United States

by

Claim Your Brain

My mind, like rusted gears, was not moving well.  It hadn’t been really since my 1st pregnancy 8 years ago.  There are few things that dumb us down as much as pregnancy and children!   Hormone changes, lack of sleep, fluctuating from 145-200-145 pounds three times, and then the subsequent growing beloveds around me to contribute to mental dissociation.  Simple sensory overload from talking, yelling, crying, petitioning, inquiring kids factors in.  You may read more about sensory issues here.

Daily writing, like a staunch governess, found my brain under cobwebs, bug carcasses, and musty stench.  (Hello old friend!  There you are!)  This helps to explain the joy gripping my hand, like girlfriends on the playground, when I sit down to write!  The world is active to me, including rather than excluding me. My in-between moments used to hang like an old woman’s breasts.   Now much more time full of nourishing thoughts bless me.  I am in awe.

My patient came in sighing deeply.  He wasn’t better.  No, he said.  He lacked motivation and interest and connection from the world.  He felt selected out to suffer.  A dumping ground for misfortune and misunderstood.  Efforts through medication, after medication changes were like looking for love in all the wrong places.

We talked about cognitive distortions, tapping into things that used to make him happy, road-blocks in poorly designed neurological grooves – volunteering at the library or animal shelter, journaling, sharing his life story with others, exploring his spirituality.  No.  No good.  Nor could he consider psychotherapy as he’d been through too much of it already to consider it again.  And he just couldn’t get interested in groups such as through NAMI.

His brain, assaulted by stressors, disease, and disuse was growing silent.

Being a friend means yelling, fighting to reclaim your journey, finding something to connect you to your process of life.  My patient was letting squatters take his property simply by being absent.

Self Care Tip #60 – Claim your right to health.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What has helped you connect with your own journey in life?  What do you think?  Please tell me your story.

by

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.

by

Let it Make You Strong

She is young, golden, blushes easily, bright solar eyes, with graceful speech, not rushed or loud.  Like so many others, she doesn’t believe her beauty.   She came to me to get help.  Crippled by anxiety that hits out of the blue, like a hooded man grabbing her in an alley.  She feels during those times like she is dying or going crazy.  She started avoiding public places and became fearful looking over her shoulder for the next attack.  She was humiliated on all accounts by her uncontrolled emotions and thought people could see how crazy she was just by looking at her.  Branded and tortured.

When Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, he made plain the cultural pressure to define what is apparent, seen, and interpreted.  But more importantly he made plain the ability of an individual to define themselves on their own terms regardless.  Hester Prynne wore her letter A at first by mandate and then by choice, letting it represent who she was, where she came from, and where she was going.  She wore her letter and when people tried to change its meaning to something culturally less scarlet, “A” for “Able” she made it clear that she is the one who will decide the meaning of her life’s events.  Her and God and no one else.

When anxiety hits, we are scrambling to understand why.  We think, “What could we have done that is so terrible to have brought this kind of torture on?”  As Hester Prynne began her scarlet letter days bewildered by the force of emotion behind her angry neighbors, so victims of anxiety are bewildered by the level of shame and wild fear they presume must be linked somehow to this judgment upon them.  It becomes their life’s work to determine the meaning of a life with this.

Nathaniel Hawthorne writes,

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not to tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and they had made her strong…

Suffering is a schoolhouse for the courageous.

After some months of medication therapy this twenty-something woman said

I’m not so uptight about things.  …I didn’t know my anxiety was that bad until I got out of it.”  What amazed her even more was how better the rest of her body felt.  “Even physically I feel much better.”  No more chest tightness, body aches, and shakes.

She has the rest of her life to figure out how to say what this disease means and how it plays into the way she defines herself.  She will decide I hope.  Not her family, future husband, church, or Brook Shields.  I hope she will take what it teaches her and let it make her strong.

Self Care Tip #57 – Let it make you strong.  Be a friend to yourself.

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

by

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.

by

Yell and Someone Will Hear

Today a reader responded to the blog posted on August 30, 2010, “Own It.  Our Life’s Work.”

Al-Anon, a great program. I really feel blessed to have found a 12 step program that is so gentle yet so encouraging with wonderful results for me personally.  It has taught me how to quiet my mind, live in the moment, live and let live, and let go and let God.  All principles I apply daily and the pleasure I get from living this way has enhanced all aspects of my life.  This program is not only for the loved ones of alcoholics but for anyone who has a family member suffering from addiction or if you were raised in a home with perfectionistic standards.  These standards stunt emotional growth and the results emotionally are no different than growing up in a home with addiction.  From the outside the perfectionistic home may look functional whereas the alcoholics home looks chaotic, but the emotional impact is the same.  Growing up this way may result in other acceptable addictions like workaholic, churchaholic, perfectionism, eating disorders etc… …It got me thinking about how thankful I am for Al-Anon.

She said it well.  First hand this woman of courage tells us bits of her story.  She demystified some of the suspicions about a group like Al-Anon.  She invites all of us, by her testimony, to also have courage.  To also share.  To also work on our own battered selves.  She unclosets getting treatment.  She tells us we need each other.  Al-Anon is a group meeting.  There is healing.  Healing is not a condition of stalemate.  She tells us about healing and progress.  We can choose.

In the Wizard of Oz

Tin Woodsman: Help! Help!
Scarecrow: It’s no use screaming at a time like this. Nobody will hear you. Help! Help!

Self Care Tip #37 – Yell and someone will hear you!  Be a friend to yourself.

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


by

Own It. Our Life’s Work.

We can control what others do about as much as we can control the Democratic government.

My patient asked me if her medications were changing who she was.  After asking her more about where that came from, she disclosed that her husband was blaming her medications for the emotional distance between.  He was not blaming his daily alcohol intake nor that he see’s her as “The Patient” and not himself.  This is after she has spent years investing in herself through medications, some counseling, and regular exercise.  This woman had courage.  Yet she still bought into what her husband was telling her.

We personalize things that have very little to do with us.  Sometimes we know we’re doing it, but more often we don’t.  In this woman’s case, I had to think, how much of this was about her versus the accuser, i.e. husband.  We came to understand together that either way, true or not, the only person in her relationship she could better, is that same person she’s been attending to so well for so long.  In the end we were talking about going to CoDA, Al-Anon, or local support groups through NAMI.  She focussed on herself, excited about her opportunities to grow some more.  She wasn’t thinking so much about her husband getting passed up by his own opportunities.  Nor about the accusations.

Talking to a friend who recently shed 15 unwanted pounds, we did a celebration whoop!  She wasn’t perseverating on her husband who was smoking again. She was hurt by it, but used the energy in that emotion to motivate change in her own life.  Who knows.  Maybe her husband will grow from wanting what he see’s in her.  Courage, self-respect, inner congruence, hope, and so many more great things that come when you fight hard for your precious self.

Not taking things personally though can be much easier said than done.  If you try over and over but see that it continues to get the best of you, consider getting an opinion from someone you trust.  Get a “third-party” opinion to bounce your perspectives from.  Maybe this is something biological and medical as well. Personalization is a familiar problem in medical illnesses such as Affective Spectrum Disorders or Anxiety Spectrum Disorders.

Self Care Tip #35 – Own it.  Be a friend to yourself.

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

by

Collaboration Between Work and Play

All my options were poking at me like specters and I’ve been distracted.  Sitting in the coffee shop.  2 hours later and I’ve just started to write.  This is the first in eons since I’ve had open space in time during daylight hours.  I vaguely remember doing this in my past lives, but can’t remember how to do it.  I’m awkward.  It’s hard to know how to press into an area without boundaries.  I’ve walked on the moon here, trying to know how to foot my thoughts.  And now that my unbelievably free time is almost over, I realize I’ve procrastinated.  A daily planner all filled up just dropped down and I can see what I should do.  There’s a comfort in it.

A collaboration between work and play is healthy.  We slide or trip across the arc that connects them.  The path back can be harder to return to when we stay too long at one pole.  Like an unused muscle.  Sometimes people get sick and need time off work to recover.  They often look at me with bewilderment and ask, “What now?”  It’s like telling a kid, it’s time to nap.  Everyone else who hears desperately wishes you were talking to them.  We can lose the flow and someone or life or a force has to show us how to get back into sync.

Gratitude helps swing the pendulum.  That awareness, gratitude, moves us back and forth to see our options, what we want and what we have.  

Humility is another fair guide.  Kids get this.  I respect that about them.  Their hearts are open flowers, vulnerable, wanting.  They move trusting the momentum and direction from which they pivot.  We get more friction as we age.  It takes humility to accept redirection.  Humility is different from insecurity though.  It takes confidence and trust in something to know when to let go.  Kids do that better than me too!

Today, some of the resistance in my journey left, and I have more gratitude for my work and for my play.  I hope that I respond more easily when I should.  Like Samuel who heard God calling, I hope to know when to answer.  Let me be like a child.

Self Care Tip #33 – Live with gratitude, humility, and confidence.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question: Does this resonate with you?  What do you think?

by

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.

Related Articles
by

This Side of the Fence

When taking care of ourselves, we are taking care of others.  It might be counterintuitive.  There is a circle service can turn us in.  I give to you, I take care of you, I start realizing at some level that I’m not being taken care of, I hold you responsible now for my neglect, and then around again.  Some support this pattern from cultural influences.  Some with intuition.

This can be a place we find ourselves in our relationship to anything or anyone.  Employment or even unemployment.  We may find ourselves saying things like why me, or feeling like we are selected out by some greater force to suffer.  Any time self-reflection whispers anything about the word “victim,” look for the “circle-walk.”

Now some listening to this might say service is the best thing of their lives and imply that without service, life isn’t right.  Sure.  However, that’s not my argument.  Mine is that taking care of one’s own self is also a form of service to others.  In fact, let’s boldly put taking care of one’s self at the top of the service list.  Standing up there can feel awkward, presumptive, selfish, unChristian.  What does it feel like for you?

I’m told 😉 this is hard.  It is.  We just try our best.  Every day we try again.  Every moment we remember, we try.  My husband often says, “God is a God of second chances.”  I think He wants us to treat ourselves with as much courtesy.

In addictions therapy, we tell the addict that a relapse isn’t a failure, it is part of the road to recovery.  When we take care of ourselves, we may find ourselves up against any number of forces, including patterned negative behaviors. We can learn from the brave people fighting the disease of addiction. When we don’t treat ourselves well, we are not a failure.  Rather we are on the road to becoming a better friend to ourselves.  That also takes courage.

Onward and upward my friends!  Let me know what you think.

Self Care Tip #28 – Look at your own side of the fence.  Be a friend to yourself.