Anger Mismanagement

Outside of the worlds of cognitive psychology and behavioral economics most of what passes for conventional wisdom in the therapy world is little more than diluted and distorted ethics.

Since these precepts pretend to be scientifically valid, journalists often pick them up and present them as objective facts.

As I occasionally mention, David Hume famously showed that science does not contain an ethical dimension. It can describe what you did, not what you should do.

Today Elizabeth Bernstein tackles an intriguing issue: how best to express anger; as the saying goes, she punts. Link here.

I was somewhat hopeful when I started reading the article. Bernstein is correct to say that we learn to express anger by watching the way our family members express theirs. My hopes were dashed when she gratuitously added that the way to overcome parental influence is to have lots of therapy.

If it happens that your parents did not present a very good example of how to express anger, then the solution is to find someone better to emulate.

From there Bernstein presents the therapeutically correct way to express anger.

It makes you-- or, I should say, me-- want to rush to open a volume of Aristotle’s ethics.

Where the therapists are clearly in over their head, the philosopher did, literally, write the book on ethics.

When he addressed the question of how to express anger, Aristotle did not think in terms of what a person who had been therapied to within an inch of his life would do. He described how a virtuous person should do it.

Given that therapeutic correctness is enmeshed in a gauzy empathy, it sees the expression of anger as a productive moment in a relationship.

Given that anger, almost by definition, is hostile and aggressive, you have to wonder how the therapists could have decided that it is going to restore loving affinity to your relationship.

According to Bernstein the therapeutically correct expression of anger should lead to a hug. I would say that if it leads to a hug you have not expressed anger effectively… if at all.

We get angry because someone has offended, insulted, or demeaned us. Having been knocked down we want to get up, to assert our dignity, and that can only be done forcefully.

Do it nicely and you are not expressing anger. You are accepting the diminished status you have just been assigned.

Aristotle would have said that the failure to respond to an offense with the right kind of anger makes you subservient, even servile.

For now, let’s examine the therapeutically correct way to express anger, as Bernstein, relying on her “experts,” presents it.

First, she says, when you feel a rush of anger, you should take a deep breath.

Here, I concur, in part. It is often a good idea to reflect on what has happened, whether you are right to feel anger, and how best to express it.

Yet, the larger issue is when and how to express your anger. If the moment is right, you would do well to get angry. As the old saying goes: carpe diem. Procrastination is not always your friend.

It is not always right to get angry on the spot, but it is also not always right to sit back and think it over.

Second, Bernstein says that you should make an appointment to express your anger. She wants you to say that you need some time to calm down, and would like to find a convenient time to discuss the matter.

This is obviously wrong. If someone has disrespected you, you should not respond with a gesture of respect. That would feel like a reward. And why would you want to telegraph your punch, thus to put him on guard? This is beginning to sound like: Anger for Eunuchs.

If you make an appointment to tell someone something that he does not want to hear, will make him more or less likely to show up?

Third, the experts believe that your first move should be to excuse and explain yourself.

By that they mean that you should begin by saying that while you would normally shut the person out or get angry, this time you are trying to do things differently.

So, now we learn that the best way to express anger is to declare, from the top, that you are not going to get angry.

When you say that you are trying out a new technique, you are saying that your anger is less serious, more theatrical… even a rehearsal.

If you follow this step, you will have told the other person not to take your anger very seriously. This means that you are afraid of his reaction, and thus, are willing to accept subservience.

Fourth, you are supposed to tell the person that it takes courage to express your anger and you already feel badly because you know that it is hard to hear that someone is angry with you.

This tells you to open with an apology, accompanied by lots of ego massage. Again, we are in the realm of subservience.

So far, not a single angry word has passed your lips. You have shown yourself to be weak and pusillanimous, afraid of your own shadow.

If the other person has not yet started to laugh at you, the only reason must be that he is having too much fun watching your squirm.

Fifth, you can now express your personal feelings. Not your angry feelings... Heaven forfend. No, you must open up about your hurt feelings, thus continuing to place yourself in a feeling of weakness.

If the insult that has occasioned your anger was intended to weaken you, then, by expressing your weakness, you are embracing the lower status that the insult was conferring on you.

Besides, when you say your feelings have been hurt, you are appealing to sympathy and pity.

Still, no anger.

Sixth, you are now supposed to excuse the other person. Therapists recommend that you say that you know that the other person did not mean to hurt your feelings, and that you would like to give him the opportunity to explain himself.

But, what gives you the right to occupy both sides of the conversation? And how can you presume to speak for someone else? Are you that afraid of hearing what he might say?

Keep in mind that if you are not acting like someone who has been insulted, then your friend will be thinking that he did not do anything wrong. He treated you as servile because you are servile.

Besides, the last thing you want to hear is an explanation. You want to hear a sincere apology.

If the apology is accompanied by an explanation-- the Devil made me do it; I was having a bad hair day-- it is, by definition, insincere.

If you get the expression right, your antagonist will apologize, accept responsibility for what he said, not try to explain it away, withdraw it, and vow not to say it again.

At that point, you do not shower him with hugs and kisses. You forgive him.

The therapeutically correct way to express anger expresses no anger. Score one for the therapy culture.

In order not to wallow in despair, let’s turn to Aristotle’s view.

The philosopher makes two essential points. These concern the way a virtuous person can express anger.

First, like all emotions, anger can be excessive, deficient, or tempered. Not too much means that the anger should be directed toward the person who caused offense, and should not, in degree, exceed the severity of the offense. Not too little means that you there are times when you cannot and should not ignore offensive behavior.

Some people are irascible; they get angry too often for reasons that do not seem to pertain to the situation at hand. Others are diffident, they do not seem to know when they are being abused, so they absorb it and wonder why they feel like they lack self-respect.

In Aristotle there is no one-size-fits-all view of anger, and there is no single formula that tells us how to express it.

How should one express anger? Aristotle’s statement is classic: “The man who is angry at the right things and with the right people, and, further, as he ought, when he ought, and as long as he ought, is praised. This will be the good-tempered man, then, since good temper is praised. For the good-tempered man tends to be unperturbed and not to be led by passion, but to be angry in the manner, at the things, and for the length of time, that the rule dictates; but he is thought to err rather in the direction of deficiency; for the good-tempered man is not revengeful, but rather tends to make allowances.”

But how do you know what is right here? That, after all, is the fundamental question.

In my view, you have gotten it wrong if you have made yourself and your emotion the center of attention. You have gotten it right when you have directed attention toward the person who has offended you.

When anger is expressed effectively it will shame the other person, causes him to apologize, quickly, directly, and sincerely.

If he fails to apologize, that can only then mean that the offense was intentional, and that he will continue to treat you as subservient.

In that case, expressing anger is fruitless. It’s best to cease contact with the person.

Feeling Bored?

The Wall Street Journal describes them as “boredom enthusiasts.” Recently, they met in London to listen to William Barrett read a list of the 415 colors in a paint catalogue. He entitled his reading: “Like Listening to Paint Dry.” Link here.

To those of us who have spent too much time hobnobbing with artists, the exercise sounds like performance art. If your, like my, aesthetic refinement is of no use in judging whether Barrett’s performance is good or bad performance art, let’s take a guess and say that it sounds pretty good.

Those of us who have a more literary sensibility can regale ourselves with the idea that there is a list in listening.

Had Barrett’s performance taken place at the MOMA it would be high performance art, and Barrett would have been feted by the Tout New York.

In principle, watching paint dry means that you are gazing intently on a scene in which nothing is happening. Or better, whatever is happening is happening so slowly that you cannot really see it happening.

If that is the standard, then the list of 415 colors does not quite qualify as soul-deadening boredom.

If Barrett had pronounced the name of a single color… magenta or fuscia or blue… over and over again for several minutes, he might have been more boring and less artful.

But, then again, those of us who have not immersed ourselves in performance art are ill suited to pass judgment.

If you’re looking for real boredom, the kind that feels just like watching paint dry, you might want to screen a couple of Andy Warhol films.

As it happens, Warhol mastered the art of metaphorically watching paint dry in his films Sleep and Empire. Both are in real time. The first chronicles the movements of a man who is sleeping for a little over five hours. The second shows eight hours of slow motion footage of the Empire State Building.

I assume that Sleep is trying subliminally to get us to take more Unisom and that Empire deconstructs American imperialism… or some such thing.

Whatever it is, boredom seems to occur when nothing happens. It seems to afflict those who suffer from the sin of sloth, who are so thoroughly lacking in initiative that they do nothing but stare vacantly at their television screens.

If they have gotten beyond the television principle, to the point where they interact with their friends on Facebook or play video games, they will, as I see it, be less bored with their lives, less disengaged, less inattentive.

Which might be the reason why people like Facebook and video games.

Of the human emotions, boredom has never taken up too much space in psychological theorizing. Certainly, psychologists think that it is bad to be bored. They see it as a failure to engage, a failure to keep focused, and an inattention to one’s surroundings or activities.

In other words, psychologists see boredom as part of the complex of feelings that comprise depression. Since there are no pills or treatment programs that specifically address boredom, they prefer to talk about depression.

Apparently, people who are bored with everything, or who have made disengagement a way of life are more depressed and less healthy than those who are interested, attentive, engaged, involved.

But, you probably knew that already.

If boredom is a symptom, if it counts among the negative emotions, then we would be well within our rights to avoid it at all costs.

One way to do so is to be overstimulated. But if we live in a world where our sensations are constantly being bombarded with stimuli, where we do not even have the right to step back and take a deep breath, to clear our minds by thinking of nothing, then boredom might not be such a bad thing.

Stop the world; I want to get off. Perhaps just for a few minutes. If that is your goal, perhaps it is not such a bad thing  to listen to a man read a list of 415 colors. It might be somewhat akin to meditation.

I didn’t attend the London meeting of boredom enthusiasts. I only know what I read in the paper. So, for all I know, the meeting might even have been a step toward mindfulness.

Mindfulness is the a Buddhist-inspired state of mind where you put yourself totally in the moment by focusing on the constituent parts of an action or an object.

Under certain circumstances it might not be such a bad thing to stop time. If your life is laden with drama, then perhaps it is good to be able to step back from it all, to clear your mind, and to focus on a list of 415 colors.

If everyday life is full of insolence and insults, of rudeness and drama, of anxiety and despair, why not try to find a moment of peace and calm by involving yourself in an activity that is perfectly empty of meaning, that does not induce any interpretation and does not provide an emotional fix.

The culture seems to tell us that life should be full of surprises. Creativity should rule. We are suffering under the tyranny of the new, or at least, what we think is new.

If we follow the culture’s dictates, we will avoid routines and refuse to get bogged town by eating the same breakfast everyday and taking the same route to work.

In truth, loving spontaneity for the sake of spontaneity is one of our worst habits. It makes life chaotic, disorganized, and far more stressful than it need be. Because we have too much spontaneity, we need a moment to unwind, to compose our thoughts, to register and process what is happening. Some of us do it in a religious service; some of us go to museums; the rest of us get together with like-minded souls and listen to someone read off a list of colors.

A life filled with psychodrama is never boring. But it is never really engaging either. It’s a whirl of actions and emotions, leading to nothing very consequential, distracting us from the work at hand.

If boredom is the enemy of work, psychodrama is an even greater enemy.

Boredom is a kissing cousin of apathy. Like boredom apathy has gotten something of a bad reputation, since it has come to be identified with an I-don’t-care-about-anything attitude. People who are apathetic seem to be so self-involved that they lack empathy. We all know how bad that is.

But apathy used to have a better reputation… before, that is, it started getting involved in casual encounters with theologians and psycholgists.

Stoic philosophers glorified apathy and made it a positive goal. They believed that we needed to overcome the sodden weight of  passion (pathos) and emotion, the better to think more rationally about problems.

The stoics, bless their cold hearts, believed that if you had overcome emotion, you would think more clearly and make better decisions.

Maybe the boredom enthusiasts are on to something.

The Carnival of Negative Emotions

Life would be much better if intellectual debates were conducted with more rigor.

Thanks to Prof. Martha Nussbaum we now confuse disgust over certain (but not all) sexual practices with homophobia. Worse yet, we have been convinced that disgust and phobia are the same as hatred.

One might expect that a serious philosopher who studies the question of negative emotions would distinguish between them.

Disgust is fundamentally an alimentary emotion; it involves feelings akin to nausea and causes people to avoid or to expel any ingestible or ingested object that would damage their health.

It may be true that many people feel disgust at the image of genital-anal contact; some feel disgust at the image of genital-oral contact. Others overcome such feelings in order to pursue sexual gratification.

Such feelings do not make them phobic and do not make them haters. By and large the people who feel the most disgust at the pictorial representation of sexual acts are women. We do not want to say that women are bigoted against male homosexuals for as much.

And we do not want people to overcome disgust altogether. No one would suggest that people stop washing their hands after going to the bathroom, for example.

By definition, a phobia is an excessive fear of something you have every right to be afraid of. People are phobic about spiders, heights, crowds, enclosed spaces, snakes, and rats.

A person who is phobic about snakes or rats is not, therefore, a bigot. If you are afraid of snakes and rats, that does not mean you hate them or even that you want to destroy them. It means that you are going to make a very strong effort to avoid them. If you are phobic about heights, you do not hate tall buildings. You will simply make every effort to keep your feet on the ground.

Both disgust at contaminants and fear of dangers to one’s physical existence involve biological survival.

Disgust is therefore not a social emotion; it involves your biological organism.

When individuals or even groups of people are persecuted or scapegoated disgust is rarely the issue.

It is possible to conduct a human sacrifice and not hate the person you are sacrificing. What would the sacrifice be worth if you were not sacrificing someone or something of value.

To understand human sacrifice or a human holocaust we need to understand the workings of guilt.

Some people are scapegoated to placate an angry god. When a group feels that it is being punished for a crime, it will choose someone, or even a group of people, to accept the punishment, and to pay the price of the crime.

When people are punished for being unclean, this also means that they are guilty of having transgressed a law. I recognize that the rhetoric involves a promise of social catharsis, but I do not believe that the reaction concerns disgust, as much as it involves other negative emotions, like envy and resentment.

Along with shame, guilt is an emotion that involves socialization.

You feel guilt for transgressing a law and you feel shame for failing to uphold your responsibilities as a member of society.

Guilt and shame do not involve your survival. They ensure your social being. Being a member of a group requires you to obey the group’s laws and that to fulfill your responsibilities toward others.

If you fail on either of these accounts, you will experience shame or guilt, depending on the nature of the violation.

Among the negative emotions, anxiety belongs to the complex involving guilt. It should be distinguished from fear

You feel fear when in the presence of a real danger-- be it a bear in the woods or a mugger in the alley. You can choose to fight or flee or even freeze before a threatening object or situation.

Anxiety differs from fear because when you are anxious you are aware of having done something wrong, of having broken a rule, and you anticipate punishment. When you are afraid of being punished, you will feel guilt and will anxiously anticipate punishment.

Anxiety does have one thing in common with fear. It involves fear of physical punishment. Crimes are punished either by physical incarceration or the infliction of physical pain.

But guilt, as opposed to fear, has a moral dimension and a social dimension.

Shame involves an immediate recognition that you have failed to uphold your responsibilities as a member of the community. Whether that involves keeping your pants on, showing up at appointments, or fulfilling your responsibilities as a corporate officer, the feeling of shame alerts you to your failure. Shame shows that you have let down the group.

In a culture that emphasizes shame, punishment involves ostracism and shunning rather than physical punishment. A culture that cuts off the hands of thieves is not a shame culture.

These are hardly the only forms of negative emotions. If shame and guilt involve your social being, your membership in a group, another set of negative emotions defines your status within the group.

Within this category we find: envy, resentment, contempt.

Politicians who try to provoke class warfare often attempt to cultivate these negative emotions. They want you to be resentful or envious of those who are more successful than you.

While we tend to direct our envy and resentment toward those we perceive to be our betters, however, we reserve our contempt for those we consider our inferiors.

Class warriors do not limit themselves to envy and resentment. They try to turn these into contempt, by convincing the lower classes to look down on the upper classes. Where the lower classes, for example, earn their way, the upper classes cheat and steal. Where the lower classes contain a vital human energy, the upper classes are dead inside.

As I suggested the Holocaust of European Jews involved envy, resentment, and contempt more than disgust.

Another category of negative emotions involves self-regard. When you have an exaggerated sense of your own self-worth you are either arrogant or vain. When you undervalue your own abilities, you become demoralized or desperate or helpless. Evidently, much of what we call depression falls within the category of unreasonably diminished sense of self-worth.

We feel anger toward people who threaten our self-regard, whether they are threatening our face or our illusion of face. We express anger because we seek to defend our reputation and because we want to affect a reconciliation.

When anger fails and when the offense is egregious it can turn into hatred.

Hatred is not about defending our honor but about destroying the other person… for a crime real or imagined. It is more about rough justice than about asserting your dignity. It is more about righting a wrong you believe was committed against your person.

When you hate someone you want to destroy him, to punish him for a crime real or imagined, a crime that can only be expiated by his being punished.

This gives us three sets of negative emotions. Some negative emotions sanction the kinds of bad behavior that would threaten your membership in a social group.

Others tend to undermine cooperative enterprise by making you feel that when others are more successful than you they have stolen from you. Essentially, these pervert the desire to succeed.

Finally, another class of negative emotions involves misunderstanding your value, your ability, your station, and your status.

Can You Spend Your Way Out of Debt?

It’s has happened so often that it's becoming a cliché. A talk-show journalist, interviewing a Republican about budget issues, will always ask: But where will you cut?

You would think that these journalists are suffering from an advanced case of castration anxiety.

Not to be too Freudian about it, but many people understand the current financial crisis in terms of one or another narrative. We would do better if we also understand that narratives never tell the whole story.

Ethical principles, society’s core values, must count. More so now that the values we have been maintaining for the last few decades have now been proven to be unsustainable.

Take the narrative: Your child spends too much money and he calls on you to bail him out. If you say Yes, you are indulging his bad habits. If you say No, God knows what he might do to himself.

The good news is that every American has come to the belated realization that Ben Franklin was right about the value of hard work and thrift.

How did we lose touch with the old value system? Simply, the mental hygiene profession decided that hard work was self-destructive and that thrift was just a euphemism for repression.

It told us that happiness and good mental health depended on our ability to enjoy a life of leisure while spending our resources freely. By resources, the therapy culture meant your emotional and sexual resources.

Along with thrift, discipline became an obscenity. Thus, in the minds of television interviewers, fiscal discipline, to say nothing of the dread austerity, is simply going to immiserate the nation.

And this is not entirely wrong. Everyone knows that you cannot spend your way out of debt. You cannot keep borrowing on the chance that your credit line will hold up long enough for you to continue to keep making your payments.

And yet, going cold turkey on a spending addiction is not going to make you happy.

You may want to teach your child responsible behavior, but you would probably not cut him off completely and risk seeing him doing something drastic and irreparable.

Besides, if your child is profligate and intemperate in his spending habits, whose fault is it anyway? How many parents will rescue their children from their errant ways because they, the parents, feel responsible for not having taught them, the children, good behavior.

And how many of them will simply not be willing to risk what might happen if they say No. A child who cannot pay his debts might become homeless, might commit suicide, might rob a bank, might start dealing drugs, or might prostitute himself.

Call it tough love if you like, but a parent who gives in when faced with those possible outcomes is not being a moral sellout.

It’s a good thing to be against bailouts. From a moral perspective, they are clearly a step in the wrong direction. And yet, when it’s your child, and the alternatives are horrifying, which set of parents would simply say No, nothing… do your worst.

And yet, many parents do arrive at that point. After having their generosity abused repeatedly, they arrive at the last recourse… treat the profligate son as an adult and cut him off.

This will force him to learn responsibility the hard way. It will offer him a lesson in good behavior that he will long remember.

If he survives it, that is.

All of this to say that either our leaders will find moral virtue on their own or the markets will impose it on them.

We have lost track of the old virtues, of discipline and thrift, of earning your way and working for what is yours.

Our fiscal incontinence is hardly limited to the government. Household balance sheets are in a calamitous state, too.

This could not have happened if we had not, as a culture, decided that debt was not such a bad thing, because it could be redeemed by the joys of spending.

Express all your feelings, we were told, even if they are not really your feelings. More at home on stage than in the real world, therapists have been teaching people to emote on cue, to feel the feelings they are supposed to have, to feel the feelings that might be appropriate for the role they have adopted.

Just because you can throw yourself into a paroxysm of rage does not mean that the anger is really yours. If it has not arisen within the right context, then it is pure theatrical display, a form of emotional incontinence.

But once such displays become their own reason for being, once we all come to believe that expressing our feelings will produce some kind of emotional equilibrium and enhanced mental health, then we lose complete track of whether we can afford the expense.

By that I mean that we will not be trying to suit our emotions to the real world of our relationships. When our newfound willingness to let it all hang out seems to undermine our relationships we will double down, express ourselves more fulsomely, and turn ourselves into perfect drama queens.

Eventually we will be alone and isolated, self-absorbed and self-involved, having racked up a string of debts to all of the people we have offended and insulted. We will find ourselves surrounded by the rubble of the relationships we have destroyed and the pain we have inflicted on those who have cared for us.

Once you get to that point, the point where you have not just run out of money, but you have run out of other people’s money, you are going to have a very rude awakening.

Who's Smarter Now?

We all like to think of ourselves as well-informed voters. We weigh the issues, consider all sides of each argument, exercise our rational faculties, and arrive at a dispassionate judgment about where we stand.

And yet, we are not really the independent, autonomous individuals we take ourselves to be. We are social beings, people for whom membership in the right group can spell the difference between success and oblivion. Therefore, we suffer the influence of others far more than we would like to think.

In the Color War of American politics-- red team vs. blue team-- we are especially concerned with being part of the right team. The right team might be the winning team, but for many people it is the team that is associated with higher status and higher intelligence.

If you have allowed yourself to be convinced that the red team is filled with dumb and dumber rubes, you will be less likely to want to join. If the blue team, as liberal commentators and bloggers incessantly insist, is populated by brilliant, serious thinkers you will be happy to sign on and pledge allegiance.

In many of America's more serious precincts-- like Manhattan Island-- members of the red team find that their intelligence, their rationality and their character are impugned on a daily basis.

It is not an accident, and certainly not the result of deep reflection, that Manhattan Island is overwhelmingly liberal in its politics.

How do you enforce this level of intellectual conformity? By shaming, of course. People who inveigh against shaming as a social sanction are more than happy to call their political opponents illiterate, ignorant, stupid, ridiculous, and dumb.

And they often add a bit of character assassination: the red team is so stupid that its members have lost their rational judgment to the invading and occupying forces of dark emotion.

They are angry, enraged, irrational, and stupid. Why would you want to associate with such people, no less belong to their team?

Emotional incontinence is a character flaw. Unless, of course, it is demonstrated by a member of the blue team.

Remember the now famous rant by Mad Anthony Weiner on the floor of the House of Representatives. Mad Anthony simply lost it; he looked like he was going to have a stroke; he was foaming at the mouth about some issue or other.

Since Mad Anthony belongs to the blue team, his emotional incontinence was not a sign of weak character. It showed how deeply he felt about whatever he was ranting about. Truth be told,  the source of all irrationality lies with the red team. Thus, Mad Anthony lost control because he was frustrated by the obtuse failure of the red team to listen to the voice of calm reason.

More recently, comedian David Letterman, not exactly an intellectual titan,. told Jon Stewart that he could not imagine how Bill O'Reilly could believe what he says he believes.

Thus is a certain order and discipline enforced on the blue team. Letterman was saying that no intelligent person could believe the things that O'Reilly believes.

Don't ask who or what made David Letterman the arbiter of intellectual illumination. He belongs to the blue team, and therefore, his judgments are supposed to be coming down to us from a higher intellectual plane. He does not have to explain what O'Reilly believes; he does not have to explain why O'Reilly is wrong.

Fellow members of the blue team know that he is one of them. They are all, dare I say, in on the joke. Because it really is something of an in-joke.

While we're talking about today's politics, how would you describe the blue team approach to the election? One of their basic tactics is to tar the red team with guilt by association with Christine O'Donnell.

O'Donnell's intelligence is derided on a daily basis-- not always without reason-- to the point where anyone who utters a word of support for her candidacy will immediately be labeled an imbecile.

Derision, scorn, and ridicule count among the most important shaming tactics. They are politically effective.

Keep in mind, if you belong to the party of imbeciles your views are of interest only in so far as they signify your lack of intelligence. Beyond their value as symptoms, they should be ignored.

Given this aspect of political discourse, ask yourself this: which team would you like to belong to? The one that is led by a Harvard Law grad or the one that seems to be led by an Idaho State grad? Your choice.

And note this. When members of the blue team  exclaim their satisfaction at seeing the White House in the hands of Ivy League educated intellectuals, they are also saying that if these people can't get it right, then things have gone so serious awry that no one could ever get it right.

I have offered this prologue to introduce Charles Blow. In the New York Times this morning Blow begins his column by remarking that liberals spend considerable time and energy stigmatizing their opponents for stupidity and ignorance. Link here.

It's not exactly news, but it is somewhat surprising to see it in the New York Times.

Be that as it may, Blow's next point will surely come as an unpleasant surprise to many Times readers. He informs us of the inconvenient fact that the most ignorant and uninformed segment of the American electorate is... you guessed it... the Democratic base.

Blow does not have information about relative IQ or aptitude, so he limits himself to what he calls, felicitously, civic literacy. Which voters are better informed about basic political realities?

In his words: "The unpleasant facts that these liberals rarely mention, and may not know, is that large swaths of the Democratic base, groups they need to vote in droves next months-- blacks, Hispanics and young people-- are far less civically literate than their conservative counterparts."

Uh, oh.

As for the  "progressive" brand that these erstwhile liberals have recently adopted as their own, Blow remarks: "According to a Gallup poll released in July, most Democrats didn't even seem to know what a progressive was...."

Uh, oh. Somehow you start to think that these great progressive minds do not have a clue about how the majority of their fellow blue team members think.

Anyway, Blow offers some advice to Obama. If Obama wants to appeal to the Democratic base, he needs to stop appealing to their intelligence and start appealing to their emotions. He must excite them by manipulating their fear and anger. That way, they will be more likely to turn out on election day.

Given the nature of the blue team, Charles Blow is probably right.

[A warm welcome to those of you who have arrived here via Instapundit and Dr. Helen. My special thanks to Prof. Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen Smith for linking this post.]

Expressing the Feelings You Don't Feel

The concept has been around for a while. It has been studied in business schools. To my knowledge, it has had less influence on the therapy culture.

Coined by Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild, it is usually called "emotional labor." Links here and here.

Anyone who is in a service or sales position knows it well. It involves the fact that your job will require you to express feelings that you do not have.

When a client walks into a sales office the salesman must express some degree of happiness to see the person, whether he feels it or not. When a patient is in the hospital he expects the nurse to show some sympathy and concern, whether she feels it or not.

Of course, when you encounter a grumpy salesperson, you are not really concerned with whether or not he really feels what he is expressing. You are much more concerned with how well or poorly he is going to help you with your purchases.

As for the nurse, you certainly do not want your nurse to treat you with contempt or condescension, but you are more concerned is that she provides good nursing service to you. Since you barely know her, you are not all that concerned with how much she does or does not care about your health. You are more likely to overlook her failure to respond to your call if she is congenial, but the bottom line is that you are more interested in the quality of her care than in whether or not her expressions of emotion are sincere.

Sociologists and economists seem to believe that a goodly part of the business world runs on false expressions of emotion. If you cannot look happy to see your client, you are less likely to make the sale. Failing to respect emotional protocol is a breach of decorum.

The same is true with friends and family. Many times we know that we are obliged to express the right emotions to a friend or family member lest we be taken to be insensitive and boorish.

When your friend is grieving a lost love, you will not take the occasion to express how happy you are that he has broken up with someone so completely unsuited for him.

If this is true, then why are therapists spending so much of their time encouraging people to get in touch with their true feelings and to express them openly and honestly?

Are business transactions an orgy of inauthenticity, practiced best by people who are hypocrites and thespians? When we socialize are we systematically defrauding people by misrepresenting how we really feel?

I am not familiar with the work that has been done on this topic of emotional labor, but I would like to offer some of my thoughts on the topic.

As I was thinking it through, I recalled a rather dense, but exceptionally brilliant book by Saul Kripke: Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition. It is definitely an important book, but it is hardly an elementary exposition.

Following Wittgenstein, Kripke argues that emotions are strictly private matters that do not and can never be fully expressed through a public medium like human language.

When John tells Jim that he is angry, and Jack tells Jill that he is anger... we have no way of knowing whether John and Jack are feeling the same thing.

If John and Jack are both discussing a named individual, whether Barack Obama or George Bush, they will be referring to the same person. Emotions, however, are private and cannot be expressed fully through a social medium.

We cannot know that your anger and mine are the same, and the fact that we both display signs of anger and use words to let you know how angry we are does not mean that our different angers mean the same thing or have the same relevance.

What does this distinction add to our understanding of emotional labor? It tells us, first of all, that the underlying concept of expressing our true feelings is flawed. We often bring them into conversation, but the signs that we use to display them-- whether verbal or nonverbal-- are merely that-- signs, elements of communication designed to make a point about how we are going to behave.

If this is correct, then the concept of emotional labor is flawed by the assumption that we can somehow express emotions that we do feel. By expressing anger, we are not so much expressing an emotion, as showing that we have been offended and by declaring our intention to respond.

If  a man tells a woman that he is in love with her, he is not simply expressing a feeling. In fact, no one really takes a declaration of love as a mere expression of feeling. More normally, we take it as a long term commitment to the other person.

Most people have enough trouble knowing whether they are really in love. How do you expect them to discern someone else's feelings. In the end, what matters is what the expression says about their future actions.

Or look at the issue this way. When you receive a gift you normally send a thank you note. At least, you should, even when you are not exactly thrilled with the gift.

If you follow the thinking of the sociologists, you would believe that in order to send an expressive thank you note you need to take a course in method acting.

Because that would allow you to become (imaginatively) the person who really has the feelings of gratitude that you do not have. Then, you could write a fully expressive thank you note.

But that is patently untrue. Thank you notes are formal rituals. They do not require an excess of feeling. They need not, and probably are best not be filled with poetry.

A good thank you note is clear and articulate, to the point, and not overly banal and cliched. Choosing expressive language is more important than filling the page with lame expressions of deep feeling.

As one who believes that method acting has been the bane of American theater, the last thing I would recommend is getting so completely in character that you trick yourself into believing that your expressions of emotion are genuine, even where you have no real command of language or diction.

British actors have not suffered the influence of method acting, and therefore they have a tendency to express the right emotion without slurring their lines and eating half their words. They allow the script to communicate what it wants to communicate without getting in the way.

Theirs is a better way to learn emotional labor.

A Cultural Chasm between America and Turkey

Nearly seven decades ago the United States Army asked Prof. Ruth Benedict to prepare a cultural analysis of Japan. The Army was making plans for an eventual occupation of Japan and it wanted to have at the ready a serious analysis of Japanese culture: its customs and mores, the way people behaved in their everyday dealings; the way they conducted their lives.

The Army also wanted to know how Japan and America differed culturally. Knowing what to expect from the Japanese was one thing. Knowing how American soldiers and diplomats would react, quite another.

The result was a wondrous book called: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

This to introduce Claire Berlinski's jaw-dropping report from Turkey, the country she currently calls home. Link here.

If were to try to invent a culture where people live by the principles that define the therapy culture, I could not do better than today's Turkey. If it were not true it would, at the least, be a compelling fiction.

Since it is true, it is terrifying.

Imagine a world where Western notions of ethics do not apply, where people do not feel compelled to keep their word, where facts do not exist, and where truth and reality are what you feel at any particular moment.

As Berlinski describes it, business does not really get done in Turkey. People jerry-rig solutions to problems but do not expect that they will last.

No one keeps his word; no one thinks to keep his word. If you object to the fact that someone has not done what he has promised he will shower you with negative emotion about how you have offended him. People are consumed by petty emotions, to the point of being dysfunctional.

Since everyone lives in the same culture they do not know that they are dysfunctional. They are, however, deeply resentful and bitter about cultures that are functional, especially America and Israel.

When Turkish people insist on the importance of their honor and dignity, the claim is a joke. The culture does not value propriety or respect for the feelings of others. Screaming about your sacred honor counts for them as having a sense of honor. To us, it makes you look like a clown or a menace.

Take a look at some of Berlinski's comments:

1. "I live in Turkey. On good days, I love Turkey. But I have long since learned that its people are apt to go berserk on you for no reason whatever, and you just can't trust a word they say. As one Turkish friend put it...: 'It's not that they're bad. They don't even know they're lying.'"

2. "People here... see 'truth' as something plastic, connected more to emotions than to facts or logic. If it feels true, it is true. What's more, feelings her tend to change very quickly-- and with them, the truth."

3. "Arguing a mild difference of opinion by screaming and threatening would come across to Westerners as weak at best, lunatic at worst. Not here. No shame attaches to displays of anger that in the West would result in the issuance of restraining orders. The fights dissipate as quickly as they start; everyone proceeds to drink tea and moistly proclaim their mutual love."

4. "In Turkey, it is normal and expected to say that you will do something, have done something, or agree with something when, in fact, you won't, haven't, or don't. This is so common that no one thinks of it as lying, in the sense that it is not viewed as unethical. It is just being polite."

5. "The emotions are the facts. Stranger still, Erdogan almost certainly believes that the objections are rooted in envy. He too assumes everyone lives in a world like his, one in which the emotions are the facts, and it is not an incidental point that in Turkey envy is particularly important emotion. Envy of the West-- in tandem with envy's sibling, resentment-- has certainly helped define modern Turkey, so it could truly seem plausible in his mind, that the sentiment runs both ways."

Surely, Berlinski is correct to call the cultural divide a "chasm." Is it bridgeable? Are we trying through the therapy culture to bridge the chasm with foreign cultures?

Perhaps so. But that might also mean that we are headed in the wrong direction.

Keep in mind that Far Eastern Asian cultures place the greatest importance on the principles of good character. Confucius declared that keeping one's word was crucial to normal social intercourse. And the Japanese do business on a handshake. They place so much importance on trust that they prefer not to have lawyers draw up contracts.

If Turkey decides that it prefers to become socially and economically dysfunctional, there is probably little we can do to stop them. At the least, we should not even be tempted to follow them off that cliff.

Anger Management via the Treadmill

How are those anger management classes working out for you? And how are they working out for New York Congressman, Mad Anthony Weiner?

By now everyone has witnessed Mad Anthony's intemperate rant on the floor of the House of Representatives. When you were watching it, weren't you thinking that this man needs some anger management?

You don't have to answer that one, but it's a good way to introduce the latest scientific research on mood management. It turns out that physical exercise helps people to control their moods, up to and including anger. Link here.

Of course, this assumes that you feel that controlling your moods is a good thing. A lot of people don't. When Mad Anthony was offered the chance to apologize for his behavior, he refused, saying that he felt very strongly about... whatever.

If you want to have more temperate moods, then the treadmill will do you a lot more good than the couch. Strangely enough, if sweating on the treadmill tempers your moods, then spending too much time supine on the couch would, necessarily, make your emotions more volatile and your moods harder to control.

As the New York Times article reports, aerobic exercise combats clinical depression, makes you more confident and more focused, and helps you to manage your anger with more "aplomb."

Of course, if you have a problem with out of control emotion, adding a little coaching to the mix would probably be a good idea. But why deprive yourself of the benefits that the treadmill will provide to your mental and physical health... unless you have bought into the idea that the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling signals authenticity.

If you have bought into that notion of authenticity, I recommend that you sell it it immediately. Otherwise you risk morphing into Mad Anthony Weiner. Check out his performance again, and ask yourself whether you would be proud if that were you. Link here.

Does Generation D Listen to Emotion?

This morning Mike Dorning joined those of us who have been reflecting on the bleak job prospects facing the Class of 2010. Link here.

Now that the Class of 2009 has finally gotten jobs ... waiting on tables, there is not much left for the Class of 2010.

Discouraged and demoralized these new graduates are not just facing a difficult job market. The lost wages and the lost opportunities are likely going to impact their careers for decades to come.

Dorning also raises an issue I discussed in my last post on the topic (link here), namely the extent that the millennial generation (those born after 1980) supported President Obama. In the last election this group went for Obama 62%-30%. Now some of them are beginning to wake up; their support for the president has declined to 55%-37%.

But this leaves the larger question open. If we are going to label this group Generation D, as some have done, what does the D stand for?

Some have suggested that D stands for "digital," since the millennial generation grew up in a digital age and is far more tech savvy than any of the preceding generation.

But maybe D stands for depressed and demoralized, given how depressed these students are at places like SUNY Albany.

This morning, however, I received some anecdotal information, to the effect that Generation D is far more reliant on psychotropic medications than any other groups of Americans. Maybe D should stand for: drugged.

Surely, this is dispiriting. To think that the millennials are the most drugged generation, not in the sense of overusing banned substances, but in the sense of using medicine to control mood and emotion.

We are not talking about someone depressed being prescribed anti-depressants. The members of Generation D use drugs to maintain their moods, to keep their emotions in check, to get to sleep, and even to stay alert and awake. This goes well beyond the proper use of psychiatric medication.

Generation D stands out for having made psychiatric medication an integral part of everyday life.

To its detriment, I would say.

Whatever good these medications do, they can easily be abused. It's one thing to treat pathological depression and anxiety disorders, but it is quite another to use pills to stifle normal emotions.

The irony is rich, indeed. For more than a century psychotherapy has worked long and hard to help people to get in touch with their emotions. Now we are at a point where young people are using medication to repress their emotions, to distort them, and ultimately to ignore their messages.

I cannot help but think that if therapy had taught people how to deal with emotion, Generation D would not be demanding prescriptions for drugs that can repress them.

It is a bad day indeed when people listen to Prozac more than they listen to their own feelings.

Many of you know that I have very little sympathy for therapy that tries to help people to get in touch with their feelings. When I say that we need to learn how to listen to our feelings, I am referring to something else.

When you are walking down a dark street and feeling a premonition of danger, you can either search your memory for a past trauma that might explain why you feel afraid, or you can accept that your anxiety probably means that you are in some potential danger. In the first case, you would introspect and rummage through your past memories. In the second, you would take action to deal with the potential danger.

Therapy tends to favor the first approach; I favor the second.

Emotion is trying to tell you something about reality. Listening to it means directing your attention out of your mind and toward the real situation that might have provoked the emotion.

Emotion may not be telling you what to do, but it does tell you that you probably need to do something.

Normally the members of Generation D would be feeling some considerable despair and anguish over their future career prospects. If they heed their emotions they will be doing something to deal with the problem. If they have repressed their emotions they might feel complacent, to the point of saying that they can move back in with Mom and Dad and wait it out.

Consider this: during the 2008 financial crisis the administration point man was Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. And Henry Paulson was a Christian Scientist, which meant that he could not take medication to deal with the emotional turmoil the crisis provoked in him.

As we know from his memoir Paulson was, at the time, consumed with anxiety, to the point where he would have to excuse himself from meetings in order to go to the rest room to vomit. And we know that he also had trouble sleeping.

There are two kinds of anxiety that accompany a crisis. In the one case you might feel anxious because you cannot grasp the reality of the situation. For many people the financial crisis was simply too complicated and too intricate for them to understand fully. In the other case you might feel anxious because you understand fully what is going on and the situation is very, very bad indeed.

Let us place Henry Paulson in the latter category. His gut reflected his understanding of the danger the financial system and the country was facing. When he proposed the TARP program to deal with the crisis, he was listening to his emotion.

This does not mean that the TARP was right or wrong. It shows someone listening to his emotion and concluding that the crisis he was facing needed quick and decisive action.

"F*ck Feelings"

Any psychiatrist who has a sign on his office wall that says: "Thou shalt not whine" is clearly my kind of guy. Even if he went to Harvard.

For those who are curious, or even uncomfortable, with my critiques of the way therapy overemphasizes feelings, I am happy to refer you to a site called, "F*ck Feelings." Link here. At the least, it's refreshing. At best, it shows that I am hardly alone in noticing what is wrong with therapy today.

Thanks to Susan Walsh for tweeting about the site. Link here.

The Case of Phoebe Prince

Clearly, South Hadley High School student Phoebe Prince was bullied to death. Just as clearly, those who were responsible, both the bullies who tormented her and the authorities that ignored her plight, should be subject to appropriate opprobrium.

Now, as the story of Phoebe's last months and days is revealed in the press, other issues come to the fore. See articles by Donal Lynch in the Irish Independent, here and here, and Emily Bazelon's most recent essay in Slate. Link here.

It's one thing to be subjected to bullying. Another is not possessing the psychological resources necessary to deal with the situation. From reading about Phoebe Prince I am struck by her lack of what I would call psychological capital.

Some would call psychological capital self-esteem but this term has been brutalized beyond recognition. Others would call it self-confidence, a person's ability to stand firm in the assertion of her own value. It is created and supported by social relationships, by the sense of belonging to a group, by contributions to the good of the group, and by the feeling that one's membership is solid and inviolate.

You lose psychological capital when you are cast out of a group or treated like a pariah. But you also lose it by being too vulnerable and too exposed. A child who barely feels that she belongs will feel vulnerable to rejection and will lack the confidence to assert herself as a member of the group. The situation will be worse if she is new in town and does not know enough of the social codes to know what she should do to make herself fit in.

I daresay that a child does not have that much psychological capital to begin with. She will need to buttress her own developing resources by borrowing capital from her parents and family members. The better her relationships with them, the more capital they have, the more she will have.

As an outsider, a new arrival in South Hadley, a girl living only with her mother and sister, Phoebe was vulnerable. Her primary emotional support, her father, had stayed back in Ireland. Bullies sense out vulnerability and weakness. Once they find it they exploit it mercilessly.

Given the difficulties adjusting to a new culture, why was Phoebe Prince in South Hadley anyway? Why did her mother take two of her five children to America, leaving the older ones in Ireland with their father?

Here there are two conflicting reports. One suggests that Phoebe's mother, Anne O'Brien wanted her youngest children to see America. Anne's sister lived in South Hadley, so that was the logical place to go.

For my part I would dismiss that reason as a transparent attempt at dissimulation.

Others have suggested that Phoebe had been bullied in her high school in Ireland. If so, it would make some sense for her parents to believe that it was imperative to remove her from an unhealthy environment. The greater the distance, the better.

If that is true, then Phoebe's parents may simply have made a well-intentioned mistake. The worst part of the mistake was separating Phoebe from her father. From reading one of Phoebe's high school class assignments we get the impression that she was very close to her father. Link here. He was her rock and her refuge; he was her most important social contact. He would comfort her and protect her.

We do not know whether Phoebe's father could have protected her from the South Hadley bullies, but surely his presence would have given her the feeling that she was protected, thus, less vulnerable to the abuse that had become a painful part of her everyday routine. And this feeling of being protected must increase one's psychological capital.

In moving to South Hadley Phoebe lost her best conversations and found that life in an American high school involved manic texting and twittering.

In an essay where she extolled the value of her relationship with her father, she also described the shortcomings of "today's impersonal electronic society." In her words: "We no longer appreciate simple conversations now that we have twitter and facebook. Personally I can't believe that reading an email would have the same effect as speaking with someone face-to-face, making a moment."

If psychological capital is built by an accumulation of gestures that signify social connection, the "impersonal electronic society" would diminish psychological capital while creating a false sense of connection.

Feelings of solitude and anomie, not merely not belonging, but not even knowing how to belong, must be more powerful for a child who has been dropped into an alien community and alien culture.

Emily Bazelon offers a slightly different explanation for Phoebe's move to South Hadley. She says that Phoebe's parents had separated... which could mean that they were living separately, but which seems to mean that they had separated as a prelude to divorce.

Could it be that Phoebe's mother was so distraught over her separation that she wanted to have a fresh start for herself in South Hadley? Even if it cost her daughter her most important social tie, her conversations with her father.

Next we must ask whether the school contributed to Phoebe's loss of psychological capital by making her feel even more vulnerable and exposed, even more threatened with social oblivion.

I find something strangely disquieting about Phoebe's touching essay on her father and her iPod. It feels too personal, too intimate, emotionally too raw and vulnerable. Keep in mind that this essay was posted on her blog, for all to read, for all bullies to exploit.

A child who is developing psychological capital should become more thick skinned, not more exposed. Those educators who believe that their job is to provide a kind of rough therapy by helping children to get in touch with their feelings are doing them a serious disservice. Seeing the way it worked for Phoebe Prince confirms my judgment.

Perhaps this happens in all American high schools. If so, American high schools should get out of the therapy business and return to the three Rs.

While the school was encouraging Phoebe to expose her feelings, she was writing that what made her happiest about talking with he father was their discussions of politics. Would it not have been better if Phoebe was assigned essays on politics and history than on her intimate emotions?

Phoebe also posted a second essay on her blog. It is a book review of a book by psychotherapist Stephen Levenkron about girls who self-mutilate by cutting themselves.

Maybe I am just revealing my age, but has anyone asked whether it is appropriate for a child to read books about disturbing psychological conditions? Especially when she is likely to identify with the girls who tell there stories of depression, anomie, and self-abuse. Do we really want a high school girl to find herself among that group? Do we want her to discover a new way to deal with her anguish?

I hope that no one believes that such reading materials will be therapeutic, or that they will help a troubled girl get in touch with her feelings. Do we really want a girl who is lost and disconnected, subjected to psychological abuse, to hear some of her own darkest feelings echoed in the words of girls who self-mutilate. You build psychological capital by accentuating your good qualities, not indulging your darkest moods.

I am assuming, charitably, that her teacher did not assign this book. But I must assume that if it was the topic of a book review the teacher approved Phoebe's choice.

Think about it. If a child asks to review a book about self-mutilation would you not take that to be an alarm. In my view the minimally acceptable adult behavior would have been to refer the girl immediately for counseling.

From the evidence we have up to now, no one seemed to understand that a fifteen year old does not have the emotional capacity to deal with issues like self-mutilation. Nor, I would add, does a fifteen year old have the emotional capacity to deal with the aftershocks of hooking up.

Bullying and the Limits of Empathy

I have it on good authority that teenagers no longer talk to each other very much. They text. They text all the time; they text to people sitting in the same room; they text and text and text. It sounds to this older person like they are all suffering from textomania.

Texting is a form of communication. It might work well as an adjunct to face-to-face talking, but, once it becomes a sole means of connecting, the children who are doing it will naturally start losing any sense that they are connecting other human beings.

Once you learn that your fellow texters are not quite human, then it is easier to bully them. Given that bullying falls within the category of sociopathic behavior, it makes some sense to say that children who bully other children have no real empathy for their victims. So says Time Magazine, representing the wisdom of the psychological profession. Link here.

These reflections were provoked by the January suicide of South Hadley High School Student, Phoebe Prince. Link here.

When faced with adolescent bullying, what is the real issue? Are we being called upon to understand it, to discover its psychological origins, and to provide effective psychotherapy for both tormentors and victims? Or are we adults being called upon to stop it, to put an end to it?

The psychologists quoted in Time Magazine seem to be proposing a warm bath of empathy for all of those involved. They want everyone to do exercises in fellow-feeling, become more aware of their own feelings, and gaining a feel for the feelings of others. In other words, they are proposing psychotherapy.

Not psychotherapy for bullies-- because no one even pretends that therapy works on psychopathy-- but prophylactic exercises in empathy. They want us to teach young children how to feel empathy, so that they will not grow up to become bullies.

It's a nice idea. It makes you feel good. It is probably not going to work.

In fact, if you have a very refined sense of empathy, you might recoil at punishing bullies because you will feel badly for the pain you would be inflicting on them.

Empathy does not tell us what adults should have done when they discovered that Phoebe Prince was being bullied by a gang of 9 students. I can easily imagine that the counselors and teachers and school officials who heard Phoebe's story or witnessed the bullying, felt her pain. They are surely warm and caring people. And they may even have tried to understand it. They just did not know how to stop it. They did not even try.

For all its virtues, empathy says nothing about how to behave toward others. You can be filled with warm and fuzzy feelings toward others-- you can be genuinely feeling their pain-- and still act rudely. Through no fault of your own. All that time learning how to feel the right feelings was time that you did not learn the codes of proper behavior.

Of course, when you are unintentionally offensive, and the other person gets angry at you, you will not understand why they are feeling that way, and will tend to blame them.

As for teaching a child how to be polite and respectful toward other children, every parent resorts to some level of sanction. Hopefully, parents do not beat their children any more. But they certainly use mild forms of shaming: calling a time out, expressing disappointment at a child's behavior, and accusing the child of not acting his age.

These children would better learn respect through training in etiquette coupled with sanctions to punish bad behavior.

But, to do that, children need strict parents, not kindly, empathic therapists.

As everyone has noticed by now, one of the tragedies of the Phoebe Prince suicide is that the adults were not acting like adults. School officials may well have empathized, but they did not create an environment where bullying was forbidden and where the bullies knew that they were risking severe punishment.

Again, how do you put a stop to bullying?

Elizabeth Scheibel had one idea. As the local District Attorney Scheibel decided to indict the South Hadley 9 on criminal charges... assault and civil rights violations. I am not competent to judge the merit of the charges. And I am also not competent to tell you whether or not these students should be sued for the civil tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress. Link here.

These cases are difficult to prove, but that is not really the issue. Most importantly, in the absence of action by school officials, the case arrived in the legal system where the town had one adult who was willing to exercise her authority. Scheibel did not empathize; she stood up and said: enough is enough.

However the trials work out, now the South Hadley 9 have been publicly shamed. And not in the somewhat restrained way that parents shame their children. The indictments, representing community rejection of these children, punished their behavior with the strongest moral sanction, shame. They have been cast out of the community; they are now pariahs; their reputations have been seriously damaged.

As People Magazine reported recently, life has not been very good for the South Hadley 9 since their indictments. The community has turned against them. They have been harassed and tormented. One of them can no longer live at home. Another is terrified for his future. Some have received death threats. They are, dare I say, being bullied. Link here.

It should never have come to this. That it did come to this reflects the simple fact that, before Elizabeth Scheibel, no one in South Hadley took the problem of bullying seriously. No one seems to have recognized how wrong it was. And no one seemed to know how to make it stop.

Would the South Hadley9 have refrained from their bullying if they had been able to feel Phoebe's pain? And after all, they were trying to get Phoebe to feel their pain, the pain Ashley Longe had felt when her boyfriend left her for the new Irish girl. Their bullying showed an understanding of empathy; they were forcing Phoebe to empathize with them.

Or would they have been more likely to refrain if they had known that their behavior would subject them to criminal prosecution and ostracism? Would it have bee enough if they had known that bullying would get them expelled from school and that their school records would always include a note explaining why? Which one would have worked better to stop the bullying: a strong feeling for the feelings of others or a strong moral sense.

Overfeeling Parents

If it's possible to overthink a problem, then it should also be possible to overfeel it.

Meaning, that it is possible to take normal good feelings, question them, flay them to within an inch of their lives... thereby to diminish the everyday joys of parenting.

Take a normal parenting event. Last week Emily Bazelon described how she discovered that her 9 year-old son throws a baseball better than she does. He catches better than she does too.

She learned this when her son began explaining that she was supposed to catch the ball in her glove, not in her bare hand.

Worse yet, Bazelon learned that she throws like a girl. I hope she was not surprised. Link here.

Of course, this is a charming anecdote. But Bazelon is a writer and thinker, and did not want just to leave it at that. So, she questioned her feelings.

Her overfeeling began with a question: "How are you supposed to feel as a parent when your child surpasses you?"

She knows that she is proud of her son's achievements. That sounds normal enough. But then, overfeelingly, she submits her feelings to psychological litmus test. Are hers the right feelings? Are hers the feelings that experts think she should be having?

Here we see an instance where the therapy culture has worked its ill effects on human experience. What else would cause a normal parent to question her normal joy?

Joy alone is not enough, so Bazelon must confess to feelings of competitiveness. She is embarrassed because her son has to teach her how to throw and catch a baseball. Worse yet, she is slightly embarrassed that this same 9 year-old can beat her-- a writer, no less-- at Scrabble.

Why might Bazelon feel competitive when playing Scrabble with her son? Might it not be because Scrabble is a competitive game, and normally provokes feelings of competitiveness.

Given that the boy is her son, she has mixed feelings. When he boy wins, he is not just another competitor; he is also a teammate. When her child wins, she wins too.

Such common sense explanations do not seem to satisfy Bazelon's need to overfeel. She asks whether her competitive emotions have a deeper meaning.

And she answers by linking her feelings of competitiveness to the story of the Greek god Chronos, who devoured all but one of his children.

As you know, Freud, his followers and his detractors, taught us that the most horrifying mythic analogies are necessarily closest to the truth. Thus, Bazelon is indulging a mental habit that the therapy culture has taught us.

Obviously, the analogy is overkill, both mythic and rhetorical.

While it is true that some parents are threatened by the successes of their children, these are aberrations and exceptions, not the basic truth about human motivation.

Mythologizing emotion leads people to overfeel, to indulge feelings that have less to do with the situation at hand and more to do with wanting to belong to the therapy culture.

A day after Bazelon's column was posted, Samantha Henig responded and took the discussion to a stranger level still. Link here.

Apparently, Henig's mother taught her that parents should never take pride in their children's achievements. Her mother believed that "pride was just a way of taking ownership of your kid's success?"

This is simply silly. When you take pride in your child's success, you are happy to see your child accomplishing something on his own, and are justifiably proud that your considerable efforts are bearing fruit.

Henig, however, analyzes the life out of the feeling of pride and concludes that it is: "really stifled envy-- a way of turning that uncomfortable sense of competition into feeling better about yourself."

Translate "stifled" into "repressed" and you have yet another instance of the Freudian effort to demean and degrade human emotions. By this reading you can never ever be really happy for your child.

Is it any surprise that the therapy culture should have produced so much narcissism?

The truth is: parental pride, or disappointment, motivates children to compete, to succeed, and to excel.

Pride needs to be rigorously distinguished from love. Parents love their children regardless of whether they succeed at school or on the playground. But they feel pride when their child learns to throw the ball or does well on an exam.

Without that pride a child will not be motivated to work hard to succeed. And he will not be able to feel that he really owns his success.

The Power of Negative Thinking

Time Magazine calls it the newest thing in psychotherapy. No longer should you try to puff up your self-esteem by self-cheerleading. Do not try to replace your negative feelings with positive ones.

No, you must embrace your negative thoughts and feelings. Get comfortable with the fact that you suck. Overcome the impulse toward "Yes, I can." Now your new therapeutically-correct mantra will be: "Yes, I suck." Link here.

Clearly, this is intended as a corrective to cognitive therapy. According to Time, cognitive treatment tries to change "self-defeating attitudes into constructive ones."

Apparently, the cognitive approach needs correcting because when you tell someone whose self-esteem is on life support that he is wonderful, engaging, brilliant, talented and competent... lo and behold... he does not believe you. In fact, he thinks you are patronizing him and insulting his intelligence. He might even imagine that you do not even know who he is. Thus, he ends up feeling worse.

Dare I say that this represents a caricature of cognitive technique. Cognitive therapy uses many different techniques to invite the patient to re-evaluate his sense of his own self-worth.

Is he correct to think that he is worthless? Does the evidence of his experience support that judgment? Or are those thoughts about self-worthlessness merely a mental tic?

Cognitive therapy emphasizes balanced judgment. It tries to show that while there might be good reasons to think ill of oneself, there are also reasons to think well of oneself. To me this does not seem to be quite the same thing as giving dishonest pep talks that attempt to invalidate negative emotions.

All of these techniques have a problematic side. They tend to imagine that it is all in your mind.

This is the message that the new issue of Psychology Today is touting in its cover article about jealousy.

It is saying that when you feel jealous you must look inside yourself, the better to overcome your insecurities and your feelings of not being sufficiently lovable.

But what if the emotion has something else in mind? What if every negative emotion is not an invitation to do more therapy?

Perhaps your negative emotions are not inviting you to do mental gymnastics to develop one or another mental muscles. Maybe they are directing your attention outside, into the world, into your life.

How many times have you heard of people who were feeling jealous, and who were told that they were delusional? Many of them were instructed to get some therapy to get over their negative emotions and to open their hearts to love.

Now, ask yourself this: how many of these people subsequently discovered that they had good reason to be jealous?

My last post was about whether or not coaching works. In researching this post I fell upon another article from Time Magazine, from a few years ago, that explains some positive results produced by a new therapeutic technique. Strangely enough, this new technique resembles coaching.

According to Time, research performed at the University of Washington concluded, as follows: "Among more severely depressed patients, behavioral techniques like setting up new routines and scheduling activities worked as well as an antidepressant and significantly better than cognitive therapy." Link here.

"Misery Poker"

When you learn a new skill you naturally want to show it off. Why spend all those hours mastering the skill if you are going to keep it to yourself.

If other people have acquired the same skill, you will naturally want to compete with them. You gain confidence by pitting your skill level against theirs.

When people go into therapy they are sometimes told to say whatever comes to mind, regardless of the effect it has on their listener.

Of course, this is abnormal, and, dare I say, socially dysfunctional behavior. But once you learn it, the chances are very good that you are going to show it off to your friends and family. What is the point of spending so much time learning to free associate if you have to repress it before you go out into the world.

Besides, therapy has declared that when you do not speak whatever is crossing your mind, you are self-censoring. It adds that self-censoring is contributing to your emotional distress. Doesn't this mean that verbal incontinence-- to call it by its real name-- is therapeutic.

Many forms of therapy also promote another dubious social skill, an offshoot of free association, called complaining.

In fairness we should note that some therapists have understood the danger involved in encouraging people to complain all the time. They invented solution-focused brief psychotherapy. When you are focused on solving your problems you are less likely to imagine that you will gain psychic benefit by exposing your psychic pain to the world.

I would add that cognitive and behavioral therapies also do not encourage people to complain about their problems.

Yet, traditional forms of therapy, the ones that have produced the therapy culture, have told people to express their feelings. If a sufficiently empathic therapist commiserates, then the patient would presumably be cured.

In some offices this process passes for a human connection.

When I practiced therapy I noticed that some patients believe that they must bring a passel of complaints to every therapy session. They have been persuaded that they would not be playing the game properly if they came to therapy to discuss things that were going well.

The source of this bad habit seems to lie in the confessional, of all places. You would no more go to confession and say: "Bless me father, for I have not sinned" than you would go to a therapy session and announce that you had done a great job dealing with your problems. You would feel that you were wasting your time and your therapist would accuse you of not addressing your issues.

This lengthy preamble to introduce Elizabeth Bernstein's Wall Street Journal article, "Misery Poker." Link here.

Bernstein begins by declaring: "Misery once loved company.... Venting helped people bond and made them feel better."

In other words, in the old days complaining was therapeutic. Or at least we thought it was. Last I heard, the nation's physicians wrote 120 million prescriptions for anti-depressants last year, so, perhaps commiserating did not make us feel that good.

Anyway, Bernstein makes an important point when she notes that this therapeutic palliative has ceased to work. "But as times get tougher complaining is starting to look more like a blood sport than a coping mechanism. Stressed to the max and desperate for everyone to know it, many of us are trying to trump each other with our carping.... Instead of sharing our misery, we seem to be using it as a competitive mechanism."

So, therapy taught people a coping mechanism. When they discovered that it no longer works, they assumed that they were not doing it well enough. Thus, they tried to hone their complaining skills by competing with others.

Now you can regain your mental health by mastering the skill of whining.

The therapy culture should feel proud.

Is Venting Therapeutic?

Today they call it "critical incident stress debriefing." As therapy for trauma, debriefing instructs victims to recall the event, to recount it in detail, and to vent the proper emotions.

This technique echoes Freud's initial attempt to treat hysteria. With one difference. Where Freud's treatment involved remembering forgotten traumas, debriefing involves traumas that are fresh in memory.

Still, debriefing owes a debt to Freud. It follows his lead in suggesting that the effects of trauma can be mitigated once the event is narrated with sufficient anger and anguish.

By now this has become the commonly accepted approach to dealing with trauma.

Any time a trauma victim appears on a talk show or writes to an advice columnist or is depicted in a television drama, someone inevitably declares that the person must seek counseling to talk it over, to work it through, and to vent intense emotions about it.

All of which begs the question: Does it work?

A recent research project led by Dr. Mark Seery from the University of Buffalo suggests that it does not. An essay on this research is posted on Psyblog. Link here.

Studying the effectiveness of debriefing in cases of traumatic stress, Dr.Seery discovered that victims who kept silent were more likely to do better than those who had expressed their feelings and told their story. Venting was most often associated with a worse outcome.

Psyblog offers one correct explanation. Debriefing mistakes a metaphor for reality. Based on the assumption that negative emotions build up in the mind like compressed gas, debriefing suggests that if they do not find a release valve, they will eventually explode.

Other therapists have gotten beyond hydraulic metaphors, only to fall into a different mistake. They assume that trauma produces bad ideas, thus mental toxins. Then they propose removing those toxins by attaching them to a story and expelling the whole mess orally.

All in the interest of another metaphor: mental hygiene.

We can also consider that if trauma injures by demoralizing, thus stripping away human dignity, perhaps the correct response is to cover up, not to open up.

When a trauma victim tells his story and vents his emotion he is not asserting a better version of himself. He is using the trauma to behave in a way that he would normally consider beneath himself.

Psychologists have known for some time that venting anger is countertherapeutic. The immediate cathartic rush always yields to feelings of emptiness and foolishness.

These begin the minute the venting individual takes a step back and starts saying to himself: What was I thinking?

Exposing yourself as a trauma victim and making a display of your private emotions is indiscreet. It runs counter to the ethical principles that guide our lives.

I would explain Dr. Seery's results by saying that a person who acts ethically under the stress of trauma is on a better path to overcome its debilitating and demoralizing effects than is someone who uses the occasion to compromise his principles.