Some of the guidelines, such as having your child within a 15-second reach at all times and breastfeeding your child until they are two seem really challenging. And, although we would all love to be perfect and give our future-babies as much of a head-start as possible, I think some of these guidelines do more harm than good.

Information can be a real anxiety-reliever, but it can also be an anxiety-accelerator. I want to breastfeed, and I want to be as attentive to my new baby boy as possible. At the same time, if I follow the prescribed steps above, I will not be happy and engaged with the baby. So – I will have to make compromises about them while trying my best.

I think that all of this information sometimes accentuates the cycle of worry, and we should all follow our instincts about what is best for each of us, rather than needing scientific direction on everything.

I am reading an excellent book by Vancouver Doctor Gabor Mate called When the Body Says No – The Cost of Hidden Stress. He calls the shortfalls of parents part of a "dance of the generations".

If a parent’s loving feelings are constricted, it is only because that parent has himself or herself suffered deep hurt. In my work with drug addicts in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, I treat many substance-dependent men and women. Hardened as they are – with their criminal records, their continued drug-seeking, their HIV infections and their harassed and socially marginal lives – the deepest pain they all have is about the children whom they have abandoned or who have been taken from them. Without exception, they themselves were abused or abandoned in childhood.*

So, basically he is saying that in the case of these Vancouver addicts, they were bad parents because they had bad parents and it goes on forever up the generations. He goes on:

Parenting, in short, is a dance of the generations. Whatever affected one generation but has not been resolved will be passed onto the next. Lance Morrow, a journalist and writer, succinctly expressed the the multigenerational nature of stress in his book Heart, a wrenching and beautiful account of his encounters with mortality, thrust upon him by near-fatal heart disease: "The generations are boxes within boxes: Inside my mother’s violence you find another box, which contains my gradfather’s violence, and inside of that box (I suspect, but do not know), you would find another box with some such black, secret energy – stories within stories receding in time."

Blame becomes a meaningless concept if one understands how family history stretches back through the generations. "Recognition of this quickly dispels any disposition to see the parent as a villain." wrote John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist whose work threw scientific light on the decisive importance of attachment in infancy and childhood.**

I find this "dance of the generations" is a really good way to think of anger at parents and could bring a lot of people peace. Now let’s see more psychologists talking about it and diffusing the blame game.

* Pg. 211of this edition
** Pg 216

I remember one of my very well-spoken and confident friends from University saying that sometimes a wave of embarrassment would pass over him after while driving, and he would hold onto the steering wheel so tight until his knuckles turned while and it passed. I couldn’t believe even HE could be embarrassed – since he was so cavalier about things… but it seems like everyone has an area of their lives where embarrassment strikes.

To help cure me of my situation, I turned to the Internet… and found that admitting that you are embarrassed is one of the best ways to diffuse the situation for everyone. In: Caught With Your Pants Down? The Psychology of Embarrassment it says:

And, if there’s any doubt that 99.9% of embarrassment is in your own mind, consider the example of British actor Richard Harris who sang the role of King Arthur in Camelot twice a day for seven months. One evening, Harris forgot the words to a song. He stopped in mid-stride, halted the orchestra and went to the edge of the stage where he said in his lilting British accent: "Four hundred and twenty eight performances, and I have forgotten the lyrics! Would you believe it?"

Because people feel sympathetic towards others caught in the throes of embarrassment, Harris received a standing ovation. Somebody then cued him on the words, the orchestra started again and he finished the musical in high style and grace.

"Research shows that people who are embarrassed, and simply admit to it and then stalwartly carry on, are tremendously well liked," Dr. Gross says. It seems to make them more human. "When you admit to embarrassment, you show the incident is not shameful. Nor does it show any defect in your character. "It only shows the embarrassing incident was nothing more than a brief lapse," he says.

Wow – so I guess I will stop being so embarrassed about being embarrassed.

Some of the main tools of the critic are cognitive distortions. These are habits of thought that interpret reality in an unreal way. They are based on emotional rather than rational processes and can separate you from living in the real world. I have discussed these on this blog before, but I find the McKay and Fanning distortions more accurate than other versions widely available on the web. 

1.    Overgeneralization
“Overgeneralizations create a shrinking universe in which more and more absolute laws make life more and more confining. It is a universe in which the scientific method is turned upside-down. Instead of observing all available data, formulating a law that explains all the data, then testing the law, you take one fact or event, make a general rule out of it and never test the rule.”*

You can tell you are using overgeneralizations when you use words like: never, always, every, none, no one, nobody, everybody and everyone. It is when you use absolutes and totally close the door to possibility. Examples are “I am always late.” or “He never says sorry.”

2.    Global Labeling
“Global labeling is the application of stereotyped labels to whole classes of people, things, behaviors and experiences. People who practice global labeling live in a universe populated by stock characters who act out unrealistic melodramas. Global labelers with low self-esteem often cast themselves in the role of the villain or the simpleton.”

You are global labeling if the messages are negative clichés about your appearance, performance, intelligence, relationships and so on. “My love life is a mess.” “My degree is a worthless piece of paper.”  “All of my efforts to improve are futile grasping at straws.”

3.    Filtering
“When you filter reality, you see your universe as through a glass darkly. You can see and hear only certain things. Like a voice-activated tape recorder, your attention is awakened only by particular kinds of stimuli: examples of loss, rejection and so on. You selectively abstract certain facts from reality and pay attention to them, ignoring all the rest. You have blind spots that obscure evidence of your own worth.”

You can suspect filtering when you are repeating the same scene over and over again and use words like: loss, gone, burnt, dangerous, unfair and stupid. If you were at a 3-hour party and can only remember the 15 minutes where you spilled wine on someone – that is filtering.

4.    Polarized Thinking
“If you habitually indulge in polarized thinking, you live in a black-and-white universe, with no colors or shades of gray. You divide all your actions and experiences into either/or dichotomies according to absolute standards. You judge yourself as either a saint or a sinner, a good guy or a bad guy, a success or failure, a hero or a villain, a noble or a bastard.”

You can catch yourself doing polarized thinking by listening to either/or messages: “I am either going to win the scholarship or completely blow my future.” “If you can’t be funny and ‘on’ then you are a bore”

5.    Self-Blame
“Self-blame is a distorted thinking style that has you blaming yourself for everything, whether you are actually at fault or not. In the self-blaming universe, you are at the center of a universe of bad things, and they’re all your fault.”

The easiest way to spot self-blame is incessant apologizing. Your partner doesn’t want to see the movie you prefer so you apologize. The clerk at the post office says you don’t have enough postage and you say, “God, I’m so stupid, I’m sorry”.

6.    Personalization
“In a personalized universe, you are the universe. Every atom in it is somehow related to you. All events, properly decoded, seem to have something to do with you. Unfortunately, there is very little power or of being in control of these events. It feels more like you are under pressure, under siege, or under observation by everyone around you.”

Personalization is a difficult one to catch. One way is to notice your reactions to people complaining. If someone at the office is complaining about the staplers never being returned to the proper spot, do you assume that it has something to do with you? That is personalization.

7.     Mind Reading
“Mind reading is a distorted thinking style which assumes that everyone in the universe is just like you. This is an easy mistake to make, since it’s based on the phenomenon of projection – you assume that others feel the way you do, basing your assumption on a belief in a commonality of human nature and experience that may or may not actually exist”.

You can see mind-reading when you are testing your assumptions: “I just had a strong hunch.” “I just know.” “It’s my intuition.” “I’m sensitive to these things.” These statements show that you are just jumping to conclusions without real evidence.

8.      Control Fallacies
“Control fallacies either put you in charge of the whole universe or put everyone but you in charge. The distorted thinking style of overcontrol gives you a false feeling of omnipotence. You struggle to control every aspect of every situation.”

You are using the overcontrol fallacy when you say things like “I’ve got to make them listen.” “He has to say yes.” Or “I’ll make sure she gets here on time.”

“The distorted thinking style of undercontrol takes control away from you. You put yourself on the fringes of every situation, unable to influence others. Of the two fallacies, undercontrol is worst for self-esteem.”

9.    Emotional Reasoning
“An emotional universe is chaotic, governed by changeable feelings instead of rational laws. The distortion in this thinking style is to avoid or discount your thinking all together. You rely instead on emotions to interpret reality and direction action.”

You are using emotional reasoning if you “are what you feel”. So – if you feel useless, you are useless. If you feel ugly you are ugly etc.

So – these are the 9 cognitive distortions. The McKay and Fanning go on to give tools on how to combat them. In general, awareness of these and using rationality to combat them is an excellent start. I find that that learning these cognitive distortions not only helped clarify my own thinking, but it also helps me see errors in arguments coming from my friends, loved-ones and colleagues. Enjoy.

*All quotes are from p. 62-68 in Self Esteem by Matthew McKay and Patrick Fanning

** Permission to use quotes requested of New Harbinger Publications on Aug 19, 2007.

As the first stress-inducing tip, the author suggests trying to control everything, including other people:

Try to control other people; both what they do, and also what they
think. The reason why this is so effective is that we can easily
perceive other people to be difficult, incompetent, and unreliable,
which gives us plenty of reasons why we need to control everything
ourselves. The stress factor here lies in the fact that trying
to control other people is much like herding cats; requires enormous
effort, and you know deep down that it’s futile and ridiculous to even
attempt.

This makes me laugh because of all of the stressed out bad managers I have encountered in my career who have tried to control people rather than trying to get the best out of them. A recipe for stress for themselves and everyone else!

The third tip is to look for satisfaction "out there":

Most people look almost exclusively to external things and circumstances for their satisfaction, instead of looking within.
And apart from being an important factor in the perpetuation of stress,
it is also what mainly drives the mechanics of western society. It’s
the reason why people spend most of their time
working for the purpose of accumulating more things, and then their
free time on trying hard to extract as much satisfaction as possible
from these things in order to justify the means of attaining them.
To be caught in this upward spiral of more and more work for more and
more sensory satisfaction is what characterizes the affluent parts of
our culture, and the potential for stress on this path is endless,
simply because more is never enough. Never has been, never will be.

I think this is a very good summary – especially the part about collecting things and then trying to extract joy. It is kind of striving for happiness by proxy instead of experiencing it directly. Why not deal direct?

The last tip is to "be more to have more":

At the core, all of the above ideas can be summed up in a single method: simply convince yourself that you need more than you have at any given moment, and you will be able to maintain a steady feeling of anxiety throughout the day.

Never being contented is something that runs in my family – but it is definitely not a great way to run a life and we all admit it. It is hard to strive at the same time as being content I suppose. Nice to see some creative work going on in the blogs.

The highlight of the whole trip was the scuba diving. My sister was very afraid of seeing sharks, but after some persistance I convinced her to go, me knowing rationally that most sharks are not man-eaters and it is precious to see them given that they are becoming endangered species.

Our guide, who was a tall, slim, tanned, and cute Columbian spent most of the day flirting with us. He dubbed us "his beautiful girls" which was somehow very touching. We followed him under water, while he helped us with our gages and made sure that we were okay and didn’t get lost.

So – we were under water milling around in wonder, swimming with schools of fish, carefully examining the ocean floor for interesting finds and suddenly, we saw the shark. Even though I knew they wouldn’t hurt us… I was paralyzed by fear, and I suddenly could not breathe properly. At this point, the dominant model for human response to stress would predict either fight (which is not realistic in this case) or flight (which would not be possible, given my inexperience with the equipment). So… what happened? Neither.

After freezing for a while, I quickly swam up to the cute Columbian guide and held his hand tight… and I would not let go for a few minutes. After I got home I did some research on the Fight or Flight response, and found that there is actually another way of coping with stress which is Tend and Befriend. According to this theory, humans have a tendency to come together in difficult times, and helps them deal with stress by joining together as a group. So, the guide was temporarily irresistible, but a few minutes later… when I tried to let go and he kept holding on, somehow my tend and befriend impulse was already gone . My sister, who was officially afraid of sharks, was totally cool and had no stress response whatsoever.

On top of the sharks, we saw three seahorses,
some clown shrimp and a sea turtle. We could not believe the luck. We
were with some very experienced American divers that day, who had been
on hundreds of dives and had never seen those animals. So – I learned a lot about creatures while I was under the ocean in Costa Rica.

In his research on deliquent children, Bowlby, known as the authority on attachment, found that one of the biggest objective predictors of delinquency in children was a prolonged absense from parents as an infant – whether it be due to hospitalization, institutional care (ie. an orphanage) or the parents becoming sick or otherwise unavailable. Babies had an extreme reaction to these prolonged absenses and often had a very difficult time recovering afterwards. Bowlby published some very influential and accepted papers on this (some of his research was funded by the World Health Organization), and Robertson created a widely-viewed movie (A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital) depicting the distress that a child goes through during these separations. From the book:

"Bowlby admonished governments, social agencies, and the public for their failure to appreciate the central value of maternal care, as important for the mentail health in infacy and childhood "as are vitamins and proteins for physical health" (pg. 64)

What Bowlby and Robertson pushed for was unlimited hospital visits for parents of sick children and increased use of foster care so the child could make new and lasting attachments instead of relying on a shift-schedule at an institution. These things really seem like no big deal in the face of the benefits – being more humane to children, decreasing delinquancy (and/or mental illness) and in general becoming better care-givers. So you would think that the people at the institutions would say:

"Okay, stop everything. Our procedures are harming the children that we are supposed to protect. Let’s immediately stop what we are doing, and change in the face of staggering evidence".

But… they didn’t. Hospitals especially resisted change. For example, many hospitals in England only allowed visitors for one hour a week. Nurses didn’t want parents interrupting their routines or critisizing them. A routine… being more important than a child’s present life AND future. Eventually, of course, they did let the parents in… and it really wasn’t as bad as they feared. From one ward in Glasgow:

"Staff found their anxiety about mothers’ getting in the way, mothers stuffing their children with sweets, and the like were ill-founded. On the contrary, mothers were usually welcome as valued additons to the team." (pg. 81)

So – it has a happy ending. But, it is too bad that institutions are frequently so inflexible, even in the face of such huge benefits. I don’t know why this inflexibility is not more despised in our society… and the flipside – quick adjustment to changing circumstance – isn’t more valued. At least one person here in Toronto sure values it… and also values guys like Bowlby and Robertson for pushing for it.

I had a day like this… but thankfully ‘loving’ my job is not permanent, personal or pervasive. Thank you Martin… It is more revolving around the 300-page website I am releasing this week.

It is a full-length novel worth of a website in two languages… what do I expect but to be temporarily miserable while combing through content…

Must… do… more… beta-testing… argh…

Any psychologist worth their salt will tell you that there is no "the one". There are actually many people that you will connect with for various reasons. Maybe that number is low, as in 0.01% for a single intellectual female in Toronto for example , but there is still more than one. We are talking about 6 billion people on this planet! Of course, this isn’t exactly a romantic notion, but it is better to live in the truth than to be comforted by a lie.

Having "the one" in your life only downgrades all of the other relationships. Most people have a variety of romantic relationships – I’ve had one for five years, one for three years and one for two. They all ended for good reasons, but that doesn’t mean that I only have bad memories with them or that the time with them was a waste… since none of them were not "the one".

This ongoing saga of adult singles searching for "the one" does not help, since it is too black-and-white. It is an all or nothing situation, where you can have all of the love possible or none at all. Why limit ourselves? In today’s world we can use all the love that we can get .   

Many of us crave thinking in black and white… but psychology offers little of this type of guidance, with its multiple theories and interpretations. One of the few black-and-white pieces of advice they offer (cognitive behavioral theory in particular) is to not engage in the 10 cognitive distortions. You can see a list here.

For example, statements like "never" or "always" are distortions. Someone could say "I will never get out of debt" – but of course, it is possible that they could. Even if they are not very good at saving money, they could somehow get a windfall in the form of a great job or an inheritance. They could also possibly find a bag of money on the street… or a myriad of other options. Who knows, but "never" is discounting many possibilities, so if someone is saying it, it means that their thinking is distorted.

Another example is when someone labels themselves as "stupid". Maybe that person has made some stupid decisions or is stupid in some or many areas, but they are not stupid in every single aspect of their life. Even if they are not genius in any way whatsoever, they are may at least be average in some areas.

At the heart of the distortions is illogical thinking – and this thinking occurs when we are under stress. So, anyone who values thinking rationally, will like the black-and-white rule of not indulging in the distortions… and will try to battle them whenever they come up for themselves and with others.

My friend and I have a little mnemonic device to remember the distortions (which will explain the polar bear ).

It is: Polar bears fly over the globe while pretending to mind control. The end.

Or: Polar (Polarized thinking) Bears (Blame of self) Fly (Filtering-mental) Over (Overgeneralization) the Globe (Global labeling) while Pretending (Personalization) to Mind (Mind Reading) Control (Control fallacy). The End (Emotional Reasoning).

Okay, maybe not exactly inspirational, but at least it helps us recognize the cognitive distortions (which is difficult under stress), realize that they aren’t real (the definition of a distortion) and most importantly, combat them with logical thinking.

So, it seems that the black-and-white advice offered by psychologists… is to always think in greys. Leave it up to them to be so cryptic!