Tag: impulse control

On trauma and the marshmallow test.

On trauma and the marshmallow test.

We were walking our dogs past our neighbor Katie’s house when she stepped onto her front porch. Katie is a philosophy professor specializing in the works of David Hume. She is also a phenomenal baker of holiday treats (her collection of cookie cutters is prodigious) and a generous guardian to several cats.

“Your flowers look beautiful!” we called out from about twenty-five feet away.

“I hope they don’t die right away,” she said. Then she shook her head and laughed. “God, what a year. They do look beautiful. And that’s the first thing I thought?”

We’re feeling traumatized. Nearly all of us.

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The marshmallow test: a researcher leaves a young child in a room with a marshmallow. “You can eat it now, but I’ll be back in ten minutes, and if the marshmallow is still there, you’ll get to have two.”

The marshmallow test has been written about extensively. The children who waited used a variety of strategies to distract themselves from temptation, like closing their eyes or singing to themselves.

Some children impulsively ate the marshmallow. Here’s a treat, nom nom nom! But the children who waited, the researchers reported, grew up to be more successful.

A variety of claims were made, like that the willpower needed to delay gratification allowed children to prioritize their futures, to keep struggling and striving even when things were hard, to turn down drugs and alcohol.

Here’s another interpretation: children who have been through trauma might be making a perfectly logical decision if they eat the marshmallow right away. Because lots of kids have been taught, by past experience, that despite a recently met grown-up’s promise, waiting might cause them to get zero marshmallows, not two.

If a child has learned that any situation might suddenly turn dangerous, they might not feel safe closing their eyes to ignore the marshmallow. If a child has learned that the money and food often run out by the end of the month, they might rightfully eat treats when there’s still a chance.

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The pandemic has made me more impulsive. Like my neighbor Katie, I worry that the beautiful flowers might die –almost to the point of forgetting to enjoy them while they last.

Like a child, I worry that the marshmallow might be gone.

I am – or at least, I have been for almost my entire life – a patient, resilient person. My graduate degree took six years. I merrily undertook a writing project that lasted another six. I’m raising children, which feels both hectic and achingly slow.

But right now, I can feel it in myself. Signing up for a vaccine and having the appointment be two and a half weeks away! felt interminable. Every delay aches. The future feels like a distant blur.

Especially amid all the outbreaks of violence – mass shootings in the national news, seemingly unrelated spates of murders in our local paper, all of them likely rooted in impulsiveness, isolation, & stress – delaying any source of joy feels agonizing. As though we might not make it another whole week, or month, or year.

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Today, at least, I set aside time in the morning for self-care. I dropped the kids off at school. I went for a fast run, five kilometers just under eighteen minutes. I stretched.

Most importantly, I took the time to meditate.

Meditation is the marshmallow test writ small.

Set a timer for twenty minutes. Sit down. Close your eyes. Choose some small phrase, meaningful or not – “sat nam,” “love more,” “I am calm” – and intone it silently in your mind, half as you breathe in, half as you breathe out. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Your mind might wander – if you notice, try to resume your small phrase. Silently repeated sound can anchor you, give yourself space to wash away some mental turmoil.

And, if you are like me, you’ll want to open your eyes and be done with it. This is taking forever! See if you can stay. Keep your eyes closed. Repeat your phrase, and breathe.

If you can last the entire time – well, no researcher will bring you a second marshmallow. But you’ll still receive a gift. A bit of inner peace that wasn’t there before.

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I could not have passed the marshmallow test yesterday.

I meditated.

I could probably pass today.

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header image by Kate Ter Haar on flickr

On prayer.

On prayer.

In jail, we read Czeslaw Milosz’s “On Prayer” (translated by Robert Hass), which opens with the lines:

You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.

All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge

And walking it we are aloft …

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Photographs by Robert Croma on Flickr.

After somebody read the poem aloud, I asked him: “What would your ideal god look like?”

“Um … tall … blonde, blue eyes …”

I was worried he was describing Thor.  It’s a bad bias, reminiscent of the old surgeon riddle.

The guy went on: “ … thirty-two D …”

Greek_-_Aphrodite_-_Walters_2399“Oh,” I said.  “You wanna worship Aphrodite.”

“Man, she’s great,” he said.  “I’ve been reading all the Greek myths and stuff.  But she is wicked when she’s mad.  Like Arachne committed suicide, and there’s Echo, and Na … Nar …”

“Narcissus.”

“… who she just wrecked.”

It’s true – the god of desire can hurt you.  We were discussing mythology in a room full of dudes incarcerated for possession.

Many of them know that desire is wrecking their lives.  I often say that I’m not against drugs, but certain drugs, mixed with certain people, are definitely bad news.

“That’s me,” said a guy who told me that he’s been shuffling in and out for the last twenty-four years, with the durations out often lasting no more than weeks.  “Last year … after my wife died … my son had to bring me back.  I was over at my nephew’s, and we’d had something like a full gram, each time we sold some I had to be like, here, let me try it with you, and I was falling out … but my son just happened to come by in my truck, and I had all the stuff.  He hit me with Narcan.”

Narcan – naloxone – revives people after overdose.

“So I know I gotta quit.  If I don’t stop, I’m gonna die.”

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In AA, people work with a higher power to stay sober.  A buddy told me, “It was hard coming out as an atheist in AA.”  But Milosz, the poet, would say that there’s no contradiction.  Milosz approached religion from a “scientific, atheistic position mostly,” and then he lived under the Nazis in Warsaw – an experience that could shake anybody’s faith.

You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.

And yet, prayer does change the mind.  Earnest prayer can heal. 

All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge

…

 if there is no other shore

We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.

The men know the grim statistics – rehab fails most people.  A counselor can’t reach into their minds and save them.  Neither can any god.  I’d argue that scientists can’t, either, but some scientists are trying – they’re testing transcranial magnetic stimulation aimed at a region of the human brain associated with impulse control.

Zap.

Do you want drugs now?

Transcranial_magnetic_stimulationA few people in the clinical trials have said “No,” but most people probably still do.  Which isn’t to disparage magnets – we’re asking an awful lot of them.  Addiction is a loop.  So many memories cause desire to swell.  For the guys in jail – many of whom started using when they were eleven or twelve – this is the only life they’ve known.  Their minds have never dealt with the world sober.  They are being asked to start all over again.

But some people manage to quit.  When rehab works, change comes from within.  And so it doesn’t matter whether any god is listening – prayer is for the person who prays.

We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.