Thinking more clearly now

A few months ago, my father bought me a book that I've refused to read. It's called The Female Brain by Dr. Louann Brizendine (neuropsychiatrist). I refused to read this book because of a few reasons. The first being that the cover is a tangle of curly-cue phone cords wrapped into the configuration of a brain. Although we are warned not to judge books by their covers, I'm not naive enough to believe that the covers are without their own messages. The photo of a phone cord sculpted to look like a brain under the title "The Female Brain" insulted me on the spot. I'm sure it was the publishers' attempt to be cute and marketable, but for their more astute female readers such an image is a slap.

Another reason that deterred me from the book is its endocrinological explanation for the female thought and emotional processes. Although I understand that, as humans, we are at the mercy of our hormonal balances, I do not believe in using this reliance as a crutch. I hate when women complain about their behavior, rubber stamp it as "PMS," and then continue behaving irrationally. I hate when men make these same excuses for women. I hate that it only seems to be women's endocrine systems under the microscope as of late rather than men's. Sure, the woman's hormonal fluctuations vary more widely and frequently than the man's, but that should not excuse us from looking at men. Research deserves to be done on them as well.

The final reason I refused to read the book in the beginning was the belief that I would be emotionally crippled by the opinions in the book. Despite my deepest abhorrence to excuses for my behavior, I will cling to them if it makes it easier on me...which might explain my abhorrence. I don't want to hear "it's not you, blame the Estrogen!" from anyone because I'm afraid that hearing that will lead me by the nose into a sort of infantile trust in a flawed system (particularly one that has been established by the patriarchal hegemony).

Last night, however, I sunk to the depths of desperation. I hung up the phone with Robert at around midnight and felt wide awake. We were attempting to consider my need to hang onto emotions so tightly...I told him about yesterday's blog entry, and that only after posting it did I finally start to feel more at peace. Through the course of our conversation, and by no fault of his, I felt increasingly despondent and self-hating. I could not understand what has been wrong with me, and I knew I would lie awake in bed all night if I didn't find something resembling an answer. So, I reluctantly took "The Female Brain" off the shelf, cried through the entire Introduction (simply because I was sure it wouldn't help me and that there was something truly wrong with me), and then flipped through the table of contents until I found something that seemed appropriate for my feelings: a chapter titled "Emotion: The Feeling Brain." I found the following quote particularly interesting:

"Anxiety is a state that occurs when stress or fear triggers the amygdala, causing the brain to rally all its conscious attention to the threat at hand. Anxiety is four times more common in women. A woman's highly responsive stress trigger allows her to become anxious much more quickly than does a man. Although this may not seem like an adaptive trait, it actually allows her brain to focus on the danger at hand and respond quickly to protect her children. Unfortunately, this intense sensitivity in adult women, as in teenage girls, means that they are nearly twice as likely as men to suffer from depression and anxiety, especially through their reproductive years. [...] While psychologists have emphasized cultural and social explanations for this 'depression gender gap,' more and more neuroscientists are finding that sensitivity to fear, stress, genes, estrogen, progesterone, and innate brain biology play important roles. Many gene variations and brain circuits that are affected by estrogen and serotonin are thought to increase women's risk of depression. The CREB-1 gene, which is different in some women diagnosed with depression, has a little switch that is turned on by estrogen. Scientists speculate that this may be one of several mechanisms by which women's vulnerability to depression turns on at puberty with the surges of progesterone and estrogen."

I wasn't angry all of Sunday evening. Yes, I was angry at some point on Sunday. But I feel that I'm understanding now that the emotional experience I struggled to move past was not motivated by anger but instead by a combination of anxiety and depression. Anxiety because now my plans are thrown up in the air and I have to problem solve when I already have a full plate of problems in need of solving. Depression because of the disappointment I felt in my family and in myself for my incapability of keeping them on task. If my brain is flooded with a hormone, I certainly can't change it, but I can understand it now and perhaps anticipate and become more proactive in how I calm down.

In yesterday's post, I expressed that Robert was upset because I was still so upset and that in the end I ruined our evening together. What happened was this: on Sunday evenings, I go over to the duplex to watch True Blood because he has HBO. Usually we're snuggling on the couch together. This Sunday, I didn't want to touch him. My unresponsiveness to his hand on my knee or his attempt to hold my hand or rub my leg hurt him. I wasn't intending to hurt him, but I truly had no interest in physical expressions of affection. While Robert sat there confused and hurt, I was confused as well. I expressed this yesterday in my post also when I wondered what else I could possibly want from my family who has already apologized. Why was I still punishing Robert? He apologized. I accepted his apology and forgave him. Why couldn't I feel affectionate toward him? Well...Dr. Brizendine has a suggestion.

"...male love circuits get an extra kick when stress levels are high. After an intense physical challenge, for instance, males will bond quickly and sexually with the first willing female they lay eyes on. This may be why military men under the stress of war often bring home brides. Women, by contrast, will rebuff advances or expressions of affection and desire when under stress. The reason may be that the stress hormone cortisol blocks oxytocin's action in the female brain, abruptly shutting off a woman's desire for sex and physical touch."

Oxytocin is, recent research is finding, a pleasure hormone in men and women. It helps us feel good and feel good about feeling good. If cortisol floods the brain and blocks the reception of pleasure, then a woman under the influence of cortisol seems to be less likely to find affectionate touch as affectionate as it is under "normal" circumstances. I would wager a pretty big bet that my brain was saturated with cortisol Sunday evening. I was feeling a great deal of stress at the thought of addressing a new stressful situation.

What I'm learning is that it does not matter so much if something seems trivial to other people. Others might look at my post from yesterday and think, "She's getting this bent out of shape over magnets?" That's fine. What matters is that I perceived it as a stressor, and perhaps even gave it additional weight because of the magnitude of stressors already influencing my life. It's the age-old "just one more thing gone wrong" situation.

I don't know if I'm ready yet to buy wholesale into the endocrinological theories, but to be fair, I haven't finished the book. I've read about half of it now. The ideas do help to offer some neurological explanations for my feelings. I was so caught up in the moral implications behind my behavior and feelings that I was only delving deeper into depressed feelings. Releasing cortisol in my brain does not make me a horrible person. It simply means that I am reacting to something perceived as a stressor, and the next step is to relieve that something of its perceived stressful nature.

The Female Brain maps out the hormonal changes and challenges the female brain undergoes throughout a lifetime, beginning in infancy and ending in the mature brain. It explains teenaged girls, single women who are looking for a relationship, pregnant women, nursing women, mothers, premenopausal women, menopausal women, and postmenopausal women. Even at this point with my knowledge of the book's theories so lacking, I would recommend reading it with a compassionate male. I'm bringing my book over to Robert's this evening so we can look at it closer together.