June - July 2005

2001-2002

2003

Jan.-April 2004
May-Dec. 2004

Jan.-May 2005
Posts on Typepad archived from July 2005 to present. To read the Weblog posts on Typepad from right after the last date that it leaves off here, click on the Weblog link in the left sidebar on the Typepad blog and scroll to the bottom of that page. (Although that will miss some posts in other categories. You'll see what I mean once you visit the blog on Typepad. Click the titles of other categories on Typepad to see those posts.)

The text of posts written from June to July 7, 2005 are on this page with links below that will jump to each post:

June 8 Lightning strikes again!
June 11 One week till Father's Day
June 11 Robin's wedding picture blues
June 11, 8 PM. Did you ever have one of those days ....?
June 12 Feelings and what to do with them
June 15 Grief: The Weight of the World ...
June 16 Friends better than family ...
June 16 Guilt: Beating up on ourselves ...
July 3 Ramblings on The Bad News in the News
July 7 On mood and blogs: How to indulge your inner narcissist!

Wednesday, June 8 LIGHTNING STRIKES AGAIN!

I've not been in the mood to write for weeks. I'm not in the mood to write today but I have some time today to write and I need to get over my writer's block.

Since the McGowan murders and suicide that I wrote about in May, there has been another family annihilation in the news. Eighteen year old Scott Moody lived in Ohio with his mother and sister. His grandparents lived close by in another house on the same property. The family was running a farm and had been having financial problems. Scott was due to graduate on a Sunday. His mother had had party for him on Saturday evening, a party that he didn't want to attend. He was described later as being cleancut and intending to run the farm after his graduation.

On the Sunday morning of the day he was to graduate he went down the street to his grandparents' home and shot them to death with a .22. Then he went to his home and shot his mother, sister, girlfriend, friend, and himself. His sister survived. The name of the school that he went to was Riverside like the name of the county in California where David McGowan killed his family. The boy shares with McGowan the facts of a cleancut reputation, the familicide, the unexpectedness of the crime, happy family events (Mother's Day, McGowan's birthday, and Scott Moody's high school graduation) near the time of the murders, some personality changes prior to the murders, the killing of people as they slept in their beds, the mystery of their motives, the horror of their acts.

The only thing that has come up that was negative in Moody's family (family name of Schafer) was dissension over the division of the farmland left by a great-grandmother who had written a will that was not a good will. This led to a dispute in the family that had gone on for some time. The farm had been going downhill. The family had money problems.

I have to wonder if this young man, possibly suffering from the depression that afflicts so many teens and leads to their high suicide rate, felt a depression-driven anger at his family's conflict and decided to end the conflict in the most unacceptable way. As though he decided that death was preferable to arguing and legal action in the courts. But I didn't know them or him. The only thing I know is something about depression and I've never experienced a depression so bad that I would want to hurt or kill someone other than myself.

I also wondered if there was something of a copycat crime in this boy's familicide? Did something about the Riverside County McGowan familicide influence him to do the same thing to his family?

What drives people who were otherwise good people to do such horrible things and how do we as a people in a free society find a way to stop them from creating horror, pain, and evil?

I know we all have a dark side but some of us let the dark side take over. I've always thought it was a good idea to become aware of the dark sides of ourselves and admit that we have a dark side rather than deny it. Denial is a dangerous thing because when we deny what exists, it can have more power than when we expose it to the light of day. Thus we end up having people turning in to monsters seemingly overnight when there must have been something wrong long before the final shocking act.

What does this have to do with estrangement? Maybe nothing. Or maybe it has something to do with people sometimes killing something for no good reason that is apparent to anyone else. That something may be a relationship or a person. Maybe there are similarities behind why people do unexpected things. Maybe the things that people do are on a range of a continuum with familicide being at the far right end, the worst of the worst. Estrangement of a family being somewhere to the right of the middle. Someone having a screaming fit being on the left side of center. Someone telling a loved one to go to hell being at the far left. Or am I being simplistic? But sometimes it helps to break things down and look at them from a simpler vantage point that makes life easier to understand. Otherwise how do we ever find a way to understand what happens that makes a loving responsible family oriented father like David McGowan get up one night and shoot his beloved family? Otherwise how do we ever find a way to stop this from happening?

Was McGowan unreachable when he did that or could someone have detected the danger and stopped him? Is it like lightning striking? We'll never know where or when? Is there nothing we can do? Or can we find a way to predict the lightning and prevent the tragedy?

Saturday, June 11 ONE WEEK TO FATHER'S DAY

Father's Day is June 19. My father has been dead 17 years now. Seventeen years? Doesn't seem as though it was as long ago as that. The 1941 photo is of my parents, Elsie and Paul. I was born in 1946. I have no siblings.

When my father died at 75 years old, I hadn't seen him for more than a year. We weren't estranged. He suffered from long term alcoholism. I had tried to get him to go to AA but when I did he would ask, "What do you think I am? A bum?" I never knew how to answer that. He was committed to drinking, smoking, and gambling as though they were a part of him that he could never let go no matter how much pain they caused him and others. Considering how much he drank and the effects it had on his body, it was amazing that he lived to 75.

He died after having respiratory problems that landed him in the hospital. The staff at the hospital kept telling me that his condition was stable when I spoke with them. They didn't say that he was on the verge of dying. I wasn't able to speak with him on the phone as he had had trouble hearing. Phone conversations with him were impossible. I believe he thought he was dying as he tried to get in touch with me through his brother but it was unclear what the situation was. He had had health problems previously, mainly due to his drinking and smoking, and had told me numerous times over 20 years that he was going to die soon. According to him he should have been dead many times over in the previous 20 years and maybe he should have been due to his bad habits. I had stopped feeling as though I should drop everything to see him whenever he said he was going to die. In 1988 I lived 350 miles away. He had never stopped drinking and was drunk more than he was sober.

That time in 1988 was the time he was right about his impending death. I wasn't there. When I had a memorial service for him, I had a Unitarian Universalist minister there who had had experience with 12 step groups. I said the Serenity Prayer at the beginning of the service and at the end. The service was more like a 12 step meeting than a memorial service. My father's addictions and choices had prevented him from being close to me and others who did care about him. The addictions contributed to his loneliness and unhappiness in his old age. His walls were stained brown with nicotine from the cigarettes and cigars he smoked. His drawers were full of brochures with gambling tips. His mattress was an embarrassment. The mystery of the gambler's mind! A gambler will spend money to gamble on a horse race but not buy a new mattress despite the fact that most reasonable people would have refused to sleep on that mattress.

My father did have a good hobby when he was younger. He was a good gardener and had a vegetable garden. He took care of the yard when I was a child and we lived in a small house with a yard with room enough for his garden. I remember a forsythia on the side of the yard that he cut every year and how it came back with a vengeance every spring with new branches of yellow flowers. I loved that forsythia. I am not such a good gardener but I did plant a forsythia hedge of 28 plants which blooms every spring. I consider it as a memorial to the good parts of my father that were not allowed to bloom as well as they might have if he hadn't had such harmful addictions. He had had good grades in school, especially in English, when he was a boy.

After he died, I found a report card of his that he had kept for sixty years. He must have been proud of it to have kept it for the rest of his life. But he had had to leave school when he was 15 years old to help his mother make ends meet when his father died. He never finished school. He tried a number of jobs before he worked in a wire mill but also found the thrills of gambling when he was young. I have a letter that a friend of his wrote to him that mentions him losing $1,000 when he was 18 years old at the race track and his feisty mother going to the track to get the money back because he was too young to have been gambling! Imagine that! $1,000 in 1933 in the depression? How much money that was then! Where did he get so much money and how did his mother get it back from the track? My mind boggles at the thought!

I have an amusing picture of my father from the forties before I was born. I don't know the story behind the picture. He and my mother must have been goofing around with a camera. He is wearing a fedora hat and a woman's bathrobe. Considering that he was a guy's sort of guy, only interested in things like sports, labor unions, horse races, and working in a wire mill, this is a very different kind of picture of him. For a picture that would be more characteristic of him, click here for him with his working buddies from the Wire Mill.

When my father was alive, he went to the horse track on most holidays if he could rather than go to family events. Way back in my twenties, I asked him to Sunday dinner four Sundays in a row. He never showed up. So I finally stopped asking. If he had shown up, he would not have been sober. He wasn't a good drunk. His personality would change from being sweet to being mean and angry. He would want to pick a fight.

Choosing a Father's Day card that said something sincere was always a challenge. I don't tell you these things in order to complain. I'm not complaining. Really I'm not! Many people have had it worse and it couldn't have been fun for my father to have been the way he was. I'm just telling it the way it was. No sense in pretending my family was something that they weren't. They were all imperfect people and they did the best that they could. My father had a serious illness of the spirit. I don't know what to call it. I did love him but I don't miss him. I wish he could have been the sort of father that I would miss.

For a long time I didn't feel as angry at my father as I did at my mother. Eventually I did realize how unfair he had been as a father and realized that my mother married a man who didn't want to play the role of husband and father. He mainly wanted someone to cook for him and do his laundry and keep him company occasionally when he wasn't at the track. He was self centered. It's just the way he was. His idea of generosity was to give me $10 when he won money at the track. Usually when he was sober he was kind. As he got older, he got less kind, even when sober. I don't know why he feared dying as his life had become something that was hardly worth living. The way he lived was self imposed. It wasn't as though he was going to wake up one day and start doing things differently like take care of himself, care about others, improve others' lives. He was a hard person to love. At the end I had given up.

In some ways my parents were similar to each other. They were both their own worst enemies. They both might have made more of life than they had. They both had terrible habits. They both failed to love themselves well even though they desperately wanted to be loved. They both pushed people away while not wanting to be alone. People are such contradictions! Their lives were so sad. But enough about sadness! Life is to be celebrated, not mourned! I will remember the good things about my father on Father's Day. The forsythia have already bloomed this spring and a great blooming it was!

I wish you all a very happy Father's Day. May you spend it with those you love. Never mind those who aren't there and can't enjoy it with you. Enjoy the day for yourself and those who love you. Life is too short to waste it on worrying, agonizing, guilt, beating yourself up, analyzing, and grieving over what can't be changed. Not that you can't grieve the lost relationships on your life. Of course you can and need to grieve. But assign a time for grieving. Give grief its due and then go onward and find ways to celebrate your life and the lives of those who are spending their time with you.

Later on Saturday, June 11 ROBIN'S WEDDING PICTURE BLUES

After writing about my father, I went to visit my daughter's personal website. She doesn't update it often. Sometimes it's gone as much as a year before it gets updated. She keeps albums of photos on there with her pictures of her dogs, cats, vacation photos, house, photos of herself at different weights, wedding photos from 1991, and a few of family. There are memorial pages dedicated to a dog and a cat that died.

Today I looked at her wedding photo page. She had wanted as large a wedding as possible but couldn't afford to pay for a large wedding. I am not the type to believe in large weddings and couldn't afford a large wedding for her myself. My current husband and I paid $10 for a license for our own civil ceremony in 1986 in Wilmington, Delaware.

She ended up having a modestly sized wedding. She asked me to pay for half which I did. She asked her father to pay for half which he did after delaying his decision until almost the date of the wedding. She asked me to be the photographer which I agreed to do.

The wedding was held in the main hall at the apartment complex where she lived. It is a hall that is large enough for small gatherings. They had a Jewish wedding followed by a catered reception in the same hall and then a pool party. Her father was at the wedding but he continued not talking to me. We avoided each other. I did not try to take photos of him. I don't think he would have allowed me to photograph him. Later we spent some time in the pool. Her father had left by then.

On my daughter's website, she has some wedding photos and a complaint that there are not more photos of the table of food or of the pool party. This is what she says on her website,

"Sadly, I have no pictures of the pool party that happened later on that evening after the reception and wedding.  Also no real pictures of me and my dad, different social photos, or the incredible spread that the caterers put on under my husband's careful guidance."

Nowhere does she even mention me or thank anyone other than her husband for contributing to the wedding or doing the photography. How many mothers of the bride would be willing to spend the day of their daughter's wedding being the one to have the responsibility of doing the photographs? Especially under circumstances of bitterness from an ex-husband? "Sadly" she has no pictures of her father. No one else was prevented from taking pictures of him or anyone or anything else. I was a nervous mother of the bride, happy for Robin's happiness but not happy to have to be in the same room with my bitter ex-husband. I took pictures of the bride and groom, her grandparents, his parents, and their friends. But I didn't take pictures of everything and I didn't take a camera into the pool. Actually, I think I did take pictures of the food and did send them to her.

In her mind I let her down. So no thanks for me. Only complaints on her website about my inadequate job as a photographer in 1991. The good thing about this is it makes me miss her less.

The day of the wedding there was one more person that was not photographed well. Me! Since I was doing the photography I didn't think to take a picture of myself or to ask anyone to take a picture of me till the day was almost done. I did think of it before it was too late but didn't give good instructions to the person who I asked to take the picture. So there is one blurry picture of me from that day.

After finding her whining on her website about the 1991 wedding pictures I feel more than a little angry. There probably is little real mystery about the reasons behind our estrangement. I once was a doormat and then I decided to stop being a doormat but she was used to having a doormat mom and no other kind of mom will do except a doormat kind of mom. I can't be a doormat kind of mom or a doormat kind of person any more. So she is through with me. No mystery to that. I never intend to be a doormat again. I'm not going to change back and after reading my daughter's website, I doubt she is capable of appreciating me for who I am. Which is sad for both of us but acknowledging it makes me more realistic about the chances of this estrangement ever ending. She's really got an attitude of "Well, when are you going to do enough of what I want for me? You fail me no matter what."

I used to be so naive and almost blissfully .... in retrospect ... unaware of this.

On January 29 I wrote, "it makes sense to be nice to the people who love you rather than spend a lot of time crying over the people who don't." Remember this.

Saturday, June 11, 8 PM. Did you ever have one of those days ....?

when this is what you'd like to do to a photo of your kid?

(Image removed.)

I'm having one of those days. God bless the wonders of Photoshop!

Ginny

Sunday, June 12 Feelings and what to do with them

After reading the horrendous things that people do to each other that make the news and after experiencing all the feelings that are brought up by losing relationships with people I loved, I am thinking about the whole issue of feelings and what people do about their feelings. Years ago when I was in a therapy group for adult children of alcoholics I remember the therapists telling us that feelings won't kill you. They're right. Feelings won't kill us. Actions will kill but not feelings by themselves. For the moment we'll not think about the studies that show that those with depression have higher rates of death from various health problems. I'll just talk about feelings and what we do with them.

Three options are:

• to let our feelings control us.

• to ignore our feelings.

• to listen to our feelings and use that information when we make a decision without letting our feelings control us. In other words, we can use our mind and our heart in making a decision.

When we experience loss through estrangement, many of us feel a lot of different painful feelings. You have probably heard of the stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, etcetera. I don't know that we all go through a neat and orderly progression of these stages of grief when we are estranged. I didn't. In my own experience I have felt anger, denial, grief, sadness, guilt, confusion, bitterness, nostalgia, loss, affection, self pity, rage, fear, self doubt, anxiety, obsession, pain, judgementalism, self loathing, and more than I can remember right now. I don't mention love because it is the loss of love that I am experiencing, not love. Love has run away. I love my daughter but my love is rejected. So I can't list love because I don't love estrangement. I do love my daughter but not the estrangement.

The feelings arising from being estranged that caused me the most difficulty in my ability to live my life were anger, grief, and guilt. I'll talk about those three.

ANGER

The blazing red emotion. Anger rises and falls. It keeps us up at night. It is energy. Generally it keeps us alive. When we might sink into the morass of depression, acknowledging and feeling our anger can get us up and moving. This is the positive aspect of anger. If we use its energy to move us forward, we can use it to be productive, creative, to move mountains, to help others, to get stuff done.

Along with anger is depression. A downside of anger is when we push it under so much that we turn it against ourselves and others. Depression can be anger turned inward.

The negative side of anger is when we are self destructive and destructive of others. We act out. We say mean things about others. We act abusively. When people allow anger to control them, they may stalk, they may hurt people, they may act on thoughts of killing others, they may destroy property, they may use up their time fantasizing about what they'd like to do to those who have hurt them. They may take out their anger on people in their lives who have nothing to do with what has hurt them. They may be unavailable for healthy relationships because they are so immersed in their anger. They are letting anger control their actions and their lives.

Additionally anger can make it hard to sleep at night, resulting in insomnia which can cause problems in functioning in day to day living. Sleeping disturbances are associatied with clinical depression.

What to do about the negative aspects of anger if you can't get a handle on it?

• Some ways to deal with anger are to talk about what you're angry about with people who you trust and who are supportive and willing to listen. This may be a friend but also could be a therapist, a minister, a real life support group, an online discussion group. It might not be a spouse. Some spouses (especially husbands from what I've heard) deal with estrangement differently and don't want to talk or hear about the estrangement much. You could start a support group in your area for people dealing with estrangement or with all kinds of loss.

• Note added on November 4, 2005: Use caution when using an email address or user name that can identify you. Others who you never intended to see your posts may find them one day, even years from now. It isn't hard to create other names and emails to keep your identity private.

• Do something ceremonial to release the anger. Be creative about this. Choose something that will not hurt anyone. For example, some people write a letter to the person at whom they feel agnry. The letter is not meant to be sent. They read the letter out loud to themselves or to a trusted friend. Then they destroy the letter in some way that feels right. Often the letter is burnt. Other ways to release anger are to beat up a pillow, scream in a private place where you wan't scare anyone, set up a ceremonial place in your yard as a memorial to your loss, create an internet site which is the equivalent of a place in your yard, throw darts at a picture, alter a photo by drawing on it or using a software image editing program. Whatever you do, don't expect that you will only need to release your anger creatively once or twice. This may be something you will do whenever you need to again and again.

• If you are diagnosed with clinical depression and are prescribed medication, take your medication responsibly. Monitor your thoughts and feelings. If something is affecting you strangely and you are having violent or suicidal thoughts while on medication, do the responsible intelligent thing and tell your doctor. If your doctor doesn't pay attention, find a doctor who does pay attention. Medication can help but not all medications work the same on everyone. Be aware of this and do the right thing. Use both your mind and your heart. Our feelings are the result of things that happen to us both externally and internally. If you take medication, be aware of your internal world and don't let anything negative happen because your mind wasn't paying attention. Pay attention to what goes on inside and make good decisions that improve your life, not bad decisions based on a temporary chemical imbalance. Be responsible!

• Read. There are a zillion books on so many topics on the mind. Self help books, books on personality disorders, books on how to deal with anger, books on feelings. Information is not a cure but it can help. Years ago I read The Dance of Anger by Harriet Lerner which was helpful for me.

• Exercise. Even walking may help. This is good for you both physically and mentally.

• When thoughts take over your mind and you can't quit thinking about the same thing over and over again, write them down in a journal. This is one of the most successful ways for me to get my mind to stop obsessing about something. Write it down!

What NOT to do with your anger:

Do NOT do anything to hurt yourself or anyone else. Do not destroy anyone's property. Do not stalk anyone. Do not take illegal drugs, do not overdose on medications, do not overeat, do not cut yourself, do not abuse or neglect yourself. If you believe that you have to do things like this and it feels irresistable, get help. Call a professional, make an appointment, tell them what you are feeling and thinking. Do NOT make something permanently bad happen in a situation that is a temporary obstacle in your ability to enjoy life.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005 Grief: The Weight of the World ...

Yesterday at this time I still had a beautiful little living pet parrot by the name of Kiwi. He was an African Lesser Jardine's parrot with exquisite deep green, black and orange feathers and a chunky beak that gave him the comical and charming appearance that all Lesser Jardine's parrots have. Last night he died. He hadn't been ill. The weather has been hot. He was stressed by having flown unexpectedly. He had full wings but wasn't used to flying and hated to step up to a perch. I don't want to go through the whole story. Suffice it to say he died unexpectedly. I'm not sure why. I think it was heatstroke and/or shock or a stroke. I wasn't able to contact the veterinarian in time as it all happened in the evening. The vet was unavailable. He went downhill quickly. He was suddenly gone.

Death happens so quickly. When life is gone, you can't even glue it back together as you can a plate or a glass. Life leaves the premises and doesn't come back. Other kinds of losses can be like that too. You're going along living your life and thinking everything is the usual, the expected, the ordinary and then something happens. Someone says something. Someone makes a mistake. A wrong turn is made. The wrong words are used. You don't pay close enough attention to a situation and then suddenly everything is turned upsidedowninsideout and nothing is the same again. Someone dies. Someone becomes ill. Someone says that they are through with you. You say you are through with someone. The glass breaks and then nothing is the same again. Yet those few minutes ago when everything was okay seem close enough to touch.

I feel so sad. Kiwi loved to swing and was the only one of my 3 Lesser Jardine's who was skilled at making his swing go back and forth. He could talk and would say, "Kitty kitty. Meow. Peekyboo. Kiwi." He had several kinds of whistles and sounds. Even in death he was still beautiful but not as beautiful as his living self with his charming happy personality.

I'll be grieving Kiwi for some time and will remember him as long as I have memory. Today I am carrying the weight of grief over the loss of my Kiwi as I write about the longterm issues of grief over estrangement.

Grief over the estrangement from my daughter Robin began as soon as I realized that I might never see her again but it hit hardest in the third to fourth year of the estrangement. For me it is the heaviest emotion, like an invisible huge grey leaden mass on my back and shoulders. While my posture was upright, in my mind I felt bowed down with the weight of grief. I felt as though I were sick to my stomach but couldn't vomit.

Grief makes me want to hurt myself as though if I punished myself enough for whatever responsibility I feel for the loss, then I might feel somewhat better. I fantasize hurting myself. I don't take as good care of myself as usual. It's a lot like depression. But grief seems weightier than depression alone. When in the midst of grief, the rest of the world disappears. It seems as though there is only me and the loss. When I'm only depressed, I am still aware of the world. In fact when I am depressed, I tend to feel angry at the world. When I am griefstricken, I feel almost empty of emotion. I have a sense of being too empty to feel angry or hurt or critical of anyone. I would like to lie down somewhere and disappear and feel nothing because the enormous weight of grief is so hard to carry around.

How to get through Grief?

One step at a time? I just kept moving forward and doing the best I could when I was in the worst of the grief. I gave my grief respect. Didn't push myself too hard. Took care of myself as best I could. Kept moving forward even if slowly. Like swimming in thick water. It was a long swim in that thick water when the grief was at its worst.

I did write down some of my feelings. I was part of an online support group of women who were all trying to cope with varying levels of estrangement from adult children. I read several books on grief. One or more of the books had homework types of assignments to work through grief. I did a number of the assignments. I considered going to a Grief Workshop but never did that. I think that could be helpful.

I said the Serenity Prayer a lot.

Grief over the loss of my relationship with Robin still hits me on occasion. Something will remind me of her. Someone will ask me a question. I'm not aware of the underlying feelings most of the time but something will trigger them and the pain and the hurt, the anger and the grief are right there under the surface. All it takes are the right words or memory or time of year.

Time is a great healer although I am not sure that I want to be so healed that this loss doesn't affect me. I can't picture myself being unbothered by this loss. I know I can live life with relative serenity despite the loss but I don't want to have complete equanimity about it. That's my thought on it at this point. It's possible I could change my mind some day. I know there are people who take their estrangements for granted. If asked about their estrangement, they talk about it in a matter of fact manner as though you have inquired about the weather. They might show more emotion about a plumber who didn't show up when he said he would. I don't know whether to envy them or not.

My suggestions for coping with grief:

Accept how you feel and what it is. Accept that you aren't going to be capable of the greatest happiness for a time. Accept the grief and feel it. Acknowledge your grief. Give it respect. Consider your grief to be deserving of extra time for yourself, quiet time, rest, care, self nurturing. Think of it as though you had lost a limb and had had surgery and were recuperating. Give yourself serious kind and gentle attention. This is an emotional loss that can be equivalent in some ways to the seriousness of the loss of a limb.

Reading may or may not help you with grief depending on your personal style and approach to things. If reading works for you, there are excellent books on the specific topic of coping with grief. They may be helpful.

Write a letter of goodbye to the person who you lost. You won't send this letter. You write the letter, read it aloud to yourself or to a good friend if that feels right for you. Then do something symbolic with the letter. Be creative on this part. For some people, ripping the letter up and burning it in a ceremony might be an option. Others might want to keep the letter in a special place for a time. They might want to create a special place for it. Some day they might choose to do something else with it when they're ready. But the letter is about you and for you, not for the person who you lost. You don't send it to them. Remember that whatever you say in the letter is not necessarily going to come true. You are only writing a letter, not making something happen. Saying goodbye in this unsent letter does not mean that you will never see your loved one again or that the estrangement will never be resolved. But you write the letter as though you are saying goodbye and as though the estrangement won't be resolved.

Learn meditation techniques for resting your mind from the weight of grief and all of the feelings of pain that come from loss. Meditation isn't hard to do and it's very relaxing. Carrying all that weight of grief around is far from relaxing!

I'm not a religious person but saying the Serenity Prayer helps me a lot.

God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen

Wednesday, June 16

I found an interesting online article on ABC News online about a study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (JECH), published by the British Medical Association.

Friends better than family to help you to live longer

Wednesday, June 16 Guilt: Beating up on Ourselves. Necessary or Unnecessary?

I have a lot to say about guilt.

I've been told that guilt is a useless emotion. This may be true. I haven't yet been able to shake my ability to feel guilt about things that go wrong. Occasionally subsequent events have convinced me that what went wrong was not due to me or my stupidity or my worthlessness. From reading that sentence you can tell that I have problems with self esteem and depression and that this is a continuing problem for me. I know not everyone struggles with guilt as I do. For those of you who do, I can empathize. These are shoes that I walk in way too often.

Many of us who are estranged from those we love experience the self questioning and pain and shame that comes from feeling guilty, whether or not we are guilty. We fear being guilty. Especially those of us who want to do things right and never make a mistake. I spend a lot of emotional energy on trying not to make mistakes. I can recall the instant agony of guilt just over dropping a glass on the floor and its having broken.

Guilt is not useless in our society as a whole. The desire not to feel guilty keeps a lot of people from doing things that are evil, illegal, immoral, and downright wrong. Guilt does have a purpose as an emotion. Some of us don't need guilt to make us do the right thing. I think lots of people do the right thing just because they are good people and want to do the right thing. Some people get tempted to do the wrong thing, either because they are desperate due to unfortunate circumstances or because they are tempted by the imagined fun of breaking the rules or they are so overwhelmed with strong feelings that they behave impulsively without taking the time to think about consequences. Maybe most of us are this way. Even if we almost always choose to do the right thing, if we are tempted to do the wrong thing, guilt is an emotion that can stop us from doing the wrong thing. It is a human emotion to help us control ourselves.

Guilt over having done something wrong is normal. However, we aren't perfect or all knowing or able to predict the outcome of every action. We can only do our best. Our best can change at any point in time. We all have bad days and good days. We all need to be cut some slack sometimes.

Then there are the opinions of others as to whether we have done right or wrong by them. Have you ever confronted someone with the facts of a case when you know that they have lied to you, stolen from you, abused you, done something that was unacceptable by most standards? Have you noticed that most times that people who victimize others react to being confronted as though it was the victim's fault? They get angry, try to turn the story around, and berate the accuser. I've seen this so many times that I think it's a common trait of being human. I've gotten so that I expect it now. It's the rare person who takes responsibility for their actions and reacts with an apology and tries to make things right. When the perpetrator uses a counterattack on someone who easily feels guilty and overresponsible and succeeds in getting their victim to assume undeserved responsibility, the perpetrator must feel mighty fortunate! How infuriating and disappointing for them when their tactic doesn't work!

(Note: I found a book titled Emotional Blackmail that looks as though it addresses this kind of manipulative behavior but I haven't read it.)

For those whose ability to feel guilty is on "automatic pilot" like me, the difficulty in sorting out what is ours to feel guilty about and what is not can be difficult. When you feel guilty about everything and blame yourself for all the things you did or didn't do to make a perfect outcome, then guilt is a useless emotion. Beating yourself up forever accomplishes nothing. Being perfect is not an option. Making mistakes is inevitable. Perceiving mistakes where there aren't any is self abuse. Analyzing how you could have done something differently and losing sleep over it doesn't accomplish anything. There is a chance that no matter what you did that the outcome would have been the same or would have occurred at a different time. There is a chance that the outcome had nothing to do with you at all.

If you didn't go out of your way to hurt someone and you aren't guilty of abuse and you did the best that you could at that point in time, then guilt is useless. If someone else is accusing you of things that aren't true, their accusations do not make those things true. What you know in your heart is what is true. It doesn't matter what they think or what anyone else thinks. What matters is that you know in your own heart what is true. You don't have to debate that with anyone. You don't have to lose sleep over it.

One test of what is really true if you are a person who feels guilty as a kneejerk reaction to everything is how you would perceive the same situation if it happened to someone else. If a good friend described the same set of circumstances to you that you are berating yourself for, would you agree with your friend that they were to blame and deserved to feel terrible? Or would you be telling them that they were overreacting and being too self critical? Would you be trying to reassure them of their goodness or would you be condemning them for their stupidity and cruelty? If your reaction to a your friend's story would be much kinder than your reaction to your own circumstances, then you might see how you are being too hard on yourself and how your sense of guilt might be exaggerated and even undeserved.

Unfortunately, some conditions such as clinical depression increase the ability of some of us to feel self critical to the point of absurdity. The good news is that there are medications now that can help alleviate that. Some work better than others and it can take trial and error to find the right one. Not all cases of feeling guilty need to be medicated but if you are unrelenting on yourself and your own critical voices are causing you misery despite your being an intrinsically good person, then it might be time to see a professional and get evaluated. I've been there and done that. In fact I do it now. My medication helps most of the time but not all the time.

If you did go out of your way to do a wrong and you did hurt someone with deliberate intent, then feeling guilty would be a normal emotion. If that is the case, then it is time to make amends as much as you can. If the person who you abused won't accept your apology or other actions to make amends, you will have to accept that and go on and live your life with the goal of never repeating that behavior. You might contribute to or participate in some group that has the goal of preventing abuse if it was serious abuse. Taking action to improve the world is a way of making your own amends.

Sometimes we have relationships with people whose expectations of us are just so much more than what we can ever achieve and they might be unforgiving of even a slight wrong or a perceived wrong. This is their problem, not ours. Making it our problem doesn't solve anything. If we've done our best, made a human error, made our best effort at amends, and it wasn't enough, then we might need to accept that the other person has a problem that has little to do with us. And that resolution might not occur until things change with them. Beating ourself up over it accomplishes nothing and takes away from our ability to accomplish other things in life that might be far more important than the opinion of that one person. Sometimes we need to accept that we can't please everyone, not even everyone with whom we want to have a loving relationship.

Feeling guilty over doing something wrong can be taken to extremes but the ability to feel guilt is much much better than its absence. Those without that ability to feel are called psychopaths and sociopaths and they contribute too much to the worst abuses in our world.

I am thinking again about David McGowan and how he shot his relatives one by one. I don't think he was a psychopath. His actions are something I still can't fathom. The only thing I can understand about it is why he killed himself. I don't see how anyone who was at all normal could have done that and not killed themselves. Anyone who was at all normal wouldn't have been able to live with themselves afterward. The worst punishment for that kind of crime for anyone halfway normal would be to have to live with that knowledge and live out their life in prison for decades. Just looking anyone else in the eyes after doing that must be torture. He had lived an apparently impeccable life till that night. He must have had some fragment of normalcy left.

There must be "healthy guilt" and "unhealthy guilt". I don't speak as a mental health professional. I'm not a mental health professional. I am speaking as a layperson from my own observations of the world.

Healthy guilt is the guilt we feel over having done something we know is wrong. It takes up enough of our mental energy to get us to make amends if we can and to keep ourselves in line so we don't repeat our wrongs. Healthy guilt stops us from doing things we know are wrong. We can imagine how we'd feel ahead of time. We can weigh our options and decide to make other choices.

We feel healthy guilt in proportion to the weight of our "crime". Healthy guilt does not make us lie awake night after night over forgetting an appointment or a birthday. If we steal money, we feel healthy guilt. Hopefully stealing money would make us feel very guilty and would keep us awake at night. If we don't feel some healthy guilt over doing something very bad, we might wonder what is wrong with us!

Unhealthy guilt is guilt that is out of proportion to our actions or is unrelated to our actions. We do the emotional equivalent of wearing a hair shirt over our smallest transgressions. It is guilt over things we can't control, have little to do with, and for which we aren't responsible.

If you take your father to a baseball game and he is hit by a baseball and ends up in the hospital and you feel so guilty that you are ready to throw yourself out a window, that is unhealthy guilt. If you believed that a person was trustworthy and they let you down and did something terrible and you feel guilty about what they did, that is unhealthy guilt. Unless you always knew in your heart that they weren't trustworthy, then you'd have to learn to listen to what your heart is telling you about people. But feeling guilty about what they did would accomplish nothing and would take away their responsibility for their own actions.

Unhealthy guilt is guilt that doesn't belong to you but you feel and behave as though it did. Unhealthy guilt keeps you from moving forward with your life. It gets in the way of living fully. It causes you pain beyond what you deserve to feel. It causes you to take responsibility for things that are not your responsibility. It may help those who do deserve the responsibility to get away with things and repeat their bad actions because they can count on someone else to take the blame. In some cases this is called codependence and many books have been written on it. Countless people have gone to support groups to deal with their codependence. (One being Codependent No More by Melody Beattie.)

So what do you do with unhealthy guilt? The first thing is to become aware of it. Admit how guilty you feel and then access whether your feelings of guilt and the amount of guilt make sense given the circumstances. Talk about your feelings with others and see if they have the same perception of the situation that you do. Talk about your feelings with people who are (hopefully) neutral, who don't have an agenda of taking one side or the other, who are kind, honest, thoughtful people who like you and care about you. Avoid sharing your story with people who you know to be very critical, judgemental, and opinionated. They don't tend to make good listeners and they don't tend to give objective opinions. On the other hand don't choose people to tell who would humor you and not be truthful. If someone is afraid of your reaction to their opinions, then they might be less than truthful.

While one opinion can be valuable, more opinions are more valuable. Everyone is different and has a different take on a situation. The more opinions you get, the more likely you are to get an accurate picture of the situation as seen by others. Not one other but many. If you don't have several people in your life who you think can be honest and objective, you might make an appointment with a therapist, a spiritual advisor, a minister. In all cases remember that people, even therapists, are human, imperfect, and are doing their best but are not all knowing. So take everything with a grain of salt and use your heart and your mind to draw conclusions. Twelve step groups are also good places for sharing a story and hearing how others respond.

With guilt, we have to own what we deserve and resist owning what is not ours. A neat trick to accomplish! I'm still working on this. This week I am consumed with guilt over the death of my pet parrot, even though he may have died due to something that was wrong with him of which I had no awareness. But yet I feel guilty, lose sleep over his death.

I still feel guilt over having said the wrong things back in 1995 that led to the estrangement with my daughter. I feel guilty over not being able to stop my mother from writing my daughter a letter two years later that infuriated my daughter further. I feel guilty over being a mother estranged, over being a daughter estranged. Guilt has shame as its neighbor and both visit me all the time. A lot of my feelings of guilt are the unhealthy kind.

I know intellectually that I am not responsible for everything that occurred with my mother and my daughter. It is easy for me to try to assume responsibility. Maybe it's a control thing? If I think in my mind that I am in control, then I have the illusion that I can fix it all. How scary that in life we cannot fix everything! Giving over to others their own share of responsibility for outcomes means that I am not so powerful. That is one of the first steps in a 12 step program: Admitting our powerlessness and giving others over into God's hands (whatever our personal interpretation of God or a Higher Power is). This is something I need to do over and over again. Admit my own powerlessness and admit that there are powers much higher than mine. You don't have to belong to a church or to believe in God to do this. I don't go to church and I don't believe in God. But I recognize that I am not all powerful and that there are higher powers in the world. I just forget this frequently!

Feeling guilt that is not our own guilt is one way of believing that we are more powerful than we are. Letting go of those feelings of guilt can be darned almost impossible for some of us even when the evidence of our guilt doesn't exist. It just seems as though it is the thing to do .... to assume the guilt. As though I am doing someone a favor. As though being a Martyr willing to take the Guilt arrows to my heart is just the right and noble thing to do. As though I will be seen as better because I admit to guilt that isn't even fully mine. This is sick! Sometimes I am quite sick!

I hope that my account of how I am on automatic pilot when it comes to guilt resonates with those of you who do that too and that it helps you to do it less. I know that I am emotionally healthier than I was 20 years ago. I've grown a lot. Been in group therapy, individual therapy, gone to 12 step groups, read my share of self help books. I know how far I've come. But I still feel pain that has more to do with other stuff than anything I deserve to feel. Maybe still feeling it and sharing it will help you and me too. I can hope!

Sunday, July 3 Ramblings on The Bad News in the News

Wishing you a good Fourth of July weekend. Hoping that you have plans to spend time with people who like you and whom you like and love. Liking as well as loving is a good quality in a relationship. Sometimes we love people who we don't like much. I always think back to John Denver's statement when he and his wife were divorcing. "We still love each other. We just don't like each other very much."

I'm fortunate that I have people in my life that I both like and love. There were years of my life when that wasn't as true as it is now. Like when I was married the first time, the marriage that ended in 1984. Tony was a good person in a lot of ways but we weren't a good couple. I did love him but no, I didn't like him.

I'll always love my daughter but right now I don't like her because of the way that she's treated me.

My antidepressant isn't working well. It is sort of working in a half-assed sort of way. I'm not feeling hostile and irritable and critical of others but I'm not feeling particulary good moodwise. I'm putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward, getting things done, but not with much enjoyment. I should call my doctor and share this with her. I know I can try Wellbutrin instead of Lexapro. I'm also experiencing nights of not being able to sleep and then other nights of sleeping too much and days of feeling too sleepy. I'm not getting as much done as I would like and that desire to be more productive was one of the strongest motivators for my going back onto an antidepressant.

I haven't felt like talking much. Not on here and not in my life. I've been disinclined to speak. Either my medication isn't working or there is something else wrong with me. The simple explanation is probably that the medication isn't working.

Do you follow the news of crimes? I follow them perhaps too closely. I think this kind of monitoring of the tragic stories in our world is one of the hallmarks of some people who suffer from depression. I have this attraction for sad stories and tragedies and crimes although what I like best are the stories of the perpetrators being brought to justice. I like to see justice gets its day. I hate that there is such an imbalance in the world in that so many seem to get away with perpetrating evil leaving too many victims in their wake. I use the word "seem" because I don't know if my perception of evil having the upper hand is accurate. Maybe justice wins out more than I know.

The mother of Natalie Holloway waits in Aruba for her daughter to be found, one way or another. She has stated that she will stay there until her daughter is found. Will she eventually have to come home to the United States without her daughter? Without ever knowing what happened to her? Imagining all the fates that might have befallen her? What kind of hell is that?

Natalie's mother's perseverance is amazing yet understandable to most mothers. When I was a child, a tornado swept through the city of Worcester, Mass. where my family lived. Ninety people were killed. A refrigerator landed on top of a little girl. Her mother managed to lift it off. The adrenalin of a mother's love, fear, and desire to protect is powerful.

I used to have a recurring dream/nightmare that something terrible was going to happen to my daughter and that I was powerless to save her. I started having these dreams when my daughter was in her twenties and continued to have them for years after our estrangement began. I haven't had the dream for a while now. I can't recall when the last one occurred. My daughter has grown away from me and I no longer feel powerful enough to protect her from anything. But I still relate to the fear and pain of other mothers whose names are in the news as they search for their daughters and want to protect them from the terrible things of the world that are worse even than the things that happen in dreams because they are real and not just the visions of nightmares.

Saturday morning the little girl missing since May, Shasta Groene, was found in a Denny's restaurant in Idaho in the company of a sex offender. Her mother had been bludgeoned to death in May along with her older brother and her mother's boyfriend. Shasta's other brother is still missing and feared dead.

The BTK murderer gave an account of how he murdered people in court last week when he pleaded guilty to ten counts of murder. He told the story with no inflection of feeling in his voice as though he was giving instructions on how to paint a garage. His victims were "projects" to him. He described some as being "a little bit upset". What was it like for his own family to have lived with this man? What is it like for them now? I've read that he has a wife and two grown children. Did they ever have a clue that he was capable of such great evil? Are they estranged from him now? How did they feel about him as a father and as a husband before they learned what he had done?

Understanding the human heart when it goes so very wrong is almost impossible for me. But not entirely impossible. The closest I came to feeling as though I could do something harmful without feeling normal feelings was when I took the antidepressant Zoloft for one month several years ago. There is a rare side effect that can occur or has been alleged to occur to some people when they take Zoloft. They can have bizarre thoughts and do things that are out of character. During that month on Zoloft I had what I would call bizarre thoughts. I thought of doing violent things and didn't have my normal range of emotions. I felt angry and irritable and abrupt, as though I was perpetually on too much caffeine. I had severe insomnia. This was around the time that Phil Hartman's wife killed him and then herself. Her family later sued the pharmaceutical company for damages. She had been taking Zoloft but she also was taking cocaine.

Lately Tom Cruise's opinions on the non-existence of chemical imbalances in the brain and his negative opinions on antidepressants have made the news. His interesting behavior on TV shows has been remarkably consistent with that of someone who suffers from bipolar disorder. He might take a closer look around at himself and the world before proclaiming that getting your mind straight is just a matter of right living, good food, right thinking, and exercise. Not that those things won't help you but they are not the easy solution to eliminating bad feelings, bad behavior, and evil. I don't know what will eliminate evil. Some people think that religion does it but it is evident that evil continues to exist both in spite of and even often because of a too fervent passion for religion.

We are not all created equally able to live a peaceful problem free life with no risk of hurting ourselves and others. Some of us are lucky enough to have inherited a good enough set of genes and perhaps experiences that enable us to get through life doing only good things for the world and leaving it a better place than we found it. Others struggle just to get through a day without hurting themselves and others. The Tom Cruise picture of the world is that of "if only you would pull yourself together and drive right you'd be fine, fine, fine". As though people's brains are manufactured to be as alike as the inside of the engine of a Ford pickup truck. All we need in order to have hunky dory brains according to Cruise's world view are regular maintenance and tune ups. He says this while recently acting in ways that many of us agree are a bit strange. He must have missed his tune up this month!

Anyway, I don't understand evil, much as I DO understand or believe I understand something about chemical imbalances and their effect on the brain. I suppose evil may be a product of something even more wrong with the brain than a chemical imbalance. A structural problem perhaps. Something wrong with the parts responsible for feeling, compassion, caring, ethics, morality, love. Something that attracts a person to doing harm to others and gives them pleasure in the act of doing harm. There has to be something very different about these people, the people we label psychopaths and sociopaths and sadists. Maybe some day society will discover a cause and a cure. A magic pill or a surgery. A prenatal test? And what would we do if we could determine during a pregnancy that a child had the trait of being a sadistic murderer and there was no cure for it? What would someone do who was a Pro-Life believer if they were told that they were going to give birth to a murderer?

Some of us do have problematic relatives who are not psychopaths. We may love them but not like them much. Love can be so difficult. Natalie Holloway's mother persists in her fight to find her daughter while the mother of Joran Van Der Sloot, the Dutch boy who is suspected of having done something to Natalie, must struggle too with her love for her son and possibly her empathy for Natalie's mother. We know where his mother's loyalty will lead even if her son has committed a crime.

If the handsome young college bound Joran is one of the bad guys, the guys who lie, who disclaim responsibillty, who hide bodies, who kill or create a situation where someone dies due to his actions, what caused him to be like this? Was Natalie's disappearance due to Joran being who he is or was it due to an unfortunate chain of circumstances that has caught both families in a web of tragedy? The fact that he has lied so much without regard to his friends, his family or Natalie's family troubles me and makes me wonder about who he is inside. His lies make me doubt that whatever occurred was only an accident. His only regard seems to be for himself. He may be just another bad guy, no different than the BTK killer or the killer of Shasta Groene's family except in the body count.

I saw an interesting movie last night: Crash. In Crash no one of the main characters is entirely good or entirely bad. No one is pure victim. No one pure criminal. An interesting movie. In the movie the fickle finger of fate has a hand too in what makes someone do something evil. The movie is about love too. How much we love each other even as we despair for each other. Even as we run away from each other. We run towards each other as much as we run away.

If I were a mathematician, I would come up with an equation for evil that went something like: Fate multiplied by ten plus childhood experience plus instinct to survive plus testosterone squared multiplied by certain inherited genes plus lack of ability to feel squared plus unfortunate brain structure cubed equals the statistical probability for great evil.

On a more positive note, I did get to see fireworks Friday night and they were great! I love fireworks held in the middle of a city. The noise, the echoes off the buildings, the perception of risk, the silhouettes of the urban landscape against the backdrop of the brilliant fiery spreading explosions in the sky, the variety of people with faces upturned. Big cool drops of rain began as the fireworks started, surprising us all in the streets and making me run for shelter under an awning where I stood shoulder to shoulder with wet strangers trying to see the show in the sky without getting wetter. People walked by holding their canvas folding chairs upsidedown over their heads as umbrellas. Then the rain stopped and we all went back out into the street to watch the show. The final barrage of sound and fury in the sky was so loud I had to flatten my hands against my ears to protect them. It was a beautiful show!

Wishing you a Happy Fourth!

I've been sitting here typing for several hours now although I've been invited to go see a friend I haven't seen for a long time. I must go. Life is going on regardless of what I am doing or not doing and I am missing it. See you later! At another time I may add in some links to the above referenced stories but not right now. I do not want to be one of those people whose life is led in front of their computers. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I just don't want to do it.

Thursday, July 7 On mood and blogs: How to indulge your inner narcissist!

Second day on Wellbutrin! The doc switched me right onto it. No waiting. It's already cheered me up in that the generic of Bupropion (Wellbutrin's generic name) is cheaper than Lexapro. (This Salon.com article about Wellbutrin is also cheering.)

I did tell her (my doctor) that I hadn't lost my sense of humor but I do feel depressed. The SSRI's have a tendency to make me sleep too much which is annoying. I didn't want to take more of the Lexapro because if the standard dose made me sleep too much, then twice the standard dose was likely to make me sleep more.

Last night I didn't have the greatest nights sleep I've ever had but it wasn't as bad as when I took Zoloft. On that I felt as though I'd never sleep again! I'm hopeful that theWellbutrin will work. I have a lot of things I want to work on and need the energy and the good mood to get to work! I have places to go and things to do and life to live! I don't want to be stopped by depression.

The last few days I've done a lot of reading on the internet which is an infinite source of reading material, constantly being enlarged and updated by existing users and new users. The phenomenom of blogging is mighty amazing! Thousands of people of all ages, interests, and writing abilities are using the internet as their personal journal and means of communication with the world.. Blogging has become a means for the individual to establish a foothold, even if a small one, in the fight to grab the attention of the rest of the world. A blogger can compete with media for the world's attention. The media no longer has a monopoly on access to the rest of the world. It may be easier still for media to find you to get your attention than it is for the individual blogger but the blogger now has somewhat of a chance which is more than we as individuals used to have before there was an interent and before there was blogging.

I see in my research that my own blog here that you are reading is not quite up to snuff in its structure. I have no calendar on my pages with days linked to posts. My posts are not in reverse order with the most recent at the top. I have no lists of links to favorite blogs. I use links sparingly compared to some. I write long posts with few links rather than short ones with many links to online articles. My site's Linkspage is more like a "traditional" blog than this page is in that the entries are short and linked. I have no options for comments other than email. But it is a blog in that it is an online journal that undoubtedly does give you some inkling of my personality.

After reading about the history of blogs and their usual structure I considered setting up a more traditional blog. I'm still in the thinking stage on that. I would like to have a structure where readers could comment more easily.

One aspect of blogging is the narcissism that must be a motivator for so much of it. I'm not using the term in a critical sense here. Not narcissism as in NPD or Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Just the average kind of narcissism that people have to some degree. Some more than others. There are blogs set up just so that a person can tell the world about themselves and their opinions on what goes on in the world. My blog here that you are reading is about specifically estrangement and about my history, experience, reactions, and opinions on estrangement and related issues. I didn't set it up to tell you all about me and what I do every day and what my opinion is on the things that happen in the news or down the street or how the cable guy was late to show up to fix the cable. Yet now it is commonplace for people to do that. So many of us are sure that somewhere someone besides our mothers will be fascinated by the routines of our daily lives. I am amused! In a good way!

I guess lately I've been tempted to do that myself, to expound on things that happen in the world that disturb me and since I don't have any other blog than this blog, I've done it here. If I've failed you by getting off topic, I apologize. There are days when I don't have something new to say about estrangement and the other things that I am thinking about end up here. It is either say nothing or let you know what's going on in my mind today. I do think of things besides being estranged.

I don't know that I have so much to say on a regular basis that it deserves another blog of its own. But I can see that it might be fun to have a blog where I didn't feel constrained to talk only about a matter as weighty and serious as estrangement. Stay tuned. Maybe I'll create one. If I do, I'll let you know.

I also did research on the internet on estrangement and have found new links for the site. New additions are marked with asterisks on the References and the Links Pages. Tonight I added in reference links in the last two posts on this page. So if you read them before I added the links, then check out the links too. You might find something interesting.

Note added later: The blog continues on Typepad.