ShrinkWrapped

The Borderline Personality: A Clinical Example

[A slightly different version of this, with some additional material, was originally posted in April, 2007 as Retrospective Falsification.]

In Borderline Personality Disorder: Early Development I described how the young child must integrate multiple images (self and object representations) into a coherent, unitary, relatively consistent and stable sense of himself and the important people (objects) in his life.  The person who suffers from Borderline Personality disorder has a greater than usual vulnerability to a regressive (re)splitting of his objects and himself when under stress.  A clinical example follows:

Ms. S was an attractive, very bright young woman who entered into an intensive Psychotherapy to deal with issues related to her chronic insecurity and unhappiness and her tendency to get involved with unsuitable and disappointing men.  Early on a pattern became apparent.  She tended to heavily idealize new men she met, as long as they met certain threshold criteria (particularly in terms of their looks, intelligence, and job prospects.)   For the first month or two of dating, the new relationship would be all I heard about in her sessions.  Nothing else mattered in her life and all efforts to engage her in reflection  about the man in question (about whom she often offered very early signs that all was not as rosy as she believed) were met with an angry accusation that I didn't want her to be happy.  In fact, she would continue, this man was the answer to all her problems and I didn't want it to work out because if it did, she wouldn't need my help anymore and I wouldn't get her money!

[I might add that she was paying a very low fee at the time, and she knew, from previous therapy and from friends, that she was paying a very low fee.]

She would fantasize about marriage and their future together for several sessions and then, without any apparent warning, he would disappear from her sessions.  Upon my inquiry, she would mention that she had stopped seeing him because he was a loser.

Her ability to explore what had happened was very limited for quite a while but eventually we were able to understand what typically happened.

After several iterations, the pattern repeated: my patient met the "perfect man." 

He was extremely talented and very good looking; he was quite well known in his field.  In addition, he was as excited by her as she was by him.  She blandly mentioned that, though he (and she) were both in their 30s, he still lived with his mother.  Further, until he met her (so he told her) he had only dated women younger than 21.

Either of these facts, on their own, would be sufficient to at least raise questions about whether this man had the requisite emotional health and maturity for a long term relationship.  Furthermore, because I was quite aware of her tendency to use important others as "self objects" (ie, as means for stabilizing a positive sense of herself; see below) I had some reason to expect he had a similar level of self-pathology.  In such cases, as soon as the important other disappoints, they lose their value as an external buttress for the damaged person's self-esteem.  Such people, which includes but is not limited to Narcissistic and Borderline characters, tend to "split" objects into all-good and all-bad.  When an all-good object fails them, the person's rage at the disappointment and sense of shame causes the object to shift to become all-bad.  Usually the relationship ends at that point.  (This is one of the difficulties in conducting therapy with such people; disappointments are inevitable in every human interaction and maintaining the therapy in the face of such reactions is a difficult technical problem.)

[A self-object is an idealized object which a person uses as a "perfect" mirror.  The dynamic is as follows: if a "perfect" person loves me, then by reflection off of their image, I must be perfect, too.  This is one way that Narcissists and Borderlines attempt to stabilize their sense of themselves and protect themselves from feeling defective and damaged.]

For the purposes of this discussion, the salient aspect is that once the inevitable disappointment occurred, a transformation in my patient's emotional life took place that was a marvel to witness.  Not only was he a terrible disappointment and a loser but he had always been a terrible disappointment and a loser.  She insisted she had always known that he was inappropriate ("how could someone who still lives with his mother at 35 be much of a man") but had chosen to overlook his shortcomings, knowing it wouldn't last, because she had enjoyed dating him, and psychologically needed him to be her perfect lover.

It is important to recognize that not only did the ex-boyfriend become, in the present and the past, a different person, but she experienced herself as a different person as well.  She had been deeply in love, ready to make the move into marriage and family; an entire new aspect of her life was about to unfold.  Her future husband was flawless and so was she.  In fact, he needed to be imagined as perfect in order for her to feel that she was perfect.  When he failed her (by dating an 18 year old while they were supposedly in love) the disappointment meant that if he remained perfect, she would have to accept that she was deeply flawed; otherwise why would he reject her?  Her rage would not tolerate such an outcome (which would have led to a serious depression) so she devalued him; he became worthless and she maintained her protective sense of herself as without flaws.  In order to protect herself from knowing of her obviously flawed choice, she had to change her memory to "remember" that he had always been a poor choice. 

It took many years of work before she was able to tolerate recognizing her own imperfections and she had to negotiate significant depression and rage to arrive at some comfort with a more accurate picture of herself, flaws and all.

In the next installment I plan on discussing some of the various treatment options at our disposal for helping people with Borderline Personality Disorder.

Bob Herbert Leaves and Almost Gets It Right On the Way Out the Door

Liberals, as opposed to Leftists, often have admirable impulses.  Sometimes they can clearly identify part of the problems that create the conditions that trouble them, but because they believe that all human problems can and should be addressed by government policies they too often propose policies that exacerbate the problems rather than ameliorate them.  Bob Herbert is a case in point; his final piece for the New York Times on Saturday makes some good points:

Losing Our Way

Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

He decries the growing inequality in America, the mazing increase in wealth of the very richest while the majority of the middle class faces economic stagnation; he correctly assails the crony capitalism that is damaging our social fabric:

The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.

This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.

A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.

In his passion he almost gets it; what could be wrong with this diagnosis?

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

This has all the Liberals favorite bugaboos.  We are doomed by greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil.   No one since Gordon Gecko has argued publicly that "greed is good", all of us suffer from unrestrained corporate power, and our addiction to foreign oil means that we damage our own economy while empowering some of the worst countries and tyrants on he planet.  Yet, sadly, Bob Herbert and those who read him and nod their heads in agreement, stop the argument just short of the conclusions that are inescapable to anyone with an even minimally open mind. 

For example, if greed is bad, it is also universal.  Government workers are no more immune to greed than Jeffrey Immelt.  To believe that simply because Immelt is President Obama's favorite corporate executive somehow renders him uniquely devoid of greed is inane.  To believe that government bureaucrats are somehow immune to the greedy lure of power rather than only driven by greed for money is equally inane.  Since humans have never shown themselves immune to greed, enlarging the sphere of coercive power (ie, government) versus the sphere with far less coercive power (the private sector, which can be limited in their ability to coerce by government power alone)  is counter-productive to the growth that Bob Herbert and I would like to see.

And consider our addiction to foreign oil.  This should be a simple equation for Bob Herbert et al to figure out.  For more than 30 years we have drastically limited the production of our vast petroleum resources.  Since economies run on petroleum, that means we have had to find our energy resources elsewhere.  The places where such are found tend to be inhabited by evil despots and populations which detest most of what we stand for.  In order to preserve our fantasy of a pristine environment, we close our eyes to the despoiling of their environments and equally cloud our minds in order not to understand that 1 + 1 always equals 2.  If we want to have a functional economy we need power.  If, in thirty years, and with billions of dollars of government subsidies, alternative, clean energy has not become economically competitive (not to mention scalable and efficient) what makes anyone believe that by pouring in billions more we can suddenly mandate effective wind, solar, or tidal power? 

Were Bob Herbert to look around he would notice that places on the North American continent where petroleum is being extracted are booming economically.  North Dakota, Western Canada, the Gulf of Mexico are all places with lots of energy resources and exploiting  them creates jobs (high paying jobs!) and moderates the price of energy for the rest of us.  It should be a win-win proposition but the religion of Liberalism does not allow for such obvious resolutions to the problem of economic stagnation and inequality.

[We should all be offended that Obama implores the Brazilians to drill for oil in deep waters off their coast, with the promise that we will be their best customer, while he impedes our ability to drill off our coasts and on our lands.  American firms have pioneered environmentally sensitive drilling technology.  Who would do a better job protecting the environment while extracting oil than American companies who have gigantic incentives to do ti right under the watchful eye of the American MSM and American regulators?  Perhaps we should continue to rely on oil drilling in far off countries where oil spills and contamination can occur out of the MSM's awareness; if it isn't on the front page of the New York Times, presumably an oil spill doesnt count.]

I won't even begin to address the issues of education.  When Steve Sailer points out that Mexicans in America do better in American schools than Mexicans in Mexico or that Swedes in American schools do better than Swedes in Swedish schools, and yet no one in the MSM or the education establishment is willing to even parse the numbers, we have a problem that goes far beyond Liberal versus Conservative, Democrat versus Republican.  When you constantly misdiagnose a problem, treatment is compromised.  By all means elevate our expectations of our students but as long as we expect Americans of Mexican extraction to do equally well as Americans of Swedish or Chinese extraction, we will be wasting our time and money on an impossible dream.  Someday, once we have figured out why some minorities consistently under-perform others and how to address the unequal outcomes, we might see the gaps close.  That day is not now and blaming the teachers (among the Right's favorite villains) or some unidentifiable, unquantifiable societal bias, means we will continue to misdiagnose and waste our precious resources.

I am with Bob Herbert in his painful recognition that growing economic inequality is bad for America.  Where I part company is in believing that government, with our increasing crony capitalism, and our "own goal" behavior limiting the utilization and exploitation of our bounteous resources, is any way to solve the problem.

Make energy cheaper, allow our native entrepreneurship to flourish, entice technological advances with the promise of great riches unencumbered by government, and our economy will soar, with the middle class soaring along with it.  In twenty years, if we do not foul up the future, we will be discussing how to manage an economy of abundance rather than scarcity.  We will get there faster if the Liberals would only open their minds to the possibilities of their fellow countrymen.

I will miss Bob Herbert's columns; I also plan on sending him a link to this post.  If he responds, I will be sure to post it.

Free the Data!

Hans Rosling is amazing and what he does with data is remarkable.  These tools will liberate data and may, if properly used, revolutionize our understanding of the world: [courtesy of Jonah Goldberg]

Take 20 minutes and be amazed.

Now we need smart people, with time and expertise, to use these tools to look at all sorts of data that are currently poorly understood even as the data is misunderstood and abused by our policy makers and reporters.

For example, were we to be able to visualize the data related to the housing bubble collapse and/or the economic meltdown of 2008 we might actually be able to begin to understand its causes and find ways to prevent a repeat.

(There is no truth to the rumor that the preceding comment was meant as a hint to M_O_M.)

While the MSM Sleeps

Egypt is slipping away: (courtesy of the invaluable Translating Jihad)

Translated from alqanat.com, 25 March 2011:

Facebook Campaign Demands Dismissal of Yahya al-Jamal

Salafi activists in Egypt launched a campaign on Facebook which calls for the dismissal of Dr. Yahya al-Jamal, the Egyptian Deputy Prime Minister. They demanded that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces dismiss him, and they accused him of doing nothing but dividing Egyptians against each other. 

It appears that al-Jamal cannot keep from igniting controversy and creating more problems in the cabinet of Dr. 'Isam Sharaf, who has thus far been unable to contain the long list of crises and problems on his desk since he emerged in Tahrir Square a little less than a month ago. At that time the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces offered him the leadership of Egypt, as his was the face that the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square accepted to form the Egyptian government. 

Unlike Sharaf, who appeared compatible with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis who embraced him in Tahrir Square, and cleared the way for him to stand on the podium on the condition that he stand in the middle of their symbols, al-Jamal intentionally collides with the Salafis and provokes their anger. Thus it seems that Sharaf's government contains one who can incite the anger of the Brotherhood and the Salafis, who so far appear to have benefited the most from the 25 January revolution. 

Read the whole thing.  While we fantasize that the people we support (the <1% of the Egyptian populace that is Western, secular, and speak English) represent the future in Egypt (and Libya, et al) the reality is that we have no idea what is going on in these countries on the ground and are likely to be unpleasantly "surprised" when Islamism wins the day.  After all, our government believes that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate group.

Borderline Personality Disorder: Early Development

Borderline Personality is much talked about, quite complicated to live with and deal with, and often misunderstood.  In a series of posts I plan on discussing the genesis of BPD, its relevance to our personal lives as well as its utility as a model for understanding different cultures, and how the treatment approaches to BPD may offer clues to managing one's relationship to those with the Disorder and to oneself.

Although different aspects of BPD were already being described as early as 1938 ( Helen Deutsch and the As-If personality) Margaret Mahler, more than anyone else, developed the framework  upon which BPD became comprehensible.  Mahler was one of the early pioneers in Psychoanalysis.  She had a particular interest in normal childhood development, especially focused on the earliest years of life. 

[Freud had made the Oedipal Complex (~4-6 years of age) the central determinant of character but even by the 1950's it had been recognized that for a great many patients, their problems had roots in the pre-Oedipal years.  These patients were particularly difficult to treat and later analysts, building on the work of Mahler and others, were able, starting int he late 1960's to find ways to address the problems which were later understood as reflections of Borderline and Narcissistic pathology.]

Mahler's work was elegant and beautifully captured the experiences of the infant.  Anyone who has spent time around infants can instantly appreciate the concept of hatching, that moment in the first few months of life, when the minimally responsive infant suddenly appears to notice that the world exists!  Parents note the burst of increased relatedness.  The baby now coos and smiles in reaction to the parents, not merely in reaction to internal processes.  The infant has begun to be involved with the world.

[The Wikipedia page for Margaret Mahler barely hints at her contributions; the Margaret Mahler Foundation offers additional resources, The Psychological Birth Of The Human Infant Symbiosis And Individuation, written with Fred Pine and Anni Bergman is quite accessible.]

Once the infant begins to crawl (the Practicing phase) its nascent Individuation-Separation phase escalates.  During this time, the infant is slowly recognizing that it is separate from its mother and beginning to develop its early primitive Theory of Mind.  Parents appreciate this development whose hallmark is the child's adamant "No!"  A child who can say "No!" is a child who has successfully traversed a significant developmental milestone and is ready to enter the next phases of development. 

It is during this time that the child is developing Object Constancy.  Object Constancy and its inverse, Splitting, are the key concepts to understanding BPD:

On "Normal" Splitting

During the first few years of life an infant develops multiple integrated images of the world around him.  For example, to the youngest infant, the Object (mother) who soothes him with the breast or by holding him is not the same Object who denies him succor when he is in distress.  When the breast doesn't soothe (because the baby is not hungry or is in distress for some other reason) the breast is not an object of pleasure but of frustration.  Eventually the baby learns that the breast and the skin and the arms and the breathing and the heartbeat and the voice that soothe him, and occasionally frustrate him, all belong to the same object, his mother.  This ability to fuse the multiple images of mother into a single coherent and consistent object is one of the early developmental milestones of early infancy; it is referred to as Object Constancy.

In situations where the frustrations by the mother are more than the infant can tolerate, the still unstable Constant Object can be shattered into its constituents as the infant's ego regresses.  This occurs when there is an abusive caretaker, for example, and is at the core of much of the pathology of the adult survivor of childhood abuse.  This Splitting of the Object is used as a primitive defense.  Since the infant needs to feel cared for (and needs to be cared for) and its psychological survival depends on its relationship with the caretaker, the splitting allows the negative aspects of the object to be repressed so that the positive aspects can be held onto.  It preserves the object even as the infant partially destroys the object.  This is a brief introduction to a complicated area.  One element of this description that is important to note is that everyone, no matter how healthy, has passed through a time in development in which their Object Constancy was not yet firmly established and splitting was an ever present risk.  As adults, under stress, it is well within the range of normal behavior to engage in periodic and limited Splitting.  The danger for us arises when such a process is unrecognized and contaminates our relationships.  For our society, the danger occurs when splitting takes place on a large group basis.

For reasons which are not well understood but typically subsumed under nature (constitutional or  biological endowments) and nurture (parenting) some children grow up to be adults who have tenuous Object Constancy.  When they fused the disparate images of self and others into coherent, unitary object representations, they retained an ease of dissociation of the unitary objects.  Under stress, they can too readily regress to a psychological state of Split self and object representations. 

In Splitting, the Object is first dissociated into an Idealized Object and a Devalued Object and then, depending on the stessor involved and the person's specific state, either of the two split images is then repressed and at that moment, the Object is experienced as only being the Split Object. 

This can be most easily illustrated by a clinical example and that will be presented in the next post about BPD...to be continued.

An Exercise in Incoherence

Does anyone know what our country's foreign policy is based on under President Obama?  He can't wait to exit Iraq and Afghanistan and he has now involved us in a war between two or more groups of noxious tibial communities in Libya.  It is rarely a good idea to step in between combatants in domestic disputes.  Ask any police officer and he will tell you that the most dangerous situations they face are domestic disputes.

Obama apparently believed that because we have cover from the UN and the Arab League, our intervention in Libya would be greeted with plaudits from the Arab world.  If he truly believed that delusion, he has already been proved wrong:

Arab League head criticizes airstrikes as Western forces impose no-fly zone

A coordinated attack by Western forces targeting Libyan air capabilities and armor appears to have succeeded in damaging Libyan military installations and armor, but Arab support for the no-fly zone may be waning.

Arab League head Amr Moussa told reporters Sunday that the Arab league thought the use of force was excessive following an overnight bombing campaign that Libya claims killed at least 48 people.

"What we want is civilians' protection, not shelling more civilians," he was quoted saying by the Associated Press.

Any day now our "disproportionate" response, the same delegitimizing tactic used against Israel when they invaded Gaza in response to hundreds of rocket attacks, will be roundly attacked by our various "allies" and enemies in the Muslim World. 

This was one of the gravest errors made by the Bush administration when it invaded Iraq.  We failed to appreciate that we would be stepping in between combatants in a domestic dispute and that both sides would demonize us one we were involved.  Obama does not seem to have learned anything by our difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He has also managed to alienate all of our allies (and yes, many of them are unsavory) in the Middle East and emboldened our adversaries.  The Saudis are looking toward the East; Egypt, whatever the outcome, is going to be less friendly to us in the future; none of our allies will believe that the US under Obama will be reliable under duress.  Meanwhile, the Iranians and their proxies are less intimidated and learning by the day that ferocity and indomitable will are more than adequate to discourage America, while oil and nuclear purchases are more than enough to keep the Europeans quiet.

President Obama clearly has a great deal of sympathy with Muslims; he seems to fully accept the faculty lounge, left wing narrative that the United States, a neo-colonialist power, is the font of all distress in the Middle East and elsewhere.  He does not grasp that according to our enemies, there is no differentiation between the evil Bush and the evil Obama, just as they do not differentiate between Israelis in settlements or in Tel Aviv (all are occupiers); nor do they differentiate between secular and religious Jews, or secular and religious Christians; they don't care if you are an atheist or agnostic, an environmentalist or a driver of a hummer; we are all the "Other" as far as they are concerned and they will always close ranks against the invader.

It also doesn't matter that we are letting France take the lead; in the eyes of the Muslim World, the US will remain the Great Satan (and Israel the Little Satan) no matter who is nominally leading the charge.  We received no "credit" for saving thousands of Muslims in Kosovo and Indonesia and we will receive no "credit" for intervening in Libya.

If even one American life is lost doing whatever it is we are doing in Libya (are we ensuring regime change?  enforcing a cease fire? freezing the current status quo?) their blood will be on Obama's hands.  He has brought us into a new conflict, too late to avoid the worst carnage, with limited possibilities for success and with no clear policy, no strategic objectives, no American vital interests at stake, and no definition of success.  It is as if he opposed all Bush policies simply because they were Bush's and now, having determined George W. Bush was the real enemy, has done a complete Walt Kelly on us: Obama has met the enemy and it is he.

The 60's Are Finally Over

Paradigms change one death at a time:

’60s LSD figure Owsley Stanley dies in Australia

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Owsley “Bear” Stanley, a 1960s counterculture icon who worked with The Grateful Dead and was a prolific LSD producer, died in a car crash in Australia, his family said Monday. He was 76.

He reportedly had no regrets:

Stanley remained unrepentant about his pioneering role in Californian drug culture that made the name “Owsley” a slang term for quality LSD and landed him in prison for two years in the early 1970s.

“I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in a rare media interview in 2007.

“What I did was a community service, the way I look at it,” he added.

A family statement Monday described Stanley as “our beloved patriarch.”

He is survived by his wife, Sheila, four children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, the statement said.

His legacy is the Dancing bear logo and lots of pretty images.  It is worth wondering what we might have learned from LSD and other hallucinogens (still rarely used in research because of legal restrictions) had it not become caught up in the counter-culture wars.

The FDA Will Kill Us All

I am no longer embarrassed by my "guild" nor am I surprised by anything they do in my name.  At some point they will over-reach and the rebellion will surprise them, harm some, and be the beginning of changes in the fueled that will some day help us all.  For now, take a look at this latest outrage: [HT: Glenn Reynolds

Your genes, your rights – FDA’s Jeffrey Shuren misleading testimony under oath

In the very near future you may be forced to go through a “professional” to get access to your genetic information. Professionals who will be well paid to “interpret” a complex morass of statistical data which they barely comprehend. Let’s be real here: someone who regularly reads this blog (or Dr. Daniel MacArthur or Misha’s blog) knows much more about genomics than 99% of medical doctors. And yet someone reading this blog does not have the guild certification in the eyes of the government to “appropriately” understand their own genetic information. Someone reading this blog will have to pay, either out of pocket, or through insurance, someone else for access to their own information. Let me repeat: the government and professional guilds which exist to defend the financial interests of their members are proposing that they arbitrate what you can know about your genome. A friend with a background in genomics emailed me today: “If they succeed in ramming this through, then you will not be able to access your own damn genome without a doctor standing over your shoulder.” That is my fear. Is it your fear? Do you care?

Bureaucrats must do what bureaucrats must do; they must regulate to their self-aggrandizement and the detriment of our freedoms.  That is their nature; without the desire, and rationalized need, to control our behavior they would be out of a job.  We do not need an FDA; it impedes far more than it helps and as progress speeds up, its impedimentary powers (the only powers it has) can only slow us down. 

Waiting for Sauron

Early returns suggest that blogging will be possible under the new regime but at a reduced level. 

In the meantime, the world is not standing still while the navel gazers in Washington try to figure out what they are doing and how it will play politically.  Nor is the world getting safer while the United States stands on the sidelines avoiding the leadership that only the United States can provide: [HT: Glenn Reynolds]

North Korea Nears Completion of Electromagnetic Pulse Bomb

North Korea appears to be protesting the joint U.S. and South Korean military maneuvers by jamming Global Positioning Devices in the south, which is a nuisance for cell phone and computers users -- but is a hint of the looming menace for the military.

...

The North is believed to be nearing completion of an electromagnetic pulse bomb that, if exploded 25 miles above ground would cause irreversible damage to electrical and electronic devices such as mobile phones, computers, radio and radar, experts say.

It is doubtful that North Korea, even were it to obtain the capacity to cripple the modern world with an EMP weapon would use it; the North Korean leadership is not suicidal.  On the other hand, some of our enemies do celebrate suicide and chaos.

First, a very well done, and quite disturbing video from Iran, courtesy of Jeff Dunetz, discussing all the signs documenting the imminent return of the hidden 12thh Imam, the Mahdi:

Moving On

Last Friday was my last day working in New York City.  I opened my office in the city in 1981 and from that time on I have always had an office based private practice and worked part time in a clinic setting.  Over the last few years my commute has become longer and more difficult as we moved to Northern Westchester for a variety of reasons, most prominently our concerns about the school's ability to meet the needs of our youngest son. 

For 10 years I have commuted ~ an hour a day each way; of necessity, I have had to budget almost 2 hours a day for commuting because of the vagaries of traffic into and out of New York.  The travel has begun to wear on me and the multiple inconveniences attendant on working and traveling into New York have accumulated.

The last straw was the Bloomberg administration's decision to discourage cars and privilege bicycles on New York Streets, something I wrote about here and here. 

I am sure the Bloomberg administration will be delighted to know that government incentives work!  I have now closed my city office and taken a full time job working in a Psychiatric Hospital 10 minutes from my house.  My office time in Northern Westchester is also increasing, thanks to decreased travel time, and in effect, I have a more demanding schedule than ever for work, offset by the ease of travel.

As a result of my new work schedule, blogging will be spotty in the next couple of weeks until I adjust to my new routine and figure out when I can find the time to blog.  My current plan is to resume regular blogging within a week or two, but time will tell if I am being overly optimistic.