in everything, maybe even old things, collectibles, or free things, like the exoskeletons of the cicada (see previous post) is the cure. It’s called personal growth, learning who you are, what you like, doing it, and convincing others, this is good to do, this is good to have.

Who knew I would have liked the stock exchange?  Never in a million years would have thought such a thing.

therapydoc

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Triangling gets a bad wrap, and blame certainly does, too, in couples therapy. But sometimes externalizing the blame works nicely and can keep people together. If it’s about either one of you it’s going to go south pretty quick.

This is a lot like scapegoating, which also gets a bad rap, but shouldn’t always. If you can scapegoat a nebulous, vague object, if you can blame it, or them, or they, then you can get your anger out and nobody gets hurt. Externalize the problem. Get it out of the marriage, the bedroom.

Let’s take a made-up example, but there are so many real ones that are similar, you’ll relate.

Say you’re at the airport waiting for your partner to pick you up.  You call and call and the line is busy, or he’s just not picking up.  You’re getting angrier and angrier.  Your plane landed early.  You want to go home.

He finally arrives and you go off on him.  “Why did you tie up the phone?  Why didn’t you check your text messages?  I couldn’t reach you?!!” 

No, “Hello, honey.  So glad to see you.  I missed you.”
No hugs and kisses.
Neither of you feels the love.

Much better to blame the phone company, or technology in general, or how dependent we are on technology. Much better to say, “Honey I’m so glad I’m home, but I HATE the phone company. Obviously you didn’t get my texts or my voice messages. I’m switching to . . .I just HATE them!”

This feels really good, to hate them sometimes. The company we all love to hate. You have effectively triangled out the phone company. And it’s about time someone did.

therapydoc

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Not my mother-in-law’s car, but it could have been.  Did you know there are several websites with photos of automobile crashes?  You can search by make. What a comment that makes, online ambulance chasing.

1. My mother-in-law calls us from her cell phone.  Her voice is a little harried, she’s working on control.  She tells us she’s been in a car accident, that she’s fine, but can we meet her in Skokie? She’s been shopping at Old Orchard, and on the return seems to have collided with a Model T.

“I was too complacent,” she tells us. “Things were going too well. I was too complacent.”  As if you can always be in control.

Days later she’s decided she will not drive anymore. This is her wake-up call.
She is in her mid-eighties and can dance circles around anyone at a wedding. We see her as the new poster child for knowing when enough is enough, for letting people help her, having trust that it will be okay.

2.  That’s Robert’s Fish Store below.  Robert is on the left, Arturo on his right.

 I call her on a Friday morning. “I’m going to the fish store on Devon. Do you want to join me?”
Devon is a famous avenue in Chicago, known for the ethnic stamp of the markets, the bakeries, places of worship..  

“Sure,” she says.

We do a little independent shopping and meet at the fish store. Waiting at the counter is a Jewish woman with two lovely little kids, a boy and a girl.

I pay Arturo and turn to leave, but Mom can’t stand it.  She has to approach the little girl.

“How old are you?” she asks exuberantly.

“Five,” the child asserts with pride.

Quietly I pipe in, “Have I got a boy for you!” thinking of my five-year old grandson.

The adults all laugh but as we walk to the car I think, How heterocentric was that? Even if I think I’m minority sensitive, I’m obviously not sensitive enough.  No, nobody else gave it a second thought, but that really is the point..

3. On Saturday morning I meet my young adult son at a senior retirement home for religious services. My kid has an important part in the service, and when he is guest reader, I like to hear him do his thing. I also like the way they run the service, how one resident calls out the pages, and the others giggle until they all agree. Being in their company feels right, being with people who have experienced life in full, great things, maybe, and much sorrow.

I take a seat near the end of the aisle so I can get up to look down from our level to the front entrance, the common room. The whole building is very beautiful and the high ceilings temper my usual institutional claustrophobia. The chapel doubles as a movie theater. Not many people under seventy here, only those who assist or bustle to get lunch on.

Three-quarters of the way through the service, a woman in her eighties in a perkie summer suit and straw hat asks if she can take the seat next to me. I’m in the row designed for walkers, and now I worry that I hogged a seat meant for someone else.

“No, please,” I whisper, “Sit down.”

First she apologizes that she doesn’t use a prayer book. “I can’t see, so there’s no point. But I listen, and I enjoy the feel, the spirituality, just being here.”

“You can be the ears of half the people here, and they can be your eyes.”

“Exactly,” she nods.

I tell her my mother is probably going to be moving here in a few months, and ask if she likes it. In Yiddish she answers, If you can’t be at home, it’s the next best thing. But she misses her home.

It turns out she has still not sold her suburban condo, like my mother hasn’t sold her house. I don’t ask if she’s just lost her husband, or why she’s here. To me it’s fairly obvious that this “solution” is highly functional for people in her age group. It beats falling at home, and people check on you if you’re not at dinner.

She asks me my mother’s name and I tell her. She gets that look of recognition people get, but it’s noncommittal. Maybe she knows my family and doesn’t like them, I worry. I’ve learned to worry first, ask later. It’s the Jewish neurosis.

“Seems to ring a bell for you,” I observe.

“That’s your father’s last name, right?”

“Right.”

“Did they live on the West Side?”

Sure did. Everyone did. Most of the Jewish Chicago immigrants moved to the west side of the city when they immigrated in the thirties, preceding the Holocaust.

“I think I lived in their building,” she continues. “My family occupied three of the six units.  That would be your grandparents.  Are they still alive?”

“No, they’ve passed on.  But that’s so coincidental, isn’t it?” I exclaim in a whisper.  “You knew them.  What do you remember?”

She’s embarrassed. I’m not sure if what she remembers is good or bad, or she just can’t remember.

“I didn’t see them as our landlords, they were just people. We were all just people.” Before the services break, she tells me the name of the street.  She is spot on.

I tell the story to my son as we walk home and he laughs, says, “How random is that?”

It’s not random at all if you have a critical mass of Jews. Happens everywhere in Israel, no matter who you talk to, and apparently, if you move into a retirement center, it will happen there, too.  I’m sure it happens wherever there are concentrations of the same tribe.

4. Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal writes about how our lives are controlled by technology, as an electronically informed culture, we’re guided by what we read.  And this is something philosophers have noted hundreds of years ago, as well.. (Information Overload is Nothing New).

Ms. Noonan mourns our obsession with our electronic gadgets to the degree that we don’t make eye contact anymore, we’re busy with our virtual communication. A patient has just complained to me that it used to be, when you went away on vacation, you got away. No more. We commiserated about the constant barrage of communication, how our lives have to be stressed as a consequence, despite the tickling of the pleasure centers in the brain, the social connectivity.

Worse than the disturbance is the volunteered slavery, the phenomena that we are led by the nose by what is new.  We’re no longer free thinkers. No longer is research under the purview of the PhD’s.  Everyone has new information to post.  So we’re always checking, checking, checking to see what others are saying before we make a move.

I read it and worry that I have guided people, not so well sometimes, here on the blog.

But then again, it wasn’t long ago that I told you to throw your cell phones in the back seat when you drive, before Oprah did her show on it.  And haven’t ranted about it for a long time because frankly, it feels that this is the wave of the future. Nobody looks out the window anymore.
Thanks, Ms. Noonan.

Below: President Dwight D. Eisenhower, West Point Class of 1915, with a 1960 graduate, admiring a ring.

5. On the opinion page of WSJ,  Margaret Lough, a recent West Point graduate, waxes on nostalgically (My Place in the West Point Ring Cycle) about the meaning of the class ring, how each class determines what theirs will say. Ordinarily the motto rhymes.  Class of 2008, No Mission Too Great. This year the class has chosen, For Freedom We Fight.

It’s a beautiful piece of journalism foreshadowing young people, idealistic, risking their lives to defend the lives of other Americans, our constitutional rights, our right to freedom.

I was in tears.

therapydoc

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I just have to tell someone.

It’s driving me crazy. The spam is driving me crazy. I screen my comments, meaning they come to me from Blogger as email. It gives me the chance to read comments before posting them.

This used to be a simple thing to do, took very little time. But now it seems that for every genuine comment, there are five that qualify as pure comment spam.

Comment spam is generally machine generated from an Anonymous individual. This entrepreneur wants me to direct you to links, places you probably don’t want to go. They’re not the kind of places you would find on my sidebar. Do you really want to visit websites for shady pharmaceuticals, diet drugs, and porn? Doubt it.

The content of the comment can be so disgusting it literally makes me sick just scanning it to screen it.

My experience is probably akin to what one of my kids experienced at the tender age of nine. He opened an email with a naked little girl captioned, Got milk? Disturbing to some of us.

So I’m becoming loathe to open comments from people who go by the name, Anonymous. Especially since they’re anything but anonymous.

Thus:

If you can. Try to work with the other options for signing comments so they’re less likely to be deleted due to my not irrational aversion, my allergy to comment spam.

Instead of choosing Anonymous, pick the option: Name/URL. Choose a name for yourself, and and fill in the box with your new moniker. We all need to reinvent ourselves once in awhile, and everyone needs an alias. This is your chance.

You don’t have to put down a URL. There are too many in the universe already.

Then tell me everything. Or whatever it was you wanted to say.

Much obliged,

therapydoc

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Caveat:

Before we begin, please do not consider the following post an exhaustive treatment on how to treat Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The intervention I discuss is only one strategy, and treating OCD can be quite long-term, begs different methods. It is never a simple behavioral therapy. I’m only suggesting that without a behavioral approach, the therapy is remiss.

Nor am I making fun of people who have the disorder or dismissing them as silly. That’s the farthest thing in my mind. It’s a very serious, painful disorder.

The Post

Many couples argue about the right and the wrong way to stack a dishwasher. There is, apparently, a right and a wrong way, depending upon the direction of the jets. You knew about the jets, right? So couples argue about this one quite a bit, and it’s not an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder thing, not even a control thing, so much as an

Are the dishes getting clean?

thing.

So we could talk about that, for sure, but let’s talk about me.

I’ve become one of those people who washes the dishes 100% before stacking them in the dishwasher. I never thought it would happen. There’s no need to do this. This particular Whirlpool sounds like an airplane, but the dishes come out clean when the war is over.

So FD comes home and eats breakfast, wants to stack his plate of crusted bagel crumbs and butter in the dishwasher. He sees the clean dishes and asks me, “Are these clean? I just emptied this thing.” His tone is upset, confused.

“Yes, they’re clean. I’m using the rack to let them air dry.”

“Well, how am I supposed to know what’s clean and what isn’t?”

He has a point.

You’re all thinking, I know you are, this is so obsessive-compulsive, washing before a wash. But the difference is that there is no second wash.

Another example of mythological OCD:

My mother, 84.5, lives independently but won’t cook for herself anymore. Or bake. She is a fabulous cook, a wonderful baker, and although I’ve tried to fill in, I’m too impatient for real baking; you know what I mean. She won’t cook because it’s too messy. Does she have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?

She might, is the truth, but in this case, her behavior isn’t a function of her OCD; it’s a vestige of self-esteem. Why should she have to clean up for herself at her age? She’s done enough of that, cleaning up for herself, for others. It’s time to call it quits.

So we don’t have to treat Mom. But when should we treat compulsions? (Obsessions are the thoughts, compulsions the behavior). And when should we leave symptomatic behavior alone?

We might suggest that if a younger person refuses to cook for herself because a splat of omelet on the range causes her too much distress, then that might be something to treat, depending upon a host of other variables.

And how would we do that, treat it?

It’s not necessary to talk about toilet training as a child, although a therapist could make decent money off this approach. And it’s fun to talk about early childhood, for we do establish much of our irrational tendencies as children just coping with life stress. Life, if you’re a kid, has inherent stressors, mainly having to do with weird rules and the behaviors of large people.

But far more elegant than talking about childhood is a behavioral approach. You start (I do) with something that’s upsetting to the patient, like a spill. A therapist like me might pour grape juice into a pitcher and leave it close to the edge of my desk for an entire visit to see how long it takes for the patient to say,

“Could you please move it? It’s going to fall.”

Ridiculous, right? It’s not going to fall. It is a full pitcher. It isn’t going anywhere. I move it an inch away from the edge.

“Good enough?”

Of course not.

“Does this make sense?” I ask.

Well yes, it does. We could have an earthquake. Anything could happen. We talk about the concept of stressing the mental set, making the brain grapple with the thought that it could fall, all kind of bad things can happen. But it won’t. I won’t let it. The thought is irrational and dysfunctional.

Dysfunctional because while under the influence of an obsessive thought, or a compulsive behavior, whatever else is going on in our lives, whatever else is important, is taking a second to something as small as a pitcher of grape juice. And we make other people miserable, waiting for us.

Sure, caution is a good thing, and most of us avoid precarious situations like spills, but when the caution is obligatory, rigid, symbolic for everything, somehow, then we have to tickle many sources, not only a difficult childhood. Pick a trigger, any cause for anxiety, then another, and play with it, talk about it, test it.

Try syrup, working with a spill phobe. No one with this set of compulsions (the cleaning set) is comfortable with spilled syrup.

Hold a spoonful of syrup over the floor, make like you’re going to spill it, but don’t. Get very close to spilling it, but definitely don’t. This requires some coordination, but repeat the near accident over and over, each time measuring the length of time the patient is holding his or her breath. (Not literally, just look for any change in expression).

A little anxiety is what we’re shooting for, not too much, and a gradual magnification of the stimulus. This teaches the patient to manage his or her anxiety some other way, and hopefully you’re familiar with relaxation techniques and have passed them on, or cognitive strategies, like the rational thinking we discussed above.

The technique of gradually increasing the stress of a feared stimulus is called desensitization. Gradual is key. No need to give anyone a heart attack with spilled grape juice of syrup. Not until you’re sure that spilling won’t cause a heart attack.

The therapy really can take years. There’s always another trigger to desensitize the patient who has this disorder. Medication is helpful, and surely a couple’s therapy is always in order, psycho-education for the spouse, and coaching, even shadowing.

So what about me and FD? With the dishwasher. We could dedicate one side of the dishwasher to clean dishes, another to dirty. But I feel this contaminates the clean ones that are minding their own business, just resting across from the dirty ones.

Maybe someone can think of a better idea. I’m not sure I want to quit washing the dishes 100%. It feels good, hot soapy water on skin (I never thought of it this way until a friend mentioned it to me). And it seems like something that should become a permanent bit of the home’s personality, saving counter space, like we’re heading in a new direction.

And FD could actually look at a dish to see if the dish is clean. Would that be so bad?

therapydoc

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Dear Readers,

I took down the last post because I’m conflict avoidant, basically, and the heat of those comments could have fried an onion.  The replacement post is probably going to be provocative, too, in a not-so-serious way.  I hope. I needed a tension cutter, and universal problems, like arguing about how to stack a dishwasher, promises to be one.

therapydoc

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