On April 9, 2011, I gave a presentation on marital therapy of infidelity, as part of a series of presentations on couples therapy sponsored by the Illinois Psychological Association. A presentation by Carol Cradock, Ph.D., on counseling couples who are in the process of divorcing, preceded mine. Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism student Helen Adamopoulos was there and wrote an article on our presentations. I've copied the text here. You can access the article itself, with a great picture of Carol in action, at:
http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=184617
Here's the text:
Therapists learn how to counsel couples on divorce, cheating
BY HELEN ADAMOPOULOS
APRIL 08, 2011
Dr. Jay Einhorn scanned the small classroom, where about 30 psychologists and therapists sat watching him.
“It would be fun to ask for a show of hands,” he said with a grin. “How many people have been unfaithful?”
The room erupted with laughter as people glanced around at each other. No one raised his or her hand.
Although no one in that classroom was willing to admit it, Einhorn said most people have probably been affected by infidelity in some way, whether they have been unfaithful themselves, been cheated on or known about someone else’s affair.
He spoke Friday morning about approaching infidelity from a therapist’s perspective as part of a workshop series on couples counseling hosted by the Illinois Psychological Association. The workshop was the fourth in a series of six sessions the association is holding on the second Friday of each month through June at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology.
Einhorn, a consulting psychologist at Roycemore School in Evanston and an independent practitioner, said there aren’t reliable statistics on the instance of infidelity, but it is evidently a common problem.
“We can estimate that many if not most divorces have to do with infidelity,” he said.
Einhorn said therapists should consider the couple’s developmental history (did they grow up in a family where infidelity was common?) as well as evaluating the relationship according to a concept called the “identity union.” The identity union refers to how the couple view themselves as one entity, rather than two separate people. They view their union as something unique and special.
“That’s what the infidelity hurts most,” Einhorn said.
Whether the couple can stay together depends on reconstructing the identity union. This cannot take place if there is ongoing infidelity, physical violence or ongoing verbal and emotional attacks, he said. The betrayed or “hurt” partner needs to realize that the couple’s former identity union was partly an illusion; the relationship wasn’t what the betrayed spouse thought it was. If the hurt partner can come to terms with that, there is a better chance of healing the marriage, Einhorn said.
In turn, the unfaithful partner should examine how the identity union wasn’t meeting his or her needs. Integrating those needs into the framework of the marriage is a key part of couples therapy, he said.
If a couple decides they can’t or don’t want to salvage their relationship, therapists can employ strategies to try to minimize the personal damage for both people. Chicago psychologist Dr. Carroll Cradock, who has worked extensively with couples in the process of separating, also spoke at the workshop about improving divorce outcomes.
“Divorce is a life transition, one of life’s most difficult transitions,” Cradock said.
She compared the process to “trying to steer a boat across Lake Michigan during a storm.” However, therapists can guide couples and their children through those dangerous waters.
Cradock staged a mock therapy session to demonstrate how to deal with a separating couple. First, she showed a clip from “The Squid and the Whale,” a movie centering on a family dealing with divorce. Then two workshop participants pretended to be the parents from the film, while Cradock counseled them.
She asked them what they wanted for their family, such as both parents maintaining strong attachments with their children. Cradock said that she would also speak to the children alone to find out what they wanted, and then combine that with the parents’ wishes to form a family mission statement.
“It’s a road map for them,” she said.
Rita Guertin, a therapist at Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital in Hoffman Estates, said she found the workshop useful and engaging.
“I liked doing this little vignette here,” she said of Cradock’s role-playing exercise. “I’m a really visual person.”
Guertin said she was attending the entire workshop series because she wants to open her own practice one day and needs to learn about working with couples first. Clinicians can earn a maximum of 39 continuing education credits (6.5 each day) by participating in the series.
For more information on the workshop series, visit www.illinoispsychology.org.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Diagnosing Attention Deficit Disorder
Several colleagues on a listserve asked questions or made comments about diagnosing attention deficit disorder, which moved me to write this reply.
When we look at diagnosing attention deficit disorder, it’s important to remember that there are three moving targets.
The first moving target is our knowledge of attention and how attention works in the brain, which is not simple. The frontal lobes are largely involved in deciding what to focus on, maintaining focus, inhibiting distractions, monitoring appropriateness of focus, evaluating effectiveness of focus, and transitioning to a new focus when that is appropriate, within a huge constant stream of perceptual and sub-perceptual inputs from both the world around us and from within our own bodies. (See Elkhonon Goldberg, “The New Executive Brain.”) Our knowledge of what the frontal lobes do and how to evaluate frontal lobe dysfunction is relatively recent and constantly growing.
The second moving target is the definition and description of attention disorders. Society itself is changing, including norms and expectations about how children and adults should behave. Styles of attention that would have been normal throughout most of human history, when children would have been running around the woods, helping around the house or in the fields, or apprenticing in some craft or business, become disorders when children and adults spend most of their time in schools or offices, seated rather than moving and focusing on abstract tasks. And professional culture is continuously modifying its concepts about what qualifies as attention disorder; DSM V is in preparation, for example.
The third moving target is the experience of the diagnostician. If we say, for example, that physicians and psychologists typically diagnose attention disorders, that places the focus on how physicians as such and psychologists as such make diagnoses. However, a closer look at how actual physicians and actual psychologists go about diagnosing attention deficit disorders shows large discrepancies not only between groups but also within them. Much of the training, in fact, is obtained on the job, and experience matters.
It is usually psychologists or physicians who make the diagnosis. Physicians usually make the diagnosis based on a clinical interview, and psychologists usually make the diagnosis based on interview(s) and testing. Both physicians and psychologists may ask third parties (often parents, teachers, spouses, sometimes supervisors, siblings or significant others) for input, either in interviews or by completing rating forms. Among physicians, pediatricians, psychiatrists, and neurologists are the usual diagnosticians, although any physician can legally make the diagnosis. Among psychologists, clinical psychologists and neuropsychologists are the usual diagnosticians, although school psychologists are increasingly making the diagnosis, especially those in private practice.
Because attention is so complex, there are a number of different ways in which it can be disordered, all of which require some compensatory strategies to manage behaviorally, and not all of which respond equally well to medication. What might be called the “classical” hyperactive type of attention disorder, the impulsive, distractible, hyperenergetic presentation, often shows the paradoxical response of slowing down when stimulants are administered. This paradoxical response has been explained by psychologist Russell Barkley’s theory of inhibitory undersupply. The structures in what’s usually called the limbic system send arousing signals to the upper parts of the frontal lobes, which select which signals to attend to and which ones to inhibit, which they accomplish through inhibitory tracts signaling downward. Barclay’s theory is that the inhibitory tracts from the frontal lobes to the limbic system structures are undersupplied with modulating and/or transmitting neurochemicals (probably especially dopamine) in hyperactive people, so they don’t work very well. When stimulant is administered to hyperactive people, his theory goes, it is selectively channeled to the neurochemically undersupplied inhibitory tracts, which creates the paradoxical effect of a hyperactive person being slowed down by taking a stimulant. For that reason, I call stimulants for classically hyperactive people, “brake fluid.” (Elkhonon Goldberg includes limbic structures as part of the lower frontal lobes, in which case we’d be talking about intra-lobe communications, which doesn’t really alter Barclay’s model, just how we talk about it.)
The diagnosis for people within what might be called this original paradigm of hyperactive attention disorder was relatively straightforward. Observation of the child in school, or a good case history supported by observations of parents and teachers, was sufficient to establish the pattern. Some hyperactive kids are obviously hyper in the doctor’s office, others can keep it together for one or several interviews, but the case history, supported by corroborating observations from school and home (or work, in an adult), was sufficient. So an experienced physician or psychologist, doing an office interview, usually with supporting evidence from parents, teachers, etc., can make this diagnosis quite well for the “standard model” of hyperactive patient, as long as there aren’t any significant rule-outs. (The diagnostician may have received the referral from a therapist who already suspects hyperactivity and can supply more background information to support the diagnosis.) But that’s where things can get complicated.
The more we learn about frontal lobe functioning and attention, and the more clinical observations we accumulate as the diagnosis becomes more common, the more obvious it becomes that this original hyperactive syndrome is only one of a wide range of possible issues with attention with which patients present. For example, people with nonverbal learning disorders, in which the relational functions usually associated with the right cerebral hemisphere, and especially the right frontal lobe, are deficient (often accompanied by a substantial discrepancy between higher verbal scores a lower nonverbal scores across a number of tests), often appear disorganized, unable to select and maintain appropriate task focus, distractible, etc., and so they present a behavioral picture very much like that of many hyperactive people; but they are not classically hyperactive, and they do not respond to stimulants by slowing down. People with sequential processing deficiencies (who may or may not have the opposite test score pattern, with higher nonverbal than verbal scores) may have difficulty perceiving information that comes in a series or sequence (as most language does), and have difficulty organizing and following through a multi-step process. Stimulants affect people with such cognitive styles as these like they affect most people; that is, by general arousal. Sometimes that helps--for the same reasons that stimulants can help high school and college students without attention disorders to cram for final exams--but they can also just stimulate the entire system, thus increasing distractibility and disorganization. And issues of stimulant dependence may be of more concern with this population than with the hyperactive folks for whom stimulants act like brake fluid. Although it used to be boys who were mainly found to be hyperactive, as professional awareness of non-hyperactive inattention as a form of attention deficit increases, more girls and women are found to have forms of attention disorder that are not of the classically hyperactive kind and do not respond to stimulants in the paradoxical, efficacious way.
And the picture gets even more complicated by other cognitive information processing styles that can be mistaken for primary attention disorders. For example, some people have a deficiency in processing language which they hear, an auditory language processing disorder, even though their sensory hearing is normal and they are fluent in speaking. This can be due to central auditory processing disorder, which has to be diagnosed by an audiologist who knows how to do it; but there are speech and language tests that can indicate its presence, if the evaluator has learned about it. Some people who seem to have an attention disorder because they don’t retain what they read actually retain better when they read aloud, or use a reading method such as SQ3R to support memory and comprehension. Their disorder is with language processing, a kind of dyslexia, rather than with attention per se; though the child may look inattentive in class or the adult in the office. Some people have limited processing speed--they may have lots of intelligence, but need to learn at a slower pace than most of their peers, although they can learn a great deal if they have the time. Some people have limited processing capacity, their cognitive “house” is like an igloo that can only admit a small amount of information at a time, even though the interior may be quite large. Some people have deficiencies at making new learning automatic (which probably involves circuits extending from the frontal lobes into the cerebellum). Any of these people, in a clinical interview, can look as if they have a primary attention disorder.
It’s not only learning and language disorders that can sometimes look like attention disorders; so can emotional and personality disorders. If someone is anxious, depressed, subject to powerful mood swings, or has a self-defeating personality tendency or disorder of one sort or another, that can show up as underachievement, difficulty focusing, disorganization, etc.; in other words, it can look, on superficial review, like a primary attention disorder. I once evaluated a physician, a very bright person indeed, for ADD/ADHD, and found that he had a writing disorder (a specific learning disability) and a complex personality structure (emerging out of his personal history) that led to undermining himself at key points in his life, but not an attention disorder.
Complicating matters still further, learning and/or language and/or emotional and/or personality disorders can present together in the same person. Patients with attention deficit disorders often present with comorbidities, which just means other clinically significant conditions. I’ve seen estimates ranging from 20% to 50% of persons with attention disorders having significant comorbidities.
That brings us to testing. While there is no test for attention disorder per se (despite the fact that some tests are labeled as tests of attention), testing can paint a picture of a person’s cognitive style, can rule in or out learning disabilities such as verbal or nonverbal disorders that can be mistaken for attention disorders, and can also look more closely at emotional and personality functioning than can be done in a routine clinical interview. The comprehensiveness and extent of testing and interviewing varies a lot among practitioners. I typically conduct a long and structured initial interview, followed up with subsequent interviews of the patient during testing, and supporting interviews with parents and teachers (or spouses, with adult patients), as well as administering neuropsychological, psychoeducational (usually reading, writing, and arithmetic, to which I add expressive and receptive spoken language, which strictly speaking are in the speech and language testing domain), and personality/emotional testing, over the course of which I get to watch how the person applies himself or herself to interviewing and responding to a variety of testing challenges. This is a fairly comprehensive approach, but it obviously involves considerably more time and expense than a single clinical interview. A full evaluation typically involves 10-20 hours of testing and interviewing, after which there’s the work of integrating the test results and preparing a report that puts the test results together with the case history, and behavioral and supporting observations, gives a diagnostic impression and recommendations. A typical report of evaluation runs to 15-20 pages, only a couple of which are boilerplate; most consist of narrative and test scores.
So the issue of diagnosing attention disorders is far from a simple one. Diagnosticians need to learn about different kinds of attention disorders and other learning and emotional conditions that can look like attention disorders. For the patient, as is usually the case with any complex condition, each person and each family has to find his, her or their own way within the educational and health care systems, and will hopefully find the doctor or team which will be able to help them understand their cognitive and personal styles, for better and worse, and find their way to achieve their goals.
When we look at diagnosing attention deficit disorder, it’s important to remember that there are three moving targets.
The first moving target is our knowledge of attention and how attention works in the brain, which is not simple. The frontal lobes are largely involved in deciding what to focus on, maintaining focus, inhibiting distractions, monitoring appropriateness of focus, evaluating effectiveness of focus, and transitioning to a new focus when that is appropriate, within a huge constant stream of perceptual and sub-perceptual inputs from both the world around us and from within our own bodies. (See Elkhonon Goldberg, “The New Executive Brain.”) Our knowledge of what the frontal lobes do and how to evaluate frontal lobe dysfunction is relatively recent and constantly growing.
The second moving target is the definition and description of attention disorders. Society itself is changing, including norms and expectations about how children and adults should behave. Styles of attention that would have been normal throughout most of human history, when children would have been running around the woods, helping around the house or in the fields, or apprenticing in some craft or business, become disorders when children and adults spend most of their time in schools or offices, seated rather than moving and focusing on abstract tasks. And professional culture is continuously modifying its concepts about what qualifies as attention disorder; DSM V is in preparation, for example.
The third moving target is the experience of the diagnostician. If we say, for example, that physicians and psychologists typically diagnose attention disorders, that places the focus on how physicians as such and psychologists as such make diagnoses. However, a closer look at how actual physicians and actual psychologists go about diagnosing attention deficit disorders shows large discrepancies not only between groups but also within them. Much of the training, in fact, is obtained on the job, and experience matters.
It is usually psychologists or physicians who make the diagnosis. Physicians usually make the diagnosis based on a clinical interview, and psychologists usually make the diagnosis based on interview(s) and testing. Both physicians and psychologists may ask third parties (often parents, teachers, spouses, sometimes supervisors, siblings or significant others) for input, either in interviews or by completing rating forms. Among physicians, pediatricians, psychiatrists, and neurologists are the usual diagnosticians, although any physician can legally make the diagnosis. Among psychologists, clinical psychologists and neuropsychologists are the usual diagnosticians, although school psychologists are increasingly making the diagnosis, especially those in private practice.
Because attention is so complex, there are a number of different ways in which it can be disordered, all of which require some compensatory strategies to manage behaviorally, and not all of which respond equally well to medication. What might be called the “classical” hyperactive type of attention disorder, the impulsive, distractible, hyperenergetic presentation, often shows the paradoxical response of slowing down when stimulants are administered. This paradoxical response has been explained by psychologist Russell Barkley’s theory of inhibitory undersupply. The structures in what’s usually called the limbic system send arousing signals to the upper parts of the frontal lobes, which select which signals to attend to and which ones to inhibit, which they accomplish through inhibitory tracts signaling downward. Barclay’s theory is that the inhibitory tracts from the frontal lobes to the limbic system structures are undersupplied with modulating and/or transmitting neurochemicals (probably especially dopamine) in hyperactive people, so they don’t work very well. When stimulant is administered to hyperactive people, his theory goes, it is selectively channeled to the neurochemically undersupplied inhibitory tracts, which creates the paradoxical effect of a hyperactive person being slowed down by taking a stimulant. For that reason, I call stimulants for classically hyperactive people, “brake fluid.” (Elkhonon Goldberg includes limbic structures as part of the lower frontal lobes, in which case we’d be talking about intra-lobe communications, which doesn’t really alter Barclay’s model, just how we talk about it.)
The diagnosis for people within what might be called this original paradigm of hyperactive attention disorder was relatively straightforward. Observation of the child in school, or a good case history supported by observations of parents and teachers, was sufficient to establish the pattern. Some hyperactive kids are obviously hyper in the doctor’s office, others can keep it together for one or several interviews, but the case history, supported by corroborating observations from school and home (or work, in an adult), was sufficient. So an experienced physician or psychologist, doing an office interview, usually with supporting evidence from parents, teachers, etc., can make this diagnosis quite well for the “standard model” of hyperactive patient, as long as there aren’t any significant rule-outs. (The diagnostician may have received the referral from a therapist who already suspects hyperactivity and can supply more background information to support the diagnosis.) But that’s where things can get complicated.
The more we learn about frontal lobe functioning and attention, and the more clinical observations we accumulate as the diagnosis becomes more common, the more obvious it becomes that this original hyperactive syndrome is only one of a wide range of possible issues with attention with which patients present. For example, people with nonverbal learning disorders, in which the relational functions usually associated with the right cerebral hemisphere, and especially the right frontal lobe, are deficient (often accompanied by a substantial discrepancy between higher verbal scores a lower nonverbal scores across a number of tests), often appear disorganized, unable to select and maintain appropriate task focus, distractible, etc., and so they present a behavioral picture very much like that of many hyperactive people; but they are not classically hyperactive, and they do not respond to stimulants by slowing down. People with sequential processing deficiencies (who may or may not have the opposite test score pattern, with higher nonverbal than verbal scores) may have difficulty perceiving information that comes in a series or sequence (as most language does), and have difficulty organizing and following through a multi-step process. Stimulants affect people with such cognitive styles as these like they affect most people; that is, by general arousal. Sometimes that helps--for the same reasons that stimulants can help high school and college students without attention disorders to cram for final exams--but they can also just stimulate the entire system, thus increasing distractibility and disorganization. And issues of stimulant dependence may be of more concern with this population than with the hyperactive folks for whom stimulants act like brake fluid. Although it used to be boys who were mainly found to be hyperactive, as professional awareness of non-hyperactive inattention as a form of attention deficit increases, more girls and women are found to have forms of attention disorder that are not of the classically hyperactive kind and do not respond to stimulants in the paradoxical, efficacious way.
And the picture gets even more complicated by other cognitive information processing styles that can be mistaken for primary attention disorders. For example, some people have a deficiency in processing language which they hear, an auditory language processing disorder, even though their sensory hearing is normal and they are fluent in speaking. This can be due to central auditory processing disorder, which has to be diagnosed by an audiologist who knows how to do it; but there are speech and language tests that can indicate its presence, if the evaluator has learned about it. Some people who seem to have an attention disorder because they don’t retain what they read actually retain better when they read aloud, or use a reading method such as SQ3R to support memory and comprehension. Their disorder is with language processing, a kind of dyslexia, rather than with attention per se; though the child may look inattentive in class or the adult in the office. Some people have limited processing speed--they may have lots of intelligence, but need to learn at a slower pace than most of their peers, although they can learn a great deal if they have the time. Some people have limited processing capacity, their cognitive “house” is like an igloo that can only admit a small amount of information at a time, even though the interior may be quite large. Some people have deficiencies at making new learning automatic (which probably involves circuits extending from the frontal lobes into the cerebellum). Any of these people, in a clinical interview, can look as if they have a primary attention disorder.
It’s not only learning and language disorders that can sometimes look like attention disorders; so can emotional and personality disorders. If someone is anxious, depressed, subject to powerful mood swings, or has a self-defeating personality tendency or disorder of one sort or another, that can show up as underachievement, difficulty focusing, disorganization, etc.; in other words, it can look, on superficial review, like a primary attention disorder. I once evaluated a physician, a very bright person indeed, for ADD/ADHD, and found that he had a writing disorder (a specific learning disability) and a complex personality structure (emerging out of his personal history) that led to undermining himself at key points in his life, but not an attention disorder.
Complicating matters still further, learning and/or language and/or emotional and/or personality disorders can present together in the same person. Patients with attention deficit disorders often present with comorbidities, which just means other clinically significant conditions. I’ve seen estimates ranging from 20% to 50% of persons with attention disorders having significant comorbidities.
That brings us to testing. While there is no test for attention disorder per se (despite the fact that some tests are labeled as tests of attention), testing can paint a picture of a person’s cognitive style, can rule in or out learning disabilities such as verbal or nonverbal disorders that can be mistaken for attention disorders, and can also look more closely at emotional and personality functioning than can be done in a routine clinical interview. The comprehensiveness and extent of testing and interviewing varies a lot among practitioners. I typically conduct a long and structured initial interview, followed up with subsequent interviews of the patient during testing, and supporting interviews with parents and teachers (or spouses, with adult patients), as well as administering neuropsychological, psychoeducational (usually reading, writing, and arithmetic, to which I add expressive and receptive spoken language, which strictly speaking are in the speech and language testing domain), and personality/emotional testing, over the course of which I get to watch how the person applies himself or herself to interviewing and responding to a variety of testing challenges. This is a fairly comprehensive approach, but it obviously involves considerably more time and expense than a single clinical interview. A full evaluation typically involves 10-20 hours of testing and interviewing, after which there’s the work of integrating the test results and preparing a report that puts the test results together with the case history, and behavioral and supporting observations, gives a diagnostic impression and recommendations. A typical report of evaluation runs to 15-20 pages, only a couple of which are boilerplate; most consist of narrative and test scores.
So the issue of diagnosing attention disorders is far from a simple one. Diagnosticians need to learn about different kinds of attention disorders and other learning and emotional conditions that can look like attention disorders. For the patient, as is usually the case with any complex condition, each person and each family has to find his, her or their own way within the educational and health care systems, and will hopefully find the doctor or team which will be able to help them understand their cognitive and personal styles, for better and worse, and find their way to achieve their goals.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
The Importance of Attitude
New knowledge about brain function supports an old-fashioned idea: Our attitude has a lot to do with our ability to learn from experience.
It turns out that how our brains operate when we make a mistake depends a lot on our attitude about ourselves and our mistakes. If we have the attitude that mistakes are inevitable and we can learn from them, the frontal areas of the cerebral cortex, the seat of executive functions, seem to be doing most of the work. This is the area that underlies sequential and relational thinking, and recognition of new patterns in information, so it’s obviously well suited to learning. But if we have the attitude that we should be right and not make mistakes, if we feel ashamed at having made a mistake and beat up on ourselves, then the more central parts of the brain that are involved in emotion become more active, at the expense of the frontal lobes. Our brains generate a neurochemical flood of negative emotion, and our learning efficiency decreases rather than increases. You can’t learn much when you’re flooded with shame and self-contempt.
This research, which was done on learning tasks like those involved in school, turns out to be very relevant for psychotherapy and coaching also. When I am talking with therapy patients or coaching clients about their decisions and behavior, in situations in which they could have been more realistic, more caring and more effective, their attitude toward their mistakes makes all the difference. Of course, nobody is happy to have made a mistake, but the people whose attitude is, “OK, I’ve made a mistake, I regret it, and now I’ll learn from it, with your help,” tend to learn more and faster. The people whose attitude is, “If I made such a mistake, then I’m such a hopeless loser,” or “I’m so ashamed of myself I can’t stand myself,” basically shut down their learning processes, because we can’t learn anything when we are in that state. Then I have to try to help them get out of that state and into a learning one.
People who have a genuine and deep sense of a higher truth, whether they think of that in spiritual or natural terms, tend to have an easier time of getting into a learning attitude. Maybe that’s because being in relationship with a truth that’s higher than we are tends to make us humble, and it’s easier to learn from a position of genuine humility. So we can see that humility is not an end in itself so much as a means of getting somewhere. If you need to learn, and you’re not too self-important, you will learn.
Paradoxically, self-abasement, which is often confused with real humility, emerges from an elevated sense of self-importance. This is what psychiatrist Arthur Deikman refers to as the arrogance of self-contempt. Both too much self-esteem and too much self-abasement emerge from an overvaluing of the importance of self within the personality, and both interfere with learning.
New York Times columnist David Brooks has written a new book emphasizing the importance of the mostly unconscious attitudes and relational skills to individual and group success: “The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement.” He talks about it during his book launch at the New York Public Library on a video available through fora.tv: http://fora.tv/2011/03/07/David_Brooks_The_Hidden_Sources_of_Love_and_Character#fullprogram
It turns out that how our brains operate when we make a mistake depends a lot on our attitude about ourselves and our mistakes. If we have the attitude that mistakes are inevitable and we can learn from them, the frontal areas of the cerebral cortex, the seat of executive functions, seem to be doing most of the work. This is the area that underlies sequential and relational thinking, and recognition of new patterns in information, so it’s obviously well suited to learning. But if we have the attitude that we should be right and not make mistakes, if we feel ashamed at having made a mistake and beat up on ourselves, then the more central parts of the brain that are involved in emotion become more active, at the expense of the frontal lobes. Our brains generate a neurochemical flood of negative emotion, and our learning efficiency decreases rather than increases. You can’t learn much when you’re flooded with shame and self-contempt.
This research, which was done on learning tasks like those involved in school, turns out to be very relevant for psychotherapy and coaching also. When I am talking with therapy patients or coaching clients about their decisions and behavior, in situations in which they could have been more realistic, more caring and more effective, their attitude toward their mistakes makes all the difference. Of course, nobody is happy to have made a mistake, but the people whose attitude is, “OK, I’ve made a mistake, I regret it, and now I’ll learn from it, with your help,” tend to learn more and faster. The people whose attitude is, “If I made such a mistake, then I’m such a hopeless loser,” or “I’m so ashamed of myself I can’t stand myself,” basically shut down their learning processes, because we can’t learn anything when we are in that state. Then I have to try to help them get out of that state and into a learning one.
People who have a genuine and deep sense of a higher truth, whether they think of that in spiritual or natural terms, tend to have an easier time of getting into a learning attitude. Maybe that’s because being in relationship with a truth that’s higher than we are tends to make us humble, and it’s easier to learn from a position of genuine humility. So we can see that humility is not an end in itself so much as a means of getting somewhere. If you need to learn, and you’re not too self-important, you will learn.
Paradoxically, self-abasement, which is often confused with real humility, emerges from an elevated sense of self-importance. This is what psychiatrist Arthur Deikman refers to as the arrogance of self-contempt. Both too much self-esteem and too much self-abasement emerge from an overvaluing of the importance of self within the personality, and both interfere with learning.
New York Times columnist David Brooks has written a new book emphasizing the importance of the mostly unconscious attitudes and relational skills to individual and group success: “The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement.” He talks about it during his book launch at the New York Public Library on a video available through fora.tv: http://fora.tv/2011/03/07/David_Brooks_The_Hidden_Sources_of_Love_and_Character#fullprogram
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Freud and Columbus
There are a lot of similarities between Freud and Columbus. Both were great and bold explorers who discovered new worlds; Freud the unconscious and Columbus the “New World.” Neither man understood what he had found, both were mistaken about most of the details (Freud’s unconscious was mostly a figment of his fertile imagination, Columbus thought he’d landed in India). Both discovered realms which had actually been discovered by others previously, but of which they and their European cultures were ignorant. Both left their epochal discoveries to posterity, which has had to sort out what’s really there from what was incorrectly imagined to be there. Both are worshiped as heros and reviled as evildoers, perhaps more than they are understood as brilliant, bold and limited men in the context of their times.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Infidelity and Marital Therapy
(This article ran in the Winter, 2010, Cappstone, the newsletter of the Chicago Assn. for Psychoanalytic Psychology.)
Keith Richards is the co-founder and lead guitarist of the Rolling Stones. Early in his rollicking autobiography, "Life," he tells a story of music, marriage and infidelity from the life of his grandparents, Gus and Emma, during World War II, when they had several children and London was under air attack.
“Why was my grandmother long-suffering? Apart from being in various states of pregnancy for twenty-three years? Gus’s great delight was to play violin while Emma played piano. But during the war she caught him bonking an ARP warden in a blackout, caught him up to the usual. On the piano too. Even worse. And she never played piano for him again. That was the price...” (p.44).
This anecdote--which I found laugh-out-loud funny when I first read it--though a female colleague to whom I read it was not at all amused, for some reason--gives us a lot of psychological meaning to unpack. Gus and Emma are married, and Gus is sexually unfaithful, not for the first or last time. Gus’ infidelities are somehow external to his commitment to his marriage, in his own mind. Emma remains with him--accepting, at some level, that Gus’s view of commitment is different from hers--but she expresses her own hurt, anger, and integrity, by refusing to play piano with Gus, ever again. The ARP (Air Raid Precautions) warden is somehow less than a complete person in this narrative, identified only by her gender and job title.
Marriage and infidelity are among the most ubiquitous human behaviors, expressing the powerful conflicting evolutionary drives of monogamous and multiple mating. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports a 2009 marriage rate of 6.8 per 1000 population, and a divorce rate exactly half that, at 3.4 per 1000 population (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/divorce.htm). Reliable metrics on infidelity seem impossible to find, but it’s a good guess that many of the marriages that end in divorce, and some that don’t, experience infidelity. Certainly, many couples in marital therapy present infidelity among their critical issues.
Typically, the infidelity will have different meanings for each partner, and working through those meanings for the “unfaithful” partner and the “hurt” partner--as Janis Abrahms Spring labels them, in After The Affair--is a big part of marital therapy. Infidelity often reflects problems in the marital relationship, as well as issues that each spouse brings to it. Spouses often enter into marriage with some reservations, usually not expressed and often at least partly unconscious. The romantic power of early intimacy will, sooner or later, need to be supplemented by conscious work on intimacy, including communication, values, and conflict resolution. But that often doesn’t happen, and intimacy can become complacency without anyone realizing it. Then unexpressed and/or unconscious needs and drives can make themselves known; living as we do in a Darwinian world in which there are interesting and attractive people in our various networks, with whom “one thing can lead to another.”
I’ve often been impressed by how lightly and unthinkingly unfaithful spouses allowed themselves to live their way into adulterous relationships, as if infidelity were somehow not likely to have a huge and potentially life-changing impact on everyone involved. Perhaps our society’s lack of appreciation of the deeper levels of commitment and relationship in marriage, together with its preoccupation with the superficialities of sexuality and mating, partly acculturates and partly hypnotizes us into expecting that casual sexual intimacy can be indulged with little consequence. By the time I hear about it, of course, the couple is in marriage therapy, things are desperate, and the future of their marriage--and often, their family--is in the balance. Or it may be one of the three parties--the unfaithful spouse, the hurt spouse, or the extramarital sexual partner--in individual therapy with a broken, or at least very badly bruised, heart.
The term “bonking,” which Keith Richards uses to describe his grandfather Gus’ relationship with the ARP warden, indicates a view of sexual intimacy as more or less impersonal and inconsequential. From a certain purely logical perspective, as long as pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases were prevented, there would be no reason for anyone not to “bonk” away. The catch, of course--which entirely disqualifies such mechanistic logic--is that the natural human instinct and need for attachment often gets involved in sexual intimacy. The yearning for attachment is often an unconscious factor in unfaithful spouses living their way into infidelities, and it is always a risk, even when a sexual pair gets together for “just a good time.”
Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher has researched three phases in loving attachment, each mediated through a different primary neurochemical. The first phase is primarily sexual, mediated primarily through testosterone, in both men and women. This leads to a romantic phase, mediated primarily through dopamine, which in turn leads to a bonding phase, mediated primarily through oxytocin. Oxytocin is stimulated by orgasm, and orgasm, as Desmond Morris tells us in Intimate Behavior, is stimulated by loving sexual intimacy. So one thing can certainly lead to another, even if that’s not what the unfaithful spouse, or even the extramarital partner, intended.
Morris is aware of the deep attachment in a genuine love relationship: “To say that ‘marriage is a partnership,‘ as is so often done, is to insult it, and to completely misunderstand the true nature of a bond of love...” Morris‘ human ethological review of the “typical sequence” of steps of intimacy is illuminating: “eye to body...eye to eye...voice to voice...hand to hand...arm to shoulder...arm to waist...mouth to mouth...hand to head... hand to body...mouth to breast...hand to genitals...genitals to genitals...twelve typical stages in the pair-formation process...Each stage will have served to have tightened the bond of attachment a little more...” (p 72-78). Of course, there are personal and cultural variations on this typical pattern, but the work of Morris and Fisher can help us to see how “one thing can lead to another.”
So “bonking” can lead to potentially life-changing consequences, pretty quickly and quite unexpectedly, because of the potential of sexual intimacy to create powerful attachment, even if unintended.
Sometimes these attachments persist unconsciously long after the relationship is over. I’ve treated clients whose unconscious attachment to lovers long since out of their lives has interfered with their ability to form successful new attachments ever since. These clients were still, unconsciously, holding their former lovers close, even though they consciously had relinquished them entirely. Sometimes new partners were unconsciously selected in part because they did not threaten the special place in the client’s heart of the closely held former (and still, unconsciously, current) beloved.
Every marriage is unique, and so is every infidelity, although patterns do tend to emerge. Like Gus, the unfaithful partner may commit infidelity with no intent to harm the marriage, and like Emma, the hurt partner may remain in the marriage even while deeply, and perhaps permanently, hurt. Sometimes the extramarital partner hardly seems to exist at all--like the ARP warden in grandpa Gus’ story--while at other times the extramarital partner is a very real person. Infidelity can be a reaching out for love and erotic connection that has been too long missing from the marriage, or an avoidance of issues in the relationship that the unfaithful and/or hurt partner have been needing to step up to. It can express self-efficacy, a determination to be true to oneself and not allow oneself be mistreated or neglected beyond a certain point, while not intending to end the marriage, or it can instantiate some sort of deficiency in self-awareness, integrity, and capacity for relationship. If unfaithful partners can’t find the intimacy they need in their marriages, it might be because they aren’t looking in the right way--perhaps because they lack the self-awareness and/or a skill set to know how to reach out to the other person around certain issues. There is an anthropological piece to some of the work of marital therapy, because American society and typical family life leave a lot out in cultivating self-knowledge and relational skills. Conflicts of values, which may derive from religion or personal philosophy, may need to be unpacked and explored. Some marriages were created with major issues left unaddressed--sort of like the way slavery was ignored when the United States of America was founded--which can emerge later on, turbulently. Perhaps either or both spouses have stopped paying attention, are taking the marriage for granted, or are distracted by issues of career, self, other family members, or health. Often, a partner’s infidelity can be a wake-up call to both spouses, and a springboard to the revitalization of the marriage. Sometimes it’s a symptom of a marriage whose romance, whatever it may have been, has run its course; a marriage whose love has expired and is essentially dead on arrival in the therapist’s office. Sometimes unfaithful spouses meet their “true” partners through infidelity. Infidelity can be self-fulfilling, self-defeating, or both; like marriage. A marriage reflects the dynamics of the individual spouses and their relationship, and some of those dynamics have more potential for regeneration and longevity than others. Whatever the background, infidelity raises the question of whether a couple can rise to the occasion and regenerate their relationship together. That is where the marital therapist meets them.
Marital therapy takes place within a network of relationships; like individual therapy does, but exponentially multiplied. There is the relationship between the therapist and the couple, the relationship between the therapist and the hurt spouse, the relationship between the therapist and the unfaithful spouse, and the relationship between the spouses; all of which are going on simultaneously in the therapeutic process. If the couple has children, there is the relationship of each spouse with each child, the relationship with each spouse and the children as a sibship, the relationship of the couple as a couple with each child, and the relationship of the couple with the children as a sibship. And, in addition to the relationship between each spouse and her or his immediate family, there is the relationship of each spouse with their in-laws, individually and collectively, and the relationship of the couple, as a couple, with both sets of parents, and perhaps grandparents. Often there are also relationships between each spouse and the other spouse’s friends and/or professional colleagues. Sometimes either or both spouses are in individual therapy, in which case I recommend that the therapists consult, occasionally or as needed, which means that the clients have to authorize that. The web of networks gets pretty complex.
And, of course, each member of the couple brings her and his own complexity to the therapy. Tendencies or habits of perception and interpretation of oneself and the intimate other that spouses bring to their marriages may need to be identified and “unpacked” in order for fresh perceptions and new possibilities of understanding, perception and relationship to occur. Sometimes the therapist has to work “bottom up,” connecting directly with the emotion in one or both spouses and “thin-slicing” it, as Sue Johnson says, to make it more accessible for therapeutic work. Sometimes the therapist works in a more “top down” way, teaching the couple about their communications and interactions, as John Gottman does, or making psychodynamic interpretations, which can be about the individuals and about the couple. Of course, there is a good deal of overlap among these various approaches, which are not, in practice, as separate as they are described here.
“Life,” Harold Balikov used to say, “is not user-friendly,” and co-creating a healthy marriage isn’t easy. A cartoon by Steve Kelly, originally in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, reprinted in The New York Times, shows a middle aged couple seated on their living room couch. The husband is reading a large document entitled: “Study: MARRIAGE OBSOLETE?” and says, “Well, I, for one, enjoy being in a committed, monotonous relationship.” “Monogamous,” his wife says. (11/28/10, Week in Review, p 2)
As I write this, I’m looking forward to doing two presentations on infidelity in marital therapy. The first will be a consideration of psychodynamic aspects of working with infidelity in marital therapy for CAPP, planned for Friday, March 11th, 2011, from 2:30--4:00 PM, in Evanston. For further information, visit the CAPP website at www.cappchicago.org, or contact me at jay@psychatlarge.com or 847.212.3259. The second presentation will be part of the Clinical Treatment of Couples series presented by the Illinois Psychological Association. That entire program takes place over six daylong workshops at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, 325 N. Wells, Chicago, and my presentation will be one of four workshops on April 8th. For further information, visit the IPA website at www.illinoispsychology.org/.
Jay Einhorn is Chair of Peer Study Groups for CAPP and a Council member of the Illinois Psychological Assn. ©Jay Einhorn, 2010
Keith Richards is the co-founder and lead guitarist of the Rolling Stones. Early in his rollicking autobiography, "Life," he tells a story of music, marriage and infidelity from the life of his grandparents, Gus and Emma, during World War II, when they had several children and London was under air attack.
“Why was my grandmother long-suffering? Apart from being in various states of pregnancy for twenty-three years? Gus’s great delight was to play violin while Emma played piano. But during the war she caught him bonking an ARP warden in a blackout, caught him up to the usual. On the piano too. Even worse. And she never played piano for him again. That was the price...” (p.44).
This anecdote--which I found laugh-out-loud funny when I first read it--though a female colleague to whom I read it was not at all amused, for some reason--gives us a lot of psychological meaning to unpack. Gus and Emma are married, and Gus is sexually unfaithful, not for the first or last time. Gus’ infidelities are somehow external to his commitment to his marriage, in his own mind. Emma remains with him--accepting, at some level, that Gus’s view of commitment is different from hers--but she expresses her own hurt, anger, and integrity, by refusing to play piano with Gus, ever again. The ARP (Air Raid Precautions) warden is somehow less than a complete person in this narrative, identified only by her gender and job title.
Marriage and infidelity are among the most ubiquitous human behaviors, expressing the powerful conflicting evolutionary drives of monogamous and multiple mating. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports a 2009 marriage rate of 6.8 per 1000 population, and a divorce rate exactly half that, at 3.4 per 1000 population (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/divorce.htm). Reliable metrics on infidelity seem impossible to find, but it’s a good guess that many of the marriages that end in divorce, and some that don’t, experience infidelity. Certainly, many couples in marital therapy present infidelity among their critical issues.
Typically, the infidelity will have different meanings for each partner, and working through those meanings for the “unfaithful” partner and the “hurt” partner--as Janis Abrahms Spring labels them, in After The Affair--is a big part of marital therapy. Infidelity often reflects problems in the marital relationship, as well as issues that each spouse brings to it. Spouses often enter into marriage with some reservations, usually not expressed and often at least partly unconscious. The romantic power of early intimacy will, sooner or later, need to be supplemented by conscious work on intimacy, including communication, values, and conflict resolution. But that often doesn’t happen, and intimacy can become complacency without anyone realizing it. Then unexpressed and/or unconscious needs and drives can make themselves known; living as we do in a Darwinian world in which there are interesting and attractive people in our various networks, with whom “one thing can lead to another.”
I’ve often been impressed by how lightly and unthinkingly unfaithful spouses allowed themselves to live their way into adulterous relationships, as if infidelity were somehow not likely to have a huge and potentially life-changing impact on everyone involved. Perhaps our society’s lack of appreciation of the deeper levels of commitment and relationship in marriage, together with its preoccupation with the superficialities of sexuality and mating, partly acculturates and partly hypnotizes us into expecting that casual sexual intimacy can be indulged with little consequence. By the time I hear about it, of course, the couple is in marriage therapy, things are desperate, and the future of their marriage--and often, their family--is in the balance. Or it may be one of the three parties--the unfaithful spouse, the hurt spouse, or the extramarital sexual partner--in individual therapy with a broken, or at least very badly bruised, heart.
The term “bonking,” which Keith Richards uses to describe his grandfather Gus’ relationship with the ARP warden, indicates a view of sexual intimacy as more or less impersonal and inconsequential. From a certain purely logical perspective, as long as pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases were prevented, there would be no reason for anyone not to “bonk” away. The catch, of course--which entirely disqualifies such mechanistic logic--is that the natural human instinct and need for attachment often gets involved in sexual intimacy. The yearning for attachment is often an unconscious factor in unfaithful spouses living their way into infidelities, and it is always a risk, even when a sexual pair gets together for “just a good time.”
Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher has researched three phases in loving attachment, each mediated through a different primary neurochemical. The first phase is primarily sexual, mediated primarily through testosterone, in both men and women. This leads to a romantic phase, mediated primarily through dopamine, which in turn leads to a bonding phase, mediated primarily through oxytocin. Oxytocin is stimulated by orgasm, and orgasm, as Desmond Morris tells us in Intimate Behavior, is stimulated by loving sexual intimacy. So one thing can certainly lead to another, even if that’s not what the unfaithful spouse, or even the extramarital partner, intended.
Morris is aware of the deep attachment in a genuine love relationship: “To say that ‘marriage is a partnership,‘ as is so often done, is to insult it, and to completely misunderstand the true nature of a bond of love...” Morris‘ human ethological review of the “typical sequence” of steps of intimacy is illuminating: “eye to body...eye to eye...voice to voice...hand to hand...arm to shoulder...arm to waist...mouth to mouth...hand to head... hand to body...mouth to breast...hand to genitals...genitals to genitals...twelve typical stages in the pair-formation process...Each stage will have served to have tightened the bond of attachment a little more...” (p 72-78). Of course, there are personal and cultural variations on this typical pattern, but the work of Morris and Fisher can help us to see how “one thing can lead to another.”
So “bonking” can lead to potentially life-changing consequences, pretty quickly and quite unexpectedly, because of the potential of sexual intimacy to create powerful attachment, even if unintended.
Sometimes these attachments persist unconsciously long after the relationship is over. I’ve treated clients whose unconscious attachment to lovers long since out of their lives has interfered with their ability to form successful new attachments ever since. These clients were still, unconsciously, holding their former lovers close, even though they consciously had relinquished them entirely. Sometimes new partners were unconsciously selected in part because they did not threaten the special place in the client’s heart of the closely held former (and still, unconsciously, current) beloved.
Every marriage is unique, and so is every infidelity, although patterns do tend to emerge. Like Gus, the unfaithful partner may commit infidelity with no intent to harm the marriage, and like Emma, the hurt partner may remain in the marriage even while deeply, and perhaps permanently, hurt. Sometimes the extramarital partner hardly seems to exist at all--like the ARP warden in grandpa Gus’ story--while at other times the extramarital partner is a very real person. Infidelity can be a reaching out for love and erotic connection that has been too long missing from the marriage, or an avoidance of issues in the relationship that the unfaithful and/or hurt partner have been needing to step up to. It can express self-efficacy, a determination to be true to oneself and not allow oneself be mistreated or neglected beyond a certain point, while not intending to end the marriage, or it can instantiate some sort of deficiency in self-awareness, integrity, and capacity for relationship. If unfaithful partners can’t find the intimacy they need in their marriages, it might be because they aren’t looking in the right way--perhaps because they lack the self-awareness and/or a skill set to know how to reach out to the other person around certain issues. There is an anthropological piece to some of the work of marital therapy, because American society and typical family life leave a lot out in cultivating self-knowledge and relational skills. Conflicts of values, which may derive from religion or personal philosophy, may need to be unpacked and explored. Some marriages were created with major issues left unaddressed--sort of like the way slavery was ignored when the United States of America was founded--which can emerge later on, turbulently. Perhaps either or both spouses have stopped paying attention, are taking the marriage for granted, or are distracted by issues of career, self, other family members, or health. Often, a partner’s infidelity can be a wake-up call to both spouses, and a springboard to the revitalization of the marriage. Sometimes it’s a symptom of a marriage whose romance, whatever it may have been, has run its course; a marriage whose love has expired and is essentially dead on arrival in the therapist’s office. Sometimes unfaithful spouses meet their “true” partners through infidelity. Infidelity can be self-fulfilling, self-defeating, or both; like marriage. A marriage reflects the dynamics of the individual spouses and their relationship, and some of those dynamics have more potential for regeneration and longevity than others. Whatever the background, infidelity raises the question of whether a couple can rise to the occasion and regenerate their relationship together. That is where the marital therapist meets them.
Marital therapy takes place within a network of relationships; like individual therapy does, but exponentially multiplied. There is the relationship between the therapist and the couple, the relationship between the therapist and the hurt spouse, the relationship between the therapist and the unfaithful spouse, and the relationship between the spouses; all of which are going on simultaneously in the therapeutic process. If the couple has children, there is the relationship of each spouse with each child, the relationship with each spouse and the children as a sibship, the relationship of the couple as a couple with each child, and the relationship of the couple with the children as a sibship. And, in addition to the relationship between each spouse and her or his immediate family, there is the relationship of each spouse with their in-laws, individually and collectively, and the relationship of the couple, as a couple, with both sets of parents, and perhaps grandparents. Often there are also relationships between each spouse and the other spouse’s friends and/or professional colleagues. Sometimes either or both spouses are in individual therapy, in which case I recommend that the therapists consult, occasionally or as needed, which means that the clients have to authorize that. The web of networks gets pretty complex.
And, of course, each member of the couple brings her and his own complexity to the therapy. Tendencies or habits of perception and interpretation of oneself and the intimate other that spouses bring to their marriages may need to be identified and “unpacked” in order for fresh perceptions and new possibilities of understanding, perception and relationship to occur. Sometimes the therapist has to work “bottom up,” connecting directly with the emotion in one or both spouses and “thin-slicing” it, as Sue Johnson says, to make it more accessible for therapeutic work. Sometimes the therapist works in a more “top down” way, teaching the couple about their communications and interactions, as John Gottman does, or making psychodynamic interpretations, which can be about the individuals and about the couple. Of course, there is a good deal of overlap among these various approaches, which are not, in practice, as separate as they are described here.
“Life,” Harold Balikov used to say, “is not user-friendly,” and co-creating a healthy marriage isn’t easy. A cartoon by Steve Kelly, originally in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, reprinted in The New York Times, shows a middle aged couple seated on their living room couch. The husband is reading a large document entitled: “Study: MARRIAGE OBSOLETE?” and says, “Well, I, for one, enjoy being in a committed, monotonous relationship.” “Monogamous,” his wife says. (11/28/10, Week in Review, p 2)
As I write this, I’m looking forward to doing two presentations on infidelity in marital therapy. The first will be a consideration of psychodynamic aspects of working with infidelity in marital therapy for CAPP, planned for Friday, March 11th, 2011, from 2:30--4:00 PM, in Evanston. For further information, visit the CAPP website at www.cappchicago.org, or contact me at jay@psychatlarge.com or 847.212.3259. The second presentation will be part of the Clinical Treatment of Couples series presented by the Illinois Psychological Association. That entire program takes place over six daylong workshops at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, 325 N. Wells, Chicago, and my presentation will be one of four workshops on April 8th. For further information, visit the IPA website at www.illinoispsychology.org/.
Jay Einhorn is Chair of Peer Study Groups for CAPP and a Council member of the Illinois Psychological Assn. ©Jay Einhorn, 2010
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Keith Richard's "Life"
I’ve just read Keith Richards’ “Life,” with great enjoyment. Richards is the co-founder, co-leader, and lead guitarist of the Rolling Stones, and author or co-author of many of their songs. Notwithstanding the outrageousness of his life, the addictions and extreme partying--and there is a great deal of that in "Life"--Richards emerges as an unexpectedly dependable and reflective person, and I find myself resonating with his insights into friendship and leadership. In addition to being a rollicking good read across one of the definitive lives of our times, “Life” offers some key insights into human nature, as well as delightful observations about characters he’s come across.
Richards’ was always about the music, and his relationship with the fans is about maintaining the quality of the music at all stages of the process: writing, recording, performing. Notwithstanding all the craziness--the sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll--his commitment to the integrity of the music, and to providing musical and entertainment value for fans, is extraordinary. It is through that commitment that he helped form and maintain the huge musical, entertainment and business entity know as the Rolling Stones. And he has appreciated and collaborated with some of the greats in the music business, known and unknown.
Richards is unrepentant about his dependency on drugs, drinking, and assistants to fetch drugs for him and look after him, which have been cited as objections by some colleagues and friends to whom I've mentioned my appreciation of his autobiography. Speaking with Andrew Marr, in an interview posted on YouTube, Richards commented on the relationship between drug use and fame. "In its own weird way, that's how heroin, all this stuff, helped me, because it kept my feet in the gutter, not just on the ground. Fame is probably a bigger killer than drugs in my game..." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjNCEhVmLxo/. One of the things that I find interesting about Richards is that he coped at all with the huge fame that he experienced as a young man; when, for example, after a Stones concert filled with hysterical female fans, the janitor commented that it must have been a good concert because there wasn't a dry seat in the house. This level of fame stopped the Beatles from touring and killed Elvis Presley, but Richards has managed to ride the wave, damaged but still himself, and with a very good memory for what happened; "episodic memory," as psychologists call it. In addition to his career success, he seems to have a successful second marriage, close family relationships, and a number of significant long-term as well as new friendships. It's because Richards cares so much and so consistently about music and relationships that his journey through sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll is so interesting.
He was a natural leader, who says that, if he’d gone into the army, “I’d probably be a general by now. There’s no way to stop a primate. If I’m in, I’m in. When they got me in the (boy) scouts, I was a patrol leader in three months. I clearly like to run guys about... I like to motivate guys, and that’s what came in handy with the Stones... It’s not a matter of cracking the whip, it’s a matter of just sticking around and doing it, so they know you’re in there, leading from the front and not from behind.”
Richards connects his outrageous partying to changes in states of consciousness. “Some of my most outrageous nights I can only believe actually happened because of corroborating evidence. No wonder I’m famous for partying! The ultimate party, if it’s any good, you can’t remember it... It’s very hard to explain all that excessive partying. You didn’t say, OK, we’re going to have a party tonight. It just happened. It was a search for oblivion, I suppose, though not intentionally... I can improvise when I’m unconscious. This is one of my amazing tricks, apparently. I try and stay in contact with the Keith Richards I know. But I do know there’s another one that lurks, occasionally, about. Some of the best stories about me relate to when I’m not actually there, or at least not consciously so...”
Here's a one-liner that I think will be around for a long time: “It’s impossible not to end up being a parody of what you thought you were.”
Having lived in Jamaica and hung out and played with Rastafarians, Richards places Rastafarianism in a cultural context. “Rastafarianism was a religion, but it was a smoker’s religion. Their principle was, ‘ignore their world,‘ live without society. Of course they didn’t or couldn’t--Rastafarianism is a forlorn hope. But at the same time it’s such a beautiful forlorn hope. When the grid and the iron and the bars closed in on societies everywhere, and they got tighter and tighter, the Rastafarians loosened themselves from it. These guys just figured out their little way of being spiritual about it and at the same time not joining in. They would not accept intimidation. Even if they had to die. And some of them did. They refused to work within the economic system. They’re not going to work for Babylon; they’re not going to work for the government. For them that was being taken into slavery. They just wanted to have their space. If you get into their theology, you can get a little lost. ‘We’re the lost tribe of Judah.‘ OK, anything you say. But why this bunch of black Jamaicans consider themselves to be Jewish is a question. There was a spare tribe that had to be filled and that one would do. I have the feeling it was like that. And then they found a spare deity in the unreal medieval figure of Haile Selassie, with all his biblical titles. The Lion of Judah, Selassie, I. If there was a clap of thunder and lightning, “Jah!” everybody got up, “Give thanks and praises.” It was a sign that God was working. They knew their Bible back to front--they could quote phrase after phrase of the Old Testament. I loved their fire about it, because whatever the religious ins and outs, they were living on the edge. All they had was their pride. And what they were engaged in was not, in the end, religion. It was one last stand against Babylon...What really turned me on is there’s no you and me, there’s just I and I. So you’ve broken down the difference between who you are and who I am. We could never talk, but I and I can talk. We are one. Beautiful.”
Richards has some pithy observations about cultural events and people. Here's Richards referring to Ken Kesey in the context of remembering founding Stones member Brian Jones, who later drowned in his own swimming pool. Taking LSD “made Brian feel like he was one of an elite. Like the Acid Test...Brian saw it as a sort of Congressional Medal of Honor. And then he’d come on like, 'You wouldn’t know, man. I’ve been tripping...' It was the typical drug thing, that they think they’re somebody special. It’s the head club. You’d meet people who’d say, “Are you a head?” as if it conferred some special status. People who were stoned on something you hadn’t taken. Their elitism was total bullshit. Ken Kesey’s got a lot to answer for.”
On the emergence of the punk bands, Richards notes “a certain sense of renewal” in the Stones when they felt “we’ve got to out-punk the punks. Because they can’t play, and we can. All they can do is be punks... I love every band that comes along. That’s why I’m here, to encourage guys to play and get bands together. But when they’re not playing anything, they’re just spitting on people, now come on, we can do better than that.”
About pop art: “I liked the energy that was going into it rather than necessarily everything that was being done--that feeling in the air that anything was possible. Otherwise, the stunning overblown pretentiousness of the art world made my skin crawl cold turkey, and I wasn’t even using the stuff."
About Allen Ginsberg: "Allen Ginsberg was staying at Mick’s place in London once, and I spent an evening listening to the old gasbag pontificating on everything. It was the period when Ginsberg sat around playing concertina badly and making ommmm sounds, pretending he was oblivious to his socialite surroundings.”
Richards' instinct for co-creating friendships that combine his intensive love of music, musical enterprise, and enjoyment of life--the latter of which does seem to have meant different things at different times--is on view throughout "Life." He comments: “Most guys I know are assholes, I have some great asshole friends, but that’s not the point. Friendship has got nothing to do with that. It’s can you hang, can you talk about this without any feeling of distance between you? Friendship is a diminishing of distance between people. That’s what friendship is, and to me it’s one of the most important things in the world...”
Richards’ was always about the music, and his relationship with the fans is about maintaining the quality of the music at all stages of the process: writing, recording, performing. Notwithstanding all the craziness--the sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll--his commitment to the integrity of the music, and to providing musical and entertainment value for fans, is extraordinary. It is through that commitment that he helped form and maintain the huge musical, entertainment and business entity know as the Rolling Stones. And he has appreciated and collaborated with some of the greats in the music business, known and unknown.
Richards is unrepentant about his dependency on drugs, drinking, and assistants to fetch drugs for him and look after him, which have been cited as objections by some colleagues and friends to whom I've mentioned my appreciation of his autobiography. Speaking with Andrew Marr, in an interview posted on YouTube, Richards commented on the relationship between drug use and fame. "In its own weird way, that's how heroin, all this stuff, helped me, because it kept my feet in the gutter, not just on the ground. Fame is probably a bigger killer than drugs in my game..." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjNCEhVmLxo/. One of the things that I find interesting about Richards is that he coped at all with the huge fame that he experienced as a young man; when, for example, after a Stones concert filled with hysterical female fans, the janitor commented that it must have been a good concert because there wasn't a dry seat in the house. This level of fame stopped the Beatles from touring and killed Elvis Presley, but Richards has managed to ride the wave, damaged but still himself, and with a very good memory for what happened; "episodic memory," as psychologists call it. In addition to his career success, he seems to have a successful second marriage, close family relationships, and a number of significant long-term as well as new friendships. It's because Richards cares so much and so consistently about music and relationships that his journey through sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll is so interesting.
He was a natural leader, who says that, if he’d gone into the army, “I’d probably be a general by now. There’s no way to stop a primate. If I’m in, I’m in. When they got me in the (boy) scouts, I was a patrol leader in three months. I clearly like to run guys about... I like to motivate guys, and that’s what came in handy with the Stones... It’s not a matter of cracking the whip, it’s a matter of just sticking around and doing it, so they know you’re in there, leading from the front and not from behind.”
Richards connects his outrageous partying to changes in states of consciousness. “Some of my most outrageous nights I can only believe actually happened because of corroborating evidence. No wonder I’m famous for partying! The ultimate party, if it’s any good, you can’t remember it... It’s very hard to explain all that excessive partying. You didn’t say, OK, we’re going to have a party tonight. It just happened. It was a search for oblivion, I suppose, though not intentionally... I can improvise when I’m unconscious. This is one of my amazing tricks, apparently. I try and stay in contact with the Keith Richards I know. But I do know there’s another one that lurks, occasionally, about. Some of the best stories about me relate to when I’m not actually there, or at least not consciously so...”
Here's a one-liner that I think will be around for a long time: “It’s impossible not to end up being a parody of what you thought you were.”
Having lived in Jamaica and hung out and played with Rastafarians, Richards places Rastafarianism in a cultural context. “Rastafarianism was a religion, but it was a smoker’s religion. Their principle was, ‘ignore their world,‘ live without society. Of course they didn’t or couldn’t--Rastafarianism is a forlorn hope. But at the same time it’s such a beautiful forlorn hope. When the grid and the iron and the bars closed in on societies everywhere, and they got tighter and tighter, the Rastafarians loosened themselves from it. These guys just figured out their little way of being spiritual about it and at the same time not joining in. They would not accept intimidation. Even if they had to die. And some of them did. They refused to work within the economic system. They’re not going to work for Babylon; they’re not going to work for the government. For them that was being taken into slavery. They just wanted to have their space. If you get into their theology, you can get a little lost. ‘We’re the lost tribe of Judah.‘ OK, anything you say. But why this bunch of black Jamaicans consider themselves to be Jewish is a question. There was a spare tribe that had to be filled and that one would do. I have the feeling it was like that. And then they found a spare deity in the unreal medieval figure of Haile Selassie, with all his biblical titles. The Lion of Judah, Selassie, I. If there was a clap of thunder and lightning, “Jah!” everybody got up, “Give thanks and praises.” It was a sign that God was working. They knew their Bible back to front--they could quote phrase after phrase of the Old Testament. I loved their fire about it, because whatever the religious ins and outs, they were living on the edge. All they had was their pride. And what they were engaged in was not, in the end, religion. It was one last stand against Babylon...What really turned me on is there’s no you and me, there’s just I and I. So you’ve broken down the difference between who you are and who I am. We could never talk, but I and I can talk. We are one. Beautiful.”
Richards has some pithy observations about cultural events and people. Here's Richards referring to Ken Kesey in the context of remembering founding Stones member Brian Jones, who later drowned in his own swimming pool. Taking LSD “made Brian feel like he was one of an elite. Like the Acid Test...Brian saw it as a sort of Congressional Medal of Honor. And then he’d come on like, 'You wouldn’t know, man. I’ve been tripping...' It was the typical drug thing, that they think they’re somebody special. It’s the head club. You’d meet people who’d say, “Are you a head?” as if it conferred some special status. People who were stoned on something you hadn’t taken. Their elitism was total bullshit. Ken Kesey’s got a lot to answer for.”
On the emergence of the punk bands, Richards notes “a certain sense of renewal” in the Stones when they felt “we’ve got to out-punk the punks. Because they can’t play, and we can. All they can do is be punks... I love every band that comes along. That’s why I’m here, to encourage guys to play and get bands together. But when they’re not playing anything, they’re just spitting on people, now come on, we can do better than that.”
About pop art: “I liked the energy that was going into it rather than necessarily everything that was being done--that feeling in the air that anything was possible. Otherwise, the stunning overblown pretentiousness of the art world made my skin crawl cold turkey, and I wasn’t even using the stuff."
About Allen Ginsberg: "Allen Ginsberg was staying at Mick’s place in London once, and I spent an evening listening to the old gasbag pontificating on everything. It was the period when Ginsberg sat around playing concertina badly and making ommmm sounds, pretending he was oblivious to his socialite surroundings.”
Richards' instinct for co-creating friendships that combine his intensive love of music, musical enterprise, and enjoyment of life--the latter of which does seem to have meant different things at different times--is on view throughout "Life." He comments: “Most guys I know are assholes, I have some great asshole friends, but that’s not the point. Friendship has got nothing to do with that. It’s can you hang, can you talk about this without any feeling of distance between you? Friendship is a diminishing of distance between people. That’s what friendship is, and to me it’s one of the most important things in the world...”
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
"Thank You For Counseling!"
I was delighted when a counseling/coaching client told me his wife's Thanksgiving prayer: "Thank you for my husband, thank you for my children, thank you for counseling!"
:-)
:-)
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