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Garbage In…

March 24, 2016 //
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I am sipping my coffee and contemplating all the many times I started in therapy or began some sort of new treatment modality intending to ease my symptoms in some significant way, or to explain (or excuse) my behavior without really having to work to change it (or myself). It was both frustrating and pointless, and I didn’t get very far at all. Was it because all those different sorts of things, and all those many professionals, just weren’t effective or appropriate? Doesn’t that seem just a bit unlikely? It’s so common, though… So… What might account for how common it is for ‘therapy’ not working out, not working very effectively, or being ‘a bad fit’? I think it over and find my way to one fairly obvious conclusion; it’s the relationship.

Therapy – any sort of mental health treatment focused on interaction between professional care-giver and patient seeking treatment – is pretty intimate stuff. If I am not entirely comfortable, emotionally, with the therapist, why would I expect to get much out of it? I won’t be very likely to be open with a therapist I am uncomfortable with, would I? In such a scenario, I find myself feeling that the therapy ‘isn’t working’, when it is more properly stated that the relationship isn’t working – very understandable. So, there’s that – it’s a relationship, and requires commitment, investment, openness, trust – all the qualities any relationship must have to thrive.

There’s another characteristic, lacking which therapy is a mockery, and that is openness characterized by absolute frank forthright revealing honesty. Approaching treatment dishonestly absolutely ensures no progress is ever made, at all. Seeking a therapist who will be satisfied to take a paycheck, push some pills my way, write some notes I will never see, say nice things to me, and reassure me that I’m ‘not crazy’, allowing me to hear that as ‘it’s someone else’s fault’ (although that’s not what’s actually being said) isn’t ‘therapy’, and progress is not an outcome to be expected. It’s just more bullshit and game-playing. It’s just more drama. It is also a serious waste of limited precious life time and resources for no point; the world is generally not deceived when we play at deceiving ourselves. Certainly our loved ones are not deceived when we come home from therapy with excuses instead of progress; they are already living with our crazy, well-acquainted with our chaos and damage. It is not possible to bullshit the people we hurt with our madness for very long.

I find myself wondering if therapists and clinical professionals of all sorts find it frustrating to be aware when a client isn’t going to ‘do the work’, or when they observe that a client isn’t committed to recovering, to healing, but only to justifying their position, or excusing bad behavior? Do they experience a sense of precious time being wasted? Is the money still worth it? Is it ‘just a job’? Are they ever tempted to say out loud “I really don’t want to see you anymore, because you just aren’t making any effort”? It wouldn’t seem a fiscally good practice, if one were employed delivering therapy to people to earn a living…but… it would seem more honest, perhaps. I’ve ended treatment with a lot of practitioners of a variety of sorts (I count 14 therapists over 34 years of seeking help) – I haven’t had one end treatment with me, even when I was clearly not engaged, and getting no benefit (although two retired while treating me).

I find it, looking back, a rather sad waste of time to have paid so much money to spend time carefully crafting a narrative that resulted in hearing what I wanted so badly to hear in the moment – that I’m fine, it’s the world that’s broken, or my relationship, or my job, or… anything but having to choke on the truth that my own choices and my own behavior might have something to do with my experience, and that I might have to be accountable for the results – and responsible for making the needed changes. That may well have been the most singularly difficult step on this journey, just acknowledging that I have choices, that I am an active participant, that I am ultimately the architect of my own experience – and that I have moments when I am one fucked-up not-at-all-rational really-not-right-in-the-head fancy monkey that owes someone dear a very sincere apology, and a commitment to the real work involved in treating myself and others considerably better. It is, however, a step that had to be taken – because all the steps leading me somewhere different (and better) followed that one, and could not ever precede it.

We are each having our own experience. It’s not easy finding ‘a therapy that works’ or ‘a treatment that helps’. I find myself thinking that at least in my own case that was because it took me so long to understand that therapy involves relationships – one with the therapist, and one with the person in the mirror. Being dishonest with either definitely slows things down.

I smile and sip my coffee. I’ve been in therapy with my current therapist now since very shortly after I started this blog… February, 2013? It is the first time I’ve had the experience of mental health treatment being effective for anything beyond crisis intervention. I’m in a very different place than I once was. I’m still ‘myself’, too. My therapist is unquestionably very knowledgeable and skilled, and it is clear that the treatment modality is well-selected for my needs – both very important things, and I value those characteristics of our work together. This morning, I make time to appreciate ‘the other thing’ that seems so very much at the heart of ‘making it work’; I showed up. Seriously, I am engaged, present, open, fearlessly intimate even when completely uncomfortable, and most importantly – willing to do the actual work, the practicing of practices, the corrections in behavior, the repetition, the accountability, the utter frankness with myself and with my therapist, the willingness to embrace change; there are verbs involved. Turns out that matters a lot. “Easy” just doesn’t enter into it.

Enjoying this moment.

Enjoying this moment.

My coffee is cold now. I smile thinking about progress made, and progress to come. I think about the work day ahead, and the evening beyond it. I recall my therapist wrapping up our most recent session asking me to think about my goal for this next bit of work together and realize that what I heard was acknowledgement that at least in part, we’ve successfully completed a portion of the work we had begun so many months ago. Wow. I take a few minutes to enjoy that awareness, and to simply enjoy this woman I am, so much closer to being the woman I most want to be in my life. It’s a nice start to the day.

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Big 5, Words

The Occasional Other Moment

March 1, 2016 //
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I generally enjoy my experience of life so much these days. Contentment is a prominent feature of my emotional landscape, sustainable, real, authentic, and fairly easily supported with a number of basic good self-care practices (emotional and physical). It’s not fancy, but it’s a long way from misery, chronic frustration, and anger – and more than that; it is enough. More often than not, these days, my experience is both ‘about’ sufficiency and enjoyed on the basis of sufficiency, as well as ‘wholeness’ – which isn’t quite ‘wellness’ – and basic worthiness.

The journey isn’t over, and I hope it continues for a long while to come. I’m still very human. There are still verbs involved. I still experience emotional weather – although the climate has improved greatly. 🙂 My results vary.

Be love.

Be love.

Last night I had a bad bit, and even now I am not certain why. I’d gotten home from an afternoon appointment with a new physician. It had gone well, and I didn’t have to travel very far at all, so I arrived home quite near to the usual time of evening. I was relaxing after a bite of dinner when a state of extreme irritation, almost anger, swept over me quite unexpectedly, and without any obvious cause at all. Unpleasant, sure, and potentially very problematic if I were living in a shared household; that’s the kind of stray emotional bullshit that quickly escalates among human primates, becoming a nasty evening of arguing, or unpleasant confrontational tension, with all the associated blame-laying and accusatory dialogue imaginable. Go ahead, imagine it if you want to; haven’t most of us been there at least once or twice? I did imagine it, in the moment, and gave myself a chance to feel the relief of living alone, and literally having no one to start shit with.

A helpful reminder; I apply it equally to how I speak to myself these days.

A helpful reminder; I apply it equally to how I speak to myself these days.

I gently alerted my traveling partner I was having some challenges with emotional balance and logged off for the night to manage my needs, medicate, meditate, and call it a night. Few things ease unexpected emotional volatility like meditation. Medical cannabis is a another exceptional tool in my toolkit, particularly if there is any chance that my issues are symptomatic of my PTSD, or when fatigue causes my injury to weigh in more heavily on the outcome. Getting adequate rest [for this particular human being that I am myself] is critical – and I’m not always aware of the impact of small changes in my sleep. (Even something small like having a stuffy head interrupting my sleep periodically over days can eventually become a bigger deal.) It’s hard to overstate how valuable it has been to learn to more skillfully take care of this fragile vessel.

I sat quietly for a long while, letting emotions ebb and flow without interference, interpretation, root cause analysis, or criticism. No tears – this one was mostly emotions of anger, quite specifically, and just not associated with anything particular. I could so easily have made it ‘something’… Instead, I let stillness fill my senses. I took deep calming breaths and let the emotions come and go, feeling them fearlessly and letting them pass. And again. Over about an hour, the landscape of my thoughts began to shift toward pleasant observations, contentment, calm, and I found myself wrapped in a gentler experience as the evening ended. I slept well and deeply.

Would it make you nuts to feel angry and not know ‘why’? Would you feel an urgent need to explain or justify it? To make sense out of it? To identify the cause and bring the wrong-doer to justice? Does there have to be a wrong-doer in the first place? Our emotions have a chemical component – and some of our most basic physical sensations are shared with emotional experiences, too. How often have I taken some physical experience and ascribed causes to it, nudged it into an emotional context, and turned it into drama – instead of taking some time for myself to just breathe through it, recognize that feelings are… feelings (and may not be anything more than the sensations of experience), without further requirement to take action on them, at all?

Sometimes finding a happy place is surprisingly close to home.

Sometimes finding a happy place is surprisingly close to home.

This morning begins gently, and I have a busy work day ahead that doesn’t occupy my thoughts needlessly early. I have evening plans with my traveling partner. In all respects a promising day unfolding ahead of me. It’s enough.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, medical marijuana, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, weight loss secrets, Words

My Own Sliver of Sky

February 27, 2016 //
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Beautiful night sky.

Beautiful night sky, a view as I leave home for work in the morning, before dawn.

I was glad to see the work day end yesterday. It was a grueling week on a number of levels, and at the end of it, by Thursday, I was also not really feeling well. I made it an early night Thursday evening, crashing out at a childlike hour of evening, and resenting the early pre-dawn hour at which I wake on Friday. I really wanted to sleep more, longer, later, more deeply… just sleep. Friday raced by, and ended fairly early (my work day starts fully 2 hours earlier than usual on Fridays). I got home with no clear plan, and again found myself crawling into bed content to end the day quite early.

The night sky.

The night sky, on some other night. 

I woke unexpectedly a couple of hours later, no identifiable reason but feeling very restless and uneasy. I got up and took a seat on my meditation cushion, in front of the patio door with the blinds open to the night sky. I sat for some time just looking out into the night. Stress faded with passing clouds, I found contentment in moonlight and thoughts of how soothing I find a view of the sky. I sat for a long while, meditating, gazing into the night sky. Eventually, I returned to bed.

I slept 12 hours, and woke feeling rather uninterested in waking to face the day. I lingered in bed for some time, nearly an hour more, meditating and dreaming in a half-sleeping half-waking state of consciousness that found me reminding valued coworkers not to crowd me so closely; even with the week behind me, work found its way into my restless consciousness.

The morning has been leisurely and filled with love and friendship, and music – an unexpected gift this morning, and I have enjoyed it without attempting to define, excuse, justify, or limit this beautiful experience. The quiet has returned, now. I find myself thinking about having a view I can ‘call my own’, here. Everywhere I have lived there has been at least some sliver of sky, some particular angle I could contemplate, free of people, industry, clutter, or suburbia. Sometimes I’ve had to work at it a bit, finding some particular corner of a sofa in a loft with a single window looking at sky above roof-tops, or a view of green space between homes or buildings. One lovely thing here in this new space is that the patio and my studio both look directly out at the park, uninterrupted by human endeavors with the exception of occasional runners and walkers passing by, and a small playground easily omitted from view by choice of angle, or disregarded during hours when no children are playing – as during my evening meditation, last night.

The view from my desk, in the studio.

The view from my desk, in the studio.

Today is a good day to enjoy the view, and a few quiet moments. Today is a good day to slow down, to be present, to enjoy each moment as it is. Today is a good day for gardens, and rain showers, and nesting ducks in meadow grass. Today is a good day to set aside stress and confrontation in favor of acceptance and ease. Today is a good day to choose a better window on the world. 🙂

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Categories Anxiety, art and the artist, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being

Reading Proust

February 9, 2016 //
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I purchased “Remembrance of Things Past” (an alternate title in some editions is “In Search of Lost Time“) by Marcel Proust. I suspect most people are familiar with Proust’s writing indirectly, and possibly often only through the fairly well-known “Proust Questionnaire“. Maybe in college a few people read “Swan’s Way“, or flipped through a condensed version, guide, or graphic novel of the author’s great work. I say ‘great’ because… wow. Yeah.

I don’t know why I’ve put off reading Proust. “Remembrance of Things Past” has clung to the edges of my personal ‘must read’ list since I was much younger (at a time when books were my escape from the unbearable). I read Milton. I read Plutarch. I read Rand. I read Tolstoy. I read de Beauvoir; I am not fearful of weighty tomes, nor voices other than my own. So…what’s been the hold up? Perhaps I have been waiting for a moment; I’ve only just begun it, and even a mere handful of pages into Swan’s Way (vol 1), I am completely blow away by the beauty of it. There’s the thing of it right there; it is singularly beautiful writing. Powerful. Complete. Authentic. I am not putting it off even another day, having tasted it and found it beyond worthy.

So… 2016. The year I read Proust. 🙂

How many ways exist to view the world?

How many ways exist to view the world?

I slept well and deeply last night, setting aside my reading some time before bed; these beautiful words are worthy of the respect and consideration of not falling asleep over them, and potentially missing even one shred of meaning over drowsiness. I woke this morning, smiling, with a heart filled with lightness, and empty of weight. My coffee is good. My yoga sequence felt helpfully pleasant, and comfortably eased the stiffness in my joints. I am not missing the opiate painkillers, and I suspect that more often than not any queasiness in the early mornings was due to the opiates, based on how I feel in the mornings since giving them up. Strangely, on the thought of painkillers, my consciousness both tries very hard to veer away from the thought of them, and also delivers a powerful moment of peculiar disconnected yearning. Craving in action. I breathe deeply, and let my thoughts move on.

This morning, the new place feels much larger than the modest increase in space measurably involved. Life is beginning to fit into the new space more fully. Morning is beginning to evolve to fit the space, routines adjusting to the changes in object placement, and room arrangement – for one thing, I have an actual dining room now, and I find myself now inclined to eat at the table, away from other things, rather than perched on the couch, which was the way of it for many of my adult years. Similarly, my studio is both real, and quite separate from the remainder of the household – and my desk is here in my studio, but the majority of my morning is not. It’s interesting how this one change actually changes so much; I do not spend time sitting for hours, fussing at the keyboard, scrolling through feeds, articles, tinkering with pictures aimlessly wondering if another email will come. Unproductive time is kept to a minimum here; I am in the studio only when I am in the studio, and at my desk only when I am actually writing. I seem to ‘have more time’ when truly, I’ve only stopped wasting so much of it … (wait for it…) mindlessly. 😉

Having moved from somewhat less than 650 sq ft, to somewhat less than 1000 sq ft, I sort of expected the feel of things would be mostly pretty similar… How incorrect was I?? lol Very. Vacuuming in the apartment I moved from took me about 15-20 minutes to do a nicely thorough job of it.  Yesterday, after 45 minutes of vacuuming, and the sense that it would never end, I still find myself wondering how an increase in square footage of less than 400 sq ft still results in more than twice as much time needed to vacuum?! Realizing, as I sip my coffee, that being quizzical about housekeeping matters signals how very moved in I really am, I relax and smile and enjoy the moment; I’m okay with a few extra minutes of vacuuming, floors, windows, and tidying. This is a really cute place, it suits me well, and I am taking care of the woman in the mirror by investing my resources in very good quality of life day-to-day. Sure, there are choices, but it is in these choices that I find my way to being the woman I most want to be, living a life of contentment and sufficiency. Isn’t that enough? 😉

Today is a good day for taking care of me – even if that means vacuuming. Today is a good day to read Proust – because I earnestly want to experience his words. Today is a good day to live authentically, and to face the woman in the mirror with honest acceptance, and real enthusiasm – simply because it is time well-spent. Isn’t that also enough?

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Categories Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, The Art of Being, Words

I Could Be Counting Down the Days

January 10, 2016 //
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It’s true. I’m sipping my morning coffee, half-wondering if I need to adjust my process, or choose different beans…and gently discouraging myself from eagerly planning to move. I consider the move, I’ve organized my thoughts on it, and made some decisions about how it can best be handled – all in the abstract, aside from some exterior photos of the new unit, and a carefully examination of the floor plan. What I haven’t done is get a lot of boxes, and start filling those with books, small items, etc – I could be pre-packing, and I’m not. Not yet.

I’ve no doubt that I will make this move… except for just one small but important detail; price. The unit will be repriced after the remodel is entirely completed. If I can’t afford the price, I won’t be moving – at least not as soon. I’ve come so far with my traveling partner’s guidance, support, and skilled coaching, I will likely be buying a little place of my own within the next two years regardless; the comfortable near-certainty and lack of insecurity about the possibility feels very good. Stable. I have choices and, since choices to be made in the future are not ideally acted upon today, I chill and smile about the possible new apartment without taking further action in this moment. I continue to sip my coffee and let the morning unfold around my thoughts.

52 is late in the game to be buying a first home…and this won’t be my first. It will be my first unencumbered by domestic violence though, which is pretty huge… and it’s going to be the first that I’ll be wise to consider with retirement specifically in mind – I’d like to retire before I am 65, and the home I buy may be the last home I buy, when the time comes.  I want a place that is mine – that I can redecorate or rebuild, as suits me. A home in which replacing the carpets or flooring is entirely up to me, and in which I can freely replace all the light fixtures with whatever I choose without asking anyone at all, would be very nice. Comfort doesn’t have to be expensive, neither does luxury, but too often I find that I can’t ‘get permission’ for small changes that would be so wonderful while living in a rental, or as a housemate. Besides all that, I earnestly want to be able to leave this world knowing, when the time comes, that the choices I have made in life benefit my loves after my departure! I would feel considerable joy knowing that my traveling partner, although grieving, would be grieving his loss from a secure home, his home – unconcerned about going without and able to focus on healing his heart. “Feeling homeless” or displaced is something both he and I have endured far too often in life, already.

Be love.

Be love.

That gets me thinking about feeling secure in life – and in love – and how often people allow anger to cause them to say things to each other that specifically and directly undercut the emotional security of those they claim they love most. “I hate you!” “Get out!” “Why don’t you just go?!” “I don’t want you here!” I hope I live the entire remainder of my life not ever saying something so horrible and distancing to someone I love. How brutally unkind, how lacking in any compassion, how… mean, simply and frankly mean, to say such things to a loved one. How do you justify it (if you have said or done such things)? Isn’t the better choice to make note of our own suffering, and take care of ourselves before we lash out with pure uncensored nastiness toward someone we’ve claimed we love? Seriously? When I see that kind of thing unfolding, I nearly always find myself also wondering “How is it anyone sees this as being ‘love’ at all?”

One great relationship best practice I follow these days is; I don’t threaten the emotional security of my loved ones by withholding affecting, or being mean, when I am angry. I make the effort to replace emotional attacks with authenticity, vulnerability, and listening deeply. Just that. Surely if I love the person I am angry with, the better choice (versus attacking them) is to take care of my own emotional needs (put my own oxygen mask on first) – which really doesn’t leave time for attacking people – and then reaching out to my hurting loved one, connecting, talking, and reaching a comfortable mutual understanding – ideally with all hurts soothed, and the wreckage tidied up with hugs, kisses, and real affection, and because we started with love, why would we end anywhere else? 🙂 There are, of course, verbs involved, and The Big 5 (Respect, Reciprocity, Consideration, Compassion, and Openness) make an important appearance, too.

Treating our loves truly well requires awareness, the choice moment to moment to do so, and practice.  It also requires the basic assumption that our loves mean us no harm, hold us in high esteem, want the best for us in life, and are most specifically and earnestly not “trying to start shit”*. That by itself is pretty huge; if you go around all the time assuming your loved ones have it in for you, aren’t playing fair, don’t look out for your needs, don’t have you in mind at all… well… I gotta wonder first why you think that person loves you if those things are true – and if they aren’t true (or you haven’t made any effort to verify your suspicions clear-headedly in a fact-based way in the first place)… um… wtf is your problem? How do you call those feelings love, yourself? What is it, exactly, that you think love offers you? It definitely took me a while to sort that one out for myself. 🙂

Love.

Love.

My thoughts wind around slowly to values and value statements, generally. I find myself chuckling about the ‘company values’ at work; some of them are two or three sentences and include contradictory statements. I generally find that a ‘value’ can be stated quite simply, and most commonly with a single word. If it takes a sentence – or more – to state a value, it tends to communicate [to me] that the value being expressed is not well understood by the individual making the statement. Sometimes value statements are deliberately unclear, in some cases because the value is being hidden rather than expressed directly. The nature of values – and value statements – became much more important to me when I began, rather late in life, to re-explore my own values explicitly. My ‘Big 5‘ developed out of those conversations with myself.

The power of mindfulness practices to spark honest self-reflection and support self-awareness, as well as awareness generally, has been an important source of personal growth, and necessary for developing a sustainable condition of day-to-day contentment and joy (without needing to aspire to be anything other than entirely human). I don’t really need to count down the days until I move – I will or I won’t, and in time I’ll know which, and that will be plenty soon enough to start a countdown. I don’t really need to count down the days since the last time I hung out with my traveling partner – I’ll see him again, soon enough, and each visit is a lifetime of its own to be cherished, savored, and enjoyed, no counting or score-keeping required. There is so much less sensation of rushing, being rushed, urgency or panic these days. It is enough to enjoy the journey as it is. 🙂

Practice the practices that take you closer to being the human being you most want to be.

Practice the practices that take you closer to being the human being you most want to be.

 

 

*It should go without saying that if you mean someone ill, willfully treat them poorly, want them to suffer, and are regularly actually trying to provoke them into anger, fear, jealously or sorrow, you really seriously honestly just do not get to say you “love” that person – because love doesn’t behave that way. I can at least hope anyone treated thusly will have or gain the wisdom to understand they are not being loved!

 

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Big 5, Words
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