The mirror is so honest. I see that as we age, things don’t stay within the lines like they should.

Lipstick, red, is creeping toward my chin. Eyebrow hair is waving, like tentacles searching for krill, over the rim of my eyeglasses. And my skin—well, in all the visible and hidden parts of my body, no one can put that back where it came from.

The frame for my canvas is less effective, and the picture shows paints are drifting.

I’m just sitting in “it” and thought—why should my thoughts not wander too, toward you?

But this untidy body is like a name tag, or like a forward to a book, or a flag that waves before we race. This is an introduction, or it can be a goodbye, this body casement. But it is not the story.

The story that breathlessly tells about me—my DNA, is a fingerprint of my ancestors and Creator. And if you look, you may not know my choices, or my sins, forgiven, or senses exchanging information between me and all that other, like the orange oriole last night who flew fast, singing over the deck I vespered at, “It is spring.” And I saw him. And because of that color, the sound, the proximity, so close to me!, The story is wide, not curated. And because my great great grandfather was someone who got energy from being with people, and because I was born fourth to my three older brothers, because I was in clinic with amazing patients all week, and ten bombs dropped on Lebanon a few weeks ago, and because, because, well because of you too, there’s a lot of story here.

When I was nineteen, or twenty-eight, or even many more years later, and before “The Great Drift” (said in a mic’d James Earl Jones deep bass voice with acoustics), I think the carapace might have been my focus much of the time. But focus or no, our humanity is rich, a tasty filo layered baklava, and more than “Me.” Our humanity is increased always because there is a “You.”

Today, three of our youth gave their testimonies in church. The title was “If these pews could talk, they would say…”

I am lonely,

I am struggling and nobody knows,

and I don’t know.

And by the end of their testimony, they each ended with, “If these pews could talk, they’d say…”

God is with me,

there are people struggling and nobody knows it … but God,

and God gave me purpose.

These three youth, normal eyebrows, lip lines intact, dewy skin, went in deep. The mirror can name the drift. But it cannot name the meaning. It cannot tell me that I belong to you, or that you, somehow, are part of me. It cannot hold the sound of an oriole, or the weight of a testimony, or the quiet way a room full of people says, without saying it—

You are not alone.

And maybe that is it, as the lines blur outside the edges—the body may wander, but the story keeps gathering. And it gathers, toward each other and God.

Question:
What part of “Me” are you mistaking for the whole story right now?

Self-care tip:
Remember your story isn’t only in the mirror. Keep on.

Hello wonderful readers. I’ve been getting some heat re: straying from my original premise of in fact being a “Friend to Yourself” from a biopsychosocial standpoint, and what does “Me” mean? I’ll just review a bit. Let me know what you think, and where I need to flush things out more.

Being a friend to yourself is more than getting a manicure every now and then, or taking the time to go shopping or watch movies, or doing what seems “fun.” In fact, being a friend to yourself often means not doing what you want to do.

That is because being a friend to yourself means taking accountability for yourself—your own happiness, your own health, your own spirituality, and your own connections to the outside world. It means acknowledging that “everything starts and ends with Me.” It means acknowledging that you are not a victim, even though you may have been victimized, hurt, misused, or forgotten.

However, responsibility doesn’t equal blame! Being victimized and being responsible can coexist. “Me” is where care happens.

We know that cash doesn’t just magically appear in our wallets unless we do something to put it there. So why do we keep waiting for our personal assets to replenish themselves? Imagine this person’s personal wallet is empty, and everyone around them is suffering the consequences. This person is so burnt out at their job that they are getting written up and in danger of getting fired. They go home and isolate in their room and never exercise. Fast food wrappers litter the floors. They never really talk to their friends or kids.

For most of us, learning to be friends to ourselves is the hardest work we ever do—and also the most important.

It’s up to us to each fill our own wallets by taking care of ourselves and taking responsibility for our own assets. That’s tangible bank. That’s what being a friend to yourself is all about.

You cannot give what you do not have.

Being a friend to yourself means caring for your body as well as your soul, and understanding that meeting—or ignoring—basic physical needs can lead to complex outcomes.

When we make ourselves a priority, we may appear to give less, but we actually have more for those we love. Just like any bank, we must deposit more than we withdraw if we’re going to protect our basic assets. And our bodies are the most important, irreplaceable assets that we’ve been given.

The choice of how to spend our assets is our own. We are free to choose self-care, or not. But when we choose to be friends to ourselves, we don’t need a mother, a police officer, or the government to strong-arm us to do what’s best, because we want, at least at an intellectual level, to take care of ourselves.

You are a complex person with many intersecting paradigms, including your general physical health and biology, genetic predispositions, coping skills, what you do to your body, what is done to your body (such as physical trauma), emotional triggers, and spirituality.

And that is the ‘Me’ I am talking about.

Self-care is not about doing what you want otherwise. It is about giving yourself what you need.

Self-care tip:
Start with one non-negotiable need your body or mind has today, and meet it before giving your energy away.

Question to reader:
What is one need your “Me” has been asking for that you’ve been ignoring?

Please Speak! Everyone needs to hear you. Keep on!

Talk therapy was upside down.

Rachel was there for the 1st time in pants. Nice pants, but still pants. She had always come, to date, dressed to the nines. Christian Louboutin red bottom pumps, Chanel suit—she was the classic OC therapist. Going into her office was a place that was so put together that one so unput-together, such as Missy, could paradoxically find space. A tidy mess, walking through like Charlie Brown’s “Pig-Pen,” with a cloud of dust floating around her, Missy would descend with her problems and float out with them one hour later.

Today though, Rachel was wearing a distress call—pants! All was not right. They spoke for her.

“What’s wrong?” Missy immediately asked.

It was like opening the hoarder’s closet door. An avalanche of woes fell out. And all of a sudden, Missy didn’t remember why she came to therapy that day. She was taken in by Rachel’s suffering. This many years later, when Missy told me the story, she didn’t remember the list of sorrows except one. Rachel’s 14 y/o cat was dying. She was, in fact, what palliative care practitioners refer to as “actively dying,” the last bit of life before the end, that can be, if not handled well, quite miserable to all, including the caregivers.

Rachel was miserable. She knew her beloved cat was miserable. Missy, a veteran ICU nurse, knew immediately what needed to be done and, by the end of the hour, had arranged for Rachel’s cat to have an at-home hospice provider come that same day and give what was needed. End-of-life is end-of-life. Rachel just could not make the call. She was so broken up with grief. And so, the therapist became the patient.

By the end of that hour, Missy relayed that she remembers feeling so well inside, so blessed, and that she was able to be outside of her “mess.” Helping someone relieved some of Missy’s own life pain.

What happened here illustrates something we see clinically. Here, in our blog narrative, I am going to make a writer’s prerogative and jump way over to the neurobiological framework of things. You’ve heard me talk about it enough to know where I’m going. I am reminded that when we have negative thoughts, one of the best ways of dealing with them is to FIRST (because I’m a psychiatrist and know that all emotions and behaviors come from the brain, and to be responsible with that means to be responsible with brain health) make sure you address the biology. Where do these negative thoughts come from? The brain.

But ALSO, because we are layered creatures, consisting of the biopsychosocial complexity of our human condition, good coping skills never go awry. In this case between Rachel and Missy, the adage that bringing more than you take is its own kind of self-care is true.

That by serving others, we in fact serve ourselves, by improving the myelin pathways on our reward circuitry. That as we love, love, love, here at “FriendToYourself.com,” everything starts and ends with Me! Yes!

In fact, by giving to others, we have less negative thoughts. By serving others, we are somehow able to, as all good CBT demonstrates, lay down some neuronal myelin in a better pathway—a more friendly brain pathway to Me. The idea that everything starts and ends with Me, scrambled together with the idea of serving others brings self-benefit, can feel contradictory, but it is not. Serving others is actually a pathway back to self-regulation.

Taking this one step further, for extra credit, would be to acknowledge that one’s agenda for helping others, in that it is also helping “Me,” is not a flaw of design. Agendas, being what they are in our human condition, and altruism a God-feature, not our own, taking care of Me is not a moral issue. It is just good self-care.

Self-care tip: When you feel those negative thoughts encroaching, help someone else.

Question for the reader: When was the last time helping someone else actually helped you? And how did it help you?

Hello Community! Every year on or around Good Friday, I try to post something about my Dad, who died in 2020 on Good Friday.

Today, I’m remembering working in the garden with him. When Dad came home from work, smelling of sandwich meats stuffed in his sport coat pockets and operating room sweat, I’d feel like my inside pieces realigned. He’d drive up, speeding to a sudden stop in the long driveway. His seat was fully back, and his knees were still just shy of knocking the dashboard—news or sports blaring on the AM radio. He’d come through the door whistling, always whistling. I’d sense him if I didn’t hear him and spring out to his location like our dog Cleo. We’d go straight to the garden most days—him whistling, and me jabbering. Somehow, I felt heard even though he whistled most of the time or hummed. He would move water lines, squish snails (“I have a personal fight with snails. It’s just between me and them.” i.e., no poisons, just shoes and thumb-to-forefinger), and pick fruit, marveling at the sweetness of the bird-pecked figs and sapote. He was patient with life, including me, even though he was always active—a character, a treasure.

Now, in my 50s, I look back on my own children and wonder what they’d say about their own memories growing up. And I have to stop myself from one thought trail or another, because it’s comparisons again, and those aren’t good for anyone. I objectively was never this gentle giant who my dad was to me. But, One, this is not the same as remembering. And Two, acknowledging with transparency, my own shortcomings that inevitably burble to the surface is not the same harmful exercise that comparisons is. Last night, reading the “blessings” that Jacob gave to his 12 sons when Jacob was dying was kind of like that—with transparency, but also with presence, he blessed. He named their mistakes and flaws within the safety of what only a parent’s large grasp can hold, and that in itself was its own kind of blessing. “I see you.” It was not a gloss-over blessing, superficial and averting the gaze. It was eyes open, seeing, and still holding. The shortcomings we live into the lives of our loved ones, inevitably human—we either remain, or we escape into a type of transactional exchange: “This is what I give you, and as long as you give me this back, I’ll remain. If you misbehave, I’ll not.”

So, as I remember my sweet Dad, I remember also my own flawed parenting, and I remember that I am, One, forgiven. Two, so grateful for Dad and my children, and I’m leaning in, in my 50s. Still here. Valued not by performance, but by more than metrics.

I remember once, when my dad was not well, he took the keys when I asked him not to. Dad drove away to go wrap his car around a pole, break his neck, and drag all of us through the sequelae. In that moment there was no calculation, just a pull toward him. What I remember then, like Jacob blessing his 12 horribly behaved sons, was that while seeing the blood all over his beat-up body and his car split in two, I loved Dad so much and wanted him, any way he came. The good and the bad together, inevitably human. Extraordinarily forgiven. Like me. Like you.

Self-care tip: Stay present with what is in front of you today, without measuring it against anything else.

Question: How are you being seen and held in safe transparency?