Well, that’s the end of my Psych journal. I just sweated through the take-home final and turned it in yesterday. I’ve read all of the chapters assigned in the book (less about thirty pages sprinkled throughout) and done all of the assignments, so I think I did pretty well. Actually, my daughter figured it out for me: I got full points for all of my homework, I did a total of fifteen points extra credit, and I get five points of extra credit for perfect attendance (ok, I was late one day). I only missed three questions on the mid-term, so that’s an A. The final itself is only worth 20 points, and I have that in the extra credit, so I could fail the midterm and still get an A in the class. No, that didn’t keep me from doing it. It was the first test I can remember taking where I had trouble figuring out which questions NOT to answer (we were only to answer 5 out of 10).

I didn’t mention the gold star. I got a gold star for turning in all of my homework assignments! Can you believe it? It made my whole day! Programmed from kindergarten, I just love gold stars. I think my mom still has all of the little strips of paper with the stars on them (or lack thereof), documenting my behavior for the week. Isn’t it funny how such small rewards can mean so much? I wasn’t the only one who was thrilled. My best friend in class got one, too. Imagine a guy built like a linebacker bubbling over his gold star! He said it was better than finding ten bucks on the street. I feel sorry for the home-schooled kids who never experienced the exhilaration of the gold star. The only sad part was that we had to turn in our assignment sheets (with the gold star on it) along with our final, so I’ll never see it again.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve heard my gripes about our textbook. I’ll have to admit, though, that I actually liked arguing with it. It really made me take a look at what I believe about the way the human mind (mine specifically) works. There was a lot I disagreed with, but there was a lot of good points, too, some of which I needed to be reminded about. The teacher is great and the class was fun. It was the most work I had ever done to have that much fun, but it was well worth it. It was a little odd being the oldest one in the class (after attrition had taken it’s toll), but I don’t think anyone held it against me. I still don’t feel a day over 26 (except when I wake up), so I don’t see any reason why I should act it. With any luck I will remain 26 well into my sixties!

There was a poem at the end of the book by Channing that got badly misquoted. Since he is one of my favorite poets, I will conclude this post with the complete text of his poem.

My Symphony
By William Henry Channing (1810 - 1884)

To live content with small means;
to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion;
to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich;
to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly;
to listen to stars and birds, babies and sages with open heart;
to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never.
In a word, to let the spiritual,
unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common.
This is to be my symphony.

“I want you to draw a picture for me, anything you like, and then we will talk about it afterward.” My eight-year-old fingers grasped the oversized crayon as I drew a picture of a tree, grass, a bird and the sun. One cloud floated in the opposite corner, well away from the shining sun. My mother would have said it was a pretty picture. My therapist said quite a few other things, analyzing what all of my symbology meant to his years of training and experience. That was kind of thing I thought I might find at the Discover and Experience Process Painting seminar at the JFK University Campbell’s open house event. I was very wrong.

“I am not unique. I am not gifted. I am not talented… but I can do THIS!” proclaimed Maria Mattioli, M.S., MFT, the lecturer of our seminar. She shared with us her personal journey of self-discovery through the practice of process art. We saw a number of her paintings which, contrary to her statements on her talent, I thought were quite impressive. She described herself as an “art appreciative;” someone without any formal training who enjoys art and “knows what she likes when she sees it.” She works with high quality tempera paints on plain drawing paper, using her closet door as her easel. She paints about once a week, working on one painting at a time until its completion. She works while the art flows from her, stopping when the process gets blocked. She said she “cultivates” the mindset to allow her the freedom needed to work from her subconscious. She challenged us to “respect the flow of what you are doing,” and to “let the art direct itself.” Don’t worry if you seem to get stuck in a rut. Repetition, she said, is your subconscious trying to become an expressive form that keeps getting blocked. “If you keep painting the same flower over and over again, it means there’s something that’s not getting properly expressed… so keep painting flowers!” She warned us that you should never rip up your paintings or start over if it isn’t working out for you. That invalidates your feelings and plants in your mind “that what you are doing is not worth shit. (This is a college campus. You can say ‘shit’ here, can’t you?)”

When I asked her if we were going to analyze our pictures, she said, “The less you try to analyze your painting, the better off you will be. Analyzing invites the judging mind and wrecks the process.” She did admit that symbology, often recurrent, shows up in her paintings. She had many examples of her work hanging around the room from the time surrounding her mother’s death. Skeletons, the symbol of her attempt to deal with the reality of death, appears in almost all of those paintings, most prominently in her self-portrait from that time, which is her depicted as the skeleton. Sometimes it takes a while for her to understand why certain things show up in her work. For a while she was painting tropical scenes, seeds and other growing things. It wasn’t until a year later that she realized these growth forms were symbols of her internal struggles with her own fertility and whether or not to have children. Even so, she emphasizes that looking for meaning in the paintings is not the point of process painting. The idea is to become more in touch with the inner workings of your own mind. “When you become more integrated, more of a whole, you go out into the world in a whole new way… You have more confidence in yourself as a whole to deal with the things you find there.”

We were each given a piece of paper, along with a backing board to make it easier to write on. Oil pastels and wax crayons were passed around the room for everyone to choose their favorites. The woman next to me said that she wished she had closed her eyes to choose her colors, so that they wouldn’t interfere with her drawing. I saw the wisdom of her thoughts because I had naturally gravitated to my usual palette of blues and browns. Since these colors already have associations for me, it had the ability to direct my drawing.

The idea of process drawing is to allow yourself to draw without inhibitions or preconceived notions of what the drawing should be or look like. You are to draw “as a child would draw,” allowing the form to flow freely from your subconscious, without making any judgment about whether it is “good or right.” Most children start out this way, but as they grow older, they are told things which hold them back. They are told that their drawings don’t look as they should, or that the content isn’t acceptable, or that they have no talent. It is these critical judgments internalized that prevent people from being able to express their inner self through art. The trick is to get outside the “judging mind.” If you stop to criticize, find fault, or evaluate the work, you have lost the subconscious mind’s flow. The judging mind also causes creativity blocks. You may lose confidence in yourself, doubting your ability to paint or the worth of your efforts, even in doing the painting at all. Also, people often have a preconceived notion of what the drawing “should” look like before they begin. When the painting starts to change from what they had envisioned, they try to “fix” it or get frustrated with their perceived incompetence. They try to direct the painting, rather than letting it flow naturally. If you “try” to make something, the freedom of the process breaks down. The idea is to allow the painting to direct itself, “as if you had all the freedom in the world.”

After we had received our supplies, we were led through a relaxation exercise. With eyes closed, we took deep breaths, exhaling the stress in our bodies and quieting our minds. Once we were properly relaxed, we were directed to “begin with a very little something.” She said, “You have to start where you are… with your dot or your line, and allow your internal voice to have an expression.” I looked at my paper, and immediately decided that was a bad idea. My mind filled with pictures of what I “should” draw. I closed my eyes and focused again. Without opening them, I began to move my crayon around the paper, just making marks that felt good. By not looking, I didn’t worry about what I was drawing or how it might appear. Once I had loosened up a bit I opened my eyes again. I found a group of upward facing wavy lines, very different from what I had thought it might look like. I discovered that I had kept track of the lines and had a preconceived notion of what I thought it must look like. I had expected to see something like a tree, but what appeared was much more like a flaming torch. Again I had to refocus to get away from my preconceived ideas. What happened next surprised me. In the lower left corner of the paper I felt the desire to draw a circle. As I was drawing, the circle kept expanding and redefining itself in my mind. I could almost see the image drawing itself with my crayon trailing behind, making the image more prominent upon the paper. When that form had run out, I found that I had another desire to make a different image in the upper right corner. This turned out to be a series of zigzag lines following the widening of the corner toward my central design. I felt satisfied with that, but we were encouraged to keep our drawing implement moving. If we stopped drawing, there was a likelihood that our conscious mind would kick in, bring with it the evaluations we have been trained to use. By continuing to draw, even if we don’t have any direction, the creativity continues to flow, without giving yourself time to think about it. I went to the lower right corner and just started scribbling. To my surprise it looked just like the kind of grass I used to make in my childhood pictures. My mind was pleased and called it grass, and I drew some more. That left only the upper left corner. I put my crayon there, but couldn’t think of what to draw. Then I realized I was letting my thinking get in the way again. I refocused and just started moving my crayon in a way that felt good again. This scribble took on a likeness of a bird in flight, and my brain labeled it “bird.” The bird didn’t surprise me, as they are a recurrent theme in much of my work. What bothered me was that it had no eye. I had done an entire series of unicorns in junior high during a period when I was becoming increasingly introverted. I had taken to “playing deaf” when other people spoke so that I wouldn’t have to deal with them. None of the twenty-some unicorns had ears, and, although it wasn’t intentional, it was indicative of my feelings at the time. I was going to draw the eye in it’s logical location, but I realized that would defeat the processing nature of the drawing again, and I was beginning to enjoy having the drawing surprise me. I refocused and left the eyeless bird alone for a while. I added some more lines to my formless central drawing and some left and right curves in my circle, as dictated by my mind’s whims. I then felt that I should switch to the other color I had chosen. At first I just started following the lines of the previous color, but eventually new forms started appearing. Probably the best moment for me was when I looked at my bird-form and suddenly saw where the eye went and what it would look like. It was almost like tracing a line that had already been drawn for me, and it looked and felt “right” when I did it. It was much better and more natural than the one I would have drawn simply because I wanted the bird to have an eye. It actually belonged there. I have only one forced part of my drawing. A dark line, an extension of the upper right corner’s zigzag, touched one of the lines from my central figure, which has gone back to looking something like a tree on fire. I attempted to “fix” this problem by blending it with its connecting line. It is the only part that I don’t feel satisfied with. Yes, that’s the drawing in my portrait space. Sorry it’s so tiny, but it doesn’t loose much in its small size. The original was 10X16.

Another thing that startled me about this exercise was that, while I could, to a degree, suspend my judgment about my own drawing, I was still quite critical of my neighbor’s drawing. She drew a large black tree with an X through it while small, tortured looking stick figures crouched near its roots. I thought, “Wow! My old therapist would have a field day with that one!” I felt that she must have forced the drawing and that the X was correcting the “mistake” of the large tree. I was brought back down to ground when she voluntarily announced to the group that she was really quite pleased with the results of her picture. I was sure that she would have been upset that she had made such a large “mistake” that would have “destroyed” her drawing. Clearly I was wrong altogether, and I made a note to review how I wish to think about other people. That one slip-up on my part I found very revealing to me. I must work on my judgmental attitude.

Not everyone seemed to understand the concept behind process art. One woman I spoke to afterward said that she was very disappointed that she “couldn’t draw a leaf the way (she) wanted to.” She showed me her drawing and expressed her frustration that her leaves all looked like feathers when she was “trying to draw leaves.” I tried to explain to her that the point of the exercise was not to “try” to draw anything, that maybe her processing needed her to draw feathers instead. She angrily informed me that she wanted to draw leaves, so rather than have her angry with me as well as her drawing, I gave her a few pointers on how to draw realistic looking leaves. I figured that I wasn’t likely to get through to her any time soon if a professional couldn’t, and the tips made her happy. I spoke to another student whose drawing I had seen when we were cleaning up. I told him how impressed I was with his drawing and how the rips that had formed in the paper during the process, I considered part of the art (he had complained about his “being too rough” with the media during the process). He responded by signing his picture “RT07” and giving it to me. We had been told that we should keep the drawings that we had done tonight because we would want to look back on them. (Our speaker has never thrown any of her paintings away.) I tried to encourage him to keep his drawing for future reflection, but he was quite insistent. His drawing shows an excellent use of the media and dynamic expression, with multiple layers of images showing through each other. It is a very good piece, but I’m not sure what to do with it.

I stayed for a time after the lecture. There was a pitch afterward to go to the school, but I don’t have an interest in being an analyst of any kind. I still get bored too easily, so I waited in the hall for a while, hoping to ask Mattioli a few questions reguarding process painting on an individual’s self esteem. Unfortunatly for me, it was getting dark and I had to head home before she emerged. If you ever get a chance to attend one of her lectures though, I would highly recommend it. You might well be amazed at what you get out of it!

Depression, loneliness, and boredom are some of the modern man’s most vexing ills. The more acutely felt, the more likely the person is to withdraw from society. I’ve been there. With all the worries of the world weighing on your shoulders, about the last thing you want to do is go out and help your fellow man, and why should you? Haven’t they all abandoned you in your time of need? Actually, no, they haven’t. You have abandoned them by crawling into your shell of self-pity and despair. You may have even roughly sent them away in your fit of melancholy. After all, they might have cheered you up when you have so many more unhappy thoughts left to dwell on. It might be time to make it up to them. What? You’re too despondent to reach out to others? Unless you are really enjoying wallowing in your misery, helping your fellow man is the best way out.

When my husband left me, I was destitute. I really didn’t want to live. I mostly lay on my bed and cried. The more I thought about how horrible the whole thing was, the less I wanted to do anything else. I had a built in catch. I had a baby to take care of. She would toddle in and tug on my shirt. I would do whatever she needed from me, then go back to my morass of misery. Then one day she needed something that wasn’t a clean diaper or food. She needed a hug. I gave her one, and she gave me a new start in life. By focusing on her needs and others’ around me, I brought myself out of the downward spiral I had cast myself into.

When my next relationship burst into flames, I vowed that I wouldn’t spend a lot of time feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t. I spent most of my time being angry and badmouthing him to all of his friends. A funny thing was that, not only did I not feel any better or become any more productive, I made a lot of enemies that would have otherwise been my friends. While I was still floundering around, trying to figure out how to deal with my feelings, I met David. He was exactly what I needed at the time. He had a short tolerance for slander and a great capacity for charity. He gently reminded me that I had focused on the needs of others to get out of my depression the last time. It would work again. Now that my daughter was older and in school, I had too much time on my hand for self-indulgence. He took me to a homeless shelter in his area and informed me that there were people who could use the vast amounts of energy that I was currently using to keep myself inundated with gloom. My first job was to find a seven-year-old girl a pair of shoes. Better than that, I discovered a pair of Beauty and the Beast shoes just her size in the bottom of the donation barrel. She gave me a hug and ran off with her mother. I would have cried, but there was an elderly woman who needed a dress for an interview. The blue one looked especially good on her, and we even found a matching purse! I turned around and a man had brought in his three children to get school clothes. I was beginning to get good at this. I found them three “new” outfits each, plus work clothes for dad. I was about out of steam when it was announced that they needed someone in the cafeteria. It took me a few tries, but I actually did learn how to pass a bowl of stew under a sneeze shield without spilling. It took me a little longer to look at the person to find out if they actually wanted stew. By the end of my shift, I realized that most of the people were greeting me as they went by. Some even asked me if I was new and if I was planning on continuing to work here. I was stunned that they noticed me as more than a bowel of stew. I helped hand out blankets to those who were staying at the shelter and told a story to the children before bed. David took me aside when I was done and we had a long talk about what it means to be human. By the end of the day I was exhausted, but pleased. I went home and hugged my daughter and went to bed.

The next morning I got out of bed, but somewhere between the shower and the front door I remembered that I had been rejected again. I saw my daughter off to school and went back to mope in my room. Less than an hour later, I got a call. David said that he needed help washing and sorting the new donations that had just come in. I told him that I wasn’t up to it. I had helped yesterday, wasn’t that enough? “I don’t know. Are you still depressed? If so, then it wasn’t enough. Now get down here.” I went and had a wonderful time. I washed clothes and toys, changed linens, served lunch, and read stories to the preschoolers. After three days of this, I started looking forward to getting up in the morning. I would race to the shelter to see what they needed me to do today. I knew many of the clients of the shelter on sight, and a few even by name. The kids were glad to see me and eagerly gave me books to read to them. I was actually having fun. I had to quit in order to get a paying job, but I’ll never forget how wonderful these people were to me. Yes, I was the volunteer, there to help them, but I was the person who got the most help.

A year later I went to hike with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in order to raise money to fight these cancers. It was slightly more than a passing thought that I might meet someone new through this charitable organization. I liked helping people, and it would be nice to find someone with a similar disposition. It worked, after a fashion. About half way through training for the even, I got together with one of the kindest men I know. He wasn’t with the organization or going on the hike. He was someone I had known all along, but never really talked with much. While I was asking for donations, I mentioned that I needed someone to hike with in the local area. He volunteered and we got to know each other through the trails around the Silicon Valley. Before I left for the hike, we had formed a relationship that lasts to this day.

So here is my advice to anyone drowning in despair or drenched in self-pity: get yourself out of the house and find some kind of charity you can volunteer for. It doesn’t really matter what you do, as long as it gets our head out of your own problems and sets it to start solving someone else’s. You will be amazed at how quickly your own plight will dwindle into insignificance once you stop feeding it the energy and attention it needs to seem so insurmountable. I can guarantee that the benefits you get from caring for others will greatly exceed the effort you put into it.

As I write this, I am sitting in a coffee shop, sipping a blended spiced chai. It is a coffee shop that I go to on a regular basis to study, do paperwork for my job, or just generally hang out. The barista says I am one of the regulars. I don’t know her name, and I doubt that she knows mine, but in an odd way we are somehow friends. There are other “regulars” here also. I recognize their faces and we nod to each other in greeting when we walk in. We don’t talk. We’re all here for our own business, and we tend to keep to that. I know the people mostly by what the barista calls out for them to get. The lady in the corner who always wears the Hawaiian print dresses is a double blended mocha. The guy who always rides his bike here and chooses the table in the middle of the room is the large spiced latte. The guy who sits against the wall and reads the paper cover to cover is an Earl Grey tea and blueberry scone. The young lady who sits at the table in the back is an extra large Colombian black. I guess any of them might identify me as “second table along the window, blended spiced chai.” I know only scant bits about them; Double Mocha is writing a book and Colombian Black is a law student at San Jose State. I’m always glad to see them and I worry when they don’t appear in their accustomed place for a protracted period of time. I am sure that I would come to their aid if they needed it, and I am reasonably sure that they would come to mine. The day that Spiced Latte crashed his bike on the way to the shop, we all rushed to him to tend his skinned knees and twisted ankle. Double Mocha once chased a guy out of Earl Grey’s chair when the stranger wouldn’t move voluntarily.

I was discussing the concept of the “familiar stranger” with my boyfriend, and he told me the following story that had happened to him several years ago.

“There was a guy who practically lived at the bar that my best friend and I used to hang out at. I never saw a day when he wasn’t there. He was a nice, older guy. You could tell that life hadn’t been very kind to him and he was here to drink away the pain. He was, perhaps, a little too sensitive to survive well in this world. He was a loner and always sat at the bar, while almost everyone else sat at the tables. He wasn’t unfriendly, though. He would join us in a game of darts from time to time. His name was Jake (name changed).

“One evening my friend and I were having a few beers when two guys came into the bar. They started going from person to person around the room. They were clearly looking for a fight. When they finally got to Jake, I guess they figured they had found their mark. Jake, a very seasoned drinker, had already put away a few pitchers of cheap beer and was beginning to get a little unsteady on his feet. The guys were harassing him and trying to get him to step out into the parking lot. Jake was doing everything he could to try to defuse the situation, but these guys just wouldn’t leave him alone. Jake was old-school, with the kind of pride that occasionally kept you in trouble if it came looking for you. You didn’t ask for help under these kind of situations, and he couldn’t accept any help offered without losing his dignity. I really wanted to help Jake, but I couldn’t think of anything to do that wouldn’t potentially make the situation worse or make Jake feel worse about himself afterward. Then I saw a guy stand up from his table a few seats away. He just pushed back his chair and looked at the guys harassing Jake. I thought, ‘Oh, yeah! That’s the way to do it,’ and stood up from my chair as well. My friend, who’d had his back to the situation turned around to see what was going on. As soon as he understood, he also stood up. One by one, people began to rise from their seats. No one actually did anything, they just stood by their chair and watched the two guys who were harassing Jake. By the time they noticed, easily two thirds of the very populated bar were on their feet, arms crossed, in silent solidarity supporting Jake. You’ve never seen two guys trying so hard to quickly, verbally backpedal out of a situation. They came up with some kind of lame excuse and backed out of the bar. A low chuckle went around the room and everyone went back to their seats.”

Even though we may not know their name or anything about their life, there may be friends out there that we never even thought about. The people we always see at the bus stop or on the train to work or school become familiar. The cashier at the supermarket who always checks our groceries or the gas station attendant who waves to us through the security window, now that we pay at the pump. We are creatures of habit, and the people who are habitually there become a part of the familiar, comfortable pattern. Without knowing who they are, we become fond of them, and hopefully they of us. Since we don’t truly become aquatinted, except in the most peripheral way, we might never know for sure, until we truly need a friend.

The following is an excerpt from "Epitaph for the Race of Man," by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Sweeter was loss than silver coins to spend,
Sweeter was famine than the belly filled;
Better than blood in the vein was the blood spilled;
Better than corn and healthy flocks to tend
And a tight roof and acres without end
Was the barn burned and the mild creatures killed,
And the back aging fast, and all to build:
For then it was, his neighbor was his friend.
Then for a moment the averted eye
Was turned upon him with benignant beam,
Defiance faltered, and derision slept;
He saw as in a not unhappy dream
The kindly heads against the horrid sky,
And scowled, and cleared his throat and spat, and wept.

I just love it when current mass media so beautifully ties in with what I am studying. I just got done watching Spiderman 3 (now showing in theaters near you) and I couldn’t help analyzing the characters in it. In the first half of the movie, everyone is a victim seeking restitution for the wrongs done to them. Peter Parker needs to hunt down the man who killed his uncle (no, it turns out he didn’t off him in the end of the first movie), Peter’s buddy, Harry Osborn, needs to punish Spiderman for the death of his father (yes, he’s still doing that), and the Sandman needs to take out his aggressions on anyone who stands between him and the money he needs. We even have a brand new victim who needs to kill Spiderman (no surprise there either). The movie actually does a reasonable job showing how each victim envisions their wrong, and how that perception changes as new developments occur. Everyone is going off half cocked with only part of the information they need to make rational decisions and everyone is unwilling to listen or think much about it, lest it ruin their plans for some satisfying revenge.

The second half of the movie is all about forgiveness. Aunt May says at one point, “First you have to do the hardest part. You have to forgive yourself. Then you can go about setting things right again.” Each character in turn must forgive himself for the wrongs he has committed, generally by explaining his side of the story to the person he wronged (the women don’t seem to need to explain or forgive much of anything in this film). It’s more of an excuse than an apology, but it does get the person listening to something other than his own pain. This ends up having a kind of chain reaction, where the forgiver now must atone for his wrongs as well. No one seems to be willing to explain things to Marry Jane, but that’s the way these things go. In the end, the bad guys are killed or vanquished, the good guys have cleansed their souls, and peace and justice is restored, at least as far as our main characters are concerned. Sorry if I spoiled the ending for you.

Although it is a bit moralistically heavy handed (all of the Spiderman movies are), it does illustrate how quickly moral indignation crumbles in the light of a point of view other than your own. Once you start looking outside yourself and your own perceptions of how hurt you are, the pain doesn’t seem to last long. I had to do a fair bit of that myself not that long ago. I was really mad at a former lover of mine that I felt had taken advantage of me. I wasn’t really willing to take responsibility for my own thoughts or actions, mostly because I found it so much easier to blame him for these supposed wrong-doings. Blaming him was easy. Forgiving myself was hard. It was, however, impossible to heal from the event without coming to terms with what had actually happened, especially my part in it. I had to admit that it was my interpretation and unreasonable expectations of the events which caused the problems for myself, that it was my compromising my own morals and beliefs that actually caused me pain, and that I allowed these things to happen to me in spite of overwhelming evidence that I should have taken action to the contrary. It doesn’t really matter what his part in the whole thing was. I am only responsible for myself, but that responsibility is entirely mine. If there is any blame for him to have, it is up to him to look after his own. Once I came to know and understand the true nature of my injury, I attempted to apologize to him for blaming him in the first place. I am no master of words, and I have no idea if I even managed to have him understand what I had intended, but I did try. Whether he will forgive me or not will probably always be a mystery to me, but he doesn’t really have to. I have done what I can to forgive myself, and that has allowed me to move on.

“…negative anger leads to hostility and aggressive impulses – and to distress within oneself. Positive anger leads to motivation to alter the situation in a positive way based on assertiveness.” (Walt Schafer, Stress Management for Wellness, fourth edition, p. 380)

The above mentioned book defines anger in its glossary with both the positive and negative version. “Negative anger is a feeling, expressed or unexpressed, of hostility, aggressiveness, or a desire to hurt. Wanting to punish the source of frustration. Positive anger is the motivation to change or correct the source of frustration. Both are based on wanting something, not getting it, and being frustrated.” It sounds to me like there are really two definitions under this one heading. Anger, according to my 1963 Random House American College Dictionary, is defined as “a revengeful passion or emotion directed against one who inflicts a real or supposed wrong; wrath; ire.” Perhaps this definition is a bit outdated and has been replaced with the newer definition above, but it more accurately describes what I feel when I say I’m angry. Schafer’s definition of “positive anger” seems more like determination than actual anger. Frustration can lead to many emotions. I have felt depressed from being kept from what I desired. I have cried because I could not get what I felt I needed. I have also just shrugged and walked away, allowing that it either wasn’t meant to be mine or that I would likely have another chance to get one at a later time. More often in my life, frustration leads to a single-minded bullheadedness, which the kinder people refer to as persistence.

My experiences with what I refer to as anger have been much less then positive. For me, anger is a form of blindness. When I get angry, I stop looking at the facts. I don’t try to see other people’s point of view or try to figure out if there is a misunderstanding. I stop looking for answers and start looking for ways to express my displeasure. Anger will occasionally be a catalyst, something to kick me in the pants and get me to take action, but the action is never constructive unless I put my anger aside or replace it with something more useful. Anger can give me the energy, the fuel I need to launch a plan into action, but anger in and of itself has no ability to plan. The times that I have acted in anger have always been regrettable. Without a course of action I tend to lash out. I explode in a flurry of fists and foul language. I say things I don’t mean and haven’t thought through, and regret them for a long time to come. I don’t listen when I’m angry, not even to the people I would usually ask for advice. Anger doesn’t think. In order to use the energy that my anger has provided, I have to change gears. I need to take a deep breath and look at the problem objectively. If someone else has given me a plan, I might start on it blindly, but at some point during implementation my anger turns to persistence or determination. By the time I am engaged in the project, I am no longer angry. I have a direction and a goal and am driven by a fierce passion to correct whatever has gone wrong. This drive, fueled by the energy that my anger has provided, is what gets the job done.

Arguably there is no such thing as “positive anger” because the anger has been replaced by assertiveness, determination, and/or persistence in order to achieve those positive results. Assertiveness combined with anger leads to bullying, not constructive change. Schafer’s definition seems to indicate that if the result from getting angry is positive, then you have experienced positive anger. If the result of the anger is negative, then you have experienced negative anger. Since the only thing which determines the positive or negative aspects is the outcome, I would like to propose that the definition does not address the emotion, but only the conclusion.

I do not wish to discount anger. Certainly there have been people throughout history, like Gandhi, who felt that anger should be suppressed or done away with. I don’t entirely agree. Anger is clearly a natural emotion. It is primal and basic to much of life on earth. Animals express anger all the time. The trick is to not let it take over and control our thoughts and actions. Anger can build up an incredible supply of internal energy. Trying to suppress or ignore this energy seems to be detrimental to the individual. But expressing it unchecked can be dangerous, not only to the individual, but to those around him. There have been all kinds of attempts to direct the energy from anger. Some try to direct it into other parts of the person’s life, such as assertiveness in work or active sports. Others simply look to release it under controlled conditions, such as scream therapy or primal drumming. There are many meditation techniques to help you breathe the stress and energy away or to put it into use through controlled movement. It is a shame that the energy from anger doesn’t seem to be able to be stored for later use, like a battery. If it isn’t managed, the energy seems to leak out into other forms, such as a back ache or short temper. Ideally, you would relax to the point where rational thought is possible, analyze the source of the anger, then use the energy that the anger has provided to resolve the issue which caused it. Sometimes that isn’t possible, and sometimes the energy doesn’t last to see the completion of the project. If the irritant is persistent, the anger may take action before a reasonable plan has been formulated. Cleaning up the collateral damage is very sobering.

“Call for the grandest of all human sentiments, what is that? It is that man should forget his anger before he lies down.” Thomas De Quincey (1785 – 1859)

“I think if I have one message, one thing before I die that most of the world would know, it would be that the event does not determine how to respond to the event. That is a purely personal matter. The way in which we respond will direct and influence the event more than the event itself.” – Virginia Satir (1916 -1998)

I will admit I was unaware, years back, how much my thinking changed my world. I remember being angry (I was angry a lot back then) and hearing people say, “Don’t be upset. It is nothing. It will all come out fine.” I can remember thinking, or saying, “How can you tell me not to be angry. It is a bad thing. Anyone in their right mind would be angry. I should be angry.” And I was.

A friend of mine said, “You seem depressed so much of the time. I think you should see someone about it.” The thing was, I didn’t feel depressed. I was at times hurt, angry, and sad, but I had a right to be, didn’t I? My emotions were real, not something like an allergy that you take pills for. I was a thinking, feeling human being. My emotions were not to be discounted as an ailment! I could understand it if I were upset without cause, but I had reasons for feeling the way I did. I was not overreacting! I was divorced and unloved by my current partner. I had a lousy job that didn’t pay enough for the stress it put me through. I had demands on me from all sides; from my child, my lover, my parents, my boss. There was never enough time for me to get myself together, and the demands became ever greater. Of course I was angry. Of course I was depressed. These things were real and I was reacting to them the way anyone would!

I cried, “I just can’t do this anymore. It’s all too hard!” I barely ate. Almost anything that the people around me did annoyed me, but no one listened when I yelled. No one did things the way they should be done, no matter what I did to change them. I remember thinking, “When they do an autopsy on my body, the doctors will all say how amazed they are that I was walking around for so long.” Living was more of an obligation than a choice. Life was evil and boring and not anything I would choose to do. I lived because the demands were too great. I didn’t have the time or energy to die.

I went to the doctor and he prescribed me a pill. It took away my emotions. I floated through life feeling nothing. I didn’t feel good or bad, I just didn’t care. I did what I usually did, but it meant nothing. I stopped taking the pill. It was better to be angry and sad and suicidal than to feel nothing at all. I went to an herbalist. She gave me some capsules. She told me that it would take about a month before I noticed any effect. She said that I couldn’t be on them forever because my liver wouldn’t take it. I would feel what it was like to be well, then I would have to learn how to feel that way on my own.

I took the capsule, three times a day with meals, for a month. I hadn’t noticed a change. It was too subtle. I went from slogging through life to simply walking. Because I had to eat, I did, but it didn’t sit in my stomach like a stone anymore. I went from school to work to daycare to home, but I had stopped dreading the routine. I hadn’t noticed a change, but it had happened. I didn’t feel angry, or depressed, or sad all the time. I actually smiled occasionally. Once or twice I laughed.

I remember the day I discovered the difference. I heard a crash in the living room, and ran in to find a broken lamp and my little daughter standing wide-eyed in terror, her hands clutched to her mouth in horror. “Oh, heck,” I said as I began to clean up the shards. “Well, it wasn’t one of my favorite ones anyway. Lamps are pretty cheap at the thrift store.” I looked up for a moment and saw my daughter, retreated into a safer corner. Her expression hadn’t changed. She was trying not to make a sound, waiting for the screaming, waiting for the anger, waiting for the punishment. I called her over and gave her a hug. “It’s ok,” I said. “It was an old one that someone had left behind when they moved. It was an accident. Tomorrow we will go to the second hand store and get another one. You help me pick it out, ok?” She relaxed a bit and nodded and I sent her off to play in her room. I cleaned up the mess and went to fix dinner. I stopped half way into the kitchen and turned to look where the lamp had fallen. I remembered the look on my daughter’s face. It occurred to me that a month ago there would have been screaming. There would have been blame. There would have been the sinking feeling that this was just one more lousy thing to pile onto a horrible day. After punishing my daughter for breaking the lamp, I would have gone in my room and cried. Instead I was making dinner and adding to my mental list for tomorrow to take my daughter lamp shopping. I was even looking forward to it in a strange way.

I could see both sides of me, the before and after, and I realized that the “bads” weren’t so bad, I had just thought them that way. No one had been hurt because the lamp had broken, and the dollar or so it would take to replace it wouldn’t keep me from paying rent. Before, it would have been the end of the world. I would have ruined a day over the death of a lamp I didn’t even like. The emotion was real, but it didn’t have to be. The lamp was broken, that didn’t change, but I didn’t have to feel awful about it. Sane and rational people didn’t have to get angry over the little things, or make them into big things. This was what it felt like to be well. I liked it!

Over the course of two months, I weaned myself off of the capsule, taking smaller doses every week. I took a deep breath the day I no longer had any capsules to take, and tried to fix in my mind how I felt when I had the herb to guide me. It took a lot of work, and I backslid occasionally, but I remembered how calm those few months felt. It is well worth the effort. The “bads” aren’t so bad now, and the “goods” are much better! It really is all in my mind. Things happen all the time, but how I deal with them is up to me. I can choose to be sad, to loose my temper, or I can choose to shrug and say, “Oh well, it doesn’t matter that much,” and move on to enjoy the rest of my life.

There is a thing in the psychological field known as a Life Script. It is a preconceived notion of how your life is going to progress, how you should act, and what you should want, which you set up for yourself during your childhood or early teen years. It is formed mostly from what you were taught by your parents, by society at large, and what you observed from the people around you. Most people have one, whether they know it or not. It runs in the background, giving you a formula for how to live your life. The problem with it is that it is static and resistant to change, even when the life script no longer works for you. It also allows you to react to things with little awareness or deliberate choice by having you blindly living out your preconceived notions of how to act, think or feel. It can make you miserable, often without knowing why, because you are “supposed to” want a certain kind of life that may not fit with who you truly are or the situations you find yourself in.

When I was five years old I already knew I wanted to have two kids, a boy and a girl, and that the girl should be born first. I wanted to be a veterinarian and live in the country. By the time I was eight, I knew that I would have a boyfriend when I was sixteen. When I was eleven, I had figured out that my boyfriend would propose to me when I was twenty so that we could be married when I was twenty-one. This would allow me to have my veterinary practice established for a few years before I had my children when I was 25 and thirty, respectively. Yes, I really did have all that figured out by the time I was eleven. I even had the boy I was going to marry picked out, although he didn’t know that yet. I was always a big one for plans. I believed that everything would be fine, as long as you had a plan. My father is very analytical and seemed to have a plan for everything. My mother always looked to him when things didn’t go the way they were supposed to, and he would tell her the plan he had to make everything better. Plans were good.

The problem was that the plan was absolute, without any ability to change or to adapt to change if something happened along the way. There are quite a few years between eleven and twenty and a lot can happen during that time. A lot did happen. When I was fourteen, the guy I had intended to marry died in a car crash. I found a new guy when I was seventeen. We were a poor match and he wasn’t at all what I had in mind, but he was fun and interesting and, above all, willing to get into a relationship with me. I hadn’t told him about the rest of the plan yet, but I was already behind schedule. Two days after my twentieth birthday I started pushing for marriage. I had already been hinting at it for a year, but he didn’t seem to be taking the clue. I gave him a ring to present to me “when the time was right” because I knew he was short on cash (I was also afraid that he would get a ring other than the one that I wanted. He and I had very different tastes). When he finally got around to proposing, I told him that I didn’t care when we got married, as long as it was before I turned twenty-two.

The baby was early and my graduation from college was late. I wasn’t in veterinary school either. My parents had promised to put me through college. What I didn’t know was that I wouldn’t be allowed to choose the major. Without any talent or desire, I was in a university art school. My parents told me that, as long as I had a degree in “anything,” the world would beat a path to my door. I neglected to ask if this worked with veterinary jobs. I had my daughter when I was twenty-three. I wasn’t going to graduate until I was nearly twenty-five. Now I didn’t know when to have my second baby. I wanted my children spaced five years apart, but I wasn’t scheduled to have the second one until I was thirty. It was a quandary that didn’t resolve itself until my husband handed me a divorce. Being a single mom was not in the plan.

A guy I’d had a crush on for a while took an interest in me. It seemed that the plan might work out in spite of everything. All I had to do was get him to marry me before it was time to have my second baby. The problem was that he turned out not to be the marrying kind. He also wasn’t the kind to settle down with just one woman or to like kids much. No matter how hard I tried, he wasn’t conforming to the plan. I had already had to drop my dream of being a veterinarian, and it looked like my minimum-wage job would never buy me a big house in the country, and this guy wasn’t likely to pop the question before I was past menopause. Something had to break. That something was me.

I had compromised a lot to try to follow my life script. I had given up a lot of morals and beliefs in order to try to make some ill-suited relationships follow what I believed I wanted. It was time for a new plan. I took two years off from everything I was capable of taking off from to try to figure out who I was and what I really wanted. I had failed to live “the ideal dream” and found myself without any real dreams at all. I broke it down into the basics of what I needed to survive; food, housing, transportation, and money enough to pay for it. It was my daughter who filled in the rest. I took her to the beach one day and watched her explore. She marveled over every pebble and shell. She stood in the serf and was mesmerized by the ebb and flow of the tide. Through her eyes I rediscovered the world. For the first time I could remember, I really enjoyed things for what they are at the moment, as opposed to what I thought they should become. I suddenly realized how much I had been missing. I had no plan, and I was happy anyway, something I had thought couldn’t happen. I lose track of it sometimes and get caught up in “should be’s,” but I generally seem to be happier without a grand plan to live my life by. I take things a day at a time and don’t plan much beyond getting the things done that I feel I need to do. I am in a wonderful relationship now and am able to just enjoy being with him, without feeling I need to fit him in to some kind of plan. Plans can be good, but life should be enjoyed!

“Things are more and more transient. If you are like most people, you buy things, then discard them more quickly than your parents did. Consequently, you make and break emotional ties with things more often than people did 25 to 50 years ago. Each time you do, you must adjust.” (Schafer, pg. 254)

This might explain why I, and so many other clutterers, have had such a hard time letting go of things. Geared for an earlier time, we make more lasting emotional ties with the things we have, even though we no longer need or use them. Socially, we need to have the bigger, better, faster things in order to keep up with the speed and technology of the day. Old things become obsolete and aren’t compatible with the rest of society. Old ways are too slow and can’t meet the demands of a faster paced world. The problem is that we still see the value in the things we can no longer use. They still work perfectly well, performing the functions as they were designed to do. The old fashioned thinking (of 50 years ago or so) says that you only get rid of things when they are broken beyond repair. These things may work fine for their intended use, or only need one small part, inexpensive but impossible to find now