Month: May 2011

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Presence Encourages Self-Care

The Forgetful Professor

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I am writing a series of blog-posts outlining self-care in which we examine the tenets of self-care:

Self-Care Tip – Sit back and listen to the emotion to be present in your own life.

There are two terms we’ve used in psychotherapy since before Freud and Jung were around:

  • Transference – putting our feelings on the clinician.  For example, my clinician looks like my father.  I will transfer onto him my feelings about my father and subconsciously think he is like my father.
  • Countertransference is the opposite.  The clinician thrusts her own memories and associations on her patient.

These can be positive or negative.  Of course they do not stay in the clinic.  Transference and countertransference happen between all of us all the time.  Often it is healthy.  It helps us grow, model others, fantasize and move towards fantasies long enough to make them true.

Remember PattyAnne from yesterday?  …In PattyAnne’s and my case, PattyAnne could be said to have transferred her fear of being treated as a lesser person.  But what was my reaction and what is yours in similar situations?  What is our countertransference?

I have often been guilty of negative countertransference in situations like this.  I remember feeling dirtied by people’s prejudices and fears.  Almost like I needed to bathe afterwards.  The truth is, though, we don’t have to feel this way.

When people are afraid of us, we do not have to be afraid of them.  We do not have to anger, agitate, or feel “soiled.”   We can just be with them.  Let it be about them and not run away.  Be present.

Clinicians can be open to hearing this song.  When any patient starts in again, this time, sit back and listen to her fear rather than worry about what words carried it.  Patients will be better for it.  Maybe clinicians will be, too.  And that is key.  The gift we give first is to ourselves.  By just being with someone in her fear, we can just be with ourselves too, and vice versa.  Quite friendly to us both.

Presence encourages self-care.  It helps guard us against the temptation to see ourselves as victims.  When we do not realize that our emotions and behaviors come from us, were not imposed upon us from external sources or realize more specifically the transference or countertransference that we are responsible for – we can feel like victims.

Any time we do not own our emotions and behaviors, this is a quick path to losing our connection to our personal journey and become “absent” rather than present with ourselves.

Still, many wonder: at what point does “too much self-care” become part of the symptomatology?  This concern will resolve when we see how emotions are not moral implications.  “See” you tomorrow!

Questions:  How has feeling like a victim disconnected you from others and yourself?  How have you collected your absent self and come together again?  Please tell me your story.

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Self-Knowledge as a Step Toward Self-Care

Yesterday, we introduced self-care and today we continue with self-knowledge.

Knowledge, mural by Robert Lewis Reid. Second ...

PattyAnne came in knowing what she wanted.  She was sure she was struggling with ADHD.  She could not focus, she had difficulty connecting with others, and she was impulsive.  This was limiting her intimacy with the people she wanted in her life.  PattyAnne had read about ADHD and was relieved thinking that taking a stimulant would improve her that much.

PattyAnne is rich inside, dark chocolate, not white, aromatic and effectively affecting.  Being with her means being touched.  When PattyAnne is good, her fresh aura in our shared space is healing.  Many baffled by this wonder why, when she passes through, they feel so much better.

Consistent with this intensity, when PattyAnne is not good, whatever comes from her is chemical warfare, and we are not safe.  You can leave, but you will always leave touched. Any time with PattyAnne feels like either too much time or too little.  We are wanting: wanting more or wanting less, somehow with PattyAnne, we will never feel satisfied.

This is part of why PattyAnne projected confidence while self-diagnosing.  Her temperament and coping skills predisposed her to do it.  Self-diagnosis in her and others also happen because of fear, lack of trust in their medical provider or defensiveness per their feelings of inequality.

There are good things that come with self-diagnosis to consider.

  1. Self-diagnosis is always informative.  Always.
  2. Clinicians may use it as a tool to build trust.  When not put off by self-diagnosis, clinicians might recognize these opportunities.

The self-knowledge each of us has on either side of the patient-doctor relationship is not inherently dangerous, and consider the inverse.  Clinicians come to the room with their own self-diagnoses as designed by biases and countertransference.  And which clinician is not also a patient?  There is good with bad and we have a choice, as always, within stories within stories….

Patients and clinicians perceive self-knowledge, at least in part, as self-care, and we are right.  Like Dad says, “Knowledge is never wasted.”  How many times have clinicians asked why patients do not try to educate themselves about their disease?  To begrudge them for it is to deny the value of that process and what clinicians also do under the guise of a license to practice.

Any of us can imagine that for both parties, these types of encounters cost emotional and physical energy.  For PattyAnne, we have mentioned already that she came defensive.

For me, I regret the times when I did not own responsibility for my feelings.  When a patient self-diagnosed, I too quickly assumed mal-intent, personalized behaviors and missed my opportunity to benefit from the connection inherent in the patient-doctor relationship.  This is what I wanted to avoid with PattyAnne.

I celebrate, however, these past many months our work on FriendtoYourself.com.  I experience much more pleasure in my profession.  I am even more clinically effective by taking care of myself first; by being present with myself.  My self-care professionally mirrors my personal self-care in that when I am first able to be present with my own self, such as through writing and interacting with you, my online community, I can then be present with my patients.

…I thank you for teaching me and hope we share this exchange for a long time.

When I can be present, I do not have to moralize my perceptions of patients’ behaviors and feelings.  Self-care is not a moral issue.

In the following posts we will discuss more about these terms: presence, moralizing self-care, trust, and the patient-doctor relationship.

Self-Care Tip – Grow your self-knowledge and find what it offers you, in turn, when observing it in others.

Questions:  What has your experience been when you have gone to your clinician with self-knowledge?  How has gaining self-knowledge been a friendly thing to yourself?  Please tell me your story.

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Introduction to Self-Care

Questions:  How do we collaborate with our patients, or with our clinicians, to take action on behalf of health?  What can we as clinicians or patients do to teach, learn and practice the tenets of the field of self-care?

Self-care is living consistently with the belief that the success of our health (emotional, physical, spiritual) begins and ends, not with “me,” but with “Me.” To teach and practice self-care comes when we understand that the essential self, the Me, is always worth fighting for, always worth the journey, always of value even in the throes of mental illness.  Here at FriendtoYourself.com, we work to define and teach self-care daily, we attack guilt, we stand up to shame, we live as we choose despite stigma and we work harder than we ever have on perhaps the hardest job of our lives.  Self-care is not weak but rather courageous.  It brings us to humble accountability for our lives, not seeking to erase our history but still reminding us that we are free to start over any time.

I will be writing a series of blog-posts outlining self-care in which we will examine the tenets of self-care: self-knowledge, presence, moral neutrality, and connection. We will look at self-care as an essential practice for both clinician and patient, examining the ways in which a self-caring clinician may, in turn, provide better care to her patients, and patients take better care of themselves.

Self-Care Tip #260 – Clarify what it means to be your own friend.

By the way, check out a still unknown glorious writer at ASkirtAWeek.com.

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In The Space of Anger, Remember You Are a Friend to Yourself.

The Rage of Achilles (1757)

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Bullying:  Series Continued.

  • #144 Leave Space In Your Beliefs To Grow
  • #163 ”He’s Never Hit Me.” Abuse.
  • #251 Just Ordinary Bullying – The Bully and The Bullied
  • #253 How to Be A Friend To Yourself When Thinking About Your Bully
  • #254 Free To Do Self-Care, Despite Our Bully
  • #255 Bullying That Includes Life-Threatening Behavior.

You are saying this to provoke me!

Paula was angry.  Her hold on her composure was tenuous.  I backed off before she lost her cool.  No one feels good when they do that.  If she felt this way around this mostly unthreatening environment, she must be suffering its effect on her relationships or lack thereof in her other life environments.  No one feels good when they can’t trust themselves.

I am not going to sit here and take this from you!  You are doing this on purpose!

And Paula walked out.  That was it.  That was all I got.  For now, my opportunity to help was over and I was left to wonder after her.

1.  In taking care of ourselves around anger, the first step is to ensure our personal safety.  Deescalate if possible the tension.  But most importantly, do what we must to be safe.  If we have to leave to do that, than we leave and it is over.  I commend Paula for leaving before she acted out on her anger.  That is good coping going on.

For myself, if she had continued to escalate, I could call for help or leave.

2.  The next step, (exclusively per Dr. Q), for those experiencing the anger…  Well there are many, and if it is happening often, should probably include medical interventions along with other considerations of her biopsychosocial self.

For those subjected to the anger, it will be most friendly to themselves to process their own emotional response to the anger-trigger.  “Do I feel angry too?  Do I think I am responsible for her emotions? Do I think what went down here is about me?”  Get our personal out of the stuff that isn’t.  Why make it about us if that isn’t true?  It is another thing if we were poking her with a skewer or had initiated our own emotional diarrhea before she did.  But that just takes us back to step #1.

3.  Finally, for the “victim,” take some time to tease out if we are putting ourselves in a position that isn’t safe repetitively.  “Is there a pattern?  Do we find ourselves in the space of anger or other negative emotions often?  How often?  Do we allow this person to treat us in a negative way that we would never allow anyone else to treat us?”  The answer to that will be telling about our self-friendliness.

Self-Care Tip #259 – In the space of anger, remember you are a friend to yourself.

Questions:  What patterns, if any, do you see in your life, or someone you love re: anger?  What empowers you towards self-care in the space of anger?

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The Self-Care Bank

A Frisian Holstein cow in the Netherlands: Int...

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I spent the day with my lovely uncle and aunt from Iowa.  We had chocolate something or other about six times, which is just to say that we indulged in the opportunity to have joy and share the goodness of each other’s company.

It is almost ten PM and they’re still talking.  Too cute.  They’re like little college kids in a late night chum session.  I’ve never heard so many analogies to different foods.  Turnips, tomatoes, corn, heifers, steers, cows, bulls – I did not know that there were this many types of cows….  We’ve talked of many tear-jerking stories and things that don’t die when we do.

Today in clinic, my kids stayed home from school to spend the day with them and fitted puzzles, read stories, petted dogs ‘n such.  I felt rich.  This kind of wealth of heart around can’t be banked other than that of self-care.

Goodnight friends.  My uncle’s still talking ‘n I have to catch this story about my dad when he was milking cows and playing pranks.  Thanks for sharing this with me tonight.  Keep on!

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Escape and Find Treasure

Rounded glass on beach.

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Self-Care Tip #258 – Let yourself escape.

On the beach this evening, waiting for sunset, our dogs were leashed around a pole whining to be free.

There is something about the beach that enchants us.  Broken glass, becomes “sea glass.”  Dirty feet seem appropriate and wanted.  We don’t remember the edge that we teetered on for hours earlier that day.  We remember our own turn and there are fantasies that come in closer.

My children were like puppies let loose.  

This place where three worlds meet; land, sea and sky, the beauty is so great that somehow forgiveness comes as if it can’t stay away.  Forgiveness comes when we don’t even know we are holding a grudge.  I guess there is just no space for that stink at the beach with our lovely dirty feet and our dreams about to come true.

My son found a feather trapped in a heap of slimy seaweed and flies and he grabbed it quickly, thinking his sister would try to get to it first.  

Look!  A treasure!  This feather!  It is a treasure!  

Sister said something inarticulate and was off toward the water’s edge.  Son turns to me and says,

A feather of chicken taken from photograph stu...

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A treasure Mommy!  This is your treasure Mommy.  I found it.  It’s yours now from me.  A treasure!

I saw the flies and remembered the bird who pooped without sphincter control that the feather had belonged to, and I took that enchanted nappy feather with my fingers.

You keep it now Mommy.  Don’t lose it.  Kay?

I even said thank-you.

Question:  Where do you feel enchanted?  What takes you away and what does it do for you to be able to escape?  Please tell me your story.

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The Pleasure That Should Be Ours In Emotional Health

Cup of coffee with whipped cream

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Some time, I’d like to come back to our bullying series as there is still some help to be had for us.  However, today, my cherubs are asleep and it’s only seven PM.  My feet are up.  I’m sitting by lots of beauty colored in varied hues of sunset, shadow and dusk.  Tonight will be short.  I will let today end and indulge the coming together of these things.  (I am even drinking reheated coffee with lots of whipped cream!)

What I have thought of to share with you my friends, as I’ve enjoyed its friendly work on me today, is the pleasure that should be ours in emotional health.

Bad things will come.  We will have anger, lower communication and such.  We will wish we hadn’t pushed the call button on the phone by accident when yelling.  BUT.  But (“Mommy you said a potty word!”).  But it will pass.  It will not define our day or our perception of self.  We won’t catastrophize and we will trust ourselves to show love and mercy to Me in our weakness.  This is a pleasure to experience.  This is what comes when we have brain health.

If this is what has always been your reality, well great.  BUT.  But (“Mommy!  Why did you say that?).  But, many of us know what it is to crave for days when we can say that the blow-ups, outs and ins don’t blot out the sun.  They shouldn’t.  The pleasure comes with health.  Go for it!  You are worth it.  You were made to feel pleasure.

Questions:  When was it that you realized that your emotions and behaviors didn’t rule you or someone you love any more?  What did/does that mean to you?  Please tell me your story.

(Ah!  There goes the last of the sun and the trees are now silhouettes.)

Self-Care Tip #257 – Go for the pleasure of trusting yourself to respond with healthy emotions and behaviors.

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Scheduled Intimacy – Mother’s Day: The Good and The Not So Good

Afghan women celebrate mother's day at a guest...

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Self-Care Tip #256 – Think about the good and the not so good on scheduled memory-maker days like today.

Questions:  What do you think scheduled intimacy has to offer you?  How do you manage to allow the not so good to come together with the good in your life?  Please tell me your story.

Just like any scheduled memory-maker, Mother’s Day brings the good and not so good.  And for most of us, we have some of both, even if just a little.

Yesterday, in the company of my three healthy children, I couldn’t help but notice the lady I sat beside was sniffling.  “Should I say something?  Should I not say something?”

…Almost six years ago, my nine year-old niece suddenly died.  One week later I delivered my second child.

I don’t remember most of my daughter’s first year of life except a couple random things.  My sister-in-law, sitting alone on a rock just staring.  I remember her clothes, the weather during that moment, the texture of the rock, but I don’t remember nursing my baby.  I think this was still in the first month when I saw my sister-in-law on the rock.

We buried my niece’s ashes under a Jacaranda tree and it took forever for that tree to bloom.  I watched its skeleton month after month thinking, “This is terrible!  It needs to bloom!”  Isn’t that ridiculous?  And I remember my brother, red-eyed.  The lines on his face cut in deep.  He said,

I’m so glad you’re having this baby Sana.  It’s just what we need.  You remind us, this baby is reminding us that we are still alive.

The good and the not so good.

Of course I sensed what my brother was saying, but I still had a moment of hypervigilance when my body seemed to say, “What?!”

There was a lot of insecurity and emotional confusion that year but I don’t remember much more.  I believe my daughter  breast-fed, learned to sleep through the night, transitioned to solid foods and took her first steps.  But I don’t remember.

Namibie, une femme Himba et son enfant

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Yesterday, I turned to the lady and asked,

Are you sad?  Is there something you are sad about?

More water-works.

I used to have a son.  I had a son.  He died.

The good and the not so good.

Right on schedule.  Mother’s Day came.  We knew it was going to happen.  And yet our bodies crack open, poorly defended.  Little our calendars did for our emotional preparation.

The lady grabbed my hands in further intimacy than I anticipated.  She told me her name but I wasn’t listening.  I was thinking about my niece, her sometimes blooming tree, my children around me; so much.  I was thinking about the good and the not so good on scheduled memory-maker days like today.

There is a coming together of our parceled selves that have been scattered to the east and to the west by the winds.  There is a coming together that this Mothers-Day, Christmas, Valentine’s or my nieces birthday, have on us and the process itself is bruising.  It is an opportunity to gather what we will or won’t.  It is an opportunity to be present with our changing selves.  In the tears, in my daughter’s crooked rainbow pictures and backwards letters,

bear mommy, i love yu….

In the grip of a stranger’s hands, in the company of our own Mom’s, wherever we find ourselves on these blue-lettered calendar days is where we have this

Hope all you moms had fun today!

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opportunity to do some of the sometimes hard work to grow presence.   Without it, we will continue to change.  That can’t be stopped.  But with it, with our choice-making, with accepting the gift of our folding up of the space between our past and our present, if we hadn’t cried again for our loss, if we hadn’t we might not have remembered what has made us and who we are.  Changed.  Covered by Love.  Connected.  Doing what a friend would do for Me.

Tonight my daughter sits on my lap.  We are watching a blue-ray recording of Les Miserables (musical) Twenty-Fifth Anniversary touring production at the London’s Barbican Centre.  I am listening to an excellent tale of the good and the not so good in life.

To God, our Mother, today was scheduled and I thank you.

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Bullying That Includes Life-Threatening Behavior

Bullying:  Series Continued.

  • #144 Leave Space In Your Beliefs To Grow
  • #163 “He’s Never Hit Me.” Abuse.
  • #251 Just Ordinary Bullying – The Bully and The Bullied
  • #253 How to Be A Friend To Yourself When Thinking About Your Bully
  • #254 Free To Do Self-Care, Despite Our Bully

Bullying is a broad term.  We could call it “dirty,” meaning non-specific.  Here we’ve spent several days discussing it and stil trip on the dirt.  What we want to do is tease life-threatening events included in the broad category of bullying apart from the…, I don’t know, can we call them lesser degrees of bullying?  Anything that isn’t perceived as life-threatening can lay in that heap, let’s say.

Teddy bear - Rory

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Each of us must figure out where we are in these two categories.  What type of bully did I or do I have?  (I have to smile when I say “My bully.”  Sounds like a teddy bear or blankie.  And it sooo is not!)  I think when we can do this, we can know even more about our self-care options.

There is a main category named, “Bullied.”

Event perceived as life-threatening -> you folks on the right.

Event perceived as non-life-threatening -> you folks on the left.

On the right, we have some who have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and some who don’t.  I’ve seen mothers get it after a traumatic birth and post-partum period when their baby might have died.  I’ve seen people get it from watching terribly violent movies.  Of course we’ve all seen or been survivors of abuse, war, or other near death experiences who become angry, irritable, nervous and suspicious of others.  We’ve watched our once cuddly personality disappear.  Everyone in this system is hurt and hurting – bully and bullied and those connected to either.

Not all survivors go on to develop PTSD after life-threatening events and we can’t clearly say why.  These people on the right straddle the line with those on the left.

We also have current events and past events.  We can number there order of passing in our lives.  For example,  1.  saw our mother beat up for years by our father, 2. watched Silence of The Lambs, 3.  excluded and conspired against in high school by mean click, 4.  neighbor strong-arms you into getting rid of your dog and paying him money for perceived damages.

PTSD can set in at any point on that time line because of the conditioning/changes the life-threatening event did to the brain.

Those on the left didn’t get much attention today.  I’m sorry about that.  You guys are just as important but my agenda today was to clarify.

Questions:  How does this clarification help you, if at all?  How would you try to define bullying?

Self-Care Tip #255 – Know what type of bully you had or have to know how to approach yourself in friendship.

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What Do You Say About Bullying?

Rally

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Bullying:  Series Continued. 

  • #144 Leave Space In Your Beliefs To Grow
  • #163 ”He’s Never Hit Me.” Abuse.
  • #251 Just Ordinary Bullying – The Bully and The Bullied
  • #253 How to Be A Friend To Yourself When Thinking About Your Bully
  • #254 Free To Do Self-Care, Despite Our Bully

Being a friend to ourselves in the context of bullying has been one of the most difficult things to get positive about, to talk about with hope, to feel empowered and to claim our freedom to self-care.

Why is that?

How do we claim our freedom to self-care?

We talked a lot about kids, many of us hopeless to a degree about their vulnerability to bullies.  But what about adults?  What are some examples of empowered adults in the context of being bullied?

Our own Sarah McGaugh of birdinyourhand blog-site asked yesterday,

What should we do to keep from getting angry when we are forced to interact/negotiate with a bully? Say, in the line of work, when we have to sit in a meeting with them or something. Some people come into those situations with only fight in them. Usually in my previous position I was fairly good at diffusing them…but I would still feel the anger over it. How do we not let a bully get into our inner world, and still deal with them?

How can we respond?

I would love to hear from you.

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Us

not alone

Image by ルーク.チャン.チャン via Flickr

No.  Not alone.

Mel told me she needed to do something or else!

I feel so alone!

Mel is in for some wonderful things as she starts her journey to self-care.  I’m really happy for her.

No.  None of us are alone.

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Free To Do Self-Care, Despite Our Bully

Demonstration in London supporting Serbia

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Bullying:  Series Continued.  (I didn’t even realize I was writing a series until now!)

  • #144 Leave Space In Your Beliefs To Grow
  • #163 “He’s Never Hit Me.” Abuse.
  • #251 Just Ordinary Bullying – The Bully and The Bullied
  • #253 How to Be A Friend To Yourself When Thinking About Your Bully

Bit’s and parts of us are unbelieving in what number of options to self-care that we have, when it comes to being bullied.  I don’t say this lightly about terrors.  Terrors change us irrevocably and hurt to the brink of our own abyss.

The question is, are we free to do self-care even when we are bullied?

Yesterday, Carl in his candid way, said,

Empathy and forgiveness? You gotta be kidding. Do you know what it is like for a twelve year-old to face this…  for an entire school term? Probably not? Cope? Isn’t coping with a chronic negative stimulus as debilitating as being unable to cope….  There may be situations where “book smart” stuff is not applicable because we cannot negotiate with the bully.

Go Serbia

Image by SanforaQ8 via Flickr

We cannot negotiate with the bully.  True, to the degree that Carl said, if I understand him.  (Carl you will surely set me straight soon.)

It is true that people who like to fight, fight well.  People who bully generally will bully better than I can ever defend myself.  They have had a lot more practice.  Have you heard this?  You never want to go up against someone who has nothing to lose because the only one that will lose is you.

When someone is agitated, in psychiatry we learn that it is good not to make eye-contact.  Avert the body.  Keep your voice low and don’t engage as much as possible.  It reminds me of letting the mist of early morning dew expire the coals in the camp fire.  Getting attacked is something we want to avoid.

Early on in my training, I was rounding on the inpatient psychiatry ward.  We often have people who are agitated admitted there and this morning, I remember it was about seven AM on a Sunday….  This particular patient hadn’t slept well.  He wasn’t well-groomed and he scowled.  All the nurses where in another room in a nurses meeting and I didn’t notice he and I were alone in the hallway.  I looked him in the eyes directly.  I didn’t concern myself with tempering my interview.  I was still sleepy myself and wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible to start my Sunday stuff at home.  (I know.  Stellar attitude for a resident-physician, right?)  He grabbed me around the waist and I nearly lost my water!  I screamed at him like a she-dog and he let go.  That was all.  No big deal right?  Well I was ticked at him and at the nurses for not being available.  No one was at the nurses station, which is illegal too.

In truth, I was pretty much an idiot on all accounts.  It doesn’t condone the assault but I have since been better about not negotiating with the bully.  

That probably wasn’t exactly what Carl was talking about but it is related.  It is by no means a full year of negative harassment, but when responding to the concept of not being able to negotiate with the bully, I don’t know at what point in degrees of trauma experiences that becomes true for us.  Perhaps it isn’t a matter of qualifying them or quantifying them.  Perhaps more depends on the victim.  I don’t know.  Do you?

What I do know, is that Carl and I are both partly wrong.  We can.  I don’t know about then.  We can now.  We are free even from those molesting monsters because of who we are.  We were created free and those horrors can’t extinguish that bit of us.  We are free not because of the protection or lack of protection we’ve lived in life.  We are free.

We don’t claim to know all the innumerable forms of suffering out there.  That is not what this self-care engages with.

Questions:  How do you find yourself free at this time in your life, despite it all?  How do you describe your freedom, even with your bully?  How have you seen others in this context?    Please tell me your story.

Self-Care Tip #254 – Free yourself from your bully.

Additional Resources:

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We Are Unique

Waiting room of Nanjing railway station

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We are unique, but it is not our suffering that makes us unique.

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How To Be a Friend to Yourself When Thinking About Your Bully?

I love real life John Waters freeze-frames

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Self-Care Tip #253 – Humanize and forgive your bully.

How to be a friend to yourself when thinking about your bully?

Have you noticed that when we think about our bully, we don’t feel so good.  Just thinking about him!  Sheeze!  In our last post on bullying, Nancy said,

Wow! This one brought up WAY too much pain. I’m feeling very vulnerable and uncomfortable and hurt and stupid at the moment. 

There are jumbled emotions that flood us, such as anger, shame, helplessness, anxiety or more.  Our autonomics may even trigger, making us hypervigilant as if we were being attacked.  We are in defense mode – all the while sitting alone in a chair at our desk, in the quiet of our bed while falling asleep, or any other place of our generally hum-drum lives.  These feelings and nervous system changes come in a time and place when we are not in danger.  They come without us realizing their approach, stealth feet and skilled hands; we are in their company before we know it.

Is there no hope?  What can we do so we don’t feel victimized all over again.

Humanize

1.  Do research on the bully.  Find out about him on the internet.  See what others have said about him.

This helps us:

  1. see him as a human, mortal, without superhuman powers.
  2. feel like we are less alone in this.
  3. realize that we are not chosen, so to speak, to suffer at his hands.  He is a bully and not just around “Me.”
  4. we didn’t cause his behaviors.  He chooses his behaviors because of the same biopsychosocial paradigm that we choose ours.
  5. realize that he hasn’t chosen to do his self-care, making him more vulnerable to his own negative feelings and behaviors.

Forgive

  1. Humanizing our bully helps us move towards empathy and forgiveness.
  2. Anger debts only hurt Me and that’s not friendly to Me.

Grow our self-confidence

  1. Such as doing our own thing.
  2. Grow our own natural genius.  Work hard at it and see how it is there for us, like a friend when we are feeling pushed down.  Our friend will be standing beside us, reminding us of our value when this remembering tries to beat us down.  Our friend will be there reminding us that this negative event in our life does not define us.

Now if they continue, these rememberings, and if these rememberings are frequent enough that we believe our quality of life is affected, we may be looking at something else.  There are other medical illnesses that can disable our abilities to cope.  In this scenario, I am thinking especially about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD.)

In PTSD, we relive experiences of trauma (which we perceived to have been life threatening to ourselves or observed by us in other(s).)  We may also feel hypervigilant, as if we are about to be attacked at times when our lives are not threatened.  We might have nightmares and avoid things that remind us of the trauma event as well.

PTSD is easily reactivated by other stressful situations – such as being bullied.  When we have a history of PTSD that has been quiet for a time, even years, we are more vulnerable to stressors reactivating it’s symptoms.  Then, although the said stressor may not have been a life-threatening stressor, we perceive similar feelings and neurologic changes we did when in the life-threatening situation.  Then, although the said stressor may be over and not recurring, those PTSD symptoms start happening all over again and may continue indeterminately – propagated by the disease process and not our bully event.

This might be endured and it may go away in time without treatment.  But it isn’t good for anyone while it is happening.  PTSD can improve with medical therapies.

Question:  How have you been able to humanize and forgive your bully?  Please tell me your story.

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When to Push – Melancholia

Edgar Degas- Melancholy

Effie came to me with many melancholic symptoms.

Melancholia is an interesting word.  It comes from the Greek word for black bile, which is where people used to think sadness came from.  The word melan is familiar to us in words we use today, such as melanin, melanocytes, or melatonin.  All of these having something to do with darkness.

Effie had been feeling dark inside, like a black cloud was hanging over her.  Effie had so many “good” reasons to feel melancholic, as if reasons were needed.  She hurt.  She had other physical problems.  She lost her employment.  She was estranged from her family.  Isolated.

I asked her what she did every day.

Just sit there sometimes.  I just sit there and think about all this stuff.

This wasn’t my first visit with Effie.  We’d worked together for years.  Some of what she was going through, along with the biology, were her psychosocial stressors and learned negative coping skills to stress.  We had been working on these together for a long time but, beyond medications and sleep, Effie had a lot of difficulty working with her directives:

  1. Medication including supplements
  2. Sleep
  3. Connection – groups, church, internet, etc…
  4. Exercise
  5. Lose forty-five pounds to decrease multiple comorbid illnesses she was suffering from.  These comorbid problems secondary to her obesity looped back and worsened her mood.  It was like a brick in her pocket taking her down to the bottom of the sea.

Effie said,

I don’t want to do anything.  I just want to be me.  It doesn’t matter if that is good for me or not.  It just matters that it is who I am now.

Thanks to our work here at FriendtoYourself.com, I felt empowered to pull out the self-care tools and share.

Effie, you need to go to groups.  You need to connect.  If your child told you that she didn’t want to take out the trash because she didn’t feel like it, what would you say?  Maybe, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way.  You still have to do your work!’  Are you going to wait until she wants to?  Do you tell her to just be herself, that it is ok?  Is that nice if you do that?  No.  It is not nice.

Effie explained that she only came to see me because I was the only one who understood her.  She didn’t want to talk to anyone else.  Of course that is flattering but I admit, however reluctantly, that I am not that good.  There are other people out there who know what she’s going through and she’s not meeting them because of her choice to isolate.

Now folks, this is not to say that when someone is depressed, that we should tell them to bucker up and get on with it.  Nor should we say that they are being childish.  We all need to be very very very careful about that.  It’s ignorant and hurtful.  In Effie’s case, however, because I knew her so well, I pushed her a little harder than I had been.  I wasn’t saying she was being childish, so much as I was telling her that she needed to do what was good for her, rather than what she wanted.

Effie wasn’t having fun either way, groups or no groups.  And although medications had helped, they hadn’t helped enough.  As we had seen each other at least once a month, if not more, for about thirty months for this most recent depressive episode, I was as clear as I could be on what had been tried and what hadn’t.  I would not do this in anyone who didn’t have this constellation of factors.  So, I pushed Effie to do something she hadn’t done yet.

Also, we hadn’t spent enough time on the primitive coping skills Effie was using.  What I told her this day was more directed towards getting her away from those.

Being a friend to ourselves isn’t always doing what we want.  It is being better to ourselves at least than our enemies.  I don’t know many people I would allow to speak to me, the way Effie was speaking to herself.  We talked about allying ourselves with the bits inside of us that were going in a direction to benefit, and not hurt.  Not collaborating with the parts of us that would further harm us, no.  This part we would name together out loud and drive forward to it deliberately.  We would see together what happens.

All the while, we are still continuing to work with medications and other therapies directed at Effie’s biology.  However, I believe we need to do more. When to introduce different therapies differs depending on the needs and abilities of the individual.  This is how it went for Effie.

Questions:  When have you done something you specifically didn’t want to do, but knew it was friendly to yourself?  How did it turn out and was it friendly after all?  Please tell us your story.

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Just Ordinary Bullying – The Bully and The Bullied

Physical bullying at school, as depicted in th...

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Self-Care Tip #251 – Help yourself break it down if you think you are a bully, or are bullied.

I was just bullied, folks.  I know.  Takes a certain someone to bully me but that person and the bullying materialized and I was left with my autonomics all barking, pupils dilated, and I had to break it down.  I was bullied.

Now, after some time and a good wonderful chat with my beloved, I am able to experience the pleasure of joining the popular group of bullied-adults.  It seems to be a posh crowd now who acknowledges that adults are in fact bullied – not only kids.

What is bullying?  I’ve linked this blog-post to various web-articles that have stated this question and answered it well.  The part I would like to highlight is the emotional bullying.

When we perceive either consciously or subconsciously that we are:

  1. Afraid
  2. Powerless
  3. Receiving implied threats (direct are obvious to us readers but the implied threats are not always as clear to us readers or others out there)
  4. Supposed to stay quite about it

Does any of this sound familiar?  If it does, you  might have read the blog-post, “He’s Never Hit Me.”  Much is the same.  I’m not able to say all that is different between emotional abuse and bullying as I don’t know of any formal scientific way of separating them.  However I will propose that emotional abuse is when it is repeated and includes system issues including the victim feeling shame and deserving of that treatment.  Bullying perhaps may not be repeated or it may and it might not be done to someone who is in a relationship with the bully before it happened.  (This is just Me, Dr. Q saying this though.  Just today in my research I have already found other sources describing it differently.)

Regardless though, what to do?!  I was bullied!

Break it down:

  1. Go to the fear.  Think about where it is coming from.
  2. Think about the power.  “Why am I feeling powerless?”
  3. Clarify the threat perceived.  We don’t have to do this collaboratively with the bully – who may after all, lack all ability to gain insight for whatever reason.
  4. Get it out of the closet as soon as you can.  Talk about it with someone.  Go to any authority who might have information to empower you.  If the bullied is doing something that is wrong, we want to know!  Right?!  If not, we want to know that too, and be as clear about it as we can.  This also helps gather an “army” around you… or you could call it support :).

Andy Becker from the Leadership Post says,

It’s not enough to say bullying is not tolerated; we need to empower ordinary adults to help stop it.

Well today, I guess I’m an ordinary person getting ordinary bullying.  The bullying isn’t special.  The way it affected me isn’t that special either.  But I am.

Similarly, the bully isn’t being served well acting out.  It’s not friendly to either of us.  We are both ordinary special people who deserve better.

Questions:  What has helped you when you felt bullied?  …or, …What has helped you stop bullying?  Please tell me your story.

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Choose The Learning and The Teaching You do, and That is Done To You: Patient-Doctor relationship

I'll Give You All I Can...

Self-Care Tip – Choose the learning and the teaching you do, and not be passive to it, when in your patient-doctor relationship.

Hearing a physician tell us when we can and cannot take medications is somewhat private.  In our culture in our “advanced” and liberated age it isn’t so easy to feel handled like that.  But feeling handled verses helped is our choice.  It is all the more reason to dig in our fears and see what scares us.  If what we find there is that our fear is playing into keeping us from receiving this information, and decide actively if that is really in our best interest.  Emotion has it’s own activity, different from a muscle in our arm.  When we respond to the emotion, and especially if we respond before we do this kind of digging into the fear, we might not actually be doing protective behavior, like our fear would have us believe.

We have talked a bit in previous blog-posts about the patient-doctor relationship being a team effort.  It quickly became apparent that some of us don’t perceive that we have the luxury of working with a physician who see’s their patient as a person to learn from and influence their treatment decisions.  But it is still important to know that this exchange is critical for us and then to let that knowledge progress to a wanting in us to have this dynamic relationship with our physician.  The knowledge and the wanting will have their way in us and in our communities subsequently.  We do not know how long that will take but it will happen.

The marvelous scientist, Deb Roy, from MIT talked about his research on language development.  It was of course extremely endearing as it began with his work with his own infant baby and hooked us both by the intimacy of it and the marvelous discoveries.  Then after we were oohing and ah’ing (most appropriately because this is AWESOME stuff!) he moved us into our cities and media and showed us with his data and eloquence that in order for learning to happen, the professor and the student, the sales rep and the client, the physician and the patient, the parent and the child, both learn and teach simultaneously.  Whether it is subconscious or conscious.  The baby teaches the parent to teach him better and the parent learns this from the baby.   The physician teaches the patient and the patient teaches the physician to teach him better.

Both roles of instructor and student you see requires humility to learn and teach.  They both push into private spaces of the other.  Without consent, either conscious consent or subconscious consent must be there, it will not happen.  So this is consensual, even when we do not realize it.

Now what do you think the friendly thing is for us to do for ourselves, considering this growth in our knowledge?

Of course.  We will be more effective if we embrace this knowingly, willingly, humbly.  Move this learning process from the subconscious to the conscious level.  Make it as deliberate as possible.  For both physician and patient, this is good self-care.  Accept that when we engage in a patient-doctor relationship, we are giving that other person admittance, by our will and choice, admittance to that private space inside of us and not feel the victim when they enter.

Questions:  How has feeling like a victim sabotaged your patient-doctor relationship?  How have you worked past it in a positive way for both of you?  Please tell me your story.

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