behavioral health

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Self-Care is Freedom, is Democracy, is Because We Are Accountable

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Self-Care Tip #159 – Be accountable for and to yourself.

It was about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which in my part of the world is considered hot.  But in Washington D.C., I considered that temperature general anesthesia.  I was breathing it in and trying hard to remain alert.  Just when I thought I could hold out no longer, I saw him.  Big and expressive, the long form of Abraham Lincoln was there, surrounded by loud irreverent people.  My brother and I were wiping sweat out of our eyes trying to keep track of our kids.  We wanted to read the Gettysburg Address for our kids, and found ourselves screaming.  The kids could barely hear the words above the disinterested rabble around us.  Despite all this, I was choking; a weepy, sweaty, nearly anesthetized but free American.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

Just down the corner from Lincoln is a president’s list of sites to see, informers and reminders of who we are and where we came from.  However, none of them were “my Lincoln” experience.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion…

A couple of days ago, writing the post about how stress intersects with medicine, I remembered “my Lincoln.”  It may seem like a stretch at first but take a minute.  Self-care is a way of saying, “I am free.”   In places where life is cheap, almost without value, self-care is not much of an option.  It is because of freedom that we can extricate the meddling fingers, the invasions, and be the keeper of our own private spaces however we choose to.  It is because of freedom that we can tell people that although my brain is ill and although I take medication, I am equal. Saying that is self-care.  Saying that is possible if we take that freedom to keep our own accountability for our own selves.  Accountability is not the same as blame.  Having accountability for our freedom is not the same as being at fault for what came before freedom, nor our current conditions.

—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

If you’re not accountable to your inner self, if you’re only accountable to your actions, or you’re only accountable to what others determine and define about you, than you are not free.  You are blamed.

Accountability is such a tender privilege.  We might lose it if we forget who we are, where we came from and our rights to freedom.  Democracy is self-care.

Question:  How do you see the relationship between self-care and your freedoms?  Please tell me your story.

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No Matter Why, Where, or What Happens, Self-Care Starts and Ends With Me

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Self-Care Tip #158 – No matter why, where or what happens, self-care still starts and ends with Me.

It’s no secret that I look at behavior through many paradigms.  Most of what I’ve shared on this blog is medical because I’m a physician.  That’s my specialty.  I’m not a physicist and don’t spend my posts on explaining how physics influences our behaviors – although I believe it does.  However, I don’t want you to think that I think behaviors and emotions exist within only the medical paradigm, even though that’s what you hear me talk mostly about.

According to Dr. Q, the roughly sketched breakdown of how stress intersects with medicine:

1.  Stress influences how we behave and feel. We “see” the stressors, and we see the emotional and behavioral responses, and we know their sources.  We know that emotions and behaviors are produced by a human.  Where else?  Anything magical or otherwise comes from Someone from another place.

2.  Stress influences our medical condition. Stress will awaken sleeping genes that carry the names of different diseases; cancer, major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, and so on.  Would those genes have awakened on their own without the external trigger flipping the switch?  We don’t always know.

3.  Because there are so many factors that influence the reasons a disease process demonstrates itself, we cannot say that it is causally related to the stressors.  Many people try to do this, and sometimes the disease’s labeled cause comes down to the jury’s decision.  But we don’t have to have read, “To Kill A Mockingbird” by Harper Lee to know that people’s opinions and judgments are biased.

4.  People try to find the reasons why.  This is natural and in my opinion appropriate.  However, where we look for the reasons for the feeling and behaviors is equally important.  Seeking accountability for how we feel and behave to come from outside of ourselves, to come from external reasons, to come from a source to fault is more often missing our chance to get friendly with ourselves.

“It just is,” as many say, and the 12-Steps would say “Surrender what is out of your control to your Higher Power.”  These are not inconsistent with owning that mental health begins and ends with Me.

Sure, there are the despicable situations of abuse, trauma, violence and other horrible biology changing events.  These are known to cause the one non-genetically related psychiatric disease process called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD.)  These are situations consistent with our previous post on not being responsible for our history but being responsible for our futures.

5.  Stress, other than in situations of PTSD, is not causal for the progression of mental illness.  Everyone has stress, but how we deal with it, how we cope makes the difference.  Even horrible events, such as losing ones wealth and the sequelae of it are not causal for the continuance of brain disease.

6.  Medications, lifestyle change, Love and various other therapies effectively influences the way genes express themselves, our biology, and our medical condition….

7.  …In so doing, medications, lifestyle change, spirituality and various other therapies effectively influence our emotions and behaviors.

Question: How has your understanding of how stress intersects with with how you feel and behave affected you?  Please tell me your story.

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Go Toward Mental Illness and Take It To The Floor

Sean and Cheryl: Drama on the dance floor

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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.

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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.

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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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Please Don’t Say “But”

Christopher Robin in his Disney depiction.

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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?
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Your Personal Fight For Emotional Freedom

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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.

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

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

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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.

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Receive When a Gift is Offered

Ms. Stephanie Cocks

Image by -kÇ- via Flickr

Self-Care Tip#149 – Receive when a gift is offered.  Be a friend to yourself.

I am totally charmed.  Sitting in the coffee-shop, and this lovely man came up and handed me his James Patterson book.  “I’m going to throw it away and thought you might like to read it.  I’m done and it was great.”  Judge and Jury looks suspenseful and I’m too fragile I think for it, but I took it anyway.  I was more charmed by the intent and character of the giver.

I try to tell my daughter about this.  When someone offers you a gift, just accept it.  It’s not so hard.  Say thank you and in doing so, give them the gift of giving and receive the gift of receiving.  It’s powerful for both parties.  The ability to receive isn’t always natural.  It’s something I’ve tried to understand my whole life.

Well, I didn’t catch the name of the book-man but we chatted despite lacking that social etiquette.  He saw my blog-site on my open computer screen and discovered my background in mental health.

“I have problems,” he said.  “Really I do.”  Maybe he was used to people not believing him and added that to add emphasis.  “I have anxiety.”  “Oh.”  I said.  “That’s torture.”  “It is!” book-man said.  “We don’t choose our emotions!  I used to think we did, but we really don’t!”  I heard it from the source.  Speak it book-man!  We don’t always choose our emotions.

We didn’t talk long.  He walked off before I could offer too much.  Maybe it was the anxiety that called him away.  I felt sad and happy.  Sad, because his suffering connected with me.  Happy, because of all the people in here, he and I connected.

Connecting with people any time any where is a small bit of the supernatural.  It’s not something that we can distil, put in a tube or slide under a microscope.  It’s not something that obeys even the excellent paradigm of temperaments.  It comes both expectedly and unexpectedly.  It comes deliberately through labor and through chance.  An airborne-something from the spirit world.  This is not to say that the natural isn’t also family, the dear child of the supernatural.  It’s just that there is a unique charm in the unknowing.

And so the book-man and the unknown connection stays with me even now after he is gone.  His anxiety, his reaching out, his generosity, the Me drawn into his space and he into mine.  I am receiving and he gave.

Thank you Great Supernatural and Natural God for this.

Question:  When do you connect despite the anxiety of being in the position of receiving?  Please tell me your story.

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Emotions: The Physical Gift We Can Name

Leprosy hand affected fourth digit

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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

The supermassive black holes are all that rema...

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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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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.”

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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?

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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.

 

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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.

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Lament, Celebrate, Negotiate to Take Care of Yourself

xprojectmanagement.com

Self-Care Tip #146 – Negotiate to get friendly with yourself.

How do you fit in socially when you’re taking care of yourself?  To be social you need another person.  How does that socialization become compatible with self-care?

These were the questions my brilliant sister-in-law, Trixie Hidalgo asked.  It isn’t so apparent really and I get what she’s asking.  Self-care is not all about the self.  There is clearly an exchange.  We are getting something from our environment that in turn is taking from us.  That environment can be anything, such as music, movies, books, work, or interpersonal relationships.  We negotiate with that.  We agree to what we get and what we give contextually.

How does one person in wanting to define self-care for themselves harmonize the exchange?  It’s a reduction of laments and celebrations.  For example, in going to medical school I lost time, opportunity to be a young mother, and joined without directly asking to, the competitive world that is culturally considered masculine – to name a few.  Yet the celebrations, although never equal to the losses, and vice versa, I agreed to.  I made the exchange between myself and my social context.

The self-care skill comes in the experience of your own self-discovery.  How does one do this?  Look inside yourself over and over again.  Lament.  Celebrate.  Negotiate.

For You:  I’m dying to hear your responses.  I have a feeling that they will complete the post, as so often they do.  Please tell me how you reconcile the effort towards self-care with the inherent social context.

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Look Around to Get Strength and Perspective.

My sister and her baby.

Image via Wikipedia

Self-Care Tip #145 – Look around to get strength.

I was talking with my colleague, Janice, who works intimately in the area of group homes and advocating for the clients.  I asked her to tell me something about them.

There are times when parents give up and they can’t provide.

I wrote a blog-post some time ago relating to this as I work with many families who are near this point or past it.  Taking care of ourselves can be hard enough in this world, let alone a disabled child or two, or three…  I’ve seen marvelous results from placements.   However, my blog-post, “Get in Someone’s Space” got a response that was not so complimentary.  I asked Janice about where she thought the comment was coming from.

There are a lot of good group homes but many are not.  The workers are paid minimum wage often and they are saints.  There are about 1/2 and 1/2 that are good v. not good.  They can make a lot of money potentially.  In some of the homes, the workers are ambivalent at best.  It is a job to them.  If they do care but are surrounded by people who don’t care they lose steam.  They can’t do it all.  Emergency homes are also useful to give parents a relief.

Some of the disabled in placement have no family involved.  Others do.  And in those that do have involved family give their family some time to recharge while in placement.  The family can recharge and use that new energy for things like continue to “shop” further for the best fit for placement.  It can be work to find the right placement and get someone moved there.  Then after that challenge is met, families will find other struggles.  Struggles such as placement being so far that the family can’t visit or be as involved as they’d like.  They find, as we all do at some ah-ha moment(s) in life, that we can’t have it all.

Mr. Rick stated it well.

I will not be a victim while choosing my burdens.

We could also say, “I will not be a victim while choosing my benefits,” perhaps.

I understand that the topic of disabled family and/or group home placements may not interest all of us.  It may not appear at the surface to be an issue involving eternal truths.  Yet, we see that it does.  We are, each of us, not so far removed from unfair life circumstances.  From choices that look “bad and also bad.”  Or could we say, rather, that look to be choices between “one benefit and another,” knowing that we can’t have it all?

No.  We are not so far away from the single mother raising her two mentally retarded children.  We are not that distant from the caregiver with license to house five children but can’t find good staffing.  We can see the fetal-alcohol syndrome child who got what he got from birth and will live where they are until they die with staff as their family.

To my parents who can’t give any more, choose your benefits.  They are there.  To my kids who are confused by their own behaviors and emotions, to my staffers who struggle to understand the value of their jobs, to you who feel more of the burdens than the benefits, to all of us, we are the same in this.  We are each other’s “people.”  We have this knowing.

Look around.  Gather strength and make your choices.

Question:  What has enabled your perspective?  What part came without effort and what part didn’t?  Please tell me your story.

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Choose Differently. You Are Not A Victim.

Candid Creeper #1 By Tony3

Self-Care Tip #143 – Choose differently.  Be a friend to yourself.

Psychiatry, love of my professional life, married me into his secretive family.  Of course I wanted and want psychiatry, finding so much inner congruence to the paradigms regarding human behavior, emotion, and more.  However, I did not want all the dangers of prescribing, of sharing advice (even solicited advice) if given outside sound proof walls, formalities with documentation, and a doctor-patient relationship that guards against abuse of power.  These are important things for sure but for me, they seemed to seep into my personal life.  For example, I was coached that even a cousin or friend or colleague whom I loved and loved me might throw me into prison, a Joseph toward the land of Egypt, should something go wrong that they thought was connected to my involvement.  Their own guilt and anger would be my judgment.

We do see this.  It is not a myth.  It happens not only in the personal scenarios I have described, but even when treatment is done in the most discreet, professional and informed circumstances.  In eating disorder families, for example, the psychiatrist might become the scape-goat.  Their calorie-deprived daughter, wife, sister, son is hospitalized and despite all their physician does or does not do, the beloved starves and dies.  The survivors are so confused by their grief.  Their pain, an angry god, will consume them if nothing is done.  And that is how the psychiatrist ends up in court to carry the sins away for the lives left behind.

And so my professional relationship with psychiatry became part of the neighborhood zoning that conditioned my choice to be more personally disconnected.  There are other cultural reasons, some of which I have mentioned in the blog-post Journey.  The key though is that is was my choice.  No one forced this on me.  No one forced me to respond in the ways that I have.  I am not a victim to my culture, sex, profession or anything else.  And I can choose differently any time I want.

I choose.  Is not that marvelous?!

Question:  What trips up your choices to connect?  What has helped you choose differently when you needed to?  Please tell me your story.

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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!

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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.