Presence

by

Connection: It’s Medical But Still Magical

XO with Internet connection, Khairat (India)

Image via Wikipedia

Self-Care Tip #157 – Don’t depend on yourself to find connection.

We are people of a greater ability to bond than our senses, emotions, intuition, reason or technology can account for.  Our connection to each other and to God supersedes our belief in connection.  In this discussion, I am looking at “connection” beyond the paradigm of our perceptions.  Although connection between me and you is all about me and you, our bond also transcends either of us.

Meet gorgeous Candy.  She refuses any medications that might change her appearance in any way, ie. increase her appetite.  She would rather freeze in a catatonic state and die thin than gain weight.  She has come to me after years of struggling with irritability, anger, depression and anxiety.  She has never seen a psychiatrist although these emotions have misshapen her relationships, crippled her parenting skills, and removed her from her community of friends and one marriage.  Her medical condition continues to threaten Candy’s connection with her own self.  It continues to threaten her connections with her now teenage children and her second marriage.  Candy tells me that she doesn’t feel anything for her husband.  When she says this, she looks at me expectantly, as if she just released a big revelation.

When people are initiating treatment, I try not to get into anything personal too much.  Although I gather their personal history, I don’t give much feedback.  I try not to discuss their desire to make sense of all their conflicting feelings.  Sometimes they ask me questions, advice, directives and that’s natural.  However, it would be misguided to answer those questions, because we can’t let our emotions guide us.  I tell them,

Let’s revisit these questions after the treatment has time to take effect and you feel more like yourself.

It’s medical but still magical.  In four to eight weeks, they often hardly remember the questions they had.  The negativity is just a haze in their past.  The resilience comes with emotional health and copes with the simple stressors that used to sever interpersonal emotional ties.

Candy was one of the lucky ones who found the magic.  She felt self-trust more than she had felt her entire life.  Feeling safe with your own self is wonderful.  Much of the population who has not been where Candy has been can’t say the kind of thank you that Candy can.  They don’t know what it means to be lost and then found in this way.  Candy has something very special.

Yet when we think of Candy’s sense of connection, we also look beyond the biology of it.  I did spend some time describing how biology can change our perception of connection, but I didn’t do it to explain how connections are formed.  I described it more to demonstrate that we cannot depend on ourselves to define connections.

Don’t stumble on the philosophies around adjustment issues and conditioning.  Connection with others exists regardless of our fortune in family, money, treatment or maltreatment, biology, and self.  We are connected because there is a force of connection created and present in all of nature, regardless.

Madeleine L’Engle, wrote in “A Stone for a Pillow,”

Perhaps what we are called to do may not seem like much, but the butterfly is a small creature to affect galaxies thousands of light years away.

Our connections are there regardless of where we are at in life.  I would even take it further to say that connections to us even survive the cutting blow from death.

Connection is an eternal truth.  It makes a difference to us just to know that, but even if we didn’t, it doesn’t change our connection.

Question:  How do you make sense of your changing perception of connections in your life?  Please tell me your story.

Related Articles
by

Go Toward Mental Illness and Take It To The Floor

Sean and Cheryl: Drama on the dance floor

Image by gwilmore via Flickr

Self-Care Tip #155 – Go toward the real issue.  Be a friend to yourself.

Little woman, she had pinched toes in her four-inch heals and wonder what her size has done for her.  Mindy was anxious.  Even though I wonder about her stressors, like possibly her height and the history she is telling me, I know something else.  Even though I wonder about her parenting and marital stressors, and about growing up in a small town but now living with giants, I don’t wonder what she thinks.  Mindy describes these giants as people with large accomplishments, things she would not try herself and that means something to her, but not what she thinks it does.  Mindy wanted to see how things went.  Apparently six months of this wasn’t long enough.

We could spend the next five years breaking all this up and apart and tossing it like a cranberry salad.  But Mindy’s anxiety is mostly not about the salad of life.  Mindy’s feelings are a bit about the stressors and a lot about her brain.

Mental illness is not a small thing.  We trim it down when we say otherwise.  The unfavored sister, Mental Illness isn’t spoken to much at the table.  Her more popular sisters, Stress and Life-Triggers, get a lot of the attention.

With some effort, people who once worked around Mental Illness like it was barely there take a chance and go straight at it, full charge, and swing that woman onto the ballroom floor.

I went for that dance with Mindy.  And she wasn’t talking about waiting and seeing how things went for long.  I told her, like I’ve told you, that how we feel and interpret our stressors comes from our brain.  I told her that mental illness gets worse if it isn’t treated and treated to as full a response as possible.

We weren’t talking about life stressors at that point.  We were talking about her medical condition.  Once treated, Mindy will continue to have life stressors.  We will hopefully also see however, that she responds to life stressors differently.

Question:  How do you make sense of the seemingly meaningfulness of how stress affects us with the seemingly less meaningful concept that we feel that way because of our brain and not because of the stress?  Please tell me your story.

Related Articles
by

The 12 Steps To Serenity

Ben‑Enwonwu‑Negritu

Self-Care Tip #154 – Go towards Love.

I realize that many of us talk about the 12-Steps, we know people working the 12-Steps, we even recommend the 12-Steps but have never read them through.  So here they are.  For all of us.  A wonderful walk with and towards love.

The 12 Steps To Serenity

  • Step 1 – We admitted we were powerless over our addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable
  • Step 2 – Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity
  • Step 3 – Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God
  • Step 4 – Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves
  • Step 5 – Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs
  • Step 6 – Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character
  • Step 7 – Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings
  • Step 8 – Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all
  • Step 9 – Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others
  • Step 10 – Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it
  • Step 11 – Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out
  • Step 12 – Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs

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

Related Articles
by

Celebrate Your Imperfections

Perception_is_Everything_-_Rusland_Beeches.jpg

Image via Wikipedia

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.

Related Articles
by

Please Don’t Say “But”

Christopher Robin in his Disney depiction.

Image via Wikipedia

Self-Care Tip #152 –  Please don’t say “but” to be a friend to yourself.

She wanted to explain why.  Her sons did not hear.  So she explained why to me.  I listened.  What I learned was…

…It is her choice.  Forget about explaining her “why.”  She knows that they can only hear themselves.  If she wants to be in their lives, she has to be with whom they are in this moment, trumpeting her failures, bemoaning their losses.  If she wants to be with them she’ll meet them there in the gutter and remember their value when she smells stench.

If you’re going to be with the sick, you can’t expect them to mop your brow with tender caresses.  Remember yourself.  If you want to be with your sons, than be where they are, apparently breathing fire and your name is the flame.  Still want to be with them?  Don’t explain why then.  Just be with them, like Christopher Robin when Poo was stuck in the tree trunk.  Just stand there until they can get out and be.  Being present.

If you say “but” it means you didn’t hear. “I’m sorry but,” is not saying I’m sorry. “Yes but,” is worse than many more obvious offenses. See the eyes roll? Hear the sighs?  Watch the words fall apart into letters that pile up like a wall in front of whatever it was that was said in the 1st place.

In some such scenarios it can be a first come first serve. Wait your turn to complain. Wait your turn to present your case.  If you didn’t get there first, listen.  And let the air fill up with all the things that someone wanted to say, and don’t open windows.  Just breath.  Just stay and breath and listen to them if you choose to.  If you choose to be a part of that person, where they are now, stay and be and breath.  Another time if and when they can be with you, you can explain the why.  Maybe they will never be able to give you that gift.  But are they worth it to you?

For her, she decides moment by moment.  You can’t give what you don’t have and sometimes she has what it takes to give that gift and sometimes she does not.  When she doesn’t, she isn’t standing beside their bodies stuck in a tree hole.   She’s off taking care of herself like she should be.  They’re still worth it to her.  And in her story, when she’s gone from them it doesn’t equal her abandoning them.  It means she can’t give just then.

For others, being gone may mean that it is not worth it.  That is fair.  It is a free choice to give a gift.  Gifts are free.  Listen or walk away. …But please don’t say “but.” No one will hear you.

And staying present doesn’t mean more than just that.  It doesn’t make you guilty by association.  It doesn’t give you a “go to jail” card.  If you don’t judge yourself that is.  Wow.  What a gift.  Standing present with the one you love.  Even when they are not being nice.  Even when they are not healthy-minded and say all manner of evil against you, still stand beside them, a witness to their value.

Nor does being present turn you into a noodle.  For pity’s sake, it means only what it means to you.  There is love.  And love is stronger than anything. …But please don’t say “but.”  No one will hear you no matter how much you love him.

And that is what this aching heart-mother taught me about presence.

Question:  How has avoiding the “but” in your dialogue affected the reception of what you’ve said?  Or vice-a-versa?
Related Articles
by

Your Personal Fight For Emotional Freedom

crochetingingeorgia.blogspot.com

Self-Care Tip #151 – Fight to be a friend to yourself.

My friend Carl, after reading yesterday’s blog-post, introduced me to this gorgeous song.  I found it on YouTube connected to a slide show of our soldiers.  Thank you to our courageous American troops fighting for the freedoms we enjoy and take and take and take.  We know that when you fight, there are losses.

We all are soldiers of sorts, fighting in life for our own selves for so many reasons.  But it’s not about the reasons or motives.  God takes care of those.  So regardless of why, thank you to all of you out there fighting for your own selves.  You who want your own emotional freedom.  The good that comes from this courageous fight ripples on the life-waves and reaches us.  Thank you.  We know that when you fight, there are losses.

Carl, thank you.  Your personal fight, your courage, touches all of us.  What you do is self-care, is care for us, is care.

Let There Be Peace on Earth, by Gill Vince

Let there be peace on earth
And let it begin with Me.
Let there be peace on earth
The peace that was meant to be.
With God as our father
Brothers all are we.
Let me walk with my brother
In perfect harmony.

Let peace begin with Me
Let this be the moment now.
With every step I take
Let this be my solemn vow.
To take each moment
And live each moment
With peace eternally.
Let there be peace on earth,
And let it begin with Me.

(child)
Let there be peace on earth
And let it begin with Me.
Let there be peace on earth
The peace that was meant to be.
With god as our father
Brothers all are we.
Let me walk with my brother
In perfect harmony.

Let peace begin with Me
Let this be the moment now.
With every step I take
Let this be my solemn vow.
To take each moment
And live each moment
In peace eternally.
Let there be peace on earth
And let it begin with Me.

Question:  How do you see your personal fight for emotional freedom rippling into the space of others?  Please tell me your story.

by

One More Honest Way To Say, It Starts and Ends With Me

Hi! I am feelin so good today. At present: joi...

Image by jessica mullen via Flickr

Self-Care Tip #150 – Be honest about why you don’t like them.  Be a friend to yourself.

Today I spent with my in-laws and my own parents:  a blend of the Philippines, farm-white middle America, and Lebanese superstar.  It was tense at first but was, despite my husband’s and my paranoia (based on preformed something-or-other) nice.

When I look around at my family, I see their good features all the while remembering their not-so-good bits.  Depending on my state of mental health, the good is more apparent than the bad, or vice-a-versa.  It depends on Me.  When I am feeling confident, loved, and am doing what I like to do in life, their fabulous selves seem like the people who came to visit.  Not the ones I “walked out” on X-number of times before.  I’m sure it goes both ways, even if they haven’t typed it up for the world to read.

All of us do form opinions about each other.  You, me, or any other connection do.  We all have some level of judgment about who is holding the other side of the string.

See, I like people more when I am doing well.  Is that so unbelievable?  Well sometimes, yes.  It is more unbelievable than we first think.  It would be more believable to say, rather, that I like people more when they are nice.  Or I like people more when they do good things.  That is easily believable.

When we have opinions about people who are less than lovely, this little epiphany is there to help:  We like others more when we like ourselves more.  Introspection is useful if we know what we’re looking for.  Using this handy-dandy epiphany-tool, we might be able to get inside ourselves and see that how we feel about others is about “Me.”  It feels like we don’t like someone because they are a baddy.  But the truth is, we aren’t feeling so good about our own selves at the time.

Inversely, we might be able to do the same for others.  When they behave negatively, pull out your epiphany tool.  (It comes in many colors.  Mine is pink.)  We can remember, “Quisas!  They don’t like themselves so much now.”

What this little epiphany-tool patent banks for us is the ability to own our feelings in one more honest way.  Feeling good in life starts and ends with “Me.”  Isn’t that refreshing!?  Ah.  Sigh.  Relief.  At least we have a place to start and finish.  Me.

My mom, sweet Mom, tucked into her car about to leave today, was swelling with joy about my melting body-fat.  It was a little overwhelming for her, dear thing, and she reacted by throwing out her “gift.”

When you get to the size you want to be, I’m going to take you shopping!

I’m not going to get into all the history of my mom (whom I do love to no end) and me as it relates our “compatibility” in the arena of fashion (very little of which I naturally have) nor shopping.

I said,

Mom, just take care of yourself.  You are the best gift I could ever want from you.”

And she is.  This healthy part of Mom is.  She, that has fought so hard all these years to be healthy, is a treasure without a number.  I just want her.  And I can say that because I feel pretty good right now.  She’s always been a treasure, even when I didn’t appreciate her enough and wasn’t using my pink-epiphany-tool.  When I think of the parts of our history that are less warm and fuzzy, I think, “That’s how things go.”  And it rolls and ripples through to the space where angels fly.  A place big enough for our good and bad parts.

It all starts and ends with Me.

Question:  When is it hard to see your own role in how you feel?  Please tell me your story.

by

Emotions: The Physical Gift We Can Name

Leprosy hand affected fourth digit

Image via Wikipedia

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.

Related Articles
by

There is Less Space Between Emotions And Science Than We Think

The supermassive black holes are all that rema...

Image via Wikipedia

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.

Related Articles
by

Oh Well. That’s How Things Go.

Artist's rendering of Georgiana

Self-Care Tip#146 – Hold your wonderfuls and your non-wonderfuls together.

Oh well.  That’s how things go.

Today the kids were needing “parenting.”  Go figure.  I was trying.  About mid-day I heard,

Oh well.  That’s how things go.

At first glance you may not see its brilliance.  You may not see its hue of acceptance and texture of presence.  If you turn away too fast, you might miss the tension taking the back door out.  See?  The perfectionism is dissolving into the scum on my drinking glass that it is.  So look.  The room is crowded and for such a small statement to be noticed you have to really look hard.

Oh well.  That’s how things go.

Bits of us panic, thinking that sort of low-religion only leads to mediocrity, or worse.  But it’s not an either-or.  We can strive for excellence and still be present with what we don’t think is so wonderful.  We can include the non-wonderful in our consciousness and definition of self.  When the non-wonderfuls come around, wave, chat, take in the weather and carry-on.  There’s no crisis here.  I can see security waving excellence on.  No rubbernecking.  Things are ok.

Oh well.  That’s how things go.

I am reminded of the “The Birthmark,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne.  The gorgeous, lovable Georgiana, has a little hand print on her cheek.  A birthmark.  Her husband Aylmer, begins to detest the birthmark intensely and progressively.  It is so distracting to him that he stops seeing “her.”  In the end, it comes down to either be perfect or die.  Great story, and yes Aylmer, read my blog.

Question:  How have you made your peace with perfectionism?  How has it affected you?  Please tell me your story.

If you’d like to read another post with related information, see, “Adequate.”

Other Related Articles
by

Think About What You Have. The Season of Epiphany.

the Epiphany

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?

Related Articles
by

Work Hard If You Think You’re Worth It

Road Trip!

Image by -Snugg- via Flickr

Self-Care Tip #144 – Work hard if you think you’re worth it.

On the last day of our family road-trip, thinking about self-care and I don’t know where to go with that!  In the past when I thought about road trips, I’d sooth myself with visions of ice-cream stops, cheese puffs, and other expected and unexpected delicious treats to enjoy and bribe the kids with.  However, I’m taking care of myself these days, (hard work!) which subsequently results in me taking better care of my kids, …my family.  They had a nap, which was nice but now they are awake, refreshed and talking.  A lot.  So close to my head in fact that it feels like I have headphones on.  Volume adjuster not currently functioning.  Oh where are the bags of junk food!? (Disclaimer:  No offense intended to my kids.)

But old habits die hard, so I imagine this one will hold on at least as long as our road-trip.  In the mean time, without inserting needles into my eyeballs, I am thinking instead about self-care.  Thankful, despite gritted teeth and ringing ears, that I will lose the baby-fat before I forget that I was any different before the babies.  The memory is already distorted a bit by the fact that I have thrown away any clothes I used to wear and haven’t allowed any pictures of me below my shoulders to pass before my eyes in years.  I’m a happy frog in a Jacuzzi getting hotter and hotter and have to find a way out before I get eaten by someone French.  (Disclaimer:  No offense intended to the French.)

Thankful also about the ripple effect to my kids.  I’m gifting them a healthy me (because I will succeed), to offer them and theirs in their future.  I’m gifting them better odds that they won’t be in my same position in time.
I’m gifting my husband as well with the hope he continues to voice that I am around to care for him when he is dyeing.  Whenever that is.  (That is a gift if it ever happens!  He can be a real baby when he’s sick.)  (Disclaimer:  No offense intended to my husband.)

And I haven’t forgotten about you either.  You will have me indefinitely to chirp on and on about self-care.  It really is the holidays!

It’s a good thing I’m belted in because I might start levitating. OH!  I just remembered I have ear-plugs in my purse!  Yes!

Ah.  That’s better.  I know I’m working hard for good reasons.  And all the reasons start and end with “Me.”

Question:  Why are you working so hard for yourself?  What has been the hardest thing for you on your self-friendship journey?  Please tell me your story.

 

Related Articles
by

When You Are Hurting – Suffering Just Is

Daughters of a father who was trapped in a col...

Image via Wikipedia

My dad, excellent in his suffering, has shown how to lose, how to spend the time it takes to grieve it and enjoy the rest that makes life worth living.  My dad should have a medal in suffering. If I knew where to get them I’d send word.

Some of his suffering, he played a causal part in, but who cares.  It doesn’t have a qualifying relationship to “deserving” empathy and the spiritual nod.  Those come because of Love, not our performance.

None of us are foreigners to suffering others, ourselves, cause, accident, defined and ignominious explanations.  For reason and for lack of reason we suffer.  No, the etiology of suffering isn’t why we care about its abuse.  Sure we hope not to repeat mistakes that lead to suffering and that makes it’s etiology worth reflection, but not as
a qualifier to caring.

So no.

Between one grief and another, between this fault and that fault, the loss “Is.”  It just Is.  That’s Dad’s presence I’m talking about.

In a culture counting and studying our wrongs and our rights for the purpose of squeezing currency out of it, we need presence.  Presence allows for all the rest.  The healing.  The forgiveness.  The grieving.  The hope that remains.  Presence allows for us to continue valued.

Presence allows us to live for what is still worth living for.

After writing blog-post “When You Are Hurting, Remember Why You Want To Live, And Live For That,” I heard from someone suffering via his fabulous on-line monthly journal “Psyche’s Flashlight.”  He said,

I read this after a recent stint in the hospital, and I can’t tell you how much it resonates with me. This is what saved my life.

Suffering Is.

Question:  What has helped keep you away from qualifying your suffering or that of others?  Please tell me your story.

Related Articles
by

Connecting to Others is a Condition of Freedom Rather Than Loss of It.

Sitting on this land, fenced and gated I felt small.  It was different from my home.  Here I lost my connection to beyond the fence.  The string that attached me wasn’t long enough.  At my home, without thinking about it, I thought my self was bigger.  Small yet as large as the large connection I had to all the life that stretched out.  I hadn’t been in that place for a long time.

In the distance I saw the strange mountains, snow-covered, scoops of freedom and thought, “I must get there before I disappear.”

That’s what internet, (blogging, Facebook, Twitter) has done for me.  Taken me there.  No fences, no neighborhoods or zoning.  Suddenly my home became the great outdoors again and although I became smaller in it’s largeness, I became bigger by connection.  I had died a little in my isolation.  Designed in temperament and by human nature to get my energy from connections, I was weakening and alone.

I did not know.  I did now know a name for my condition.  I did not know the nature of my weakness.  I did not know what would happen when I took it down.  And I was afraid.

Tomorrow I’ll talk a little more about what conditions us to disconnect.  But for today I only share the openness around me with you.  It surprised me and wasn’t my conscious goal originally when I set out writing FriendtoYourself.  But as all true gifts come, It came to me from Love, not bought by labor or coin.

My land has changed.

Self-Care Tip #142 – Use the internet as a way to connect with others to be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What have been the connecting forces in your life?  Please tell me your story!

by

Live And Live Despite The Ongoing Loss

Red slipper

Image via Wikipedia

Self-Care Tip #141- Live and live despite the loss.  Be a friend to yourself.

The other day, my hair was barely pinned back in a knotty mass, when I arrived at clinic late with my house slippers still on.  I didn’t realize this of course until I heard this flapping sound echoing behind me as I hooned down the hall.  Distracted by myself, I seemed to suddenly come upon an old man.  He was lovely really, wrinkled, clearly handsome in his day, shuffling my same direction, and also in his house slippers.  It was less than a second when I took this all in and I suddenly felt very self-conscious.  Not awkward for the normal reasons that I should have been, like my nappy appearance, but I’ve never really thought I was “normal.”  No, I felt rude.  I’m much more sensitive to rude than ugly.

Do the younger seem rude to the older?  There with their supple joints, perky bodies and minds, hope, and shorter medication lists?  I felt rude.  Rude combined with awkward is not something most people are comfortable looking at, which is what I unfortunately offered up to this innocent man.  Walking fast felt wrong.  Not sure what to do, I sort of slowed, yet my tardiness to clinic didn’t let my gait relax.  Giving an uncertain smile, I managed not to make eye contact when I said “Hi there,” lest the eye contact lead to further tardiness.  Then off I galloped, luckily for both of us, only 3 doors down.

I didn’t spend more than a few seconds with that stranger, yet remember well what he symbolized for me.  I remember him when I get grumpy about not being able to eat as much as I did 10-years ago.  When I get resentful with my feet, (a size and a half HUGER since I had my first kid,) I see his lordosis (hunched back often from a collapsed spine.)  I wonder how he is doing with his losses.

There’s not much romance in growing old.  What is romantic is a beautiful person, who has been real with their losses and with the joys of life that are still available to them.  There’s no point in my denying that I can’t have cereal and pasta every day any more.  There’s no point in being angry about it.  I’ll just eat slower and force, er, I mean find more pleasure out of what I do eat.

I like to think that the old man in the hall made his and makes his peace with losses and is more glad than not for his life.  If so, maybe he was ok with my fast pace when he couldn’t.  Maybe it makes him more comfortable in a world in which he is becoming more and more of a stranger.  That is something to admire.  That is something that is worthy of life’s privilege.

After yesterday’s blog-post, a reader said it quite fine,

I did not know depression was progressive.  That’s depressing.  As is the realization that aging is progressive.  …On the other hand I can say I’ve had 61 more Christmas times than a new-born and perhaps that makes it worth it!

Question:  What losses are you struggling with?  How do you come to terms with your losses?  Please tell me your story.

by

Things Will Always Be About “Me”

Common Clownfish (Amphiprion ocellaris) in the...

Image via Wikipedia

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.

by

Stop Blushing. It’s Not About “Me.”

Beckwith James Carroll Lost in Thought

Image via Wikipedia

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.

by

What Are You Getting From Pain?

For most people the aftermath of a punch in the face means a phone call to the police or a trip to A&E. But not Lucian Freud. His reaction to a nasty altercation with a taxi driver was to put the pain and anger aside and head to the studio to get his rather impressive black eye down on canvas.

guardian.co.uk – Lucian Freud

Self-Care Tip #136 – Get something other than anger from your pain.

Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away.

Say it however you want, everyone gets and everyone looses.  We could say, “Life,” if you prefer.  Or insert wherever you think good things come from and where they go.

Who hasn’t just gotten their fingers around something they wanted, realizing more and more each moment that they really wanted it, pleasure rising, gratitude and satisfaction driving itself deeper inside – just to find it somehow escaping their grasp?

Morris Venden, preached it.  He had a low, hound-dog voice, a face to match and severe social phobia he struggled with life-long that just added to his beauty.  He preached his own shared experiences with people.  People like me and you.

A man working a job he never liked finally retires and buys his little house to grow old in, a garden he could play with, and a year later finds the love of his life suddenly dead with cancer.   And it all turns to ash for him.

 

Early portraits by Lucian Freud

Your firstborn dies.

You were cruel in a debase way.

You develop mental illness.

Your divorce is ugly.

You father commits suicide.

You have a disabled child, and then another.

You’re paralyzed.

You prostituted yourself for drugs.

When I heard Venden give this talk the first time, I thought I got it.  Even now after years and after darkness, I think I get it.

Before one of his talks, when I was still in medical school, Venden asked me to sing this with him.

Angels never knew the joy that is mine, for the blood has never washed their sins away, tho they sing in Heaven there will come a time, when silently they’ll listen to me sing “Amazing Grace.”

We stood there on stage.  Me smiling too largely because that’s what I did in front of people.  He, uncomfortable, a little blunted and suited with a thick knotted tied, stood a few paces away.

And it’s a song holy angels cannot sing, ‘Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. ‘And it’s a song holy angels cannot sing. ‘I once was lost but now I’m found’

I looked at his droopy moustached face and his eyes were red and wet.

Holy is the Lord, the angels sing, All around the throne of God continually.  For me to join their song will be a natural thing.  But they just won’t know the words to “Love Lifted Me.”

This is what Morris Venden thought he was getting from pain.

What ever our pain-story is, was, and becomes, holding the anger is gripping the ash.  For Morris Venden, he took care of himself by finding this instead of anger – more knowledge of God’s love.  Moving his grip to that was his self-care.

Question:  What are you getting from your pain?  How do you do self-care when you lose?  Please tell me your story.

by

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

 

greaterlearning.org

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.

by

When Someone Is Afraid Of You, You Don’t Have To Be Afraid Of Them. Just Be.

Self-Care Tip #131 – When someone transfers negativity on you, just be.  Be a friend to yourself.

Reading up on the woe’s of Harry Potter, Sam did not let his children near those books.  He’d read “what they say” which shows that when kids read books like Harry Potter, it was the same as inviting the devil into their minds.  “Kids can’t tell the difference between fantasy and truth,” he said.

Sam had a friend.  A best friend named Matthew.  Sam was very afraid for Matthew who didn’t guard against this kind of attack.  Sam said, “Did you know…?”

What was Matthew’s response?

There are 2 terms we’ve used in psychotherapy since before Freud and Jung were around –

  • transference – putting our feelings on the therapist.  For example, say my therapist is a man who looks like my father.  I will transfer on him my feelings about my father and subconsciously think my therapist is like my father.
  • countertransference is the opposite.  The therapist thrusts her own memories and associations on her patient.

These can be positive or negative.  Of course they don’t stay on the couch.  Transference and Countertransference happen between all of us all the time.  Often it is healthy.  It helps us grow, model others, fantasize and move towards fantasy’s long enough to make them true.

In Sam and Matthew’s case, Sam was transferring his fears of immorality on Matthew.  But what was Matthew’s reaction?  What was Matthew’s countertransference?

I have often been guilty of negative countertransference in situations like this.  I remember feeling dirtied by people’s prejudices and fears.  Almost like I needed to bathe afterwards.  The truth is though, we don’t have to.  When people are afraid of us, we don’t have to be afraid of them.  We don’t have to despise them.  We don’t have to be angry, irritated, or feel “soiled.”   We can just be with them.  Let it be about them and not run away.  Just be present.

Matthew, wonderful best friend Matthew had heard this song from Sam before.  When Sam started in on it again this time, Matthew was able to sit back, listen to his fear rather than worry about what words shuttled it.  And Matthew was better for it.  Maybe Sam was too.  But the gift Matthew gave was first to himself.  By just being with Sam in his fear, he was able to just be with himself too.  Quite friendly.

Question:  How has transference and countertransference played out in your life?  How do you, “just be,” when you are inclined to “countertransfer” instead?  Please tell me your story.

Related articles