Paradigms

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Celebrate Your Imperfections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Emotions: The Physical Gift We Can Name

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Self-Care Tip #148 – Identify your emotions, navigate, and get help.

Mad.  And when Mia was angry she wanted to go eat.  Nervous.  When she was nervous she wanted to go eat.  Like a wire with a current, she couldn’t stop her thoughts from moving and moving.  Although eating soothed her in less than a shard of a second, it was also followed by self-loathing.  Self-loathing brought on more eating and then purging.

Sitting in my office, Mia said it was like she was looking at herself from the outside in and the self on the inside could hear the, “Stop!”  Demands, petitions, and begging to stop came from the other Mia, who was loosing her command-authority in a scary-fast way.

How often we hurt ourselves but blame a trigger, an emotion, a person, or an act of malice.  If only we could say, “Put the offense down and take two steps back.”  But sometimes we can’t.  It’s easy to piously say, with habits and cassocks or soutane (French for traditional priest’s attire) in place, “Don’t make decisions based on emotions.”  It’s easy to say, “Be objective, we can’t trust our emotions.”  But if emotions are what we use to interpret the world around us with, if that’s all we have, what can we do?

Emotions are ideally the color, texture, perfume, music and salt in our physical self.  Emotions are our spiritual sensory system.  Not being able to trust them is a big loss.  Being blind, deaf, anosmic (can’t smell,) unable to taste, and numb would make it really hard to interpret the world around us too.

Paul Brand, MD, coauthored with P. Yancy, “Pain:  The Gift Nobody Wants.”  This book uniquely tells Dr. Brand’s story of working with lepers in India.  Leprosy is a disease that causes a person’s nerves to stop working so they lose their sense of touch and subsequently can’t feel when they hurt themselves.  A once harmless thing like bumping a finger for example, is extremely dangerous.  Lepers can’t feel the pain, and so don’t accommodate for it and protect themselves. You can imagine that bumping a finger but not reacting to it leads to tissue damage when it is done over and over, until one day the finger falls off.

Dr. Brand is right.  Pain is a gift.  And so are emotions.  Including emotional pain, if serving as intended, to protect the individual and not self-destructive things such as bingeing and purging.  The purpose of this post is not to get into what binging and purging is.  That’s just an example of behaviors that might grow out of emotions gone amuck.  Emotions that we used to trust.  That use to tell us who is a friend and who is an enemy.  Emotions that used to know who’s side they were on.  Emotions that forget their own like that can be just as extremely dangerous as leprosy is to our tender fragile fingers.

The purpose of this post is to flatten the mountains of understanding between here and there.  Between understanding that emotions are as physically important as anything else, such as the spinal cord.  The purpose of this post is to furthermore say what to do about it once we can 1) identify the problem and 2) get past the stigma.  Mia did the eating and purging stuff, but she also asked for help.  3) Ask for help.

Lepers have still so few options to help their disease.  Us with emotional illness are very blessed because we do.  We have medications, psychotherapy, coping skills, miracles, and more.  We have a lot.

Question:  How do you define the space between emotions and other “real” medical illnesses such as diabetes?  How do you navigate around stigma?  How do you ask for help?  Please tell me your story.

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There is Less Space Between Emotions And Science Than We Think

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Self-Care Tip #147 – Bridge the gap between emotions and science.  Be a friend to yourself.

She had been through a lot – Aimee.  Lost her baby brother to medical disease.  Was in a stressful marriage and didn’t like her work.  There was more but you get the drift.  She found herself thinking that things would be different if things had been different.

Would they?

Readers, I am referring specifically to her medical condition.  Not to the fact that the universe is different because her brother died.

Madeleine L’Engle talked about death affecting the whole universe.  She compared it to the death of a star.  In death, the star creates a hole in space dark and large, enough so that the absence of it has its own gravitational force, a “black hole.”  L’Engle says that when any part of creation dies, we are all touched.  Life knows and the absence of that bit of creation leaves the surviving universe changed forever.

Aimee wasn’t talking about that.  Aimee thought her emotional illness was largely secondary to her life stressors.  Because this influenced Aimee’s choices regarding her medical treatment, I had to tell her no.  Gently.  It was hard for her to hear.  “Aimee, your sadness you feel now, four years after your brother’s death, your isolation and amotivation, your low sex drive, your difficulty feeling pleasure in other things, your sleepiness during the day – these things are not because you have suffered your brother’s death, nor because your marriage is hard.”

There are times when directly saying things is the more gentle approach.  No one going through what Aimee is going through wants to hear about how I feel about it.  Yuck.  There’s not much that is slimier than going to someone for objective feedback and getting their emotions and personal opinions all over you.

Aimee left saying she understood and with a new medical treatment for the medical illness propagating emotional and behavioral symptoms in her.  We’ll see if she did some days from now.  But what about you?  Do you believe that her emotions and behaviors were secondary to medical illness?

Readers, life stress will continue to happen.  What may change is how we respond to it.  If our response does change and it isn’t serving us or others well we need to think that we might not be interpreting how we feel objectively.  We might be having changes to our biology that “taste like chicken.”  It helps to get a physician’s opinion – someone who sees behavior as more than the spirit, the abstract, the puppet of our volition.

Question:  How do you bridge the seemingly abysmal distance between emotions and science?  Please tell me your story.

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Think About What You Have. The Season of Epiphany.

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Self-Care Tip #145 – Think about what you’re wanting and waiting for, and then think about what you have.  Be a friend to yourself.

Today my husband told me that it is the season of Epiphany – the climax to our waiting and wanting (or Advent) is celebrating when we find out that God became a human.

I like epiphany’s.  Who doesn’t?  At dinner we talked it over with the kids.  We asked them questions like, “What do you remember from last year that you’re glad about?”  “Did you learn anything that you want to remember in this new year?”  My three-year-old was glad our house isn’t destroyed yet by the rain.  (Yes.  It is raining again.  Blah.  The basement should be filled in with dirt!)

Then, my epiphany came.  Self-care includes being grateful for what and whom we already have in our lives.  Ta-da!  May not seem like much but it hit me strong and soulful.  I have names, including yours on my list.

Self-care for me today was stopping on the bits of life I already have, the people I already know, the gratefuls I don’t habitually spend enough spirit on (generally all of them.)  I get poetic and lumpy thinking about it.  My epiphanies feel like soppy insides, doe-y eyes, choking up over the smell of my husband’s neck, the mysteries of time and such.  Epiphanies generally don’t come without a waiting and a wanting.  It can all be deliberate, which is good news too, because those of us who don’t do that unconsciously have a chance.

As said by Fred Clark, Author of blog “Slacktivist,”

Epiphanies don’t seem like the sort of thing one can schedule ahead of time and plan for.

It isn’t as romantic as I hear it was for Edison, but we can plan.  Waiting, wanting, and the ah-ha’s can be deliberate and are part of self-care.

Question:  In this season, what are your epiphanies?

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Leave Space in Your Beliefs to Grow

 

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Self-Care Tip #144 – Leave space in your beliefs to grow.  Be a friend to yourself.

Madeline brought her son in.  He was born male but has always allegedly believed he was female inside.  It was Madeline’s appointment with me, not her son’s.  But he came in with her and I could either listen to her concerns about her son or ask him to leave against her wishes and still hear her talk.  So I listened.

The issue was a matter of salvation.  Madeline was fighting for her son’s salvation as a mother might.  That part was lovely to watch.  I thought of God hearing her and being present with her pain and being The One behind her fierce love in the first place.

We talked a little about the biology of homosexuality.  What is transgenderism?  If God’s Word is absolute, what part does a progressive understanding of biology play in our perception of truth?

Madeline’s son asked to leave.  I thanked him for coming in and he shrugged.  His whole family abused him, Madeline said, gulping and losing form.  She had spent many years defending him even though in her heart she was terrified that her son was damned.

Some of you may have read the powerful blog-post, “My son is gay” in which a mother described her halloween experience.  Her son dressed up as Daphne from Scooby-Doo.  She and he were promptly abused. As a mother I empathized, and as a scientist, I wanted to scream things like, “You thought the world was flat too!”

But Madeline was worried not only about bullying.  She was worried about the Last Judgment.

Stigma comes from all directions.  Inside of us, our homes, our churches, our schools, our government, up, down, sideways, this way, that…  Stigma is everywhere and it is usually a painful encounter for everyone involved.  Perpetrator included.

So here’s the scoop folks.  Homosexuality is biological. We have as much choice in it as the shape of our nose.

I’ve seen kids be mean about noses.  I’m half-Lebanese and believe me, I know what big noses are.  The nose that makes you wonder how the head escaped the vaginal canal without injury.  But I’ve never heard anyone hate someone’s nose and believe that he’s going to loose his salvation for it.  I’ve never seen someone turn her back on her brother and leave him to die without the love of family around because she thought she was condoning his nose if she did.  I’ve never heard about moral judgment being attached to a culturally incorrect nose.

In my son’s church class the other day, the teacher was trying to get him and the rest of the other oppositional three-year-olds to wear angel and shepherd costumes for the song they were going to perform. Only the stage-hams garbed up.  She kept giving the rest of us parents her pleading eyes, pleading words, and pleading emotions. She was making the wrong people feel guilty.  The kids were unfazed in both compliance and emotion.  The ones who were genetically inclined to get energy from performing that way, were.  The others were not.  I could have said to my son, “Get this on!…!”  And made him feel like he was bad if he didn’t.  But attaching morality would never change where he gets energy.  That part is genetic and it won’t change despite his conditioning.

It’s a bummer that Paul’s letters were translated the ways they were in the 1950’s using the word homosexuality.  A lot of people are scared when they read it.  Fear has threatened and hurt a lot of people.  Reverend Mel White posts about this.

I don’t know if Madeline was given anything she came looking for.  I’m not always the best teacher or student myself.  But I do know that we, all of us, will continue to learn through all eternity.  We will never know enough, love enough, or be sinless and perfect enough to take over that awesome job of being Judge.  I once heard of a beautiful beloved angel who tried.

Question:  What has been attached to morality in your life that you know is not?  How have you dealt with stigma?  Please tell me your story.

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Things Will Always Be About “Me”

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Self-Care Tip #138 – Stay aware of “Me” to be more present with them.

The second thing I learned from Toastmasters is that no matter how good I get at doing the 1st lesson, in my eyes, things will always be about “Me.”  No matter how skilled or self-aware or Mother-Theresa I become, “Me” won’t disappear.

Mother Theresa, by the way, did exactly what was congruent with her temperament.  Doing what she did for others tied her in more closely than ever with them …her.  Doing what she did naturally only made her more present with herself, her own journey, her own awareness of self and at some point with others.  There is a symbiotic relationship so to speak.  Remember Nemo and his home in the sea anemone?

Doing well for myself and for others is not a problem of effort towards altruism or other saintly motives.  It’s a matter of biology.  More than ever, I believe in hard-wiring.  Acting like it isn’t about “Me” is boring and even irritating at times for others to watch.  Even when we are trained actors or Toastmasters in this case.

When we say that the acts of heroism someone did was temperamentally congruent, it takes a little shine off.  Would you still call Mother Theresa a saint if you knew this?  How about “Me?”  That shouldn’t make it any less wonderful, what we do in life when we do it this way.  Yet the sense of enchantment gets a little fainter.  It’s a shame because who we were made to be is magical.   Doing what we do best by design is what our personal angels might have a hand in, I think.

If we can’t keep sight of ourselves, of “Me” while still seeing who’s around, there might be something medical going on.  No one wants you to disappear.

Question:  How do you keep it about you even while remembering that it isn’t?  How do you live symbiotically?  Please tell me your story.

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Stop Blushing. It’s Not About “Me.”

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Self-Care Tip #137 – Take yourself out of it to be more present in it.

When I started Toastmasters, I blushed, I stammered, I um-d my way through every talk.  I thought about “Me” a lot.  I thought about others in relation to Me.  I kept thinking, “What’s the worst thing that can happen?”  (Which, by the way, is supposed to desensitize Me and make Me feel better.)  But I just got more doe-eyed in the headlights.

I lasted about a year in this speaking club before life grew over it and I dropped out.  I still consider myself a Toastmaster, though, and, many friendly critiques later, I remember my hard-earned lessons:

1.  In other people’s eyes, it is not about “Me.”

Bob Freel, from Toastmasters International, often coached us to think about our emotional connection with our audience.  He made it clear that the reason so many of our talks stunk was that we were so caught up in ourselves.  We were not looking at “their” faces.  Thinking about “their” feelings.  Speaking to “their” interests.

Now how does this relate to self-care you ask?  Well, when anxiety hits my patients, they seem to find a little solace hearing that most of the things people do or say around them, to them, about them, etc. has nearly nothing to do with them.  Even when they are named by the person speaking.  That can be confusing, but just because our name may be on someone’s lips, on the program, on the tag — that doesn’t make it about us.

I am amazed at how true this is when flipped around too.  When I think about how often I’m thinking about others, (or not thinking about others,) I stop in my own tracks.  I’m pretty darn self-absorbed.  Yet, that is not a bad thing.  It’s just how it is.  For all of us.

Pulling our own selves out of the equation, helps us in fact to be more present in it.  For our own selves and later for others.

Sometimes we just can’t do this though.  That’s when we need to think biology is getting in our way from getting out of ourselves.  Let’s do it and stop blushing.

To read about #2 on this fine list, tune in tomorrow fellow friends-to-ourselves!

Question:  How has pulling your own self out of the equation helped you be more present in it?  Please tell me your story.

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The Presence of Stress Doesn’t Make the Disease Process Any Less Important

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Self-Care Tip #135 – If it’s medical, call it medical and not stress.  Be a friend to yourself.

New to me, Stacy came because of her problems with violence.  She was enormous.  5’11” and 200 pounds, she was just too big for her parents to handle her any more.  She was precious to them, their only child.

Taking Stacy’s history, I asked, “Does your family have a religion you practice at home?”  Stacy’s parents were giving her history since Stacy was disabled and used very few words.  Mom looked at me, and asked, “Why?  Why are you asking about our religion?”  She was sensitive.  Worried that I was packaging her up in a religion-box, she personalized my question.  I explained that religion is part of family culture and the question was simply part of getting to know them.  She relaxed a little and then said, “We have more of an ‘Autism’ home-culture these days!”

Mom looked tired although still very much engaged in her daughter’s life.

It often happens, when someone see’s me in clinic for the first time, that my questions take them by surprise.  They aren’t used to someone so directly and objectively asking and speaking about them and to them.  So it went with Stacy’s mom.  Question after question, she seemed to be in a mild state of wonder.  It wasn’t gun fire but she might have felt like it was.

“Does anyone in your family have emotional illness?  Any depression, anxiety, suicide, drugs, alcohol…?”  Why do I want to know about the family? her face said.  “No!  No one.”  I was just ready to move on to further history when she said, “Well I… I have been depressed a little on and off but I don’t have depression.  Who wouldn’t feel depressed with this stress?!”  And then Stacy’s case manager said, “Who wouldn’t feel stressed in your situation?!” and smiled and laughed with her to put her at ease.  Stacy’s case manager is a nice person.  She is bonded to the family and cares about each of them.

We completed our history and formulated a treatment plan together.  Stacy had sat mostly quietly through the hour and her parents were now at ease.  Before they left, I was able to share with Mom a couple of sentences on taking care of herself.  On seeing herself as important and in doing so, was giving Stacy the best gift she could.

What I would like to say to Stacy’s mom and to her case manager is that thinking depression is because of stressors is a great lie.  There might be some initial correlation but it is often not the point .  The real issue is medical.  I wanted to tell Stacy’s case manager that she should know better than to promote this.  I wanted to tell Stacy’s case manager that helping Stacy’s mom not minimize what she was going through was friendlier.

Stacy’s mom is not my patient, but I did pick up that she is sad, fatigued, personalizes things that aren’t about her, anxious, a little hypervigilent and suspicious, and that something biological was likely going on.  Everyone has stress, but not everyone reacts the same way.  Some of us get ill for biological reasons.  Using the stressors as decoy to the disease only preserves the state of suffering.  And it affects everyone.  Mom was part of Stacy’s recovery too.

Question:  How do you see the relationship between stress and mental illness?  Please tell me your story.

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Having Mental Health Means Sleuthing Magical Perceptions Sometimes

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Self-Care Tip #134 – Looking past the dark magic in your life might require medication.  Be a friend to yourself.

Much of what psychiatrists do at work is help with misperceptions.  Seeing something one way does not make it true.

In Scientific America, there was a great article, “Magic and the Brain: How Magicians ‘Trick’ the Mind,” By Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik | November 24, 2008 | 17.  It tells us that we misperceive things so easily, that people use that quality to entertain others.  Magicians use it to entertain and exploit the limits of cognition and attention.

Magicians aren’t the only ones to exploit that.  We do.  We exploit ourselves.  Tsk.  Not too friendly and not generally as entertaining.

How is having our misperceptions a form self-exploitation, you say?  Because we nurse them and drive our own selves into the ground with them.  No one else is doing it when down to the last trick.

It comes to me that when we feel disconnected from others, we are mistaken.  Some magic turned us awry and we don’t see the gazillioin links touching us all around.  When we feel worthless, when we think we are despised, when we feel singled out for suffering, that be black magic my friends.  When we think our lives our so hopeless that we would be better off ending them, look for the mirrors.  Look for the rabbits and top hats.  We aren’t seeing things right.

When I move the curtains across my clinic day, I often find medical diagnosis hiding behind.  Some sort of biology giving us the slip.

My dad often told me, “Things are never as bad as they seem.”  I realize he was talking about this kind of magic.

Question:  How have you gotten past self-harmful misperceptions?  How have you seen another do it?  Please tell me your story.

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When You Are Hurting, Remember Why You Want To Live, And Live For That

 

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Self-Care Tip #133 – When you are hurting, remember why you want to live, and live more purposefully for that.

My daughter has a viral upper respiratory infection.  She is laying on the floor in her sleeping bag that has the stuffed puppy dog head for a pillow.  She just wants to be near me today while I work.  She wakes up and coughs, I check her out and dose her if she’s febrile.  She goes back to sleep.  Awakens.  Trundles up to drink some mango juice, water, eat 3 noodles, comes down again and lays there, pink in the cheeks, red eyes and chafed upper lip.

Sometimes when one of the kids is sick they stay home if I’m here.  It usually stresses me out but I’ve been getting better at believing more that we can take what comes and still get the work done.  Today, in-between patients, I laid down beside her.  Face-to-face.  She leaned in, opened her eyes and smiled!

She is one of the most delicately framed little people I know.  My nuclear family has never had small bones so this must be from someone on my husband’s side.  My daughter swung that tiny arm, warm with fever over my neck, put her face on mine, and fell asleep.

Lying there, thinking I’m so glad I could do this for her, suddenly felt wrong.  It flip-flopped over in my mind and I realized that I was glad.  But for me.

Having her near me while I work is a connecting force.  To both of us but maybe more for me.  My family has been exchanging this virus for 2 weeks now.  It hasn’t been hell but it has not been a delight.  Yet here I find myself delighted.  I wonder how long I’m going carry this gladness around.

Come what may in this world, it is these surprising moments that convince us about the rest.

In psychiatry, I’m required to ask each patient if they have thoughts of wanting to die.  Then I ask, “What do you want to live for?”  That catches some people off guard and I’ve gotten looks that could defend anyone in war.  But we aren’t at war and eventually they tell me why they want to stay alive another day.

At some level we all answer that question even if indirectly.  Everyone suffers.  If I were asked, my daughter’s smile would be on my list.

I am often amazed by good things that come out of bad.  Knowing that, gives hope.  But it also gives purpose and we can choose to angle ourselves more purposefully towards that rather than passively.  We can choose to live for the reasons we think worth living for.

My husband prays, “God please turn my posture toward you today.”  I’ve always loved that.

Question:  Why do you want to stay alive?  What are you living for?  Please tell me your story.

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Self-care Begins and Ends With “Me” – Own It

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Self-Care Tip #129 – Self-care begins and ends with “Me” – own it.  Be a friend to yourself.

Yesterday we talked about connecting self-care with pleasure to make it sticky.

Today, We’ll talk more about some of the adjustment issues of why we don’t do self-care on the obvious, such as nurture vs. nature.  We’ll talk about the nurture part.  Specifically, our own not what our parents did to us.

Why don’t we stand up to our personal needs?  We don’t.  We don’t own the friendly changes that we would benefit from.

Carol who used to abuse methamphetamines and alcohol many years ago, now tells me that smoking is her only vice and she needs to have at least one.  She says she doesn’t want to stop even though her feet and hands are blue from not getting enough oxygen.

Another part of the answer is that we are so overwhelmed by the wrong we see around us.  We qualify and quantify it away, desensitized to our own needs.

“Have you seen that dietitian?!  How can she possibly give advice on weight loss when she can’t see her feet?”  And we ignore our own central fat, knowing that it has meaning.  Meaning like, we have unseen fat layering onto our central organs.  Meaning, we are more likely to develop metabolic illnesses such as diabetes.

We don’t own it.  We don’t “Just do it.”  We talk about other people and draw lines between their mistakes making pictures that we can hide our own problems behind.  We can make sense of why they are suffering so.  Yet our own problems are some sort of enigma.  Yet to be determined by science!  Open-mouthed, hands splayed in a why stance, we can’t connect our own dots.

All health begins and ends with “Me.”  Including mental health.

Find yourself again.  Amidst all the world’s needs, you still are important.  Peel off Channel 4 News, the internet, the fears about what is outside your front door, and see yourself there under it all.  Needing self-care.

Question:  How do you keep view of yourself despite the distractors?  Please tell me your story.

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When Self-Care Gives Pleasure, You Will Be Friendlier To Yourself

Self-Care Tip #128 – Connect pleasure with self-care.  Be a friend to yourself.

There’s a reason we have bad habits in our life.  It’s not only the loops, the neurological grooves in our brain, it’s also that they bring pleasure!  It’s not so unbelievable understanding obesity, drugs, addictions, poor sleep hygiene, inactivity, whatever it is when we think about the amazing effect that dopamine has on our pleasure center!  Ah.  Say, “Dopamine!”

Our real question with ourselves should be why we so often expect ourselves to do “good” things if they don’t give us pleasure?  How do we expect to stop over-eating if the substitute we offer our biological selves is suffering?  How do we expect to exercise, if we’d rather poke needles into our eye-balls than jog a mile?

We’re smart people, we have knowledge and we know what to do.  But, knowledge isn’t the answer always.  The “language of the heart” is dopamine, is feeling good.  How can we link what we want to do with ourselves objectively with feeling good.  It would be nice to pair up our dopamine with friendly habits and not those that are self-destructive.

How to do that might be worth some effort figuring out.  Figure it out individually if we want it to succeed.  The reason for the discussion here is not to give directions, but simply to draw attention to our need to find our own feel-good buttons and how we can wire them up to self-friendly behaviors.

I’m struggling through this also.  I hope to share this awareness with my kids before they move out, so I better get busy!  Can’t do that too well until I do it well for myself.

Today when I went on a mommy-date with my daughter, instead of taking her to Starbucks, we went and bought Bendaroos.  That was all I could come up with in the 10 minute date we had allotted for something feel-good.  Maybe she’ll develop shopping addiction instead of food addiction.  Time will tell, but I hope she got out of it the pleasure of creating shapes with Bendaroos instead.  Hopefully when she get’s creative, dopamine squirts out in her brain like a geyser.

Now, to get back to me…?  huh.

You can read a related post here.

Question:  How are you linking self-care with pleasure in your life?

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Have The Courage To Be Known

 

 

 

Driving my kids to their dental appointment today, we passed a corpse.  I could see the top of his head, bits of the gurney, but mostly the shape of his blanketed body.

In the first chapter of Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince,) by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Prince describes how he is a misunderstood artist with hidden undeveloped talent.  He had drawn a postprandial (after dinner) boa constrictor, large with the elephant inside his stomach.  Unfortunately people who looked at his picture saw a hat instead.  Better with words than picture, Prince narrated rather his great loneliness amongst all creation and a yearning to connect.

This morning, seeing the blanketed corpse, I remembered the boa constrictor that Prince related to.  The futility the Little Prince felt about getting connected.  The inevitable misunderstandings that left him as a hat instead of boa constrictor that just swallowed an elephant whole.

http://www.angelfire.com/hi/littleprince/However, Prince refused the constraints other people’s perceptions offered him.  He refused the constraints by believing even still that he could connect with others.  In his simple way of living, he tried, going from planet to planet to be known as the Prince he was and not that other thing.

Driving today, I was very upset by what I had seen.  The facelessness of the man shaped in his blanket.  Covering him up and no one crying over him.

Someone was there with a clipboard and I could see an investigation was underway.  Of course necessary, but yet it upset me.  I kept seeing the boa constrictor that swallowed an elephant whole all day and thought about the man’s life, connections, and hopes.  Was he understood? Did he refuse perceptions and demand to be known and to know, giving others the same courtesy of life’s desire?

I cried over him today.  The same desire being inside of me, somehow the corpse who had been the man and I shared that relation.  So I cried for my brother and hoped someone had seen him.  As I hope to be seen.

Live as courageously as The Little Prince and believe.  You can connect.

Self-Care Tip # 126 – Demand with your life, to be known.  Connect.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What obstacles to connecting have you been covered with?  How have you refused them?  Please tell me your story.


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The Biopsychosocial-How-to Be a Friend to Yourself

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There is interplay between biological, psychological, and social issues that make us who we are.  You can work as a team not only  with your family, physicians, therapists, and whomever else is involved in your team approach to getting friendly with yourself – but you can also team up with yourself so to speak.

Think:

1.  Biology

Anything going on materially with my physical body?

Medical illnesses, temperament, sleep issues, diet, exercise, air, rash….

2.  Psychological

i.e., thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

Things like lack of self-control, coping skills, catastrophizing, and negative thinking.

3.  Social

Such as socioeconomic status, culture, poverty, technology, and religion can influence health.

Think God, friends, marriage, parenting, work, unemployment….

We can do this not only with others who are here to help us, but also in our own thoughts.  We can start seeing ourselves as more than one part or another.  Separate and disconnected.  This might take some practice or it might be natural for you.  Just start wherever you are and run this through yourself.  When you’re stressed, break it down.  Take it apart to bring it back together.

Read more about this at “Forget About Divisions In Knowledge.”

Question:  How do you see the connections within yourself?  How has this played into your healing processes?  Please tell me your story.

Self-Care Tip #125 – See yourself as parts that make up your whole.  Be a friend to yourself.

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“You” Are The Best Gift

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Self-Care Tip #123 <–> Take care of yourself.

Before I was found by my man, my brother Vance Johnson used to tell me, “Become the woman whom the kind of man you hope to marry some day would want.”  It was one more thing that helped keep my focus off of searching for boyfun-friends and on to living my life.

Of course it doesn’t end when we get what we want.  When we stop growing, we stop living – as Sarah said in the blog-post, “You Are Enough.”  Regardless of where we are in life, we are responsible for being the person that the people we want in our life want to be with.

Many of us deteriorate under the guise of service, employment, obligation, parenting, care-giving or whatever reason.  We neglect ourselves and then give that battered up self to our hopes and to the people we love.

Don’t be misled.  If asked, those very people we are serving would say, “Just take care of yourself.”  If you don’t believe it, reverse it.  What do you want to say to the over-extended people you love?

Jennifer who is a stay at home mom, tells me that she feels so guilty when she takes time to go for a run.  She laughs, saying her husband wants her to go.  He comes home and tells her, “Go!  I’ll watch the kids.”  Yet she still feels bad.  She thinks about her husband’s long day at work and the kids moods, their needs, what she could do for them, and she can barely force herself to leave.  Once she does, she says she always feels great about herself and them, and comes home having more than she did before to offer.

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Taking care of ourselves, is giving the best gift to the people we love.  “Me.”  Taking care of ourselves might be the most selfless thing we could do.  It keeps us connected to our life journey, which by definition includes keeping us connected to the very people we love.

Keep on!

Question:  Where are you in your journey?  Taking care of yourself, connected, disconnected?  How does it affect those you love?  Please tell me your story.

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Do The Opposite. For Your Self.

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Self-Care Tip #121 – Do the opposite, do the “un,” and go where you don’t want to go.  Be a friend to yourself.

Frank, accomplished in chess, employed in a 3 digit salary job, married with children, and he heard that things were going well.  From other people.  In his opinion, Frank believed the inside life-details were more destructive than the redemption of the apparent details.  Frank listed himself off to me like a confession, but he got little relief from the exercise.  It didn’t change that he was still addicted to sex, ashamed and the addiction was changing his ability to function in the other areas of his life.  He was taking more risks and realized that if he didn’t get clean, he’d lose “everything” but the addiction.  Not wanting the addiction didn’t make it go away.

How many of us wrinkle our nose at the Frank’s out there!  How we avert.  Either side is not really good or bad.  It just is.  Frank is addicted.  And we are ignorant.  Sex addiction is in the recesses and communes of where any of us live.  And, “we” are no better than they or worse.  It just is that way.  The qualifiers are the stink that kill our connections.  The qualifiers are rotten.

One thing I love about Jesus’ earth-story is that He was always un-everything.  He was Un-segregation, un-rules, un-prejudice, un-divided, and many people thought he was un-qualified.  Wherever these things were, He went there.  I love seeing people who use Him to draw lines between their spaces.  To say, “This is because Jesus wouldn’t…”  Hmm.  Jesus wasn’t scared of mucking up in the chaos of people’s lives.  Jesus not being scared is actually the wrong way to say it.  Let’s say rather, Jesus honed in straight to the muck and chaos, drawn there because He couldn’t and didn’t want to stay away.  We are not so loving as that but who cares about motives?  I also say with confidence that Jesus/God understood biology much better than we did then, now or will.

When we can look at each other objectively, when we don’t personalize what isn’t about us, we can let go of some of what separates us.  It goes both ways.  We are afraid of Frank and what he does.  Frank is afraid of what he does and of us.  But it’s not the fear so much as it is the qualifiers that ruin us.  Bad, good, Clang!  Down go the dividers.

None of this is meant to minimize the pain that these things bring on, such as addiction.  Rather, taking away whatever is dividing us helps us be more present with the pain, with each other, and often leads to healing.  It is another opposite, another “Un,” another Jesus-move.  Doing just the opposite of what we think should be done.  Got to love that Man!

Why would any of “us” want to be connected to the addict, or to whomever is doing something hurtful, scary, negative whatever it may be?  Why?  For your self of course.  Our life is better if we are.  That is a motive I think is worth pursuing.

Question:  How has your life gotten better when you did the opposite of what you felt like doing?  Please tell me your story.

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Put The Struggle Down and Take 3 Steps Back

I almost gave up on tonight’s post.  But after taking a Glee break watching Kurt get bullied, get defended, then get out of his school, I felt more refreshed.  Go figure.  What I have to tell you about self-care tonight is to go back to the basics.

When you become inundated with all the good things out there to do, go back to the basics and let it rest.  Get your sleep.  Take your omega 3’s and vitamin D.  Take your medications regularly and step back from the struggle not to.  In fact, if possible, put all struggles down and take 3 steps back.  There is time enough to pick them back up when ever.  Go to sleep and sleep well.  If you don’t think you will, take something to help.  Something safe that will protect your deep sleep.  Then, get up, worship God, exercise and see what’s next.

Any time you want, any time you need, any time, you can go back to the basics any time.  These are mine.

Good night folks.

Self-Care Tip #120 – Get basic with yourself.

Question:  What are your basics?  Please tell me your story.

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The Great Lie.

One of the great lies of mental illness is that, “If things weren’t so stressful, I wouldn’t feel so bad.”  Look inside ourselves now and see them.  All the numbered and ranked stressors we tick off to explain how we feel and/or behave.  How about someone we love.  Do we tell them, “Of course you feel that way!  Look at all you’re going through!”

Because major depressive disorder (MDD) is mainstream enough, I’ll use it as an example.  Who, when they are down, doesn’t look for reasons why?  Say there is an additive effect of stressors such as home conflicts, financial duress, and poor sleep.  Since these events, you haven’t felt pleasure, you’ve felt sad and depressed.  You aren’t motivated or interested in your usual.  And where you normally would seek people out when you felt down, to get more energy, now you just want to be alone.  And so on.  You are able to say that you started feeling this way progressively since triggered with those stressors about 3 months-ago.  Before that you were “fine.”

Many people in your life, have told you that you are just going through a bad spell.  You have believed them but say, “Even if this is a bad spell, if it goes on much longer I think I’d rather die.”  Your best friend responds, “Anyone would be depressed if their boss was that evil!”

My answer, “No.”  Feeling down is appropriate to stress when it doesn’t disrupt your life for more than two weeks at this level.  And it is never normal to want to die.  Everyone has stress but not everyone responds to stress in the same way.  Not everyone if put under your same triggers would develop MDD.

Would you have developed this disease if you weren’t put under these stressors?  I can’t say.  We develop illnesses for many reasons.  One of the many reasons is external stress.  A hypothesis supporting this is that stressors trigger our genes for MDD much like we know cancer genes can be turned on by stress.  However, we do not have a direct correlation to the stressors as being entirely causal events.

Even if it were, none-the-less, we are left with the disease process in progress.  It is not an adjustment reaction to stress.  It is medical illness.

Feeling this way is not normal for what you are going through.  Telling yourself that it is, that is the great lie.

Self-Care Tip #118 – Don’t believe the lie if what you’re going through is affecting your function in life.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What whispering lies are you struggling against?  Please tell me your story.

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Pebbles to Diamonds

 

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Self-Care Tip #117 – Notice, you got diamonds out of stones!  Be a friend to yourself.

Cindy replied to yesterday’s post (that had some discussion on functional mental illness,) “I understand Miranda’s feelings completely.  Some days it’s all I can do not to down tools and scream ‘What about ME?’”

That is one of the lovelies that these illnesses bring to us.  In our honest moments, we can, like Cindy did, perceive our own traits that resemble them.  Perhaps, if we are lucky, that will lead to empathy, one of the great human experiences.  To be able to put yourself in the hypothetical place of someone else.  To imagine what they think and feel.  “If I were in your shoes…” and so forth.  If you’d like, read more on this at this post.

Illness is often considered a step in the dyeing process.  Others see it as part of the living process.  Of course, it is both.  We are all on level ground when it comes to having been born, coming into life, and knowing we will equally die.  Illness reminds us of our like-natured frailty and of course the opposite – resilience.  Whether seeing our own illness or someone else’s, we have this privilege of being blessed this way.

My Dad used to tell me a story (author unknown) when I was little.  It’s been a long time but I remember it this way.

Three travelers were walking when they heard a voice telling them to bend down, pick up pebbles and put them in their pockets.  The voice told them further that in the morning they would be both happy and sad.  The travelers did but not equally.  Some pockets were more full than others.  In the morning when they awoke, their stones had turned to diamonds.  Whoever gathered many stones were happy even though all of them wished they picked up more stones.  But whoever gathered few, well, they were not happy.  They still had diamonds but the comparison soured them and they finished their journey full of “what if” thoughts and not thoughts about the obvious.  They got diamonds out of stones!

We are all similar, with the opportunity to say thanks in seemingly off times, such as mental illness.

Question:  What have your “stones” turned into?  Please tell me your story.

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Who Cares What Your Diagnosis Is?

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Self-Care Tip #115 – If it’s not serving you well, don’t waste your time on it.  Be a friend to yourself.

Trixie Hidalgo, advocate to end violence in America, tells me that many of the people engaging in gang crimes tell her that they are put in their life positions (poor, stereotyped, impoverished) by the people who have the power, to keep those people in power and to keep them down.  They have some credible arguments we’ve shared before in history relating to oppression such as race, color, gender, money, or status.  Are these people victims?  Sure, why not.  But is that the point here?

The victims reminded me of a clinic I was in the other day.  I was working with Marcus and his father.  The father was torn about where to go to get his disabled son, Marcus, treatment.  Marcus was disabled with both brain illnesses and severe psychosocial stressors.  Currently we found Marcus, 2 years into treatment with me, and as of yet, father and mother (divorced without amicable terms) had yet to engage in treatment with me.  They wanted to know why Marcus was the way he was.  Father pointed at Mother and Mother pointed at Father.  They blamed other things as well, the schools not providing the right services, the medications for not working, his genes, and more.  Meanwhile, Marcus is tearing up his classroom and his own life.  He is barely functional socially.  Moody and volatile.  Anxious with physical symptoms.  He was having multiple medical work-ups going successively for various physical complaints.

Before I let them go, I told his parents, “Who cares what his diagnoses are?  It’s not about the diagnosis.”  The purpose of a diagnosis is to serve the patient.  The patient doesn’t serve the diagnosis.  Right now, Marcus was serving the quest for his diagnoses.  If all they can see is that, and they miss the fact that their son isn’t functioning, he’s depressed and anxious and violent and no one can stand to be around him, Marcus is worsening continually while they go on debating – they’ve missed “IT.”

They’ve missed it.  And so have we when we waste time counting up the offenses we’ve directly or indirectly suffered.  We miss it when we increase our injury by holding ourselves responsible to our history.  I asked Marcus’ parents what the point of what they were doing for Marcus was.  I ask the victims of America, what the point is when they point to history to answer for their present condition.  If it’s not serving you well, if it’s not doing something good for you, than what are you doing with it?  Do good things for yourself.

For the victims, for Marcus, and for Marcus’ parents, 1st make sure we weren’t missing something medical that was keeping them from having life quality.  You can’t give what you don’t have.  Then move on to the psychosocial issues and spiritual and so on.  What ever we ran into that missed our point, we’d walk past it together and on to something that served us well.

If you’d like to read more on this topic, read more in “It’s Time to Grow Up” and “The Whole World Becomes Blind.”

Question:  How have you managed to move past things that weren’t serving you well?  Please tell me your story.