When the problem is the owner rather than the dog

Dogs are like children. You’ve got to love them (and try and stop yourself from smacking them). With me it’s a struggle not to smack. Loving is pretty easy, especially when she looks at me with her big brown eyes. But the not smacking is an ongoing learning thing for me. There are just so many things my dog does which are inappropriate. Here is a list for starters: sniffing people’s crotches; chasing the cat; climbing onto the furniture; entering other people’s gardens and doing her business there; entering other people’s houses; running away when she hears the garbage men or there’s a thunderstorm; licking her paw obsessively when owner is trying to concentrate; bullying small puppies; slobbering on strangers.

A lot of people would read a list like that and think: It’s the owner’s fault. Why did he let her get out of hand? Where was the consistency, discipline, loving guidance, rules? And then I’m quick to reply that I’m the third owner and that she learned her bad behaviour in her puppyhood. She wasn’t socialised adequately. Pedigreed ridgebacks are highly strung. We’ve had four homes in four years. I’m a single working dog-owner etc.

Actually I shouldn’t blame her for the paw-licking and the slobbering and the running away from noisy garbage trucks. That’s pretty much involuntary. And she’s a lot better about not climbing onto the furniture and slobbering on strangers. The crotch-sniffing is easy to control if you are an assertive person. Lifting your knee, turning away and saying “No” in a stern voice will do it.

Big dogs need lots of exercise and since I’m away from the house from 7am to 4.30pm she only gets one walk a day. I know exactly what I would say if I were the dog psychologist giving my opinion. If you want your dog to change her behaviour, you have to change your behaviour. Losing your temper and throwing a small blue baby elephant at your dog when she licks obsessively is not appropriate behaviour. Smacking her with the dog’s lead for not listening to instructions on a walk is not appropriate behaviour. Oy vey.

All the dog classes in the world will not make a difference unless she has a stable home environment. I’ve been working on that and I’m pretty happy with the current set-up. Granny (and sometimes grandpa) looks after her for much of every day. She has routine and another dog to play with. She gets a daily walk (although admittedly not as long as is needed for a dog of her size). She gets to take her aggression out on the Alsatians up the road (a lot of fierce barking through the fence). We avoid small puppies since it’s just too traumatic to try and explain to their owners that my hulking brute of a ridgeback is actually an anxious dog rather than a big bully. The dog and the cat have separate living quarters.

On a happier note, seeing a bouncy dog running wild on the beach is a pleasure. She takes off at speed, does figures of eight, chases her tail, attacks the waves and does some serious sprint-work, tail tucked in, down the shoreline. Then I forget about the slobbering and the furniture and the embarrassment of explaining an exuberant overgrown puppy to non-doggy people.

Handel and the blue TB light

A bit of lightness after the serious post on Coetzee.

Right now I’m listening to Keith Jarrett playing Handel’s “Suites for Keyboard”. It’s soothing music, not completely enhanced by the drone of a rather odd blue TB-light on the ceiling of my office at the military base. This TB light and I are not friends. It was introduced in order to kill the TB germs that some of our patients bring into our offices. Since I share a smallish out-building with two social workers, the main switch for the TB lights affects all of us. I can’t just switch it off, although I’ve negotiated an uneasy truce with the chief social worker whereby I can temporarily switch it off when I am consulting.

Now this is pretty trivial, this kvetching over a TB-light. But fights have broken out over lesser things. I once had a week-long standoff with a colleague because I politely (or so I thought) mentioned that I found it hard to concentrate in our office when she sang. She didn’t speak to me for three days and the awkward silence that reigned in our office was worse than her pleasant if somewhat distracting singing. She subsequently moved into broadcasting and I should really have made more of an effort to watch her show, even if just for the childish joy of pressing the mute button. Ridiculous I know, but there’s a saying about wars being fought over the smallest trifles. I seem to remember a murder case in which the accused (who was well in his eighties) said in his defence that one day he snapped at the breakfast table, he just couldn’t take it anymore. I don’t know what his wife’s “crime” was, perhaps she burnt the toast. It’s sad how tragic stories can be comic at the same time. As a mental health practitioner I should really point out something about the mental health of the elderly. Dementia affects executive functioning (and hence impulse control), which is possibly the explanation for outrageous acts committed by old people.

Returning to the TB-light, my colleague is convinced that this light is responsible for the ongoing wellbeing of his sinuses. So I will have to learn to live with background noise. Perhaps I will build up an aural immunity to it with the help of Friedrich Handel and Keith Jarrett.

In the meantime I’m rather cold and a bit grumpy. I have a PR story to finish and then some delightful reading to do on the Short Story as Case Study. It’s called “How People Change” by Bill Tucker, a professor of psychiatry in New York. A quick squizz at the index shows me that he uses stories by Joyce, Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, Albert Camus and others to illustrate the processes by which people change. I really think that psychology and psychiatry without literature is just tinkering. Stories are what make us human.

Coetzee’s Cruelty

I’ve just finished the South African-born writer JM Coetzee’s childhood memoir Boyhood and I was intrigued by the complex interplay of empathy, isolation, emotional cruelty, shame and ambition that I saw there.

When Coetzee was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2003, the Swedish academy noted his capacity for empathy which enabled him to “time and again creep beneath the skin of the alien and the abhorrent”. I haven’t read enough Coetzee to comment authoritatively on the relationship between cruelty and empathy in his other writing, but I was curious about these themes in Boyhood.

I read “The Life and Times of Michael K” many years ago and then most recently “Disgrace” which was celebrated but also widely criticised for its bleak outlook on South Africa under a Black government.

As an aside, Coetzee is probably as much disliked as he is admired, especially in South Africa. People in Cape Town take him and his writing personally because he was, before he left for Australia in 2003, the most celebrated writer at our local university. Some people who’ve come into contact with him say he is arrogant, detached, aloof, and pessimistic but also brilliant and a master storyteller. He has been described as a master of “ruthless honesty” which cuts to the bone and as a “misery guts with a mother complex” (at least in Boyhood).

I found Boyhood refreshing, thought-provoking and compelling. From an autobiographical point of view, the first odd thing about it is that he writes in the third person, almost as if John Coetzee is one of his characters. This allows him to be revealing of his thoughts while at the same time creating a sense of distance from them. Coetzee has consistently shied away from giving interviews about his books, preferring to let them speak for themselves.

Here he gives us a sharp and richly textured account of the boy that became the man (and the Great Writer who is apparently the major living author most closely associated with the tradition of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett). Perhaps what struck me most was his cruelty, his dogged ambition fuelled in part by a deep sense of shame, an extremely close relationship to his mother, and his barely veiled antagonism towards his father.

He writes about taking his intelligent, devoted but over-involved mother for granted, of feeling suffocated and guilty, and then of developing a gradual streak of emotional cruelty towards her.

He yearns to be free of her watchful attention. There may come a time when to achieve this he will have to assert himself, refuse her so brutally that with a shock she will have to step back and release him. Yet he has only to think of that moment, imagine her surprised look, feel her hurt, and he is overtaken with a rush of guilt. Then he will do anything to soften the blow: console her, promise her he is not going away. … Feeling her hurt, feeling it as intimately as if her were part of her, she part of him, he knows he is in a trap and can’t get out. Whose fault is it? He blames her, he is cross with her, but he is ashamed of his ingratitude too. Love: this is what love really is, this cage in which he rushes back and forth, back and forth, like a poor bewildered baboon. (p.122)

At other points he describes his disappointment with his father, his barely-concealed contempt mixed with sparing admiration for him, and of gloating over the fact that he, as the oldest son, was the most important person in the house and first in his mother’s affections, a step up from his shameful and mediocre father.

Since the day his father came back from the War they have fought, in a second war which his father has stood no chance of winning because he could never have foreseen how pitiless, how tenacious his enemy would be. For seven years that war has ground on; today he has triumphed. He feels like the Russian soldier on the Brandenburg Gate, raising the red banner over the ruins of Berlin.
Yet at the same time he wishes he were not here, witnessing the shame. Unfair! he wants to cry: I am just a child! He wishes that someone, a woman, would take him in her arms, make his wounds better, soothe him, tell him it was just a bad dream. He thinks of his grandmother’s cheek, soft and cool and dry as silk, offered to him to be kissed. He wishes his grandmother would come and put it all right.” (p.160)

He appears to delight in his father’s humiliation and defeat but at the same time feel guilty about what that might mean for him. Winning the oedipal conflict, in a sense, has devastating consequences. In self psychology terms, the grandiose self wins out over the internalised parent image. It’s also interesting that the woman he wants to take him in her arms is his grandmother rather than his mother. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this. But I think there’s a sense of wanting to have your cake and eat it too. Wanting to be the baby, soothed and comforted by the mother while his rival suffers, but also wanting to avoid the recriminations that this could bring.

Returning to cruelty and a detached awareness of empathy, he recalls crushing his younger brother’s finger in a machine (which then required half of the finger to be amputated) and not feeling any remorse. Even his first memory is one of cruelty:

He is leaning out of the window of their flat in Johannesburg. Dusk is falling. Out of the distance a car comes racing down the street. A dog, a small spotted dog, runs in front of it. The car hits the dog: its wheels go right over the dog’s middle. With its hind legs paralysed, the dog drags itself away, squealing with pain. No doubt it will die; but at this point he is snatched away from the window. …It is a magnificent memory, trumping anything that poor Goldstein can dredge up.

Critics have pointed to a thread of cruelty which runs through his fiction, particularly his early novels which provided a scathing (but oblique) criticism of apartheid. In this memoir, Coetzee seems to point out that at a broader level, cruelty was an inescapable fact of South African life at that time. Just going to school was a battle for survival against sadistic bullies. If he internalised this sadism, perhaps he’s saying, then it’s not his fault. And his relentless ambition (which included being cruel to and distant from his family) was necessary in order for him to achieve success. Isolating himself emotionally was a form of cruelty but also a form of survival and a means to produce something significant.

Random blogging thoughts

First up an introduction. This is Joschka (in typical sleeping mode), named by her previous owners after the German ex-politician. There’s so much to say about her but I think it’s a bit like blogging about your child. Where do I start? Do I tell you about the time she broke the same window three times in a row and I was so frustrated and despairing that I tried to give her away? Or about the fight that I had with my girlfriend at the time which boiled down to a variation of “It’s me or the dog”? Another time maybe.

I could also tell you about a blog challenge on another blog I visit here. It’s mostly a fun, social-type blog and from time to time we give each other topics to write about. My inspired title for this week was “Those three words”. I still have no idea what I’ll write about but I really liked Franky’s post about her dad.

And then there’s the newbie blogger thing. I’ve actually been blogging off and on for about 2 years but this is my first serious attempt at blogging. I know I’ll grow into it and that I should just be myself rather than trying to get all hyper and impress people. After all, the only person I need to impress is myself since this is primarily for my benefit. As Alan Bennett says, you don’t reveal yourself in writing, you find yourself. I suppose the same could be said for therapy.

Reading wise I’ve been making progress with Divisadero and the audio version of War and Peace and I’ve also started J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood. I have mixed feelings about Coetzee but I like this book enough to blog about it (at some point).

Job-wise, I’m starting to feel a little more settled. I’m relieved that this new psychology position is not overwhelming but a bit sad that it’s so dull. It’s only for a year and I’ve got lots to keep me busy in the meantime. But there’s still some regret that I opted for the easy option (in cape town with the military) rather than taking a more challenging position elsewhere.

Weather-wise it’s pretty cold and rainy. So it’s perfect weather for a hot mug of something comforting and the rest of that Ondaatje (if the blogs don’t get me first). Happy reading.

Tolstoy in Traffic

Nice view, hey? Windscreen’s a bit dirty but you still get a good idea of sunrise over the N2, which is what I saw this morning on my way to work at the military base. Now I know I shouldn’t try to multi-task in early morning traffic. Trying to listen to War and Peace on my car stereo, taking a picture of the sunrise with my phone and staying in the right lane at the same time is not recommended.

I blame Bloglily I was reading her Measure for Measure experience on the train and I thought that my 40-minute car journey (each way) every day would be a perfect opportunity to catch up on some classics. Unfortunately the choice in my dad’s CD collection was between the collected works of Marcel Proust (about 20 CDs) and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Now I’ve got nothing against Proust but being in the military for a year (community service) meant that I opted for Tolstoy. I would have preferred Anna Karenina just for its opening line: “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Sadly all the Jane Austens were on tape.

About five minutes into my journey, happily going against the town traffic, I realised that my concentration was waning. Trying to get your mind around a whole cast of new characters while you are rushing to work in the dark is probably a recipe for disaster. Fortunately I could slow down to about 80 or 90 kms/hr on the freeway in order to actually hear some of the action.

So what can I tell you? As one wisecrack put it, it’s about Russia. Also don’t marry for money because you can borrow it much cheaper. Actually I haven’t got there yet. I guess one way of looking at the action so far is that it’s very bourgeois, and I wonder if Lenin or his contemporaries read Tolstoy (they must have done). One memorable but rather silly part is the account of how Pierre, the lovable but rogueish illegitimate son of Count Bezukhov, strapped a policeman onto the back of a bear and dropped them both into a river. I guess it’s a kind of epic soap opera for its time. The Young and the Restless or Days of our Tragic Russian Lives. Love and death are just around the corner but for the moment we’re knee-deep in salon parties. Bring on the revolution?

From a gender perspective it’s also interesting. Prince Andrei on marriage:

“Never, never marry, my dear fellow! That’s my advice: never marry till you can say to yourself that you have done all you are capable of, and until you have ceased to love the woman of your choice and have seen her plainly as she is, or else you will make a cruel and irrevocable mistake.”

Thankfully this is the abridged version.

Embracing anxiety

“Since anxiety is a natural, even a sacred part of life, we need to learn how to become anxious about the right things in the right way, one that leads to personal and spiritual growth. Unfortunately, many current therapies are directed towards merely reducing stress and anxiety. But if, as the existentialists observe, anxiety is life being aware of its own aliveness, then the only way to reduce our anxiety is to become less alive, to numb ourselves to life. In fact, our problem as individuals and as a society may not be that we are too anxious, but that we are not anxious enough, and we are not anxious about the right things.” — Robert Gurzon, Finding serenity in the age of anxiety

For the past while I’ve been thinking quite a bit about anxiety. Anxiety at starting a new job, making new friends and generally making small and big changes such as moving house etc. Getting to the anxiety that underlies a secondary emotion such as anger was quite a revelation for since it took much of the sting out of my anger. And what Gurzon writes about anxiety being the key to personal change has certainly been true for me. Becoming aware of my own anxiety, and the ways in which I react to it, has helped me to respond to it in a more healthy way, and to also understand others better.

Gurzon, a Massachusetts-based psychotherapist and author, says that the way we react to anxiety determines our personalities and our characters. Do we try and control it, desperately avoid it, numb it with excessive alcohol and reckless living, internalise it? I think I tried a combination of all of the above. Attending an all boys private school I got the message that boys don’t show fear (and don’t cry, although they could perhaps get a bit misty-eyed at a brilliant try in rugby). Part of the teasing at any boys school runs along the lines of: Don’t be a whuss, a girl, a moffie. Be a man. So I drifted through my school career, blindly unaware that I was even anxious. By the time I got to university I went through the usual drinking phase and then became mildly depressed. Counselling helped, I studied psychology and, after Honours, I went into teaching to get some life experience.

As a young teacher, anxiety is a daily occurrence but I learned to tough it out, partly through preparing thoroughly enough to try and be in control of the situation. But it was only when I actually studied Masters several years later that I really understood the significance of the anxiety that I was experiencing. This isn’t just something you grow out of as you become more experienced — this is a fundamental and important part of life.

One of the things I have noticed in my short time as a psychologist is that people who suffer from anxiety just want it to go away. But repressing it has the adverse effect of making it come back, often stronger and in a different guise. Anxiety can take the form of recurring worries, disturbing dreams, panic attacks, stomach complaints, sweating, dizziness and palpitations (to name just a few symptoms). But what happens, if as Gurzon suggests, you acknowledge the anxiety and try to understand its riddle? If you embark on a conversation with your anxious thoughts? Hopefully you learn to dance with anxiety, to interact with it in a way that leads to greater awareness and a more meaningful personal life.

The personality-forming side of anxiety is also an interesting one. Gurzon says that our reaction to anxiety determines our personalities. I often wonder if I would have progressed more quickly in therapy if my therapist had spelled this out for me, and given me the benefit of her psychological knowledge regarding personality traits. I think in my mid-to-late twenties when I was in real therapy for the first time I would have appreciated knowing about some of the different personality traits and disorders (e.g. Borderline, Narcissistic, Avoidant, Histrionic, Anti-social, Dependent). Since everyone has a personality, everyone has traits which can be understood in terms of psychological diagnoses. For someone who’s intelligent and who already has a good grasp of psychology I think it can be empowering to be given tools (labels, knowledge, patterns) with which to re-examine their own personal development.

Of course the counter-argument to this is that imposing a label on someone who could be vulnerable and distressed is likely to push them away. Bion says that therapists should sit on their wisdom rather than offering their interpretations too readily. And I know from my own experience that often the most helpful thing a therapist can do is to listen, to understand and just to sit with what the client brings and then reflect that back to them. Allowing people to come up with their own solutions and insights can be more meaningful and rewarding than being given the answer. But, since knowlegde is power, learning about maladaptive reactions to stress and anxiety can actually help people to learn more effective coping strategies. This education function is one of the aims of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), which is a treatment of choice for Borderline Personality Disorder.

Sunday reading

Books I’ve been reading recently or am intending to read:

Karma Suture, Rosie Kendal
Mothers and Sons, Colm Toibin
Essays on Love, Alain de Botton
Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje
Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks
With Chatwin, Susannah Clapp
Through the Darkness, Judith Garfield Todd

The Sacks one is great for dipping into and being inspired to listen to more music, to play more and just be aware of how extraordinary our brains are. The Rosie Kendal is easy reading (chick-lit) and is set in part in the same hospital where I did my internship. It was fascinating to read her descriptions of a place I know well and to get the personal perspective of an ordinary but dedicated doctor in the overstretched and underfunded South African public health system.

I read about “Mothers and Sons” on Litlove’s blog and thought that it was fitting for my present situation (since I’m temporarily back home with the parents). Patrick Ness writes that Toibin has “an eye for the chasms in one of life’s key relationships”. Jeff Turrentine says that in the wrong hands the relationship between Irish mothers and sons would be “a recipe for mawkishness that can end only with the pipes calling Danny boy from glen to glen while his beloved Ma waits patiently in sunshine or in shadow”. Far from it. These stories are about the silent, awkward distance between family members rather than any mystical connection.

The family dramas played out in the nine stories here are understated and as revealing for what they don’t say as what they do. There’s a lot of not knowing and not saying and much of the drama gets played out inside the minds of observers.

I was a bit reluctant to start “Essays on Love” even though I really like Alain de Botton’s writing (his book on Proust for beginner’s for a start). I wasn’t in the mood to think about love or read about love since I just didn’t feel like the pain that I knew was in store. Luckily De Botton book wasn’t gloating or preachy or smugly self-satisfied. And the inevitable break-up was painful but also done with just the right amount of humour. He also brings a lot of psychological insights to his practical philosophy.

Had to force myself to sit down with the Ondaatje but once I’d done so I started loving it. (Another recommended read so maybe that’s the reluctance). I love the sparse lyricism of his writing, as in the part where Anna is talking about her mother: “For Claire and me she was a rumour, a ghost barely mentioned by our father, someone interviewed for a few paragraphs in this book, and shown in a washed-out black-and-white photograph”. There’s a sense that life is elsewhere and the early pages are full of melancholy, longing, beauty and then terrible violence. I’ll have to read some reviews to clarify what it is I’m thinking about this.

Psychology A to Z

Anxiety (and Attachment)
Breakdown
Catatonia
Depression
Electroshock therapy
Freud

Good-enough mothering, Group Therapy
Hysteria
Infantile, Introspection and Insight
Jung
Kohut and Klein
Libidinal energy
Mother (and Manic-Depressive)
Nihilism, Narcissism, Neurosis
Oedipal
Prozac, Placebo, Playing (and Penis-envy)
Queer
Rogers
Schadenfreude, Schizophrenia, Sadism and Sex (also Splitting)
Transitional Object
Understanding
Validation
Winnicott
Xenophobia
Yalom
Zeitgeist

There are so many ideas here to blog about that I don’t know where to start. I want to do an Anxiety blog, a few on Depression, Narcissism (and Blogging), Freud vs Jung, Klein’s take on Splitting. There are quite a few negative terms in there (such as Hysteria, Queer, Breakdown, Infantile) which raise the issue of labelling. Despite its good intentions, psychology (like religion) has arguably had as much of a negative impact as it has had a positive one. The history of psychology and homosexuality is an interesting (and perhaps infamous) example of how psychology has oppressed minorities. On this issue I still want to read Edmund White’s account (in My Lives) of how his therapists tried to talk him out of being gay.

I was thinking of doing a negative A to Z and then a positive one – but the negative labels are a lot more fun. Anxiety, Breakdown, Catatonia, Depression etc. has a nice energy about it. The positive A to Z would start: Attachment, Balance, Containment (and then I get stuck).

Bluepete’s psychology blog

Playing is one of the most important things we do in childhood because it allows us to learn. So, in the spirit of Winnicott and other psychology theorists, I want to make this blog a playful space to explore ideas.

To start off with, some quotes from some of my favourite theorists. The quotes are a bit of a mish-mash but hopefully set the scene for more detailed and focused blogs in future.

“For Freud …. We are all in recovery from having been children.” – Adam Phillips

“But what are our selves? Everything, good or bad, that we have gone through from our earliest days onwards, all that we have received from the external world and all that we have felt in our inner world, happy and unhappy experiences, relationships to people, activities, interests and thoughts of all kinds — that is to say, everything we have lived through — makes parts of our selves, and goes to build up our personalities.” — Melanie Klein, 1937 (cited in Hayes, 2006)

Freud, Klein, Winnicott – I almost feel a bit embarassed using these names here but you can’t avoid them. Psychology for me traces its roots back to Freud, and Adam Phillips, who is also the Penguin Freud editor, brings out those links better than anybody.

“Today’s analysis consists not of the earth-shattering realization, insight or interpretation, but of the slow building up of conditions in which it is possible for the patient to understand herself afresh and to construct a meaningful relationship with the therapist in which she feels more fully accepted and understood. …. These can be the small moments of emotional settling, when what has been misplaced or sat awkwardly outside the patient’s experience is incorporated in a new way into the individual’s psyche.” — Susie Orbach, The Impossibility of Sex

I love the way that Susie Orbach (who is also a therapist and a writer) brings fresh light and insight into the therapeutic relationship.

“… being a Community Psychologist is a question of identity, a definition of who we are and who we want to be. … As whole people, our personal, political and professional selves are intertwined.” — Nelson & Prilleltensky, 2005

This quote reminds me that psychology is as much about the social as it is about the individual. Likewise, Critical Psychology points to the fact that the psychological knowledge which we take for granted is a social project and that it needs to be understood in context.

“Money can’t buy you happiness, but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.” — Spike Milligan