Posted by boB on April 8, 2000, at 21:15:24
In reply to Re: jaded retailers, posted by Phil on April 8, 2000, at 9:10:13
CarolAnn,
Perhaps I can help you find some more perspective on this situation. I am a reporter. I was once asked to write a nice story about a new business, a Mexican restaurant. I learned, from the restaurant’s hired publicity manager, that part of the reason the restaurant was so slow to open was that the help had been deported before contractors finished all of the remodeling. Not being a strong proponent of nationalism and national borders and being an advocate of people’s right to work where they choose, I asked the restaurant manager about the situation. I was hoping my inquiry might help change things, as it often has. We were standing in the kitchen and the manager was cutting onions. With a long sharp knife. A long sharp knife that he pointed in my face to emphasize that I did not need to inquire about that part of the story.
As a journalist, I put myself in these kind of situations, some could suggest. True. My point now is that you put yourself in the situation with the store manager. You may feel that medications or medical conditions put you there, and they certainly might have contributed. But in defining and reacting to a situation, it is best to consider your own acts as well as the acts done toward you. My editor replied to my report of the restaurant incident by saying I could avoid the situation by not asking those kinds of questions. True. But i will continue to ask those kind of questions when I find a cause to do so.
Well, remember I am one of the first people to suggest that you stand up to the store employees. I have stood up to lots of people, time and time again. I could no doubt find plenty of clinicians who would label my willingness to stand my ground and my tactics as "acting out" or as some sort of rage, which should be treated with meds. My brother, going through a divorce, finds himself confronted by his ex-wife’s account of how he had words with a chiropractor many, many years ago. It was a consumer complaint, not a sign of anti-social behavior. Some of the times I have stood my ground could be called anti-social. The behavior of the store employees toward you could be called anti-social. Either side could, if telling the story to a sympathetic audience, portray themselves as right and the other as wrong.
My advice is to prepare yourself by thinking in advance what sort of verbal strategies will be effective when you are in a situation where you want to defend yourself. Then, when emotion starts to do its work you will be prepared. And emotion will take over, in all of our lives - our emotional self is wired a lot closer to the parts of our brain that act than are the parts of our brain that plan our actions on the fly. The strength of our emotional brain over our rational brain is fundamental to the argument for psychopharmacology. Our emotional brains were trained by genetic predisposition and by childhood experience. But continued training of our rational brain is our best shot at getting a leg up on our emotions, short of manipulating our brains with meds. There is a great book called "The gentle art of verbal self defense," that offers rational strategies for verbal confrontation. Such planning helps us avoid letting emotions formulate plans on the fly during moments of conflict and stress.
The depression thing, I don't encourage you to use that as a fighting tool. To defend yourself against stigma is one thing. That is what I am doing here, for a whole class of people, saying it is Okay for us to act out. But I am saying that those of us who choose to act out need to train our actions so when driven by emotional drives, we are prepared and don't loose control. Those of us who may be genetically programed toward various mental behaviours can, if we train ourselves well, contribute to the improvement of the human condition as a whole.
The Americans With Disabilities Act made some great progress for people with a variety of physical conditions. But think about people who are a lot worse off than yourself - who are blind, deaf, non-ambulatory, etc. This doesn't demean your condition, but your condition pales compares to that of many. Having been diagnosed as having such a mental condition does not excuse a person to do as they wish. And if we are to share battle camp with others disabled by medical condition, we need to calculate our skirmishes so as not to divest the hard won political accomplishments of our worthy allies.
Diagnosis can become a crutch for avoiding responsibility. I am not saying you are doing that, we are using your situation in a group discussion to help us all better control our individual and collective behavior.
I could have easily been diagnosed as bipolar, depressive, ADD and as having a wide range of personality disorders if I visited the right clinician and related, honestly, the reality of my feelings and my behavior. My ability to handle threats on the job, to tread close to hard-driven law enforcement personnel in their most difficult moments, to sit through domestic battery and murder trials, is not because of an absence the same symptoms for which you have been diagnosed. I promise you, I share your symptoms. My mental well-being is the result of having developed mental strategies for accepting the range of feelings I encounter. My serotonin levels are as likely to be low as yours. I use a sympathamementic aminergic agent (double-double shots of espresso) every day to focus my lagging attention on a deadline.
Friends, I have been in some tough situations .... crowds nearly out of control, personal threats by out of control individuals in the workplace, etc. Before I was a journalist, I was persistently confrontational with retail institutions, and with law enforcement agencies. I do not consider my behavior symptomatic of disease, I consider it appropriate response in a troubled society. If there is anything that separated me from a user of prescribed psychotropics is that I was fortunate to learn effective verbal coping strategies.
I make less than the average factory worker. I did not complete high school. I do not attribute my survival to my mental grit or strong mental health, I attribute it to the strategies I have learned. I did not learn these strategies watching Jerry Springer or Slam Bang NWO ProWrestling.I am not free to say whether I used illegal medications to level my mood while i learned these strategies. All I can say is I like the strategies, and I like having a reliable comfort level with my wide-ranging and often dark moods and I refuse to let anyone call my dark mood sick or pathological.
I am not here to question anyone’s right to medicate themselves. I am impressed with the level of intelligent understanding of medications I see on this site. But I am enough of a wordsmith to recognize that a diagnosis drawn on DSM-IV nomenclature, and the ability to change that condition with chemicals is not the equivalent of a person honestly understanding their neurochemical condition and how that condition fits into the large pattern of human experience.
If you think you will find some catharsis by fighting back with this store manager, and I think you will, I say do it. But do it with understanding of your position and of his, and of your mutual limitations as people. Good-cop / bad-cop strategy works well, and one person can do it alone by forcing an opponent to steer the actor toward a compassionate good-cop persona. I go into these skermishes knowing that my huge effort might only change things, in the larger picture, by a minuscule amount, and that after the conflict subsides, I will likely feel empty and depressed because of the changing levels of neurochemical I produced by facing a conflict.
Take it from an old guerilla psychological warrior. Hit hard and back off. Don't be drawn into a front-on conflict unless you are assured of victory or the rewards of battle are worth your personal loss. Don't be thwarted by a little bit of pain and live to fight another day.
poster:boB
thread:29069
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000401/msgs/29365.html