Healing Heart

If we pay attention, our vulnerabilities become our superpowers. Winston Churchill, considered one of the greatest public speakers of all time, struggled with a speech impediment. Noel Gallagher, singer and lead guitarist and songwriter for the rock band Oasis, had a stutter. 

There’s something alchemical and inspiring about a problem turning into a strength. 

I’ve experienced this in my own little way. My family moved to the United States from San Salvador when I was five years old. I didn’t speak English because my primary caretaker had been Solita, a Salvadoran who only spoke Spanish. 

My father, himself a Swiss immigrant, spoke limited English as well. We moved to the rural Wyoming town of Centennial, home to just fifty people and many, many cows. 

Centennial had a downtown of sorts, and in it was a metal trailer turned ice cream parlor.  One exciting day my dad brought my sister and me in for ice cream. I was a cheerful kid, and tried to engage with the large, pretty woman serving the ice cream.  

“Are you pregnant or are you just fat?” I asked her with a big smile in my friendliest voice. She did not smile back. Her scowl surprised me. My father tried his best to intervene. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, “we’re just teaching her English and we haven’t taught her how to lie yet.” He also smiled his friendliest smile, and laughed a little bit as well. Her frowny face lines made it clear she was mad. I did not know what I did wrong. Nor did my father understand why his attempt to explain my faux pas went awry. 

Needless to say, we were not popular among the locals. 

Now, decades later, I believe my ease and skill in communicating comes directly from my inability to do so. 

From birth until I was five, my family lived in three countries with three languages and three separate cultural norms about discussing bodily differences (absolutely celebrated in Jamaica, my birthplace, where a bus driver would cheerfully call out “Fatty, you break ‘da bus” when a larger lady boarded). 

A million communication mistakes ensued. In second grade my friend told me her dad was in the Navy. “That’s silly,” I said, “your dad can’t be inside a color.” I was sure she was joking. She thought I was disrespecting the military. 

All of this heightened my awareness of how important and delicate communication was, of how intensely I wanted to understand others and to make myself understood. 

In my work as a therapist, my clients often have trauma histories that create vulnerable feelings of urgency, anxiety and dread. 

But also, dealing with trauma creates within them a strong capacity for empathy, compassion and commitment to protect the vulnerable.  These qualities might not exist if they hadn’t once experienced victimhood in the hands of the powerful. 

If we pay attention, our vulnerabilities become our superpowers. 

Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW

I’m so lucky to get to meet dynamic, interesting people in my work, and through my writing life. Brigitte Cutsall, the host of the “Real Things Living” podcast is one of those folks. She’s a generous-spirited, curious interviewer and I loved being on her show. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Here are the links:

Spotity – https://bit.ly/4nIhekB

Apple – https://bit.ly/466qUz6

iHeart Radio – https://bit.ly/4kunKbJ

YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp8FXm9HFHs&t=1244s

By Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW

Today I am writing about time off, not from work, but from marriage. Not in any kind of alarming, relationship-dismantling kind of way, but more like a vacation from the normal pattern of cohabitation.

My husband bought a decrepit, tear-down house in Southern California during Covid. He proceeded to revive it from the studs, learning along the way how to frame, hang sheetrock, install trim, lay tile, create irrigation, and stagger asphalt shingles.

Sometimes I accompany him, but mostly I stay home, working and eating seafood (which he detests and I adore), going out with friends every evening (he wishes I would mostly stay home and adore him), and cleaning my house to surgical standards. I have time now to wash the curtains, replace the vacuum filters, clean out the leftovers, launder and hang dry all the blankets, use baby bottle cleaners to scrub out the hummingbird feeders.

I read two books a week when he’s out of town, and just when I miss him too much to enjoy my freedom, he comes home.

Meanwhile he enjoys his time off just much: he sleeps on the couch in front of the television which he never turns off, cuddling the dog which I am allergic to. He eats fast food of frozen food for every meal. He doesn’t shave or shower more than occasionally.  He goes to Home Depot three times a day and doesn’t keep track of his receipts and throws away anything he can’t use because I’m not around to nag him about wasting money.

Buying a property in another state is an extreme—and expensive—proposition and I can’t recommend it to anyone: The short-term rental that we now manage in the adorable and fixed up home is sometimes more effort than our full-time jobs combined in terms of aggravation, and with a wee fraction of the income to boot.

But it gives us a break from one another. He doesn’t have me insisting the countertops be wiped down just so and can just sort of push the food residue around with his laptop and then later not even notice that its greasy and covered in crumbs.

I believe every successful relationship is a cross-cultural endeavor with each party bringing their own experiences, expectations, and preferences, each member instinctively—and incorrectly–believing that they alone are doing things the “right” way. It takes years of soul searching and honest communication and compromise to find a middle path that both can walk: one where each person’s non-negotiables are met, and both parties are willing to live with the idiosyncrasies of their beloved.

My wish for you this glorious spring is both that you have love in your life and that you get to take a break from that very same beloved. Whatever floats your boat—and not your partner’s boat—I hope you get all of it, companionship and solitude, the full range of your heart’s desire. And I hope you don’t think there is anything wrong with you or with your relationship if you relish escaping once in a while.

Announcing “How to Be Human and Not an A$$hole”

I’m thrilled to announce my new book How to Be Human and Not an A$$hole is now available on Amazon in both print and Kindle editions!

This is a collection of essays, blog posts, public speaking, and reflections on how to help us all (firstly, me: I am my first intended audience as I have strong assholic tendencies!) wrestle with self-centeredness and the fleeting desire to bonk people on the head when they piss us off.

If you think you might relate, this book will at least help you feel less alone, and hopefully can help you develop some skills to be a less frequent asshole.

I would be honored if you checked it out: https://www.amazon.com/How-be-Human-Not-hole/dp/B0F3XXXBRW/ref=sr_1_1?crid=280S15484KBVE&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.bLJoX_WxoYuUm1-aHUlIpIwjDM7zgLsIP9Uwul9J-WXGjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps.yhXUkA8N2Z9NDPSPGrMciDmKJMRw5Gi-WZ_sladY1ak&dib_tag=se&keywords=how+to+be+human+and+not+an+a%24%24hole&qid=1744841720&sprefix=how+to+be+human+and+not+an+a+hole%2Caps%2C181&sr=8-1

Tanya Ruckstuhl LICSW

Long ago, late at night when my twins were perhaps four or five years old, we were all asleep and I heard one of my boys–who had been struggling with potty training–holler from his bedroom, anger and disappointment in his voice:

“Mom!  You should have woken me up!” I knew what this meant: He had peed himself in his sleep, but because he was young and experienced everything as my responsibility, in his mind I was the one who had failed.

“I was asleep!” I hollered back.

A moment of silence, followed by a grumpy voice:

“Well, you should have woken me up anyways.”

I got up and helped him change his clothes and the sheets on his bed, and we both went back to sleep. Eventually he learned to wake up when he needed to go to the bathroom, and we all got a better night’s sleep.

I love this story because it beautifully illustrates the difference between how kids think: the adults in charge have all the power and all the responsibility, and how adults think: we have some of the power, and most of the responsibility.

When I was in college, I had a professor whose beloved wife died of cervical cancer. In discussing his experience of the medical system, he stated great bitterness: “If only doctors wouldn’t medically hex their patients by telling them they were terminal, those patients could live.” His belief was that the cancer might not have been fatal, if only the doctor hadn’t pronounced it so.

Some years later I worked with a woman whose husband died of pancreatic cancer and she said, “If only the doctor had told us he was terminal, we would have spent more time together and wasted less trying to treat the cancer and act like everything was normal.”

All three of these stories are about the perception of authority figures from the perspective of people with limited power who need help.

None of them involve anyone acting with malicious intent: not the authority figure and not the person complaining about the authority figure’s behavior.

It’s important for our own mental health to remember that the rate of sociopathy holds steady between three and five percent, meaning there are legitimately dangerous, malignant people in the world, but mostly we are made up of the sleeping mother, the potty-training kid, the frightened person navigating a health crisis, the doctor who can’t get it right if they give the bad news straight or if they soft pedal it.

In this divisive political season, I believe: Authority figures have limited power to solve their own problems, much less the problems of other people. If a country like Mexico, overrun by crime and poverty, lies next to a country like America where even poor people can get food from food banks and soup kitchens and Tanif programs, no one is going to be able to stop them from crossing our borders. Neither a republican nor a democrat. If the global economy has outsourced production to developing counties with lower cost goods and labor, nothing is going to turn back the clock to a time when our cars and clothes and shoes were made in America, in factories staffed by union members who could afford to buy a house and pickup truck while their wives stayed home to raise their children. Not a republican nor a democrat.

Anyone who tells you they can take a starving person and stop them from immigrating is either a liar or they are plotting mass murder.  Anyone who tells you they can bring back manufacturing to this country, that they will be able to take our least marketable-skill-specialized citizens and give them a living wage is either delusional or a liar.

It’s time for us to be our own trusted authority figures, to be appropriately skeptical swallowing a comforting story about someone else taking care of us. Sociopaths present as saviors, with tempting candy and promises of help. Grownups check in with their own understanding of reality and maintain intellectual autonomy, checking promises other people make against the possible distortion of the speaker’s agenda and assessing what is their realistic capacity to bring about results. Barring disability, grownups assume the mantle of responsibility for themselves.

A sense of personal agency (aka power) is a cornerstone of mental health. If we are lucky enough to live in a democracy, voting is one of the ways we can exercise it. No matter which party or candidate you back, I hope you think for yourself this season, and I hope you vote.