Psychology Research

This quasi-facetious title is meant to highlight something essential to understanding childhood. Namely, that–more than anything else–what distinguishes children from adults is in their ability to control impulses. Put simply, the younger the child, the less developed the ability; the older, the greater the ability. And when the child eventually becomes an adult, presumably this capability has been more or less mastered. Fundamentally, civilizing or socializing children depends on the capacity of our institutions (particularly that of family and school) to teach them to curb or eradicate many of the behaviors deeply embedded in them. If, ultimately, they’re to function adequately in society, what–universally–is natural for them needs to be almost completely subdued. It’s almost mandatory that their original “biological scripts” be rewritten. If, specifically, they’re to fit in with others and, more generally, into society at large, they just can’t continue to do what their inborn nature might dictate. That is, from within the mind of a young child, if something is wanted it ought to be pursued–and immediately , too (and, further, with little or no regard for consequences). Additionally, if something is keenly felt , it should be acted out at once. So when angry, hit or scream. When sad, cry. When afraid, run or hide. When disgusted, make a face. Such impulsive acting-out is nothing more than being true to our inborn nature. In this respect, impulse and instinct are virtually inseparable. But unfortunately, we all learn over time that doing what comes naturally is, typically, not in our best interests, nor is it acceptable to the world around us. Well-adjusted behaviors–vs. developmentally normal but pragmatically “disordered” behaviors- -necessitate all sorts of self-imposed restraints (call them, if you will, “inner checks and balances”). So impulsive behavior, while it may be totally natural and reflective of where, in a sense, we should be at any particular stage of development, is nonetheless neither safe nor healthy for us–or even appropriate in helping us negotiate the difficult process of finding our proper place in society. And though our impulsiveness may to varying degrees be tolerated by our parents, it still needs to be taken charge of–or reined in–by them. If not, how will we avoid ultimately being rejected by those around us? After all, by definition unruly children don’t play by the rules. And generally they don’t share as much as they’re “supposed to” either. Nor are they very adept at suppressing their aggressive tendencies–or restraining or disciplining themselves. It’s simply not part of who they are. Again, impulsive behavior is innate–wired into us at birth. It can be seen as the pre-installed software that enables our organism to function. And since it’s how we’re “made,” it’s certainly nothing to feel guilty or ashamed about. The problem is that such impulsivity is primitive. It optimizes our chances of survival–but far more in the wild than in civilization. And this is exactly why, in the context of modern society, it warrants being viewed as dysfunctional, or “disordered.” For such impulsivity, pre-programmed as it is for another time and place, is precisely what gets in the way of our becoming fully socialized. If, finally, we’re to get along in the world, we have no choice but to adapt to what the world requires of us. And so, contrary to how we’ve been “constructed,” our unwary impulsivity needs systematically to be disciplined out of us. In fact, responsible parenting literally demands that parents bring this impulsivity under control–that they teach us to regulate (if not outright repress) it by correcting us almost every time we follow our internal dictates (i.e., what we’d do “naturally” if not subject to others’ reactions). For example, the constitutional inclination to cry or strike out when someone hurts us is automatic . . . until we’re motivated–through external conditioning–to inhibit such expression. Kids with ADHD represent a case in point here. Their marked inability to control their impulses can wreak havoc both on themselves and their relationships, as well as cause all sorts of problems for others, both at home and school (and anywhere else their wayward impulses might take them). Without malicious intent, their behaviors can easily end up being “anti-social–for example, heedlessly expressing their creativity through graffiti; or acting in public in rowdy, obstreperous, or otherwise obnoxious ways; or even punching out someone who’s just said something upsetting to them. In consequence, if such children are ever going to fit it (not to say, thrive), they’ll require an inordinate amount of parental training and discipline, and be subject to all kinds of behavioral modification. And if all this external regulation still fails sufficiently to reduce their maladaptive behaviors, they’ll also need to be put on medication–all in the expanded effort to bring their behavior up to acceptable childhood standards. But even these standards, though far more adaptive and age-appropriate, aren’t adequate to enable children to meet the demands that society will one day make on them. So all parents, if they’re to be responsible, need to set firm limits on their children when they’re behaving impulsively. And this impulsivity can include acting foolishly, imprudently, gullibly, mindlessly, rashly, and (as is so frequently the case with ADHD children) recklessly as well. Moreover, it’s only right that parents exert such authority. For unless their child’s impulsive, unrestrained behavior is brought under control, that child will have problems making (and keeping) friends, experience difficulty in applying themselves to anything that doesn’t “capture” their attention, will repeatedly antagonize others (most notably their parents–thus weakening this all-important attachment bond), and so on and so on.   Note: Part 2 of this post will deal with (1) how all addictive behavior–in the addict’s inability to control strong, though self-defeating, impulses–warrants understanding as a regression to (or fixation in) childhood; and (2) why it’s essential that parents learn to be as compassionate as possible when their children act impulsively.  

Once you figure out that women have many lives, nothing is surprising.Women have many guises, many names: maiden names, married names, professional names, nicknames. We pile on aliases. All of us have at least one version of ourselves packed away in a suitcase under the bed. She’s an escape route. She’s another edition, not quite a duplicate, maybe our self from another life. Like the moon, our unknown selves shift and tug at us, exerting forces both profound and unacknowledged. When a feeling washes over us, swells, recedes, carries us off-course, we may not be able to tell where it comes from, but oh, yes, we feel its pull. Often we have another self because she’s a part of our past. The past isn’t something you can paint over and erase. The past remains, as a wooden table remains a table no matter what you varnish it with, whatever surface you apply. Hundreds of years pass and the table is placed in nearly endless rooms; it’s in a kitchen for suppers of bread and cheese, in a bedroom where an infant lies on it having a diaper changed, and finally in a cellar where a matchbook is stuck beneath one leg to keep it steady. But the table can be reclaimed. Someone will see beneath the peeling blisters and cracked paint and choose to scrape it down to the oak. Patience and force will vitiate the accumulated layers, summoning back its essential strength and beauty because these, after all, have remained unchanged. Then, of course, somebody will need actually to fix that broken leg so it can once again be in balance. Our lives are not revealed to us all at once, in whole pieces. Women wipe up, sponge off, take it all in, absorb; permeable as we are, entered as we are by lovers and babies, we’ve all been occupied territories. A woman’s place is in her home, and her is wherever she chooses, wherever she can lay down her head, gather up her selves, and sleep in peace.   © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

The setting of Jesus’ first miracle-his transmuting water into wine-is a wedding ceremony in Cana. "All marriages take place at Cana," says a faithful Thomas Moore. Therefore all marriages are miracles. At the unhappy end of the spectrum, others join Montaigne, who says, "The land of marriage has this peculiarity, that strangers are desirous of inhabiting it, whilst its natural inhabitants would willingly be banished thence." But it isn’t the marriage that causes the dissatisfaction, it’s the problems of the people involved in the relationship. Marion Solomon, in her book on the power of positive dependency in intimate relationships, identifies these disturbances under the rubrics of defensive dependency, anxious attachment, boundary busting, fragile connection, and defensive distancing. An even greater poison in relationships is the issue of mistrust, earned or not. An old Sufi parable, "The Ancient Coffer," as told in Moore, is a case in point: A very respected man named Nuri Bey had married a much younger woman. A faithful servant reported to him that the wife was behaving suspiciously-sitting alone guarding an old wooden trunk that was big enough to contain a body (i.e., another man). When he asked her to unlock the large chest, she refused to do so because it would mean acceptance of his mistrust. Instead she handed him the key to do so himself. After pondering the situation, Nuri Bey and his servants carried the unopened coffer far away and buried it. What was buried in that cold and lonely place was the soul of their marriage. Most marriages start with some healthy ambivalence but also with good intentions. Two people faithfully enter an arrangement seeking many unspoken, if not unrecognized, fulfillments. They may end up with blissful epiphanies or bitter struggles. If an individual is expecting the partner to actualize his or her potential, that individual will frequently find that the partner falls short of that expectation, especially if the other is suffering from the same illusion. It is probably our idealization of relationships that causes marriage to be so vulnerable. One has to establish a healthy balance. If couples did not expect marriage to be their ultimate source of satisfaction, they would not be so susceptible to its disappointments. However, if their expectations are too low, even the marital relationships of people who relate well will take second place to work (mostly in men), children (mostly in women), or some other primary agenda. Marriage at its best puts couples in a confusing dilemma: the attempt to have a union with someone else while maintaining an independent sense of self. Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary defines marriage as "the state or condition of community consisting of a master, a mistress, two slaves, making in all, two." The more the individual is undifferentiated, the greater the conflict with the partner. Marriage is a fertile ground for individuation as well as for union, but first one must be differentiated, just as a prisoner who wishes to help free his imprisoned companions must first break out of his own chains. Marriage requires attachment and individuation simultaneously, rather than sequentially, as it occurs in our early developmental years. Adapted from The Art of Serenity © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

Bestselling author and relationship expert Harriet Lerner dances with the Seven Questions. This project surveys several influential authors, theorists and policymakers on the same seven questions to illuminate the diversity in modern psychotherapy. No two therapists are exactly alike, a hypothesis Dr. Lerner’s direct, no-nonsense answers support. Harriet Lerner (Ph.D. City University of New York) is one of the world’s most respected voices on the psychology of women and family relationships. For more than three decades she was a clinical psychologist at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, and a faculty member of the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry. She has appeared on national radio and television programs including Oprah, CNN, and NPR. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and her monthly advice column appeared in New Woman magazine for over a decade. She currently has a private practice in Lawrence, Kansas. Her 10 books include The New York Times bestseller The Dance of Anger , The Dance of Intimacy , The Dance of Fear , The Dance of Connection and Women in Therapy . Her two award-winning children’s books, co-authored with her sister, are Franny B. Kranny, There’s a Bird in Your Hair! and What’s So Terrible About Swallowing an Apple Seed? Dr. Lerner’s books have sold three million copies and are frequently recommended by therapists because her writing is so insightful, direct and relatively free from jargon . Her style is clearly reflected in her straightforward responses below. I particularly appreciated her views on question 3, the mistakes therapists make. Therapists often miss the fine line between too much and not enough talking, distance, empathy and allegiance to theory. I’m grateful to Dr. Lerner for taking the time to share her wisdom. Seven Questions for Harriet Lerner: 1. How would you respond to a new client who asks: "What should I talk about?" "What would you like to talk about?" 2. What do clients find most difficult about the therapeutic process? The fact that I can’t change their husband (mother/sister/son/etc), and the fact that change is often a slow, bumpy process. 3. What mistakes do therapists make that hinder the therapeutic process? Therapists make an endless variety of mistakes: They say too much or too little, they are too distant or too over involved, they cling rigidly to one theoretical perspective or have no theoretical perspective at all, they lack empathy or they over-do it. 4. In your opinion, what is the ultimate goal of therapy? The ultimate goal of therapy is to accomplish the client’s goals. Of course, clients’ change their goals and come up with new ones along the way. 5. What is the toughest part of being a therapist? The toughest part of being a therapist is that you constantly run up against your limitations. 6. What is the most enjoyable or rewarding part of being a therapist? The most rewarding part of being a therapist is that you always have the opportunity to push your limits. (That is, you can keep learning and the work is a lesson in humility.) And, of course, it’s a privilege to be someone’s partner in the process of self- exploration and change. 7. What is one pearl of wisdom you would offer clients about therapy? There are countless therapists with different belief systems who work in different ways, so if one therapist or therapy isn’t helping you, another might. It is never a personal failing when you don’t find a particular therapist helpful, even if this therapist has helped other people you know. Trust your instincts and remember that you are the best expert on your own self. © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all crimes. (Proverbs, 10: 12) If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (The Apostleship of Paul, Corinthians, 13, 3-7) I started to ask myself: What should I accuse myself for? Am I guilty for going and loving her? That I loved the girl? What did I do, after all? I loved her. She broke me. (A man who murdered his wife) Love is typically evaluated in very positive terms. However, as there are various kinds of love, some of them -especially the romantic or erotic one-have been frequently criticized. The different views of love can be extreme; thus, while some people consider love to be a supreme source of moral value and strength, others regard it as a kind of disease or destructive intoxication that can makes lovers abandon their moral values. Can love be quite as pure as we would like it to be? Aristotle takes love to be a wish for good things to happen to another person, with no benefit for the subject. The lover wishes the other’s benefit for its own sake, without calculating whether there is any personal benefit to be drawn. Thus, love is not measured in terms of its practical value as a means to achieve certain ends. For instance, loving someone as a means to satisfy one’s sexual desire or to become rich is partial and transient; the moment the end is achieved, or a better means is found, love disappears. Disinterested care is not the same as indifference. Disinterested care implies that the beloved is evaluated as having intrinsic worth and not as something that may give us some future benefits. Although Aristotle considers the essence of love to be caring for the other, love is not an entirely selfless emotion. Aristotle argues that the good things an individual wishes for other people are the same things he wishes for himself. So in a sense, our activities for promoting the good things for the beloved will in fact brings good things for us as well. Aristotle also emphasizes the importance of reciprocity in love, as a lover is someone who loves and is loved in return. The virtuous aspect of love is emphasized in many cultures that consider true love to be modeled on God’s bestowal of love on humans: an unconditional act that lacks any association with deservedness. It is a kind of gift the beloved receives. Erich Fromm defines love as "the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love." True love has less to do with the lover’s own needs and more with concern for the other. Accordingly, love has often been considered to be pure in the moral sense: love involves merely good deeds and "love can do no evil." Hence, it has been claimed that those who fail to love should be considered sinners. Romantic Ideology even upgrades the moral status of love and considers it to be a moral seal of approval, a synonym for purity of intention. Therefore, everything that is done for the sake of love, because of love, and in the name of love is justified precisely for that reason. As Esther, a widow in her late fifties, who had many affairs with married men, says: "I really, truly believe that all love is good wherever you find it-independently of what status your lover is." In such a view, love is considered an ultimate justification for either self-sacrifice or for evil; thus, it can even be considered worth dying or killing for. Although romantic love encompasses genuine care for the beloved, it is not a general concern for the beloved’s happiness in all circumstances. Typically, the lover desires the beloved’s happiness only insofar as the lover is either a part or the cause of this happiness. The spouse can be an extension of our self only in a conditional manner: the condition is being connected to us. In particular, we do not want our beloved to be sexually happy with another person. Pablo Picasso expressed this concern in a rather extreme manner when saying "I would prefer to see a woman dead than see her happy with another man." The egoistic nature of romantic love generates an inherent contradiction: whereas romantic love expresses great concern for the beloved, it cancels the beloved’s autonomy. Moreover, the lover’s care for the beloved may focus on those aspects that the beloved does not consider to be significant. Despite, or more precisely because of, the profound moral value of love, love has been used as an excuse for justifying immoral deeds, such as a husband who murders his wife because she plans to leave him. Ronald de Sousa argues that "It is a commonplace that love motivates some of our worst behavior, ranging from dishonesty to murder. … But what is most astonishing is that we regard love as a justification for treating people far worse than we would ever condone treating a stranger." Despite the high moral value of love (like that of religion), people can allow themselves to act in quite immoral, and sometimes evil, manner. In extreme cases of unrequited love, rejected lovers have committed suicide; in fact, certain genres of literature even regard such suicides as perfect expressions of true love. The aura of love, as a moral, noble emotion that can do no evil, can be taken to imply limitless justification, which may be used to legitimize whatever is done "in the name of love." This notion encourages people to reject any compromise. Accordingly, men who murder their partners sometimes use it as a moral defense and to avoid recognizing themselves as murderers. They can often use it as a defense against feelings of guilt or even to see themselves as victims of the women who violated their love. Love may be indeed be "a many splendid thing," but love also hurts a lot, can be dangerous, and may lead us to behave foolishly. It is indeed advisable to make love, not war, but sometimes war and its associated atrocities are enacted, on a private scale, within romantic love itself. Adapted from In the Name of Love © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

Golfers love to talk about their game as a sport. Tiger Woods, after all, weight trains like a fiend. But the critics will not be moved. It’s a pastime says, well, almost anybody with a pair of eyes and a brain. Turns out the eyes may not be telling us the full story. Neil Wolkodoff, director of the Rose Center for Health and Sport Sciences in Denver, decided to put things to the test. He wired eight golfers up with sensors and tracked oxygen consumption, heart rate, carbon dioxide production and measured the distances they traveled on their rounds. Afterwards, Wolkodoff told AP that: "The study shows there’s a significant energy expenditure in golf, more than bowling and other sports it’s been compared to." Really? I mean, really, bowling’s a sport? He found subjects carrying their clubs burn 721 calories a round and folks who walk with a caddie burn 718-though, honestly, there’s got to be something faulty in that data since clubs weigh around 40 lbs. and carrying 40 lbs for 18 holes has to be worth more than 3 calories. That said, even though it’s not the 750 calories an hour that running burns, Golf beats, well, fishing (302 calories). Like Wolkodoff says, "as far as physical exertion goes, it’s not the same as boxing, but it’s definitely more than people thought. About this he’s right. It’s certainly not boxing.   © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

Is that George Carlin I hear laughing from beyond the grave? When he died a few months ago, we posted a humble tribute to the great man and Psychology Today carried an excellent in-depth interview by Jay Dixit. Were curious George alive today, we’re pretty sure he’d be cracking up at the recent indefinite suspension of hockey-playing loudmouth Sean Avery. Apparently, Avery made an off-color remark about how a couple of his former girlfriends were dating other hockey players, using a phrase, composed of two innocuous words that somehow, when put together, become explosive: nitrogen and glycerine, sloppy and seconds. Watching the various news outlets desperately try to dance around the phrase without stepping on their own flat feet was most entertaining — especially since neither the phrase nor either of the words composing it have been declared officially verboten up til now, as far as I can tell. But now that the NHL’s offended enough to suspend the guy, no more sloppy seconds for anyone, apparently. Maybe we’re about to expand our habit of humiliating ourselves by saying stupid things like "the c-word" by expanding the inanity to "the s-s phrase." "In today’s news, another hockey player has been suspended for refering to his ex-girlfriend as ‘the s-s phrase.’"  It’s only a matter of time. There appears to be a tipping point at which we somehow determine that enough of us know the secret meaning of a heretofore obscure word or phrase that we have to stop saying it publicly. It’s an amusing process to watch, since knowing the hidden meaning means we all know what we’re avoiding, which makes the effort to avoid it seem what, hypocritical? Absurd? Delusional? It’s a funny thing: we seem to believe in the magical power of words. Don’t believe me? Try saying, out loud, the following sentence: "I hope my children get cancer." Even if you can do it, it feels downright creepy, right? It goes the other way, too. Remember when it was offensive to say something "sucked?" Well, no more. Whatever its salacious origins, the word is now as acceptable as oreo cookies. A few years ago, Seth Stevenson amusingly argued in Slate that we should all just relax and use the word freely without thinking of its, you know, meaning.  Which is fine by me, but why not apply that line of reasoning to all the other still-offensive words we use in ways not aligned with their literal meaning, like doctors prescribing drugs "off-label?" Strangely, it would be acceptable to say I though the film Rachel Gets Married sucked, but it would be offensive to say that watching it f*cked up my night. Go figure. Hypocrisy is like lying: you start out small but before you know it, you’re drifting into the emptiness, like an astronaut’s toolbag. © 2008 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

For most of my life, when I looked at the people passing by in my daily activities, on some subconcious level I felt like I was one of them. Beneath whatever surface tensions, we were all part of the human family, and aside from my transition I wasn’t terribly unlike most of them when it came to the basics. But even more so than a lifetime of almost numbingly commonplace rejection, the heartbreaking contempt toward transsexual people (as part of the GLBT community) exposed by the heightened politics around the 2008 Presidential election has left me feeling like I need to examine closely who and what I am a part of. For trans people, gender is forced into being a social, political and legal issue as a matter of simple survival. Almost one transsexual person is murdered in the US every month , which is an astounding number considering how few of us there are nationwide. We have been at the center of legal attacks from schoolteacher Dana Rivers to wife Christie Lee Littleton to Colorado’s recent and typical scare-tactic PSA against trans people being allowed to use public spaces such as the restroom by positioning it as "what if a MAN was in the restroom with your daughter?!" Look at my photo next to this blog entry. That is the face of someone who would be forced to use the men’s restroom by these people. Trust me, my interest in teenage girls extends only so far as they can accurately fill my order at the local hamburger drive-thru. Most recently, after watching national leaders represent their constituencies’ beliefs by seeking to restrict marriage with Constitutional amendments redefining it as "between one man and one woman" and using condescending terms such as "tolerance", I fear that next steps will inevitably involve imposing into the Constitution their definition of what exactly a man or a woman is. Should one’s gender be defined by reproductive ability? Then what about men and women born sterile? What about impotent older men and post-menopausal women? Does genitalia define gender? Then what are intersex people? Is it chromosomes? Then should we do a chromosomal assay on every newborn and adult, and do we claim to fully understand all aspects of the human genome anyway now? Very few opponents of non-hetero, non-gender normative people understand the science behind these questions, and many would eschew science in favor of religious interpretations anyway. In any case, it’s an unwinnable situation for us in their minds. We are "gross", scary and threatening. All their rationalizations against us fall into line behind these gut-level feelings. These beliefs, held by politcally powerful and wealthy people, directly influence my daily life and set a tone for the national zeitgeist that says trans people, as part of the GLBT community, are "less than", and worthy of "tolerance" at best. If I sent you an invitiation to my birthday pary which said, "Calpernia will tolerate your presence at her upcoming birthday celebration on February 20th, 2009", would you want to come? Why did I "choose" this "lifestyle" of being a gender rebel? All I can say is that one’s soul seems to be whatever it will be, and our only choice is how to express it in our lives. At very early ages, I began to discover differences that went beyond the average person’s. Many things I wanted to do would upset the adults and other children, who seemed to follow their own hearts’ desires with the loving hands of the community guiding them onward while they reprimanded and punished me. My eyes were drawn to things like the games that the girls played with each other on the monkey bars, sharing secrets while perched like birds in a tree. They talked and watched the boys, or a leader would direct the others in improvised routines of flips and twirls done in hypnotic unison. I wanted to hang upside down with them and shake my own curtain of silky hair that swept the ground. I wanted to hear the whispered secrets, and receive the frightened consideration of the boys who were happy to be separated but endlessly fascinated with the girls. I had never heard of transsexualism or homosexuality. I had never seen a drag queen or transsexual, never read "Heather Has Two Mommies", never encountered anything other than simple suburban Southern folk in a Christian home. Yet these needs were there, from the earliest ages. My only choice was whether to hide my true self, or cherish and express it. I discovered quickly that hiding it was my only option, as I was not welcomed by the girls, and while the boys had no desire to include the feminine child I was in their games, they rained down all the derision they could muster when I left them to flip and twirl on a lonely perch atop the parallel bars by myself. But I still felt like I was one of them all, a person among persons. Just not a popular one. If worse came to worst, we were all in this life together as human beings, I seemed to know without putting it into words. I would learn in the coming years that I was not considered "one of them" by the majority, to my great disadvantage. In my world, it is simply a fact that social and religious conservatives are horrified by people who transgress the gender boundaries that they have set up. This is backed up by a lifetime of personal experience. Never mind that current gender boundaries are mostly fabricated based on what is comfortable and familiar to the majority, and have little to do with anything "universal". "Well, my little Joe likes trucks and baseball, so all boys should!" Here in America, men don’t wear dresses, women do. Men have short hair, women have long hair. Boys wear blue, girls wear pink. Mostly meaningless, but crossing those lines has often stirred up fevered responses driven by terror from mostly conservative and religious citizens. Trust me, I’ve walked through a mall full of conservative Southern families as a fledgeling transsexual woman. I’ve seen the responses. There are certainly a few religious groups who welcome or at least "tolerate" gay, lesbian and transsexual people without subjecting them to "reparative therapy". I can’t think of any socially conservative groups who are welcoming, but in any case none of these small groups seem to be in a position to dictate public policy, legal precedent or social moires in the way that I see from the major religious and conservative groups. And by "dictate policy", I mean legislate me out of the fabric of society. A lifetime or two has passed since those childhood days, and now I am a battle-hardened and battle-weary veteran of the rejection that only grew more complex and urgent as those children grew into adults. Where they once excluded me, the feminine little boy, from their playground games, now they vote and litigate to exclude me, the transsexual woman, from their social institutions, workplaces, schools and hospitals. But looking beyond the immediate threat of debates on whether a transsexual woman is legally a "woman", and thus belongs within or outside of things like California’s upcoming anti-gay-marriage "Proposition 8" initiative , I look at what these questions mean about what these people would do with us, if they had the power to do so. Where would they have us go? How would they have us live? I won’t even go into the fact here that the biggest threat to heterosexual marriage and families is obviously a little something called "divorce", which rends up to half of all hetero families in two. What if the tens of millions of dollars they spent fighting the tiny threat of GLBT marriage had been spent fighting divorce? Keeping us out of the concepts of "family", marriage, the workplace, schools, health care and the very fabric of society is part of a larger mission of "othering" us as much as possible in the current legal framework. I wholly believe that people seeking to push us out of those spaces in society would ultimately only be happy if we didn’t exist at all, in any way. If we can’t work, study, take care of ourselves or be a part of families, what’s left?  What has become most distressing to me over the past few years is the attempt by religious and social conservatives to exclude trans people (as part of the GLBT umbrella) from the universal concept of "family". As if we came from something other than a family ourselves. A prime example of one of the groups that uses the word "family" to mean "not Calpernia Addams" is the online Journal of the American Family Association. They even put my picture on the cover of their July 2006 issue , as an example of "sexual radicals who hate Christianity". While "hate" is a rather strong word, considering my treatment by the institution, you can bet I don’t "love" them. They are one of countless conservative and politically active groups using the term "family" as something that doesn’t include GLBT people, and scaring members by holding up their children as assumed targets of our imagined nefarious schemings.  The word "family" has been appropriated by conservative religious people as a code that means "NOT gay, lesbian or transgendered". Where once the word meant "mom, dad, brother and sister" to me, now it means "NOT YOU!", which is a terrible shame. And a terrible way to position another human being’s place in this society. Because, you see, we are not the monstrous aliens from some other dimension who hunger for the souls of your children, as conservative media personalities would have you believe. We come from you . In recent years, some lesbian women have chosen to bear children through various means, and some gay men have adopted. Some few GLBT people have children from previous mixed gender relationships. But for the most part, historically the GLBT community has not made up a large segment of the reproducing population. And even when we do reproduce, our children only have the same tiny percentage chance of being GLBT as anyone else’s. Most likely, we’re making more of you , not more of us. For the most part, we do not reproduce ourselves. We are not born from space pods, or made from string and twigs by witches. You , the average heterosexual gender-normative couples, make us. We are made up out of your offspring, and your families. We come from you. Yes, "families", that word from which they work so hard to exclude us. Every time you, your relatives, your friends, have a baby, you are rolling the dice and a small number of times out of every so many babies, a child comes who will eventually be attracted to members of the same sex or who will not fit gender stereotypes. This is just a fact, played out throughout recorded history and across the world in every culture. Not only were we once children, just like the precious ones held up as shields by the terrified parishioners who fund scare-tactic television ads and websites encouraging you to push us out of the fabric of society. But some of those little angels who play among your own children right now in school, church and the neighborhood are young gay, lesbian and transgendered human beings just like I and my GLBT friends once were. Some of your own children are young gay, lesbian and transgendered human beings, just as some are young heterosexual and young gender normative humans. As most GLBT people will tell you, we always knew something was different. We weren’t hetero-normative and gender-normative kids who decided at age 21 to become gay or to transition. We may have learned to fake it, or tried to suppress it, but most who I’ve met always knew something was going on. We were gay, lesbian and transgendered children, just as others were straight and gender-normative kids. Yet, we had birthday cakes with big wax candles in the shape of the #1, just as other kids did. We watched cartoons and wanted to eat too much candy. We studied for algebra tests, attended or rejected the prom and had all the same human moments that you all had, albiet with an added layer of strife due to the rejection of our sexuality or gender identity by society. We are not "the other", we are not monsters. We come from you. It’s a very simple thing, but it’s one that bears mentioning to the many who would "otherize" and demonize us as monstrous threats to "their" proprietary ideas of family and children. And it’s something that I must remind myself, too, when I look out my window now at the people walking down the street. I struggle with bitter knee-jerk thoughts of "are you the one who votes against me, or apathetically doesn’t support me? Are you the one who rejected me, mocked me and insulted me from childhood all the way up to now? Are you the one who lackadaisically sits in judgment of whether or not the things most natural and comfortable to me are acceptable to you in a social, workplace, medical, legal or entertainment setting, while your most natural and comfortable urges often get a free pass by your own religions and social systems?" I then have to remind myself to hope that these strangers are not a cruel, unified, hypocritical majority of "others", but that they are imperfect human beings just like me, and that I do indeed come from them, so there is a possibility that soemday they will see me as one of them. That I am still part of the human family, and that there is still some thin hope that the hypocrisy and hate will end one day.

It’s commonly held that critical feedback never has to hurt so long as you deliver it tactfully. Tact transcends all resistance. There’s a nice way to say anything. I live by that belief and promote it to my students. I tell them to assume that there’s nothing they can’t say to anyone as long as they just come up with the right way to say it. I encourage them to work lifelong on their rhetorical skills, to build their vocabularies, to aspire to the ability to run turn aside any resistance to get their messages across. Make it like a video game racing against time before the listener’s ears close, and against all the objections listeners might raise. Practice speaking truth to power, but speak as an influencer and not as a martyr. Martyrs speak truth to power and pay the ultimate price. But one doesn’t have to pay that price. There’s always a way to influence the powerful, changing their minds or at least keeping them from killing or firing you. That’s a game worth playing. At the same time I find myself feeling annoyed when people tell me I’ve lost a round of that game. Here I’ve tried to be tactful and they tell me it wasn’t good enough. They didn’t like my feedback or the way I delivered it, and they assume it’s the latter. Half the time they’re right. My impulses do get the better of me, and I need to think more strategically. But half the time it feels like they’re exploiting a blanket rationale for dismissing unwelcome feedback. Since they feel hurt, they automatically assume it means I failed to find a sufficiently tactful approach, and they therefore shouldn’t have to consider the content of my feedback. Such a policy excuses recipients from ever having to take responsibility for their resistance to feedback. It’s tact gamesmanship–a tried-and-true recipe for defense. I appear therefore to have double standard. Here I promote the tact game. I say the customer is always right and even if he isn’t you’ll do better if you assume he is. But then when a customer rejects my feedback, declaring it insufficiently tactful, I don’t automatically buy that assessment. I play the game–but when told I lost a round, I doubt the referee. Maybe it’s just that, a double standard. I wouldn’t put it past me to hold double standards, and being better at dishing it out than taking it in is a common one. That double standard whereby you hold different standards for yourself than for others is not OK. It’s something to work on. And yet it’s not a double standard if one holds different standards, not for people but for roles: As feedback giver, be as ambitious as possible in your search for the tactful way to convey your message. Since you search more ambitiously if you assume there’s something to find, always assume that a perfect way to say what you want to say exists. You need only look for it. But as the receiver, make the opposite assumption. Assume that the person delivering the feedback did a reasonable job of presentation–and that if it bothers you, it may well be because the content is genuinely something to think about. We like to pretend we’re always open to useful feedback, but that openness is at best ambivalent openness. Think about it. You’re cruising along on second nature, intuition, habits, and best effort. You do what you can to be nice and you do what you can to maintain the self-esteem necessary to keep from second-guessing yourself. You maintain a bubble of serenity and self-respect. And someone just comes along and pops that bubble, sticks a hand in, and rubs your nose on feedback that you’re not doing as well as you think. In principle you may welcome feedback, but that doesn’t mean it’s fun. With that in mind, as a recipient, take it in dutifully. Ingest it, unpalatable though it may be. Then wait a while before digesting it and deciding what’s nutritious and what’s waste by-product. Next week I’ll survey strategies for giving feedback effectively–speaking truth to power without getting your head cut off. These strategies all have strengths and limitations. None is a perfect surefire recipe for winning the tact game and influencing people, but they all can boost your chances when selected on the right occasion.

Along with my passion for science (say it with me, “SCIENCE!” Don’t you feel awesome now?), I have a passion for history. I love history books (yes, really) and history podcasts, and nothing is cooler than when Mr. SiT takes me to see historical stuff (well, ok, unless we’re going to a Natural History museum, those make me pretty hot, too). So when I talk about the Olden Days, I’m not just talking about the 1920’s. Sometimes I’m talking about the 1530’s (Tudors ROCK), or 1805 (Napoleon was pretty awesome), or even the era of the Byzantine Empire (why doesn’t anyone ever get my references to Justinian?). The machinations of the governments are not the only thing that is interesting to me. I love hearing about the way that people in history viewed aspects of science. Many of the biological processes and physical processes were always considered part of “science”, though sometimes the processes of the human body were lumped under medicine, and classified differently. What I find really interesting is the way the ancients (and not so ancients) thought about what we now call neuroscience. The inner workings of the mind, and how it can change, learn, remember, and screw up. Of course, ancient thinkers then did not think of the mind and brain as working together. Rather, the mind and the soul were lumped together, and didn’t reside in the brain. They resided…somewhere else. Sometimes it was the pineal gland , sometimes the passions were in the liver , and of course there’s the heart, which has held everything from love, to anger, to jealousy, and everything in between. Of course many of the things they thought turned out to be incorrect. But you never know, probably a lot of the things we think right now will end up being incorrect. But many of the ideas of the ancients are stunning in their clarity and logic, and most of them still affect us today. And so, in this post, Scicurious polishes up her rusty little Bachelor’s in Philosophy, and has a go at one of the most ancient texts in the history of Psychology, “On Memory and Reminiscence” by Artistotle, circa 350 BCE. (From Classics in the History of Psychology ) Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…