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.