Strib: Boys Still Face Emotional Challenges

From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

By JEANNE JACKSON DeVOE, Newhouse News Service
June 6, 2008

By fifth grade, boys know that there are certain rules on the playground. They know that they're not supposed to cry, especially in front of other boys, or show they are scared.

"If a boy doesn't do something he normally would do -- he's scared to play tackle football -- some people would yell at him, 'sissy' or 'baby' or 'wimp,' " said 11-year-old Thomas (not his real name).

Thomas said he burst into tears recently because other kids were teasing him and he got into an argument with one of his friends.

"I totally burst out crying after lunch, but normally boys try to keep that in or hold it until they're alone," Thomas said.

Even in this new millennium, boys struggle with the unwritten, unspoken rule that it's not acceptable for them to express sadness and other emotions, said psychologist Dr. Dan Kindlon, co-author with Dr. Michael Thompson of the 1999 bestseller "Raising Cain."

"Emotions become this foreign territory for boys," Kindlon said in a recent lecture.

Feminists helped broaden the definition of what it is to be feminine in the 1960s and '70s, Kindlon said. As a result, everyone accepts that girls should be able to play sports and do math and that they can have careers and be wives and mothers, he said. That has given girls the flexibility to know they can be leaders and still be emotional and nurturing.

But the definition of masculinity has not evolved as much, Kindlon said. Boys don't learn that they can be strong and nurturing and they still view displays of emotions as weak. So they are less flexible.

"We've got to expand that if we want our boys to be more mentally healthy," Kindlon said.

Read more ...

Read more »

Slate.com: How to opt out of our own stupid choices

from Slate.com:
By Dahlia Lithwick

The real trick to understanding how to approach Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, the new book by Cass R. Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler, lies in recognizing the limitations of your inner Homer Simpson. In the authors' view, your whole brain is a civil-war zone between your "automatic system" (the rapid, intuitive, reptilian part) and your "reflective system" (the slow, deliberate, self-conscious part). Behavioral economists take the position that snap judgments formed by your Homer Simpson brain are often quite terrible ones, which go on to have enormous consequences in your financial, physical, and emotional life. Like Homer, we use all sorts of mental "heuristics" or cognitive "rules of thumb" that are flawed, which is why we pay for magazine subscriptions for years after the three-month "free" trial ended ("status quo bias") and why we buy lottery tickets ("unrealistic optimism").

The premise of Nudge—the authors caution in their very first footnote that this is not to be read as noodge (noun: from the Yiddish, meaning, "You never call; you never write. ...")—is that in framing public policy, "choice architects" should gently guide us to make better choices, the sorts of choices Albert Einstein or Star Trek's Mr. Spock* might make or that we would make if we were to consult such men on our personal decisions about, say, giving up smoking. Laissez faire economics holds that faced with a broad menu of choices, most of us will choose wisely. Sunstein and Thaler fear that some of us might pull a Homer Simpson and try to eat the menu.

Now, nobody appreciates being compared to Homer Simpson, but isn't that really the whole point? Sunstein and Thaler are very persuasive in illustrating how often we channel him in our daily decision-making. In fact, your automatic system may reveal your own biases with respect to this book: While your Homer Simpson brain might leap to the conclusion that any book by a University of Chicago economist and a law professor—Sunstein is about to become a Harvard law professor—might be hopelessly dry, that could just be a mistake of the so-called "availability heuristic" (assessing the likelihood of an outcome based on the examples that come most readily to mind). But Nudge is actually great fun to read. And while your reptilian mind might balk at their language of "libertarian paternalism"—even the authors concede the words are "off-putting" if not "contradictory"—your reflective mind may have to concede that there's something to be said for gently guiding children to eat fruit in the cafeteria or inducing workers to sign up for their 401(k) plans, so long as nobody is being coerced and the Oreos are merely moved to a higher shelf, not banned. In some ways the whole project involves resetting the default buttons of your life to healthy and wealthy and wise. Of course someone else is doing the resetting, and that is where the problem lies.

Read more »

NPR This I Believe: The Importance of Restlessness and Jagged Edges

by Kay Redfield Jamison

I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways that less intense emotions can never do. I believe, in short, that we are equally beholden to heart and mind, and that those who have particularly passionate temperaments and questioning minds leave the world a different place for their having been there. It is important to value intellect and discipline, of course, but it is also important to recognize the power of irrationality, enthusiasm and vast energy. Intensity has its costs, of course -- in pain, in hastily and poorly reckoned plans, in impetuousness -- but it has its advantages as well.

Like millions of Americans, I was dealt a hand of intense emotions and volatile moods. I have had manic-depressive illness, also known as bipolar disorder, since I was 18 years old. It is an illness that ensures that those who have it will experience a frightening, chaotic and emotional ride. It is not a gentle or easy disease. And, yet, from it I have come to see how important a certain restlessness and discontent can be in one's life; how important the jagged edges and pain can be in determining the course and force of one's life.

Read more ...

Read more »

Enlightened Living: The Myth of Managing Emotions

Posted by Michael J. Formica in Enlightened Living:

One of the great secrets of life is that ‘it's not all about you.' When we interact with others, we tend to see ourselves as the cause of their reactions and emotions. The folly of this perspective is that, in truth, we are responsible only for ourselves, and our own feelings. We are not responsible for the feelings of others (although we are responsible to them), and we cannot, nor do we, cause those feelings to emerge. Unless we do something intentionally hurtful to another person, the feelings that they experience are those that they have created for themselves. Similarly, others do not cause the emergence of our own feelings.

Failing to recognize this balance of responsibility within our relationships can get us into the dance of managing others emotions. When we do this, we immediately introduce inauthenticity into those relationships. As soon as we begin to anticipate another's reaction, and shape our behavior to meet our expectation of their reaction, we engender a subtle deceit. Firstly, we deceive ourselves into believing that we are somehow helping the situation, and, secondly, we deceive the other into believing that things are different, sometimes vastly different, than they actually are. This dynamic is at the core of both codependence and counter-dependence, and it can be destructive for a number of reasons.

read more...

Read more »