Coping skills

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The Price of Manure

In yesterday’s post I asked “What has happened in the space between you and the ones you love?”  A reader responded,

Think of being loved but not being able to be touched. …Rituals above spontaneity. Of having Lysol applied to everything you touch. Lysol applied to children’s legs and shoes. Not being able to hug your kids after work until after a bath and your inside-clothes on. The tirades. Most things literal and not humorous. Any cabinet or freezer needing to be as stuffed as possible.
As a young person it seemed very personal and hurtful. …All the lost years….  After all those years now on the mend.

It doesn’t matter how old we are, it takes courage to live.  There are many astounding parts of this story, but today I draw attention to “the lost years.”

I don’t know if any of you readers saw the episode last week from the musical comedy, Glee.  It irreverently tossed together a potato salad of high impact emotions.  (Delicious potato salad!)  The best part was as usual the great Jane Lynch.  That woman is brilliant.  She shows us anger, resentment, and personalization through spitting words.  She contrasts this against her thick velvet love for her older disabled sister. Sue Sylvester (Lynch’s on-screen character) has festered the insults she absorbed on her sister’s behalf, ever since she first realized her sister was different.  It was only until her sister, with a still-waters affect told Sue that she didn’t care what others said about her.  Her disabled sister was whole inside.  Sue started to heal too.

Being present with our dark history, can summarily be our gain.  Especially if in the end we found love, became connected with our journey and with others, and forgave.  It becomes rather an education of sorts.

When I was struggling with my ambivalence about vocational choices, my dad told me, “Education is never a loss.”  I plunged forward with that as a talisman.  

Education is never a loss.  Even our school of suffering?  Look at it as a currency of sorts.  It’s all perspective.  Even manure helps you know.  We had to pay $100 the other day for a truckload of chicken-poo for our farm trees.

Self Care Tip #73 – Find the value in your suffering.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  Do you agree or not?  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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What’s Happening in Your Space?

Almost finished a triathlon today.  If it wasn’t for that chafing because I forgot my biking shorts, I think I would have.  I was wearing surfer shorts.  I will never poke at people who whine about chafing.  They’re right!  It hurts!  Enough for me to cut my run in half twice.  And I walked.   People I saw afterward kept saying “At least you finished!”  I felt like I had to confess but then I’d want to explain so I left it all out which I know in itself is a little lie if there is any such thing as a little lie, so I’m atoning by confessing to you.  There.  (Breath.)

The truth is, even though I cut across lawn, and walked the cross walk, and broke all sorts of athlete-codes of honor, I had such a wonderful time.  With all my abbreviating, I caught up with my brother, Vance Johnson, and his 10% body fat.  He’s always been sensitive, so he kindly slowed to walk me down the last stretch.  We don’t get to spend enough time together and even a few moments like that are golden!  We were laughing and strolling and probably looking too pleased to be appropriate for the last 40 yards of a long race.  So, of course it took us both a few extra seconds to realize what the woman had yelled as her large frame thundered by.  “If you aren’t going to race, get off the road!”  It was extra shocking because it was like a parallel universe suddenly collided ours.  We were happy.  I with my swollen inner thigh, and Vance with his little sister as audience.  It was over-cast, perfect weather for the day.  The beach was a few yards to our right.  Everything else was San Diego green.  Then, Pow!  “Get off the road!”

At first, I was ticked.  “Listen …,” I said in my mind.  Not nice.  But then I saw my brother.  How could I be angry?

There were many scenarios of this woman’s life that a carousel flashed on the screen in my mind.  Maybe none of them were true. Maybe she was simply an avid committed athlete who found us people soiling her turf.  Whatever the situation was, she was finishing the race and looked like she’d done well for her potential.  She hadn’t cut lawn and street.  She wasn’t walking.  She was running or galloping or something.  But she wasn’t happy about any of it.  Looking back, she might see us as the reason her mood soured.  Regardless the reason or the date and time of onset, she was sour.

It was only a few moments really that my thoughts stayed on her.  Vance had moved on to another subject and I didn’t want to miss it.  Reflecting now though, of course I’m struck by the perspective of success and failure.  A race is a perfect stage for demonstrating something with a beginning, middle and ending.  Sounds like a shortened version of life.

I’m not sure who first said that there is only one beginning and one ending to life.  “It’s the journey that matters.”  Probably God.  Someone who is timeless and infinite would get that.  Today He blessed us with that.  I can’t count on myself to have it the next time.  God knows I’ve been the one screaming something like, “Get off the road!” enough times before.  But next time, I hope I remember what God gave Vance and me today.  I hope I will succeed as happily as I did today when I lost the race.

Self Care Tip #65 – Get into the in-between spaces in your life and go for the joy!  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What have you been finding in your own space?  What do you think?

If you’d like to read more blog posts on the journey, read here.

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Get Treatment to Move On – Addictions

Molested by his cousin, neglected by his parents, he watched his intoxicated father beat his mother.  Thinking she would die too many times, he ran away, returned in a police car over and over again, as if wanting to get away was a crime.  He came back and raped his neighbor, more than once.  He spent a lot of time trying to get sex even though he knew it was ruining him and others.  He lost interest in almost everything else.  He suffered uncontrollable impulses.

He was 18 years old when he left it all for the safety of prison.  During the next fifteen-some years he was diagnosed, treated, and kept.  But kept for what?  For eating.  He gained weight, until he needed 2 seats to sit in.  Eating became his preoccupation.  He didn’t have sex.  He had food.

He was released to a home for sexual offenders, put on a diet and lost weight.  He lost it big and fast and felt in control.  He started purging and not finishing his meals.  He thought about purging all the time.  He knew he shouldn’t do it.  His voice was changing, raspy and his throat hurt but he still purged.  He wasn’t having sex.  He wasn’t over-eating.  He was purging.

For whatever reason, no one had yet seen the pattern.  Mostly everyone saw sex offender.  Me included.  I was trying.  I was trying to treat him with empathy, trying to get past the bile that comes when I think of rape, trying to consider the courageous things this man was doing now in life.

In one of my favorite scenes from the film, Rachel Getting Married, Kim played by Anne Hathaway argues with her sister about her own chances to have a future:

Rachel: Kym, you took Ethan for granted. Okay? You were high for his life. You were not present. Okay? You were high.
Kym: [Whispering] Yes.
Rachel: And you drove him off a bridge… and now he’s dead….
Kym: Yes, I was. Yes, I was stoned out of my mind. Who do I have to be now? I mean, I could be Mother Teresa and it wouldn’t make a difference, what I did. Did I sacrifice every bit of… love I’m allowed for this life because I killed our little brother?

I thought of this and somehow through all that trying, I did. And because I could empathize, a space opened up for me to be more objective.  That’s when I saw it.  I saw the pattern.

Addictions migrate.  Someone who may have started out as a food addict, might turn to gambling, and then later to alcohol.  Someone with sex addiction, might turn to food and then later to purging.

It can be like that game I used to play at Chucky Cheese, trying to hammer down the little animals that pop out of holes.  We need to treat the disease of Addiction regardless of how it’s dressed, or else it will keep popping up.  And like Kym, if we do, although perhaps terribly wrong in some unchangeable ways, we will still have a future.  If you’d like to read more about this “kainos” (Greek word for the opportunity to be made new,) read the post New versus New.

Self Care Tip #62 – Get treatment to move on.  Be a friend to yourself.

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

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Claim Your Brain

My mind, like rusted gears, was not moving well.  It hadn’t been really since my 1st pregnancy 8 years ago.  There are few things that dumb us down as much as pregnancy and children!   Hormone changes, lack of sleep, fluctuating from 145-200-145 pounds three times, and then the subsequent growing beloveds around me to contribute to mental dissociation.  Simple sensory overload from talking, yelling, crying, petitioning, inquiring kids factors in.  You may read more about sensory issues here.

Daily writing, like a staunch governess, found my brain under cobwebs, bug carcasses, and musty stench.  (Hello old friend!  There you are!)  This helps to explain the joy gripping my hand, like girlfriends on the playground, when I sit down to write!  The world is active to me, including rather than excluding me. My in-between moments used to hang like an old woman’s breasts.   Now much more time full of nourishing thoughts bless me.  I am in awe.

My patient came in sighing deeply.  He wasn’t better.  No, he said.  He lacked motivation and interest and connection from the world.  He felt selected out to suffer.  A dumping ground for misfortune and misunderstood.  Efforts through medication, after medication changes were like looking for love in all the wrong places.

We talked about cognitive distortions, tapping into things that used to make him happy, road-blocks in poorly designed neurological grooves – volunteering at the library or animal shelter, journaling, sharing his life story with others, exploring his spirituality.  No.  No good.  Nor could he consider psychotherapy as he’d been through too much of it already to consider it again.  And he just couldn’t get interested in groups such as through NAMI.

His brain, assaulted by stressors, disease, and disuse was growing silent.

Being a friend means yelling, fighting to reclaim your journey, finding something to connect you to your process of life.  My patient was letting squatters take his property simply by being absent.

Self Care Tip #60 – Claim your right to health.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What has helped you connect with your own journey in life?  What do you think?  Please tell me your story.

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Your flawed self

My niece is sitting beside me and I can barely keep my hands off of her 5 month self.  I am eating a blueberry scone slowly.  She, with her tummy-full of breast milk, is watching every bite, a faint smile on her pink face.  I’m a little afraid she’s learning to eat carbohydrates from me and I want to tell her that I can’t remember the last time I ate one of these.  I start eating faster and turn away so I don’t imprint this on her supple myelinating neurons.

We closet eat, closet smoke, closet shop, closet sex, closet what we want to protect others from but what we independently are strong enough to handle …or not.  There is a term called “self-sabotaging behavior.”  Reducing this, we find that the process of closeting is in fact the handle on the door to that mal-behavior.  Keeping it real is the same as saying get it out of the closet.

My mentor and brother, Cameron Johnson used to say, “Go where the pain or fear is and it will lose control over you.”  People who work the 12-Steps call this “Rigorous Honesty.”  It is a pealing away of all pretense with yourself.

Avoiding rigorous honesty turns into self-sabotage.  We end up cutting ourselves down at the knees.  Anxiety uses fear to make us hide.  In cases that include emotional illness, of course medication will help our work toward honesty.

It is not about whether we hide our bad sides or not – we do.  It is about trying to keep it real.  The only thing to be ashamed about, if we must, is not trying.

So to my niece, I give her my flawed self and when the time(s) come, I will accept hers as well.

Self Care Tip #45 – Show the world your flawed self.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  How have you experienced the freedom that comes from going toward the fear?  Please tell us your story.

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Get to Know Yourself to Be A Friend to Yourself.

On the Threshold of Eternity

Image via Wikipedia

Let us put our efforts toward becoming who we can become, who we were wired to be, who we want to be, what gives us pleasure.

We can get beaten up by wanting.  Wanting to be someone who gets energy from being with people rather than from being alone.  Wanting to be someone who is a finisher rather than grazer.  Wanting to blend and lead and be chosen.

Some of this filters out as we age.  Aging fills our lives up with so many responsibilities that wanting to be anything more than someone who gets solid sleep hasn’t crossed our minds in a very long time.  Children get more of it right than us in this regard.  They have space to want more openly.  Our wanting muffles and cramps when we turn away from who we were genetically designed to be.

My patient came in depressed again.  Depression was familiar for him.  A psychiatrist works with a specific area of medicine.  So I get to see people after multiple medication trials before their primary physician refers them to me.  Well this patient hadn’t found lasting help from medications. He came to me with doubt.  I wish I could say we worked it out.  I can say that we are still trying.

What we are working on influences the way his genes express themselves.  We can’t change the genes but we can affect some of how and when they are activated.   We can do this by choices, such as medication therapy, sleep hygiene and exercise.  Choices are more effective when we know what and who we were wired to be.  What are our natural talents?  What are we interested in?  Feeling inner congruence when we are doing something points the way for this.

In Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell says

“the biggest misconception about success is that we do it solely on our smarts, ambition, hustle and hard work.”

I don’t know if Mr. Gladwell recognized how closely his thoughts harmonized with Carl Jung‘s regarding temperaments.  Doing what is natural for us recruits our best through the path of least resistance – our interest, our attention, our creativity.  Rather than forced effort, drudgery and dragging feet, time looses some heaviness as we get caught up in inner and outer congruence.

Intuitively, we all surmise that when this happens, we have less stress inside and outside of us.  Ah.  What a relief.  This is what my patient is working on and when he is able to say he is doing what he wants to in life, he is less hopeless and panicked.

Self Care Tip #40 – Get to know yourself to be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What do you think?  Have you been using these tools?  Have they made a difference for you?

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Enjoy Life.

This morning my children have a wanting that seems to draw energy from lithium batteries.  They are creative in their persistence and for that I suppose I should congratulate someone.  When they are all petitioning, they find harmonics I never knew existed.  What to do?

It’s like stacking blocks.  All the blocks on top depend on their base.  Oh the lessons we can learn from our children’s toys!  There is the swing that pivots from the hinge.  The potential energy in a ball turned active only by the hand that throws it.  The, …well, we get it.  Our kids need us, parents and care-givers, in good working order, dependable, secure and safe.

Further, we show them by example.  It is not about getting more of what we want, but by pleasuring in what we have.  Such as 3 kids that scream a lot and demand for more, shouldn’t turn my subconscious into wanting a 4th fantasy child who looks like me but doesn’t holler as much.  Right?  Er…

So what do we do?  Take care of ourselves.  Appreciate what we have.  Live by example.  Get taught by circumstance.  Choose and then choose and keep on choosing what we chose to appreciate, live, and learn again.

The Gallup Organization has done many sociological studies on happiness.  In one Gallup World Poll more than 136,000 people in 132 countries were surveyed in 2005-2006.  To measure this, they used questions about emotions, perceived respect, family and friends to count on, and freedom to choose their daily activities, learn new things or do what they do best.  (By the way these are questions worth asking ourselves too.)

As Quoted in Bloomberg Businessweek about the results from this study,

The public always wonders: Does money make you happy? This study shows that it all depends on how you define happiness because, if you

look at life satisfaction, how you evaluate your life as a whole, you see a pretty strong correlation around the world between income and happiness… On the other hand, it’s pretty shocking how small the correlation is with positive feelings and enjoying yourself.

This was the first study to differentiate between life satisfaction and day-to-day positive or negative feelings that people experience.  Getting richer may not be the only thing we can do to enjoy life.

This prompts us to understand our own agendas. (A discussion for another blog-post.)

But how do we take care of ourselves?  Per the positive psychology movement, founded in part by Martin E.P. Seligman, PhD – do things that build self-confidence, strengthen character and develop interpersonal skills.

Well that’s a lot to process for today folks ;).  I’ll shut it down for now.  But before you go…

Question!  What do you think?  Does any of this stand out for you in your life?

Self Care Tip #39 – Do things that build self-confidence, strengthen character and interpersonal skills.  Be a friend to yourself.

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Choose Your Prophesy

A woman today with a frank quick smile found out I wrote FriendtoYourself.com.  She swung open the door to her story.  People like her never bore me.  In brief, she was sad after many life losses.  Then when she made some changes in her life she got better.  “I didn’t know how bad I felt!”  (And who does?)  Now every day has activity she loves.  She gets tearful just telling me about all the gratitude that took her by surprise.

In psychiatry, the way she felt when she was sad is called an Adjustment Reaction.  An Adjustment Reaction doesn’t last long, it is in response to stress, and it goes away when the stressor is removed.

Stress is dangerous to us.  It can affect us for different amounts of time, like measuring cups.  During that time, it can affect us to different depths within ourselves, like a scuba diver exploring a coral reef.  If the sad time in this woman’s life went longer, and if she had gotten more sick, it might have become a Major Depressive Episode.  In that case, medication therapy would be appropriate.

Stress affects different intersecting paradigms that make us into who we are, like storm water over farmland.  It crosses over our biology, our genes, what is done to us in life, what we do to ourselves, what is put in our bodies, and how we cope.

Stress can pass over us like a Jewish holiday or it can stay, working, changing, reshaping, adding and taking away bits, always active and busy.  Ants in the walls of our house.  Most often we don’t know what it is doing, for how long, or where it is at work in us.  Stress mutates our cells, turns sleeping genes into loud cancer, depression, anxiety, heart attacks, dementia, old and wasted faces.

But what to do?  Do we avoid stress?  Do we end it?  Do we cure it?  All of that, of course.  My dad told me, “Everyone has problems.  The difference between you and somebody else, is what you do with your problems.”  Not the number of them.

No.  This woman’s story didn’t bore me at all.  The opposite does.

In the film directed by Adam Shankman, “Bedtime Stories,” the character played by Adam Sandler thinks choices have little effect on inevitable negative outcomes. “Life has no happy endings.”  He lives consistent with that belief, until love finds him.  A happy life story can be chosen.  His fantasies are freed to cross the boundary from imagination into the material world where love was waiting, in the shape of family and strangers.  Love showed him that his life had been a self-fulfilling prophecy.  He hadn’t even realized how unhappy he was.  (And who does?)

Self Care Tip #38 – Choose to go towards your fantasies.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What do you think?  What is 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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Own It. Our Life’s Work.

We can control what others do about as much as we can control the Democratic government.

My patient asked me if her medications were changing who she was.  After asking her more about where that came from, she disclosed that her husband was blaming her medications for the emotional distance between.  He was not blaming his daily alcohol intake nor that he see’s her as “The Patient” and not himself.  This is after she has spent years investing in herself through medications, some counseling, and regular exercise.  This woman had courage.  Yet she still bought into what her husband was telling her.

We personalize things that have very little to do with us.  Sometimes we know we’re doing it, but more often we don’t.  In this woman’s case, I had to think, how much of this was about her versus the accuser, i.e. husband.  We came to understand together that either way, true or not, the only person in her relationship she could better, is that same person she’s been attending to so well for so long.  In the end we were talking about going to CoDA, Al-Anon, or local support groups through NAMI.  She focussed on herself, excited about her opportunities to grow some more.  She wasn’t thinking so much about her husband getting passed up by his own opportunities.  Nor about the accusations.

Talking to a friend who recently shed 15 unwanted pounds, we did a celebration whoop!  She wasn’t perseverating on her husband who was smoking again. She was hurt by it, but used the energy in that emotion to motivate change in her own life.  Who knows.  Maybe her husband will grow from wanting what he see’s in her.  Courage, self-respect, inner congruence, hope, and so many more great things that come when you fight hard for your precious self.

Not taking things personally though can be much easier said than done.  If you try over and over but see that it continues to get the best of you, consider getting an opinion from someone you trust.  Get a “third-party” opinion to bounce your perspectives from.  Maybe this is something biological and medical as well. Personalization is a familiar problem in medical illnesses such as Affective Spectrum Disorders or Anxiety Spectrum Disorders.

Self Care Tip #35 – Own it.  Be a friend to yourself.

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

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An Honorable Goal

“I feel things I had no capacity to feel before!  I can’t believe how much better life is for me.”  She was 2 months into medication therapy and she felt like she was back to whom she wanted to be.  Who she thought she really was.

Before medications, she was “making it.”  Although she was irritable, easily activated by simple triggers, edgy, she was mostly not acting on it. Making it to the end of the day every day was a victory.  Now she realized that if someone told her the difference before treatment began, she would have never believed them.  She hadn’t perceived how rough things were for her.  Now that she knew, she felt joy and sadness.

Getting well is never all good.  There is the daily reminder that you need help.  Every time you take a pill, you have to argue down all the reasons not to.  Sometimes that argument doesn’t last long.  Sometimes you spend more time than any one looking at you would guess.

The justifications for medication don’t only come from ourselves.  We have others “in the know” saying how much better we are.  Or what ever their opinion is.

Some of us are entirely on our own.  Hiding our pills so we don’t have to hear it.  When something goes wrong, the pills are to blame.  It reminds me of menarche and listening to the boys saying empathic things like, “She must be on the rag!” Things said about us when we behave or feel in a way others don’t think we should, can be just as humiliating.

Is there anything that draws more public opinion than behavior?  Being your own advocate may be easier said than done.  However, difficult as it is, it has to be done.  It starts with “me.”  If I don’t fight for my own self, choose for my own self, …well, it results in so many things.

What is surprising is how things look so different once we do take action.  Sticks and stones make more sense.  We have the confidence that inevitably comes when we gave our best towards an honorable worthy goal – a healthy self.

Self Care Tip #33 – Accept help.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question: What do you think?  Agree or disagree?

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Collaboration Between Work and Play

All my options were poking at me like specters and I’ve been distracted.  Sitting in the coffee shop.  2 hours later and I’ve just started to write.  This is the first in eons since I’ve had open space in time during daylight hours.  I vaguely remember doing this in my past lives, but can’t remember how to do it.  I’m awkward.  It’s hard to know how to press into an area without boundaries.  I’ve walked on the moon here, trying to know how to foot my thoughts.  And now that my unbelievably free time is almost over, I realize I’ve procrastinated.  A daily planner all filled up just dropped down and I can see what I should do.  There’s a comfort in it.

A collaboration between work and play is healthy.  We slide or trip across the arc that connects them.  The path back can be harder to return to when we stay too long at one pole.  Like an unused muscle.  Sometimes people get sick and need time off work to recover.  They often look at me with bewilderment and ask, “What now?”  It’s like telling a kid, it’s time to nap.  Everyone else who hears desperately wishes you were talking to them.  We can lose the flow and someone or life or a force has to show us how to get back into sync.

Gratitude helps swing the pendulum.  That awareness, gratitude, moves us back and forth to see our options, what we want and what we have.  

Humility is another fair guide.  Kids get this.  I respect that about them.  Their hearts are open flowers, vulnerable, wanting.  They move trusting the momentum and direction from which they pivot.  We get more friction as we age.  It takes humility to accept redirection.  Humility is different from insecurity though.  It takes confidence and trust in something to know when to let go.  Kids do that better than me too!

Today, some of the resistance in my journey left, and I have more gratitude for my work and for my play.  I hope that I respond more easily when I should.  Like Samuel who heard God calling, I hope to know when to answer.  Let me be like a child.

Self Care Tip #33 – Live with gratitude, humility, and confidence.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question: Does this resonate with you?  What do you think?

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Sensory Overload

crying-baby

Image by bbaunach via Flickr

Sensory overload.  There are some neurodevelopmental disorders that cause heightened sensory awareness.  People might need to brush their arms to be desensitized to the sense of touch.  Or use a vibrating toothbrush or wear shades even with little to moderate light.  I hear most about the senses of touch and hearing from my patients who will hit their head, scratch themselves, or do other self-injurious behaviors to self soothe.

Hearing about these people might feel like you are far removed.  However, many of the general population have some sensory issues although to a lessor degree.  These things come out when we are tired.  When we have multiple emotional stressors.  When we feel trapped or overextended.  It is linked to anxiety and so we may notice tension crawling up our skin or into our throats.  If we could escape we would.  Some people can push through this and make it until a window opens.  Some people end up reacting.

Today I found myself squinting more.  My energy was low and I yawned a lot during clinic which is rude.  My inner milieu had a lot to do with what I was bringing to the table and little to do with what was happening to me or around me.  However, there I was, a player in life.  I did my best.  And then the sound level started going up.  It felt like my skin was lifting up and contracting all at once.  Sound travels so it followed me around the house.  Before I had to put a dollar in the family money jar, I remembered my ear-plugs.  Ah.  Things went down a notch.  I could cope better.

Self soothing.  Babywise by Gary Ezzo and Dr. Robert Bucknam, the much disputed early parenting book, tells new-by’s that babies need to learn to self sooth.  Parents are advised to let their babies cry at night until they quiet down, rather than pick them up and sooth them externally.  Thus teaching  a baby that they can’t use Mom or Dad as a sleep prop.

Many of us even as adults struggle with self soothing.  Awareness of what is bothering us helps.  Getting that awareness might be a deliberate effort or it might come effortlessly.  Either way, knowing what is the trigger helps to know how to respond.  Anyone can describe a time in their life when this didn’t happen and they tried to self sooth in a way that was hurtful to themselves or someone else.

Whatever the feelings are, whatever the stressor, self soothing should be something simple, easy and fairly obvious.  Today, I was surprised at how much better I parented with ear-plugs in place!

“Mommy, why are you wearing earplugs?”…

Question:  What do you think?  Agree or disagree?

Self Care Tip #32 – Self sooth simply.  Be a friend to yourself.

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Be Aware

Cover of "The Psychology of Gratitude (Se...

Cover via Amazon

We’re sitting at the piano practicing.  She is smart, reading for a year already, beautiful in a way that scares me at times, has advantages that surround her just because.  She isn’t thinking of these things though.  She thinks about the things she is not.  She says, “I can’t do that.  I don’t know how.”  She is not thankful just now about her opportunities.

I wondered, as I was sitting at the piano, if success and gratitude are collaborators.

Gratitude should not be conceived just in terms of a particular relationship. Gratitude is a philosophical emotion. It is, in a phrase, seeing the bigger picture.  …And so viewed, being grateful for one’s whole life is not a “grateful to whom?” question so much as it is a matter of being aware of one’s whole life, being reflective in a way that most of us are not, most of the time.

-Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough, The Psychology of Gratitude

Seems like a little much to expect out of a 5 year-old?  Maybe, maybe not.  But it definitely is if her parent isn’t practicing awareness, reflection, gratitude.

We will have more success in our life’s ambitions if we practice gratitude.  This much I will do and maybe, my little girl will learn to see herself differently too.

Self Care Tip #30 – Be aware.  Be a friend to yourself.

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Journey

“Mumford, The screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan, describes Henry Follet, a man who is living in his fantasies.  The superior problem isn’t that he’s living in his fantasies however.  It is that he has never been a character in them.  They only included other people.  At some point he gets more connected to his own journey, which is when he started appearing in his fantasies.  Or one could say his fantasies became his reality.

Connecting to our journey is multidirectional.  It includes the folding and opening of time.  Someone asked me why I started this blog.  I told him one of the reasons is that so much of what made me who I am was shelved when I went to medical school and then had children.  Time is folding for me when I write now, connecting me here to where this writing-self was last seen then.

When avoiding crucial work, it is as if a broken person’s bits of self are walking their different directions.  There is a divorce and the kids….  What does the father do?  Five years later he is still trying to get the courage to ask them to love him again.  Relapsing negative relationships, and she found herself again with someone abusive.  Overweight, and still buying and bringing binge-foods home.

As Will Rogers said,

When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

Lately I’ve enjoyed my journey more since I stopped breaking traffic laws.  Exhale.  Now I can relax when I’m driving and think, pray, listen to podcasts, be with myself.

Immaterial things like our hopes can both connect us and disconnect us.  When a thought like, “I wish I did…” comes, when employment is more a job than an interest, when anger flares often – look at times like this as opportunities to find your path.  I found that this yearning in me was really a portal for my fantasies to come through and join me.

Self Care Tip #29 – Take your opportunity.  Be a friend to yourself.

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Do This.

A basic recipe to becoming a friend to yourself:

Before, during and after # 1-6.  Love.  Find it.  Go to it.  Be in it.

1.  Sleep well regularly

2.  Aerobic  exercise at least 5 to 7 days a week.  Try to hit 60 minutes as many days as possible.

3.  Take your supplements:  Omega 3 and vitamin D.

4.  Do what gives you energy.  This means what is congruent with your inner self.  If all stressors disappeared, along with all roadblocks, what would you want to do?  Do what ever that is as regularly as possible.  Is it playing basketball?  Is it playing with children?  Is it canvassing?

5.  More on the above.  Get creative with it.  Grow in that area.  To do this requires work.  So the 5th ingredient is to work.

6.  Reflect on yourself.  Take stock.  Are you feeling more friendly with yourself?  If not or if not enough, consider medications.

This is not a complete recipe.  I didn’t speak about diet, water, air.  Can’t live without them.  But for now, I wonder what this recipe will make for you.  Please let me know.

Self Care Tip #27 – Do this.  Be a friend to yourself.

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Keep it Real

Smoke screens around our choices or rather lack of choices block our journey. It takes a lot of courage to look past defenses and see what we are ashamed of. Desires people call “base” or “primitive.”

Wanting to dominate sounds like someone trying to oppress the populace. However it is a core drive in people with testosterone. Wanting to purchase sounds superficial and greedy, no? Yet it is a genetic predisposition to the extroverted sensor personality type.

We waste our time being ashamed of things we never chose. Of things that in themselves aren’t shameful. And shame mixes us up. It influences our decisions. Important decisions like what to study. Who we should be friends with. When to get medical treatment. If we go where the shame is, it will

lose

lose some of its power over us. We will see more clearly what our options are.

Keeping it real improves quality of life. Our relationships are more connected, including with our own selves.

Self Care Tip #26 – Keep it real. Be a friend to yourself

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Fewer Choices

We have infinite choices in life but they aren’t necessarily the same choices. I don’t know at what age that starts making sense. It reminds me when J.K. Rowling‘s 9y/o Luna Lovegood witnessed her mother killed, which enabled her to see Thestrals. In story form, saying suffering brings sight. Choices can bring us suffering, which in turn might bring us sight. It’s true that we always have a choice but it’s not true that we can choose the same choice again. Nor is it true that we will have the same quantity of choices.

My sister-in-law Joana Johnson, neuroscientist, says we recruit more areas of our brain as we age but use less brain matter to problem solve and think creatively. We can generally multitask better than we could when we were younger although our short-term memory is less available. It is a biological example of renewed options all the while earlier options are no longer available.

As we mature, the beauty is that we have a greater capacity to work with our options. It is obviously not that we have a greater number of options. But isn’t that marvelous!

Scott Anthony, president of Innosight writes, “You can’t do more with less unless you understand what more means.” Hopefully there comes a time when each of us will look into our choices daily for all they can become. Think plate of chocolate lava cake in front of you. Will we get the gift of sight? Anyone can.

Self Care Tip #25 – Get the gift of site. Be a friend to yourself.

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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.