THE FIRST TIME IT HAPPENED....

The first time it happened I was elbow deep in dish suds having washed every dish from our finals ravaged house. It was the day before our college graduation ceremony. It was the day before all our families, including many of our grandmothers with delicate sensibilities were due to arrive. And it was about 8:00 pm.

My soon to be fiance, soon to be husband, and soon to be co-parent, Kevin, walked in the door and smiled at me. He had gone missing that whole day while I and my housemates scrubbed our dilapidated, well-worn college house from top to bottom.

We were a co-ed house, 4 men, 4 women. I hoped like anything this fact would not become evident to my very catholic, very old fashioned, beloved grandmother. She figured it out in a second, unfortunately, being just as smart as she was catholic.

Anyway, at the very least I could make sure our house of sin was clean. Plus everyone in the whole world knows you do not under any circumstance invite a whole bunch of mothers and grandmothers to your house without scrubbing it down from top to bottom, right??

So when my soon to be fiance sauntered in at 8:00 pm after I had been cleaning for hours and had settled into a good hour of dish washing as my last chore, I interpreted his pleasant smile as a smirk of smug satisfaction that said, “I managed to avoid the cleaning duties all day, haha…”

And the cleaning duties, I have to say, were terrible. Everyone knows how dirty college houses can get, particularly during finals. We were all interdisciplinary studies majors, a program requiring from us a big, huge, hairy senior project, the culmination of work we did since sophomores. We were knee deep in our projects up through finals week. Our moderate level of cleanliness went out the window the entire month.

All of us in this three story college funhouse had been cleaning all day except for Kevin. Three of the eight of us had bedrooms on the first floor, the main floor of the house, where the bulk of the living, studying, eating, and partying happened. The lucky three with rooms on the first floor were me, Annie, and Kevin. Annie and I, being reasonably clean people for 20 somethings, did a decent job of keeping the family room, kitchen, and downstairs bathroom reasonably clean and picked up all year.

The year was 1983. Feminism was definitely a part of our college manifesto, but it hadn’t seeped into our gender roles quite yet. The almost husband did not cook or clean all year. Not that what any of us did could entirely be called cooking, but we took turns putting things on plates that could be eaten.

Annie and I did a lion’s share of the cleaning on the first floor all year because we were super duper nice and because we had to live on it. Plus, Kevin had been elected Student Body President and was crazy busier than all of us put together. Annie and I did not make a big deal out of sharing the chores equally with Kevin and all that egalitarian jazz. We just did them.

It didn’t hurt I was head-over-heels in love with Kevin. Even in the advanced year of 1983, I came from pretty old fashioned stock where a woman did a lion’s share of the cooking and cleaning for the man she loved. Actually who am I kidding, the women did all of it. I took on the role of housekeeper and occasional mediocre food preparer without too much thought because when you have been raised by a tribe of intensely Irish Catholic women you cook and you clean, no questions asked.

I was still a card-carrying feminist, however, struggling to figure out how to translate theoretical feminism into practice. I was acutely aware on this last day before graduation, armed with all of my new feminist sensibilities, that Kevin could and should help us get our house cleaned up. He was done with his presidential duties, so not only should he help, he should also take this opportunity to show Annie and me how appreciative he was for all the cooking and cleaning we had done all year. We were still kicking it old school with the gender roles, but today we were going to be refreshingly modern by sharing equally in the housework.

Except Kevin never got the memo. Kevin had the exact same cultural heritage I did. He was and is the hardest working man I’ve ever known, but brought up as he was, cooking and cleaning was not something he ever had to developed organized thoughts about. Much the same way, I had no thoughts in my brain about the coaching strategies of the defensive coordinator of the 1982–83 Cleveland Browns.

Without organized thoughts about cooking and cleaning, Kevin was neither ungrateful or grateful about these matters. He would have been just as happy to live with dirt and eat whatever. I didn’t form thoughts about the defensive line of the Browns and he did not form thoughts about how often to sweep the kitchen floor.I did not see these distinctions at the time. So when Kevin went missing the day of the cleaning, my anger hit the fan.

You know the kind of rage you can feel towards your spouse after 15 years of marriage? I did not know anything about it yet. In fact, I was 100% clueless about the level of rage I would eventually feel towards this man in the years to come.

The first time it happened, the first time the rage came to me, even though still in its infant stages, was during this cleaning debacle. When Kevin walked in at 8pm after the work was all done I lit into him about how inconsiderate, ungrateful, and ridiculous he had been to disappear all day. (Cell phones hadn’t been invented yet.)

When I started yelling, Kevin was blindsided. I had never even so much as frowned at him. Throughout our senior year I had been the sweetest, most helpful, most adoring girlfriend a guy could have. And my sweetness and adoration were totally sincere. I loved him to distraction. My anger at him blindsided me as much as it did him.

This was the first of many times Kevin would provoke my anger and vice verse. Eventually, this guy I loved as much as one human could love another would provoke rages in me I could never have seen coming. This first time it happened was small potatoes, a walk in the park, child’s play. It resembled only a hint of my future rages. Neither of us had any idea what we were in for, what dark places our beautiful and intense love would lead us to…

When I finally stopped yelling at Kevin about the house cleaning in college, he had big crocodile tears slowly stream down his face. He quietly started pretending to find things to clean and straighten even though there was nothing left to clean or straighten. We made up and moved on, got engaged, got married, had a baby, then another, then another, then another. The love of my life and I would build a life together, climb the socioeconomic ladder together, deeply love and raise our 4 children together, but most of all, we would build all consuming rage towards one another, one incident at a time for 27 long years.

We never lost our intense love for one another, but our rage beat it to death. We tried every form of help and intervention in the known world to figure out why we precipitated so much rage at one another in the hopes of being able to stop it. We read everything we could get our hands on about psychology, relationships, and communication. We tried one psychological theory and personality theory after another we thought would help us. We went to one totally kind but unhelpful psychologist after another. We even delved into the world of alternative healing. Nothing made a dent. Nothing made our rage at one another stop. Quite the reverse. The harder we tried to stop it, the more it grew exponentially every passing year until we could no longer bear it.

We turned 50 in the year 2011. We still, despite all the raging for 27 straight years, loved one another as much as people can humanly love. We also had all the other necessary ingredients for a successful marriage in spades. We shared common interests, backgrounds, senses of humor, and ideas about childcare and money.

We wanted our relationship to work so badly, so very badly. But by year 27 we were exhausted by each other and we had exhausted every possible problem-solving option available to us. The field of psychology had nothing, zip, zero for us even though we methodically mined it for everything it has to offer the whole 27 years.

So at age 50, in the year 2011, we threw in the towel, a separation plan was hatched, and divorce lawyers were called. Exactly one day after calling my divorce lawyer, I was playing kickball outside on an 80 degree day. I was an Adaptive Physical Education Teacher for students with special needs at the time. During our break in play, I watched one of my 5th-grade students problem solve.

My student with all sorts of sensory and cognitive differences never once referenced anything or anyone outside of himself to identify his problem, assess his options, organize his thoughts, form a prediction for how to solve it, and then act on his predicted solution. My student did what made the utmost sense to his own personal sensory, motor, and nervous systems.

In solving his problem however, my student broke three school rules. I should have given him a consequence, but he changed my life for the better that day, saved my marriage, and caused me to reinterpret everything I had ever come to know about how to understand my own personal relationship to everyone and everything outside of me.

Simply put, there is me, my brain, and then there is everything else in the world that isn’t me. I call everyone and everything that isn’t me information. The only role I have to play in my existence is to continuously interpret the information around me in order to supply my brain with a continuous stream of predictions, or cues for what my brain and body should do next. When events unfold differently than I predict they will, my brain becomes alarmed in the exact same way my skin does when it encounters a hot curling iron. Both cues tell me something is amiss and I have to reorient to get my bearings. We rage if our hand is held onto a curling iron and we rage when we cannot make our predictions match up to our reality.

This is the skeleton of the biological theory of personality I downloaded into my brain that day after kickball. More importantly, I erased everything I had ever learned about how to interpret information and make predictions for what to do next directly and indirectly from the field of psychology, my childhood religion, yoga, Oprah Winfrey, crystals, aromatherapy, and the self-help industrial complex and started living my life from my own brain and body.

My whole life I had learned that my own personal physiological cues were to be controlled and pushed down, that they were mysterious forces to overcome, that my ego was always trying to assert itself, and that my unconscious mind was an elephant and I a mere hapless rider. Who knew this was a lie? I was in fact lit up with sensory, motor, emotional, and cognitive cues, to name a few, that were in me to help me respond to everything and everyone around me at all times in ways that made optimal sense to my own uniquely customized nervous system. I wasn’t filled with sabotaging states of subterfuge. I was filled with biological bells and whistles and super effective problem-solving cues. Who the heck knew?

My student knew, that’s who. He knew because he did not have the processing capacity, speed, or desire to learn how to interpret information and make decisions solely based upon how other people would judge the outcomes of his decisions. This would have seemed crazy to him, preposterous, and hysterical. My student would also never have thought to take his cues for how to organize information from the nervous systems of other people.

My student interpreted information in his environments the way humans are biologically set up to, with the aid and assistance of his own sensory, motor, and nervous systems. Due to his sensory and thinking differences, nobody had been able to teach this dynamic out of him. My student showed me how efficient and pleasing it is to be human by interpreting, organizing, and responding to information from the perspective of one’s own personal brain, body, and nervous system. He showed me how inefficient, ridiculous, and rage provoking it is to make my own personal decisions as if others had to emotionally and intellectually process them from inside of their own nervous systems in order to approve of them first. He showed me the absurdity of judging the decisions of other people by processing their decisions through my own nervous system in order to personally respond to their decisions as if I had been the one to make them in the first place.

Unlike my student I had learned since birth how to understand my own personal thinking capacities from the point of view of how others would interpret my thoughts and decisions. I did not rely upon my own physiological cues to guide me. I learned how to take cues for how to think and decide from the facial expressions, body language, and verbal responses other people directed at me before, during, and after my decision-making processes. As a result my brain was wired up to the world completely backward to what it should have been. The decision making parts of my brain were wired into everyone and everything else but me.

Until I observed my student I didn’t know interpreting information from my own personal nervous system was even possible. Actually that is not entirely accurate. I was existing from my own personal nervous system, but I was using cues for how to operate it mostly from external sources, those sources being the judgments and body language of other people, religious standards, feminist standards, psychological theories, self-help books, yoga, Oprah Winfrey, and a whole host of supposedly much wiser and ‘self aware’ people than myself.

The first 27 years of my marriage I had been expecting my husband to respond with his words, face, and body in the ways that jibed with my nervous system and vice verse. I was processing his nervous system output and he mine. Our backward orientation to our own nervous systems caused the destabilization which caused the rage. Problem solved. Case closed.

My new biological theory of personality takes a while to explain. It is straightforward and makes neurological sense and it involves unlearning many inaccurate ideas promoted and perpetuated by the field of psychology, religion, self help, yoga, etc. All these disciplines teach us how to develop a backward relationship to ourselves. They teach us how to understand ourselves by understanding the intellectual and emotional needs of other people and the rules of an ideology while simultaneously repressing our own emotional and physiological cues. All of these disciplines offer elaborate means of coping with ourselves due to the destabilization and anxiety that accompanies the backward orientation to the self they teach. Being super flexible mammals, many of us humans can get along reasonably well with a backward orientation to our own physiology, but it causes many stresses and strains, thus the need to constantly cope with therapy, yoga, prayer, and meditation, etc.

The application of my biological theory to my own life has made my life exquisitely pleasing to live. I don’t have to do the constant self-improvement and self-healing I use to as a matter of course.

The application of my biological theory of personality has enabled my husband and I to have the stable and loving relationship we wanted so badly. The fix was absurdly simple, completely a matter of properly understanding our human brain mechanics. We didn’t have to fix ourselves, we just had to understand how we work. We both work just fine, there was never anything wrong with us, or our relationship, we just had our physiological wires crossed.

Finally, when I figured out how to exist from my own nervous system instead of trying to repress it and ‘work’ on it with every form of self-help available to mankind, I felt like Helen Keller must have felt when she connected the dots between the finger spelling in her hand and representations of the world around her. She figured out how to explore, learn about, organize, and orient her own personal decision making capacities to the information all around her. She learned how to learn and thus she learned how to thrive. And that is exactly what happened to me. My student, however, was my teacher.

I write about my biological theory of personality daily in an effort to streamline it and craft it into something scientifically legitimate. My goal is to write a book with a thorough explanation.

MORE PSYCHOLOGICAL THERAPY NOT THE ANTIDOTE TO OVER-DRUGGING CHILDREN WHO UNDER-PERFORM IN THE CLASSROOM

As long as behaviors are the attributes we rely upon to diagnose and treat children for psychological disorders or personality disorders, we will over-prescribe drugs and we will subject children to way too much psychological therapy. We need a third option. A third option requires a new paradigm for how to understand human behavior in relationship to human cognition.

A third option focuses intently and intentionally on maintaining the mental health and overall integrity of a child’s brain and personality. The current vague and non-specific psychological theories of personality teachers are taught to apply in the classroom do not allow children to preserve the coordination and cohesiveness of their own unique sensory, motor, and nervous system capacities.

Micromanaging the behaviors of a human being via drugs and/or therapy will have grave negative consequences for that person’s capacities to understand and organize information and orient himself in space and time in the ways that make the most sense to him sensorially, motorically, and cognitively.

Human behaviors allow and support the brain in its task of sensing internal and external information, assessing that information, and then forming conclusions about that information in order to make decisions for what to do next. Behaviors do not occur independently of the brain’s directives, but the brain is constantly cueing for behaviors to help it assess future information it predicts it will need. For example, a child about to cross a street anticipates a car might be coming so his brain directs him to engage in the behavior of rotating his neck left and right to position his eyes so they can take in the view of the road in case a car is approaching.

All human behaviors serve a purpose and reflect how a human is CAPABLE of and is in fact understanding and managing the information present in any given moment. When adult authorities arbitrarily decide which behaviors are acceptable and which are not, it is the same as taking the pain sensors out of his skin. A child uses his pain sensors to orient safely in space. Individuals born without pain sensors suffer gruesome injuries their whole lives because they have no cues for how to safely orient their bodies in space.

An individual’s array of behaviors serve many purposes, one of which is to allow him to safely orient in space. We cannot pick and choose for a child the behaviors he can or cannot rely upon in any given situation. We must help children orient their brains and bodies in our classrooms and other group situations using methods that do not require us to constantly modify and comment on their behaviors.

All we have to do to successfully teach children is present information in ways they are CAPABLE of understanding it. We have thousands of ways of presenting information we can try before defaulting into behavior modification, or shipping the child off to therapy, or drugging him.

Gently helping children understand what to do next at all times instead of identifying them as disordered based upon their behaviors and putting them on behavior plans will eventually change the field of psychology from top to bottom someday and will dramatically decrease mental illness.

Ironically, the emergence of artificially intelligent machines might help us treat the developing brains of our children with more accurate and humane methodologies.

For example, if an instrument of AI was programmed to scan and interpret genetic information and was intermittently inaccurate, nobody would modify the machine’s output, it’s ‘final behaviors,’ they would modify the machine’s processing capacities to make sure the machine understood how to move from one piece of information to the next accurately.

Conversely, I am a teacher and we teachers are taught how to modify the output of our children, their final behaviors after they have already sensed, assessed, organized, and decided upon a whole string of information that resulted in their final behaviors. We teachers are taught precisely how to modify our students’ behaviors when they exhibit inaccurate output of any kind. We are taught much more explicitly how to modify their final behaviors than we are to consider how they arrived at those behaviors in the first place. Every child behaves for reasons that make sense to him and that are important to him. When we modify their output to suit our own goals for them, we disorient them, confuse them, anger them, and I believe lead many of them towards mental illnesses.

In the classroom setting, whenever a child goes off task, I have observed about half the teachers and teaching assistants will interpret the off-task behaviors as resulting from deliberate student defiance and stubbornness. These educators will then attempt to change the behavior of the child by giving the student a negative consequence or denying him a reward.

Modifying behaviors through drugs OR therapy are not evidenced based options with conclusive evidence for how they work, they are simply our only options thus far. Just because they are our only options does not make them our best options. Similarly, a large majority of children will learn regardless of how we teach them or whether or not we modify their behaviors, subject them to therapy, or give them drugs. Because some children will always learn despite what we do or don’t do to them does not mean existing options are optimal. If any of our existing methods of teaching and raising children were optimal, 1 in 4 of them would not end up mentally ill at some point in their lives or for their whole lives.

We teachers use a whole variety of behavior modification methods mostly by default. There are no theories of the human personality we can apply practically in the classroom that don’t involve behaviorism of some sort. We need a new biologically accurate theory of personality we can easily apply in our classrooms.

What if we focus on the unique manner in which each child senses information, organizes and orients to it, and then forms predictive decisions for what to do next with that information. Helping a child expand his ability to understand the information in his environment according to how we want him to can be a routine and easy task if we focus on the child’s understanding rather than his behavior.

Getting a child to have a specific relationship to any piece of information does not happen due to magic pills or magic behavior management plans. For a child to orient to information in specific ways he needs specific instructions for how to do so that MAKE SENSE TO HIM. Magic pills do not change how a child fundamentally senses, organizes, or orients to information. Just because a child is paying attention to information for longer amounts of time due to pills does not mean he is making sense of the information any better than he was before the pills. Forced behavioral changes do not equal better understanding of information. Forced behavioral changes lead to anger, rage, withdrawal, depression, anxiety, and/or mental illness.

Modifying a child’s ability to UNDERSTAND information in a specific way might require many attempts and many environmental adaptations but can be done. Modifying the child’s behaviors destroys the integrity of his sensory, motor, and nervous systems as they do their jobs of taking in, assessing, concluding, and deciding what to do next. Modifying and inhibiting BEHAVIORS damages the developing brain and I believe it to be the leading contributor to mental illness.

When a child does not behave according to how an adult wants him to, it doesn’t mean he has psychological problems or disorders. It means he senses, thinks, concludes, and decides differently than the adult does. It means the child has a different orientation to and relationship with the information in the classroom environment.

We can easily help Andrew change his relationship with the information without declaring him disordered. If Andrew is bouncing off the walls in school, drugging him will likely calm him down so he will behave more like his peers. What if we can simply create developmentally appropriate lessons for Andrew and consider the developmental level he is at instead of the developmental level we want him to be at? If Andrew does not receive constant negative consequences for how he behaves, this will calm him down more than anything. If he is set up to engage in learning experiences where he is successful, he will learn and thrive. He might need stations that captivate his interests in the classroom where he can move around and spend just a moment or two at each one due to a short attention span and the need to move. He might need more direct assistance. But we can surely come up with hundreds of ways to channel his exuberance, energy, and constantly shifting attention without declaring him disordered and drugging him or subjecting him to psychological therapy. (Occupational and physical therapy rock. They offer real strategies to help kids accomplish real life tasks.)

We need a biologically accurate theory of personality that flows from observations for how behaviors reflect the unique manner in which each human being continuously understands and organizes the interplay of internal and external information in order to continuously orient him or herself in space and time to make predictive decisions for what to do next. When we artificially attempt to change this dynamic in a child by modifying his behaviors so the child can achieve an ideal adults have created for how his or behaviors should or should not be, he is forced to adapt in often extreme ways in order to maintain any sort of equilibrium. Cognitive and behavioral adaptations implemented to maintain one’s equilibrium when one is expected to constantly sense, think, and behave in ways that are dictated by other people are mental illnesses.

If we artificially and forcefully change how a child orients himself in space and time by targeting his behaviors for modification according to the latest acceptable behaviors in vogue, we disorient, confuse and damage the child.

We need to discard current theories of personality that create an ideal for how people should behave and then declare them disordered when they do not measure up properly to that ideal. We need to discard psychological theories that identify specific behaviors as disordered and then take medical or therapeutic steps to change those behaviors.

A new biological personality theory would consider the fact that a human being’s relationship to information is really his primary and most crucial relationship. Survival of the fittest is really survival of the individual who can organize, understand, and respond to information in the most optimal ways in relationship to the interaction between his own sensory, motor, and nervous systems and his ever changing environments. Behavior management destabilizes the integrity and coherence of a child’s unique sensory, motor and nervous systems and sets him up for unmanageable anxiety which leads to mental instability and then potentially mental illness.

The psychological theories we teachers apply in the schools set our children up to have mental health problems that then must be treated by psychologists or psychiatrists. This is a vicious cycle we can easily alter by gently helping children figure out what to do next cognitively throughout the school day instead of micromanaging their behaviors.

It is destabilizing to not know when or how your thoughts and behaviors will be commented upon, drawn attention to, or forcibly altered. Whether this process is done gently or roughly by an adult authority, the process is totally destabilizing and anxiety provoking to a child. Anticipating destabilization causes children to withdraw or become hyper active due to the anxiety. Children often behave erratically and wildly when destabilized or anticipating destabilization, ensuring they will receive ever more behavior modification. The integrity of the child’s relationship to information, how he senses, assesses, and makes predictive decisions for what to do next becomes ever more confused. And that child becomes ever more passive and/or aggressive.

Children deal with mountains of old and new information every single day of their lives. They do not have the stored memories or the experience base of the adult authorities. Adults often assume children should know how to behave appropriately at all times when the children are clueless about the information they must know in order to call up the expected behaviors from their stored memories. Even when a child has seemingly mastered material, he can still become confused by it because he is an inexperienced child.

There are a million ways to become cognitively confused and disoriented by each child in each classroom each day of the year. When we fixate on behaviors during moments of confusion or perceived wrong doing, we miss hundreds of teaching moments and we destabilize and damage our children in the process.

Instead of drugging or requiring psychological therapy, we need to help children preserve the integrity of the totally unique relationship they each have with the information in their environments that they must continuously sense, assess, conclude, and form predictive decisions about in the ways that make the most sense to each of them.