Recreation

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Let Him “Save Face” Because it is Friendly To Yourself

Your argument is invalid.

Image via Wikipedia

If you’ve argued, here’s what I want to ask you today:

Are you getting what you want?

That argument we had, knowing the pristine rightness of our position, knowing we have taken the fall so many times for reasons as loaded, knowing we’ve been disadvantaged, our pearls were trampled and we knew and we argued because we thought we finally should.  Was it friendly to Me?  Choosing to argue.  (There we’ve already passed up the victim role and claimed accountability for the argument.  We chose it.)

The question is what is most friendly to Me?  To be right?  Hm.  What will we do with the rightness?  Sleep with it at night?  Will it clean our house?  Will we get anything for it?  Will it take us on vacation?  What ever the argument was about.

Most of us think we are right.  Now what?

Ellen had argued.  Not aggressively.  There was no volume or matter flying about.  It was short but potent.  A bit nuclear if you must know.  She was so in the right.  If she were a tooth, she’d be the brightest whitest one in the mouth.  Pearly white.  An incisor perhaps.  She gained ground but lost her goal.  Now, neither of them got what they wanted.  They just got what any one gets when they argue.  Lonely.

Mass General put out a great guideline to conflict resolution I’ve reference below if you want to peruse …or tattoo it to your arm.

Basically, if you want to get something, let the other person save face.  You ain’t getting much by being right.  Think about what is friendly to yourself and remember that friendly is not what is easy, natural or desired many times.  It is what improves you and gets you what you really want in the big picture.

If you can’t do this even though you are deliberately trying, it may be that it is a symptom of brain illness and needs medical care.

So how am I doing in our argument?  Smile.  Are you getting what you want?  Have you ever been mid-stride argument and been able to change the direction of your projection?  Have you ever been able to stop yourself once you started and chose to be friendly with yourself rather than just right?  How?  Please tell me your story.

Self-Care Tip:  You guessed it.  Let him save face.

Related Articles:

Find the Best Route To Your Destination:  Conflict Resolution

How to win Arguments

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Deliberately Setting Myself Up To Improve

dayspa-1

Image by samuelalove via Flickr

Self-care is about improving life, not harm.  Even though it includes doing things we don’t enjoy and sometimes hurt, it doesn’t harm us.

That’s a useful meter-stick when we wonder about something in our life.  Is this harming us?  Including people.  Do I feel better about myself when I’m with them?  Do they help me become a better person?  A better friend to myself?  Or, do they turn me toward things that harm me?

When thinking about our days activities, our choice of employment, things we put in our body, put them by this “No-Harm Meter-Stick” and see how they measure.

A deliberate check-point in my life is consistent with a deliberate goal.  …”I want to be  healthy.  Is this improving my health?”  “I want to have good self-esteem.  Does this improve my self-esteem?”  And the journey is consistent with the beginning and the end.  If the goals for the moment isn’t consistent with our big picture goals than they might not be the goals we want.  Like putting substances in our body that feel good for the moment but harm our life.  There are innumerable examples of this but you get the picture.

Questions:  What checks you when you need it?  What has been useful to remind you in this area or that to be friendly to yourself?  Please tell us your story.

Self-Care Tip – Deliberately set up feedback in your life to let you know that you are a friend to yourself.

See blog-Post:  “You” Are The Best Gift

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The Growing Process Shifts From Shame and Fear to Friendship

Hello Friends.  Tonight ends our pilot run of the self-care workshop series.  Whoop!  Thank you for your support.  Very much.  The growing process, when in the company that we have here, shifts the experience form one of fear and shame to one of …well this:  friendship, with you and with our own selves.

One of our participants was kind enough to send me his recap,

Some of the points that were most important to me were:

  1. Going toward our temperament/the languages we use,
  2. Invest in your bank,
  3. Going against your intuition,
  4. The energy balance as illustrated by the triangle diagram,
  5. It doesn’t always feel good to perform self-care.
  6. categories in the bio…model and how they interrelate, i.e. biopsychosocial model.  (Smile.)

Pretty good! Huh?

This was written after our second week.  After tonight, we can add,

  1. Accountability for our flawed self doesn’t mean blame or fault.
  2. Our flaws become part of our opportunity for growth and personal presence.
  3. Self-awareness is a tool for,
  1. Understanding our agendas,
  2. Bettering our sense of presence,
  3. Freedom that is ours independent of our effort, morals, or any human quality
  4. A freedom that we want to fight for with everything we’ve got to preserve.  I.e., a freedom we can lose.
  • Using the biospychosocial model as a tool for,
    1. Understanding where our emotions and behaviors are coming from
    2. Understanding where emotions and behaviors of others are coming from – such as STIGMA

    I wish I had another summary from one of our participants rather than my own.  I can make this so much more complicated than it is!  I am learning.  I am flawed.  I am accountable.  I am not blamed.  I am in the company of friends, including myself!  Whoop!

    If I get another summary though from “someone,” I’ll pass it on for your perusal and comments.

    Again, thank you and until tomorrow…!  Keep on.

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    I’ve heard, “It Never Hurts to Ask”

    It never hurts to ask and what I learned from Honda…

    Honda stojan

    Image via Wikipedia

     

    I am a believer in Honda.  They’ve won me over with their automatic doors, convenience in just about any way they can, but mostly because of their Starbucks coffee, fresh-baked cookies and 10% discounts.  “Ten percent?,” you ask.  Well, not so easy as that.  We have to ask.  Ask nicely.

    Honda has, if not taught me, reinforced my once shaky belief that if you ask for something, you’re more likely to get it.  Sounds obvious but how often we don’t.  We don’t ask.  What are the barriers?  Flip it and we wonder what helps us ask?

    We bring out our biopsychosocial model again.  (Hear the whip-ahhh! as it comes out of our pocket?!)

    Question:  What do you find when you break it down?

    Those barriers or the helps we have in other areas of our life, including with our own friend, Me.

    Self-Care Tip #277 – If you want to change something, ask.  Including when it’s about yourself from yourself.

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    Choose Back! …As Long As Life Chooses You.

    A Girl On A Footbridge

    Image by jyryk58 via Flickr

    Self-Care Tip #241 – As long as life chooses you, it is your right to choose back – so do.

    Although I am not a geriatric psychiatrist, I have still been given the pleasure of serving a “golden” few.  What has impressed me has been their willingness to start over.

    Starting over takes courage and humility whether it is deliberate or not.  Sometimes fear dances between the lines of all the emotions and intentions. But still, wouldn’t you agree that it takes courage and humility to negotiate fear?

    (Enters Hans.)  Hans was seventy-three years old.  He had struggled with brain illness on and off he thinks since he was at least twelve.  There were big spaces of time when his disease exacerbated, and he largely suffered.  But he chose, at this age, to try again for improved brain health.

    Is there a time when we start thinking, don’t keep trying to start over?  Maybe in the dying process.  In case you don’t know, the dying process is a specific term.  It means the time when a person is facing impending death.

    This area of medicine is not my specialty but I imagine at some point we want to stop with that starting over process, give up, but not in a hopeless way.  In a way that says,

    I can stop trying for new anything and sit in the space of what I already have in me…

    …Which hopefully includes all the ingredients and interrelations of life.

    But how far before that point in life do we consider starting over reasonable?  I’ve heard of kids being told they’re too young to ride a bike, or cut with a knife, or understand the dinner conversation.  No one bobs their head at that.  But find a seventy-three year old who believes that after a lifetime of perceived failure by onlookers or themselves, who still says,

    Now let’s give this another go,

    …and if it hasn’t been said, it’s been thought,

    give it over already!  You’ve hit your seventy-times-seven chances!

    It’s like they’re shopping in the teen-ware.  We blink our eyes and angle our heads.  Even the thought of starting over as a real option feels indiscreet.

    (Enters Hans.)  Hans is seventy-three.  He is starting over.  Humbly and with courage, he pursues brain health in the face of stigma.

    I think I had celebrated my six birthday when my dad asked me if I felt any different from how I felt when I was five.

    Yes!  I feel older!

     Then he asked me how old I thought he was.  When I answered some enormous number like, “twenty-two!” he asked,

    Does forty-four seem old to you?  

    Of course it did!  But I had an intuition that if he was old, than he’d die, so I said a definitive,

    NO!  Daddy you’re still young!  You aren’t old!

    Now, almost that same age myself, I am in awe of him and the others in their golden or not so golden years (Enters Hans) who believe that as long as life chooses them, they will choose back.  It is their freedom.

    Questions:  When all your senses don’t sense pleasure in life, or you feel old and useless, or you feel that you’ve failed too many times, how do you choose to start over?  Who has inspired you and what did they do?  Please tell me your story.

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    Your Bridge Between Choosing and Being Chosen By Guilt

    INNOCENCE/GUILT

    Image by ~fyrfli~ via Flickr

    Self-Care Tip #227 – Find out about your bridge between choosing and being chosen by guilt.

    Guilt.

    Sometimes we think people who do wrong should feel guilt.  But how many of us improve ourselves or others in response to guilt?  And because this is a self-care blog (wink), I have tooled around with what it is all about and if it is a positive self-service.  In my meanderings I remembered, Schadenfreude.  (Isn’t that a marvelous Americanized German word?!)

    Schadenfreude is different from guilt, although often in the same company.  It is a natural response in which we find pleasure at observing another’s demise or suffering.  I speculate that when we see someone feeling guilty and suffering from that guilt, even against our better natures we experience a degree of Schadenfreude, i.e. pleasure.  Because we moralize things, we responsibly feel shame when insight dawns on Schadenfreude, but “it just is.”  It is a part of who we are in this time of humankind’s history.

    However would we go so far as to say that we want people to feel guilty when they do wrong because of the motivating reward that Schadenfreude has on us?  For example, Mom is disciplining her children and just won’t stop until someone cries.  I remember hearing jokes about this in mommy groups when my kids were a bit younger.  …Mom thinks silently,

    I’m suffering so I want to see you suffer.

    Even though we maturely and grandly empathize (the counterpart to Schadenfreude) with the kids, there is a simultaneous “secret Schadenfreude” (a private feeling) that goes on at their failure.  The blend of both can be confusing.

    As we continue to travel the bridge between voluntary and involuntary, we are learning more about how choice remains regardless which side we are looking at.  For example, if guilt and Schadenfreude are so natural, so biological, so reflexive, we look for our choice.

    Cathy wrote on the blog-post, Choosing Perspective,

    I become trapped in my own guilt. Yes it is about perspective but what to do when even changing your perspective provides no relief, only a different source of constraint?

    Questions:  I can’t help but wonder what you think about this?  Where and what is your bridge between choosing and being chosen by guilt and other negative emotions?  How do you choose when guilt and other negative emotions come involuntarily and inappropriately to context?  Please tell me your story.

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    Self-Care Is About More Than “Me”

    Self-Care Tip #208 – If for no other reason, get friendly with yourself simply to survive and you’ll see what that means later.

    my self care reminders

    Image by CatrinaZ via Flickr

    It is not unusual to think of “selfish-care” when we hear “self-care.”  I can imagine children gripping their mother’s skirts more tightly, husbands pulling their helpmate’s hands away from this influence, church-folk sniffing over rejections to service-calls or friends personalizing the way their phone doesn’t ring as much as it used to.  This is a natural response, although it is a false perception.  Think – feeling suffocated by her penance, he’s wearing a martyr’s cross or she’s giving to us from victimhood.  Those are the times we would rather not receive the gifts of time, person or anything dripping with that kind of guilt and implied debt. This kind of service comes from someone impoverished, giving on credit.

    I’ve been known to say, “We can’t give what we don’t have.”  Or as Jasmine said,

    You can’t give someone a ride if you’re all out of gas!

    So when is self-care selfish?  To be true to what self-care is, I’d say almost never.  However, because the question comes from such an intuitive fear in any of us, “never” can’t be an entirely fair answer.  To answer it best though, we need to turn it over and go back to trying to discover why we wanted self-care first.  What brought us here?  Jacqui said it well in yesterday’s post-comments:

    Ditto about ‘self-care boot camp’. I may steal that one. You’ve given me permission to be selfish if need be. It’s all about self-preservation.

    Sometimes we are reduced to self-preservation.  It has an intensity to it, a survival mode of live or die, which may be appropriate to a desperate condition in life.   Many of us know what that feels like.  So in this context, self-care is in part about survival.  Alright.  But is survival a selfish need?  Are we worth that little?  Does the life in us hold value only at that level?

    rejuvenation.self.care.logo

    Image by guttersnipe.76 via Flickr

    You hear the clomping my words are making and can follow that I answer, no.  Survival has far reaching significance.  I matter.  You matter.  We have value beyond our own selves and Me booting up to live better also ripples over those same infinite number of connections.

    I am confident that if for no other reason than getting friendly with yourself simply to survive, you will still see at least some of what more that means later.  Self-care is about more than Me.

    Question:  When do you think self-care is selfish?  Why do you think self-care is not?  Please tell me your story.

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    Blog-Jacking By Dogtor Timothy Q (Alias Mr. Rick C.)

    This photograph of my dog was taken by me in S...

    Image via Wikipedia

    Guest Blogger:  Dogtor Timothy Q.


    For some time “The Queen”, as we like to refer to her, has asked me to help out with her fine blog.  Technically, she may have never asked directly.  However, I think “Stay in the gosh darn yard before I go bazookas” could be translated into our language as “Please write my blog for me”.  I would like to begin by introducing myself.  My name is Timothy and I am a dog that lives in a magical floating house that is at the top of the bottom of a hill.  (This confuses me, also.  I just go with what I am told.)  As you may have guessed… Our Queen is none other than the very “I’m gifted”, “I’m talented”,  and “shucks I am so fat” … Dr. Q.  This description is not my own, but rather, what she repeats each morning as she looks into the mirror before chasing the fine young prince and princesses around the house as the one we like to call “The Knight” pets us and escapes.

    I have worked on this for the last month.  Not because I have a lack of things I would like to say, but because paws and keyboards do not go well together.  This is just one of the many discriminations that we as dogs face.  I am proud to say that, rather than make excuses or bark endlessly about my problems (I tried that once and endured something called mad neighbor with a water hose), I have learned to use my nose.  My tongue worked better but seemed to create issues with the computer.

    I grew up with all the comforts a Labradoodle could hope for… Gourmet meals, attendants, a plush customized mini van, grooming at the finest spas.  Yet, I have always felt like I have missed something.  Recently, I discovered a loose patch of grass right next to the fence.  The sign could have been no clearer.  It said to me, “Dig!, Dig!, Dig!… your time to explore the world has come”.  That is just what I did.

    I have made many friends during my adventures through the neighborhood.  I have also learned that there are many out there that will lead you astray.  Being a stray is not a bad thing and can happen to the best of dogs.  I have quite a few friends that fit into this classification, even.  Many dogs are born stray, such as the ones they call coyotes.  As my grandfather once told me, Labradoodle translates into “Feared by every single coyote that has ever even come close to us”.  With this in mind, I reached out a paw to the yotes and found out that they’re not so bad.  We have a lot in common… We all dislike cats and agree that they do taste a lot like chicken.  Trust me… after hitching a ride on a banana truck back from Tijuana, I will never ever listen to a cat as long as I live.

    Screenshot of Barbra Streisand from the traile...

    Image via Wikipedia

    Interestingly, people seem to let their guard down when they think that it’s just us dogs watching.  Aside from enduring the occasional really bad rendition of Barbra Streisand, we pick up some pretty interesting information.  Gets kind of complicated sometimes.  Too much of this, not enough of that, need to change,blah, blah, blah, blah, woof.  Believe it or not…. most of the stuff we see and hear as dogs doesn’t change what we have for people that feed us and pet us…. unconditional love.

    How has your dog been rewarded today?  What bad things have cats done to you?  Do you know any sweet young female dogs (censorship!) that are looking for a good time?  How does your dog see you and do you really have to dance while you sing the same gosh darn song every single morning?

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    Remember Love to Feel Bigger Than Your Self

    A Mothers Love. The Hand of a Child.

    Image by Steve Rhode via Flickr

    Self-Care Tip #175 – Remember Love.

    Yesterday was my son’s birthday and today we partied over him.

    How old are you?

    He looks at his fingers and sees how many come up before he answers,

    Four.  I’m four!

    Right now, he feels really big.  He blows his lid if anyone says otherwise.  And because he’s never been above the bottom twentieth percentile on the growth curve, and because he’s four years old and the youngest of three, and because he’s so small, when he says, “I’m big!” looking serious over, yet under you with his bottle cap eyes, it’s really hard to keep straight.  But more often I do …until he loudly says,

    I love you the whole day, Mommy!  The whole day!  You are my friend!

    Then it’s over for me.  I can’t stay off of him.  He’s just too beautiful.  His open forwardness humbles me and I remember that it’s Love that makes us great.  It’s Love that brings us to our knees.  It’s Love, more than this stack of years, inches and knowledge that makes my son bigger than me when I forget Love.  He doesn’t.  He’s just too small to.  Four years of Love is big.

    Questions:  What has helped you remember Love lately?  What has made you feel bigger than your own self?  Please tell me your story.

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    Lost But Now Found

    A three-year-old labradoodle.

    Image via Wikipedia

    What a night.  Mr. Rick C. was right.  Sometimes I do sit home and medicate.  It is not self-medicating, though, as I have my own prescriber.  And last night I was using my self-care tools to survive:  0.25mg of alprazolam got me through the first half of the night crisis, and then 2.5mg of zolpidem got me through the rest.  Despite these helpful medications, I dreamed of Timothy and Jack in the worst of circumstances.  I was amazed at how many positions a coyote could hold my Labradoodle in his mouth.  My eyes are still swollen red cherries and my complexion is bad.

    Earl and I were not connecting.  Who does when they are afraid and grieving?  I simply told him,

    Sorry honey.  I’m no good.  Can’t connect.

    Earl is gentle.  He responds easily to words.  He doesn’t react easily to negative emotions.  He is a wait-and-see kind of guy most of the time.  His eyes are not red this morning.  He did not medicate.  He did not make this about him.

    We made forty flyers describing our Great Pyrenees Jack and Labradoodle Timothy with our phone numbers and including a lucent plea for anyone to call if they saw them.

    Our three kids in the mom-van, I planned to go door-to-door and harass people – I mean ask people – if they knew anything about our dogs.  We first targeted our neighborhood mailboxes where there is a bulletin board for community announcements.  I lifted my flyer to staple in front and center position and, “Darn-it!”  My kids had broken my stapler.

    Pyrenean Mountain Dog

    Image via Wikipedia

    While banging my stapler on the wall, I noticed another white sheet flyer.

    2 White dogs found!

    More tears.  I called the number and blubbered.  The woman was comforting me, suggesting more alprazolam and a good psychiatrist she knew.  Our dogs were happily frolicking in her back yard with her two German Shepherds.

    Timothy and Jack are home now figuratively and literally in the dog house.  We have a dog trainer, at much expense, coming tomorrow to help us.  We will also be placing an electric wire around our fence before the rest of our neighbors cement a reactive opinion about us.  Although our dogs are important, we hope to live here a long long time and don’t want to be picketed out of the neighborhood.

    Thank you so much everyone for your kindness, for your empathic responses and patience with your own Dr Q.  It was a large blessing for my fragile self last night to know you were all there.  I hope that blessing comes back to you.

    Keep on!

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

    Cover of "To Kill a Mockingbird: 50th Ann...

    Cover via Amazon

    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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    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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    What We Get For Our Work

     

     

    Number three on Bella’s List:

    Farmer Brown hired help to get his crop in.  Half way through the job, he realized he needed more help, so he got some.  This happened at least 3 times before the job was finished.  Come paying time, Farmer Brown gave everyone the same, $100.  “What’s going on here!?” the people who worked the longest complained.  “We should get paid more!”

    Farmer Brown, …well you probably know that this is my version of the story from Matthew 20:1-16.  The Farmer gave them more than money.  But what did he give?

    What are we getting for what we do?  Intuitively we probably think, like the hired farm-hands, and like my patient Bella, that we aren’t getting what we should at times.

    “The day has been ruined!” Bella said.  Her eyes sparkled and flashed as she spoke of her injury.  Bella was not so pleased with her labor’s reward.

    The real point of our stories here – the hired farm-hands, Bella’s, and our own story – is figuring out the reference point of why we do things.  Everyone makes their reference point in their own way.  Find your reference point.  Just find it.  You’ll get more for your dollar, so to speak.

    You might remember from some earlier posts, about doing what is congruent with our hard-wiring, i.e. our temperament.  This gives us more joy in our work, we are better at what we do, we feel less self-pity, and an energy generated simply by our own natural interest drives our efforts.  As a believer in biology, I’d list temperament not as a reference point, but as an influence of how we search for and how we define our reference point.

    Finding our reference point is not impossible if we don’t do what comes natural to us.  Finding our reference point is impossible though if we aren’t looking.

    After searching in my special way for why I do what I do in life, I found God.  Is that true?  Just ‘cuz I said God is my reference point, doesn’t make it true.

    Self-Care Tip #95 – Find your reference point.  Be a friend to yourself.

    Question:  Have you actively, purposefully used your biology (like a hoe in the field) to find why you do what you do?  Is it helpful?  What have you found?  Please tell me your story.

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    Connect With Others to Get Friendly With Yourself

    Self-Care Tip #81 – Connect with others.  Be a friend to yourself.

    So you have bought into the famous, “You are not alone” stock.  After 2 months on psychotropics (medications for emotional illness,) you finally have an interest in people.  You are at least a little motivated and less afraid of things that move.  You don’t feel like you are the reason for original sin and more often than not, you think happiness might be more than what shopping can offer.  What is this strange and unfamiliar sensation?  And what to do with it?

    It is time to connect.  Many of us get to the point where we no longer want to hide, we don’t hate ourselves, and we don’t hate others.  We get to the place of showing our under-belly just a little to the big wide world and are shocked that the only thing we feel is the wind as everyone is rushing by!  Just when we start wanting what we spent so much time hiding from, we seem to have forgotten how to connect with others.

    It is no secret.  America is culturally impoverished.  We have little of cobblestone streets to meander down, dressed in clean clothes after a days work, checking up on neighbors and gossip.  We have few degrees of activity between full throttle and dead/no heart beat.   Come now!  How to connect in a world where our parents expected us to pay rent when we turned 18years old?

    If you find yourself in something of this situation try on one of these basic tools and see what fits.  You can’t expect them all to.  So if you strike out a few times, keep on!

    1.  Volunteer – for example, and in no particular order…

    2.  Meetup.com – an awesome site to find people interested in what you are interested in.  e.g. book clubs, skiing, small business, Italian

    3.  Support groups

    4.  Write!  Although this at first thought may appear isolating, it is not necessarily.

    • Blog!  🙂
    • Journal

    5.  Toastmasters

    There is so much more.  Please let me know your thoughts and I’ll keep adding to this list!

    Self-Care Tip #81 – Connect with others.  Be a friend to yourself.

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    Taking Care of Yourself Is Not Selfish

    The line between self-care and self-centeredness is a thin line.  We are part of the narrative.  We are not the narrative.

    I’ve got some heat lately folks for talking about “Me” in a way that excludes the import of “You.”  How does anyone talk about the importance of the self without sounding seriously arrogant, disinterested in others, egocentric, ungrateful and rude?  Clearly it’s a learning process.  That’s something of what I’m hoping will evolve this year as we journey together.  Please let me know what you think on this subject.

    I was very excited about having a morning to myself today and had built up a storybook page turning space of time for me.  However my night went bad, and like opening the oven door too soon with the bread still rising, I just didn’t get up well.  Partly in denial that the day was already slipping away, I kept going towards my hopes.  The clock sped up and I finally got out the door with the kids buckled to where they needed to go.  And then I realized I forgot my computer and phone.  Not so easy to work without those.

    I live in the hills and although I’m not far from street lights and normal trafficked buildings, getting between me and them takes me through many blind 25 mph corners, steep hills over narrow roads.  Today I felt like I got caught in those hills.  My mom-van felt off-balance and the tight corners treated my tires cruelly.  I went back home to get my computer and back down to town finally.

    I had great intentions for today.  However, I got stuck and stuck again.  That is what it can be like when we try to treat ourselves well.  It can feel like the roads swallow us up and we just can’t get there.

    As my husband says, “That’s how it rolls!”

    Question:  How do you see self-care differently from self-centeredness?  Please tell me your story of friendship.

    Self-Care Tip #77 – Don’t get confused.  Taking care of yourself is not selfish.  Be a friend to yourself.

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    Believe What You Say! It Might Make a Difference.

    If you want to get passionate about something, You have to believe it.  Many people speak it, read it, plan on it, but they don’t believe it.  Do you?  Do you believe that you can actually start doing what you want to do, feeling what you want to feel, become who you want to be?

    And how bout the opposite?  Too many of us quietly or loudly hold our negative patterns.  A Heathcliff with Catherine scenario in Bronte‘s Wuthering Heights – slowly bringing on our own demise.  Reminds me of the mistletoe, a parasite on it’s host but accepted and beloved nonetheless.

    MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung gave a wonderful TED conference, “I am my connectome.”  He tells us the good news that we are more than our genes. Our memories are not “stored” in our genes.  They live amongst the neuronal connections.  He empowers us saying that because we can change our neuronal connections, we can change our behaviors and habits – which are based on neuronal memory (indian trails.)  You see, because our habits are really memories ground into the fiber of our minds, and not into the constitution of our matter, we can make different ones.

    Wow!

    We may not have pixie dust or elf stones, but we do have power.  We can stop, drop and roll! to that destruction in our lives.  We can be friendly with ourselves at any level of our beings – neuronal to behavioral and emotional.  Mr. Seung, that is great news!

    Self Care Tip #70 – If you are going to do it, have courage and believe it!  Be a friend to yourself.

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

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    Caught in Your Net – Thanks

    Connecting more with friends since I started blogging. People I went to school with are knitted together electronically.  The world is smaller than ever.

    In school, a people whom we drifted in and out of intimacy with, as kids will do, surrounded us.  Regardless of intimacy, they were generally there the next day and the next day. Familiar faces, personalities, specific laughs, and voices you could pick out in any crowd.  I’m pretty sure with many of them, I still could.

    After many years without them there to see me fall off my chair, set a ball, share books, compare bra sizes, whisper, giggle – did I not miss them?  But I did.  Now however, through this technology-net, impossibly dispersed groups of people show their faces on my computer screen daily.  And regardless of degrees of intimacy, they are witnesses again when I fall down and when I stand.  I feel more alive!  Even seeing an angle of someone’s jaw line can take me back to a lawn and a tree and a bench we used to share between classes.  In almost real-time, I am laughing at their jokes, fame and foibles.  Crying with them when they lose.

    Certain things are even better than they were when we were in school.  We don’t have as much time for closeting behaviors, hurts, shame.  It leaves more room for the real self to occupy.  Read more about this in the post “Sunshine.”

    So to all you old (and new ;)) friends who have given me this privilege, thank you for catching me in your “net.”  Life with you is better.

    Self Care Tip #58 – Connect with others to feel more alive.  Be a friend to yourself.

    Question: What has helped you feel more connected?  Please tell me your story.

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    Bringing Your Worst or Your Best – Family

    When I go to work, I feel my spirit get up off the floor, onto its knees and then it’s feet, and then fly into skies of happiness and inner congruence.  Work is where people are respectful to others.  If not they disappear.  (i.e. They’re fired.)  They do their chores and sometimes even with pleasure.  I am less often reminded of the fine line between success and failure, and I can always find my scissors, tape and stapler.  I’m sitting at home now, letting out a dreamy sigh.  Ah.

    Why do we treat strangers so well and our family not so well?  Why do we give our best where our best is valued only as much as the going rate of gold and

    silver?

    John Tauer, Ph.D. states that coöperation and competition are not an either or.  He tells us from 4 years of research at basketball summer camps that the effects of combining coöperation with competition (intergroup competition) is much more powerful than either one alone.   In other words, individuals competing isn’t as fun or successful as a group of people competing against another group of people (i.e. teams.)  I propose that this might be part of the play in the difference between home and out of home behaviors.

    In the home, we tend to see ourselves as individuals maybe even competing against each other.  Out of the home, we ally with others whom we can work with to compete against others.  We bring our best to the playing field perhaps.

    In The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss, we see a family who is marooned, cooperating as a team against dangerous elements (intergroup competition) to survive.  They have so much fun doing it that when rescue finally comes, nothing could entice them to leave their happy treehouse.

    We see other examples of this (intergroup competition) when a family member gets sick and everyone rally’s to fight the disease together.  I wonder how we can do that good stuff without having to wreck a ship or fight cancer.  I’d like to give my best to my husband and kids every day.  The fraternities, the gangs, the undying lure of neighborhood rivalries, reality TV show Survivor – all show us that this intergroup competition is pleasurable and effective.

    Question:  Have you experienced this kind of success in your own home?  Please tell me your story.

    Self Care Tip #57 – Bring your best to the people you love.  Be a friend to yourself.

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    In The Days of Our Youth

    We have many chances to start and restart taking care of ourselves.  Lots.

    When things get so bad though, sometimes we have to stop everything and declutter our lives to make room for self-care.  It might be dramatic.  It might represent many missed opportunities of self-care that accumulated into a heap of messy angry resentment.  However, we can hope that those times in life are few. The majority of our moments and days we hope are not extreme renovations.

    It reminds me of the verse from Ecclesiastes 12:1

    Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw near, when you shall say, I have no pleasure in them.”

    Even our relationship with God is developed by the little choices along the way.   In personal relationships with God or with man, they hold beauty, they bring pleasure because we did what was right for ourselves “in the days of our youth.”   Because we did, we don’t have much to resent them for.  We are available emotionally to connect with our “Other.”  We can see them. We can be present.

    And when the stressors hit, the “evil days,” as they do come inevitably to every relationship, we can say that we remember the good times.  There is bank there to get us through the bad.

    As said to me today by the Australian Labradoodles breeder, Tiffany Aveling, taking care of ourselves along the way avoids “death-bed conversions.” Those big swings.  Those, “I’m changing everything about my life,” type of changes. They might be necessary.  However, they usually hurt a lot.

    In the film, Avatar, directed by James Cameron, we hear over and over the lovely quote,

    I see you.

    That is a gift we can give better when we can give the gift of a healthy self.

    Self Care Tip #41 – Take the little chances.  Be a friend to yourself.

    Question:  What did you think?  Do you see this in action in your life?

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    Journey

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

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

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

    As Will Rogers said,

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

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

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

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

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