hope

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Love comes out of that?!

hope

Hello Friends.

I write to you so many times “in my mind,” which makes me a great writer! Wink.  But even there, I am grateful to have you to write to.

I just got done watching, Fault in Our Stars, with our local hospice team and, oh my word!  I had to breathe through it.  I was terrified I would lose it several times there.  Not being one of those damsels who cries pretty, I was seriously grateful to be sitting in darkness.

So where have I been?  Trying to figure out this friend to yourself thing.  Still.

I had one of my favorite discussions with a patient the other day on where and why good comes out of bad.  Do I love this conversation because it is about an epic force, an energy and a Truth that wins and kicks bad stuff, like, fungus armpits, dead children, divorce, broken friendships, finding yourself alone in a huge space, depression and a brain that you’d rather not be living?  Do I love this discussion because I feel so freaking right?  I do.  Do l love it because I need to participate in it one more time, now, and now?

Probably.

I’m hoping I’m not right though.  I’m pretty sure that even these eyes see dimly and the Truth is even better.  I’ve been told I don’t know it all.

The chat goes something like this,

(Context is status post some real, personal, bleak disclosure.  I’m facing them, and sometimes they look at me.  I sit in an erect chair with a lap desk and laptop computer between us.  Just enough.  Sometimes my service dog, Timothy is present.

One of us inevitably brings up a curving effort toward hope.  Maybe,)

…Love is stronger.

Yeah…

But I don’t know if there is a question mark or a period at the end.  It sits there in the room with us, like it is a squirrel scratching at its whiskers.  It can go in different directions.

Where would it go for you?

Does Love bring good out of bad as if it needs the bad, like dirt around its roots?  Does Love turn the bad into fertilizer, and grow into some apple tree?  We know Love is stronger than bad.  We know Love wins.  But we think, do I have to be loved like this?!  Rather not.

Tevye, the milkman in Fiddler on The Roof, said this view well,

  • [to God] I know, I know. We are Your chosen people. But, once in a while, can’t You choose someone else?

That is a pretty rough idea of Love.

Love is and Love brings good out of us in any context because where Love is, there it is. Think about presence.  Honest self-awareness.  When you found it was more important to still be able to walk than care if your t-shirt was inside out.  Love is more true than that.  It is more true than looking into her eyes, than hot water over skin.  Love is.

As Green says in the voice of Hazel Grace, “I hope this enough for you.  This is your life. And I love you.”

Question:  What is stronger in your life?  Why?  What happened to disclose such honesty?  Please tell us your story.

Self-Care Tip:  Love wins, even for you.  Keep on.

Sending a message to the hope out there, to the love I know exists, to the friend who knows me, the place I can always call part home, part critique, part play-fellow, counselor, walking stick.  Hello.

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Know You Are Blessed

ulysses

 

Think of the worst of us.  Think of the worst about us.  Think of those with self-loathing.  Those with low self-awareness, the violent, and the violated, think of them.  Where is the blessing?

Blessed are the depressed and anxious.

Think of the healthy.  Think of the diseased.  The misunderstood, the ones who live miles apart from connection, who ever push like a dingy from the peer into waves and self-destruction, think of them.

Blessed are the poor and lonely. 

Where is the blessing when your real estate is brought low by the creeping up of low-life.  Where is the blessing when you get cancer just when you might retire, when your own body calls you stupid, when you lose your eyes after training as a surgeon?

Blessed are those whose bodies are dying.

Think of every corner, every shadow and open space and the turns you still don’t know about inside of your life.  Think of the unacceptable, the character you wrestle against to moderate away from extreme.  The rope you swing on and try to bring to rest, think of the grey you think you will never achieve.  This bit and chapter, this part of your construction, this surprise in how you deliver is Loved.

There is no aberration from the norm that can separate you from that Love.  There is no addiction or misdemeanor or illness or mutated cell that can lose blessing.

This is fact.  Our life is to live with it.

Blessed am I.  Blessed am, “Me.”

Question:  Where is the blessing in what you like least about yourself?  Please tell us your story.  We need to hear you! Keep on.

Self-Care Tip:  Be your own friend in adversity as in prosperity.  Know you are blessed.

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Be Friendly Enough With Yourself To Acknowledge the Gift In Your Suffering

Strange Lady

Image by bending light via Flickr

Pain. There are so many of us suffering from pain that sometimes it is as if nobody escapes. Even so, in the contorting agony that pain brings, we have a very hard time thinking outside of ourselves at all. We are preoccupied with ourselves. We do not think about the others hurting or others in general at all. Pain does that – emotional and/or physical.

Penelope was preoccupied too. She had suffered and was suffering still. Peeling her thoughts away from survival during those times when, with teeth and muscles clenched, her body felt like a universe unto itself. Everyone outside of her were aliens she was able to visit occasionally. Watching her and hearing her describe how it molded her current person, I remembered the book by Paul Brand, Pain: the Gift Nobody Wants. (We mentioned this book before in our blog-post, “Emotions: The Physical Gift We Can Name.”)

When we are sick with Pain Syndrome, with symptoms seen in our emotions, behaviors and nerve language, it is hard to perceive what good can come out of bad. Saying, when we are in that ditch, that the sun is happily shining overhead is rude and boring. Especially when it is rhetoric. Change that rhetoric to insight, well that would then be worth friendly and interesting. That would be hope. There comes a degree of knowledge that hasn’t reached our sensory selves yet but sits in our intellect. We have a glimpse of the ark of the covenant, a promise, nearly prophesy in fact – we have a knowing that something good can come out of this.

This is why I thought of the work of Paul Brand, M.D. with the lepers. I thought that Penelope might want to know that there is something good that could come out of her bad if she were healthy in other ways, enough to receive it. If her senses could perceive it, her emotions, sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell could take in that information and deliver enough of it uninterrupted, what was promised to her would come true; past the pain that distracts and preoccupies.

It is as if this good that comes out of bad were like a runner in a war zone. Bombs are exploding. It is noisy even though hearing was taken out after the last gun fire. Dirt and sweat drip over eyes and into mouths and no one believes they will survive. And then the runner trips into our shelter and collapses still alive; still holding the message in his hand. Something good made it across a land in havoc and war and we know about it now.

I thought of Paul Brand, M.D., telling Penelope that her pain is her gift at that point of knowing, with that timing. Better than I could. She wouldn’t laugh angrily and give him a bad review on-line. She would hear him. “Something good is coming your way. You have hope.” In my imagination, Penelope would not hear Dr. Brand moralizing her experience – “You are good if you perceive your gift and you are bad if you don’t.” In my fantasy, Penelope would understand that this offering wasn’t intended to make her feel guilty for hurting. It was an offering of hope.

Not so easy to do, as it turns out, in real life. I am a very human psychiatrist without

much magic about me very often. But if I did…

Question: How do you give yourself hope when your senses don’t perceive it? How are you your own friend when you are preoccupied and distracted from that which is friendly? Please tell us your story.

Self-Care Tip – Be friendly enough with yourself to believe that there is something good that will come out of your bad. There is hope.

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Love Comes Out of Bad Because in Any Circumstance, Good or Bad, Love Comes

Victor Hugo-Bridge

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Ten years ago, what were you doing in life.  Did you think you would be “here?”  Were you thinking past September 11?

My daughter asked me the other day what I meant when I said that good can come out of bad.  You know me.  I cocked my guns and started happily blazing.  Good coming out of bad has nothing to do with the badness of events.  It has everything to do with the goodness.  It has everything to do with what is stronger.  The love.  Love is stronger than anything.

Victor Hugo described La Esmerelda‘s beauty with this kind of quality around her peers.

As, however, they all possessed nearly the same degree of beauty, 

they fought with equal weapons, and each might cherish a hope of 

victory. The coming of the Bohemian suddenly destroyed this

equilibrium. Her beauty was so surpassing, that at the moment 

when she appeared at the entrance of the room, she seemed to shed 

over it a sort of light peculiar to herself. In this close 

apartment, over-shadowed by hangings and carvings, she appeared 

incomparably more beautiful and radiant than in the public place 

like a torch which is carried out of the broad day-light into 

the dark. In spite of themselves, the young ladies were dazzled. 

Each felt wounded, as it were, in her beauty.

Love, or call it goodness, has a victory to offer us.  In the presence of bad or not bad, Love is.  And because it is, the turning of bad into good happens.  In consequence to its goodness and nothing else.

...like a torch which is carried out of the broad 
day-light into the dark.

September 11, ten years ago, the streets of Boston were filled with parked cars.  The taxis were not going anywhere.  Their drivers were dazed, their radios blasting the news of smoke and buried bodies.  I was weeping with them and sat on the curb, cold with the early night, listening to their radios.  I don’t know why I didn’t go home to watch the news.  I wanted to be with these people I think.  The people.  We needed each other.  What could love bring out of this ten years later?  What would light do in this darkness?

I don’t know what your story is but I believe that Love is.  And because of what it is, in our darkness, good can come.  It has everything to do with what Love is and is all the more lovely because of the bad company.

Here is one mother’s story.  Please tell us yours.  Keep on.

Self-Care Tip – When bad is there, remember that Love is.

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Bring Your Separate Selves Together – Personal Journey

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Self-Care Tip #199 – Bring together what you are naturally inclined to do with what you spend your energies on.

When we do what we like to do, what is congruent with our hard-wiring, what is naturally inspiring, fatigue becomes part of our pleasure in my life.  Cliché,

Enjoy the burn,

…is common for a reason.  There are times when pain, fatigue, difficulty and hard-surfaced days are bits of what make life journey one of richness, rather than diminished.  I was reminded by Jaclyn Rae’s Blog-post today, that when we can say,

I’ve learned that I’m tired but still want to do what I do,

…we are paddling the same river our life is floating down.  When we by mental illness, misfortune, choice or neglect, don’t – we are more observant of our lives rather than participants to them.  We find being present in the process difficult.  It’s not something everyone can do in all aspects.

However, we don’t have to be defined by those particulars, choosing instead to do the hard work of processing our choices, our energy and where it comes from, our emotions and see how they weave into our constitution.  Then, some time when breathing hard, limping and spent, we will remember this and reconnect the experience with the choice and the emotion a little quicker.  We will less often separate from the water our life is traveling.  Not become observers but participate more often, more actively, more tangibly with that kernel in us that stays, our essence.  (See blog post, My Essence.)

In the marvelous work, “His Dark Materials” trilogy, Philip Pullman describes us as split persons, a body and a spirit (“demon”) that might be parted by neglect, carelessness, abuse, or other disasters.  But when it is separated, the body suffers and is disconnected from it’s life purpose, what brings pleasure and presence in the world around.  (See blog post, Soul and Body.)

There are medical illnesses that do this, as mentioned above, and in those cases, perhaps all to do is get medical care, heal, treat and get on with life.  Other times, it might be that we forgot ourselves in the midst of caring for children, a demanding job, an opinion that victim-hood defines our life possibilities or what not.  We have options.

As Jjen reminded us some days ago,

The bad doesn’t disappear but it is not a qualifier for the rest of life’s potential.

Questions:  How have you reconnected to your life journey?  Your essence?  What is constant about you in your changing self?  Please tell me your story.

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Know What You Are Fighting For – Your Right To Journey.

You Should Be Living

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Self-Care Tip #162 – Know what you are fighting for.  Be a friend to yourself.

Bridget told me,

I felt free to do something creative without having to feel guilty about it.

She had read the blog post, “Self-Care is Freedom, is Democracy, is Because We Are Accountable.”  I was just starting to think about other good places to go with that but before I got too far she hit me with,

I just hate myself!

Hearing those words is like watching squishy and partly moldy tomatoes hit the wall.  It’s messy.  It’s dirty.  No one’s excited about dealing with it.  And, there is something negative that brought it on.  Readers, you’ll remember this countertransference when you’re the counsellor in some other situation and think, “Darn that Quijada!”

My thoughts bumped and piled up.  Stopped, until they started pulling themselves off of each other.  I tried to put these disparate bits of Bridget’s narrative together.  And I wasn’t alone.

I don’t get it!  Why do I feel this way?

Who doesn’t have conflicting feelings about themselves?  Bridget perceived and celebrated her freedom to self-care, yet was betrayed by her own, just when she was reaching for it.  Is that ok?

What strikes me about Bridget is her journey.  She has struggled with anxiety and depression for many years.  I know with me, she’s been in treatment for five of them.  During that time, she has been lovely although not perfect.  She does her hair, glossy blond in large waves, trim body frame and polite like no one I’ve met.  Many medications have failed her and she has taken those failures and claimed her future over again.  The intense forward movement of her inner self has never been muted, even when she has had thoughts of wanting to die.

I have learned what she values, what she’s willing to let go of and what she isn’t.  Her appearances matter.  She is artsy and gets energy from being alone.  She loves people.  Her marriage is rocky.  She struggles with parenting.  She loves her husband and her children.  Bridget’s journey is a journey of imperfection, beauty and courage.

And here she is again.  Conflicted self, ill, hopeful and claiming her future.  Bridget is right on her course.  I wish I could help more.  I wish she wasn’t still ill.  But I can at least be as courageous as she is.  I can hope with her.  I can stand with her or walk.  I know that put to the question, Bridget prefers this journey than losing the right, the privilege, to journey at all.  Bridget is free.  Many of us are not as free as she is, who knows what she is fighting for.

Question:  What are you fighting for?  If nothing were to ever change for the better in your life, what makes your journey worth it?  Please tell me your story.

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Celebrate Your Imperfections

Perception_is_Everything_-_Rusland_Beeches.jpg

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Self-Care Tip #153 – Celebrate your imperfections and adequacy.  Be a friend to yourself.

Chrystal came in.  Years with degrees of depression pulling her up and down leave her hoping to reach euthymia (steady level mood).  Chrystal and I frequently find ourselves talking about the grief that comes with this.  But not so much today.  She was hopeful after a new medication trial gave her a week with less melancholy.

In depression, even a few hours of relief from the dark inability to feel pleasure or interest, even a few hours when hope slips in can be enough to remind us what it is about life that is worth living for.  Chrystal has stood in and out of that shard of hope many times.  Each time it returns, she turns her face into it.  Hungry.  Wanting.  Alive still.  Responding to what any of us do, as any of us would, when hope is on us.

Celebrating a little together this lovely hope, she was nevertheless aware that it might sneak off again.  She said, “We’ll see.”  I said, “We’ll see.”

And then I remembered.  “Why can’t we celebrate your flaws?  Who says we can’t?”  They have beauty.  They have depth and shape and the loveliness that comes only from pain.

Chrystal looked at me doubtfully.  “Really?  I’m not so sure about that.”

I remember Someone perfect.  Last I heard, He had some pain and scars too and it didn’t change His status, value, or essence.

If we can’t celebrate our imperfections, we can’t celebrate anything because that is who we are.  Imperfect, all of us, except for One.  All of us adequate.

Adequate.  I celebrate that I am adequate today.  Adequate to live, to love, to do what I do.  “Adequate” implies a personal balance between perfection and flaws.  It implies a presence with both poles.  It does not quantify.  It does not mean that we don’t continue to grow or hope.

I’m not sure about everyone’s opinion about my self-perception, my attitude, or my effort at life.  However, I am growing surer of my own and am getting glad about that.  I’m wondering if Chrystal can celebrate her flawed self as much as she celebrates the hope of escaping her suffering.  What about you?

If each of us in turn were as pleased with ourselves as that, still hoping, still growing, still hurting, still suffering, what then?  Let’s celebrate together, alone, healthy, ill or wherever we find ourselves.  Let’s celebrate our imperfections and adequacy.

Question:  How do you live with your adequacy?  Please tell me your story.

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Our Changing Reality

She had been gone for 3 months helping her mother transition from life to death.  However, instead of it being a melancholic experience, she felt better than she had since a time she couldn’t calendar.  Back when she had a respect for herself.  Back when she had youth, she had hope, she believed in a generous future.

I had no way of knowing what it was like for me until I left the situation.

Reality is only as real as our perspective.  She came back to a new perspective and her reality changed.  She saw an impoverished life.  She saw need to stop waiting for the better of future’s promises.  She saw disrespect when caring for her disabled daughter and emotionally abusive husband.  She hated disrespecting herself.  She felt this and she rebelled inside.  Holding back her furry with the flimsy lid of guilt-glue.  She cried.  She had just let her mother go and feeling good about letting her daughter and husband go now embarrassed and shamed her.  But there it was.  The thought she hadn’t thought before.  Reality had changed.

I’m told that it is bad for a counsellor to tell someone specifically what to do.  Turns out that my job includes some counseling.  I ran into a former patient today at a coffee shop.  She saw me typing on my computer and learned about this blog.

But you do meds!

Apparently sometimes I’m not that great of a counselor.  Or maybe I am if she didn’t realize I was, with her, all along.

I had to stop and say hello!  I’ve missed you!

(Whew!)

Today, I kept thinking about the way reality changes when we let our perspective get some air.

This daughter/mother/wife will never be the same woman she was before she left for 3 months.  She didn’t know.  And now she did.  She can’t stuff that knowledge.  She can’t disappear it.  She is left with a knowledge.  Is it better?  I think so.

We played with options as we talked.  A window opened in the room and a breeze came through called hope.  That was lovely to share with her and I am grateful.

Maybe when with determined labor we are trudging on in life, we might think of this.  With this memory, we could more willingly accept the urge to walk away just to see for a time.  Maybe a knowing, that we were missing, will come and change us.

Self Care Tip #67 – We might be in a different reality if we walk away.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What has your own experience been?  Please tell me your story.

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Let It Go and Keep Going

Like gripping a blade the reflex may be to grip harder.  When to let things go when it feels like we can’t…  How do we, if it is still active in our lives?.  Something negative but still going on with no end in sight?

A woman comes to me anxious and depressed.  She looks older than her age.  She cries a lot talking about what she is ashamed of.  Staying with her emotionally abusive husband. Probably having sex with him though she didn’t want it.  Unable to leave because she didn’t have money, job, or family support.

This woman I mentioned, she is courageous.  She has tried for years to find herself again and still tries again and tries another time, times times.  She talks to her kids about it and they say she should never have married him.  She talks to her friends and they sigh and heap insults against him.  She talks to God.

She comes to me.  Why she comes when she does?  She found the courage to ask for help one more time, times times.  She takes medications.  We spend 6 months together before she starts responding to the combination therapy and each day she had the courage to wait another day times another.  Her face looks younger, slowly, like looking through an album backwards over the next weeks.  She starts talking about doing more than making it through the day.  More fits into her hopes than survival.  Like Mary Poppins‘ travel bag, she keeps pulling more out of her life than she ever thought it had space to hold.

One day about 1 1/2 years later, she came to me with a secret smile, holding her purse like a stolen cupcake.  The door closed to our room and she pulled out her dog.  She said, “I’d like you to meet my best friend in the whole world.  I just love him so much!”  She is a woman who found courage to love and be loved.

I am in awe and humbly wonder after her.

Remember again the addict who so often leads us in this example.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

Serenity Prayer

We surrender when we can, when we think of it, when awareness dawns, the things we cannot control.  It might take a higher thought to “let go” of what we cannot control.  When we are able to do this, we are larger in a sense than the moment.  The recurring yucky events are seen more objectively and less personally.  We are more knowing.

It takes us back around to how we define ourself.  Our spirit.  Our essence.  This woman, she found it.  She found she was more than her circumstance.

“How do we surrender what we cannot control?” you ask.  Ask yourself.  I have my answer.  I hold my answer in my mind’s eye, like a Swiss bank account.  My most precious treasure in the care of The One,

…where neither moth nor rust does corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.

This woman, she is courageous.  She journeys without being defined by the events.

Self Care Tip #36 – If you can’t control it, let it go and keep going.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What do you think?  Please tell me your story.

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Successful People

“Successful people expand their dreams to move them forward, others shrink their dreams to justify where they are.”
—Sam Meers

How do you see yourself? To be truthful, any of us will find ourselves in a straddle. Which side we think we’re leaning towards will depend on emotional confidence at the time and our perception will flux accordingly. Getting yelled at by a respected mentor may make you see yourself as stalemate, but that doesn’t make it truth.

If we stayed on the exact course of our current, what do we imagine our lives will look like in 5 years? There are bits of tack and turn we influence. No matter the level of abuse suffered, individuals have a sense of their own person. Their separateness. Their choice is there held fast on the buoy of their human right.

While shrinking some dreams to justify condition, the mere courage to persist in life is a form of expansion. You might not agree with this. We all have people we scorn. But this isn’t a matter of opinion. Without expansion, we die, even the grossest of us. There are more obviously lovely examples of expansion, of going towards what is congruent with your inner self, of doing what gives you energy. When someone is in flow, aren’t we all drawn to them? When someone is not, it can be hard to make eye contact, even with yourself.

When getting friendly with yourself, give your straddle a nod of courtesy. Counter intuitive at times, this in fact promotes self-respect. The more we trust the ebb and flow down our river of dreams, the more a part of our own journey we can be.

However, if you can’t look yourself in the eye, if despite setting your jaw and keeping a strangle grip on life you still feel like the ground is sucking you under, think about a medical reason. You always have a choice.

I really liked what Mr. Meers said, but I’ll say it differently for our purposes:
Successful people expand their dreams to move them forward even while they shrink their dreams to justify where they are.

Self Care Tip # 21 – Be a success by joining your journey. Be a friend to yourself.

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Trust What is Inherent

Does loving and liking go together? Not always. I like to think of loving as a constant not entirely dependent on us. Thank goodness!

Waiting to like someone is like waiting to go to the gym until you’re in shape. Or, not getting to know God until you are a good person.

This morning I woke up to the sound of dishes and quiet excited little voices. There was a vibe of energy in the air. My eyes were still blurry and crusty and my mind in a haze of, “What’s happening here?”

Some mornings I wake up to the anxiety of hearing other sounds. Someone wasn’t being nice to someone else. Wondering if I was going to have that job for the rest of the day of refereeing and…. Some mornings I am afraid. Some mornings when I wake up, they know I don’t like them. Because we love each other so, it just hurts all of us.

But today I couldn’t believe it. The kids had folded and put away the laundry and were unloading the dishes! Before I woke up!

Why? They knew the deal. No going to their friend’s house to bake cake until finishing all their chores. So, their motives weren’t all lined up right. They didn’t do it out of largeness. Nor did they do it for me. After licking that wound, I jumped up and down and whooped for them!

We don’t wait to go to school until we have knowledge. That’s the point of school.
God doesn’t care why you go to Him, he just wants you there. He’ll take care of our motives.
We don’t keep off the game field until we already know how to play.

  • …We all get it.

    With my children, I’m hoping some of how I felt was noticed by them. Maybe they’ll remember some of how they felt. There was a joy in the house that a time-out just doesn’t invoke.

    Moving back to loving and liking, well, they don’t always go together either. The inherent goodness in something like that is responsible for drawing forth the other. The same force I’m counting on to move in my children. The same force I’m counting on for me when I wake up scared. When we trust that force, we’re more able to be present with what is already around us. We can say, “This is enough,” without giving up on what we still hope for.

    Self Care tip #20 – Trust what is inherent. Be a friend to yourself.