Rachel’s Musings

I thought Barack Obama’s speech on race, racism, Rev. Wright, and hope was very well thought-out and very moving. Yet, every time he mentioned his strong ties to religion I cringed. Sam Harris has done a great job of commenting on Obama’s speech from a religious standpoint.

Some excerpts:

Obama did not say that religion’s effect on our society, and on the black community especially, has been destructive–and where it has seemed constructive it has generally taken the place of better things. Religion unites, motivates, and consoles beleaguered people not with knowledge, but with superstition and false promises. Surely there is a better way to bring people together in the 21st century. The truth is, despite the toothsomeness of his campaign slogan, we are not yet the people we have been waiting for. And if we don’t start talking sense to our children, they won’t be the ones we are waiting for either.

Harris also points out Christianity’s support of slavery, which Obama did not mention. Or how Christian churches in the South kept racism and hatred alive.

Harris poignantly ends his post with these thoughts:

Despite all that he does not and cannot say, Obama’s candidacy is genuinely thrilling: his heart is clearly in the right place; he is an order of magnitude more intelligent than the current occupant of the Oval Office; and he still stands a decent chance of becoming the next President of the United States. His election in November really would be a triumph of hope.

But Obama’s candidacy is also depressing, for it demonstrates that even a person of the greatest candor and eloquence must still claim to believe the unbelievable in order to have a political career in this country. We may be ready for the audacity of hope. Will we ever be ready for the audacity of reason?

We still have a long way to go despite the hope that Obama brings to the table.

As I was waking up this morning, in that state of not-quite-awakeness, the name Sisyphus bubbled up. Somehow the idea of dragging myself out of bed to do almost exactly the same thing I had done the day before, felt like a Sisyphean task. Noticing the beginnings of a meaning crisis (an existential depression), I forced the thought away and got up. As I woke up more fully, Sisyphus returned. This time I became intrigued: There certainly is something to our days that is very much like the myth of Sisyphus. Just like Sisyphus rolls a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down and start all over again, we do the same things day in day out. That’s called routine. And while there can be something rather comforting about it, routines contain the kernels of a meaning crisis since they have removed us from the effort of making meaning. Then I remembered something else: According to Camus’ telling of the story, Sisyphus was happy. According to Eric Maisel’s take on the story, this mythical character is happy because he “reckoned with the facts of existence” (The Van Gogh Blues, p. 99). He accepted reality, even though that reality involved that he’d be doing the same seemingly meaningless task over and over and over again. In Maisel’s words, Sisyphus forced meaning onto his existence and thus created happiness (or at least, avoided a meaning crisis). Sisyphus could roll the boulder up the hill while complaining that the boulder is too heavy, that he shouldn’t have to do this, that this is ridiculous work, that it is utterly meaningless - fighting reality. This would create unhappiness because it steals meaning from life. I know because I’ve done that way too frequently at my job. But we can do the same as Sisyphus has obviously done: defiantly deciding to be happy no matter what reality brings.

There is another message in the myth of Sisyphus, though: It takes effort. Not only is rolling a boulder up a hill difficult but maintaining a sense of contentment, let alone happiness, takes work as well. Back to my morning: I had to mentally kick myself out of bed. I had to exert an effort to refuse to be drawn down into a meaning crisis by the idea of my Sisyphean day. It took me a while. It took a lot of mental effort, a conscious choice to make meaning, to refuse to be drawn in by my negative self-talk. One thing that I find helpful in cases like this is to connect with others, including strangers, sometimes willfully faking a cheerful attitude until it takes over. As I was walking to the bus stop, still teetering close to the edge of a meaning crisis, I saw the father and son walking down the street I see on many mornings. I don’t know their names. I suspect that the father drops his toddler son off at day care. This morning, I forced myself to smile at them, to say good morning. Making an effort to smile at the first stranger I passed seemed like pushing a boulder up a mountain. The smile was answered, my effort rewarded, making the boulder just a little bit lighter to roll up the hill. Human connections are very important to me, even the small gestures toward strangers seem to help bring more joy into my life. Deep connections with friends are longer lasting and build a stronger foundation. Yet, even the small gestures help and are essential when friends are busy with other things. We cannot rely on one basket to fill our life with happiness.

Jennifer Michael Hecht writes in her book The Happiness Myth: “Happiness maintenance work is creating things to look forward to on a daily basis; arranging some peak experience for yourself occasionally; and making sure the overall story of your life has some feelings of progress and growth” (135-6). I realized this morning that the things to create daily need to be outside of our routine. The routine numbs our minds and hearts, it closes us to the opportunities to make meaning, to find happiness. We need to do something out of that routine to feel alive, the foundation of happiness. To me that out of the ordinary was a simple “good morning” to someone I had never acknowledge before. A stranger, yet not a stranger, since I see the father-son pair almost every morning. Noticing that I was wearing the same sweater that I wore yesterday because I had forgotten that I worn it just the day before, thus breaking the thou-shalt-not-wear-the-same-thing rule, helped, too. It created another opportunity to go beyond the routine and laugh at myself. Not taking life so serious is another way to get out of my routine. Slowly, the danger of a meaning crisis seems to be fading, though I am still making an effort to notice the small things that can add to my joy, just to make sure I don’t slip and fall into the hole of a crisis.

Timothy Wilson’s book Strangers to Ourselves is a fascinating journey to our adaptive unconscious, which he defines as the “mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness but that influence judgments, feelings, or behavior” and have adapted through evolution (23). Wilson contents that we cannot observe these processes because they are simply inaccessible to us: “a lot of the interesting stuff about the human mind - judgments, feelings, motives - occur outside of awareness for reasons of efficiency, and not because of repression” (8). He argues that this is similar to other processes, such as perceptual processes or even digestion, which we know are happening but are not observable through introspection. In contrast to Freud, modern psychological research suggests that the unconscious cannot be explored no matter how deep you dig. This is not a bad thing, Wilson points out, but it is a reflection of the mind’s power: a lot of information can be processed very quickly and efficiently (although not always accurately) (16). Our minds are parallel processors because we process quite a bit of information unconsciously. Instead of looking inward, Wilson suggests a much more powerful way to self-understanding: observing our behavior (16). In addition to not being able to understand ourselves well through “navel gazing,” we might even be driven by goals from our adaptive unconscious that we are not completely aware of (34). Wilson summarizes: “We know less than we think we do about our own minds, and exert less control over our own minds than we think. And yet we retain some ability to influence how our minds work. Even if the adaptive unconscious is operating intelligently outside our purview, we can influence the information it uses to make inferences and form goals” (48).      Continue reading this post » » »

…and no end in sight. On March 19, 2003, George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq. The war was ill-planned, with essentially no effort put into preparing for the post-war era.  And now Iraq is the scene of civil war with the U.S. caught in the middle by our own making. Too many people have lost their lives because of this quagmire. All we can do is remember them and work toward ending the war as insurmountable as that seems.

Several disturbing and interrelated posts can be found this week on the Feminist Philosophers’ Blog. Monkey gave us low-lights of a Lingerie Superbowl and a new “dating” show, both filled with stereotypes and objectification of women (and men). What really disturbs me, though, is how these two posts tie in with a third about an article in the New York Times. The article by Kate Zernike on “Postfeminism and Other Fairy Tales” shows what we could argue are the consequences of stupid TV shows like the ones described: Sexism is alive and well in our culture. Worse, though, at least to me, is that most of us have almost become immune to the pervasiveness of sexist shows and the use of women as sex objects. Zernike points out how the combination of the treatment of Hillary Clinton and Spitzergate seems to shake some women out of our trance, especially the younger generation who might’ve taken feminist achievements for granted. Slowly we are realizing that, as Katha Pollitt puts it:

“The hysterical insults flung at Hillary Clinton are just a franker, crazier version of the everyday insults — shrill, strident, angry, ranting, unattractive — that are flung at any vaguely liberal mildly feminist woman who shows a bit of spirit and independence,” she wrote, “who puts herself out in the public realm, who doesn’t fumble and look up coyly from underneath her hair and give her declarative sentences the cadence of a question.”

“Every woman I know who calls herself a feminist, or is even just doing well, especially in a field in which men also contend,” Ms. Pollitt wrote, “deals with some version of this.”

It is interesting to observe how Obama is treated versus how Clinton is being portrait. The sad conclusion from this observation is

But some also argue that the media is not as quick to recognize misogyny as it is to recognize racism. “The media is on eggshells about race, but has blinders on about sex and gender stereotyping,” said Ms. Goldberg of Columbia.

Kate Michelman, a former president of Naral Pro-Choice America, who is an adviser to Mr. Obama, said in an interview that “racism has risen to a level of social consciousness that sexism has not.”

Hopefully, this is not temporary increase in awareness but the beginning of some important consciousness raising.

I was raped twenty years ago. It was date rape. I didn’t even consider it rape until someone pointed it out to me: The doctor who saw me for the STD I contracted. It made sense. I hadn’t wanted sex. Somehow it happened. To this day I am not exactly sure how. I had pretty much forgotten about the rape until just recently. I got the assignment to read an article about rape on campus (here’s a rebuttle to that article). Slowly, everything came back. I was starting to have flashbacks again. It’s like a movie that plays in my head without my control. It just plays whenever it wants to. I used to call myself a survivor. That helped with healing to a point but I didn’t want to define myself that way, so eventually I moved on. Other things happened in my life and the rape faded into the background. Obviously, it never went away. The hurt, the pain, the doubts are trickling back in. I don’t think I suppressed the memory - it’s just not something you can dwell on, plus it’s just damn painful to talk about in detail. Healing from the experience of rape requires us to move on, to not solely define ourselves as rape victims. As survivors. Yet that is who we are. It will always be a part of our history. The movie is encoded in our brains and plays when triggered.

Now that I am beginning to read more about the evolutionary process - more in terms of memes than genes because I find that more fascinating - I am wondering what a traumatic experience like this does to us. There’s more than movie encoded in my brain. The movie is just the obvious part. There is also a very, very deep hurt that never quite goes away. And there is always a part that doesn’t quite feel okay anymore. What pathways are forged in the brains of a person who experienced such trauma and how can we heal those pathways because they are obviously much deeper than I, at least, realized? I can only suspect how this experience affected the rest of my life. I don’t even know if it did. I do know that I have had my share of unhealthy and abusive relationships. Did I end up in those because of some wiring left behind by the rape experience? Or is that giving the rape too much power? Maybe it wasn’t such a formative and destructive event.

There is evidence, though, that does suggest that traumatic events that trigger Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, including rape, change the brain, thus are quite formative. The amygdala, a part of our brain, is involved in the processing of our fear response (among other emotions). During trauma, this fear response sensitizes the amygdala, which then apparently reacts more quickly and strongly to fear-inducing stimuli. The hippocampus, the part of our brain involved in memory, is also affected. Studies have found changes in the hippocampus of patients with PTSD. Our body releases natural opiates when we’re faced with danger. These opiate levels remain high in people with PTSD, possibly leading to the blunting of emotions we experience. Neurotransmitters that activate the hippocampus - our memory - are at higher levels than normal, which might explain why the movie of the trauma is so well preserved.

All this is comforting to me, as well as fascinating. There is a reason why this experience keeps popping up, despite all the work I’ve done around it, and why each rerun of the movie leaves me scatter brained and close to tears. It’s wired in my brain. The reaction is completely normal. And that is what every rape survivor wants to know: we are normal, we are okay. It happened to us and we survived. However, knowing about the effects of the experience on our brains can help us accept the after-effects of our trauma. That, too, is normal and there is a biological explanation for it. Though, to me, the question that remains now seems to stay largely unanswered: How do I undo that rewiring? I am not sure if there is a way to do that. After all the nature of trauma is that it is traumatic, i.e., different than our normal experience (though for some, such as survivors of childhood abuse, unfortunately, the trauma became the “normal”). There are, of course, treatments that help us cope but I don’t think those treatments re-wire our brain again. They help us learn to live with our “new” brain; they help us cope and move on, yet our brain remains rewired. My flashbacks are a vivid reminder of that.

There is also an interesting comment, which almost seems like an aside, in the Psychology Today article on PTSD: “Thus, the fear induced by re-exposure to traumatic material indicates a failure of inhibition on the part of the hippocampus, and is evidence that the traumatic episode is not integrated as a narrative, spatio-temporal event in autobiographical memory.” As Timothy Wilson would put it - based on Strangers to Ourselves: We haven’t found a good self-story yet. Maybe knowing that our brain got re-wired can help us integrate the trauma into our self-story.

What about the effect of the rape on the rest of my life? Of course, this is speculation at this point but it sounds like the scientific evidence points to a heightened fear response. We become afraid faster and more strongly. Maybe that is why I was attracted to men who seemed strong and able to protect me. Unfortunately, they were neither.

I am hesitant to post this to my blog. It’s a much more personal note than anything that I’ve posted so far. But this is part of who I am, part of my history. And I found the neuropsychological findings on PTSD very helpful for making sense of that past, writing a little more of my self-story. Learning this, contributed another piece to my healing from the rape. I want to share that with other survivors of trauma in the hopes that it might be helpful to them. Still, it feels like a big step to hit “publish.”