“When Our Emotions Become Our Prison”

“When Our Emotions Become Our Prison”       Sept. 29, 2019   Dr. Roger Ray  

 click here to see the video

Johann Hari’s Lost Connections pp 74-75

Feeling lonely, it turned out, caused your cortisol levels to absolutely soar - as much as some of the most disturbing things that can ever happen to you. Becoming acutely lonely, the experiment found, was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack. . . .  It turned out that [isolated people] were three times more likely to catch the cold than people who had lots of close connections to other people. . . .  Loneliness itself, . . . seemed to be deadly. 

I was at a dinner party several months ago with several clinicians and academics and the subject of misophonia happened to come up. Because, how else can you make everyone feel painfully self-conscious before the food arrives than to mention a disorder in which people are driven mad by the sound of other people chewing. And, as it would happen, about half of the people at the table volunteered that they have problems with misophonia. Which made me want to ask for my food to go because I wasn’t going to eat my dinner without chewing. 

What you may want to notice about this book, “Does the Sound of Others Chewing Fill You With Rage?”, is not only that this problem has become so common place that someone felt the need to write a book about it, but rather more disturbingly, this is the 2^ndedition.. . because Thomas Dozier found that he had more to say on the topic! 

But what I want to draw your attention to, and, honestly, the only reason that I brought up misophonia at all, is the subtitle, “understanding and overcoming misophonia.” Everybody I know has some issues, some triggers, some tics, neurotic, compulsive, mental quirk, if not a full-blown mental illness. 

About one in five people in the world, half of all dogs and virtually all cats, have some degree of mental illness. Kinda wish I was kidding but this, Reconcile, is the veterinary version of Prozac given to dogs . . . mostly dogs that have to live with cats. This is not me; this is veterinary science. 

No one gets to be held up as the model of mental health. Everyone has issues but where I am struggling is at the crossroads of naming disorders and putting them on your personal list, and working hard to overcome them. 

I get that the sound of chewing "bugs" some people . . . maybe even a lot. And I get that there are degrees of irritation at various forms of table manners. But I am glad that the subtitle of the second edition of the book about misophonia talks about getting over it. All such social affectations become like a bar in a prison and if you keep adding up your triggers, you end up living in a self-imposed prison. 

Identify the problem, try to understand it, work towards overcoming it. I had difficulty eating sausage after I had to help make it. . . I got over it. I got food poisoning on bad fish and couldn't eat it for a long time, but I got over it. As a child of the rural south, I grew up with all kinds of irrational prejudices, but I got over them or I am continuing to try to get over them. I was reared in a literalist, conservative religious environment . . . I got over it. I am SO GLAD that I didn't just stay in a self-imposed prison that the culture of my rural Kentucky childhood tried to pass along to me. 

In philosophy we talk a lot about causality, and I wish that psychology would strive to consider causes more carefully. There may be reasons for certain mental illness or personal triggers, but reason and a cause are not the same thing.

My clinical work in grad school was primarily with addiction, a problem that has only become much more profoundly serious in recent years. It was not uncommon when I was running an intake group at the Veteran’s Hospital to have a new patient who would say, “My dad was a drunk, I’m a drunk, and my kid is a drunk.” And sure, we often see family or origin as a reason why someone has a problem with alcohol or drugs. But when I would ask about other family members . . . “Did your dad have siblings who are not drunks? Do you have siblings who are not drunks? Do you have children who are not drunks?” 

In my experience, if an alcoholic has three children, one is likely to become an addict, one is likely to become a rabid teetotaler, and the third will spend his or her life wondering why both of the other siblings are so mental?

Alcoholism does run in families. We can run the numbers on the disease and predict, with fair accuracy, the general outcomes. About one in 10 people in America abuse alcohol, but if you grew up in a home with an alcoholic, your probability of being an alcoholic doubles. And, in those sad cases where both parents are alcoholics, the probability doubles again.  

What came to frustrate me in this field, is that I only saw the one in five or the one in 2 that had become an alcoholic. And I know that the family of origin gives lots of reasons for their addiction, but it can’t be a cause since four of the five didn’t become an alcoholic. What was different for them?

A kid growing up in a drug crime infested neighborhood is more likely to become involved in drug related crime but all of the kids in that neighborhood don’t become dealers. Kids in failing schools are more likely to end up in prison, the school to prison pipeline is a very real thing, but what happened to the kids who emerged from those failing schools to be personally successful? 

If having an alcoholic parent caused my clients to become alcoholics, then all of the people who grew up in an alcoholic home would be alcoholics and the fact is that 80% of them don’t. There are reasons but we have to be very careful about assuming that a reason is a cause, because they are not at all the same things. 

Psychology is anything but an exact science. There is a great deal of scientific research going on in the field, and we have learned a lot about the complexity of the human psyche but I think that physicists may know more about dark matter than psychologists know about human metal illness and physicists will tell you in a heartbeat that they know nothing about dark matter other than that they think that it exists . . . and it makes up most of the matter in the universe. Very similarly, few things are more important that mental health and it seems that we know almost nothing about it.  

Somewhere in your therapist’s office there is one of these . . . the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

This is a book written by a friend of mine, the former Harvard professor and founding member of our church, Paula Caplan. Paula wrote this book about the DSM pointing out that there is virtually no science in it. A group of very influential psychiatrists determine who they think is normal who is mentally ill, and the fact that they have had to change their story five times now more or less proves Paula’s point. In the first DSM, being homosexual was a diagnosable mental illness. Now being homophobic is a diagnostic criteria for some mental illnesses. I’m glad they changed their minds about several things, I just think we have to hold virtually all of the worlds of medicine, psychology, and especially psycho-pharmacology, with a bit of suspicion that the whole story has not been written yet and won’t be in the DSM 6 either. 

I don’t want to entirely disparage the whole field of identifying, cataloguing, and researching mental illness but I do want to suggest this corrective. Let’s spend more time thinking, talking, researching, and working on mental health rather than mental illness. 

We have spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out if mental illness comes from our inherent nature from birth or if it is actually a result of our environment. Clearly, both play a role. If there is any field in which there is more uncertainty than there is in psychology and physics, it has to be neurology. Why our brains work the way they do is shrouded in mystery and we have devoted huge amounts of effort in trying to figure out how to nurture emotionally healthy children to become happy and productive adults. It is apparent that both nature and nurture are at work but what is equally obvious is this: no one is happy, mentally stable, and leading a fulfilling life if they do not choose to work towards those goals. Good marriages don’t just happen by accident. Happy lives do not just fall on us out of heaven. Mental health, as rare as it may be, is a choice to reject other options. 

One of my favorite people in the world is the little 10 year old son of some friends of mine. I have known Jack since he was a baby and have been involved with the dawning realization that Jack is not just a bit quirky and train obsessed but he is, in fact, on the autism spectrum. He has always had food issues, something I learned when I was taking care of him and his older sister one day and though I had made my classic southern breakfast of country ham, biscuits, eggs, and grits, Jack insisted on having a PopTart. He let out a blood curdling scream when he saw me put his beloved PopTarts in the toaster. He cannot stand for them to be heated up. They have to be, as he said, “raw.” 

His food issues evolved so that now he cannot stand for his foods to touch one another. Not at all. I patiently explained to a waitress that I would tip her handsomely for the trouble, but she needed to bring Jacks food out on small separate plates, fries on one, hot dog on another, and mac and cheese on another. However, the waitress brought out his lunch out on one large plate, with the foods carefully placed so that they were not touching one another but, to Jack’s eyes, they were suspiciously close to one another and he simply couldn’t eat any of it. 

And this is what endeared me so to Jack, he looked up at his mother and said, “You know that I don’t want to be this way.” Bingo! He is not using his issues to control the people around him, his environment, or even his theologian surrogate grandfather who stupidly puts toaster pastries in a toaster . . . he has issues, not of his own choosing but, as the book I mentioned a few minutes ago suggests, we will understand and overcome these issues because Jack didn’t choose this prison of trigger issues and he will not stay behind the bars. 

What I want for Jack, what I want for me, what I want for you, is to not let the reasons for our challenges to become causes. I want for us to reject the bondage to ways of thinking that have become bars that hold us tightly into behaviors that make us lonely, that isolate us, that rob our lives of joy and meaning, and that keep us thinking about illness rather than health, about weakness rather than strength, and acquiescence rather than freedom.

My favorite saying from all of those addiction meetings I had to attend when I worked in the VA is this: “Don’t tell me how sick you have been. Tell me how well you want to be.”