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On pain
The people from Teen Empowerment (a program in the high school where I work which hires high school students to do projects to "improve their school climate") came up with what seemed like a fairly daring project this year. They had an English class of students from our high school, E High (urban, almost all students of color and/or recent immigrants, many of them living in housing projects, and all of them dealing with gangs, drugs, shootings, poverty, racism, and a fuckload of other badness on a regular basis), do an exchange program with a class from W High School (almost all White, upper-middle-class, suburban). They exchanged emails for several months, had classroom discussions about social inequality, and then, finally, went to visit each other's schools.
It seems to have gone well-- better than I expected. The W High kids talked about being happily surprised to see "people, not stereotypes," being shocked/impressed with the sorts of things our kids deal with all the time and how they're able to handle it, as well as enjoying the "colorfulness" of the school. I didn't get a sense of whether they learned much that they hadn't been expecting to learn from the experience. But I was more struck with the reactions of our kids. One thing that was something of a relief was that while they did get a clear sense of the unfairness of the situation, they also found things that they appreciated about their school-- the diversity, the energy, and the teachers who care very deeply about them and support them*.
But the other thing that struck me was how struck our kids were by the problems of the kids of W High. They had, they said, assumed that since the W kids were rich and White, they wouldn't have many problems. And indeed, the kids at W don't have to deal with watching their friends get shot, or watching their parents work three jobs to put food on the table, or trying desperately to learn English on the fly quickly enough to pass their classes. But they have problems, our kids said. Problems with parental expectations, and grades-- problems so bad that they do things like pour vodka into water bottles to drink in class to get through the day. One of our teachers said that when the two classes were talking together, some of the W kids were talking about binge drinking, and our teacher realized, looking around the room, that her students had no idea what this meant. She explained it, and they stared at her in confusion, then said, "That's just stupid."
All of which leads me back to a question I had when I, too, was a White, suburban, upper-middle-class kid-- and I looked around and saw how terribly, self-destructively miserable my friends were-- and I didn't understand. How, I wondered, does it hurt so much when life is just not that bad? Of course, I was young and naive and quite emotionally stunted (didn't let myself feel sadness until college, didn't understand depression until after I graduated, I'm only just now learning about anger, and I haven't touched fear yet)... but it's still a question for me. Why is pain like this? Why is it that outside circumstances don't seem to make a damn bit of difference to how much it hurts?
The somewhat paradoxical answer I came to was that the kids at E High have the "advantage" of everyone around them undergoing basically the same stresses. That means that their parents and peers can teach them-- these are the ways to deal with the shit life hands you.** There are a lot of differet coping mechanisms which people are taught and encouraged in, and everyone understands that life will be hard enough that you'll need to use them. This strikes me as an improvement over the suburbs, where if you hurt, you're weird.
The major piece of it seems to be expectations. When I was growing up in the suburbs, I was raised to believe that my life could go wonderfully. I had parents who loved me, I had a nice house, I could expect to get good grades and go to a good college, and I could expect to be happy. If there were anything that was making me unhappy, well, that could probably be fixed. And when I couldn't fix something-- when, for example, the other kids made fun of me for being socially inept-- that meant there was something wrong with me. I was not raised to take unhappiness as part of life, as a matter of course. I was raised to see unhappiness as a problem.
And that seems like a major reason why kids in the suburbs crash and burn in ways that kids from much more difficult circumstances don't. Because, of course, no-one's life is perfect. Everyone suffers eventually (watch out, I just read all of Osamu Tezuka's Buddha) from illness, old age, and death. And in the meantime, everyone has imperfect parents, everyone is sometimes unlucky in love, everyone gets rained on. But for the kids at E, this is to be expected, and you'd have to be nuts to think you could escape it. Too many bad things happen to them for them to have any illusion of life's perfection. And that means that there's nothing wrong with you for being unhappy or angry or scared. In fact, it's so normal to be unhappy or angry or scared that they see it as a little weird to make a big deal of it. I was fascinated, when I did classroom presentations on depression, to hear them say that they thought kids at their high school weren't likely to be dealing with depression-- that was for rich White kids. It's not true in my experience-- all of my clients were dealing with depression to some degree or other, though only some of them named it. But they didn't talk about it to their friends or families, and the one who did was seen by other people (including one of my kids who was dealing with depression herself) as "crazy." But the thing he did which made him "crazy" to them was not, I think, to be miserable and think about or try to kill himself, but to have behaviors that came with it-- being hospitalized, being on medications, and above all, talking about it as "depression." Which attitude is, in itself, a coping mechanism. The assumption behind it seems to be that of course you're going to be miserable sometimes-- so's everyone else. What makes you so special, that you make a big deal of it? It's really unhelpful for people who actually are hit hard with biochemical depression (or any other major mental illness), but it gives everyone else a way to think which I think helps to get through a lot of tough situations.
Now, neither the suburban nor the poor-urban ways of living strike me as ideal. Obviously, if your life sucks, then it doesn't matter how good your coping mechanisms are-- your life still sucks, and the only morally justifiable position is to try to help people change this situation as quickly as humanly possible. But the suburban attitude-- life is perfectable, and there's something wrong if you aren't happy-- also strikes me as very, very, very problematic. I knew so many people in high school, and I still know people now, who are very committed to fixing what's wrong with their lives. On the one hand, this is useful-- if there is something wrong in your life which it's in your power to fix, you may as well do so. But on the other hand, sometimes you'll be unhappy. No matter what you do, no matter how well things are going, sometimes, you will simply have a bad day. I don't know why. I suspect that it is, like many other things, evolutionarily adaptive-- being sad causes you to slow down, rest, release tension, stop moving so fast-- and sometimes, that's necessary for balance. Being angry charges you, lets out tension in a different way, feels powerful. Being afraid helps you avoid stupid risks, makes you more aware of the world around you and your connection to it. These feelings are, I think, good for us, no matter how bad they feel. Our mistake is to try to eradicate them and their causes, rather than just live with them.
So, in my ideal world, everyone would have the life-circumstances of people in the suburbs: little physical danger, plenty of material resources, plenty of opportunity. But everyone would also have permission to see their lives as non-ideal, and non-perfectable. Everyone would understand that sometimes, fear, unhappiness, and anger happen, and that they don't necessarily need to be fixed.
Well, I've got my work cut out for me.
--R
Reading: Buddha, Vol. 1-8, Osamu Tezuka; The Anything Box, Zenna Henderson.
*Which makes sense. Anyone who works in our school-- and stays there-- is doing so, as far as I can tell, because they really want to throw themselves into loving and supporting and teaching kids who really, really need it. Of course, a lot of teachers are also pretty burned out and just stuck... but you do see the others, and they are amazing.
**A lot of these means are things which we, as therapists, are encouraged to get them to give up; most of the girls I saw were in for "anger management," meaning that they took their pain outwards and got into physical fights about it. Which, yes, gets them into trouble and maybe hurt, but also strikes me as a damn-sight more psychologically productive than, say, cutting themselves-- at least it gives them a sense of being strong and tough and able to deal with things.
It seems to have gone well-- better than I expected. The W High kids talked about being happily surprised to see "people, not stereotypes," being shocked/impressed with the sorts of things our kids deal with all the time and how they're able to handle it, as well as enjoying the "colorfulness" of the school. I didn't get a sense of whether they learned much that they hadn't been expecting to learn from the experience. But I was more struck with the reactions of our kids. One thing that was something of a relief was that while they did get a clear sense of the unfairness of the situation, they also found things that they appreciated about their school-- the diversity, the energy, and the teachers who care very deeply about them and support them*.
But the other thing that struck me was how struck our kids were by the problems of the kids of W High. They had, they said, assumed that since the W kids were rich and White, they wouldn't have many problems. And indeed, the kids at W don't have to deal with watching their friends get shot, or watching their parents work three jobs to put food on the table, or trying desperately to learn English on the fly quickly enough to pass their classes. But they have problems, our kids said. Problems with parental expectations, and grades-- problems so bad that they do things like pour vodka into water bottles to drink in class to get through the day. One of our teachers said that when the two classes were talking together, some of the W kids were talking about binge drinking, and our teacher realized, looking around the room, that her students had no idea what this meant. She explained it, and they stared at her in confusion, then said, "That's just stupid."
All of which leads me back to a question I had when I, too, was a White, suburban, upper-middle-class kid-- and I looked around and saw how terribly, self-destructively miserable my friends were-- and I didn't understand. How, I wondered, does it hurt so much when life is just not that bad? Of course, I was young and naive and quite emotionally stunted (didn't let myself feel sadness until college, didn't understand depression until after I graduated, I'm only just now learning about anger, and I haven't touched fear yet)... but it's still a question for me. Why is pain like this? Why is it that outside circumstances don't seem to make a damn bit of difference to how much it hurts?
The somewhat paradoxical answer I came to was that the kids at E High have the "advantage" of everyone around them undergoing basically the same stresses. That means that their parents and peers can teach them-- these are the ways to deal with the shit life hands you.** There are a lot of differet coping mechanisms which people are taught and encouraged in, and everyone understands that life will be hard enough that you'll need to use them. This strikes me as an improvement over the suburbs, where if you hurt, you're weird.
The major piece of it seems to be expectations. When I was growing up in the suburbs, I was raised to believe that my life could go wonderfully. I had parents who loved me, I had a nice house, I could expect to get good grades and go to a good college, and I could expect to be happy. If there were anything that was making me unhappy, well, that could probably be fixed. And when I couldn't fix something-- when, for example, the other kids made fun of me for being socially inept-- that meant there was something wrong with me. I was not raised to take unhappiness as part of life, as a matter of course. I was raised to see unhappiness as a problem.
And that seems like a major reason why kids in the suburbs crash and burn in ways that kids from much more difficult circumstances don't. Because, of course, no-one's life is perfect. Everyone suffers eventually (watch out, I just read all of Osamu Tezuka's Buddha) from illness, old age, and death. And in the meantime, everyone has imperfect parents, everyone is sometimes unlucky in love, everyone gets rained on. But for the kids at E, this is to be expected, and you'd have to be nuts to think you could escape it. Too many bad things happen to them for them to have any illusion of life's perfection. And that means that there's nothing wrong with you for being unhappy or angry or scared. In fact, it's so normal to be unhappy or angry or scared that they see it as a little weird to make a big deal of it. I was fascinated, when I did classroom presentations on depression, to hear them say that they thought kids at their high school weren't likely to be dealing with depression-- that was for rich White kids. It's not true in my experience-- all of my clients were dealing with depression to some degree or other, though only some of them named it. But they didn't talk about it to their friends or families, and the one who did was seen by other people (including one of my kids who was dealing with depression herself) as "crazy." But the thing he did which made him "crazy" to them was not, I think, to be miserable and think about or try to kill himself, but to have behaviors that came with it-- being hospitalized, being on medications, and above all, talking about it as "depression." Which attitude is, in itself, a coping mechanism. The assumption behind it seems to be that of course you're going to be miserable sometimes-- so's everyone else. What makes you so special, that you make a big deal of it? It's really unhelpful for people who actually are hit hard with biochemical depression (or any other major mental illness), but it gives everyone else a way to think which I think helps to get through a lot of tough situations.
Now, neither the suburban nor the poor-urban ways of living strike me as ideal. Obviously, if your life sucks, then it doesn't matter how good your coping mechanisms are-- your life still sucks, and the only morally justifiable position is to try to help people change this situation as quickly as humanly possible. But the suburban attitude-- life is perfectable, and there's something wrong if you aren't happy-- also strikes me as very, very, very problematic. I knew so many people in high school, and I still know people now, who are very committed to fixing what's wrong with their lives. On the one hand, this is useful-- if there is something wrong in your life which it's in your power to fix, you may as well do so. But on the other hand, sometimes you'll be unhappy. No matter what you do, no matter how well things are going, sometimes, you will simply have a bad day. I don't know why. I suspect that it is, like many other things, evolutionarily adaptive-- being sad causes you to slow down, rest, release tension, stop moving so fast-- and sometimes, that's necessary for balance. Being angry charges you, lets out tension in a different way, feels powerful. Being afraid helps you avoid stupid risks, makes you more aware of the world around you and your connection to it. These feelings are, I think, good for us, no matter how bad they feel. Our mistake is to try to eradicate them and their causes, rather than just live with them.
So, in my ideal world, everyone would have the life-circumstances of people in the suburbs: little physical danger, plenty of material resources, plenty of opportunity. But everyone would also have permission to see their lives as non-ideal, and non-perfectable. Everyone would understand that sometimes, fear, unhappiness, and anger happen, and that they don't necessarily need to be fixed.
Well, I've got my work cut out for me.
--R
Reading: Buddha, Vol. 1-8, Osamu Tezuka; The Anything Box, Zenna Henderson.
*Which makes sense. Anyone who works in our school-- and stays there-- is doing so, as far as I can tell, because they really want to throw themselves into loving and supporting and teaching kids who really, really need it. Of course, a lot of teachers are also pretty burned out and just stuck... but you do see the others, and they are amazing.
**A lot of these means are things which we, as therapists, are encouraged to get them to give up; most of the girls I saw were in for "anger management," meaning that they took their pain outwards and got into physical fights about it. Which, yes, gets them into trouble and maybe hurt, but also strikes me as a damn-sight more psychologically productive than, say, cutting themselves-- at least it gives them a sense of being strong and tough and able to deal with things.
no subject
The first is that yeah, I totally don't know as much about the uses of self-injury as I should. So I'm speculating wildly, and let me know if I say anything really offensive as I try to understand (I'm trying not to, but see above re: ignorance). I think it's true, actually, that self-injury may fuck up your life less than fighting others, as it doesn't lead to possible jail time. And I do think that hurting people is bad for your soul, and hurts your sense of empathy. And I think that fighting others can be a cover for hating yourself, and that while your therapists waste time trying to help you not hurt people, they do nothing about the underlying problem (I've totally got a client for whom that's the case, and so with whom I spend much less time on "don't fight!" than I think the school administration would like).
On the other hand, I've got kids who are angry/depressed because their lives suck, for reasons completely out of their control. And with them... well, this may be my Xena-watching prejudices coming out, but I love to hear a girl tell me "I'm not scared. I can take care of myself." It's not always true-- they have a lot to be scared of-- but there does seem to be a certain confidence that comes with being able to beat someone until s/he backs down. And that confidence will be incredibly useful when they're trying to make their lives what they want of them. One of the clients with whom I feel I've had the most success is someone who used to fight a lot, and has been able to learn to take the energy she used to put into fighting and use it to reach her other goals (academic and relationship and family-related). But I think that the work we did there was to look at fighting, and how it gave her a sense of power and control, and then look for other ways she can feel the same way. I don't think we could have done that particular piece of work if she hadn't already laid the groundwork by fighting. So... it's complicated.
I think you also make a good point that "other populations self-injure in more private and insidious ways and are less public about it," because that's absolutely what I saw. When it's easy to go out and overdose, or get shot in a driveby, then self-injury becomes pretty easy-- all you have to do is be a little more "careless" than you usually would. And I think we do see a lot of that, where people don't want to deal with the "shame" of suicide, but if they take risky behaviors, their epitaph will just be that they were dumb (and much missed).
So, yeah. And thank you for making me think, and for being really open. And I would really like to hear more about how self-injury works as a tool, if you feel like talking about it.
no subject
I think it's important if you come across a cutter to acknowledge the merits of the coping mechanism as well as its obvious disadvantages. People wouldn't do it if it wasn't helpful in some way.
Also while I guess self-injury and suicide are somewhat related concepts in a way, the "getting careless and being shot suicide alternative" is not really directly comparable since self-injury is generally not a life-negating act and not a suicide attempt. Really the Northern rural equivalent to that "shameless suicide" is people who commit suicide while hunting and make it look like a hunting accident, to spare their families the shame.