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Water and Other Simple Things

Ron Johnson Uncategorized

Water. So simple. So necessary. So easily neglected. I will never take water for granted again. It has been a blessing (recently) and a curse (in the past).

It started about six months ago. More accurately, it started several years ago. Much more accurately, it started 15 years ago. But back to the present and the recent past. We have had some serious troubles with…water…for the last six months or more. Like many people in Wisconsin, we had some freezing pipes problems during this very long, very cold winter. Specifically, the pipe that runs water to our office/barn, running underground from our house to the barn, froze sometime late December of this year, about the time Deb and I were wandering around the Southwest enjoying our travels in various national parks, canyons, and Native American cliff dwellings. Well, we didn’t entirely enjoy the trip because our Hybrid SUV, with its 186,000 miles, had some disturbing messages leading us to stop at no less than three Ford dealerships on the way. But I am getting off track. I could have written about “Cars” instead of Water, but that is another story.

Water. How central is that in our lives. We are born out of an environment composed largely of water. We, as human beings, are, as one Star Trek episode said of us, “bags of mostly water,” about 75% I think. What an odd thing, being a “bag of mostly water” walking around, talking, doing, dreaming, and the like. How is that possible? But again, I am off track from the “water problem.” We came back from this lovely dry climate of the U.S. Southwest to the equally lovely, but also cold and wet Midwest, arriving just after the New Year. We arrived to find our water in the office/barn had frozen. Now this is not good. It is not a good thing to have frozen water in your office where people coming in for psychological services have enough on their minds, and would rather not worry about  the sink not working or the toilet not flushing. So, being the good doer/caretaker I am, I put some buckets of water in the office rest room for people to use when flushing the toilet and some hand cleanser. Surely, I thought, this would take care of things until our predictable thaw of the ground in February, maybe late January. Surely, it will thaw. January finished, February came, and no thaw. Well, we certainly will get to early March, and it will thaw. March came, and no thaw. How awful, do we have to wait until July for goodness sake?

While we are not-to-patiently waiting for the water to thaw, things actually got worse. What is worse than not having water flowing? Having the drain freeze. How could a 4 inch drain freeze when water flows downhill? I figured out that the “condensate” from the furnace slowly dripped into the drain, and over a month or two slowly froze all four inches of the drain. Now I am in a real fix. And on top of that I didn’t realize that the drain was frozen until sewage started seeping up into the utility basin in the garage, which is right under the office/barn. Oh great! Exactly how will I deal with this? You don’t want to know. You really don’t want to know. Consider buckets, dipping buckets, carrying buckets, and dumping buckets in the woods. That is about all you want to know. So it is about this time that we decide that we need a clean out in the drain system so that we can somehow unfreeze the drain. This took a lot of work, including digging 4 feet under concrete, sand, gravel, and a lot of stones to get to the drain, and then to the water line. Finally, we got the drain to work. That was April. But still no water.

Awe, certainly the water will simply unfreeze, and we will be back in business. It did unfreeze, but unfortunately, when it unfroze, it broke the pipe. Here is where this last 6 months really relates to the last 15 years. Fifteen years ago I, an unaccomplished plumber, put the pipe underground, along with natural gas, drain, and electric. But I did what I often do: I did it cheaply. I put the water in ¾ inch PVC. A lot of guys would have put the underground pipe in copper, or CPVC, or stronger PVC. Not me. So now we have PVC pipe leaking somewhere four feet underground. I do what I do best: I just do it. I found the (apparent) leak, repaired it, and put new pipe to the break. Then, trusting that the leak was prepared, we covered this 4×6 feet hole with sand, gravel, stones, etc. and covered all that with concrete, replete with Deb’s decorative stones in the concrete. And off to the cabin with the relief that this whole water mess was finally finished.

After our brief respite at the cabin, as we came back home and pulled into the driveway, I noticed what seemed to be a stream of water coming from the office/barn. Surely, this couldn’t be. I had fixed the pipe, right? Wrong. Evidently, the pipe had again broken, and we had been leaking ¾ inch of water for…how many days? We found out when the next water bill came in together with a note that explained why out bill was 5x more than normal. They wondered if we had a leaky faucet. Not exactly. Now we are looking at this concrete leaking water and decide we need to do something more permanent. What could that be?

We start with hiring the son of a basketball player friend of mine, a young man, by the way who worked well beyond the $10/hr. I offered him, so I had to increase his pay to $15/hr. He dug the same hole, now bigger and deeper. And we thought: is it possible that we could somehow avoid digging a 100 foot trench through our yard, 5 or 6 feet down. Well, maybe. Perhaps we could use “Pex” piping that we had put in the barn/office a few years back when we had a different leak (and flood of our entire office). Yes, we could use Pex, but could be actually push it through the ¾ PVC? It just might work. Long story short, we tried it, and it seemed to work; we pushed this Pex pipe through the PVC and it went well until, boom. It stopped. We must have run into some kind of bend, 90 degree or 45 degree, or something about halfway through the yard. OK, we can do this. Let’s just dig a 6 foot by 6 foot hole in the middle of our backyard and find the angle of the PVC. No luck. Nice hole, however. Time to go to bed and sleep on this problem.

Thank goodness for my “analyst” wife. In the middle of the night, she thought (analyzed) that we might somehow shave off some of the end of the Pex pipe and create some kind of loose end that might…just might…get through the PVC angle. So down in the basement again, and we did just that: shaved off a few inches of the Pex, and pushed it through the pipe. It went further. A bit harder to push, but it was moving. Or was it bending. I stopped pushing for a moment, but Deb insisted: just keep on pushing, you! OK, I’ll push. I pushed, and then it stopped. Could it be that it came into the garage 100 feet away? I don’t know, but I hoped. “Deb, why don’t you go to the garage and see if, by some wild chance and by God’s grace, the Pex has found its way to the garage.” I waited. No word. I came upstairs, and I saw Deb standing 100 feet away from me in the 4 foot hole in the garage smiling…and flashing her…reasts at me. I got the message. The Pex was through. I couldn’t believe my eyes…. How wonderful…to have water again…and for other things.

Just to put one more anticlimax to this story, we were able to push the Pex through the final 15 feet of PVC so we didn’t have to tear up another 10 feet of concrete. And in the process I ripped my finger open as I pulled the pipe through. It just didn’t matter. And as I type today, my finger is still recovering two weeks past this last water event. It is a reminder to me that God was, indeed graceful in giving us water, albeit by our work and Deb’s ideas, but Grace nevertheless, which is what I think/feel when I see this damaged finger.

Water. How basic. How necessary. I will never take it for granted again. I wonder how much else I take for granted: electricity, natural gas, gasoline, house, family, friends, peace, and safety. There is something very special, and oddly, very spiritual, about our now having our water problem solved. It is humbling. It is a reminder.

I need a glass of water. How great that I can just turn the faucet on and get a glassful.

 

Mother’s Job is Done

Ron Johnson Uncategorized ,

We have too much mothering in this country. Mothering of all kinds including biological mothers, fathers and others who for one necessary reason or another act as “mothers” to their children, government providing a kind of mothering too people who act like children, single mothers who have no choice but to continue to be mothers doing the best they can, and a general mood of fear that is so pervasive these days and seems to call for the security of mother. I’d like to call for an end to undue mothering and replace it with fathering, and then with personal responsibility. Let me explain…or have I already lost my audience?

The security of mother

Let me start this sermonette by stating that I think there is nothing so central to life as mothers, in whatever form they come. Biological mothers do nine months of work before their children even breathe, and God love them for that work. I have no idea what it is like to carry a developing child inside of my body, but at the very least I have a sense that something truly special occurs during these nine months. I truly wonder what happens, what it is like, for both mother and developing child to have this kind of union where mother cares for her child at a natural, biological, and possibly a spiritual level. Since I have been a (small) part of the births of my children, I have at least seen the wonder of breathing life beginning along with the wonder of mother and child together as God means it to be. I yet muse over those moments 35 and 40 years ago and am moved by the beauty.

I want to make a brief point here about what a “mother” is as I have suggested in my introductory paragraph. Most mothering comes from biological mothers, which will be my primary thrust in this blog. But I would extend my generic view of what a “mother” is to include anyone who provides basic security to children, and then would extend this idea of “mothering” a bit beyond the raising of children. “Mothers” (or “mother figures”) could be grandmothers, aunts, or other females, or they could be fathers, uncles, or grandfathers. I consider the providing of security and nurturance “mothering” however it comes and whoever renders these things to children.

My belief is that mothers provide basic security to children. This providing of security begins in the womb and continuing afterward for some time. Most mothers provide this basic security to their children, perhaps first in the womb, and then perhaps at the breast, and further into infancy and toddlerhood as children explore the world more and yet need nearly constant care and security. If a child does not receive this rather constant care and security, the child will be hurt physically, or possibly even die. Equally important, however, is that a child that does not feel the security of mothering will never feel secure in the world unless that child finds a way to develop it in adulthood. Much of psychotherapy has to do with providing this basic mothering security to people so that they can find a deeper security inside of themselves.

Mothering also means providing nurturance. Simply stated, this nurturance begins in the womb, continues at the breast and later with assisted eating, and culminates with children knowing how to feed themselves. Nurturing has largely to do with food, but there is also a deep nurturing that comes with physical touch that a mother figure ideally provides. Thus, if a child feels the security of mother and the nurturance of mother, that child will be able to engage the world with a sense that the world is largely safe as well as a place of adventure and accomplishment.

There is nothing as basic as mothering. There is nothing more important. If I don’t have proper mothering, nothing else works because there is not a sense in the person that the world is safe and that one can make it in the world with achievement and challenge. Most people grow up without a feeling of internal security, which means that they have not been provided with the mothering that they needed and hence have not progressed to the point of internal personal security. But there is more than nurturance and security to life, to success, and to happiness.

The place of father(ing)

Fathers or father substitutes provide a bridge, namely a bridge between the safety and security of mother to the relatively insecure world. If fathers do their due in life they help their children face the challenges of the world that have to do with work, play, success, and relationships. Right off the bat it might seem odd that I would place “relationships” as something fathers do because it seems obvious that most fathers have little understanding of such things. I would agree that most fathers haven’t been good over the years at helping their children formulate relationships. Ideally, however, a father would slowly and patiently help a child move away from the nearly absolute safety of having hovering mother to a place where there is no mother, where there is little or no external security, namely the real world.

As I have said of biological mothers, I will say of biological fathers. A father doesn’t have to be biological. He doesn’t even have to be a he. “He” can be grandmother, aunt, or mother. Anyone who provides this bridge from security to adventure is doing fathering. In some societies, usually “primitive”, fathering is done by a biological uncle, a grandfather, or an “elder.” The person who provides the bridge into adventure is doing fathering.

Fathers who successfully help their children bridge into the real world do so with three elements: encouraging, challenging, and sacrificing. A man (generically speaking) who helps his child bridge into the world needs to encourage first. Encouragement is something like saying, “Look, you have been secure for a while with your mother. You now have the ability and freedom to look into the world and see what you can accomplish.” Encouragement itself is a bridge because it suggests that security is good and now is the time to do something while feeling secure…but perhaps not too sure what that might mean. After encouragement a father needs to challenge. Challenging is something like saying or implying, “You can do this. I know you can do this. You might fail or you might succeed, but you need to try to do this. You need to do this because the world is a wonderful place and there are wonderful things to see and do, so you need to get up and go.” A properly challenged child feels that he has felt safe with mother, has felt encouraged by father, and now feels the desire to do something.

Fathering doesn’t end with encouraging and challenging. The third element of fathering is sacrifice. A father who sacrifices for his child is one who loves his child more than he loves himself. He occasionally sees the need to give up on what he wants for the sake of meeting what his child needs. Sacrificing can come in the form of buying something for his child instead of himself, giving time to his child instead of himself, or on a rare occasion, placing himself in some kind of danger for the protection of his child.

A child who has inadequate fathering does not do anything significant in the world. Such a child never bridges beyond the security of mother. As a result a child without sufficient encouragement, challenge, and sacrifice ends up without the tools “to face triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters the same” as Kipling said in his poem. There can be too much fathering, but this is rare because good fathering tends to help children get beyond the need for encouragement, challenge, and sacrifice and find their own success and achievement in life.

Too much mothering

Our culture provides too much mothering and not enough fathering. I blame both mothers and fathers for this tragedy, but mostly fathers. It is tragic that 73% of African American children are born out of wedlock, and the large majority of the children in these families are raised without functional father in the home. It is equally tragic that 50% of Latino children and that 25% of White children are born out of wedlock, but there tends to be more active involvement of fathers in these latter two categories. But it is not so much the born out of wedlock that I am concerned about. I am more concerned with the difficulty that children have bridging into the world of adventure and success because they can’t seem to get away from the need for security.

A major problem has to do with the single Moms out there, and the sort of single Moms who have husbands and partners who are not really part of the family. The challenge for many women, and most specifically for single mothers, is to change from being a person who provides basic security to a person who provides adventure. I don’t think any woman makes this change easily. I don’t think it is natural, meaning that it is not natural to be a person providing security and nurturance to a person who provides encouragement, challenge, and sacrifice. This is not women’s fault. Women have a more natural orientation towards security than men do (usually), and have great difficulty setting this nurturing/security orientation aside for a very different approach to children. Rarely, are mothers able to manage this change in orientation. They either provide too much security, and usually rescuing, or they provide some kind of complaint that their children are not doing anything while all the time providing security and nurturing to these children, who may, indeed, be in their 20’s and 30’s.

In my mind it comes down to moving away from external security into adventure, and then into internal security. As long as I have a mother who is providing external security, I will not be able to reach into the world, experiment with my abilities and interests, and figure out what the world is and what I can do in it. If I have a mother (remember, or mother substitute) continuing to provide me security from the outside, I will not have the opportunity to develop internal security. 

Too much mothering also comes from other sources beyond a biological mother or a mother substitute. A culture or government that provides security but does not provide challenge and adventure is just at fault as is the ever present mother or the usually absent father.

The simple solution

The solution to the problem is that we have too much mothering and too little fathering. This is simple but it is not easy. It is very hard. This means that (1) men need to understand what they as men (or women) need to do is to encourage, challenge, and sacrifice, (2) women need to allow men to help their children bridge into adventure, which is always unsafe to some degree, and (3) our culture needs to encourage children to experiment in the world finding what they have to offer the world.

But this is another topic, namely helping people find their gifts, talents, and abilities rather than their weaknesses, limitations, and so-called problems.

 

Friends

Ron Johnson Uncategorized

“I don’t have any friends,” he said. Jack went on: “I don’t know what to do about this. How do you go about finding friends when you’re 50? I had a lot of friends when I was a kid; I had a few friends in high school; I met one or two people in college that were kind of friends; I know a lot of guys at work, and a I know some of my neighbors. But I don’t have any friends.”

I have known Jack for a couple of years. His wife and he came to see me for marriage counseling. As is our policy we did a “marital assessment” to understand Jack and his wife before we would engage in counseling of any sort. Our practice is to understand the people we see before rendering any kind of advice and counsel. More accurately our procedure is this: understand the person, understand the person better, understand the person better than anyone else understands the person. Then we might be in the position to counsel or advise. So after this marital assessment it seemed best to see Jack individually and seek to understand him and help him understand himself better. Now after two years of therapy we have made some progress in the marriage, work, and some other matters. But we have come to a major hurdle, a kind of a problem. I understand him pretty well; he understands himself better; but no one else understands him. As he said, he doesn’t have any friends. In a way, I am a professional friend.

Jack went on. He said that his “best friend,” Sam, is someone he has known for many years. Jack and his friend have spent many hours together over many years doing things, playing, and working. But interestingly, they have never really talked. Jack certainly loves Sam, and I expect that Sam returns the favor. It is likely, however, that they have never used the “L word” (love) with one another. Perhaps it isn’t necessary that they tell one another that they love each other. There are people who insist upon saying, “Love you” when they and a phone call. After a while this kind of “I love you” seems to lose its punch. Yet it is interesting that Sam is Jack’s best friend, and a friend for many years, and a friend that he dearly loves, but yet they do not share words of love. More importantly, they don’t talk, meaning that they don’t talk about what they feel, what they want in life, or who they are. Jack and his best friend have never talked the way Jack and I talk when we meet. Jack and I talk about feelings, like hurt, joy, sadness, fear, anger, excitement, and passion. We talk about work and marriage relationships as well but the heart of these talks is still the feelings involved in these relationships. It is what I do for a living: listen to people. They talk to me about their thoughts, feelings, and doings.

I think the best way to look at valuable psychotherapy is to consider that it is a professional friendship. It is a great privilege to be “friends” with so many people, and I do not take the responsibility lightly. I have many “professional” friends, meaning patients whom I see occasionally or regularly. I recently saw a man, now 24, whom I saw when he was pushed into my office by his mother when he was 15. Now he comes in on his own accord. I saw a young man, now 16, whom I saw when he was seven. I saw another returning patient, a girl now 11, whom I had seen when she was six. She remembers that our friendship was all about playing together. It was good to see them again as I recalled our “friendship” that had existed years ago and now was reinstated. Generally, my deeper professional friendships are with adults with whom I can find some commonality of vocabulary and conversation and well as some years of life experience.

I am privileged to have these many professional/patient friendships, where I can have depth conversation about things that matter. And therapy is not all depth and quality. There are also times of frivolity and talk about the weather. Yet these friendships are exclusive to the office…my office. It is necessary to keep “boundaries” with patients, which usually means that there is little or no outside-of-office contact. It is even a bit awkward to meet a patient while at the grocery store. How do you say, “How’re you doing?” when you know that he is not doing well and struggling to stay alive? It is much harder for me to develop and maintain adult friendships, somewhat because of my professional knowledge, but more because of the dearth of true friendships available in the Western world. I once wrote a lead article in a professional association newsletter entitled, “Do therapists have any friends?” Many of my colleagues resonated with my rhetorical question.

All this about friendship, mostly absent in men’s lives, got me thinking: what is friendship? And what are the ingredients of friendship? And how in the world does a man in, say, his 40’s, 50’s, or older develop a friendship? Establishing and maintaining friendship is no easy task, mostly because of words.

Words
There are many jokes that have as the main ingredient some kind of reference to women talking while men are essentially silent. The data on actual number of words used and the quantity of talking indicates that men talk more than women. The caveat to this interesting fact is that men tell stories and they talk about things. I played basketball last night with a bunch of guys many of whom I have known for 15 years or more. There was plenty of talk, like, “Did you watch the NFL playoff game?,” “What do you think of the Badgers losing two games in a row?,” “It’s supposed to snow five inches tonight,” and the like in addition to the routine teasing me about my 70-year old body trying to keep up with these young bucks of 30, 40, and 50. There was lots of talk, lots of chatter, and lots of friendly razzing. But there was nothing of emotional content, nothing of personal substance, nothing of feelings, and nothing of depth. Now, we might not expect this kind of talk with a bunch of guys playing basketball on a Sunday night. I imagine, however, that if 18 women were playing basketball on a Sunday night, there would be much more than, “How about those Packers?”

Words of depth, words of feelings, and words of personal revelation don’t come naturally to men. At least they don’t come naturally to North American men. My wife and I have had the privilege of being in southern Europe, Greece and Italy, a couple of times. We found a remarkable thing: southern European men talk. They talk about themselves. They talk about feelings. They talk about philosophy. They talk about important things. Walk around Athens or some small town in Greece and you will see men talking…and talking…while they drink that awful Greek sludge they call coffee. I think the reason they spend so much time talking about those small café tables is that it takes two hours to drink (or is it eat?) Greek coffee. It is amazing to watch town after town, street after street, café after café where men are talking. Not to be seen in America. Guys here are working, watching TV, or drinking beer…at least most men. When I have the privilege of seeing a man in my office, I am usually the first man he has talked to in his 20, 30, 40, or 50 years. Words, at least important words, don’t come easy to most American men. I often tell men something like, “At your age of 40, your intellectual ability is at least 55, your vocational/work commitment is maybe 60, your personal ethic is 70, but your emotional/social ability is about age 12. Amazingly, most men say, “Yes, I feel like a child, or adolescent at best when it comes to words, friends, and conversation.”

Feelings
I just had a phone call with a man I saw in my office 15 years ago. I will call him Jim. Jim is a very successful businessman and has had many trials in life, trials I will not elaborate to keep his confidence. I haven’t seen Jim for the past 15 years, but he called me today to ask for help in his process of helping a friend. His friend is dying. His friend is dying of an “incurable” disease. His friend has chosen to take an alternative medical approach to healing, and at least by the report I had today, this approach is not working. Jim has tried to help his dying friend “correct” his direction with his last years or months of life. I told Jim that while his desire to help Jim was admirable and laudable, it was deficient in a central ingredient: feelings. Jim is trying to convince his friend what Jim thinks is the right thing to do. Now, I don’t know if it is right for this guy to continue with alternative therapy or go in a different direction. And I don’t know how he should talk to his kids about his disease. But I know this: Jim’s decision on these matters is not about facts; it is about feelings. And likely, neither Jim nor his friend knows how to find a path into these feelings.

In previous blogs I have discussed the basic feelings in life: fear and anger (defensive feelings), and joy and sorrow (love feelings). These feelings become complex as they are felt and expressed and often combine together in various ways. Feelings are not the only part of a true friendship, but they are a central ingredient. If a friendship is all about feelings, it is insufficient. If it is all about doing, it is insufficient. If it is all about thoughts, it is insufficient. A growing and valuable friendship has to have all three: feelings, thoughts, and doings. Getting men to find and express the “f word” (feelings), as I call it, is usually quite a difficult task.

Women
In many ways women have many more friends than men. And they certainly have the ingredient of feelings in these friendships much more than men do. I envy the way most women can talk about their feelings, sometimes at the same time. This is quite remarkable. I won’t belabor the neuropsychology of this phenomenon here but to note that there are significant brain differences between the male and female brains that allow a more free flowing expression of feelings in words for women. This is the good news.

The bad news is that men are usually quite at a loss to deal with women who have this much better ability to express feelings in words. Women can also express their feelings in tears much more easily. I believe this ability women have is a combination of certain neurological factors and cultural factors. I have seen southern European and Middle Eastern men express feelings in words and tears quite easily and freely. But we are not living in the Mediterranean. We’re in America. We’re in a culture where woman have…dare I say this…the monopoly of feeling words. Men, at least men in this culture, can’t keep up with a normal woman if it is in the realm of feelings, especially feelings surrounding hurt, helplessness, needs, and sadness. I am often with a couple in my office where both of them are hurt and sad, but it is the woman who is crying, not the man. The man gets mad or is just silent. He doesn’t have words for his feelings of hurt and sadness. He thinks that such feelings are a sign of weakness, but more importantly, he just doesn’t have words for these feelings. In our American male culture, you just don’t express such feelings at work or, for that matter, on the basketball court. You just feel them. And then these feelings (of hurt and helplessness) usually deteriorate into analysis, anger, or addiction. I call these the “three A’s” to avoid expressing feelings.

It is no small task for a man to find words for feelings that we might call “softer,” like hurt, helplessness, and sadness. It takes a lot of work. It can be done, but there is little in American culture that truly rewards men finding the process of feeling these feelings, and then expressing these feelings. If a man truly works at establishing and developing a friendship in adult life, he will need to establish and develop his vocabulary for feelings. He has all the feelings he needs to have. I abhor the expression, “Men are not in touch with their feelings.” Men are completely “in touch” with their feelings. They just don’t have a vocabulary for them. When I am the first man in a patient’s life with whom he has expressed his feelings, I feel privileged. Then it is my task to help this man find other men to express these same things.