"Sex"

 

Brian Lynch

Revised

"The propagation of the human race is not left to mere accident or caprices of the individual, but is guaranteed by the hidden laws of nature which are enforced by a mighty, irresistible impulse." (Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing, 1840-1902, Psychopathia Sexualis, 1866.)

Why after millennia do we not know how to deal with human sexuality and thus, for the most part, not have the foggiest idea of what to tell our children about sexuality?

I think we now know or at least the information is there for those that will consider it.

For so long it would seem it did not matter. Throughout the majority of human kinds existence “childhood” barely existed. Life expectancy only slowly crept up to 40 years within the last two hundred years. High percentages of women died young in childbirth.

 

These are some reasons. The problems we have now have not always been around. They are a product of huge social change over only several hundred years where a “childhood” has been carved out and the idea,  that  “protection” is needed is  recent.

 

Let me restate. Would that humans would have always cared better for their offspring, but the idea, the thought was not there. Childhood had to be invented first. Now that we have invented it, we have to now figure out the rules and after a very long time, we have not done that.

Yet, in short, we fairly universally feel that “children” having children is not a good idea. Yet in some sense, we are finding out what will, in some sense, always be the case. We are finding out that “maturity” is a moving target and that the brain is not fully integrated, on average, until age 25 by which time many people have started large families. To add to this young people are maturing at a younger and younger age. It is estimated that for several decades, young women have started menstruating a month earlier as every decade passes in the northern hemisphere. We are reminded:

"The propagation of the human race is not left to mere accident or caprices of the individual, but is guaranteed by the hidden laws of nature which are enforced by a mighty, irresistible impulse." (Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing, 1840-1902, Psychopathia Sexualis, 1866.)

 

What does culture have to do with anything?

We do not seem to have the slightest idea how to deal with this situation.

I first want to say that I am not pointing any fingers at young people. And given the biological facts, how can we? And they are often doing a wonderful job of managing their lives with and without children even despite the biological facts. On the whole, statistics show that for the most part, they have much more “sense” than we give them credit for. And by the way, if they don’t have that “sense” it is not a reason to admonish or punish them.

How do we make things better? I think it is by helping children understand very basic, now known, concepts about their emotional lives.

One of these is that we not only have “drives;” The sex drive, the drive to eat and sleep and breath, but we also feel something about those drives. 

Psychology is slowly coming out of a fixation with “drive” and realizing that we feel something about the way we experience a drive. I can get hungry and be irritated by that feeling or I can feel happy or interested. I can feel distressed. Obviously with sex, if I have a sexual urge I can feel interested in fulfilling it or I might feel disgusted or shame about it based on previous experiences.

With this basis, we should naturally move to a new maturity. “Sex” is and is not simply a drive that everyone takes for granted that is going to and needs to be satiated. It is a localized neurological hormonal complex of activity in our body that produces feelings in that body. This is the “simple” part. It then becomes much more “complex” in that it becomes generalized, and we feel many things about it.

So many parents think it is inevitable that their child is going to engage in early sexual activity and I say this is because we simply think of it as a wild erg, drive, that is going to be completed no matter what. Or that children by their nature are morally bad and need to be set right.

 

But might not we have another view of things, my goodness, if we realized the power of being interested in another human? Indeed, some of my patients (parents) have been surprised by their children.

Once one recognizes this feeling, this emotional feeling of “interest” can be and is  powerful. “I am interested in you.” If I am interested in you would I want to hurt you? Would I want to emotionally damage you, impregnate you/us, change your life course irrevocably? Some people call it respecting others.

Make no mistake about it, I am not in any way saying “just say no” or anything like that. I am looking at a problem that tears families apart daily and ruins lives. Such problems need deep solutions. It is not easy to create a revolution in thought but it happens. Are you interested?

“Tipping Point.”

“Tipping Point.”

Brian Lynch

In his first best-seller “The Tipping Point” Malcolm Gladwell makes an interesting and powerful argument that our general environment often creates radical change in individuals and not particularly individual work. As proof, he runs us through the deplorable state of New Your City not so many years ago when murder rates soared to, at times over 2000, a year and felonies were through the roof while the subway was wall-to-wall graffiti. Then, within a very short time, everything reversed spearheaded, according to Gladwell, by a drive to clean up the subway. The drive was an all-out attack; no train was to be let out of the barn with graffiti on it once clean. The point is, and the argument is, that all the criminals did not move out of New York. So why did they quit doing crime?

Environment matters. 

We tend to have an either-or perspective and look to the individual or the community for solutions. And on the level of, say, criminality we certainly do not think that a simple change of venue, or cleaning service, might be enough to change a life, but if we consider what often is so often given as the proximal cause of harmful actions maybe it is not such a stretch. 

What is hard to explain is the force that makes the difference, indeed the “tipping point.” I talk a great deal about our day-to-day battle against confusion and being hurt. No one likes to be hurt or confused. Each of us has various capacities to handle incoming messages and it is not a difficult thought to think that a pleasant beach would be more attractive than a war zone and that people have different capacities to handle those environments. And that is about the extent of it. But Beirut, Lebanon, once a “Paris” with beaches is something quite different now, and of course, Paris has often been something quite different from her ideal. So it is more than just “place.”

But all this said another way to say this is that people want a certain quality of life and simply do not get it. They desire things. And we often are wrong in thinking that what they/we need is all that much. Small changes can indeed result in large changes.

We see people floundering and we want to “shake them” and say my god stand up and straighten yourself out.” Yet there has to be a “place” in which to do that. Is there?

In memoriam

 Father Michael van der Peet, S.C.J. 

Yesterday, I attended the funeral and burial of my friend Farther Michael van der Peet S.C.J. in Milwaukee Wisconsin. Of course each is in relation to other with a personal history and biography.  Many people have rich lives growing up with large families and a number of friends they will have throughout their lives. It is too noted that your siblings are those you will probably know longer than anyone else in your life. Now with his passing I note with  great sadness that  it so happens in my life that here is one of the few people that I knew from my early life that has followed me into my adulthood and one that cared about and for me, truly cared about me that is no longer with me.

Way leads on to way and as we say in my business  we "repress" our better instincts and so I did until yesterday and until now realize his importance as a family friend and personal friend who I should have paid more attention too.

I had met him as a child through my sister who for a while was a nun . My most extended contact with him was on a road trip to Mexico with the family and him to visit her. On the way back I remember there was some promise to visit "The Alamo" but time was short and we missed the turn off. He sensed my bitter disappoint and tried to speak to it. I know I had very mixed emotions at the time but  a lasting effect held that he tried to connect with me and recognize my pain. I find this advanced parenting technique even today.

Later, not so long ago, I asked his opinion on some psychological material I had put together and I must say that to this day he is one of only several  people in over a decade that have taken the time to do such a thoughtful critique as he did.

And so I lament not having taken the drive north, to meet if only a couple of more times. 

Our loves and interests should so much be in the doing.

It is  ourselves we weep for.

Brian Lynch April 29th, 2010.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/29221239.html

"Obesity"

 "Obesity"

Brian Lynch

It is certainly not as simple as having to do with food. It has almost nothing to do with food.

The reason most of us are overweight is, in fact, well-known but oddly avoided. We come upon the concept that it might have something to do with our feelings, but for the most part, quickly set this possibility aside.

True enough, our culture offers many reasons to help us avoid: Plenty of food, and even if poor plenty of empty and innutritious calories, “not enough time for activity” and “the fat gene.” In short, we throw up our hands in despair.

It is confusing and the reasons we do not act fold in on each other causing more despair and worsening the emotional turmoil.

The bottom line is much of our eating is to self-medicate. Much of our weight has to do with shame, the shame in the sense that I have wanted something other than food and not gotten it. My desire has been thwarted. It hurts and I do something about it, I eat.

As has often been pointed out we do not need to smoke or drink or use drugs but we have to eat.

And we now know so much more about how to articulate what happens to us.

One easily elicited reason for our state of girth is the shame that comes with the pounds. As I said we eat due to shame but then are thrown into a shame spiral or “bind.” We feel shame for our very weight. This alone can increase the eating but we also now isolate ourselves so as not to be seen. It is a vicious circle. Shame begets shame and eating begets eating. 

This is often exacerbated by our self-image which we now know is so much determined by our social status and family. We often, that is, will not surpass our family; to do better than my parents would shame them and myself. My mother is big I cannot lose more than her or I will shame her.

True enough, there are all kinds of exceptions and genes do play a role. Adopted thin kids in large families tend not to be large! It takes discipline to read and learn from various sources. But if the shoe fits, wear it. I am not discounting genes. I am saying a hundred years ago we probably had much the same genes what we didn’t have was the same activity and eating habits. 

What then in this society where well over half of adults are overweight? Being overweight becomes “normal.” It becomes a family emblem, “the way to be.” Again, if I lose weight and take care of myself it will be shaming to all those that are not doing it! Thus, this ignites another vicious cycle. Those that shame will oh so subtly or viscously sabotage my every effort to be different: To lose weight, to be healthy.

Then there is the painful logic of the 30-40-year-olds who have “just gone to the doctor” and been told that they are in perfect health. Yet they are 100 lbs overweight. This is what I call “disavow.” Disavowal of any thought of the disaster that might and probably will come in ten years of heart disease, diabetes, and stroke or out-and-out death. It simply reminds me of the patient I saw the other day that I had long worried about who had been doing well on one long-term contract that I knew had to end someday, and so it did, and now he is in shock in this poor economy. So we hope as doctors that our overweight patients will have a “minor” stroke or heart attack before a major one to see if they might take the hint.

A confession dear reader; so was I about ten years ago in terms of my weight. I was much over the mark.

Yes, being overweight has little to do with food.

Humiliation

Humiliation 

Brian Lynch

This is to clarify; at some level; the difference between shame and humiliation. I follow Silvan Tomkins in his view of these themes. As elsewhere in these writings I have said that shame is the gap between the desired and acquired. The state of pleasant emotion was now interrupted.

But how is it that shame and humiliation are near the same? That is Tomkins says that shame and humiliation lie on a continuum going from shame to humiliation. It is an idea, a concept to consider, a way to describe what we do experience. We could say that we feel lesser and more shame. Is “shame” the same as “humiliation” in the sense of our desire being blocked their only difference being one of intensity? We are saying yes, that is the case.

Let me be clear, this is not an exact science. Language is imprecise and one rich benefit of understanding what “Affect Psychology” has to offer is understanding how vague and how personal our emotional language is and how much more we should pay attention to it.

So, for any given person intense “shame” can and does have the same meaning that intense “humiliation” has for someone else? For our purposes, we are going to purposefully make the distinction that humiliation is more intense than shame.

But then there is the problem that, it is hard to remove “humiliation” from the image of any external force acting on us. My point is and will be does “shaming” and “humiliating” always have to come from “outside?” I have said already that it does not. This is to clarify and parse the words and dynamics a bit more. If there is an outside force, a person, or a situation that “humiliates” me it can also “shame” me. Again, it is an internal assessment on my part. It is what I feel. What I feel will be based on my emotional biography and what I have learned to label this feeling. “I was humiliated or I was shamed.”

So to humiliate is to shame and or humiliate all depending on the internal environment of the person humiliated. One defense against humiliation, of course, is simply to become acutely aware of this feeling. That said, I am never offering the idea that therefore it is ok to suffer it and we should just “toughen up.”

The contrary is being suggested the very act of humiliation or shaming (it works both ways, that is you can call humiliating “shaming.” ) is in effect a physical assault on the brain tissue, a preemptive strike from which the brain first has to recover. The brain has to first recover from cognitive shock; this puts anyone at a disadvantage and raises the chances of a dangerous or at least an inappropriate response manyfold.