Notes #68

Professionally, I have been dealing with many more angry people recently, so here is a bit on anger.

Anger

-Of those people who suffered the greatest damage in childhood, most    were harmed by repeated exposure to anger. Majority of chronically angry people were also damaged by anger as children.

-People struggling with chronic anger suffer long-term consequences involving work and personal relationships. They tend to feel more alone, more disappointed by life, and less nourished by their relationships.

-The greatest predictor of satisfaction in marriage is how people learn to handle conflict and anger.

-Anger is a learned response, and the anger response can be unlearned with commitment and effort.

-Anger is a good short-term defence against fear, loss, guilt, shame, and feelings of rejection or failure.

"Often the roots of anger can be traced back to earlier times you were hurt, abused, or neglected in your family of origin. The pain was something you carried, year after year, and may have left scars so that now it's hard to feel safe, or loved, or truly worthy. Sometimes it doesn't take much of a provocation to trigger those feelings of being unloved, unworthy, or unsafe -and the anger rises up right alongside the old pain. You aren't to be blamed because you struggle with anger. You're not a bad person, but a person in pain." (McKay and Rogers, "The Anger Control Workbook")

"Your anger is understandable but not appropriate." (Dan Rosin, Communication & Relationships). Anger is a way of coping. It helps to overcome hurt, disappointment, and helplessness. Anger is a response you learned early in life to cope with these feelings. It is a way to gain control, however temporary, of one's life. Anger is a habit.

The literature seems to indicate there is a link between stress and anger. Stress creates an internal feeling of tension, and the greater the stress and number of stressors, the greater the tension. It seems that the act of getting angry actually breaks the tension in one's body. However, each time you indulge in anger to cope with the stress and tension in your life, the easier and stronger the outbursts of anger become in the future. Your anger gets worse and harder to control. You may feel somewhat relieved after an angry outburst, but it is short lived as there is a price to pay for those on the receiving end of your anger.

If you save Notes, check out #29 for more on anger.

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Very clever

PRESBYTERIAN:
When you rearrange the letters:
BEST IN PRAYER
 ASTRONOMER:
When you rearrange the letters:
MOON STARER
THE EYES:   
When you rearrange the letters:
THEY SEE
THE MORSE CODE:
When you rearrange the letters:
HERE COME DOTS

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Covid-19 has kept us from seeing family and friends. It has decimated long-standing traditions and made spontaneous gatherings and shows of affection unlawful.

Social interaction, which most of us have put on hold for the last many months, is number one in the Brigham Young study (below) and Close relations is second, in reference to our health and longevity. Having read this study, I have a bit better understanding as to why there is such an increase in anxiety and depression, despair, and a sense of hopelessness in our society - it has much to do with the isolation from our friends and family. I knew relationships and social interaction were important, but the pandemic has really shone a light on that importance.

 Covid-19 is not always the cause of these feelings but the disease certainly has exacerbated whatever people's issues were before Covid-19 struck. The emotional and psychological damage that Covid-19 has imposed on our society has certainly become more "in our face".

A study by Brigham Young University has identified 10 factors that can be used to predict how long people will live (and you need to be in good health to live longer). The list includes:
     10. Clean air
      9. Hypertension
      8. Lean versus overweight
      7. Exercise
      6. Cardiac rehab
      5. Flu vaccine
      4. Overuse of alcohol or drugs
      3. Smoking
      2. Close relations
1. Social interaction

How are you doing in regards to this list? Do you need to plan a cruise or pick out a therapist?

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In my lifetime I have not been faced with the undue hardship of having to go to war. Neither I nor my family have seen those terrible catastrophes that change one's life. By some standards, I have led a serene and perhaps boring life but have always had choices based on hope, hard work, and the belief that I was in charge of my life. Covid-19 has changed that. It is the first real catastrophe, outside of those small ones I have created with poor choices, that I have experienced in my life. And I have come to the conclusion that the price to stay healthy in this catastrophe is not really that high.

I am not referring to the price people pay when they have Covid-19, that's a very high price, but the price of staying safe and healthy doesn't seem overwhelming to me. Yes I have to wear a mask, keep 6 feet from others when I leave my home, wash my hands, and keep the groups down to just those in my bubble/household. But I don't have to carry a gun in a war zone, or haul bodies out of landslides or from under collapsed buildings, or do without food, or toilet paper, or 415 TV channels.
 
Life is actually pretty darn great, and I say this with a very big "If"': if you have a steady source of income, if you are not responsible for home schooling children, and if you don't have a loved one who is dying or has died and you weren't able to say goodbye. Steady income or little income, kids or no kids, I don't believe those behaviours that help keep us safe from Covid-19 make our lives so difficult that we need to protest and cry "violation of my civil rights" and put ourselves and our neighbours' health at risk.

Please give me your feedback-- how is Covid-19 playing havoc in your life? How are you successfully dealing with the restrictions that Covid-19 has placed on your life. Any funny stories you care to share (I know there are lots of tragic ones).  danrosin@drcounselling.com

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Bathtub Test
During a visit to the local mental institute, John asked the Director during a tour how to determine whether or not a patient should be institutionalized.
"It's simple actually," said the Director. "We fill up a bathtub, then we offer a Teaspoon, a Teacup and a Bucket to the patient. We ask him or her to empty the bathtub."
"Ohhhh, I understand. "Obviously a normal person would choose the bucket because it's bigger than the spoon or the teacup."
"No. A normal person would pull the plug and let it drain. Do you want a bed near the window?"

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More on the protests, so if you're weary of this topic don't read any further.
You might have caught this next offering on-line.

Andrew Coyne

The blockades that paralysed Ottawa and various border points have been removed, at least for now. But the blockades are merely the symptom. The disease is disinformation.
We are discovering for ourselves what until now we had observed at second-hand: large numbers of our fellow citizens can be made to believe almost anything. This is a challenge to our democracy orders of magnitude greater than the disruptive possibilities of a few strategically placed trucks.
It is a challenge, in part, because we are so reluctant to consider it. If so many people are so upset about something, we think, surely there must be some basis to it. There are two sides to every question, we are taught, and by and large this is a good rule to follow. Too many people nowadays are too ready to declare too many debates "closed."
But we should not fall prey to the opposite mistake, of assuming any belief is worth discussing, simply because lots of people believe it. There are not two sides to whether the Earth is flat, or whether Donald Trump won the 2020 election. And yet millions of people believe both.
It was possible for a reasonable person to worry, circa December 2020, whether the vaccines developed in such relative haste against the corona virus might pose some risk to human health. Fourteen months and 10 billion safely delivered doses later it is not. Valid health exceptions are well known and accommodated; unanticipated adverse events are ravishingly rare.
And yet thousands of people were persuaded that vaccines, and vaccine mandates, pose such a monstrous threat to their health or freedom as to justify occupying the national capital and menacing its citizens, in defiance of the law, for weeks on end. Hundreds were willing to risk arrest rather than obey a police order to disperse. This is not normal.
Opposition to vaccine mandates was not by any means the only idea behind the occupation, or the strangest. Protest leaders appear to sincerely believe that vaccines contain RFID chips; that the governor-general can rule by decree; and that Canada has a First Amendment. This is a movement in opposition not merely to vaccines, but to science, authority, and expertise of all kinds: in a word, knowledge.
What is at work here is not a series of individual deficiencies, but a collective failure of socialization. These are people who appear to have detached themselves not only from the behavioural norms of civil society, but from the whole transmission chain by which knowledge is spread among the population.
Knowledge is a social process. We form our beliefs about the world, not in isolation, but with the help of those around us. We learn from people with more knowledge, experience and judgment than we have, and through them absorb the accumulated wisdom of society. We have to. We cannot individually remember every elementary fact of human knowledge every day.
But what happens when that breaks down? What happens when knowledge is transmitted, not vertically, as it were, but horizontally? Then you have what we have witnessed over the past few years. It has been described as a class war, but it is a class war of a particular kind, in which the dividing line is not money or birth, but knowledge.
Previous generations of class warriors wanted to smash capital, first physical then financial. But in an age in which capital resides in knowledge, the objective must be to smash knowledge itself, together with its repositories - the universities, the courts, the media. All are not merely fallible but hostile, enemies of the people, filled with lies - which is to say, with facts they refuse to believe.
In their place, the new class warriors must attempt to make sense of the world unaided. They are "doing their own research," via the internet, and sharing their findings with each other, via social media. They are, in short, defenceless, vulnerable to any number of bad actors looking to manipulate them.
This is the other discovery we have made of late, far more disturbing than the first: not just how easily a certain section of the population can be made to believe the most outrageous lies, but how willing a certain section is to tell them. The latter know exactly what they are doing. They know that they are spreading falsehoods, validating lunacy, crossing lines previously considered uncrossable. They just no longer care.
How long would the Ottawa occupation have lasted, had certain members of the Conservative Party not given it their enthusiastic support? How much comfort did the occupiers take from their enablers online, as quick to minimize their misconduct ("peaceful protest") as to exaggerate their mistreatment ("police brutality")? How healthy can our democracy remain, under this combined assault on reality?
Comments? danrosin@drcounselling.com