Vulnerability Hangover

I gave a talk to our staff on ‘Anger Management’ yesterday and I found it much more stressful than I thought I would. Perhaps because this is an issue that is quite personal for me. Part of the reason that I went into Psychology in the first place was that I struggled with relationships and ‘Anger’ is all about relationships.

Here is the start of the talk:

By way of introduction, I have to tell this story. A couple of weeks ago I was walking my two-year old daughter in the park. She was being impossible, she wouldn’t walk, she wouldn’t be carried. So I picked her up and carried her on my neck. She’s fighting and trying to claw my eyes out. So I snap. Put her down and give her a couple of firm smacks on her bottom. Then I look up to see who has witnessed this embarrassing incident of child abuse. Inevitably of course it’s a fellow staff member. One of my colleagues is walking towards me with her husband. I try to shrink into the shadow of a tree. And then the next day I asked this colleague (who is a lovely person, warm, very together, not judgmental) if it looked as bad as I thought it did. She said she was focused on her conversation with her husband and so she hadn’t actually noticed!

From there I was able to share some interesting research on anger and attachment before discussing anger in relationships, the Fear -> Anger -> Aggression cycle and some case material. I finished up with some anger management tips. I thought it was a pretty good talk and the feedback was positive. But going into the talk I was definitely feeling more stressed than usual. I have been fighting a cold over the past few days and was really worried about losing my voice. I managed to get through the talk without losing my voice but then I was croaking for much of the day. Today it’s a little better but I’m still battling.
It doesn’t help of course that Leah has been sick this past week and L was sick yesterday and today.

But after my talk yesterday I felt a bit ‘spacey’ for the rest of the day. I suppose part of this was that I was running over the internal tape of my talk to see if I had embarrassed myself. Had I offended anyone? Made a fool of myself? Did I reveal too much personal information? For example, I confessed that early in my teaching career I was ashamed to admit that I had been aggressive towards a Grade 8 pupil. The boy was seriously ‘pushing my buttons’ and I asked him to wait after class. Then when he carried on being cheeky, I grabbed him by his tie and spoke to him sharply. I knew I had crossed the line immediately that it happened. And I was cross with myself for losing it like that.

So today I’m still wondering about sharing that incident with the staff. I’m sure they probably took it in the spirit that it was meant and that they don’t think worse of me as a result. If anything, it probably opens up a space for them to reflect on their own ways of expressing anger.

But, as Brene Brown commented after one of her popular TED talks on Shame, I want to go into my house and stay there for a while until I’ve recovered. Brene Brown calls it a vulnerability hangover. Unfortunately I have lots of things to attend to here instead.

On turning 43 and reading Bluets

Pictures of Kirstenbosch this past Saturday. Late summer sun shining on Castle Rock. Red balloons in the trees. A quiet bench. I was in a bit of a mood. Still digesting turning another year older (43). Nothing to feel bad about really. Tea on my birthday with family two days earlier. Lovely presents (including some really interesting books, many of them chosen by me).

Admittedly Leah had a complete meltdown on the evening of my birthday. It was a good thing we hadn’t planned to go out. Screaming. Refusing supper, bath, bottle, bed. Climbing out of her bed. Telling L and I to “Go away!” It’s all relative of course. I told L that I thought our daughter had the beginnings of a mood disorder. “This is not normal! Our daughter will end up with Bipolar.” L in tears.

So to Kirstenbosch on the Saturday. By myself for an hour. A book (Bluets) to finish but I was disappointed. I loved parts of this book but as a whole it was disappointing. As a memoir there was so much she left out. As a meditation on the colour blue and what it meant to her in that period of her life it was amazingly powerful but also …. skimpy perhaps? It didn’t fit the mould of memoirs that I’m used to.

But as always, just thinking about this book makes me appreciate it more. And I know that when Litlove reviews it, I will see it again in a whole new light. But on Saturday I was grumpy. And the book didn’t help. I think she captured the intangibility of the colour blue and also the intensity of emotion. (Very crude plot summary: she was a bit depressed at the end of a relationship.) The result was a disturbing but also inspirational read. We love (people, colours, things) and then those things disappoint us. Life goes on.

Reading Challenge Update

I love the way that Goodreads keeps track of how I’m doing with my Reading Challenge for the year. Here’s a pic of the six books I’ve read so far this year. My modest goal is 25 books for the year.

I’d love to review The Innocents by Francesca Segal some time but first I’m going to let it simmer in my mind for a bit longer. And I’ll probably read a few reviews as well to check out that what I’m thinking corresponds to what others think as well. I really enjoyed it but I also have a few reservations. Which is not to detract from the fact that I think it’s a really excellent debut by a really talented novelist.

As for writing challenges, I’ve definitely fallen off the bus. But even if I have to revise my goals down quite drastically, the current plan is to stay with one case a month and write up my thoughts. It takes a lot of discipline, especially since there’s no-one else to keep me on track here.

Easter at Betty’s

We’ve just returned from Betty’s Bay where we spent a relaxing Easter weekend. The weather was mostly foul (wet and windy) but we made up for it with an abundance of chocolate, some reading, shopping and walking.

The Leah girl clearly loves chocolate. She had fun on the Easter egg hunt and also enjoyed her new keyboard. Hope you had a great Easter weekend too.

Tempted by audio

1. I’m seriously tempted to buy some more audiobooks. I know that I often don’t have the time or the energy to read so it might be easier just to listen instead.

Wolf Hall or The Examined Life? I’m really interested in Stephen Grosz’s account of 50,000 hours of being a psychotherapist. This is just the kind of book that I like. Purrr.

2. I enjoyed Netherland by Joseph O’ Neill but I also found it a bit boring in parts. However, since I finished it and read an interview with the author I’ve been thinking about it a lot more. There was the whole comparison with The Great Gatsby which completely passed me by but which now makes perfect sense. Chuck Ramkissoon and Jay Gatsby. Both self-made men embodying the American Dream. Both idealists who are brought down by their own greed. And the voice of Hans van de Broek has also stayed with me (and the comparison with Nick from the The Great Gatsby). I found the descriptions of cricket in the US charming. And I’ve warmed to the book a lot more now that I know that Joseph O’ Neill lived in the Netherlands and the UK himself. I presumed (quite wrongly) that he had decided to make his lead character Dutch on a whim.

Oscar and Reeva

I was pretty shocked and numb about gender violence before this story broke. Then the Oscar and Reeva story was all over the media (in case you’re living on Mars, the double amputee athlete shot and killed his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day) and I was poring over the newspapers. This post is one attempt to make sense of it.

Of course many men commit violent acts, and a lot of these violent acts are directed towards women. Athletes are no different from other sportsmen and paralympic athletes equally so. But there was something of the Cinderella aspect about Oscar. I think we wanted to believe that miracles can happen. That people can overcome huge obstacles and not pay the price that so often comes with success. Part of our shock, apart from the fact that another beautiful young South African woman is dead at the hands of her South African male partner, was the sheer enormity of the gap between the images of hero and villain. Oscar was, in the stereotypes of the media, a ‘super cripple’. A phenomenal athlete and an inspirational example for others. Now he is just another fallen sports hero, a ‘terrible warning’ of what can happen if you mix guns, aggression, fame and fortune.

Of course I am speaking from the available reports and it could still be proved that it was a tragic case of mistaken identity. Perhaps it really is true that Oscar thought that Reeva was a burglar and so shot her four times through the bathroom door. But given Oscar’s history, the reports of shouting and domestic disputes, it is just not believable.

Last week I was blogging about Anene Booysen and wondering how South African society would react. I am relieved that our society has reacted. There have been marches, silent protests, countless radio interviews, media articles. There seems to be a wave of righteous indignation that has reached far and wide. Even in our quiet corner of the Cape, our principal addressed the whole school on Friday on gender violence and led a minute’s silence. We were all encouraged to wear black for the day. And other consciousness (and money) raising events have been planned.

I’ve realized that Anene Booysen’s story has come to symbolize the fate of so many South African women who are victims of gender violence. And then along comes the Oscar and Reeva story and we are shocked and saddened even further. If it was still possible to imagine as middle class South Africans that we are somehow different from the ‘masses’ out there, then this story should have made us think again.

The media loves celebrities and Oscar was a much-loved celebrity. Yes, we knew he was a bit of a jerk but to fall to this level? Many South Africans identified with Oscar. He symbolized the plucky spirit of our young democracy. Just as our rugby team could win the World Cup (twice) and we could produce a world leader such as Mandela, so too could we produce a ‘triumph-over-adversity’ story such as Oscar’s. But as Justice Malala commented at the Guardian, Oscar’s fall is also our fall. If he can give into uncontrollable anger, what about the rest of us? His ‘craziness’ can make us confront our own demons.

And what about Reeva Steenkamp? By all accounts she was an intelligent, beautiful young woman with a promising career ahead of her. She had been dating Oscar for under three months. How can she suddenly lose her life just like that? What does this mean for South African women generally? Are South African men really that dangerous?

I was watching the SA versus Pakistan cricket test on television this weekend and the cameras frequently showed members of the crowd. Every time they focused on a pretty young woman I was reminded of Reeva. I wondered what those women made of what happened. Was it my imagination that everyone seemed more subdued than usual?

In our adolescent psychology group last week we were talking about knowing yourself and my co-facilitator was teaching them about Johari’s Window. The diagram below also provides a handy tool for discussing relationships.

I can’t help wondering about Oscar and Reeva’s relationship. Does the report of recent loud arguments between the two indicate that they were in the process of discovering the ‘hidden’ aspects of each other’s personalities? And what about the concept of the “shadow”, the unconscious parts of ourselves that both we and our partners are perhaps initially unaware of? As the relationship deepens, those hidden parts inevitably come out. And if one of the partners has a history of aggression, then this could help to explain aggressive outbursts, intimate partner violence and even extreme violence such as shootings.

These were some of the lines of thinking that were triggered by the Oscar-Reeva story over the past few days. Of course we bring our own projections and experiences to these stories. My own research into anger, aggression and violence is salient here. And, from a psychology point of view, it is interesting (and disturbing) how often the trail leads back to experiences of shame. It is relatively easy in Oscar’s case to speculate on the hidden shame of his disability. As I say, this is all my speculation. But the story is too important for me to leave alone.

On Gender Violence

(At the memorial service for Anene Booysen. Source: Daily Maverick)

Anene Booysen was a 17-year old girl from Bredasdorp in the South Western Cape. On Saturday the 2^nd of February she went to a bar and drank there until the early hours of the morning. She was then lured out of the bar by some men, who raped her and mutilated her body. Several hours later she was found at a construction site by a security guard and taken to hospital where she later died from all her injuries. Before she died, she named at least one of her attackers (her former boyfriend, Jonathan Davids).

Since then there has been a huge media outcry and somewhere in all the outrage and public statements and marches, the person of Anene Booysen has been, if not ignored, then overlooked. For stories on this, read Kate Stegeman in the M&G and Ranjeni Munusamy at the Daily Maverick. I’ve read several stories on this and heard radio interviews and commentary and all I know about Anene Booysen, other than her shocking murder, is that she was fostered by another couple after her mother died. On the night Anene was killed, her foster mother warned her not to stay out too late.

There is talk that this will finally highlight the appalling violence against women in South Africa in the way that the terrible gang rape in India of the woman known as “India’s daughter” highlighted gender inequalities and violence there.

Generally people have reacted to this story with a combination of shock, numbness, disbelief, sadness, anger and outrage. There have been calls for improved justice, calls for a sustained focus on gender activism, as well as calls for increased funding of NGOs such as Rape Crisis. The UN Commissioner for Human Rights called for a comprehensive approach to tackle the “pandemic of sexual violence in South Africa”. Other commentators have said that after the initial outrage, we as South African society will forget … until the next time.

Apart from making a quick donation to Rape Crisis, I spoke to one of my colleagues about what he thought should be done. He was all for stopping school for a morning and protesting outside Parliament. Since my colleague is a lot older than me (and a respected figure) I couldn’t forcefully disagree with him. But I was frustrated by this response. It’s all very well to protest at what government is doing, but what are we doing? Government would say that they have substantial social development budgets. The President condemned the incident and called for a end to violence against women (perhaps ironic given that he was himself charged with rape a few years back, a charge that was later dismissed).

As for what we as schools or community organisations can do, schools have the power to raise money for worthy causes. Schools as organizations raise money and awareness with all kinds of drives and initiatives. Of course we are all busy. But isn’t it time that civil society engaged around this issue? How do we as a country address these vitally important issues?

We often hear the statement that South Africa is the “rape capital of the world”. Just today I saw that about 65,000 cases of sexual violence are reported in South Africa every year. A small percentage of those result in convictions.

Munusamy quotes Saths Cooper, one of South Africa’s most prominent psychologists, who highlighted the complex nature of sexual violence in South Africa.

He said there were several root causes of sexual violence against women including power relations, socialisation and economic and social conditions.

“In most societies where there is economic stability and social security, incidence of rape is fairly low. But when social and economic conditions are unstable, and there is a high level of uncertainty and anxiety, there are concomitant levels of rape and other aberrations,” Cooper said.

“We don’t know to what extent the frustration of young and old males, at their wits end in a society that has discarded them, where they have no jobs and women tend to get things quicker exacerbates the situation. That is not a cause, but could be an underlying issue behind incidence of sexual violence.”

 

I hope this story runs and runs. We need to move past numbness and hand-wringing and finger-pointing and outrage and highlight the areas of this problem that need fixing. Then we can support the various organizations that are already working to address the various facets of the problem. Justice needs to be the first priority. Empowering women and young people is crucial. Rehabilitating men is also important. It’s time for the politicians and civil society leaders (and all of us) to come up with plans to address this massive problem.