Blog post #5 3/8/2021

Allow me to start by saying that I LOVE my Finnish heritage.  I am fiercely proud of the fact that my background lies along the Arctic circle.  (Somewhat, at least.  Sorry, dad, I WILL take that genealogy test you gave me and find out for sure!)

There are so many good things about Finnish culture:  so much of the food (no, not salmiakki, I never did learn to eat that), the work ethic, the connection with nature, the summer cabin on a lake, and saunas.  Many Finns are reserved and quiet, yet they are among the most hospitable, friendly, and downright “real” people you can meet.  Part of the Finnish psyche is a self-deprecating sense of humor.  How can you tell if a Finn likes you?  He looks at your shoes while talking with you, instead of at his own shoes.

One of the things that Finnish people are known for is their work ethic.  Somehow it is part of the culture, and children grow up with it ingrained in them.  I have heard anecdotal stories of Finns being actively sought out by employers, because there is a (not unreasonable) assumption that they will be very hard workers, honest, and reliable.

Finnish culture embraces the idea of “SISU,” an ability to continue on, even when the odds are against you.  A dear sister in faith (from Finland) who recently passed away lived 18 months after an initial prediction of days or weeks, and her daughter and I agreed that there is no medical explanation for Sisu!  Sisu can also mean very, very stubborn, which does not always have positive connotations, but stubbornness can be a very good thing depending on the circumstances!

The sauna is an essential part of the Finnish identity.  The experience of sitting in a very hot room (180-200 degrees or even hotter!), dumping water on the hot rocks to create steam, is cleansing physically and mentally.  It is a place to relax and reconnect with yourself, and also a very social place, where you can take time to visit with your family or friends.  Having a “sauna evening” at someone’s house is a very bonding experience, where different generations can mingle and enjoy each others’ company.

I came across this cartoon in, of all things, a coffee table book about Upper Michigan rug making. Many Finns emigrated to Upper Michigan, and part of this book took on trying to explain the Finnish experience.

However, there are also things about Finnish culture that are not ideal.  The piece of the Finnish psyche that is reserved sometimes says that showing affirmation or affection of any kind is not appropriate.  There’s an old story that, after many years of marriage, the Finnish wife asks her husband, “Why don’t you ever tell me that you love me?”  His answer:  “I told you once that I loved you, and if anything ever changes, I’ll let you know!”  It’s a funny story, but it’s very sad when it’s actually true.

As much as the Finnish people are kind and warm-hearted, this approach to life can be very difficult for those close to people who actually live like this.  Daily empathy and affirmation of another person’s feelings is a very important part of a healthy relationship.  Every one of us needs to hear, on a regular basis, that we mean something to someone.

The Finnish work ethic can become too much when it becomes the most important thing in a person’s life.  Some people seem to be wired to take this so seriously that it becomes an integral part of who they are, to the extent of not being willing (or even able) to spend time with family or friends, damaging relationships in the name of “I can’t stop until the job is done.”

Parenting is, by most standards, the most important job we are called on to do as people.  If we do not invest enough quality time with our children, there are very real and long-lasting consequences, both in their emotional health and in our relationships with them. We need to spend time learning to be attuned to their emotions and needs, empathizing and validating them, teaching them their own importance, and helping them realize their strengths, while building them up where they are weak.

The same is true in romantic relationships:  they take time and effort.  If someone is so focused on work that they cannot take time and effort to care for their relationship, things can go south very quickly.  Add to that an inability or unwillingness to share affection, and it is very difficult for the other person, who can quickly feel like they simply are not on the priority list.

Of course, generalizations of any kind are not true for everyone.  Many, many Finns are outwardly loving, are willing to invest in emotional growth, and are very supportive partners and parents who are able to balance work and family or social life.  I am speaking of those who embrace work and reservedness to the detriment of personal relationships.  That is when it has gone too far.  We cannot expect our children and our partners to get by only on Sisu.

I have heard the argument, “Well, this is how we were raised, and our parents were raised, and so this is how we raised our children and this is how it is!”  I would submit that with new understanding about the importance of emotional support (even from a scientific standpoint it is fairly new understanding), we can give ourselves permission to hang onto the best parts of our Finnish heritage, and improve on those parts that we now understand to be less than ideal.

Footnote: I introduced Alexithymia in my previous post. It is very interesting to me that Finnish culture, the Finnish psyche, and Finnish men are mentioned again and again in my readings about Alexithymia. There seems to be something about Finnish culture that makes emotions very difficult to deal with for some people.

Blog post #4 3/1/2021

Empathy can be defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.”

One extension of this:  “Developing empathy is crucial for establishing relationships and behaving compassionately.”

The ability to know how another person feels relates to all the parts of our life where we interact with other people.  Whether it’s in romantic relationships, with our children, with our friends, or even in the workplace, it is an important skill to have.

So much of our emotion is shown, not in WHAT we say, but in our tone of voice, our body language, or our facial expressions.

Empathic ability is very much tied to success in life.  In one study, children who were able to read feelings nonverbally were more popular and more emotionally stable than their peers.  They also did better in school, even though their IQs were not any higher than children who struggled with reading nonverbal cues about emotions.

Even in babies only a few months old, empathy can be seen.  Quite often, if a baby hears another baby in distress, she will start crying herself.  As children grow, they learn that others’ distress is not their own, and begin to try to comfort other children who are having difficulties, for example by retrieving a special stuffed toy or blanket for the other to cuddle.  Children whose discipline included the parent pointing out how their behavior caused someone else’s distress learned to be more empathetic.

Children learn empathy and become emotionally balanced when the adults around them respond appropriately to their emotions:  if a child is sad, the parent can mimic a sad expression and speak in a soothing tone of voice.  If a parent underreacts, a child can become passive:  “If I can’t make my dad react when I get excited, why should I even bother trying?”  Even babies as young as three months old can pick up on the mood of a depressed parent, and mimic that mood.  When a parent consistently fails to show empathy, a child can learn that s/he should avoid expressing a particular emotion -- or can learn to not feel that emotion at all.

This ability to connect with our children (or even with others!) is known as “attunement.”  If we do not give our children this connection, it can lead to them struggling with emotional health.  

If people visit with a counselor or therapist, they feel the most understood when the therapist “mirrors” their feelings, reflecting back how the patient feels.  This is very similar to how we can teach our children how to handle their emotions -- by validating them.

Validation is one way we can show empathy:  by reassuring someone that we understand where they are coming from, whether or not we actually agree with them on the particular subject at hand.  It takes into account wherever the person is coming from, whether their current state of mind or their previous experience with a given situation.  It’s what we do when we tell our friends, “No, you’re not crazy!  I understand why you would feel that way.”

If we see in ourselves that we have failed in showing empathy or validation, the good news is that relationships are continually shifting and changing, and an imbalance can be corrected.

What about people who struggle with empathy?  These could be people who are very depressed, and can barely see beyond the inside of their own heads.  They could also be abusers or sociopaths.

There is also another group of people who have a condition called Alexithymia.  This word means, literally, “no words for feelings.”  They often don’t know what they themselves are feeling, and by extension have very great difficulty understanding what anyone around them is feeling.  The emotional world is perplexing to them, and trying to discuss and describe emotions to them has been compared to trying to explain color to someone who is colorblind.  Some experts consider it to be related to (or a subset of Asperger Syndrome).  People who are in a close relationship with someone like this especially need empathy and validation from the other people around them.

In conclusion, empathy is a very important piece of what makes our lives rich, especially in reference to the people around us.

Main outside resource for this post:  “Emotional Intelligence:  Why it can matter more than IQ” by Daniel Goleman

Blog post #3 2/22/2021

Logic and emotion lie on opposite ends of a spectrum.  Logic can be called “using one’s head,” and emotion can be called “using one’s heart.”  Sometimes logic and emotion work together with each other, and sometimes they are at odds.  Both the “head brain” and the “heart brain” are very important pieces of life.  We use logic, combined with our emotional experiences, to make decisions, to plan, to parent, and to interact with each other.

Everyone lands somewhere on this spectrum.  Usually (there are many exceptions, of course!) women land more towards the emotional end, and men more towards the logical side. Where we fall depends on our inherent personality, our upbringing, our life’s experiences, and possibly our background of study or training (for example, someone who works in a first responder job may have had to learn to set emotions aside and look at a situation logically, even if it’s not how that person was “wired” to begin with).

A husband and wife are driving on a back road at dusk, and a deer runs out into the road in front of the car.  Despite his quick reaction slamming on the brakes, he slams into the deer.  The car grinds along to a halt, and they both get out of the vehicle.  She immediately runs to the deer to see if it’s still alive (it’s not), he immediately runs to the front of the car to survey the damage.  She bursts into tears to realize that the deer is dead, and he starts muttering about the damage to the car.

Is it okay to feel bad for the deer?  Is it important to get the car functional again?  The answer to both of these questions is YES!  In the moment, however, she is frustrated with his concern over the car:  “All you can think about is the car!  Do you even care that we just killed a deer?”  He is mystified with her reaction:  “Don’t you understand, we don’t have a vehicle to drive if we don’t get this running!”

In our own family, we had this experience:  One of our children was quite ill with an upper respiratory issue.  He was probably about 10 months old, struggling to breathe, and feverish.  We had been at the doctor earlier that day, and his oxygen saturation was right on the border of whether he should be hospitalized or not.  The doctor was comfortable letting us go home, knowing that I have experience with breathing issues, both with myself and with other of our children, and that we have a nebulizer and the appropriate medicines at home.  I was warned to rush him to the emergency room if anything changed for him at all.

That evening, my husband reminded me that he was leaving to go help his brother-in-law with a house remodel project.  I was horrified and burst into tears.  All I could think about was, what if I had to rush to the hospital?  What would I do with the other children?  Just taking care of an extremely miserable 10 month old can be exhausting, never mind that we had other small children to care for.

He literally COULD. NOT. UNDERSTAND. why I would be so upset that he was leaving.  “I told him that I’d be there tonight!  This has been planned for a long time.  I can’t NOT show up!”  He was so puzzled and overwhelmed by my reaction and my inability to see his logic that he actually laughed.  Not that he found it funny, but that he had so many conflicting things going through his head and that was how it released from him.

This is a perfect example of how we can get into conflicts with those near to us when we land on different parts of the logic and emotion spectrum.  I was so overwhelmed with the stress, fear, and anxiety of the situation that I couldn’t see anything beyond my own struggles; he is a man of logic and of his word, and in that moment, he couldn’t see anything beyond that he had promised to help a friend.

There are plenty of situations where I have been very thankful for his logical approach to life.  I don’t think of myself as a super emotional person, but it has been a blessing to have someone so grounded traveling this journey next to me, especially when it comes to parenting, when women can (more easily) get bogged down with the emotions involved in child rearing.

Both emotion and logic are very important pieces of any life puzzle, but our differences in how we see a situation can lead to conflict in any of our relationships and friendships.  It is easy to get frustrated with someone close to us when we are on significantly different parts of this spectrum.  Being able to understand that we land in a different place from each other is the beginning of freeing ourselves of negative thoughts towards the other person.

In a marriage, in a group of friends, in a household, in a family, we can share our strengths with each other.  Each viewpoint is important and valid.  Where one is not strong, often another one is.

Each of us have our gifts, our strengths, the inner workings of our mind, and we are most successful when we use them to help each other.

Blog post #2: 02/15/2021

Have you, like me, ever experienced how much easier it is to wash the dishes, sweep the floor, or clean the bathroom, at someone else’s house? It’s much easier than at my own house, where it is expected of me to do it.

There is a very interesting difference between choice and obligation.  For some reason, the things we *choose* to do of our own accord, often are so much easier to do than those that we are *obligated* to do.  My mom’s dishes are much easier to wash than my own.  Some days, other people’s families are more fun to cook for than my own.  I do believe that a big part of the reason why is how outwardly appreciative the other people are when you *choose* to do something for them that you didn’t have to do, which is a good reminder for us to remember to thank each other for everything we can.

For me, understanding choice and obligation, and the relative ease of answering the call of each, has helped me to understand a lot about myself and the people around me.

For some reason, many (maybe all?) of us have a preschooler inside of us, telling us that “You can’t make me do that!” in our own lives.

As a diabetic, I struggle with the idea, “Who is anyone to tell me that I can’t eat sugar/cookies/chocolate? I’m my own person!”

Diets?  For many people, especially those of us who have that feisty inner preschooler, these are especially difficult, because “No one else can tell us what we can/can’t/should/shouldn’t eat!”  We feel *obligated* to follow the meal plan.  In my case, the more I try to diet, the worse I eat because of that rebellious streak.  *BUT* if I work on adjusting my thinking that I am *choosing* to eat healthier, something I am doing for myself to feel better and preserve health, those food decisions become just a little bit easier.

There is a verse in our church hymnal that says this:

“With selfishness and hurry,

how blinded we become.

We scarcely even notice

our dear ones’ needs at home.”

Why is it that sometimes it’s easier to “be there” for our friends, neighbors, and acquaintances, than for our own families?  It’s very difficult to admit the truth of this.  But I believe it comes down, again, to *choice* and *obligation.*

For most of us, home is a safe place to vent, to relax, and to let our guard down.  For some of us, when we are completely comfortable to “be our true selves,” our behavior can make us very difficult to be around.  This is where it is very important for us to *choose* to love each other.  Not because we are *obligated* because we are family, or share a household, but because we *choose* to show each other love and support.

The other side of that is to remember to tell each other how much we appreciate each other, and to be sure to express thanks whenever we can, perhaps ESPECIALLY to those with whom we closely share our lives.

LOVE, then, in this context, is an action word, where we make a conscious effort, again and again, moment by moment, day after day, to *choose* each other, in our friendships, marriages, and within our families.