Sigmund Freud

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The Gift of Desperation

Life (23/365)

LIFE

Misty sounded relieved,

Yes.  That’s it.

She had just realized that life isn’t fair.  Sure.  She knew that before, but she just realized what she knew.  Don’t we all love that moment when our senses join up – sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, emotion, intellect, spiritual and the rest.  That is a lot to coördinate after all and sometimes some of them don’t make the train.

Misty was a single mom of three.  Her ex-husband was what she called, “Disney-Dad,” and her kids relished their time with him.  Misty complained that she didn’t get to spend the special times with her kids.  She mainly took care of them, but missed out on irresponsible fun.  She was sure her kids wouldn’t look back and think of her like they would their father.  She was getting angrier about it all the time, ruminating about it and it was getting in the way of her ability to connect with others and feel pleasure.  There it was in front of her blocking her from seeing her kids even, let alone herself.

Then after weeks of this along with medication and talk therapy, she told me,

Yes.  That’s it.  Life is not fair.  There are many other things in my life that aren’t fair either and if I look for them, I could spend my whole day every day counting them off.  

It broke my heart a bit to hear her and see her there.  Humble like that; she would I think affect you the same way.  So real.

Yesterday, Carl D’Agostino replied to our post about growing our understanding of our choices beautifully.

…we wait until we are at our wit’s end before we seek assistance…. considering reaching out as personal failure or inadequacy re: our own self-esteem…. Foolishly we wait until our way just is not working anymore. That is why AA calls this a gift: the gift of desperation. …For many, the depths into which we have succumbed are now found not to be so deep at all and in fact, ladders are readily available if we use them in recovery. 

Ah Carl.  Say it again.

The gift of desperation.

Too good.  Don’t you think?

Questions:  Have you ever received the gift of desperation?  What did it bring you?  Where did it take you?  What did it do to you?  Do you still have it?  Please tell me your story.

Self-Care Tip – Celebrate your gift of desperation.

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Why Psychiatry?

An American Lady butterfly against a cloud-fil...

Image via Wikipedia

If we have ever seen a psychiatrist, then there has been some point in our lives when someone told us to go or we told ourselves.  I have some questions for you.

How did you hear about psychiatry?

What are your thoughts?

What did/do you understand?

Please tell me your story!

Self-Care Tip – Explore your connection with psychiatry.

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Presence Encourages Self-Care

The Forgetful Professor

Image via Wikipedia

I am writing a series of blog-posts outlining self-care in which we examine the tenets of self-care:

Self-Care Tip – Sit back and listen to the emotion to be present in your own life.

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

  • Transference – putting our feelings on the clinician.  For example, my clinician looks like my father.  I will transfer onto him my feelings about my father and subconsciously think he is like my father.
  • Countertransference is the opposite.  The clinician thrusts her own memories and associations on her patient.

These can be positive or negative.  Of course they do not stay in the clinic.  Transference and countertransference happen between all of us all the time.  Often it is healthy.  It helps us grow, model others, fantasize and move towards fantasies long enough to make them true.

Remember PattyAnne from yesterday?  …In PattyAnne’s and my case, PattyAnne could be said to have transferred her fear of being treated as a lesser person.  But what was my reaction and what is yours in similar situations?  What is our countertransference?

I have often been guilty of negative countertransference in situations like this.  I remember feeling dirtied by people’s prejudices and fears.  Almost like I needed to bathe afterwards.  The truth is, though, we don’t have to feel this way.

When people are afraid of us, we do not have to be afraid of them.  We do not have to anger, agitate, or feel “soiled.”   We can just be with them.  Let it be about them and not run away.  Be present.

Clinicians can be open to hearing this song.  When any patient starts in again, this time, sit back and listen to her fear rather than worry about what words carried it.  Patients will be better for it.  Maybe clinicians will be, too.  And that is key.  The gift we give first is to ourselves.  By just being with someone in her fear, we can just be with ourselves too, and vice versa.  Quite friendly to us both.

Presence encourages self-care.  It helps guard us against the temptation to see ourselves as victims.  When we do not realize that our emotions and behaviors come from us, were not imposed upon us from external sources or realize more specifically the transference or countertransference that we are responsible for – we can feel like victims.

Any time we do not own our emotions and behaviors, this is a quick path to losing our connection to our personal journey and become “absent” rather than present with ourselves.

Still, many wonder: at what point does “too much self-care” become part of the symptomatology?  This concern will resolve when we see how emotions are not moral implications.  “See” you tomorrow!

Questions:  How has feeling like a victim disconnected you from others and yourself?  How have you collected your absent self and come together again?  Please tell me your story.

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Living Where We Feel Safe is Part of Self-Care

Self-Care Tip #213 – Live in safety.  Be a friend to yourself.

In My Fridge

Image by Nikita Kashner via Flickr

I love psychiatry because for me it is a safe place.  A place where I am comfortable pushing aside distractions.  The blinking lights disappear and I don’t have to waste myself on B.S.  Some time ago, I told you about how Mom has been when Dad’s been hospitalized in the past.  When she pushed his tubing aside and just got in bed with him to hold him.  All that mattered then was Love.  They didn’t see the clutter any more.  That’s what psychiatry offers.  If we want, we  can come together and be real.  In twenty to forty minutes, we can hune and warp time and find a gravity where we breathe differently.

Chewbacca

Image by Andres Rueda via Flickr

Unfortunately, I have found that the longer I do this psychiatry thing, the worse I am with life otherwise.  Whether I’m with the grocer, dog-trainer, my child’s teacher or person in front of me in the coffee-line – I just don’t graze well.  (See blog-post, “Do You Feel Pleasure.”)  I’m always yelling, “Hit it Chewbacca!” and we’re off at warp speed into asteroids of personal information; perhaps inappropriate to the setting.  (See blog-post, “Using The Force.”)  I hate to think what I’ll become when I’m more thoroughly demented and disinhibited.  These things just get more pronounced with age and soon I’ll just be that crazy Auntie with her bra snapped on top of her bathing-suit in winter yelling at the young kids to turn the music down so we can talk.

The truth is, I’ve never been so wonderful in tinsel-town.  I found home and found that home needs to be a place where we are safe.  In fact, this is true materially in the home we live in.  It starts there and diffuses out.  If at home we are able to speak uncensored knowing we respect others and are respected because we are human, not because we have to earn it, if we can enter our kitchen and not fear temptation from chocolate chip cookies, open the fridge and know as an alcoholic the wife or husband didn’t buy beer, argue and trust that we are loved enough to be a priority, we know the issue won’t be lazily passed up, we know we are safe – then there is a ripple and a ring of safety and another ripple and another ring of safety and soon safety follows us because we just aren’t interested in anything else.  (That was a super-sentence.)  We have found home.

Questions:  How do you define safety?  What feels safe for you?  How do you grow your circle of safety?  Please tell me your story.

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Freud Did Not Know

Bad dreams.  Just woke up from one.  There’s a lot out there on dreams in mental health.  After all, they come from the brain.  When Freud was looking at things, he saw dreams as “unconscious wish fulfillments.”  However since Freud rocked our world, we’ve learned so much more about brain biology and Freud was wrong.  Oochie ouchie.  Just saying that makes me feel like his still very much alive reputation will come at me like an angry ghost and be mean!

Dreams are just that, dreams.  Sometimes they are good, but often they are scary, bad, and even terrifying.  Why?  According to Dr. Quijada ;), yours truly, they are commonly symptoms of emotional disease or side effects of medications, etc….  In anxious states, we dream.  After going through life threatening events to  ourselves or witnessing it in another, we get nightmares.  When there is a disconnection is our sleep architecture, we can get “parasomnias” such as night terrors.  Some medication such as Trazodone can cause vivid dreaming where people say they dream “in color.”  And on and on.

Freud didn’t know this, so no offense taken.  However, we do.  Enough with the hocus pocus moral dilemmas that are discussed in our own thoughts and among some ongoing therapies.  First look to biology to give us the answer. Even after having a nasty scream-your-lungs-out dream, remember that your brain is mortal, human, made up of carbon and not aura.

Sometimes even that much information can help people sleep better.

Self Care Tip # 43 – Don’t make too much out of your dreams.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  Do you agree or disagree?  Did this help you in any way?  Please tell me your story.