Brave New Kitty

From www.integrative-healthcare.org:

“Many scholars believe that pain and trauma are incidents prevented from being completed. These can be single damaging events such as a car accident, continuous bombardments requiring emotional defenses, or over-training of isolated muscles that lock the body into a recognized pattern. Traumas can be considered anything that keep us locked in a physical, emotional, behavioral or mental habit. Recovery from trauma is the process of the body finding balance and freeing itself from constraints. All too often, the recovery process is halted, preventing the traumatic occurrence from completing.”

This phenomenon is what some people call “tissue memory.” While there is no definitive scientific evidence for tissue memory, there is much circumstantial evidence that unresolved pain and grief can result in physical symptoms in the body. This is more than just the fatigue of depression or the muscle tightness caused by anger or anxiety. “Continuous bombardments requiring emotional defenses” is the very definition of childhood trauma. And often, that trauma is so deeply ingrained and so much a part of us that we’ve long since ceased to notice it.

The point is that there is a physical aspect to emotional healing, and it should not be ignored. My own experience provides strong, if anecdotal, evidence for this. I visited my first body worker a few years into my recovery (which at the time meant sobriety and therapy). She was a rolfer, which is a form of very deep massage. She told me beforehand that I might experience some weird side effects, such as stomach upset and strong emotions. In our first session, nothing like this happened, and I smirked inwardly at the whole idea. But as she kneaded my thigh muscles halfway through our second appointment, I was shocked at a sudden attack of nausea, which in turn seemed to set off a whole gamut of emotions that seemed entirely out of context. I went home that evening feeling…cleaner. I felt like I’d been through an ordeal, but had come out the other side. I saw the rolfer a few more times, but she was really out of my budget, so I had to stop.

After that, I experimented with a number of other body workers. I saw a cranial sacral practitioner who was masterful at getting me to release tension in my neck and shoulders. I saw a “visual body worker” (I’m sorry to say I don’t remember what she called herself) who had me describe my visions in detail as she worked on various parts of my body; I don’t know how this worked but I really felt more at home in my own skin after these sessions. I saw an applied kinesiologist, and while I think his “science” borders on the absurd, he was a natural healer who seemed to instinctively focus on the parts of my body that held the most “memory.” There were a few others, as well, but these were the three who had the most influence on what I call my “tissue memory issues.”

Then, when I began to meditate, everything kind of broke loose. It didn’t happen at first, of course; it took several months of effort to quiet my mind enough to be even somewhat present with my body. But when I was able to do so, I began to notice how tense and anxious I really was, and I was able to actually pinpoint the areas in my body that were “holding,” or unnaturally tight (I had not been able to do this before, beyond the obvious stiff neck and shoulders that arose from day to day tension). One of the main things I noticed was that, no matter how hard I tried, I could not relax my hands and forearms. I could release them for a second, but they would instantly revert to a state of tension. Trying to release them for any longer period provoked an acute feeling of discomfort bordering on physical pain. My hands were, I realized, in a constant state of “alert,” always at the ready, as if to fend off attacks. And trying to stop doing that made me feel exposed, vulnerable, and unprotected, like I was asking myself to give up the one safety net I had. I’m not sure if this is what experts would call “tissue memory,” but that is certainly what it felt like to me.

This was a huge revelation. I had no idea I did this, much less that I’d been doing it all my life, which I now realized I had. Becoming aware of this evoked a very visceral sense of how truly frightened and vulnerable I’d felt in my family. It made me aware in a new way of how my childhood conditions had affected me, a way that was very concrete, a way that still influenced my daily life in a profound way. It drove home for me how deep, complex, multi-layered, and all-encompassing abuse really is, and how important it is to address it on not only emotional levels, but physical and spiritual ones as well. The body work and meditation provided awareness and release that would have taken many, many years of work on a psychologist’s couch, and even that may not have gotten at it: this tissue memory was so much a part of who I am that it required a sideways (which in this case means non-intellectual) approach for me to get at it.

Trauma affects us in many ways, and so I think it is best treated in many ways. Tissue memory may not be an actual physical ailment, but the mind-body connection is undeniable, it exists, so it makes sense that some of our pain would go to the body. It makes sense that when we go numb in an effort to protect ourselves, that whatever it is we’re not feeling has to go somewhere. And that being so, treatment for residual emotional stress in the body makes sense. I was fortunate enough to be in the care of a psychologist who encouraged me to pursue these avenues. Each one was a gold mine of self-awareness.

I am not a huge believer in holistic medicine. If I have an illness, I will go to a medical doctor every time, and a psychologist for my emotional issues. But I have no doubt that body tissue holds onto unresolved grief and trauma, and that, under the care of a kind, supportive body worker (and there are a lot of kooks in these fields, so shop around for a good fit!), it is possible–and highly desirable–to let go of it.

I have said this many times, but it’s worth saying again: when healing from emotional trauma, it is never about placing blame. But sometimes, it can feel like it is.

There will be anger, there will be hurt, and there will be grief, and in working through them, there will probably be periods of blame. Why didn’t they love me more? How could she have been so cold? How can someone treat a child as they treated me? Some version of these questions will come up in the healing process. When they do, it’s normal to feel angry. It’s even healthy–anger is the appropriate response to being treated disrespectfully, and it was probably denied you as a child. So feeling it in the present probably means you’re getting in touch with some disowned parts of yourself, and that’s good. In fact, it’s kind of the whole point.

These feelings can be so intense and powerful, it’s easy to think we need to act on them–to go to the person or people who hurt us and “confront” them. This is almost always a mistake. It usually creates deeper rifts, and we rarely get what we want. In fact, such confrontations, be they in letter form or face-to-face, are really just a way to try to force these people to change, and that is not how healing works.

The difficult truth is that we almost always have to work through anger and blame on our own, with “outside” people who understand and support what we’re doing. This can seem pointless, like we’ll get nothing out of it if we don’t take it to the source, but it is actually the opposite. Working through tough feelings is infinitely more productive if done with people who want to help rather than people we try to force to help. The urge to take the blame to the people who “deserve” it is almost always just another form of trying to get them to treat us differently. That didn’t work when we weren’t aware of our feelings, and it won’t work any better when we are.

It is, however, a stage most of us must pass through. Blame is one of the first stages of accepting our feelings. It’s nothing to feel guilty about or ashamed of. But it also is not something that needs to be satisfied by confrontation. Instead, sitting with the blame, talking it through with people who want to help, and releasing it through letters we don’t intend to send (for example) are more productive approaches. Then, after you’ve worked through a lot of it and are clearer–and calmer–about what happened, maybe you can have a frank conversation with people. Maybe. But if you choose to do this it should never be in the spirit of hurting them. Rather, it should be in the spirit of having a more honest relationship, and only if you truly believe that is possible. The short-term sense of relief (or release) blaming provides will never feel good after it’s over.

Sometimes family may just be too toxic to spend a lot of time with, much less try to have frank conversations with. If so, keeping your distance is not punishing, it is self-preserving. This doesn’t necessarily mean cutting people out of your life (although it might) so much as it means being careful about what information you share. Navigating dysfunctional families can be an emotional mine field, with every situation having explosive potential. The more wisdom and circumspection you can bring to the issue, the better. Work to acknowledge the truth of the situation–how things were and how they are now–and make decisions accordingly. And remember that it can take time, sometimes a lot of time, to figure these things out, and also that what you figure out will change over time. You will never regret practicing “restraint of tongue and pen.”

If in healing from emotional trauma your focus is understanding what happened and why, an interesting thing starts to occur. At some point, you will begin to see a pattern in your family, a thread of suppressed rage, veiled hostility, addiction, or whatever particular grief your family specializes in. You will see that some form of this pattern stretches as far back as you can track, that your parents endured pain and invalidation similar to your own in their own childhoods, and their parents before them tell the same sad story, and theirs before them, and probably theirs before them. You will see that, much like heirlooms, family dysfunction, if gone unaddressed, is passed on to the next generation to deal with, ad infinitum. And while you must hold people accountable for their actions, seeing this pattern may help you do so with compassion and empathy you never thought possible; for others and for yourself. If you allow yourself to move past the blame, this is inevitably what you will find. This is forgiveness, in its truest and highest form.

In any situation, your primary goal should be to take care of yourself, whatever that looks like for you. Your secondary goal should be to respect others, even those who may have hurt you. Blaming does neither. Your grief and anger are your own burden, as frustrating as that is, and saddling other people with them only adds to it. So no matter how alluring the prospect of going to the source of childhood pain and trying to give it back can be, I strongly urge you to resist it. Blame is a normal part of the healing process, but acting on it, not so much.

then you may have some boundary issues.

I grew up in a family with terrible boundaries. My parents had no qualms about drinking, swearing, fighting, name-calling, and talking about sex in front of their children. My father was a blamer, constantly berating my mother for making him angry, making him drink, and making him have sex with other women (I knew this from far too young an age). We all cowered in terror of his rage and spent our childhoods walking on eggshells hoping to avoid it. I can’t remember ever receiving praise from him that wasn’t tainted with sarcasm or undermined by ridicule (it may have happened, I just don’t remember it). My mother came from a family of triangulators, and pitted my sisters and me against each other just as her mother had done with her. She went through my drawers regularly and read my diary. She was also sexually inappropriate: wearing sleeveless shirts without a bra to family functions, for example, and flirting with our boyfriends. Both parents used us for emotional support. My mother’s version was coming to me in my bedroom in the post-fight period after my father had passed out, wringing her hands and sobbing about how unhappy she was. My father’s was telling me, in amazing detail, what a horrible person my mother was and how he was going to divorce her as soon as we’d all moved out.

(This never happened, by the way. My parents stayed together until my mother died in 2002, and it was only then, in going through her belongings, that I found photographs of them when they were young and in love, and cards my father had sent her on many occasions apologizing for being an asshole. I was astonished to discover that they had really loved each other; for some unfathomable reason, they both felt the need to hide this from their children.)

I could go on but you probably get the idea, which is that when children grow up without trust or respect (or perhaps more accurately, without good models of trust and respect), they don’t learn how to gauge trust and respect as adults. So they end up trusting too easily, trusting the wrong people, and not knowing how to give or receive respect. Sometimes they are even drawn to disrespectful treatment because it feels familiar, while respect feels uncomfortable and foreign. This was certainly true for me–it took a long time and a lot of hard work for me to not consider kindness in men to be a character flaw. (I wrote about this here.)

It’s like a child never learning how to swim, ride a bike, or ski: if you want to do these things as an adult, then you have to learn how. Of course, learning good boundaries is not as simple as signing up for lessons. As with most emotional issues, boundary setting is complicated, with no quick fix possible, and best approached on a number of fronts simultaneously. You can read books, go to therapy, attend self-help meetings. All are worthwhile endeavors, as long as they move you toward understanding and owning the underlying causes, which can be painful and difficult to face.

Whatever path you take, go into it knowing that screwing up is part of the process and you needn’t be too hard on yourself when you do. For example, in the self-help world, the allure to share, share, share is powerful, and it can just feel so damn good to be heard and understood. But just because people are in these groups doesn’t mean they’re safe. In fact, many people are there because they aren’t. Like you, they too struggle with bad boundaries, so they may tell other people your secrets even when they know better. It probably isn’t an overstatement to say that everybody who’s ever attended one of these groups has been betrayed like this at least once, and has probably been the betrayer at least once, as well. When you put large groups of people together, particularly people with highly personal and emotional struggles, this is somewhat inevitable. The good news is that such betrayal is rarely fatal, and can be a powerful lesson in honing your boundary-setting skills.

Many people also tend to go overboard when they discover the initial sense of empowerment that comes from setting boundaries. The excitement of it goes straight to their heads, and they see every interaction as an opportunity to set a boundary, share an opinion, or demand respect. This is a perfectly understandable reaction, as boundary setting is such a critical piece of the self-care puzzle and it feels so good when we start to “get it.” But a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. I know one fellow who, after a few months in group therapy, got drunk with the power of boundary setting and felt entitled to demand certain treatment on all fronts of his life. He ended up divorced and fired. Now, I’m not saying it’s okay to put up with poor treatment, ever. But I am saying that not every situation requires “boundary setting” simply because we don’t like it. If we set boundaries without self-awareness–that is, without understanding the underlying causes of our lack of boundaries, and without a clear knowledge of what it is we’re trying to accomplish–then we can end up using boundaries as a way to hurt people or provoke unnecessary confrontations in the name of taking care of ourselves. Some of this is understandable in the early stages of learning boundary setting, while we’re learning, but it should be tempered with time and experience. Otherwise, we just become bullies using therapyspeak to get our way. This is just another kind of bad boundary, and one that is particularly off-putting in its passive-aggressiveness.

It took me a long time to learn better boundaries (and, as with everything else, I am still learning). One very simple thing I understand clearly now is that people have to earn my trust, and I theirs. Making friends should be a slow process, with both people demonstrating honesty, dependability, and respect to each other repeatedly and in small increments. Being open, but not too open. I still get the urge sometimes to wrap up people I like in a cocoon of immediate intimacy, but I can resist now. And I have never regretted doing so.

It’s occurred to me that sharing my childhood stories as I did here might be construed as bad boundaries, but I disagree. You don’t know me personally, so you can’t repeat these stories in any way that could hurt me. And my family is unaware of this blog, so they can’t be hurt, either. And I am able to tell these stories as sad facts now, not like I’m disclosing secrets about myself. If people share my stories, it could only be in a general way, because they’re having a discussion about these issues. And that is exactly what I want. If my stories help even one person feel better or seek help or have a new awareness, they will have done their job. And that is the opposite of too much information.

Why do people continue to go to family for support when all they get is pain? When it hurts and hurts some more, what keeps us going back? Is it masochism? Ignorance? Some subconscious form of self-punishment or self-destructiveness? No. Almost never.

It’s numbness.

People go back for more because they’ve long ago become numb to the experience of familial invalidation; they are literally unable to process what is happening or how they feel about it. Instead, there is a flatness, a drained feeling, often edginess, and sometimes confusion, but no capacity to trace any of it to its source. This is not bad or wrong or requiring of any value judgment whatsoever. It is just a coping skill children learn to deal with an emotionally invalidating environment. They turn themselves off so the bad sensory input can’t get in. But if they don’t figure this out in adulthood, then the pattern can continue, and it can be highly detrimental to a person’s sense of well being, resulting in addiction, a wide spectrum of emotionally distant relationships, and an ever-present, gut-level sense of not knowing who you are or your place in the world.

I had an experience in early–very early–sobriety that resulted in a great epiphany about how numb I’d been all my life. It was my first family get-together since I’d gotten sober. I remember that it was at my grandmother’s house, but I don’t remember the occasion, and I don’t remember the details, and I don’t remember who was there other than my parents. (Some interesting story, huh?) All I remember is that when I left, I had the strongest urge to get high that I’d ever had, before or since. Of course I had no pot (and even if I had, I’d like to think I could have resisted), so all I could do was sit with the urge while I drove home. I remembered my treatment counselor calling pot “The Great Numb-er.” I put the two thoughts together, and I realized that the urge to get high was a direct result of spending time with my family! I was feeling bad and wanted it to stop. The significance of this struck me in a very visceral way. I not only saw, with tremendous clarity, why I’d been using drugs and alcohol as I had been, but I felt some of the feelings I’d been avoiding. When I got home, I cried, loud and long; it was the first of many such cries I would have in the process of reconnecting with all that grief and anguish I’d numbed away. It wasn’t a fun process, but I knew it was necessary, like scraping out a wound so it can heal instead of letting it fester.

Numbness protected us as children by allowing us to tune out our parents fighting, or not question their shame and ridicule, or feel nothing but the physical pain when we were backhanded, slapped, or worse. Numbness allowed us to pretend the experiences didn’t happen or that they happened for reasons that were valid, but beyond us. These are the only choices a child has. She is not capable of the complex thought required to sort out, and emotionally separate from, abuse and cruelty at the hands of the people who are supposed to be nurturing her and protecting her from such things. Numbness offered a much-needed escape. In an environment where a child’s emotional needs are not being met, numbness is necessary.

According to every definition I’ve read of post-traumatic stress disorder, emotional numbing is a key factor in dealing with stress and trauma. But other than as a way to function during traumatic events, numbness is not necessary for adults, and if it fits certain patterns, it can be indicative of disowned feelings. Often, precisely because of the numbness, people can have trouble determining if this applies to them; people who’ve learned to numb out are often in the position of guessing at what they’re feeling. If you think you might be in this category, but aren’t sure, here are some indicators to look for:

• feeling tired and drained around relatives
• feeling out of control of your emotions
• feeling powerless over your life or clueless about what you want
• depression
• compulsive behavior/addiction
• unsatisfying relationships, wanting to feel closer to people but not knowing how to
• confusion about what you feel or guessing at what you’re “supposed” to feel
• having “emotional amnesia” about past events; having no feelings about something you know was painful
• inappropriate emotions: laughing about something that was painful
• blanking out chunks of your childhood
• feeling like something’s missing from your life but not being able to identify what it is.

Nobody gets through childhood completely unscathed. But if you have any of these symptoms in a persistent pattern, chances are you don’t need antidepressants (which are really just medically sanctioned numbness pills) so much as you need to own the disowned fear, anger and grief that you traded away for numbness so long ago in a survival pact with the devil.

The only way out is through.

Despite my family get-together experience, it took a few more years before I stopped going to my family for validation, approval, and support. It took that long to fully understand the pattern in which I was stuck and how to get unstuck. For me, it was kind of a weaning process. I instinctively stopped going to them for certain things, got hurt when I went to them for other things, and found myself limiting contact more and more until I finally stopped going to them with any emotional information at all.* If I hadn’t had that initial awareness about how numb I was and why, I would probably still be going to my family to get something they aren’t capable of giving. Words can’t describe what an awful thought that is for me. Numbness served its purpose, and without it I may not have survived my childhood as intact as I did. But in adulthood, it is a terrible handicap, and I am so grateful to be out of that pointless, painful pattern.

*An interesting thing happened here. When I stopped sharing emotional information with my parents, they began to make it up. They either assumed or manufactured (I will never know which) unflattering “facts” about me, which they spread among family members, including my grandmothers. As hurt and angry as I was when I found out, I did feel vindicated in my decision to keep my distance. They’d been doing some version of this to me all my life, and it was only after I’d distanced from them that I was able to see this malicious pattern.

Like most people, I had to find this out the hard way: family does not always provide the best support when we start healing from emotional pain and trauma. In fact, family members can be utterly unsupportive, sabotaging and blocking change. In most cases (but not all, which I’ll talk about in a minute), our family members love us; that isn’t the problem. But sometimes healing can create a number of different issues for family that make them unable to provide the objective, compassionate support that non-family members can give without a second thought.

The primary reason that relatives can be a bad choice for support is shared history. Family members know each other in deeper and more intimate ways than is possible for other people because of time, proximity, and common experience. When combined with basic human fallibility, this can cause all sorts of problems for a person healing from trauma. Relatives assume they understand your problem. They feel freer to express “opinions” about your process than other people would. They tend to be more critical and less objective than non-relatives would ever be (usually in the name of “your own good”). And both they and you will have reactions, sometimes very strong ones, that would not happen with non-relatives. To understand the significance of shared history, think of what strong feelings a simple gesture, sigh, or glance can evoke when coming from a parent or sibling which, when coming from someone else, would evoke no response at all. If that weren’t enough (but it is), add to it that raw-nerve feeling of healing from trauma, and you can begin to see the potential for volatility.

As Tolstoy opened Anna Karenina, All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Unsupportive reactions differ greatly from family to family, depending on the dynamics involved. Sometimes, siblings don’t understand your struggle because they had a different experience than you did. Parents treat their children differently; this is a truth we must all come to terms with. So siblings may truly not believe what you’re describing. Or, some relatives, particularly parents and older siblings, feel resentful if a person goes outside the family for help because they believe they’re the only ones capable of helping (regardless of much evidence to the contrary). Or sometimes, relatives think you’re violating the family trust by airing the dirty laundry to outsiders. (Of course, this isn’t a problem unless there is, in fact, dirty laundry to air, thereby roundaboutly validating what you’re doing.) But most of these reactions have deeper roots, and they are as complex and multi-layered as the family structure itself.

By facing your emotional trauma, you are upsetting the family apple cart, rocking the family boat, breaking the “no talk” rule. People feel threatened by such an interruption in their status quo, even if that status quo is less than ideal. Also, if people think you’re tacitly blaming them for your issues, then they’re likely to feel threatened and defensive. And you can’t really blame them, can you, because in many cases, they’re right. (You might not understand yet how and why this is true, but they do, even if only intuitively.) With family, there are many possibilities for hurt feelings, misunderstandings, and resistance to change. The upshot is that it is often extremely difficult to get support from people with whom you share the emotional entanglements of a family history. And in general, the worse the family situation was for you as a child, the more resistance you will encounter from your family when trying to change, heal, and talk about it.

A tremendous grief can accompany the acceptance of truths such as these. Family is supposed to be supportive, after all. They are supposed to be on our side. And we go to them instinctively because we want so badly for this to be the case. When it isn’t, it hurts. And when we find that out the hard way, by seeking their support and being shamed or judged or rejected, it can make that raw-nerve feeling a thousand times worse. My heart goes out to everybody who’s ever had this experience, and all those who will in the future. But there is a silver lining in this sad, gray cloud, and it is this. When our families deny us support, this is a powerful validation that we are on the right track. The pain and confusion we’re struggling with is real, it’s rooted in our personal history, and the family reaction is evidence of that. If you’re able to step back from the hurt and grief and look at the situation objectively, you will eventually see that your families’ present reactions follow familiar and probably very old patterns. Understanding these patterns, and how they affected you, will go a long way toward healing, even if the grief of it seems too much to bear. It isn’t, and you will survive. And the sooner you accept the reality of your family situation, the sooner you will move past the pain and into the healing and all the wonderful possibilities that healing will bring.

In most cases, parents love their children. But not always. Sometimes the fallibilities go too deep for this to be possible. Some parents are too narcissistic to really love anybody and are incapable of seeing their children (or anybody else) as anything other than extensions of themselves. Others are downright sadistic, committing acts of abuse and psychological cruelty that they feel little or no remorse about. Adult children can spend years going to them over and over, subconsciously trying to fill the emotional hole left by this treatment. Some very old part of them still believes it’s their fault and that as such,  they can fix it. But they can’t. Let me repeat this: you can’t fix your parents. You can’t make them love you. You can’t make them give you anything. The only way to win this struggle is to walk away. Find other means of support. People who appreciate you. People who are on your side. Because I promise you, if being on your side means facing their own fallibilities, people will pick themselves every time, and often in a very nasty, ugly way.

Yes, sure, people change. But if they do, it won’t be because you want them to, ever. It will be because they had an experience, perhaps one similar to yours, that prompted them to seek healing. In the absence of that, it’s highly unlikely to happen. And waiting for it or expecting it to is a great way to waste your time and your life.

These are some of the things you’re up against when you go to your family for support. Remember that even the most loving family members can be highly resistant to discussing emotions they’re not accustomed to discussing. If you’re new to the healing process, you may be thinking something like, yes, but not my family. I hope this is true for you, I really do, but tread very carefully. And even if you have to find out differently the hard way, by going to them and being rejected, do yourself a favor and seek support outside your family as well. It’s much harder to do so after you’ve experienced what a lack of support feels like, and they’ll be there to help you pick up the pieces.

I just finished reading a book called How to Read a Book. A friend recommended it to me because I’m starting a large research project, and this book discusses how to tackle such a thing. If it weren’t for that, I’d have thought it was a silly topic about a simple, straightforward activity that I’ve been doing since I was four years old. But because I’m a little intimidated by this project I’m undertaking, not sure where to start or how to organize it, I gave the book a try.

Turns out it was one of the best books I’ve ever read. I’m showing my ignorance here, but I’d never heard of the author, Moritmer J. Adler, before picking up the book. Now I have great respect for him. He was a writer, professor, and philosopher, born in 1902 and died in 2001, and one of the clearest thinkers I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Adler took what seems like an elementary topic and turned it into a step-by-step system for clarifying your general thought process and expanding your mind. I am not overstating the case; if anything, my praises cannot do the book justice.

I don’t think I can say enough good things about this book. It was first published in 1940 and updated in the early 1970s. This may sound out of date, but because it talks about universal principles, applicable to all forms of reading (and, I think, learning in general), it isn’t. I don’t want to get into too much detail, as a condensed version could seem like all that was necessary but is very much not, and anyone curious should pick up the book themselves and prepare to be amazed and delighted. For me, it was one of those “aha” experiences–information so logical that it seemed like I’d always known it, but had not been able to organize into precise ideas the way Mr. Mortimer has done. It is a tool I will return to many times over as I increase and sharpen my skills.

Here are the basics. Mortimer divides reading into four categories: elementary, inspectional, analytical, and syntopical. Now, because the project I’m starting is in the last category, syntopical, I wanted to skip all the rest and go straight to it. But I found that impossible because, as soon as I skimmed the book (in Adler’s terminology, the inspectional read), I realized that, while I had a general idea what inspectional and analytical reading were, I had never been taught any formal way of doing them. I did them, but I had no system for doing them. And lacking a formal system, I realized, had been a lifelong handicap in my pursuit of knowledge, and one that would make it difficult to do a syntopical project–that is, a project requiring inspectional and analytical reading of many books for the purpose of coming up with new ideas about the topic. In short, research. How to Read a Book provides a system for getting the most out of any book, and out of any project consisting of many books.

Now, rather than do any more outlining of the book’s contents, I’d like to share a few of what I thought were the books highlights. If they pique even one person’s curiosity enough to pick up the book, I feel this post will have done its job.

• Elementary reading. Elementary reading is what we learn as children–how to translate symbols on a page into ideas. Spelling, grammar, punctuation. But here’s the scary part: this is as far as any formal educational system goes! There is no class that teaches you how to do inspectional or analytical reading, much less syntopical. Adler says that he has seen very few graduate students who know how to research their projects properly–that is, in a way that gleans the most information in the least amount of time. This is because once we learn elementary reading, we are largely on our own. If you’ve had a teacher or professor explain the mechanics of how to tackle difficult books or take on a research project, as opposed to discussing or grading it after you’ve flailed through on your own, that’s wonderful. But it would make you an exception to a very sad rule about our educational system.
• Being well read vs. being widely read. If you read a lot of books, but they are not books that teach you very much or expand your way of thinking about a topic, then you are not well read. It is far better to read a few difficult books than many easy ones. Adler explains why:
• Reading for information or entertainment is not the same as reading to learn or understand. It’s easy to see how reading for entertainment–popular fiction, for example–doesn’t really teach us anything and that we do it simply because we enjoy the story (and there’s nothing wrong with this, by the way, as long as we understand that just because it’s a book, it does not necessarily improve our thinking). But it’s not as straightforward to understand how this principle also applies to reading for information–reading newspapers, magazines, or even books if all they do is report facts (or someone’s opinion about facts). Adler says that it is far better to read a book (or, ideally, several, if it is something that interests you) on the history, theory, and principles of a topic than to read current reports about it. Such a background is essential if you are to put news articles about it into perspective. If you read only news, without some sort of deeper grounding in the politics, history, and culture from which it stems, then you are merely filling your head with facts that do nothing to grow your understanding. Only through the tackling of deeper analysis of a topic do we really learn anything about it. This leads to my final highlight:
• Reading above your head. Adler’s ideas can really be broken into two main categories: reading for entertainment, and reading for knowledge. If you are reading for knowledge, then it follows that you must read books that are beyond you, doesn’t it? Because you won’t learn very much by reading books that aren’t. As logical as this is, how many of us truly make the effort to read books that are beyond us, books that intimidate us, books that we think are intended for people smarter than we are? But Adler believes that there are very few books that can’t be conquered if a person has a systematic approach, which is what he offers us in How to Read a Book. Furthermore, reading difficult books is important because difficult books usually have the most to say about a topic. Further still, learning how to approach books above your head improves you in many ways: it increases knowledge, not only about a topic but also about how a great mind thinks about a topic. It opens you to new ideas and possibilities. It builds confidence. It changes how you view the world. This is what great books do, because this is what makes them great. And if we are willing to engage in the challenge of reading them, some of that greatness inevitably rubs off on us.

The book also has, in Appendix A, a list of what Adler considers the great books of the Western tradition. Conquering them all would take a lifetime, but choosing from the ones that interest you most, and maybe just a few that don’t, would be a good place to start.

How to Read a Book is really a treatise on critical thinking. As such, I think it’s essential reading for anybody interested in improving their capacity for objective, analytical thought. No other book I know of lays out the process as clearly and systematically as this one.

Contrary to common belief, self-esteem and narcissism are not the same thing. They are, in fact, polar opposites of each other.

Narcissism is really just a fancy word for self-absorption, for being concerned with oneself to the exclusion of other people’s needs and feelings. It is the state of being undeveloped, the state we are born into. It may seem odd to equate narcissism with being small and helpless, but it’s really the perfect analogy. An infant is completely narcissistic in the sense that he has no capacity to empathize or consider how his actions affect other people. As he develops, he becomes aware of the world around him. He begins to understand that people don’t exist solely to fulfill his needs, that the world does not revolve around him (perhaps the first existential crisis a person experiences). As he develops still more, he learns how to relate to other people, how to share, listen, and make friends. As he grows, so does his world. He realizes he is part of a community, perhaps of many of them: school, sports teams, a family, a neighborhood. Growing up is, in a very real way, the process of outgrowing narcissism.

If narcissism is our natural, undeveloped state, then self-esteem is the opposite. Self-esteem is not a natural state at all. It is the result of the effort, ideally made by one’s parents and oneself (but if necessary, by self alone), to reach a more developed state of being. Self-esteem is the product of an evolution, a metamorphosis, which we undertake in an attempt to better our lot, to improve our lives, to find meaning, serenity, and happiness. It is the lifelong adventure of discovering and affirming our human potential over and over and over.

Narcissism or self-esteem is sort of the psychological version of fat or fit, although vastly more complicated. That is, narcissism is easy, while self-esteem can be a struggle, especially for those of us who didn’t get the best start in life. Part of getting a bad start usually involves having narcissistic parents (in myriad forms!), so we don’t learn the difference between narcissism and healthy self-esteem. Or worse, are unconsciously attracted to narcissism because it feels oddly familiar. This can result in a lot of confusion. Many personality traits that might look like self-esteem at first glance–needing to be right, needing to be admired, and needing to win arguments, for example–are much more likely to be rooted in narcissism. Not knowing the difference can mean making a lot of bad decisions, and it can take many painful years to learn how to make different ones; sadly, some of us never do.

With all this in mind, I did a comparison between the two. These aren’t set in stone, and they should not be applied without careful consideration of circumstances and motivation, as behavior is not always what it seems. But mostly they fit, particularly when the behavior follows a long-term pattern. At the very least, you can consider them a “guideline of discernment” to help differentiate between the two ideas and eliminate some common confusions about them.

Narcissism: a state we are born into
Self-esteem: a state we achieve by effort

Narcissism: self-absorption
Self-esteem: interested in other people

Narcissism: needing the approval of others
Self-esteem: wanting the approval of others, but ultimately finding it internally

Narcissism: has little interest in other people’s feelings
Self-esteem: is aware of other people’s feelings

Narcissism: seeing yourself as a victim of other people’s shortcomings
Self-esteem: taking responsibility for your own shortcomings

Narcissism: being annoyed at other people’s shortcomings
Self-esteem: feeling compassion for other people’s shortcomings

Narcissism: thinking the world owes you something
Self-esteem: wanting to give back

Narcissism: needing to think you’re the greatest
Self-esteem: accurate self-assessment

Narcissism: denying your faults
Self-esteem: seeing your faults and liking yourself anyway

Narcissism: afraid to ask questions or look foolish to other people
Self-esteem: more interested in learning than in avoiding embarrassment

Narcissism: self-admiration dependent on the admiration of others
Self-esteem: self-admiration an inside job

Narcissism: fragile ego, defensive and easily hurt or offended
Self-esteem: solid ego, willing to hear opinions and even criticism

Narcissism: jumps to conclusions
Self-esteem: weighs the evidence

Narcissism: out to get what he can regardless of consequences
Self-esteem: considers how his actions will affect other people

Narcissism: win/lose is more important
Self-esteem: win/win is more important

Narcissism: self-love results in contempt for others
Self-esteem: self-love results in love for others

Narcissism: delights in the failings of others
Self-esteem: feels compassion for the failings of others

Narcissism: avoids introspection like the plague
Self-esteem: embraces introspection

Narcissism: avoids intimacy
Self-esteem: desires intimacy

Narcissism: operates from a deficit
Self-esteem: operates from a surplus

Narcissism: refuses to admit mistakes
Self-esteem: may not like admitting mistakes, but does so

Narcissism: has to win an argument at all costs
Self-esteem: cares more about coming to an understanding

Narcissism: places blame
Self-esteem: accepts responsibility

Narcissism: closed
Self-esteem: open

Narcissism: stingy
Self-esteem: generous

narcissism: needy
self-esteem: giving

Narcissism: destructive
Self-esteem: nourishing

Narcissism: exclusive
Self-esteem: inclusive

Narcissism: closed-minded
Self-esteem: curious

Narcissism: opinionated
Self-esteem: willing to learn

Narcissism: arrogant
Self-esteem: humble.

The process of growing up is ongoing, never quite finished, and never as smooth as we hope for. Between the complexities of the human psyche and all the external things that can go wrong, we’re all a messy mix of child and adult, good and not-so-good, self-esteem and basket case. We all have occasional bouts of self-centeredness, particularly when feeling threatened or anxious; this does not make us narcissists. But being able to recognize when and why they occur can be helpful in forgiving ourselves and moving past them. Just as importantly, such recognition can help us make more informed decisions about other people’s behavior, and what is and is not worth tolerating.