Protected: Trust fall
I have a Ph.D. in psychology. This is a science degree. I was a researcher for many years, following the scientific method to answer empirical questions. Before starting a study, there is also rigorous review of research involving human participants by ethics committees, which are comprised of both academic researchers and community members. I also have a number of peer reviewed research publications. The peer review process requires that other researchers in the field (and they shouldn’t be your buddies, by the way, that would be a conflict) review an article and not only weigh in on whether the article should be published but also make sometimes very extensive recommendations about changes to be made in the writing, the logic, the conclusions, or even the type and amount of statistical tests that are performed. And by the way, the authors’ names are taken off of the article by the journal editor and the authors are also not told the names of the reviewers.
It is not a perfect system. It is not totally devoid of bias. But it a systematic process, with built in checks and balances, carried out by in my experience, very smart and dedicated people. I find it extremely powerful that at the basis of statistical testing is the possibility that a hypothesis is wrong. Mathematically, each hypothesis is tested against the null hypothesis, which to make a long story short means, “Researcher, you are wrong. What you thought made a difference, made no difference.” So while an individual researcher might be arrogant, the basic assumption of statistical testing is still steeped in a kind of humility. In sum, carrying out science involves the hard work of employing logic, making predictions, gathering evidence, and working as a scientific community to continually build a systematic understanding of the world.
I love doing science. I’m no longer a researcher so I am not engaged in conducting it anymore. But I like to think of myself as an extremely logical person, a scientific person, a person who despite the fact that I am passionate with strong feeling and quick thoughts, tries to examine questions in the time it takes to do so, think about evidence to support my initial judgments, and make revisions as I go.
I am also a person with a strong faith in God. And again, I am not a traditionally religious person but I do have strong faith. God cannot be seen directly, anyway. God cannot really be measured. A belief in God is not scientific. The way I have thought about this is that there are some questions that are subject to faith and others that are subject to science. The existence of God is not a question, at least at this time, that is subject to scientific inquiry. But I have faith and experience God through the love people express for each other and nature’s majesty the latter of which includes Earth and the wide expanses of the universe.
Today, is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was a truly tragic and horrible event during particularly turbulent and violent times in our country’s history. People die for no good reason all of the time. It is easy to get desensitized to it. But thinking about JFK, a charismatic, young, idealistic, and good looking president grounds us and reminds us of the horror of violence.
I think most people in the U.S. would agree that there is too much violence in our country. But after that agreement, things tend to fall apart. Today I was reminded of the National Rifle Association slogan, “Guns don’t kill people, people do.” I hate that slogan. And as you know, I hate very few things. But I hate it and it’s not just because I disagree, as do most Americans, with the extreme positions of the NRA.
I could go through the illogic of the slogan. It’s not an either or situation. People with guns kill people, both a person and a weapon are usually necessary. Yes, people still get beaten to death with someones bare hands and feet, but this is a minority when all violence related deaths are considered. A tool is usually used and guns are an extremely fast and effective way of killing someone.
There has been systematic research on guns in this country. I could give you all kinds of statistics about how having a gun in one’s home increases the risk of gun death. I could quote all kinds of evidence that our current gun control laws are insufficient in truly protecting people. I could also give you really obvious logic like do people really need assault weapons for duck hunting? Or do you really want to follow the logic of Ted Nugent? I mean have you listened to him? He makes no sense.
I could give you data. Because guns, their use, and their impact are observable. They are subject to scientific inquiry. And yes that inquiry can be subject to bias and given that NRA successfully lobbied to defund grant funding through the Centers for Disease Control (they have a section of injury prevention) on any studies that involve guns, we will unfortunately get less information about a problem that most all of us would agree exists. Too many people are getting killed by people with guns.
But I could not convince most of the people I’d like to convince with logic and data. Because many people have decided that this question is one of faith, not one of science. So there’s really no way to argue. And it doesn’t matter that there is supposed to be a separation of Church and state. A religious belief, by a powerful lobby, in highly unrestricted gun access and ownership is held to not be questioned and is incorporated into law.
As a general rule, I avoid discussing politics especially the politics that get intertwined with religious belief. It’s not so much that I disagree with everyone. I just find that whether I am discussing these issues with a person who agrees with me or not, there’s an incredible intolerance for people who express a different view point. And not only is there intolerance, there is name calling, “morons”, “un-American”, “not real Americans”, “Bible thumpers”, “idiots”.
And then I just come out of the conversation fighting harshly judgmental views. I try really hard not to be harshly judgmental because it is incompatible with love and respect. And I add “harshly” because we are supposed to be judgmental; we make hundreds perhaps thousands of judgments in a single day. But the best judgments are those that are fair, safe, and respectful to ourselves and to others.
You may agree with me. You may disagree with me. If you’ve gotten to this part of this post, I thank you for your kind attention. In any case, I have faith in God. I have faith in the power of love. And I believe that violence is a problem in our society. And in my work, I help parents and children to use alternatives to aggression. In that sense, I work on the “people” part of the NRA slogan. Along with my husband, I work to teach Zoe how to live as a loving, peaceful, fair, and respectful person. I continue to try to live in this way myself. I am not always successful. Nobody is, there is conflict in life. But I hold peace as an ideal to which I continually strive. To me, that is my personal practical brand of pacifism.
People, let’s get to work.
I’ve had a couple of difficult days. We all have them. It’s just part of life. Something throws you on your butt, you rally, you still feel kind of bad, maybe another thing knocks you back on your butt, you rally again, and keep inching your way along until you re-right yourself.
Today, I had paperwork to do but did not have to go to the office to see patients. I had been knocked on my butt a couple of days ago and still felt knocked down this morning. I meditated for a long time and thought about my life. My past, my present, and my future. I gained some clarity. I had some really wonderful thoughts about perfectionism, which I had planned to share on my blog, but promptly forgot as soon as I got out of bed. (Darn!)
The sky was blue today. I went out for my walk. The sky was not only blue but the mountains were visible. I walked to Bird on a Wire, my neighborhood coffee shop, which is quite excellent. It was as if the universe knew that I needed to be cheered up. Maddie said, “Oh, Elizabeth I’m glad you came at this time. (It was a slower part of the day.) We hate it when people we like come at busy times and we don’t get to talk to them.” Then Adrian noticed that a gluten-filled biscuit was being prepared for me instead of a gluten-free one. She saved me from some major eczema. Adrian keeps an extra eye on this, I’ve noticed and I very much appreciate it. And finally, Angel told me that I was one of his favorite people. The people who work at the coffee shop are always friendly but this was much more than usual. I told them that they were awesome but I did not let on that I was having a hard day and they have no idea how much their kindness meant to me. I also experienced the incredible kindness of a friend in the past couple of days who knew that I was having a hard time, who has checked in on me periodically over the past couple of days.
I continued, with coffee and gluten-free biscuit in hand on my walk. It was WAY too nice not to go to the beach. I didn’t have enough time to walk there so I walked a half mile back to my house, jumped into my car, and drove to Lincoln Park, which is on the Puget Sound. There was new snow on the Olympic Mountains. The sun was bright and the sky was a brilliant blue. The wind was strong and it was cold. But it was amazing! The water, the islands, the Olympic Peninsula, and the mountains were glorious. I saw osprey flying over the water and then suddenly drop to the water to fish. I saw cormorants and a few species of duck. At one point, I saw black figures as the waves broke. They were two harbor seals about 20 yards off of the coast. They were swimming along and coming up every several yards. I was able to walk along the beach fast enough to continue to observe them for several minutes. I have seen seals at this beach, but only 2 or 3 times in the past 10 years. The Pacific Madrone, one of my favorite trees, which only grow near salt water, were beautiful. The orange trunks with their peeling bark were beautiful against the blue sky. The towering Douglas fir were majestic.
I’ve had a stressful life for the past many years. The reasons for this are many, most of which I have written about here. One of the ways I deal with the stress as well as to help prevent recurrence of depression is to get a full body massage every three weeks. I have gotten them from the same lovely person, Jann Coons, for the past 13 years. The first massage from Jann was a gift from my husband for my 35th birthday. I got the first one and have never stopped going. I’ve had massages from three or four other people and no one holds a candle to Jann!
Jann surprised me today. She told me that she had a Christmas present for me in her car and noted that she couldn’t keep it in her office. She walked me out to her car and I could see that she was getting ready to open the trunk of her car. I said, “Oh, well I am guessing that you are not giving me a puppy!” She pulled an amazing variety of home grown vegetables, artfully arranged in a basket, from the cool depths of her trunk. The basket contained red chard, two kinds of kale, delicata and other squashes, red and yellow onions, mizuna (a type of green), and beautiful red beets. I’m sure Jann could tell that I was moved by her generosity. I gave her a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. I still can’t believe it. I almost cried.
I am not a traditionally religious person but I believe my faith in the spiritual beliefs I do have is very deep. Today, I experienced an overwhelmingly beautiful display of nature’s bounty. The bounty from the sky, the water, the mountains, dirt, and from other human beings, who are also part of the natural world. And I know this is only a fraction of the bounty that I enjoy. I have so many wonderful people in my life, friends and family. There are so many wonders of the Earth.
I know that Thanksgiving is not for another eight days but today I feel very thankful, very blessed, and so loved. My heart is bursting.
Jann’s Christmas present to me. A basket of health that she grew with her own hands.
Many years ago, I was working with a child with aggressive behavior problems and his parents. As I recall, he was 8 years old at the time. He was so easily angered. Some children are. By the time an 8 year-old child who has trouble regulating anger and has a great deal of trouble with impulse control, they typically have a lot of practice being aggressive and being impatient. There is an automatic reflex for disappointment and frustration.
The boy had been playing with toys, Legos I believe. It was time to clean up. There are children who kind of lose it when they are told to clean up. He was one of those children. Now, I don’t set things up so that kids will blow a fuse. I wrote out the session schedule as a check list. An example of this kind of schedule might be as follows. 1) Grown up talking time, 2) Show and tell, 3) Grown up talking time, 4) Show and tell, 5) Clean-up time, and 6) prize time.
In other words, “clean-up time” did not come out of the blue. But as soon as the words, “It’s time to clean-up” were uttered, I could see the boy’s brow knit and his fist clench. He picked up some Legos and I could tell that he was planning to throw them across the room.
A big part of my job is observing and waiting for little opportunities. Opportunities to offer a child a chance to do something different. An opportunity to be appreciated by an adult in a positive way. Once these opportunities present themselves I have to work extremely quickly.
I picked up the Lego bin, smiled, and said, “Oh you look like you are ready to put those Legos away! Thanks so much for helping!” His face relaxed and he put them in the bin. I said, “Wow, I bet you are really fast at putting things away. Oh look at that! You put all of those away. Oh, there are some more in the corner! There you go, I knew you were fast. Thank you for taking care of the toys. That means that other children will be able to play with them. You have been very kind.”
Did that interchange solve all of the boys problems? No, it didn’t. But I do believe that it opened a window to how things could be different. For how helping can be powerful. For how seeing the positive possibilities in another human being can be powerful rather than naive. And more important than showing this possibility to the boy was the fact that the window was opened for his parents, to see their son as capable of positive growth.
It doesn’t always work when I try to take these opportunities to make a shift with my patients, with their families, with my loved ones, or with myself. But sometimes it works and works beautifully. As I become more mindful in my own life, I look for these micro-opportunities to make changes in my own life, in the way I think about things or in the way I behave.
I often tell children, “One of the best things about life is that you almost always get another chance. Every day is a new opportunity.”
Lux aeterna luceat eis,
Domine, cum satis tuis
in aeternum, quia pius es.Let perpetual light shine upon them,
O Lord, in the company of your saints
forever, for you are compassionate.-From the Concluding Rites of the Missa pro Defunctis (Mass for the Dead).
Last night I went to the Mass of All Souls at the St. James Cathedral in Seattle. This year the choir, in which my mom is a member, sang Mozart’s Requiem. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this piece of music, it is the piece that Mozart is composing toward the end of the film, Amadeus. It is a powerful and beautiful mass, which was sung splendidly by the choir. The beginning of the mass definitely emphasizes the downside of death, the wrath of God, judgment, and burning in eternal fire. This is the part that also has the most exciting music. As the mass progresses, themes of life, grace, and redemption emerge. The music and lyrics become lighter, more peaceful, and let’s face it, not nearly so exciting. Mass ends with a processing of white robes, the crucifix, and candles.
St. James is a popular church and the Requiem Mass draws a large crowd of parishioners as well as lovers of sacred music from a variety of religious faiths. If you don’t arrive early, you have to stand. So I got there about an hour early. My dad, my younger brother James, and his wife, Meagan were already there. I sat next to my brother and we chatted before mass started. The church filled up but the seat to my right was empty because it was reserved for people with physical limitations. After a little bit, a woman, who was accompanied by another woman, sat down next to me. I noticed that she was bald as well as wearing some really cool black and white patent leather shoes that looked like a cross between sneakers and wing-tipped dress shoes.
Several minutes later, I saw my mom, dressed in a choir robe, walk across the church. I waved at her. The woman seated to my right asked, “Do you know her?” And this is how I met Brenda and her wife, Kristen. Brenda is being treated for breast cancer and also gets her treatment at the Swedish Cancer Institute. She was diagnosed last May and underwent a double mastectomy in June. Brenda is currently getting chemotherapy and had an infusion earlier in the day. She told me that she had just switched from Taxol and was pleased to still have some energy on this first day of the new medication. I mentioned my blog and both Brenda and Kristen expressed keen interest. It also turned out that Kristen is also a mental health provider. It just so happened that Brenda was also looking for a supportive community and not sure where to start. I described the wonderful support I have received from the breast cancer blogging community. After the mass, Brenda asked for a hug and I gladly gave her one. I told Kristen and her that they would likely be mentioned in my blog today. It was a lovely and very human encounter.
Today, I have been thinking of Brenda and Kristen, who are near the beginning of this breast cancer mess, a very scary and unfortunately exciting part of treatment. And I hope that with our connection and their potential connection with the many dear souls of this wonderful community that we will all progress further toward grace and light.
Finally, the choir really was magnificent and at the risk of being totally tacky in church, I hid my smartphone under my program and made a sound recording of a portion of the Sequence, which is the longest section of the Requiem. The choir begins after a few croaky bars sung by the congregation. Here they are, The St. James Cathedral Choir and Chamber Orchestra, directed by Dr. James Savage.
A look up at the oculus.
View of the altar. St. James’s original design was more traditional. The altar was moved to the center of the church several years ago.
A view of one of the two pipe organs.
Dad, my sister-in-law Deb, Mom, Me, my sister-in-law Meagan, and my brother James. (Mom, I know that your eyes are closed but they were in the other photos, too.)
As I’ve mentioned on this blog in the past, I am not a psychologist trained in dream interpretation and generally speaking, the area doesn’t hold a lot of interest for me. But in my own flat-footed way, I get information from my dreams at times. For example, when I have a dream that bad guys are chasing me, it tells me that my daytime anxiety has gotten high enough to invade my dream scape so I take it as a cue to get myself to “calm the Hell down”. (And when I used to have Gilligan’s Island dreams frequently as a kid I perhaps should have taken that as a cue to watch less television! I would ask the Professor, “What do you mean you can’t find civilization? There’s a big resort hotel across the water over there, within easy swimming distance!”)
Another popular theme for my dreams has been pregnancy. I remember having my first pregnancy dreams when I was a teen and they continued for many many years. As I teen I thought of what my life would be like, would I be married, would I have children, what would my career be? I think a lot of those pregnancy dreams were about how my identity was shaping up as a woman and since a lot of those dreams involved me giving birth to lots of babies at once, I think I was perhaps more than a little concerned about how I would establish a work/home balance. When I was pregnant, I had birth dreams. My husband had one, too. He said that I gave birth to a baby who looked like a softball with one eye. Not wanting to distress me (thoughtful even in his dreams), he casually asked the obstetrician, “Hmm, so when do you think the baby will get a SECOND eye?”
Now I have middle-aged pregnancy dreams. On more than one occasion, I’ve realized in the dream, “Wait a minute! I’m not in my thirties anymore. I am 47 years old! Good Lord, how did this this happen? This is a very high risk pregnancy!” No one else in the dreams seems to worry about this. And I try to be as excited as I can be for the birth. Even if this cancer mess had never occurred, I would have a very low chance of getting pregnant at my age. And as long as I take Lupron shots, I will be infertile. Eventually, this state of affairs will become permanent as a natural consequence of aging.
So what’s the deal with the dreams? I guess an obvious explanation is that in losing my fertility I am thinking about it. (Yeah I know, “D’uh!”) The only thing I’ve noticed in my attitude about losing my fertility is that it doesn’t really seem to bother me that much. In contrast to much younger cancer patients, I was done having children quite awhile ago and was in peri-menopause when I was diagnosed. I had never planned to bear any children past age 35, anyway so I think I’d pretty much processed the probability that I would never get pregnant again, already.
I think part of this is just the realization that although I am not old, I’m not young anymore. Unlike my historical hang ups with body image, beauty, and weight, I am surprisingly less concerned about getting older. But I do notice it. My father-in-law, Don, a very fit and physically active man in his early 70’s, tells me that it shocks him when he looks in the mirror. Inside he feels much younger and the person looking at him is old. My Great Aunt Blanche had uncorrected vision problems for a number of years. Once they were corrected, she was shocked at her aged appearance because she had not seen herself clearly in quite some time. She died at age 105 years. She was still living by herself and in her own home, tending to her magnificent garden until she was 103. She was extremely fit and good looking for a centenarian.
But we don’t start off life as 100 year olds, do we? And we develop a view of ourselves over the years that changes over time but perhaps not as quickly as we change externally. I imagine that youth has always been prized due to its association with fertility and reproduction. Our culture, however, has gone incredibly and irrationally overboard with youth idealization. Some people decide that they are old when they are middle-aged, that this is a bad thing, and then they interpret the advancing years in a negative way for the rest of their lives. I sometimes tell people that Aunt Blanche chose her burial outfit when she was 80, only to live 25 more years. My grandmother also chose her burial outfit, a decades old pink and black peignoir set, which she used to wear on special occasions. I think she was trying to set her sex appeal setting to Ava Gabor in Green Acres. But it might have just as well been Esther Williams, since Grandma also used to wear an authentic 1940’s era gold lame bathing suit while she was watering the garden. But I digress…
When my father-in-law was a teen boy he asked his grandfather if there were things he missed about being younger. His grandfather replied, “Every age has compensations.” Don told me that he has carried his grandfather’s words with him throughout his life. As for my own life, I am not as fit or beautiful as I was when I was younger but I am a whole lot happier. I don’t sweat the small stuff so easily. I appreciate each day more fully. Finally, I know a lot of cancer survivors say this but I look at aging differently now. Aging is more life. I can’t be old unless I live for a long time. And that sounds pretty good to me.
Christmas at Johnny and Katie Torlai’s house. The boys are my brothers. I am the girl. I am guessing the year was 1969.
For those of you who didn’t get the Ava Gabor in Green Acres reference, here she is.
Protected: I can still read Curious George at night
Today, my brain feels pretty functional and I feel calm despite the fact that I still have a number of unknowns in my life including the results of my MRI from last Friday. I spent a good 2-3 weeks up until last Friday on a roller coaster of anxiety. I can’t remember if it was Wednesday or Thursday of last week but on one of those days I was a mess for a few hours. I was so worried about my MRI and the prospect of going through cancer treatment all over again. I have had plenty of sadness and fear. This was different than in times past. As I have written, I have felt storms of emotion at different times during the past 1 1/2 years. But at my core there was a sense of peace and calm.
How was my core different this time? In addition to the stress around the MRI being scheduled, then cancelled, then rescheduled (I hate that kind of stuff), about a week or two into that whole mess, my energy dipped precipitously. I was really really fatigued. Like everyone else, I have a low energy day every once in awhile. But I had several in a row. And the fatigue felt different to me, it was the kind that can pull me down into very sad places. This scared me. Anxiety followed by prolonged fatigue is how my depression has started in the past. And I have had periods of time, especially in the winter when I experience this fatigue and although I can never be certain, it feels like the start of a depressive episode that never happens because I am able to fight it off with my medication and cognitive therapy techniques.
I have not had clinical depression in over 10 years but it has been a strong concern of mine that I would have a recurrence due to the stress of being a cancer patient. So I was really scared last week and although I talked to a few people about the fears I had about cancer recurrence, I told no one, not even my husband, about my fear of being depressed again. I felt isolated, lonely and guilty about being a very needy person. I was still able to work and behave with a semblance of normalcy when it was very important that I did so.
By Thursday night, I started feeling significantly less stressed. I had gotten the core of peace and serenity back even though I was still distressed. But I wasn’t entirely back to whatever “normal” is these days. My emotional states change so much more frequently and intensely than they used to and I understand why they do. I can live with the “normal crazy” of cancer treatment. I am still myself but in technicolor. When I am depressed I am not myself. There are some people who have persistent depression, which tends to be a steady, low level misery.
In contrast, when I’ve gotten depressed, it has been acute and more severe. I fell into a very scary, powerless, and hopeless chasm, into a world where I could act like myself for some periods of time but it was acting. And I didn’t feel like myself at all. The first time it happened, I kept thinking that if I just kept problem solving, it would go away. So I let my untreated depression go on for some time. The second time it happened, I recognized it within a week or two and thought, “Oh no, we’re not doing this again” and got myself back to see a psychologist and my internist within a week and my symptoms started subsiding very quickly, within a couple of weeks.
Now that I’m writing this, I am realizing that I handled that last episode pretty well. And I am also still seeing a psychologist every month, not to mention all of the healthy things I do that are good for both physical and mental health. Depression, you are not welcome, but if you come anyway, I can deal with you, too.
My Eyes Are Up Here 