EPISODE 305

Dr. Erlene Rosowsky is a clinical psychologist at Harvard specializing in the field of aging — or “geropsychology.” Her research and writings spring from a deep sense of empathy for seniors and their families. Today, she offers expert advice about aging — including “the stories we tell ourselves” and the importance of humor. “Dr. R” also has plenty to say about ageism and forming friendships later in life. A must-listen for seniors — and their loved ones! Check out her blog, “The Older Self,” at https://erlenepsyd.com/category/blog.html.

TRANSCRIPT:

ANNOUNCER: It’s You Earned This, the Social Security and Medicare podcast, brought to you by the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. And now, your host, Walter Gottlieb. 

WALTER: Older age can be a rewarding time of life. Of course, it can also be a little challenging, and there is no “Bible” for aging, nobody to tell you exactly how to do it. But there is some wisdom about how to make the most of our older years.

Today, we turn to a clinical psychologist who specializes in aging. Dr. Erlene Rosowsky is a Teaching Associate in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Not too shabby! She is also a professor emerita at William James College in New England. Her field is Geropsychology… Gero-Psychology. 

And we’ll find out what exactly that means in a moment. Dr. R, as her students call her, also has a blog called The Older Self. She has a lot to say about the stories we tell ourselves as we age, forming friendships later in life, and even using humor to cope with the challenges of aging. Good afternoon, Dr. Rosowsky. 

DR. ROSOWSKY: Good afternoon. Nice to greet the day with you. 

WALTER: Yes, thank you very much. And same to you. So you’re up in New England, and you said it’s a wonderful day up there. 

DR. ROSOWSKY: Beautiful, crisp beginning of fall, the leaves are starting to turn…just lovely.

WALTER: Which is often used as a metaphor for aging, right? The autumn of life, our “golden years.” I have to ask you right off the bat, what is Geropsychology? 

DR. ROSOWSKY: Oh, that’s an easy one. Psychology is the scientific study of emotions and thinking and feeling, et cetera, behaviors. And you put “Gero” in front of pretty much anything, and Gero stands for “aging” and “aged.” So, what you have is the study of psychology of people who are old. We’re finding out that cats and dogs have Dementia now, so it’s Gero, aging and whatever the topic is. 

WALTER: Yes. And one of my cats is somewhere on the spectrum, and the other one is psychotic. So…

DR. ROSOWSKY: There you go. And if you put the word “clinical” in front of it, clinical Geropsychology, then you’re talking about the study of people who are older, who have medical and psychological situations that warrant attention, whether it be pharmacology or psychotherapy or what have you. 

WALTER: It’s a good explanation! So, when in your career did you begin to take a special interest in aging, and why? 

DR. ROSOWSKY: Well, good question. I continue to have a special interest in it as I’m getting older. It’s like special and special and special. It really began in graduate school, studying Neuroscience and Language Development, which was my big interest at the time. And much of the research that we were doing was with people with aphasia, mostly people who had some strokes and this kind of thing. And the fact that they were older people. So I got to know a lot of older people. I received my degree when I was over 40 years old, and it’s been the best thing that I ever did, which was to follow my heart and soul. Now, the easy question was, when did that start? And I can tell you, Walter, that it started because I had a grandma, I had a beloved grandma that was in my heart, and she told me stories. So I loved old people and stories.

WALTER: It’s funny, because “stories” is a word that keeps coming up in your work. You just used it now, and you have a blog post about the stories we tell ourselves as we get older. What do you mean by the stories we tell ourselves as we get older, and how is that useful to us as we age? 

DR. ROSOWSKY: Okay. I think that we have a storyline, a narrative. In fact, there’s a whole psychology of narrative psychology. I think that develops extremely, extremely early, I think, probably with the attachment to your mom, dad, and grandma. Did you have a grandma or grandpa that you were close to? 

WALTER: I was close to both of my grandmothers and grandfathers. I was lucky. 

DR. ROSOWSKY: Did they tell you stories about themselves and things when they were little, and things that you took into your mind? 

WALTER: Of course. One grandfather told me about something called “penny candy” at the corner store in the early 1900s, and one grandmother told me about the organist at the silent movie house, and on and on and on. Of course, being older now, I wish they were still around so I could ask them about other things. 

DR. ROSOWSKY: Other things… okay. You’ve answered your question pretty well, and that is that we seek narratives, we seek stories, we seek lines, we seek hope and encouragement, and also markers of where we’re going. So, the concept of story really goes through the whole development, gives you guidelines, and I think the posts that you may have been referring to, it also informs, even at a sub-aware level, where you’re going as an older person. 

WALTER: Let me stop you for a sec because I want to understand something. Are stories we tell ourselves as we get older the same things as narratives that we repeat to ourselves that may or may not be encouraging? Like, “Oh my God, I wasted all those years doing X,” or “I’m actually wiser and smarter now that I’m older.” Do those count as stories we tell ourselves? 

DR. ROSOWSKY: Yes. And if you tell yourself a whole boatload of, oh my gosh, I could have done better, I’m such a failure. Look at that. Once again, it’s happening. 

WALTER: What is your advice for people as they age when they tell themselves stories? 

DR. ROSOWSKY: There are little things that I encourage people to do, including myself. If I get into a negative mood, you know, when something starts off bad in the morning, it’s like, “Okay, what’s going to happen next?” I kind of do that. I say to myself something like, “Okay, I’d like to do two appreciations for every complaint.” Getting into negative self-talk is hurtful because it hurts us for the moment and it primes us for hurting down the road. So at least be conscious of it. 

DR. ROSOWSKY: I have a credo that’s right here in my office on the wall, and it says: Take care of yourself so you can take care of others. Don’t hurt yourself and don’t hurt others. This is very, very important. 

WALTER: That seems like a really good motto. 

DR. ROSOWSKY: That’s IT for me, Walter. I mean, it doesn’t get any clearer than that. 

WALTER: You write that humor helps older adults cope with the challenges of aging. I, as a part-time stand-up comedian, am particularly interested in this, and someone who’s aging. Please explain how humor can help. 

DR. ROSOWSKY: Okay, but it won’t be funny. 

WALTER: That’s okay. 

DR. ROSOWSKY: I use humor a lot. You know, you don’t laugh at grief, but life can be surreal and silly and stupid and unbelievably impossible. Just greeting things with accommodation and being able to be flexible to meet things, sometimes it’s just impossible. It’s just out of our ability to deal with it. So we can label it and laugh about it. 

WALTER: So is part of the humor aspect of this the difference between saying to yourself, “Oh my God, poor me, I’m having all these, you know, medical problems, they might not be life-threatening, but they’re uncomfortable and painful.” Or just, “Oh my God! I’m falling apart! Well, I guess that’s just part of getting older!” Is that the use of humor to yourself, or did we about humor in your interaction with others?

DR. ROSOWSKY: Humor, interaction with others, yeah, and certainly humor with oneself. You know, you can’t see me, but I’m short. I’m under five feet tall. I’m like 4’11 and maybe a little less. And there’s not a prayer in heck that I can reach the shelves in the market. And the mustard and pickles are always on the top shelf. So what I do is stand in the middle of the aisle and wait for anybody over five foot four. And then I ask them if they would get the pickles or the mustard, which is on the top shelf. And they say, “sure.” 

And they give it to me and I say, “Oh, thank you so much. You know, I already signed up for my next life to be four inches taller.” And they smile, and then they go away, and they’ve been thanked and they leave the aisle with a smile on their face. 

WALTER: Yeah. So the use of humor helps you. And it also does something for the person who’s helping you reach. Oh, well, that’s a great example. 

There are many aging experts who have said that we should not view ourselves as “diminished” as we get older. But on the other hand, there are very real challenges of aging, like increasing physical and cognitive issues. So how do we square those two thoughts, not feeling diminished, but also coping with physical and potentially cognitive decline? 

DR. ROSOWSKY: Yeah, the degree to which we can cope helps us adapt to what is inevitable, because declines are real. OK. And part of the difficulty that most of us have is accepting that that’s true. The implication is you can avoid aging or the vicissitudes of aging or the manifestations or the appearance of aging. And guess what? You can’t. You can be as healthy as you can and maybe as beautiful as you can. If that’s to be believed, the stuff is going to happen. There’s not much you can do about it except to accommodate and live with and find some humor in it. 

WALTER: Right. 

DR. ROSOWSKY: Be the best you can be at any age. That’s really it. To say, you know, at the age of 76, I want to be the best 76, the age of 93. I want to be the best I can be at that age. And people who really can do that are happier, more content, et cetera. 

WALTER: I think that’s a great way of putting it, what you just said. I think that’s very helpful. So let’s talk about ageism, a topic that we’ve covered on this podcast in the past, but I really want to get your take on it, Erlene. There is no question that ageism is pervasive in our society. Most of us older folks have experienced it in some form or another. What can we do about ageism, both to push back on it and to cope with it ourselves? 

DR. ROSOWSKY: There are things that can be done about it. One thing is to have an equal measure of exposure of what old people do in society. What good are they? From the perspective of those of us, or at least me and my group, my age cohorts, the most important thing for me is to matter, to have your life matter, not to have another hundred years. 

WALTER: Right. 

DR. ROSOWSKY: You know, but whatever years you have left, for them to be meaningful and have a meaningful life, however it’s described, and to know that your life at the end has mattered. 

WALTER: I see exactly what you mean. There’s a growing body of literature about the challenges of forming lasting friendships later in life, especially among older men. Lots of articles about how hard it is to make friends, especially for older men in this day and age. Do you agree that this is real? And what do you suggest to older people about how to cultivate new friendships? 

DR. ROSOWSKY: Yes, I do. Both. As far as the men part of this, well, it’s notoriously in couples historically, in more traditional relationships, the female has been in charge of the socialization of the couple. 

WALTER: Absolutely. 

DR. ROSOWSKY: OK, that really is. So we see with widowhood and divorce, it’s a hard time for men because it’s the dust off a skill that they may not have had since, you know, 7th grade or something. So this is true. 

This is also sometimes why men will remarry or repartner rather soon with somebody that was also widowed or divorced in their coupleship. Going forward to the next generation, my kids are third generation. It’ll be different because men’s background, they’ve been a little more responsible for their own socialization. But we’ll see…you know, I won’t be here to watch. 

WALTER: OK, so that’s a good analysis of why some older men might have trouble forming new friendships. But what do you suggest for both men and women about cultivating new friendships? Does there have to be a certain fearlessness in it, a certain risk-taking, a certain willingness to take the initiative? What does it take these days? 

DR. ROSOWSKY: A lot of things. First of all, no matter how good and wonderful, skilled and terrific you are with social stuff, you’re not going to make a long term friend because there isn’t a long term out there.

So, this is very different. I have one female friend who has been a friend because we were in school together for over 50 years.

WALTER: Goodness.

DR. ROSOWSKY: I don’t have a chance of making another friend that can be there for another 50. 

WALTER: Of course. 

DR. ROSOWSKY: So that’s different. So, the measure of what is a friend is different. It doesn’t matter what your gender is. So can you make friends that are, you know, I call them “gold friends” and “silver friends,” but it’s a different kind of friend, and then some personalities are better adept at that and some not. And then there’s many, many fears in older people to be able to make friends. But friendships are important, of course, connections, relationships. 

WALTER: Well said, well said. One thing I like about everything you’re saying is you have so much empathy for everyone, both the young and the old, and I think that that’s very, very valuable beyond any specific advice. So, as we wrap up, kind of a personal question, if you don’t mind, Erlene, you do give a lot of wise advice about aging, but do you always follow your own advice? 

DR. ROSOWSKY: No, probably not. But I do follow the most important one, the overarching advice that I would give. I do, and I didn’t used to, but I do now that I’m older, and that is: put myself and my self-care first. And guess what? Every day I make my cup of coffee and drink it. I read the newspaper. I love newspapers. Do the crossword puzzle. Now, I’m already into about an hour and 15 minutes of me time in the morning, at breakfast, before I do anything that even says look at your emails or patients calling or whatever else. 

I also meditate and I prioritize that too, and I meditate exactly ten minutes at a time because that’s what I started to do, and I do that about twice a day. 

WALTER: I’ve been trying to do that also, and not to cut you off, but I think that that’s a really important point that you make, that we all could get caught in that trap of procrastinating and putting off the self-care for another day, and you realize a certain point, “I really can’t put it off any longer. It’s too important.” I think that’s a valuable piece of advice and wisdom, along with all the others. Well Erlene, we’ve run out of time. 

We could probably keep talking for another couple of hours and definitely enjoy it, but I just want to say, please keep up the great work both in your research and in your blogging. It’s The Older Self blog. We’re encouraging everyone to check it out. 

DR. ROSOWSKY: Right, love that, and someday I’d love to hear all about your story about the stand-up comedy. 

WALTER: I would be happy to tell you more about that offline, and there’s a little bit of ageism involved in that too, and challenges as an older stand-up comedian, but we’ll talk about that another time. Okay, Erlene, thank you and enjoy the New England autumn. 

DR. ROSOWSKY: Thank you

WALTER: You can find Dr. Rosowsky’s blog at earlenepsyd.com. Let me spell it out, that’s e-r-l-e-n-e-p-s-y-d dot-com. And if you like what you heard today, please follow and review this podcast. We very much appreciate it. We just launched a new website for the show at youearnedthis.org, Check it out sometime!

Our engineer is Shahab Shokouhi, our editor is Steve Lack and I’m Walter Gottlieb, reminding you: “You earned this!”