Back when all the children were still at home and we took family vacations, I'd always get excited beforehand, beginning each journey convinced we'd have a wonderful time together. I'm a devotee of ideal family life, forever in pursuit of the Father Knows Best type of vacation where everyone gets along and we have a meaningful experience together. As the first day or two of those trips passed by, I'd struggle to stay upbeat in the face of the predictable bickering, complaints about the amount of time spent in the car, indifference or hostility to the activity we had planned. Eventually I'd snap and get surly, utterly disillusioned by the experience.

During the year we lived in France, we drove from Burgundy down to Barcelona and then to San Sebastian -- all five of us in the minivan for horrendous hours on end. In a series of photos over that week, you can see my mood degenerate until finally, near the end when we were visiting the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, I am stony-faced and angry. My children like to tease me about my absurd optimism concerning family life, and about vacations in particular. They all know better.

I found myself recalling those vacations this past week as I was looking forward to Thanksgiving with buoyant spirits. Oldest son coming in from Chicago, middle son flying in from California, my 13-year-old daughter eager to participate in preparing the feast. She and I made happy plans to do the marketing together Tuesday afternoon. All five of us would finally reunite for a holiday meal, glad to see one another after this time apart. Good food, meaningful conversation at the table, and maybe we'd play some games in between the main meal and dessert, just to let our food settle.

Now wait a minute.

Even a pathological optimist like me sometimes wakes up in time. I reviewed prior holidays and revised my vision of this coming Thanksgiving to conform with past reality. The boys will be eager to see their local friends and probably won't want to hang out much at home. While they're more or less past the phase where they bicker all the time, I wouldn't call them close. And playing any kind of game as a family is absolutely out of the question. We're all so ruthlessly competitive that a round of cards could easily end in bloodshed. I imagined myself feeling disappointed and depressed by Friday. Then my daughter told me she'd made other plans for Tuesday afternoon and I'd have to do the marketing without her. So much for my visions of blissful family togetherness.

For those of us who came from very troubled backgrounds, the dream of happy family life is a potent one. Many of my clients are often tortured by the thought of happy families during the holiday season. A deep sense of shame pervades their experience of Thanksgiving or Christmas, because other people -- the winners in this world -- are having the kind of ideal holiday I had envisioned for myself this week. So my first bit of advice, for those pathological optimists like me, is to ramp down your expectations. Rather than trying to enact the ideal holiday, where one size is supposed to fit all, plan one that fits your actual family. How much time is too much? Maybe everyone doesn't need to come over at noon, sit in front of the TV for one or two football games, eat too much and then spend another hour or two trying to make space for dessert. Just because our culture has enshrined the all-day family event, that doesn't mean you have to do it that way. Even if you mom told you to arrive at noon, you can still show up at three, in plenty of time for dinner. White lies are permissible.

Sometimes it seems to me that the people who have the most satisfying holidays are those who spend them with their closest friends. Too many families I know feel compelled to celebrate the holidays in traditional ways that make everyone unhappy. Surely it's possible to celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas in a more satisfying way. In my family of origin, we of course used to spend all day together; once we kids grew up and started drinking, we'd invariably consume way too much alcohol, partly because that's just what my family did, but also because it helped us get through it. There would be a lot of laughter, but I invariably came away feeling poisoned. Too much alcohol in my system, and too much pain -- other people's pain that I had absorbed on top of my own. Especially as the younger generation grew up, I found it excruciating to watch their lives blow up or deteriorate.

On the other hand, I have very happy memories of spending time in the kitchen with my sister. Since I left Los Angeles and moved to North Carolina, we both miss those holidays cooking together. Cooking is what I enjoy most about Thanksgiving. I enjoy eating the meal, but I like preparing it even more, especially when I'm doing it with people I love. So as I was marketing alone this morning, bringing my expectations in line with reality, I decided to focus on that part of the experience. I felt better, less exposed to disappointment, when I thought about it this way. Everyone in our family likes to cook, and they'll be a lot of time -- maybe even enough time -- spent together in the kitchen, though the kids will likely criticize one another while we're doing it and then disappear not long after we eat. An hour or two of reasonably placid (for us) family time, doing what I like to do best -- that's what I should expect, rather than looking forward to my idyllic togetherness marathon which will invariably be followed by disappointment when it falls apart and we turn out to be the same contentious, prickly crew.

And that leads me to my second bit of advice. Put yourself first. Instead of succumbing to all the sentimental messages you receive, about feeling love and gratitude during this season of giving, make sure you spend the holidays the way you'd like to spend them. If you look after your own needs first, and don't expect too much from other people, you might find yourself having a few intermittent exchanges of meaning with the people who matter most to you. That's something to be truly grateful for.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

The Hatred of Authority

May 24, 2011June 10, 2011

I came of age during the late 60s and early 70s, when youth rebellion against authority exerted a profound influence on the entire culture.Â Parent-child relationships, marriage and family life, music, television, politics and, of course, the war in Viet Nam -- in just about every sphere, my generation rebelled against the status quo.Â So much good came out of this revolution, with enlarged rights for women and minorities, greater freedom from repressive attitudes toward sex, and a government more responsive to the voice of its people.Â Without rebellion against established authority, progress would never occur.Â Just take a look at the regime in North Korea if you want an example of what happens when authority forbids any challenge to its position.

Given how profoundly rebellion against authority has shaped our culture since the 1960s -- how it has become an accepted norm, in many ways, especially within politically liberal circles -- it's easy to forget that authority also has a social value. Without authority to curb our anti-social tendencies, for instance, anarchy would prevail.Â If everyone did whatever he or she wanted, without regard to restrictions imposed by the social order, civilization could not exist.Â Another kind of authority comes with the accumulation of experience:Â in its best expression, authority tries to pass along the lessons of experience so that the next generation doesn't have to start from scratch and learn everything all over again.Â This is a large part of parenting:Â we teach our children what our own parents taught us, as well as what we may have learned in our own lifetimes -- about how to navigate the challenges and frustrations of existence, to manage ourselves and our relationships, to work, play and find meaning in our lives.

A large part of parenting involves the word No.Â No, you cannot pull the cat's tail -- she will scratch you.Â No, you cannot run into the street -- a car might run you down.Â No, you cannot stick that paper clip into the electrical socket.Â Children, especially very small ones, have no idea about the dangers of the world; by exerting their authority to curb dangerous impulses, parents teach their children about those dangers.Â By imposing other limitations such as bedtimes, homework-before-play rules and good eating habits, parents also help their kids learn how to take care of themselves.Â Thoughtful rules, imposed with concern, encourage the development of self-control and self-discipline.Â In these ways, proper authority is enormously useful.Â Imagine a child growing up without it.Â Parents also pass along values they have absorbed from their culture which (optimally) have helped make their own lives more meaningful -- values such as monogamy, devotion to family, the importance of community and meaningful work, etc.Â This is a best case scenario, of course.

Some people who rebelled against authority during the 60s and 70s threw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.Â They rejected just about every aspect of the status quo, as if it had zero value; they believed they could create a new social order from scratch, free of all the "hang-ups" of their parents' generation and every other one that preceded it, unrestrained by any kind of authority.Â Monogamy, family life, career -- for some of my generation, these were contemptible "bourgeois" values which must be rejected.Â While the idealism of my generation led to so many worthwhile changes, the confused rejection of all forms of authority led many people to waste years pursuing impossible dreams.Â One couple I know "dropped out" and went to live on a commune for ten years; only after experience taught them some painful lessons did they return to society-at-large and find a way to express their idealism within the "real" world.Â They tell few people about their experience on that commune and acknowledge feeling a great deal of shame about it.Â In rejecting society and the bourgeois lifestyle of their parents, this couple at the same time rejected the meaningful aspects of that society, the useful role of authority and the positive aspects of the lives their parents had led.

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The Difference Between Shame and Guilt

May 14, 2011May 17, 2011

According to Wikipedia, the "dividing line between the concepts of shame, guilt and embarrassment is not fully standardized."Â Many people use guilt and shame interchangeably, but from a psychological perspective, they actually refer to different experiences.Â Â Quoting from Wikipedia:

"Psychoanalyst Helen B. Lewis argued that 'The experience of shame is directly about the self, which is the focus of evaluation. In guilt, the self is not the central object of negative evaluation, but rather the thing done is the focus.'Â Similarly, Fossum and Mason say in their book Facing Shame that 'While guilt is a painful feeling of regret and responsibility for one's actions, shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person.'"

I would go further and say that the action that inspires guilt usually involves the infliction of pain, either intentionally or unintentionally, upon another person.Â As an example, in the anecdote I related in my post on envy and jealousy, I once said something hurtful at a dinner party, and on some level, I intended it to be hurtful.Â Afterward, I felt guilty about my actions because I could see that I had hurt my friend.Â More painfully, I also felt ashamed that I was the sort of person who would behave that way.Â Guilt arose as a result of inflicting pain on somebody else; I felt shame in relation to myself.

As a therapist, I find this distinction to beÂ important and useful.Â Many deeply troubled people have very little capacity to feel guilt, for example.Â In order to feel guilt about the harm you may have done to somebody else, you must recognize him or her as a distinct individual, to begin with.Â Thus a person who struggles with separation and merger issues might not feel true guilt even if he or she were to use that word to describe a feeling.Â Many people who display narcissistic behavior often suffer from profound feelings of shame but have little authentic concern for other people; they don't tend to feel genuinely guilty.Â This explains why an authentic sense of guilt rarely appears in narcissistic personality disorder and anti-social personality disorder:Â guilt depends upon the ability to intuit how someone else might feel and as a result to experience remorse for the pain one has caused.

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60 Minutes and Greg Mortenson’s Fraud: The Power of Sentimentality

April 30, 2011May 1, 2011

As you probably know, Greg Mortenson is the best-selling author of two books that detail his efforts to build schools and promote the education of young girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools.Â On CBS, 60 Minutes recently aired a segment which revealed convincing evidence that much of Mortenson's narrative is a fraud:Â some of his heart-warming stories are exaggerated or mis-represented, others invented whole cloth.Â The segment also highlights financial improprieties at Mortenson's charity, the Central Asia Institute, which Mortenson has used to pay millions of dollars for his book tours without sharing the proceeds of those books with his charity.Â If you haven't seen the segment, you can view it here.

These books are required reading for U.S. servicemen deployed to Afghanistan.Â In the liberal-minded district where my children have gone to school, Three Cups of Tea is assigned almost every academic year:Â it exemplifies the values of altruism and social service heavily promoted by its instructors and administration.Â According to the teachers who assign it, this book is full of tales that should fire your idealism, inspiring you to emulate Greg Mortenson's self-sacrifice and dedication to social service; it presents an alternative model to the egoistic, selfish approach to life that seems so prevalent in our society today.Â My kids hated it.Â My oldest son found it manipulative and preachy.

The 60 Minutes piece on Greg Mortenson's fraud shows that he used his stories, retailed in two best-selling books and hyped with promotional tours and speaking engagements, to solicit donations to the Central Asia Institute, which he used as his own "personal ATM."Â Despite the way my own children felt about Three Cups of Tea, it apparently does the job Mortenson intended, for his charity has collected millions and millions of dollars in donations.Â A look at some of his core stories -- his founding myths, so to speak -- will show why he has been so effective in bilking the public.

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