“ Why Can’ t You Just Say, Thanks?”

If this sounds familiar it is because most of us have said it or heard it.

• Most people want to feel appreciated, particularly by the person closest to them but too often the expression of gratitude gets lost in the fabric of couple’s lives.
• Recent research in the field of positive psychology informs us that feeling gratitude, the awareness and appreciation of what is valuable and meaningful to oneself, has many benefits including positive mood, enhanced physical health and optimistic outlook. Actually expressing gratitude has proven to have even greater benefits in terms of personal happiness and relationship enhancement.

Then… Why is it difficult to express gratitude to a partner?

People are complicated. Add in couple dynamics, prior history, unconscious factors, cultural context and you multiply those complications.

• Most partners don’t consider how often they thank their partner or if not-why not?
• Few are aware of the proven benefits of expressing gratitude on their personal feelings, their view of the partner, the patterns and value of the relationship.

Consider Recognizing Your Resistance and Understanding the Possible Benefits of  “Just Saying Thanks.”

As the Penn State Sexual Scandal continues to unfold and dominate the media, people everywhere are expressing shock, anger, anguish and loss.  College Football, a beloved symbol of healthy American values, has been fractured by the disillusionment suffered when trust and safety are gone and children are no longer safe. Driven by the news and social media updates, people everywhere are asking:  How could it happen?  Why wasn’t it stopped? Who should be blamed? Who was protecting the kids?

There is one group that is not surprised.  They have been silently asking these questions for years. They are the countless adults who were sexually abused as children.

For many of them the Penn State Scandal is emotionally complicated. Whether they have identified and come forth as victims, embraced the power of healing or live with the memory of abuse on the edges of awareness, they are watching a nation grapple with an unthinkable crime – child sexual abuse, a crime of betrayal and the destruction of innocence -“ soul murder.“ For them the response to this scandal carries with it the possibility of both positive and negative impact.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words – the words of warriors are different. For centuries, warriors have written in a way that has pulled us into the heart and horror of war. As illuminated by Jonathan Shay, Homer’s epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey depict the brutality of men and war and the difficulty of homecoming in a way that has had timeless relevance for generations who have served. Ernest Hemingway experienced war firsthand and wrotes dispatches from his many frontlines and Vietnam veteran and author, Tim O’Brien invites us to shoulder, Things They Carried in Vietnam.

Building upon this tradition, The National Endowment of the Arts has made a unique contribution to American Literary History and to those who have served our country. In a project called Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families, they reached out to the 2 million active military and their loved ones and invited them to write about their personal experiences of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while the events were happening.

The response was overwhelming. The National Endowment of the arts offered fifty writing workshops by esteemed literary figures on 25 bases in 5 countries, an aircraft carrier and a fleet ship in the Gulf. Six thousand troops participated – another 25,000 were sent the audios.

Given that there are now 81 million baby boomers in this country ranging from ages 46 to 66, there are many people navigating the transitions of midlife. When you add to that the fact that 80% of the male boomers and 77% of the females are married the journey gets more complicated.

Amazon lists over 2,000 books dealing with midlife with titles as different as Awakening at Midlife, Midlife Meltdown, Thinking about Tomorrow: Re-inventing Yourself at Midlife, How to Survive Your Husband’s Midlife Crisis, Midlife Crisis For Men: Male Menopause, My Favorite Midlife Crisis etc. The message is that against the backdrop of mortality and a story half told, men and women navigate their midlife passage in different ways with different challenges and different needs. When married, the impact they have on each other is inevitable.

It depends. It most cases it’s not the differences that threaten a marriage, it’s how the partners experience and react to those differences.

There Are Always Some Differences

Whether you were drawn together by the attraction of opposites or finally found your ideal match in terms of similar looks, education or socio-economic background, most partners at some point realize they are married “ with differences.” The fact is that no two people have the same goal, react the same way or enjoy the same thing, at the same time – ALL THE TIME. ( Thankfully)

• “ You really like working in the garden?”
• “ You don’t mind driving the kids for 8 hours to ski?”
• “ You really want that many pairs of shoes?”

When Do Differences become Problems?

Working with couples, it seems that differences become problems when they are unexpected, imply change or are experienced as a threat to either partner or to the relationship. Often partners react to the assumed threat with accusation or judgment which sets the stage for conflict. For example,

While most partners can live with having different tastes in foods and music, differences that emerge in the face of life events ( jobs, children, financial burdens) often threaten partners.

Suicide ranks as the eleventh leading cause of death in the United States. We have lost loved ones across the generations.

• Older Americans are disproportionately likely to die by suicide. Although they comprise only 12 percent of the U.S. population, people age 65 and older accounted for 16 percent of suicide deaths in 2004.
• Suicide is the second leading cause of death in college students and the third leading cause of death in adolescents.  Every day 14 teens take their own lives.
•  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for the second year in a row, middle -aged adults have the highest suicide rate in the country, surpassing even older Americans.

While there are many factors that contribute to suicide, an important new study identifies two factors that have been associated with increased risk for suicidal thought and behavior across the lifespan – hopelessness and lack of connectedness to others.

Do you know why you overeat?

Overeating is a common and complex behavior in this culture.

A Pew survey finds that about six-in-ten Americans say they eat more than they should, either often (17%) or sometimes (42%). More particularly, a majority of Americans report that they eat more junk food than they should, either often (19%) or sometimes (36%).

More than 85% of people say that Americans are more overweight today than five years ago and two-thirds of the public call this a “major problem.”

While issues with eating are often driven by personal or familial dynamics, food expert, Brian Wansink, who conducted research with thousands of people over many years, found that when it comes to overeating, people actually share some common patterns.

On Sunday we commemorate the 10th Anniversary of 9/11, an event of unthinkable proportion in terms of the destruction of civilian lives and life as we knew it. Globally, millions will bear witness to this terrorist assault from the retrospective of ten years. Many will resonate with the commonalities of loss, fear, courage and even growth that have unfolded. At the same time, the personal meaning of the 10th Anniversary and the reactions it evokes will be unique to the men, women and children whose lives have never stopped being touched by that day.

How do we cope with the 10th anniversary of a traumatic event of such proportion? How do we withstand the physical and emotional pain of re-triggered shock, loss, traumatic memory? Now, ten years later, how do we bear witness and re-visit in a way that gives more than it takes?

Ten Coping Strategies

Make Meaning of Anniversary Reactions - The nature of anniversary events is that they often trigger the same reactions of body and mind tied to the original trauma but experienced in the present i.e. hyperarousal (anxiety, sleep problems, startle response, concentration problems); intrusive imaging (memories, flashbacks and dreams); numbing, avoidance and constriction. Such anniversary reactions in addition to feelings of fear, anger, guilt, and grief are common in the weeks before and after an anniversary event.

If you are feeling anxious about the upcoming 10th Anniversary of 9/11 — you are not alone. Nationally and internationally the world is focusing on commemorating a day of unthinkable destruction of lives and life as we have known it.  As such, the event has private and public significance that evokes a broad range of reactions, body memories and feelings.

Trauma theorists tell us that we heal in community, that we heal by bearing witness to atrocity, the we need to remember and mourn and that we must give voice to what has happened to inform  future generations.

Trauma theorists tell us that with anniversary events comes the opportunity to do this as well as the emotional déjà vu – the anniversary reactions.

As we watch the images and follow the updates of “The path of Hurricane Irene,” we are confronted with the fine line media must walk between providing necessary, often life-saving information and escalating anxiety and traumatic reactions. While adults, themselves, need to find a viable way to regulate their exposure to traumatic media cues, it is particularly important to consider the impact of disaster media cues on children.

Given the centrality of media in this culture the impact of media coverage of man-made or natural disasters on children can easily go unrecognized.

• What becomes the white noise or background sound of TV’s in every public place and often in many homes is a never ending reminder to a child that something frightening is about to happen- although no one seems to be talking about it.
• For pre-school and even grade school children, the combination of not fully grasping a verbal TV message while registering a tone of alarm or seeing frightening images can be very terrifying.
• Given a child’s perspective of time and place, there may be little ability to differentiate how close they are to what they are seeing.
• Children, as we found with 9/11, are often  unable to determine that what they are seeing is a repeat of the same video clip and not more planes or waves or houses blown away.