Grief Akin to Drug Withdrawal

Although I have written about this topic before, I have some further thoughts that I would like to now share.

After my husband died, I had a very hard time adjusting to singlehood. Although living in a retirement community helped me survive those awful first months, I was still lonely and bereft.

The way I helped myself was by trying to understand what is happening to me. So I started talking to recent widows and widowers and found that they very often experienced the same thing. So I asked myself, what does “loneliness” mean? It is the lack of a companion, the lack of a witness to your life—someone who knows what you think, read, eat, and where you go and who cares. My witness was a caring husband. In a good relationship, one gives and receives constant validation. By this I mean, a knowing look across a room, a hand squeeze, a good conversation, a compliment—whatever makes one feel recognized. We need to feel cared for and care in return.

And where does that good feeling come from? The brain secretes chemicals such as dopamine (which helps regulate movement and emotion and is essential to the normal functioning of the central nervous system), oxytocin (the bonding hormone), and endorphins (which reduce the sensation of pain and affect emotions) flooding the body with happy feelings. So being in a relationship where there is mutual support creates pulses of feel-good neurotransmitters and hormones. We get accustomed to these, need them to maintain our brain chemistry, they become a normal part of our being, and we get addicted to them. Yes, we become habituated to feel-good substances. When a loved one is away from us for a short time we use phone calls or e-mails to stay connected, because they give us small doses to keep us going until we can be with the person again.

Now what happens when that loved one dies? Not only do we mourn, we are also deprived of the endorphins, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and other feel-good substances. We are in drug withdrawal!

If this is correct, it could explain the physiological symptoms experienced by a surviving spouse which are akin to drug deprivation: loss of appetite and thus not eating enough—which impacts the release of serotonin, a neurotransmitter—trouble sleeping; memory problems; feeling disoriented, listless, and unable to engage in an activity; short attention span; depression; crying spells; feeling weak; physical pain; and what seem like psychosomatic symptoms but are actually physiological withdrawal symptoms.

Until we are deprived of them, we are seldom aware of how much we interact with our loved ones and how often our brain chemistry is activated to make us feel good. Parents and children give each other this validation, so do siblings, close friends, co-workers, and even pets. People who don’t have animals can’t understand why the death of one can be so terribly upsetting. Every time your dog makes you smile, every time you pet him, you get a small dose of dopamine to which you become accustomed. When the dog dies, you are deprived of that fix and go into withdrawal.

Every time we have a lifestyle change—be it going off to college, moving to a new neighborhood or leaving a job—we lose some of the reliable ways of feeling good, and we can experience that loss as homesickness.

I am a great believer that, by giving a label to our feelings and making the unconscious conscious, we can then exert some control by understanding our feelings and behaviors. Becoming conscious of one’s needs can help to identify what one must do to better meet them. In other words, knowing that you are in need of some dopamine, what can you do to stimulate its production? Is it by calling up a friend, going to a uplifting movie, listening to music, eating an ice-cream cone, joining a grief group which validates your feelings, going to a fun event, getting involved in an interesting project, doing volunteer work, or whatever else activates the reward centers of the brain. For some people, fond memories can trigger feelings strong enough to release the chemicals.

What helped me were long phone conversations with my children. Also I threw myself into volunteer work and found that helping others provided me with dopamine and therefore helped me in the process.

Because what stimulates those reward centers is different for each one of us, the task for individuals is to figure out what particular thoughts or behaviors seem to trigger an emotional high. Some friends of mine have children who call everyday—and sometimes several times a day—this helps. Others have plunged themselves into non-stop activities, which may or may not affect brain chemistry, but do at least decrease cortisol, which is the stress hormone. Time spent with friends seems to be a universally helpful activity.

Isolating oneself seldom works and can lead to depression. In other words, it may be important to push oneself out of the house, to accept invitations, to initiate contact with people, and not to indulge in the at-times-overwhelming desire to give up all interactions and just stay in bed.

So the task at hand is to find the activity that will provide some dopamine and other feel good hormones that may help you to cope better.

Balancing Work and Home: The Unachievable Goal

When women started to go to work in large numbers as a result of the feminist revolution, we were told that that balancing work life and home life was an achievable goal and one to be pursued with great alacrity. Before that, many women worked in low-paying jobs such as waitresses, nurses, schoolteachers, factory workers, and all the other service jobs such as hairdressers, maids, typists, but no one was paying attention to them. If they had to go home after a day’s work to shop, cook, clean, and take care of children without the help of a husband or with a husband who didn’t help, no one was writing about balancing their lives or having goals or a clear vision. For these women, it was dead-end jobs with no expectations of promotions, raises, or even recognition.

Then, quite suddenly, Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique came out and the term “the problem that had no name” became the problem with a name: the malaise of the stay-at-home mom, the lack of fulfillment of the formerly satisfied homemaker. And so women started looking for work that was significant, well-paid, and on equal par with men in terms of both opportunity and salary. And it worked--well, most of the time. There are still serious salary disparities between men and women for the same job.

But a new problem emerged. Now that women did not have “jobs” but “careers,” they also experienced what men had experienced all their lives: a commitment to get the work done, even if it took evenings and weekends. The newly important woman who could not be easily replaced could not remain in a strictly 9-to-5 job.

However, the culture at home was not changing. Although many husbands took up some of the slack, it was still the woman’s responsibility to manage the home front and the children. The now continuously exhausted woman who was rushing home from work to find cranky children, difficult-to-keep baby sitters, and a sullen husband, started to look for solutions, trying to hone her time-management skills.

I never did manage to handle each piece of paper that came across my desk only once, however I did not buy anything that needed to be ironed, learned the secrets of how to make ready-made look like cooked-from-scratch, and delegated to an incompetent husband and unwilling children some household tasks. This is what all my friends and colleagues did, and yet we were nowhere near finding that elusive balance between work and home.

Either work suffered or the family did, with frustration and guilt ever present in all our lives. We saw ourselves as failures and tried harder. I have come to realize that, in fact, balance between those two extremely demanding roles is an unachievable myth, and the elusive pursuit only made women feel inadequate.

Even a two-week vacation is time that has to be made up on one’s return--to wit the waiting stack of mail and phone calls. And even during that so-called holiday, we check our e-mails on the run and remain available 24/7 via our cell phones.

When women are advised to plan, have goals, and prioritize, it is assumed that we have choices. In fact, life is full of unpredictability, unintended consequences, and problems we cannot control.

We also must deal with our own ambivalence towards our social lives: How often do we see friends, who do we have time for, how often do we go to fun things like movies and theaters, and is it at the determent of other pursuits? And where does “quiet time” go? Where is time with the family to just hang out--down time?

By creating the imperative of balancing work and life, we are creating an idealized image of how we should feel, be, and what we should want. As our self-esteem starts to depend on how closely we live up to this image of balance and harmony, we end up feeling more and more frustrated at what we perceive as our own lack discipline and time-management skills.

The language of work/life balance is one that includes predictability, control, individual achievement, hierarchies of values, constant movement towards goals, and compartmentalization of life. It demands that we set priorities--as if one can easily decide between finishing an urgent report for work and helping a child with her equally urgent report for school.

The self-help books are of no help--each one of us individually must figure out what we can live with and what we can let go of.

We need to re-think achievement, success, and status. I live by the mottos: “not everything worth doing is worth doing well” and “better is often the enemy of good enough.” As a writer I have come to realize that a book or column never really gets finished--it can always be improved--so at some point, it gets “abandoned” to the publisher. I stop before it is perfect, because it can never be that anyway.

The price in refusing to be part of the competitive rat race is thwarted ambitions. Making peace with one’s choices is to forego status. Parenting cannot be delayed, some work can be, but more often the opportunity for significant advancement is lost in bad timing. This, in fact, is our ultimate choice. It is for most women and now also for many men.

Openness Leads to Better Communication

I grew up with the admonition from my parents that “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Also, “Do not share your opinions unless asked, and then do so cautiously.” And, “Keep private thoughts private--especially in marriage.”

In other words, don’t share your feelings and thoughts, remain an observer of life, not a participant. Indeed, that was the safer stance for my immigrant parents who fled the Russian Revolution, and then the war in France. “Be careful of what you say in public” was good advice.

But, I grew up in a safer world, and so these admonishments fell on deaf ears. I wanted to know others and be known by them.

My experience with openness started with my first encounter group. I was absolutely thrilled to learn that openness was a must for successful communication, and that baring one’s soul or at least one’s most intimate thoughts would lead to certain closeness with a mate, happiness with friends, and success with business colleagues.

How truthful to be--with whom and in what situations--has always remained a question mark for me. To be truly known by one’s spouse and be known in return is surely the underpinning of any good relationship. It is a goal I have always aspired to and succeeded at in my marriage. Yet my friends tell me that such reciprocal knowledge would spell catastrophe in their marriages and that there are many things better left unsaid and unknown--perhaps vaguely guessed at but never confirmed. To be known, yet loved because of and in spite of one’s strengths and weaknesses, to be respected even though mean-spirited thoughts and embarrassing behaviors are out in the open, to have no secrets from one another is for me the ultimate achievement of a perfect union. It is within such a context that anger can be diffused, irritations can be smoothed out, and pain can be healed.

I tried never to lie to my children, although I had lied to my parents (in youth) to escape reprimand for a misdeed and in older age, to protect them from bad news they could do nothing about. My children, however, did not appreciate my honesty and told me that my private life was my affair and friendship was expected from friends and parenting from parents.

I took this to mean that parenting was to forever remain a one-way street. You are there for them, with comfort, advice, and availability, yet you are to require little in return besides the privilege of being asked for comfort, advice, and availability. My life, my thoughts, were of little consequence compared to their lives and thoughts. Of course I know that in a real crisis, my children would care and be there if needed, and in fact they were after my husband died. Now that I am living alone, they have remained concerned and caring, perhaps in even a bit of a role reversal.

Actually it is very satisfying to know that the children, even though middle-aged themselves, have a parent that they can absolutely trust to always have their best interest at heart, have the confidence that their questions matter, that their opinions are taken seriously, and that their problems, no matter how small, will be considered important. No friend has the patience to discuss for hours the best color to re-upholster the sofa, but I could do this with my mother as my daughter does with me.

Honesty with friends is where the question marks come in. Somewhere between not telling the truth because it may hurt, and telling the truth because it can help, a decision needs to be made. The decision is difficult because it is based on how I would feel if I were told, which may be very different from how he or she would feel under the same circumstances. In wanting to be helpful, I have hurt; in trying to be truthful, I have been seen as rude. Yet when an honest opinion is being sought, my friends turn to me.

The dividing line between white lies and truths is whether the person can do anything about the problem. I will not tell an unattractive friend that she is hopelessly so, but will comment, if asked, about her new unbecoming haircut.

Some people play it safe--are always complimentary to everyone. This, for me, is not being a real friend. I can only trust friends’ opinions if I know that they can also tell me the unvarnished truth. Yet, openness in the wrong setting with the wrong people and at the wrong time can lead to negative reactions and lost friendships. Unsolicited feedback is often unwelcome feedback.

Alas, we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, yet with our families and friends, perhaps it is possible to know and be known. And even though I have lived my life contrary to my parents’ advice to be mysterious and difficult to get to know, I have found great happiness in honest relationships, openly sharing feelings, conveying unpopular opinions, and always being willing to re-examine even dearly held beliefs.

My Adventures with New Technology

Not wanting to be a dinosaur, I decided to become part of the information age and purchase the new iPhone 4S. I waited until Black Friday to get special deals online, but I went a bit overboard and am now the owner of an iPad 2, a leather satchel to carry it in, and a wallet-sized pouch for my iPhone which can also hold credit cards. John, the manager of the Verizon 4G Wireless store on Pearl Street, who had ordered the phone for me, offered to set me up and give me lessons.

The first thing I learned is that whatever he taught me one day, I forgot by the next. In other words, I must continuously use the knowledge or it leaves my brain without a trace. The reason is that I don’t have a proper storage place in said brain—this new information does not relate to anything already there, so it needs brand new synapses to go from short-term to long-term memory.

My friend Vance came over the next day and taught me how to cradle the phone and use my two thumbs to type on the almost impossible and much-too-small keyboard. Luckily for me, the keyboard is a mind reader, when I make a typing mistake it knows what I meant to write and corrects it automatically.

The two-year-old daughter of a friend of mine, when given a book, started sliding her fingers across the cover and announced “broken” because no new image appeared. Is this whom I am competing with?

I am adding new words to my vocabulary daily. Today it is “synch,” the past tense of which is not “sunk” like for a doomed ship, but “synched” as in “synchronized”). I have now synched my contact list and my e-mails from my computer to both my iPad and iPhone. They are all actually compatible and do everything together.

I have also made a phone call and received one (with some trepidation). I have even talked to Siri (the computer voice built into the new iPhone 4S). She asked: “How can I help you?” I had no idea except to wish I were younger than my current age of eighty-five. Siri will also answer any question I would have formerly looked up in a dictionary or encyclopedia at the touch of a button.

I am looking forward to being able to download all my medical records to my iPhone and have them available to any doctor, whether in La Jolla or Timbuktu. Weather forecasts, traffic reports, and the latest news are now all at my fingertips.

As I sit here and write long hand in my recliner, both my new gadgets are hooked up and getting charged. I know they needed it because of the little lines at the right top of my phone that weren’t as many as they should be. But my life is about to greatly improve. To my now-synched calendar I have added an alarm that will ring fifteen minutes before any meeting and wake me up if I’m napping. I will never again have an excuse for being late or just not showing up.

Although my life has become significantly more complicated and I am consuming an inordinate amount of time on this learning curve, I am confident that if I ever become competent—which at this moment does not seem probable—I will be the better and more efficient person for it, addicted to these new little companions who will always be able to tell me where I am located, where I should go next, and how to get there.

I am looking forward to reading a book online while waiting at some checkout counter, or answering my e-mail or watching a movie while in the waiting room of some doctor’s office. But be careful, dear readers, you will soon be in deeper trouble, for next, I am going to learn how to tweet all of you.

When He’s Ready for Retirement and She’s Ready for New Challenges

We hear a lot about how dual-career couples manage their responsibilities at home when both work full-time. We also read a great deal about the conflicts women experience juggling children and a career, but there is very little written about the couple that is thinking about retirement.

It is very difficult to function without a schedule when for fifty years one was set for you. It is important for people who have worked all their lives to continue with regular activities, be they golf, politics, board memberships, community volunteering, or simply reading, if that provides satisfaction. For most people, having a routine after retirement provides needed structure. I have always believed that one does not retire from something but to something. In other words, one should never stop work without a plan to pursue specific activities.

If she has been a full-time housewife and he retires, that can begin their golden years of new, shared interests: travel, family, hobbies. Or, it can also be that he’s bored and she feels he’s always underfoot. There is an old joke: “For better or worse, but not for lunch.”

But there is a new problem emerging: what if both the husband and wife have worked full-time, or perhaps she started a new career after the children were grown?

He may be ready to retire, and she may be in the midst of her most productive years. After having stayed home, she is looking outward, whereas he, after having been out there, is looking inward towards home and family.

Difficulties can emerge when women retire after their husbands, and about one-third do so. Because women are often younger than their husbands and because many have started work later in life, the decision to stay in the job market may be an economic one, the accruement of a good pension and bigger Social Security benefits.

Also, while he may feel burned out and glad to be away from the daily pressures of work, she may be at the crossroads of her greatest opportunities. He has a legitimate wish to be able to share his retirement years with his life-long companion, while she has an equally legitimate wish to be able to accomplish more.

It is also important to note that after a man has been the breadwinner all his life, seeing his wife bringing in the money may be difficult to accept. A man’s identity is so often tied to work that losing that status could be traumatic and he may be at loose ends until he feels engaged in some meaningful or new rewarding way.

Couples need to start thinking about this dilemma before it is upon them. Will he be satisfied to market and cook while she’s at work? Will he be lonely or will he enjoy this time on his own? Will she feel guilty about the role reversal, about abandoning him, or will she be thrilled to come home to a (hopefully) clean house and a hot meal?

Couples must be clear about their expectations, their needs, and negotiate the compromises they can live with before the decisions are upon them. If this is discussed ahead of time, he may want to arrange for a consulting job after his retirement or she may prepare herself for part-time work. They may also decide that if he stops working and she doesn’t, they will manage their time together around weekends, with decisions on how to deal with housekeeping tasks. Studies have shown that too often after retiring, men become depressed and/or suffer from a variety of physical ills. This is why it is so important for couples to have plans that will be conducive to continued satisfaction with one’s activities, with one’s life.

It is interesting to note that the man gone all day and the woman at home is much less of a problem than the other way around, since this may have been the case when the children were still living at home. Also, women have had more experience dealing with being home alone and are better at being self-sufficient and using resources such as family and friends for companionship and help when needed.

A pending retirement is a time for honest reappraisal of one’s life’s goals, a realistic look at one’s past achievements, while still being a time to accomplish what has been set aside in pursuit of a livelihood.

It is no easy task, but it may be the most rewarding time of a couple’s life together.

The Personality Factor

What is your personality style?

Find out; it influences the way you feel, think and behave on an unconscious level. It is only when you have identified the unconscious forces that move you that you can consciously decide to try some different behaviors if the ones you usually use do not work well for you. Here are eight personality types one most often encounters in the workplace as well as in the home.

1. The Restless Type: Restless people like change for change’s sake. They don’t settle on anything for long; they balk at routine and take risks that are not well thought out¾often to the detriment of their organizations.

At home, they are not satisfied with routine and look for new things to do¾the perennial travelers fit into this category.

2. The Aggressive Type: Aggressive people are often competitive and want to be top dog. They want power and try to dominate others. They have high control needs but may not always be in good control themselves.

At home, these people often have troubled marriages as well as conflicts with their adolescent and grown children.

3. The Workaholic: These people are often perfectionists. They want order in their lives and pay attention to detail. They withhold the show of emotions and are susceptible to many stress-related health risks. The workaholic makes others feel inadequate as they stay at work later than anyone else and go to the office on weekends.

Workaholics are unavailable parents and spouses, choosing to spend their evenings and weekends at work.

4. The Mercurial Type: People in the arts often belong to this category. They are very effusive, spontaneous, and uninhibited and like being the center of attention. Their impulsiveness, however, can create problems for them at work when they don’t think through the consequences of their behaviors.

Mercurial people are also often solipsistic, thinking the world revolves around them. They may be fun to be with, but their lack of responsible behavior eventually spells trouble on the home front.

5. The Worrier: These are fearful people who predict negative outcomes to most undertakings and thus will avoid risk. They are guarded in their relationships. Their anxiety and lack of self-confidence make them cling to known routines and prevent them from making necessary changes.

At home, worriers are over-protective of their children and may become paranoid in their relationships.

6. The Leisurely Type: These people are sometimes accused of being too laid back, because they put their personal priorities ahead of work¾they prefer to relax and enjoy themselves. These individuals don’t like to feel pushed and may have a tendency to procrastinate.

The fun-loving person may not take on their share of responsibilities and thus annoy those who must take up the slack.

7. The Loner: These people are often found in the sciences. They are unsentimental, they are not feelers, but instead are observers and doers. Their main problem is not understanding other people’s feelings, so they hurt others inadvertently.

The loners at home include the computer-obsessed person who would rather surf the Net than spend time with family or tinker in the garage at the expense of time with spouse or children.

8. The Go-Getter: Usually successful, the go-getters are ambitious, often overly self-confident and concentrate on their own goals sometimes to the detriment of organizational goals. They forge ahead, not caring if they step on other people’s toes.

The go-getter may overly push their children to excel academically or at sports in ways that may not be beneficial to them. Winning becomes everything.

There are many other personality types, but these are ones that seem to impact the workplace the most.

If you do not get the recognition you feel you deserve at work, if you do not have the colleagueship you expect, ask yourself whether any of these personality types, or combinations thereof, fit you and thus may be the problem.

Hardly anyone fits into just one category. People can be restless and aggressive, or restless and worried. On the other hand, go-getters are not usually loners nor leisurely, but can be workaholics.

To find out, observe your responds when under pressure. It usually indicates the basic personality type that you control better under more normal circumstances.

If you don’t have a clue as to what personality type you have, show this list to a few trusted colleagues or family members and ask them to categorize you. Don’t be defensive about their responses, even if you disagree. Remember that feedback is a gift that is meant to help. Only by identifying the way your behavior affects others can you make the necessary changes.