Tag: Writing for Healing

Schadenfreude Radio

Schadenfreude Radio

The radio. How I love the radio!

Transistor radios first appeared on the shelf behind the cashier at Walgreen’s, alongside the cigarettes, in the 1950s. The purchase price was cheap enough for my mother. I can’t imagine what my life would have been had it not been for the radio. 

In our teens, we lay on the floor, smoking pot and singing to the Beatles on the radio. A friend once mused, “our lives would be more manageable if it weren’t for the radio.” Every half hour DJs stopped spinning records and announced the news. Radio news. It stirred me up for life.

The radio these days is an Amazon Echo. It is set to turn on NPR at 7:00 am in my house these days. On Sundays, I usually ignore a 7:00 am show called Hidden Brain. A neuroscientist interviews interesting enough people, but I just want to hear the news at 8. Recently I put off walking the dog and making coffee when I heard the voice of Dr. James Pennebaker on Hidden Brain. He talked about how people’s language, written and vocal, signals what’s happening inside their heads.

James Pennebaker is a social psychologist at the University of Texas-Austin. He taught me that chronic pain can be healed through expressive writing. His recipe, grounded in scientific research, consists of writing it down. Just write it down. It’s cheap, easy. And it works. My writing teacher Beth Finke and I used to call it bibliotherapy. Pennebaker’s books are sweet old friends. The same goes for Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living, John Sarno’s Healing Back Pain, and Howard Schubiner’s Unlearn Your Pain. Thinking of these now butters my memory with gratitude. I write because these authors taught me words can heal. And, for the most part, they have.

I’m not particularly interested in interpreting the language of my friends. I don’t want to know what’s happening in their noggins as Pennebaker does with his research subjects. No, what’s tasty lately about Pennebaker is what he says about Donald Trump.

He examined Trump interviews from 2015 to 2024 and found a whopping 44% increase in words plated in the past. What’s that mean? Well, usually presidential candidates dish out rhetoric about the future. Pennebaker says Trump whips up such simple words and sentences that he can only be described as “an incredibly simplistic thinker.” 

“I can’t tell you how staggering this is,” he told Stat News. “He does not think in a complex way at all.”

I loved hearing this. And there I was again, glomming on to any tidbit that humiliates and demeans Trump. It’s called schadenfreude. I love that word but ashamed how I delight in its meaning: the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, pain, suffering, or humiliation of another.” 

Schadenfreude is one of the delicious habits I metabolized, after using Pennebaker’s and others’ writing exercises to relieve chronic pain. Obviously this is not a vice easily kept at bay. Availing myself of some form of spirituality, like meditation, helps. And the writing, of course. 

But for now, it’s back to the radio.

Witness to Writing’s Healing Power

I have no idea when I first started going to the movies. Lists of movies from the 1950s always include ones I can tick off. I know I saw some in theaters, some on TV. 

My father loved thinking-man westerns, film noir and dramas. My mother knew all about the latest movies from reading reviews in the New York Times. They never went to movies together, but they discussed movies, fought about them, of course, as they did everything.

He started taking me to the movies with him when I was about ten. I instinctively knew to supress my yearning to see Elvis or Davy Crockett movies. In order to be included in the moviegoing, I’d feign more sophisticated preferences—Alexander the Great with Richard Burton, Anastasia with Ingrid Bergman, Giant with Rock Hudson. He never admitted to liking musicals or comedies like Anything Goes or Pajama Game. But he hummed songs from the musical Pal Joey as if he’d seen it and expressed careful admiration for its stars, Rita Heyworth and Kim Novak. 

One of the movies I’d be forbidden to see by today’s standards is The Searchers. John Wayne and his cowboys ride off in search of female relatives abducted by Indians. When they find them, the women are all dead. It’s the first time I heard the word “rape”. When I asked what that meant, my father had no answer. Faced with the unknowing, I sensed an ancestral knowing, a subconscious knowing churned up from the genetic code. I listened to these cross-generational gut reactions and the fear I heard settled quietly in my lower back. 

In 1959 my father took me to Witness for the Prosecution. An avid reader of Agatha Christie, he knew the story. I hadn’t paid attention to the chatter about the acclaimed movie starring Charles Laughton, Marlene Deitrich and Tyrone Powell. As we entered the Deerpath Theater in Lake Forest, my father casually offered a wager.

  • Lake Forest Illinois 1950s

“If you guess who did it in the first five minutes, I’ll give you fifty cents.”

“Ok, but I don’t even know what it’s about.” I balked.

“That’s the point.”

I watched each second tick by on my Timex, and at the five-minute mark I leaned over to my father.

“He did it.” I whispered.

“We’ll see.” He said.

I was electrified for the rest of the movie. He did, indeed, do it. I won. My father was so pleased he let me drive home.

Desperation to please my father dominated my secret life. I wanted to be a reason he’d stay home with us. The fear, the anxiety, the straining to decode adult silences landed like hot lava in the tangled ganglia of my lower back where it lay dormant for forty years.

That’s the last movie we saw together. My parents split up soon after. In my fifties, the secrets smoldering in my lower back suddenly fired up. The secrets turned to truths through writing. And the writing put out the fire.