Category Archives: philosiphy

Learning How to See Family

How does your child see you?
How does your child see you?
When it comes to perspective, I am not sure there is a single perspective more powerful than how we ourselves. However if there is one, I bet it is how we think others see us. Do they see all of our failings or our strengths? Do they see us as worthy of love?

Over the weekend, J and I took a hit in the how we think we are viewed by our kids. Our son,O, ran away. It started off as his usual morning defiance, riling up his younger sister and refusing to do the normal morning routine. He thought we would chase him down and force him to do it. So when I told him I had our foster baby in my arms because I was feeding him and there would be consequences if I had to go get him, he said “Make me.” After another minute of him dancing around, I put down R, and I went to go get him. He was waiting by the door which he opened with a smile towards me when he knew I could see him. He ran out into a down poor of rain. I texted J, and we thought his attempt to get attention shouldn’t work. He would come right back. After all, he wasn’t even wearing shoes.

He did not come back. He ran and 20 minutes later while J was out looking for him, he got into a stranger’s car. He told them he did not want to come home because his mom “mistreats him.” He was so lucky, because the older couple took him to the police station. The woman fell carrying our shoeless son into the police station treating him like the brave abused boy he was portraying himself. The cops heard he was “mistreated at home” and there were two other girls and a foster baby in the home. The cops took him to the hospital for an exam and to take photo’s of the bruises on his body as evidence of his abuse.

Of course by this time, I have called the police department giving his name and description trying to get their help to find him. After we had heard nothing for another 30 minutes, I called them back. They said a car was in route to my house. Two cops came in and asked if they could search the house. I replied, “Sure, I have looked everywhere in case he snuck back in somehow, and we have had a neighbor who does searches for the police over to look already, but the more eyes the better.” At this point, we have most of our street looking for him with phone calls out to all of the friends we could think he might try to reach. When they called back in, they said another cop was on the way to our house, their commander. When he got there is when I got the phone call saying O was safe at the precinct, but he was on the way to the hospital for an exam. We were relieved, and J wanted to go be with him, but we were asked to stay at home for questioning.

They took pictures of his bruises, none of which were from us. Wrestling on a trampoline with a kid who outweighs you by 30% will do that as will falling from the lip of a bathtub he was dancing on for his sister’s giggles. As I spoke with the ER doctor, I felt his hostility towards me grow steadily less when I explained his diagnoses and medications. Even though the doctor and Child Protective Services agent believed me, we still had to wait for him to come home and find out if there will be an investigation effectively ending our ability to foster children.

Now O had no idea the ramifications of what he was doing. He started off afraid of being yelled at again for misbehaving. Then it was a fear of being yelled at for running outside, and when I didn’t chase him he worried more. Fear drove him to act and then exaggerate. When the cops said they were going to go get the other kids in his house, he was happy. It never occurred to him that did not mean they would be with him in a new home. He just did not want to be yelled at again. When we questioned him about the ordeal that night, we had to be extremely careful with the wording of questions, because he was searching to say only what he thought we wanted to hear. He was still scared to the point he would have agreed to leave our house because he felt scared there.

I know his very early childhood before us was hard, but will he always be this scared? Will he always act impulsively to better his immediate situation without understanding how others perceive his actions and the motivation for them?

If one reads the Atlantic this month, it would seem likely. The article, There’s No Such Thing as Free Will, argues our thought process is predetermined by chemicals in our brains and the neural paths signals can take. Science seems to be arguing the nature side of the nature vs. nurture is the better bet for predicting and explaining actions. I buy the science behind the article, but I think it is too static. Sure we can predict/explain a behavior or action by looking at the brains pathways, but over time are we explaining the actions or the predispositions to certain actions?

Atlantic, There’s No Such Thing as Free Will

Can we change the brain process over time? Is this self determinism or free will changing the determinism?

Having seen Ericksonian hypnotherapy work, I also question how fixed these predetermined thoughts, reactions and emotions are to given stimuli. Can we not change how our brains work? If we can decide to change these paths, then the predictive value of the determinist model would seem to fall apart. Granted, one may say the decision to change was predictable, but were the situations to allow us to do so also predictable?

Family, it does a soul good.  The next step is teaching our body to react to this truth.
Family, it does a soul good. The next step is teaching our body to react to this truth.

Raising kids who have gone through trauma but still have highly malleable brains, I have to hope the nurture model can help. Maybe I am but a part of the masses needing to be gullible, but I tend to think the brain was wired to make this choice and do this action is believable only in a specific static scenario. My brain, as it is right now, will always decide A if given a choice between A and B. However, I might train to look at both choices and sometimes choose B based on a different decision model. My thought processes are not carved in stone, and I hope my neuro paths are not either…though a bit more resistance to cuts of those paths would be nice (Sorry, bad MS joke since Multple sclerosis, which I have, means many cuts).

Could we not plausibly argue the brain paths simply predispose us to a course of action or thought at a given time under given circumstances? Can we then work to narrow the range of circumstances prompting the bad reactions and broaden the number of paths to the preferred outcome? If not, then why bother with parenting?

Side note: The highlight of my week came when I heard O tried to calm a girl in his class using what I had taught him. I have been working with him to be the candle giving a soft glow rather than an inferno burning everything to ash. It was all based on a nintendo Wii game where you have to sit perfectly still. We started saying to each other, “Be the candle, not an inferno.” Of course for me, the candle is my grandfather’s torch of my dreams.

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Cogito Ergo Sum

“Cogito Ergo Sum”
– I think therefor I am, Descartes 1637
Descartes originally wrote this in French rather than the Latin I have as the title.  Somehow having it appear in a language other than originally thought, then translated to a language few know or understand now, seems fitting for my MS afflicted brain.  The idea that a profound concept  from the 1600’s which provided a foundation for much of Western philosophical thought, should be translated from a commonly spoken French to a language no longer spoken so it can remain undiscypherable for many who would make use of its knowledge fits my ideas filtered through MS. With my MS, many perfectly good stimuli are misinterpreted or lost from the point experienced to the point in my system where such signals would make sense.
All of this philosophical pondering was spawned while I was at a seminar on Friday where we were discussing “How do we know what we know?”  Descartes statement is usually taken as the starting point for discussion on this, though Plato certainly wrote about it.  I had to chuckle because there were two paths taken from this original statement in our group.  The first was the path of banging a hand on the table to say the table exists whether we think it or not because it hurts to run into.  
I had to chuckle.  I pointed out this line of thought is rather faulty for an MS patient who has gone through months of numbness over various parts of my body.   Using the logic of things are real because we feel them or experience them physically in some way would seem to indicate I was less real as I became numb.  Maybe this MS requires a total rethink of very basic philosophy.
The second road was one I just found full of humor, though I couldn’t find the fault in logic.  Shouldn’t the statement really be “I think I think therefor I am.”  After all isn’t it the recognition of thinking to which we are assigning reality?
I find such thought exercises fun because they impact how I think and attempt to teach O, A, and K.  There is more than just the action involved in living.  There are experiences to be had from the kiss of the dog to excited hug of a parent, but these are only half the life to be lived.  The rest happens only when you stop to think how much you love each other or why we clean up so the dogs won’t destroy or…It’s the second half which carries the lasting meaning, not the smell of the poopy diaper. 
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On the crazy life side, I celebrated my 37thbirthday a bit early with my in-laws this weekend.  The food was fantastic, and I had a minute to sit down and talk politics with my father-in-law.  Everything was going wonderfully till it was time to go.   From the time we started gathering items to head out the door through the rest of the weekend, O and A completely lost anything resembling self control.  Both screamed at night to the point where we were still trying to get them to go to and stay in bed after 11pm.  Of course they were up bright and early Sunday with all the attitude of sleep deprived kids.
For a weekend which started so nice, it went down hill in a hurry, and I don’t think I had more than 10 min uninterrupted till 9pm.  Of course when I was walking the dog, a cat was scared by 2 of our dogs.  The third dog, our most recent rescue abandoned in our back yard, was startled by the barking and yanked free.  Of course being skittish, his leash hitting the road startled him further.  Every time, he stopped, the leash would catch up to him and startle him again.  I had to go home to stop a feed to avoid waking everyone up when it ended, but I was right back out for another hour looking for him.  At 10:35, I gave up hoping as food driven as he is, maybe he would be back at our door when 5am rolled around for his normal breakfast.  He wasn’t.  
Thankfully, a neighbor picked him up and told us this morning she had him.  So all in all, it meant only one crazy day.  Even with this, there were a few very good small stories from the lady who took Fiz in to A refusing to get hyper again when O tried to rile her up.  Seeing a mature sense of reserve was a moment which took away the sting of the crazy day.  
All’s well that ends well… Calling silver lining, Clean up needed in aisle 220.
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