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Sunday, April 17, 2022
Ad-serving limit applied (2022-Apr-17)
Sunday, April 10, 2022
Chapter 1 - Lessons From Vietnam Veterans
From the book: The Body Keeps the score, vessel van red Kolk, 2022 I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.... That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past.... Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years. —Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot.... It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it. —Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror The Tuesday after the Fourth of July weekend, 1978, was my first day as a staff psychiatrist at the Boston Veterans Administration Clinic. As I was hanging a reproduction of my favorite Breughel painting, “The Blind Leading the Blind,” on the wall of my new office, I heard a commotion in the reception area down the hall. A moment later a large, disheveled man in a stained three-piece suit, carrying a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine under his arm, burst through my door. He was so agitated and so clearly hungover that I wondered how I could possibly help this hulking man. I asked him to take a seat, and tell me what I could do for him. His name was Tom. Ten years earlier he had been in the Marines, doing his service in Vietnam. He had spent the holiday weekend holed up in his downtown-Boston law office, drinking and looking at old photographs, rather than with his family. He knew from previous years’ experience that the noise, the fireworks, the heat, and the picnic in his sister’s backyard against the backdrop of dense early-summer foliage, all of which reminded him of Vietnam, would drive him crazy. When he got upset he was afraid to be around his family because he behaved like a monster with his wife and two young boys. The noise of his kids made him so agitated that he would storm out of the house to keep himself from hurting them. Only drinking himself into oblivion or riding his Harley-Davidson at dangerously high speeds helped him to calm down. Nighttime offered no relief—his sleep was constantly interrupted by nightmares about an ambush in a rice paddy back in ’Nam, in which all the members of his platoon were killed or wounded. He also had terrifying flashbacks in which he saw dead Vietnamese children. The nightmares were so horrible that he dreaded falling asleep and he often stayed up for most of the night, drinking. In the morning his wife would find him passed out on the living room couch, and she and the boys had to tiptoe around him while she made them breakfast before taking them to school. Filling me in on his background, Tom said that he had graduated from high school in 1965, the valedictorian of his class. In line with his family tradition of military service he enlisted in the Marine Corps immediately after graduation. His father had served in World War II in General Patton’s army, and Tom never questioned his father’s expectations. Athletic, intelligent, and an obvious leader, Tom felt powerful and effective after finishing basic training, a member of a team that was prepared for just about anything. In Vietnam he quickly became a platoon leader, in charge of eight other Marines. Surviving slogging through the mud while being strafed by machine-gun fire can leave people feeling pretty good about themselves—and their comrades. At the end of his tour of duty Tom was honorably discharged, and all he wanted was to put Vietnam behind him. Outwardly that’s exactly what he did. He attended college on the GI Bill, graduated from law school, married his high school sweetheart, and had two sons. Tom was upset by how difficult it was to feel any real affection for his wife, even though her letters had kept him alive in the madness of the jungle. Tom went through the motions of living a normal life, hoping that by faking it he would learn to become his old self again. He now had a thriving law practice and a pictureperfect family, but he sensed he wasn’t normal; he felt dead inside. Although Tom was the first veteran I had ever encountered on a professional basis, many aspects of his story were familiar to me. I grew up in postwar Holland, playing in bombed-out buildings, the son of a man who had been such an outspoken opponent of the Nazis that he had been sent to an internment camp. My father never talked about his war experiences, but he was given to outbursts of explosive rage that stunned me as a little boy. How could the man I heard quietly going down the stairs every morning to pray and read the Bible while the rest of the family slept have such a terrifying temper? How could someone whose life was devoted to the pursuit of social justice be so filled with anger? I witnessed the same puzzling behavior in my uncle, who had been captured by the Japanese in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and sent as a slave laborer to Burma, where he worked on the famous bridge over the river Kwai. He also rarely mentioned the war, and he, too, often erupted into uncontrollable rages. As I listened to Tom, I wondered if my uncle and my father had had nightmares and flashbacks—if they, too, had felt disconnected from their loved ones and unable to find any real pleasure in their lives. Somewhere in the back of my mind there must also have been my memories of my frightened—and often frightening—mother, whose own childhood trauma was sometimes alluded to and, I now believe, was frequently reenacted. She had the unnerving habit of fainting when I asked her what her life was like as a little girl and then blaming me for making her so upset. Reassured by my obvious interest, Tom settled down to tell me just how scared and confused he was. He was afraid that he was becoming just like his father, who was always angry and rarely talked with his children— except to compare them unfavorably with his comrades who had lost their lives around Christmas 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge. As the session was drawing to a close, I did what doctors typically do: I focused on the one part of Tom’s story that I thought I understood—his nightmares. As a medical student I had worked in a sleep laboratory, observing people’s sleep/dream cycles, and had assisted in writing some articles about nightmares. I had also participated in some early research on the beneficial effects of the psychoactive drugs that were just coming into use in the 1970s. So, while I lacked a true grasp of the scope of Tom’s problems, the nightmares were something I could relate to, and as an enthusiastic believer in better living through chemistry, I prescribed a drug that we had found to be effective in reducing the incidence and severity of nightmares. I scheduled Tom for a follow-up visit two weeks later. When he returned for his appointment, I eagerly asked Tom how the medicines had worked. He told me he hadn’t taken any of the pills. Trying to conceal my irritation, I asked him why. “I realized that if I take the pills and the nightmares go away,” he replied, “I will have abandoned my friends, and their deaths will have been in vain. I need to be a living memorial to my friends who died in Vietnam.” I was stunned: Tom’s loyalty to the dead was keeping him from living his own life, just as his father’s devotion to his friends had kept him from living. Both father’s and son’s experiences on the battlefield had rendered the rest of their lives irrelevant. How had that happened, and what could we do about it? That morning I realized I would probably spend the rest of my professional life trying to unravel the mysteries of trauma. How do horrific experiences cause people to become hopelessly stuck in the past? What happens in people’s minds and brains that keeps them frozen, trapped in a place they desperately wish to escape? Why did this man’s war not come to an end in February 1969, when his parents embraced him at Boston’s Logan International Airport after his long flight back from Da Nang? Tom’s need to live out his life as a memorial to his comrades taught me that he was suffering from a condition much more complex than simply having bad memories or damaged brain chemistry—or altered fear circuits in the brain. Before the ambush in the rice paddy, Tom had been a devoted and loyal friend, someone who enjoyed life, with many interests and pleasures. In one terrifying moment, trauma had transformed everything. During my time at the VA I got to know many men who responded similarly. Faced with even minor frustrations, our veterans often flew instantly into extreme rages. The public areas of the clinic were pockmarked with the impacts of their fists on the drywall, and security was kept constantly busy protecting claims agents and receptionists from enraged veterans. Of course, their behavior scared us, but I also was intrigued. At home my wife and I were coping with similar problems in our toddlers, who regularly threw temper tantrums when told to eat their spinach or to put on warm socks. Why was it, then, that I was utterly unconcerned about my kids’ immature behavior but deeply worried by what was going on with the vets (aside from their size, of course, which gave them the potential to inflict much more harm than my two-footers at home)? The reason was that I felt perfectly confident that, with proper care, my kids would gradually learn to deal with frustrations and disappointments, but I was skeptical that I would be able to help my veterans reacquire the skills of self-control and self-regulation that they had lost in the war. Unfortunately, nothing in my psychiatric training had prepared me to deal with any of the challenges that Tom and his fellow veterans presented. I went down to the medical library to look for books on war neurosis, shell shock, battle fatigue, or any other term or diagnosis I could think of that might shed light on my patients. To my surprise the library at the VA didn’t have a single book about any of these conditions. Five years after the last American soldier left Vietnam, the issue of wartime trauma was still not on anybody’s agenda. Finally, in the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School, I discovered The Traumatic Neuroses of War, which had been published in 1941 by a psychiatrist named Abram Kardiner. It described Kardiner’s observations of World War I veterans and had been released in anticipation of the flood of shell-shocked soldiers expected to be casualties of World War II. Kardiner reported the same phenomena I was seeing: After the war his patients were overtaken by a sense of futility; they became withdrawn and detached, even if they had functioned well before. What Kardiner called “traumatic neuroses,” today we call posttraumatic stress disorder—PTSD. Kardiner noted that sufferers from traumatic neuroses develop a chronic vigilance for and sensitivity to threat. His summation especially caught my eye: “The nucleus of the neurosis is a physioneurosis.”2 In other words, posttraumatic stress isn’t “all in one’s head,” as some people supposed, but has a physiological basis. Kardiner understood even then that the symptoms have their origin in the entire body’s response to the original trauma. Kardiner’s description corroborated my own observations, which was reassuring, but it provided me with little guidance on how to help the veterans. The lack of literature on the topic was a handicap, but my great teacher, Elvin Semrad, had taught us to be skeptical about textbooks. We had only one real textbook, he said: our patients. We should trust only what we could learn from them—and from our own experience. This sounds so simple, but even as Semrad pushed us to rely upon self-knowledge, he also warned us how difficult that process really is, since human beings are experts in wishful thinking and obscuring the truth. I remember him saying: “The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves.” Working at the VA I soon discovered how excruciating it can be to face reality. This was true both for my patients and for myself. We don’t really want to know what soldiers go through in combat. We do not really want to know how many children are being molested and abused in our own society or how many couples—almost a third, as it turns out—engage in violence at some point during their relationship. We want to think of families as safe havens in a heartless world and of our own country as populated by enlightened, civilized people. We prefer to believe that cruelty occurs only in faraway places like Darfur or the Congo. It is hard enough for observers to bear witness to pain. Is it any wonder, then, that the traumatized individuals themselves cannot tolerate remembering it and that they often resort to using drugs, alcohol, or self-mutilation to block out their unbearable knowledge? Tom and his fellow veterans became my first teachers in my quest to understand how lives are shattered by overwhelming experiences, and in figuring out how to enable them to feel fully alive again.TRAUMA AND THE LOSS OF SELF
The first study I did at the VA started with systematically asking veterans what had happened to them in Vietnam. I wanted to know what had pushed them over the brink, and why some had broken down as a result of that experience while others had been able to go on with their lives.3 Most of the men I interviewed had gone to war feeling well prepared, drawn close by the rigors of basic training and the shared danger. They exchanged pictures of their families and girlfriends; they put up with one another’s flaws. And they were prepared to risk their lives for their friends. Most of them confided their dark secrets to a buddy, and some went so far as to share each other’s shirts and socks. Many of the men had friendships similar to Tom’s with Alex. Tom met Alex, an Italian guy from Malden, Massachusetts, on his first day in country, and they instantly became close friends. They drove their jeep together, listened to the same music, and read each other’s letters from home. They got drunk together and chased the same Vietnamese bar girls. After about three months in country Tom led his squad on a foot patrol through a rice paddy just before sunset. Suddenly a hail of gunfire spurted from the green wall of the surrounding jungle, hitting the men around him one by one. Tom told me how he had looked on in helpless horror as all the members of his platoon were killed or wounded in a matter of seconds. He would never get one image out of his mind: the back of Alex’s head as he lay facedown in the rice paddy, his feet in the air. Tom wept as he recalled, “He was the only real friend I ever had.” Afterward, at night, Tom continued to hear the screams of his men and to see their bodies falling into the water. Any sounds, smells, or images that reminded him of the ambush (like the popping of firecrackers on the Fourth of July) made him feel just as paralyzed, terrified, and enraged as he had the day the helicopter evacuated him from the rice paddy. Maybe even worse for Tom than the recurrent flashbacks of the ambush was the memory of what happened afterward. I could easily imagine how Tom’s rage about his friend’s death had led to the calamity that followed. It took him months of dealing with his paralyzing shame before he could tell me about it. Since time immemorial veterans, like Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, have responded to the death of their comrades with unspeakable acts of revenge. The day after the ambush Tom went into a frenzy to a neighboring village, killing children, shooting an innocent farmer, and raping a Vietnamese woman. After that it became truly impossible for him to go home again in any meaningful way. How can you face your sweetheart and tell her that you brutally raped a woman just like her, or watch your son take his first step when you are reminded of the child you murdered? Tom experienced the death of Alex as if part of himself had been forever destroyed—the part that was good and honorable and trustworthy. Trauma, whether it is the result of something done to you or something you yourself have done, almost always makes it difficult to engage in intimate relationships. After you have experienced something so unspeakable, how do you learn to trust yourself or anyone else again? Or, conversely, how can you surrender to an intimate relationship after you have been brutally violated? Tom kept showing up faithfully for his appointments, as I had become for him a lifeline—the father he’d never had, an Alex who had survived the ambush. It takes enormous trust and courage to allow yourself to remember. One of the hardest things for traumatized people is to confront their shame about the way they behaved during a traumatic episode, whether it is objectively warranted (as in the commission of atrocities) or not (as in the case of a child who tries to placate her abuser). One of the first people to write about this phenomenon was Sarah Haley, who occupied an office next to mine at the VA Clinic. In an article entitled “When the Patient Reports Atrocities,”4 which became a major impetus for the ultimate creation of the PTSD diagnosis, she discussed the well-nigh intolerable difficulty of talking about (and listening to) the horrendous acts that are often committed by soldiers in the course of their war experiences. It’s hard enough to face the suffering that has been inflicted by others, but deep down many traumatized people are even more haunted by the shame they feel about what they themselves did or did not do under the circumstances. They despise themselves for how terrified, dependent, excited, or enraged they felt. In later years I encountered a similar phenomenon in victims of child abuse: Most of them suffer from agonizing shame about the actions they took to survive and maintain a connection with the person who abused them. This was particularly true if the abuser was someone close to the child, someone the child depended on, as is so often the case. The result can be confusion about whether one was a victim or a willing participant, which in turn leads to bewilderment about the difference between love and terror; pain and pleasure. We will return to this dilemma throughout this book.NUMBING
Maybe the worst of Tom’s symptoms was that he felt emotionally numb. He desperately wanted to love his family, but he just couldn’t evoke any deep feelings for them. He felt emotionally distant from everybody, as though his heart were frozen and he were living behind a glass wall. That numbness extended to himself, as well. He could not really feel anything except for his momentary rages and his shame. He described how he hardly recognized himself when he looked in the mirror to shave. When he heard himself arguing a case in court, he would observe himself from a distance and wonder how this guy, who happened to look and talk like him, was able to make such cogent arguments. When he won a case he pretended to be gratified, and when he lost it was as though he had seen it coming and was resigned to the defeat even before it happened. Despite the fact that he was a very effective lawyer, he always felt as though he were floating in space, lacking any sense of purpose or direction. The only thing that occasionally relieved this feeling of aimlessness was intense involvement in a particular case. During the course of our treatment Tom had to defend a mobster on a murder charge. For the duration of that trial he was totally absorbed in devising a strategy for winning the case, and there were many occasions on which he stayed up all night to immerse himself in something that actually excited him. It was like being in combat, he said—he felt fully alive, and nothing else mattered. The moment Tom won that case, however, he lost his energy and sense of purpose. The nightmares returned, as did his rage attacks—so intensely that he had to move into a motel to ensure that he would not harm his wife or children. But being alone, too, was terrifying, because the demons of the war returned in full force. Tom tried to stay busy, working, drinking, and drugging—doing anything to avoid confronting his demons. He kept thumbing through Soldier of Fortune, fantasizing about enlisting as a mercenary in one of the many regional wars then raging in Africa. That spring he took out his Harley and roared up the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire. The vibrations, speed, and danger of that ride helped him pull himself back together, to the point that he was able to leave his motel room and return to his family. THE REORGANIZATION OF PERCEPTION Another study I conducted at the VA started out as research about nightmares but ended up exploring how trauma changes people’s perceptions and imagination. Bill, a former medic who had seen heavy action in Vietnam a decade earlier, was the first person enrolled in my nightmare study. After his discharge he had enrolled in a theological seminary and had been assigned to his first parish in a Congregational church in a Boston suburb. He was doing fine until he and his wife had their first child. Soon after the baby’s birth, his wife, a nurse, had gone back to work while he remained at home, working on his weekly sermon and other parish duties and taking care of their newborn. On the very first day he was left alone with the baby, it began to cry, and he found himself suddenly flooded with unbearable images of dying children in Vietnam. Bill had to call his wife to take over child care and came to the VA in a panic. He described how he kept hearing the sounds of babies crying and seeing images of burned and bloody children’s faces. My medical colleagues thought that he must surely be psychotic, because the textbooks of the time said that auditory and visual hallucinations were symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. The same texts that provided this diagnosis also supplied a cause: Bill’s psychosis was probably triggered by his feeling displaced in his wife’s affections by their new baby. As I arrived at the intake office that day, I saw Bill surrounded by worried doctors who were preparing to inject him with a powerful antipsychotic drug and ship him off to a locked ward. They described his symptoms and asked my opinion. Having worked in a previous job on a ward specializing in the treatment of schizophrenics, I was intrigued. Something about the diagnosis didn’t sound right. I asked Bill if I could talk with him, and after hearing his story, I unwittingly paraphrased something Sigmund Freud had said about trauma in 1895: “I think this man is suffering from memories.” I told Bill that I would try to help him and, after offering him some medications to control his panic, asked if he would be willing to come back a few days later to participate in my nightmare study.5 He agreed. As part of that study we gave our participants a Rorschach test.6 Unlike tests that require answers to straightforward questions, responses to the Rorschach are almost impossible to fake. The Rorschach provides us with a unique way to observe how people construct a mental image from what is basically a meaningless stimulus: a blot of ink. Because humans are meaning-making creatures, we have a tendency to create some sort of image or story out of those inkblots, just as we do when we lie in a meadow on a beautiful summer day and see images in the clouds floating high above. What people make out of these blots can tell us a lot about how their minds work. On seeing the second card of the Rorschach test, Bill exclaimed in horror, “This is that child that I saw being blown up in Vietnam. In the middle, you see the charred flesh, the wounds, and the blood is spurting out all over.” Panting and with sweat beading on his forehead, he was in a panic similar to the one that had initially brought him to the VA clinic. Although I had heard veterans describing their flashbacks, this was the first time I actually witnessed one. In that very moment in my office, Bill was obviously seeing the same images, smelling the same smells, and feeling the same physical sensations he had felt during the original event. Ten years after helplessly holding a dying baby in his arms, Bill was reliving the trauma in response to an inkblot. Experiencing Bill’s flashback firsthand in my office helped me realize the agony that regularly visited the veterans I was trying to treat and helped me appreciate again how critical it was to find a solution. The traumatic event itself, however horrendous, had a beginning, a middle, and an end, but I now saw that flashbacks could be even worse. You never know when you will be assaulted by them again and you have no way of telling when they will stop. It took me years to learn how to effectively treat flashbacks, and in this process Bill turned out to be one of my most important mentors. When we gave the Rorschach test to twenty-one additional veterans, the response was consistent: Sixteen of them, on seeing the second card, reacted as if they were experiencing a wartime trauma. The second Rorschach card is the first card that contains color and often elicits socalled color shock in response. The veterans interpreted this card with descriptions like “These are the bowels of my friend Jim after a mortar shell ripped him open” and “This is the neck of my friend Danny after his head was blown off by a shell while we were eating lunch.” None of them mentioned dancing monks, fluttering butterflies, men on motorcycles, or any of the other ordinary, sometimes whimsical images that most people see. While the majority of the veterans were greatly upset by what they saw, the reactions of the remaining five were even more alarming: They simply went blank. “This is nothing,” one observed, “just a bunch of ink.” They were right, of course, but the normal human response to ambiguous stimuli is to use our imagination to read something into them. We learned from these Rorschach tests that traumatized people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them and have trouble deciphering whatever is going on around them. There appeared to be little in between. We also learned that trauma affects the imagination. The five men who saw nothing in the blots had lost the capacity to let their minds play. But so, too, had the other sixteen men, for in viewing scenes from the past in those blots they were not displaying the mental flexibility that is the hallmark of imagination. They simply kept replaying an old reel. Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word— all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships. When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of imagination, a loss of the mental flexibility. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach. The Rorschach tests also taught us that traumatized people look at the world in a fundamentally different way from other people. For most of us a man coming down the street is just someone taking a walk. A rape victim, however, may see a person who is about to molest her and go into a panic. A stern schoolteacher may be an intimidating presence to an average kid, but for a child whose stepfather beats him up, she may represent a torturer and precipitate a rage attack or a terrified cowering in the corner. STUCK IN TRAUMA Our clinic was inundated with veterans seeking psychiatric help. However, because of an acute shortage of qualified doctors, all we could do was put most of them on a waiting list, even as they continued brutalizing themselves and their families. We began seeing a sharp increase in arrests of veterans for violent offenses and drunken brawls—as well as an alarming number of suicides. I received permission to start a group for young Vietnam veterans to serve as a sort of holding tank until “real” therapy could start. At the opening session for a group of former Marines, the first man to speak flatly declared, “I do not want to talk about the war.” I replied that the members could discuss anything they wanted. After half an hour of excruciating silence, one veteran finally started to talk about his helicopter crash. To my amazement the rest immediately came to life, speaking with great intensity about their traumatic experiences. All of them returned the following week and the week after. In the group they found resonance and meaning in what had previously been only sensations of terror and emptiness. They felt a renewed sense of the comradeship that had been so vital to their war experience. They insisted that I had to be part of their newfound unit and gave me a Marine captain’s uniform for my birthday. In retrospect that gesture revealed part of the problem: You were either in or out—you either belonged to the unit or you were nobody. After trauma the world becomes sharply divided between those who know and those who don’t. People who have not shared the traumatic experience cannot be trusted, because they can’t understand it. Sadly, this often includes spouses, children, and co-workers. Later I led another group, this time for veterans of Patton’s army—men now well into their seventies, all old enough to be my father. We met on Monday mornings at eight o’clock. In Boston winter snowstorms occasionally paralyze the public transit system, but to my amazement all of them showed up even during blizzards, some of them trudging several miles through the snow to reach the VA Clinic. For Christmas they gave me a 1940s GI-issue wristwatch. As had been the case with my group of Marines, I could not be their doctor unless they made me one of them. Moving as these experiences were, the limits of group therapy became clear when I urged the men to talk about the issues they confronted in their daily lives: their relationships with their wives, children, girlfriends, and family; dealing with their bosses and finding satisfaction in their work; their heavy use of alcohol. Their typical response was to balk and resist and instead recount yet again how they had plunged a dagger through the heart of a German soldier in the Hürtgen Forest or how their helicopter had been shot down in the jungles of Vietnam. Whether the trauma had occurred ten years in the past or more than forty, my patients could not bridge the gap between their wartime experiences and their current lives. Somehow the very event that caused them so much pain had also become their sole source of meaning. They felt fully alive only when they were revisiting their traumatic past.DIAGNOSING POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS
In those early days at the VA, we labeled our veterans with all sorts of diagnoses—alcoholism, substance abuse, depression, mood disorder, even schizophrenia—and we tried every treatment in our textbooks. But for all our efforts it became clear that we were actually accomplishing very little. The powerful drugs we prescribed often left the men in such a fog that they could barely function. When we encouraged them to talk about the precise details of a traumatic event, we often inadvertently triggered a full-blown flashback, rather than helping them resolve the issue. Many of them dropped out of treatment because we were not only failing to help but also sometimes making things worse. A turning point arrived in 1980, when a group of Vietnam veterans, aided by the New York psychoanalysts Chaim Shatan and Robert J. Lifton, successfully lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to create a new diagnosis: posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which described a cluster of symptoms that was common, to a greater or lesser extent, to all of our veterans. Systematically identifying the symptoms and grouping them together into a disorder finally gave a name to the suffering of people who were overwhelmed by horror and helplessness. With the conceptual framework of PTSD in place, the stage was set for a radical change in our understanding of our patients. This eventually led to an explosion of research and attempts at finding effective treatments. Inspired by the possibilities presented by this new diagnosis, I proposed a study on the biology of traumatic memories to the VA. Did the memories of those suffering from PTSD differ from those of others? For most people the memory of an unpleasant event eventually fades or is transformed into something more benign. But most of our patients were unable to make their past into a story that happened long ago. The opening line of the grant rejection read: “It has never been shown that PTSD is relevant to the mission of the Veterans Administration.” Since then, of course, the mission of the VA has become organized around the diagnosis of PTSD and brain injury, and considerable resources are dedicated to applying “evidence-based treatments” to traumatized war veterans. But at the time things were different and, unwilling to keep working in an organization whose view of reality was so at odds with my own, I handed in my resignation; in 1982 I took a position at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, the Harvard teaching hospital where I had trained to become a psychiatrist. My new responsibility was to teach a fledgling area of study: psychopharmacology, the administration of drugs to alleviate mental illness. In my new job I was confronted on an almost daily basis with issues I thought I had left behind at the VA. My experience with combat veterans had so sensitized me to the impact of trauma that I now listened with a very different ear when depressed and anxious patients told me stories of molestation and family violence. I was particularly struck by how many female patients spoke of being sexually abused as children. This was puzzling, as the standard textbook of psychiatry at the time stated that incest was extremely rare in the United States, occurring about once in every million women.8 Given that there were then only about one hundred million women living in the United States, I wondered how forty seven, almost half of them, had found their way to my office in the basement of the hospital. Furthermore, the textbook said, “There is little agreement about the role of father-daughter incest as a source of serious subsequent psychopathology.” My patients with incest histories were hardly free of “subsequent psychopathology”—they were profoundly depressed, confused, and often engaged in bizarrely self-harmful behaviors, such as cutting themselves with razor blades. The textbook went on to practically endorse incest, explaining that “such incestuous activity diminishes the subject’s chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external world.”9 In fact, as it turned out, incest had devastating effects on women’s well-being. In many ways these patients were not so different from the veterans I had just left behind at the VA. They also had nightmares and flashbacks. They also alternated between occasional bouts of explosive rage and long periods of being emotionally shut down. Most of them had great difficulty getting along with other people and had trouble maintaining meaningful relationships. As we now know, war is not the only calamity that leaves human lives in ruins. While about a quarter of the soldiers who serve in war zones are expected to develop serious posttraumatic problems,10 the majority of Americans experience a violent crime at some time during their lives, and more accurate reporting has revealed that twelve million women in the United States have been victims of rape. More than half of all rapes occur in girls below age fifteen.11 For many people the war begins at home: Each year about three million children in the United States are reported as victims of child abuse and neglect. One million of these cases are serious and credible enough to force local child protective services or the courts to take action.12 In other words, for every soldier who serves in a war zone abroad, there are ten children who are endangered in their own homes. This is particularly tragic, since it is very difficult for growing children to recover when the source of terror and pain is not enemy combatants but their own caretakers.A NEW UNDERSTANDING
In the three decades since I met Tom, we have learned an enormous amount not only about the impact and manifestations of trauma but also about ways to help traumatized people find their way back. Since the early 1990s brainimaging tools have started to show us what actually happens inside the brains of traumatized people. This has proven essential to understanding the damage inflicted by trauma and has guided us to formulate entirely new avenues of repair. We have also begun to understand how overwhelming experiences affect our innermost sensations and our relationship to our physical reality —the core of who we are. We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think. We have discovered that helping victims of trauma find the words to describe what has happened to them is profoundly meaningful, but usually it is not enough. The act of telling the story doesn’t necessarily alter the automatic physical and hormonal responses of bodies that remain hypervigilant, prepared to be assaulted or violated at any time. For real change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present. Our search to understand trauma has led us to think differently not only about the structure of the mind but also about the processes by which it heals.
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Thursday, March 31, 2022
Top 10 Posts and Top 20 Locations of 'survival8' as of 2022-Mar-31
Both our Top 20 Locations and Top 10 Posts have gone past 1K Benchmark as of 2022-Mar-31.
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1. India : 752K 2. United States : 155K 3. Unknown Region : 24.4K 4. Germany : 15.7K 5. Russia : 14.8K 6. United Arab Emirates : 10.6K 7. Kenya : 8.76K 8. United Kingdom : 8.56K 9. Singapore : 6.4K 10. Canada : 5.44K 11. Netherlands : 4.44K 12. France : 4.38K 13. Brazil : 3.25K 14. Ukraine : 2.03K 15. Philippines : 1.28K 16. Pakistan : 1.17K 17. Australia : 1.14K 18. Hong Kong : 1.11K 19. Uganda : 1.01K 20: Other : 129KTop 10 posts
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Sunday, March 27, 2022
Word Meanings (12 words) - 2022-Mar-27
Index of Word Meanings
1.
hearken
/ˈhɑːk(ə)n/
verb
past tense: hearkened; past participle: hearkened
ARCHAIC
listen.
"he refused to hearken to Tom's words of wisdom"
---
2.
coda
/ˈkəʊdə/
noun MUSIC
noun: coda; plural noun: codas
the concluding passage of a piece or movement, typically forming an addition to the basic structure.
"the first movement ends with a fortissimo coda"
# the concluding section of a dance, especially of a pas de deux or the finale of a ballet in which the dancers parade before the audience.
# a concluding event, remark, or section.
"his new novel is a kind of coda to his previous books"
Origin
mid 18th century: Italian, from Latin cauda ‘tail’.
---
3.
expediency
/ɪkˈspiːdɪənsi,ɛkˈspiːdɪənsi/
noun
noun: expediency; plural noun: expediencies
the quality of being convenient and practical despite possibly being improper or immoral; convenience.
"an act of political expediency"
Similar:
convenience
advantage
advantageousness
usefulness
utility
---
4.
troupe
/truːp/
noun
noun: troupe; plural noun: troupes
a group of dancers, actors, or other entertainers who tour to different venues.
"a dance troupe"
h
Similar:
group
company
band
ensemble
set
cast
Origin
---
5.
primordial
/prʌɪˈmɔːdɪəl/
adjective
adjective: primordial
existing at or from the beginning of time; primeval.
"the primordial oceans"
Similar:
ancient
earliest
first
prehistoric
antediluvian
antique
primeval
primitive
primal
autochthonous
autochthonic
primigenial
Opposite:
modern
(especially of a feeling or state) basic and fundamental.
"the primordial needs of the masses"
h
Similar:
instinctive
primitive
basic
primal
primeval
intuitive
intuitional
involuntary
inborn
innate
inherent
inbred
natural
congenital
hereditary
inherited
in the blood
ingrained
Biology
(of a cell, part, or tissue) in the earliest stage of development.
"primordial germ cells"
Origin
late Middle English: from late Latin primordialis ‘first of all’, from primordius ‘original’ (see primordium).
---
6.
stave
/steɪv/
See definitions in:
all
building
carpentry
weapons
music
prosody
noun
noun: stave; plural noun: staves; noun: staff; plural noun: staffs
1.
a vertical wooden post or plank in a building or other structure.
any of the lengths of wood fixed side by side to make a barrel, bucket, or other container.
a strong wooden stick or iron pole used as a weapon.
2.
British•Music
a set of five parallel lines on any one or between any adjacent two of which a note is written to indicate its pitch.
3.
a verse or stanza of a poem.
Phrases
stave in
break something by forcing it inwards or piercing it roughly. "the door was staved in"
stave off
avert or delay something bad or dangerous. "a reassuring presence can stave off a panic attack"
Origin
Middle English: back-formation from staves, archaic plural of staff1. Current senses of the verb date from the early 17th century.
stave in
phrasal verb of stave
verb: stave
break something by forcing it inwards or piercing it roughly.
"the door was staved in"
Similar:
break in
smash in
put a hole in
push in
kick in
cave in
splinter
shiver
fracture
stave off
phrasal verb of stave
verb: stave
avert or delay something bad or dangerous.
"a reassuring presence can stave off a panic attack"
Similar:
avert
prevent
avoid
preclude
rule out
counter
forestall
---
7.
beaver 1
/ˈbiːvə/
See definitions in:
all
mammal
clothing
textiles
scouting
military history
noun
plural noun: beavers; plural noun: Beavers
1.
a large semiaquatic broad-tailed rodent native to North America and northern Eurasia. It is noted for its habit of gnawing through trees to fell them in order to make dams.
the soft light brown fur of the beaver.
"long coats trimmed with light beaver"
historical
a hat made of felted beaver fur.
noun: beaver hat; plural noun: beaver hats
a heavy woollen cloth resembling felted beaver fur.
noun: beaver cloth; plural noun: beaver cloths
a very hard-working person.
"Hopkins was a regular beaver where gardening was concerned"
2.
a boy aged about 6 or 7 who is an affiliated member of the Scout Association.
verbinformal
3rd person present: beavers
work hard.
"Bridget beavered away to keep things running smoothly"
Origin
Old English beofor, befor, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch bever and German Biber, from an Indo-European root meaning ‘brown’.
...
beaver 2
/ˈbiːvə/
noun
plural noun: beavers
the lower part of the face guard of a helmet in a suit of armour. The term is also used to refer to the upper part or visor, or to a single movable guard.
Origin
late 15th century: from Old French baviere ‘bib’, from baver ‘slaver’.
...
beaver 3
/ˈbiːvə/
noun
plural noun: beavers
1.
vulgar slang•North American
a woman's genitals or pubic area.
2.
dated•informal
a bearded man.
Origin
early 20th century: of unknown origin.
---
8.
prosaic
/prə(ʊ)ˈzeɪɪk/
adjective
adjective: prosaic
having or using the style or diction of prose as opposed to poetry; lacking imaginativeness or originality.
"prosaic language can't convey the experience"
Similar:
unimaginative
uninspired
matter-of-fact
dull
dry
humdrum
mundane
pedestrian
heavy
plodding
lifeless
dead
spiritless
lacklustre
undistinguished
stale
jejune
bland
insipid
vapid
vacuous
banal
hackneyed
trite
literal
factual
unpoetic
unemotional
unsentimental
clear
plain
unadorned
unembellished
unvarnished
monotonous
deadpan
flat
Opposite:
imaginative
inspired
commonplace; unromantic.
"the masses were too preoccupied by prosaic day-to-day concerns"
h
Similar:
ordinary
everyday
usual
common
conventional
straightforward
routine
humdrum
commonplace
run-of-the-mill
workaday
businesslike
pedestrian
tame
mundane
dull
dreary
tedious
boring
ho-hum
uninspiring
monotonous
h
Opposite:
interesting
Origin
late 16th century (as a noun denoting a prose writer): from late Latin prosaicus, from Latin prosa ‘straightforward (discourse)’ (see prose). Current senses of the adjective date from the mid 18th century.
---
9.
licentious
/lʌɪˈsɛnʃəs/
adjective
adjective: licentious
1.
promiscuous and unprincipled in sexual matters.
"the ruler's tyrannical and licentious behaviour"
Similar:
dissolute
dissipated
debauched
degenerate
salacious
immoral
wanton
decadent
depraved
profligate
impure
sinful
wicked
corrupt
indecent
libertine
lustful
lecherous
lascivious
libidinous
prurient
lubricious
lewd
promiscuous
unchaste
carnal
fleshly
intemperate
abandoned
ribald
risqué
smutty
dirty
filthy
coarse
perverted
horny
raunchy
naughty
pervy
randy
concupiscent
lickerish
Opposite:
moral
virtuous
2.
archaic
disregarding accepted conventions, especially in grammar or literary style.
Origin
late Middle English: from Latin licentiosus, from licentia ‘freedom’.
---
10.
begrudge
/bɪˈɡrʌdʒ/
verb
gerund or present participle: begrudging
1.
envy (someone) the possession or enjoyment of (something).
"she begrudged Martin his affluence"
Similar:
envy
grudge
resent
be jealous of
be envious of
be resentful of
2.
give reluctantly or resentfully.
"nobody begrudges a single penny spent on health"
Similar:
resent
feel aggrieved about
feel bitter about
be annoyed about
be angry about
be displeased about
be resentful of
grudge
mind
object to
take exception to
regret
give unwillingly
give reluctantly
give resentfully
give stintingly
be dissatisfied with
Translate begrudging to
---
11.
vexed
/ˈvɛkst/
adjective
adjective: vexed
1.
(of a problem or issue) difficult and much debated; problematic.
"the vexed question of how much money the government is going to spend"
Similar:
disputed
in dispute
contested
in contention
contentious
debated
debatable
open to debate
open to question
questionable
at issue
open to doubt
controversial
moot
unresolved
unsettled
up in the air
undecided
yet to be decided
undetermined
unconcluded
ongoing
problematic
problematical
taxing
knotty
thorny
ticklish
delicate
sticky
dicey
hairy
iffy
dodgy
Opposite:
undisputed
resolved
2.
annoyed, frustrated, or worried.
"I'm very vexed with you!"
Similar:
annoyed
irritated
angry
irate
furious
incensed
inflamed
enraged
infuriated
maddened
fuming
wrathful
choleric
exasperated
piqued
irked
nettled
ill-humoured
hot-tempered
testy
cross
in a bad mood
in a temper
in high dudgeon
huffy
in a huff
put out
fed up
disgruntled
displeased
dissatisfied
frustrated
resentful
upset
perturbed
fretted
bothered
troubled
worried
agitated
harassed
harried
flustered
distressed
aggravated
peeved
miffed
miffy
mad
riled
hacked off
peed off
hot under the collar
foaming at the mouth
browned off
cheesed off
brassed off
not best pleased
narked
eggy
teed off
ticked off
sore
steamed
vex
ireful
snuffy
wrath
vulgar slang
pissed off
pissed
Opposite:
calm
content
---
12.
vex
/vɛks/
verb
past tense: vexed; past participle: vexed
make (someone) feel annoyed, frustrated, or worried, especially with trivial matters.
"the memory of the conversation still vexed him"
Similar:
annoy
irritate
infuriate
anger
incense
inflame
enrage
irk
chagrin
exasperate
madden
pique
provoke
nettle
disturb
upset
perturb
discompose
put out
try
try someone's patience
get on someone's nerves
bother
trouble
worry
agitate
harass
harry
fuss
fluster
ruffle
hound
rankle with
nag
torment
pain
distress
tease
frustrate
chafe
grate
fret
gall
outrage
displease
offend
disgust
dissatisfy
disquiet
rub up the wrong way
mither
peeve
aggravate
miff
bug
bite
eat
hassle
rile
get to
hack off
make someone's blood boil
make someone see red
get someone's goat
get someone's hackles up
make someone's hackles rise
get someone's back up
get someone's dander up
drive up the wall
drive bananas
needle
be a pain in the neck
ruffle someone's feathers
get in someone's hair
get under someone's skin
give someone a hard time
nark
get on someone's wick
give someone the hump
wind up
get across
get up someone's nose
tick off
ride
rankle
gravel
bum out
vulgar slang
piss off
get on someone's tits
Opposite:
mollify
appease
West Indian
be annoyed, irritated, or unhappy.
"I wouldn't vex; it will be just great if whoever borrow the pump, just bring it back"
archaic
cause distress to.
"thou shalt not vex a stranger"
Origin
late Middle English: from Old French vexer, from Latin vexare ‘shake, disturb’.
Chapter 1 - Power of Framing (Negotiating the Impossible)
1: THE POWER OF FRAMING
Negotiating in the NFL “YOU’VE GOT TO COME up with some new idea. You guys keep talking past each other instead of to each other.”1 These were the exasperated words of United States Magistrate Judge Arthur Boylan, who had been tasked with helping to end an escalating conflict between players and owners in the National Football League (NFL). It was May 2011, and team owners had already locked out the players. Much of the action was taking place in courtrooms, as each side tried to gain leverage through legal maneuverings. Ultimately, if a deal could not be struck, the coming season would be in jeopardy. This was not just a theoretical possibility: in 2005, a prolonged dispute between owners and players had decimated an entire season in the National Hockey League, eliminating more than $2 billion in projected revenue. The NFL had even more to lose, with approximately $10 billion standing in the balance. With so much money at stake in professional sports, you can be assured that, once in a while, the action at the bargaining table will rival anything fans get to witness on the field. At issue in 2011 was the fate of the new collective bargaining agreement (CBA), a multiyear contract between owners and the players’ union that governs the negotiation of individual contracts for all NFL players. The CBA also dictates, among other things, the revenue distribution between players and owners, the salary cap, minimum salaries, free agency rules, the terms of the annual draft, and working conditions. As in most CBA disputes in sports, one of the most salient and contentious issues in 2011 surrounded revenue sharing between owners and players. In other words, what percentage of the game’s revenue should go to players and what percentage to owners? In this case, the owners were demanding a $2 billion off-the-top credit to support investments before any split of revenues would take place, after which the players would receive approximately 58% of what remained. Players wanted no off-the-top credit for owners, and a 50–50 split of all revenues.2 How do you resolve a dispute in which the demands of each party add up to more than is on the table—and neither side is willing to concede?NEGOTIATING THE IMPOSSIBLE
The conflict escalated, and good faith bargaining gave way to legal maneuverings, heavy-handed tactics, and even appeals to the US Congress for intervention. Finally, there was a breakthrough. The resolution came when the parties agreed to a proposal (originating from the owners) that called for an entirely novel structure for revenue sharing. They decided that the way forward was to stop negotiating over “what percentage of all revenue” goes to each party. Instead, the parties would divide “all revenue” into three separate buckets that represented the different streams of NFL revenue. Then, they negotiated a different revenue sharing percentage for each bucket. The idea worked. The final agreement, signed August 4, 2011, states that players will receive: • 55% of League Media revenue (e.g., revenue from TV rights) • 45% of NFL Ventures / Postseason revenue (i.e., revenues from related businesses of the NFL) • 40% of Local revenue (e.g., stadium revenue) The solution, however, begs the question: What percentage of all revenues do the players receive from this deal? Running the numbers indicates that the three-buckets solution gives the players between 47% and 48% of all revenues in the first year of the contract. But wait! If that’s the case, why go to all the trouble of creating three buckets with different percentages for each? Why not avoid the hassle of creating a new accounting system and simply agree to the players getting ~47.5% of all revenues? There is an economically rational explanation for why three buckets may be a wiser solution than one big bucket. For example, consider what happens after the first year of the contract. If the players expect that League Media revenue will grow faster and hence represent a larger share of all revenues in the future, and the owners project that Local revenue will grow more rapidly, then the three-buckets approach is a value creating solution: it gives each side a higher percentage of the bucket it values most. The only problem with this economically rational explanation is that it has very little to do with why the two sides actually agreed to three buckets. We can be sure that the economically rational explanation falls short because when you read further down in the CBA, there is another provision that contains the following language: If, in any of the 2012–14 League Years, the Player Cost Amount … is greater than 48% of Projected “All Revenue” then the Player Cost Amount will be reduced to 48% of Projected “All Revenue.” … If, in any of these League Years, the Player Cost Amount is less than 47% of Projected “All Revenue”, the Player Cost Amount shall be increased to 47% of Projected “All Revenue.” In other words, the two sides are agreeing to roughly 47.5% of all revenues going to players. If the percentage deviates in any meaningful way from 47.5% in any direction, it will be brought back to this relatively tight range.3 So we still have the same question: why go to the trouble of creating three buckets if the agreement is practically indistinguishable from what they could have achieved by agreeing to some specified percentage of all revenues for each year of the contract? To answer this, we need to first keep in mind that very few people actually look carefully at these kinds of contracts, and almost no media outlets comprehensively report or analyze the finer details of the deal. Second, while practically inconsequential, there is a small degree of movement possible in the revenue split in future years. Most importantly, the three-buckets approach is superior to the one-bucket approach in one essential respect: it allows each side to go back to its constituents and declare victory. It creates just enough room for league negotiators to report to the owners that they can keep a higher percentage of revenues where owner investments are greater (i.e., stadium-related revenues), and it lets Players Association negotiators announce that they get more than 50% of revenues whenever fans click on the television.CONTROL THE FRAME
As the NFL example illustrates, even in difficult negotiations where the parties are deadlocked, stalemate might be overcome without the use of money or muscle.4 Even though the argument was over money, the league did not have to keep throwing more dollars on the table to get the players to agree to the deal. Instead, what they did is a great illustration of the power of framing: objectively identical proposals can be made more or less attractive simply by how they are presented. The “frame” of the negotiation is a psychological lens. It is a sense-making apparatus that influences how people perceive each other, the issues at hand, and the options that exist. There is almost no limit to the number and types of frames that can emerge in a negotiation. For example, negotiators may look at a deal through a financial or a strategic lens, see it from a short-term or a long-term perspective, or regard it as a friendly or hostile engagement. Likewise, diplomats may look at a problem from a political or a security point of view, as being a central or a peripheral concern, or in a historic or present-day context. Deal makers may evaluate a proposal relative to their initial aspirations for the deal, or how well it compares to what others have achieved, or how it will be judged by others. There are no “right” or “wrong” frames, but which frame takes hold has important implications for how the parties behave and what they will ultimately be willing to accept. For example, sometimes a low-stakes issue that neither side really cares much about becomes infused with so much political or symbolic significance that neither side is willing or able to back down. In recent years, Democrats and Republicans in the United States Congress have been confronting this problem extensively: compromise on the slightest issue is considered by many partisans to be akin to wholesale betrayal, making it harder to reach agreements even where there is a lot at stake and plenty of bipartisan support on the substance of an issue. Importantly, negotiators almost always have the power to influence the frame, and as we will see, reframing can be a powerful tool for overcoming barriers to deal making. Regardless of the objective stakes, much of what determines how people approach a problem depends on how they (or their constituents) subjectively make sense of it. Deal makers are unwilling to make concessions to perceived adversaries but are more amenable to doing so when they perceive the task as a collaborative problem-solving effort. Negotiators who frame a conflict as “winner takes all” will have a harder time than negotiators who believe it is possible for everyone to “win.” Negotiators will be more or less willing to accept certain proposals when they adopt a short-term versus a longterm lens, or when the offer appears better versus worse than what they initially expected. As we discuss the power of framing throughout this section, we will pay particular attention to how objectively identical proposals and options can be reframed to make them more attractive to the other side. Paying attention not just to the substance of what is being negotiated, but also the lens through which parties are evaluating their options, can sometimes help break seemingly impossible deadlocks. Control the frame of the negotiation. The frame that takes hold will shape how negotiators make decisions, evaluate options, and decide what is acceptable.THE IMPORTANCE OF HELPING THE OTHER SIDE BACK DOWN
The problems that negotiators face in early stages of deal making can be quite different from the problems they face as talks progress. One critical difference relates to the reasons why someone stubbornly insists on making demands that you cannot possibly meet. When this happens early in a negotiation, it is usually a sign that you have failed to set appropriate expectations for what is possible. This can lead the other side to ask for the impossible—that is, to demand concessions that are true deal breakers for you. This is why it is a good idea to educate the other side at the outset about the limits of what you can offer and about the areas where you have more or less flexibility. Negotiators often fail to do this in the false belief that the other side is well-enough informed about the parameters of the negotiation, or because they are worried that discussing any limitations or constraints will raise doubts about their value as a partner. There may also be insufficient trust, making it harder for either side to believe that the other is genuinely so constrained, or that there is truly so little room for movement. When people are initially deadlocked over incompatible positions, it usually means that their aspirations are unrealistic and there is simply not enough value on the table to meet them. If both sides want more than 50% of the pot, you have a serious problem, and the sooner you realize that it has nothing do with poor math skills, the better off you will be. This was undoubtedly the case in the NFL. The same problem frequently surfaces in diplomatic negotiations and business disputes. But at some point in the process, perhaps after weeks of interaction, or months of trust building, or years of impasse, one or both parties may come to the conclusion that their earlier demands are not possible, and that major concessions will be needed to avoid a truly disastrous outcome. When that day comes, you may find that people are still unwilling to lower their demands. Now, you no longer have an education or trust problem to solve. The problem is how to get the other side to admit that they initially asked for more than was reasonable, and to back down and accept what is actually possible. The problem is all the worse when the other side will have to back down publicly, because they have committed to aggressive positions in front of others (e.g., their constituents or the media). In my experience, it is often relatively easier to get people to understand that they have overreached and that their demands are impossible to meet; it is a lot harder to get them to acknowledge this and change course. This was the problem that the NFL negotiators faced—and ultimately solved. Convincing the other party that they will have to concede or withdraw from initial positions is not enough. You have to make it easier for them to back down.NEGOTIATE STYLE AND STRUCTURE, NOT JUST THE SUBSTANCE
When the NFL negotiations were deadlocked, either side could have tried to make the deal more attractive to the other by reducing their own revenue demands. But this would have been a costly concession. As the solution they reached shows, you do not always have to throw money at the problem to move things along. Sometimes, wise concessions on style and structure can solve the problem more cheaply than costly concessions on substance. In this case, the three-buckets solution seems to have helped the parties accept a deal that did not seem palatable with a one-bucket structure, even though the objective value of the deal was almost identical. Negotiators who are mindful of style and structure are better positioned to overcome resistance, avoid impasse, and achieve better outcomes. Wise concessions on style and structure can help solve a problem more cheaply than costly concessions on substance. In the next chapter, we take a closer look at the various ways in which framing can help break deadlock without using money or muscle. In doing so, we derive more principles for resolving conflict of all kinds. We also devote particular attention to two factors that were at play in the NFL negotiations and that can make deadlocks especially difficult to break. First, there is the audience problem. The other side may be concerned not just with what they get from you, but also with how others will judge their acceptance of your offer. Second, there is the zero-sum problem. In a zerosum situation the amount that one side gains must precisely equal what the other side loses. When people are stuck negotiating over only one divisive issue, and there are no other interests involved, it becomes hard for them to make concessions without feeling they have lost and the other side has won. Let’s see how these issues might be tackled.
Saturday, March 26, 2022
Effects of Marketing in Africa on Top 20 Countries in terms of Page Views
Uganda:
Friday, March 25, 2022
The Firing at Mobileum (Jun 2018)
Index of Journals
I though I was going to write about the Dunnhumby Interview but it turned to be a completely different story about an incident that happened around the same time. THE DUNNHUMBY REJECTION: It was my first serious interview for a data science job. I have been working since 2013 but even to this date I cannot say what are the telltale signs of getting a pink slip, getting fired, being relieved from the job or starting of a separation process, or telltale signs of getting off boarded. The first, foremost, palpable sign that you will be fired is that company starts reducing the dependency on you. % Have you been asked to give KT (Knowledge Transfer)? % Have you been not getting attention in calls and meetings? % Have you been asked to work on low priority tasks? % Have you been asked to work on trivial stuff? % Has your reporting manager been changed to lower ranking employee? .... The SECOND telltale sign that you will be fired soon is if you have been given a task to do in which you badly faltered or failed at least once in your employment history. A related sign to first and second sign is the tacit lowering of your status in the company. Like passing of comments by your team lead or manager of the sorts: Turn around, bent down, pants down. And: Can a manager hit an employee at workplace with a shoe? All of this was happening with me at Mobileum. After this was roughly when I had seriously started taking my preparation for data science job interviews. The hardest part about knowing whether or not you will be fired is to detect lying or deceitful behaviour by the people higher up your corporate ladder. Here is a disclosure: I always thought that Chandrashekhar Marathe (the Vice President) was an honest, straightforward man. I was wrong. After I had been relieved from the job, I was still in denial and I called Shekhar to ask him a few things like why was I fired, what can I do to get back in the job, and etc. The information he divulged during this phone call was that Shekhar had known about the firing long back. More than that, he was the signatory approver of it. He told me that he got the same feedback from all three managers I had worked with: Dinesh Sawant Rupesh Patodi, and Prashant Saxena The feedback was in three parts: 1) I was not sitting on seat but other people's desk or meeting rooms. 2) I was giving huge time expectations for every task. 3) My timings of coming in the office and leaving the office were very erratic and unusual. Although everything looks crystal clear in the hindsight but back then when I was in the exit meeting with the HR director and Prashant Saxena that I had to submit my resignation letter before 5 PM, I was shocked to the level speechlessness and then in phase of denial for a long time post that day. Thank you for reading. See you in the next post.
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