Participant

August 6, 2014 //

As you know, I love photography. I mostly take nature photography, but I also take photos of people. My people shots are usually informal but occasionally I try to take a good portrait. I have come to view the goals of nature and portrait photography differently. In portrait photography, the goal is usually to capture a human image that looks better than a person usually looks in day to day life. If you think about it, people have ever changing appearance due to our changing mode of dress, use of make-up, but even more importantly, we have muscles and our bodies, especially our facial features are in motion. When I’ve had my portrait done professionally, the photographer puts effort into getting me to hold my body in a particular way, tilt me head just so, look at the camera, and usually, to smile. Backdrops and lighting are used.

I think the goal of nature photography is to capture the subject as it ACTUALLY LOOKS. I have taken so many photos only to think, “That looked so much better in real life. Because I try to capture natural subjects as they actually look, I don’t typically rearrange the environment to make a better photo. Occasionally, I use a flash and on the rare occasion, I might move a twig out the way that’s blocking the shot. When I move a twig out the way, I actually feel like I’m cheating, I try to remove myself from the photo except for choosing what part of what is actually there is going to fill the frame.

In this way, I think of taking portraits as requiring being more of a participant in the photo and of taking natural shots as being more of an observer, standing back so as not to mar any of the natural beauty before me.

A common way that I try to take myself out of my flower photos is when my body casts a shadow on the flower. I will move to take the shot from another angle or occasionally, I duck my body down, keeping my arm raised and snap. The latter approach doesn’t work particularly well but if I can’t take the shot otherwise, I often give it a try.

A few days ago, I was taking close-ups of roses, something I love to do. Roses are not just beautiful from a distance. They are mesmerizing up close. The texture of the petals, some creamy, some satiny, some velvety. And their multi-petal form creates interesting light and shadow and well as patterns within their overall forms. It was mid-day and the sun was overhead. I leaned over to snap a photo and I saw my shadow. I was about to make some attempt to remove my shadow when I realized, looking down through the view screen on my camera that my shadow actually added interest to the rose. It looked like it belonged and it actually enhanced the beauty of the bloom by showing contrast of light and shadow.

I often write in this blog about how much healthier I am when I feel connected to nature. Every time, it fills me up a little more. Over time, I am more frequently able to carry a feeling of joyful serenity for a little longer.

Mindfulness sneaks up on me with gentle waves that ebb and flow but still manage to build a reservoir.

Tags mindfulness, nature photography, photography

Categories Flora and Fauna, Mindfulness

Alliances

August 4, 2014 //

As a clinical psychologist, an important part of my job is what is called “forming a therapeutic alliance”. This is a bond of rapport, trust, and understanding. It is a necessary component whether I am doing a short term assessment or long-term psychotherapy. I work with difficulties that require a team to effectively address.

As a child and adolescent psychologist, the size of the team is bigger than it is for adult clinicians. Although my primary alliance is to the child or teen, I must also form working alliances with parents, teachers, other mental health providers, and physicians. It is also not uncommon for me to have to interact with school principals, individuals with a school district or with the state superintendent’s office, occupational therapists, speech/language pathologists, or grandparents. I am fortunate in that my contact with child protection, case workers, and police enforcement is rare, but it does happen.

I work with the “it takes a village” kids. And I often take on the role of training the adults who are with the child daily about how to best support the child’s unique needs. The members of the village with whom I have the most contact are parents.

Parents are in a very influential position withe the kids I assess and treat. They often feel helpless. They often feel guilty about their children’s challenges. They often take out these painful states on the people they love the most, their children.

And to my patients, the teens especially, I often look like another adult who is going to tell them how they are screwing up their lives and making everyone miserable.

Because I primarily do short term assessment, I have to work fast. I don’t have the luxury of letting relationships and alliances develop slowly over time. In some ways, this is an advantage as the time limited nature of the process creates a sense of urgency to enact change, assuming the family is ready to make changes. Part of working quickly is that I need to communicate directly, I need to make recommendations, and I need to communicate hopefulness but also urgency not to continue to let problems worsen. Some of the kids I assess have long-standing undiagnosed and untreated difficulties leading not only to a worsening of the primary conditions but to the development of secondary disorders.

I don’t work for a system like a hospital or community health center. I have my own little private practice office. I don’t work in a prison but I do work to prevent children and teens from getting involved in juvenile justice. I don’t work in a mental hospital but I work to prevent teens from being hospitalized or help them transition back to the community from the hospital. I don’t work for the welfare office but I do work to support my patients’ educations as much as possible so that they can complete high school and perhaps even complete college so that they can become reliable members of our country’s workforce.

This is my long way of saying that my job involves a big team and a long view towards the future as well as responding to the present issues. Sometimes I forget how hard my job is.

What I do remember more easily are the times I felt like I needed to break an alliance in order to protect a child. Now I don’t mean calling child protective services, though that would certainly be an example. I am talking about other instances that are not as clear cut as making a suspected abuse report.

I am talking about times I have to give someone very firm direction or feedback when it is a risky thing to do and I have either exhausted other strategies or there are no other strategies available. Sometimes it means writing an email and leaving a voice mail with my patient’s psychiatrist who has been unresponsive despite our mutual patient’s level of depression, saying, “You need to communicate with me more frequently. _____ was talking about killing himself just three months ago. He is not doing well. I know you are busy, but I need to hear from you as soon as possible.” (I heard back within an hour.)

I am also talking about responding to a mom of a teen, adopted from another country. She was mad at him and told him that she was going “to give him back.” Since I had already conducted the background interview and he was there for testing. In other words, she was supposed to be in the waiting room, not in my office. I empathized with her frustration but told her that the next step was to do assessment. She kept telling him how horrible he was. Then I told her that her job was to “make things better instead of worse” and suggested that she go take a walk to regain her composure. She kept yelling. I told her that she had to leave. Believe it or not, I think that she really loved her son. I didn’t think she was a bad person. But she was not well herself, depleted, making bad decisions, and her behavior was hurting her son. It was not her fault that her son had the challenges that he did. But it wasn’t his, either. And it was her responsibility to be the adult.

I was pretty sure I would not see that family again and I didn’t. I knew I had hurt and angered that boy’s mother. I saw the opportunity to do was to let that boy know that the way he was being treated was unkind, unfair, and harsh. It was the best I could do at the time.

Most of the time, I am able to navigate these sometimes conflicting alliances. It is complicated but doable. One of the things that makes it easier is that my professional relationships are not reciprocal. In other words, my patients and allied health professionals are not responsible for taking care of me.

This is not, however, the case in much of my personal life. In my personal life I have reciprocal relationships with friends, my husband, or with professional colleagues. And that’s where alliances get even trickier. Because now my expectations, my wants, and my needs enter into the equation; they become part of the team of my relationships.

With expectations comes fulfillment and disappointment.
With need comes receiving and hurt.
With wants come desire and loneliness.
With dependence comes relief and uncertainty.
With honest communication comes raw hurt and vulnerability.

Relationships bring the best and the worst to our lives, even with the right people. I am kind of impressed that people keep trying and that many people have strong and resilient relationships. This makes me hopeful. Just because my relationships can be difficult doesn’t mean that I am doing them wrong.

Tags interdependence, intimate relationships, Mental Health, psychology, therapeutic alliance, trust

Categories Family, Marriage, Mindfulness, Uncategorized

Hello, my old familiar

August 2, 2014 //

In the early 90’s, John and I drove to rural Pennsylvania from North Carolina. His research adviser, a computer science professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, was throwing a 50th birthday party for his wife, who was an English Professor at Syracuse University in New York. They owned a Mennonite farmhouse from when they were both professors at Penn State University. He had a pilot’s license and a small plane. This was the house he flew to when he and his wife spent time together.

The distance between North Carolina and Pennsylvania is sizable. We were newly married and both in graduate school. We didn’t have a lot of money and hence, no form of reliable transportation. But we wanted to go to the party. So we rented a car, packed our bags, and drove north.

The drive was really quite beautiful especially through Appalachia. If you have never been through the eastern U.S., the Appalachian Mountains are beautiful and old. Because they are old, they are worn. They are not snow-capped. I’ve always thought of them as lovely broccoli-green hills speckled with charming farm houses and old grain mills. Ah, there are also the fireflies that light up the hillside.

It was so beautiful. Ahhhhhhhhh. The drive was so relaxing, so breath taking… And then I took a look at the gas gauge. “Hey, John, you’re down to a quarter of a tank.”

“That’s plenty of gas”, he replied.

“John! We are out in the middle of nowhere!”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I relaxed and as I get ever so slightly car sick, I fell asleep. I awoke to John frantically saying, “There’s something wrong with the car! We’ve lost power.”

“John. We. Ran. Out. of. Gas.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“OH-MY-GOD! I-TOLD-YOU-THAT-YOU-WERE-LOW-ON-GAS-YOU-BLEW-ME-OFF-AND-NOW-YOU-BLAME-ME-I-CAN’T-BELIEVE-YOU-WHY-IS-EVERYTHING-MY-FAULT-AND-YOU-CAN’T-TAKE-RESPONSIBILITY-FOR-ANYTHING!”

This was before cell phone days and we really were out in the middle of nowhere. We hitched a ride to the nearest gas station (‘OH-MY-GOD-YOU-MADE-US-HITCH-HIKE!!!!”), bought gas and hitched a ride back to the car. Then we drove to a gas station. I would say that we went upon our merry way. I mean, we actually had a wonderful time on that trip, in the end.

But in the mean time, we had what has become an age-old argument between the two of us:

Me: “There’s a problem coming; here’s what you need to do.”

J: “There’s no problem. Stop worrying about it.”

Me: “See? There was a problem. You don’t listen to me!!!!”

J: “I could have handled it. You are treating me like a child. Also, whatever problem MIGHT occurred is your fault, anyway.”

Me: “Don’t you remember that time I TOLD YOU that we were running out of gas”…

There are many versions of his argument. Since it’s my blog, I started out with an example of a time when John truly did blow me off and then blamed me for the outcome.

Oh, I so dislike it when he does that! It is so frustrating and then the “and it’s your fault” part really hurts.

But there are other versions of this fight, ones that I am not as likely to remember.

E: “I am feeling anxious. Anything could be a problem right now. Hey look, there’s a problem. DON’T YOU SEE THE PROBLEM! HEY, YOU NEED TO RESPOND TO ME. THERE’S A PROBLEM!!!! SEE THE PROBLEM!!!! HEAR THE PROBLEM!!!!”

J: (Actually trying to get his wife to CALM THE HELL DOWN): “There’s no problem. Don’t worry about it. I will handle all of this.”

E: “BUT YOU’RE NOT LISTENING TO ME!!! HOW CAN YOU UNDERSTAND THE PROBLEM IF YOU CAN’T HEAR ME!!! YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION!!!! REMEMBER THAT TIME WHEN I TOLD YOU THAT WE WERE RUNNING OUT OF GAS IN PENNSYLVANIA?”

And then it ends up that the problem didn’t occur.

E: (Thinking to herself) “Wow, good thing I went ape shit there. Otherwise, WE WOULD HAVE HAD THAT PROBLEM I KNEW WAS GOING TO HAPPEN.”

Those are two versions. In one version, John is not at his best. In the other, I am not at my best. Of course, there are many other versions of this conversation. But they are not as memorable because they are healthy and functional.

Most of our communication is healthy and functional. And what I mean by most, is the vast majority. But we do get stuck on those two examples, the first of John’s under-responsiveness and the second of my insistent and anxious problem solving.

I have no tidy answers for this communication problem. I am describing it as part of my mindfulness practice in hopes of continuing to chip away at the way these conversations trigger strong emotional reactions from each of us.

I do know that we have had versions of these arguments hundreds of times in our 27 years together. I have learned in studying marriage and marital therapy that there are perpetual arguments that even happy couples have. There is a difference in how these perpetual arguments are handled, however, John and I are working hard.

If I keep working hard, I know that he will FINALLY start doing what I tell him to do.

I kid, I kid, I kid!

Tags conflict management, Marriage, mindfulness, perpectual arguments

Categories Marriage

The Hive

August 1, 2014 //

Some animals, like bees, are eusocial. They live in highly organized social groups, each with a job to do, and all for the survival of the group. Adult bees are drones, workers, and for one unlucky female, the Queen.

This would all seem so complicated except for one thing. Bees have tiny brains and they don’t live very long. In other words, it is unlikely that more than the tiniest bit of learning goes into this process and I’d say it’s safe to say that no thinking goes into it. Bees follow instinct. They do their jobs, they don’t change roles, and when they communicate, they send messages that are easy for everyone to understand.

People are also social animals but from an evolutionary standpoint, we are driven for individual survival, not group survival, a quality the ethologist Richard Dawkins called the “selfish gene“. Evolution is not everything. There are other forces at work and some of them even motivate us to get along with one another and nurture each other for the greater good.

But people have big brains and live a long time! We learn to play many roles and carry out many responsibilities. And these roles and responsibilities are not predetermined at birth. Unlike bees, we are not born into an inflexible caste.

Living in a group is really complicated. We communicate with our words and other behaviors. We don’t always say what we mean. We don’t always know what we mean. Our roles overlap and our goals may be at cross purposes.

Bees have very organized relationships. However, they don’t have intimate relationships. People bump and scrap with each other all of the time. We protect ourselves from real and perceived slights. Most of us put a lot of energy into individual survival as well as to helping our loved ones.

I try to live a peaceful life. I try to be a helpful and nurturing person. I try to belong to the community of humanity and to contribute to its health. But I often fail to do so and sometimes spectacularly so.

I am a nice person but I am not always nice. I am a caring person but sometimes I try to protect myself at the expense of others. Sometimes, I use my intellect to come up with fancy justifications for my behavior when in my heart of hearts, I know that I am doing wrong. I am a happy person but sometimes I am irritable and sometimes I lose my temper and yell at the very people that in my hearts of hearts, I love the most.

Almost every time this happens it is because I have neglected my self-care. I have pushed myself too hard, worked too many hours, not eaten well, not taken time to myself, and not exercised. When I think of myself last, it is because I am looking outward to what I think my family needs, ignoring cues from myself that a good deal of my distress is simply because I am not caring for myself.

It is at the times I make these seemingly altruistic sacrifices, I am most prone to behaving selfishly.

I am not perfect. That is okay. Expecting myself to have no needs is not okay. Being selfish is not okay. I am not perfect. That is okay.

Tags altruism, ethology, evolution, Mental Health, mindfulness, self care, selfish gene, selfishness, stress

Categories Family, Feelings, Marriage, Mindfulness

Something out of nothing

July 26, 2014 //

I come from an Italian American family on my mother’s side. Her great grandparents were farmers in northern Italy who immigrated to the U.S. to raise children and work the coal mines near Seattle. In other words, they were not fancy people. They were poor. But they were smart, hard working, life loving, and resourceful. They not only loved food but had a lot of mouths to fill. They knew how to “make something out of nothing”.

My mom knew how to do this, too. It wasn’t as if we were poor but money was tight and there were a lot of people to feed in a family of eight. Mom is also masterful at re-purposing leftovers into new meals so that food is not wasted.

The week has continued to exhaust me. I rallied in the writing of my last post, only to have an extremely fragmented and stressful evening, during which my irritability peaked, and I became quite irrational. My daughter had gotten rather angry with me because she told me that she had another parade the next morning and I had reminded her that I had asked her to tell me about all of her events and she had just told me, “Don’t worry about it, Mom.” I was not able to sacrifice half of a work day to get her there. She got very angry. It was kind of a last straw for me and I mostly took it out on my husband because she had treated me extremely disrespectfully and he left the room instead of backing me up. Realistically, he was probably doing what he needed to do to keep from yelling, with which I was already doing a good job.

I spent a good deal of the early part of yesterday fighting the urge to go back to bed. I have not had a day like this in a very long time. My brain and my heart were utterly exhausted despite the fact that it was a gloriously beautiful summer day in which I had much to do. I forced myself to stay out of bed. By late afternoon, I was sitting on the couch with a head both full of everything and nothing, swirling in eddies of acute pain and numbness.

My husband came home early from work and asked what I wanted to do for dinner. I said, “I am not doing well at all. I know I will be okay. Right now, I can’t think. I can’t answer questions. I need 15 minutes to finish up work.”

Then I started on my unfinished progress notes, one by one, and with the completion of each one, I gathered a tiny but noticeable bit of energy. In about 45 minutes I was done. I had accomplished something. I told John, “Sorry, that took longer than 15 minutes. I’m going to cook dinner.”

I walked into my kitchen. I had a perfectly ripe mango, a perfectly ripe avocado, and some limes. They were not planned for a particular meal. In general, that is often the way I shop. I just buy what looks good. In my freezer, I had some large shrimp. I also had a bit of simple salad left over from another meal. It was made from jicama, radish, and lime. I thought that might be a nice textural and flavor contrast with sweet mango but I wasn’t sure but I started getting excited to try. And as I sliced, zested, crushed, sauteed, and mixed, my spirit continued to lighten and I felt myself filling up again. When I tasted, I could tell that I’d made a lovely summer salad full of good things. My husband and I had a nice meal together, which led to a nice evening.

I had been depleted and feeling in utter need, just an hour before. I needed to give myself an experience of creating from start to finish, to remember that I am capable of making wholes and not just carrying an armload of loose fragments, which keep falling to the ground, and then others fall as I stoop over to pick them up.

Remember what you have and make use of it.

That is my meditation for today.

Shrimp and mango with lime, avocado, radish, and jicama.

Shrimp and mango with lime, garlic, avocado, radish, and jicama.

Here is the recipe:

About 1 pound of large shrimp, peeled and deveined with tails left on.
1 lime, zested (put zest to the side), then cut into quarters.
1 large ripe avocado, peeled, pitted, and cut into large dice. (Squeeze one of the limb slices on it so it doesn’t discolor).
1 large ripe mango, peeled, pitted, and cut into large dice. (If you have not cut up a mango, read some directions on doing it. It’s not hard but it’s different than other fruit.)
1/4 of a jicama, peeled and cut into matchsticks.
3-4 mild-flavored radishes, peel on, sliced thinly. (I used a small portion of a large watermelon radish, which was about the size of my fist and cut it into match sticks.)
3 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed.

1. Put all of the ingredients into a bowl except for the shrimp, garlic, half of the lime zest, and all of lime wedges into a bowl. Add salt and pepper to taste and the juice from 2-3 lime wedges. Mix gently with your hands so the avocado does not lose its shape.

2. Heat 1 teaspoon of oil and about 2 teaspoons of butter in a large saute pan, on medium to medium high, taking care not to burn the butter. Add garlic and cook for about a minute, stirring frequently. Add the shrimp and cook for a minute or two on each side until curled up and opaque, but not rubbery!

3. Put the salad into a serving bowl and top with the shrimp. Sprinkle the remaining lime zest on the top so it looks pretty!

Tags cooking, creativity, Family, Marriage, mindfulness, Parenting, stress

Categories Family, Feelings, Marriage, Mindfulness, Recipes

Getting a head

July 23, 2014 //

Last week I dreamed about my kittens. (Yes, I know, despite my formative years as a “dog person”, I have become a “cat lady” in my middle age.) My kittens are litter mates, brother and sister, both with pure black coats.

In my dream, they were conjoined twins. People looked at them and remarked, “Oh, look at the cute kitties!” Then the heads of the kitties started looking in different directions and the front right and left feet did the same. The kitties looked distressed. They were not working as a team.

When I awoke from the dream, I thought, “I need to use this image in a blog post.” Yes, really I did. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I am not someone who makes fancy dream interpretations. But I do think about my dreams, especially when I think they signal distress. At the time I was having the dream, I was concerned that John and I were not parenting as a team as well as usual and that we were having trouble communicating about the logistics of our lives. I think that is probably what the dream was about.

I have been pretty stressed during the last couple of weeks. I am an energetic extrovert. Nonetheless, I don’t function well if I am pulled in a hundred directions, living a fragmented life. I am not good at perpetually switching gears. That’s one of the reasons I was attracted to pursuing a research career rather than a career as a clinician. Clinical work means switching gears between people, situations, and goals, quite frequently. When I did research, I worked on one or two projects for years at a time. But I ended up being a clinician and thank goodness, I learned how to switch gears much better than I did previously.

Right now my workdays consist of switching constantly among work, driving my daughter around, getting to my healthcare appointments. My daughter has needed to be driven to one to three locations all around Seattle, every day, starting in the middle of the day. She takes the bus when she can but there are logistics to be worked there there, too.

Yesterday, I reminded her of what time she needed to be home from school (she is volunteering each morning to help with a band program for younger kids) so that I could take her to an activity at 2:00 pm in northeast Seattle. (We live in southwest Seattle.) The original plan had been for her to take the bus downtown and then take a transfer to get to the office. However, we’d tried that the day before and she missed the bus. Since it was mid-day, there was not another bus for an hour. I cancelled my annual physical so that I could come home from work and drive her. Seattle is not an easy city in which to get around. It is long, narrow, surrounded by water, and hilly, for starters. This means that there are a rather limited number of highways and streets available to get from one place to another.

As I complain frequently, I find driving to be taxing and stressful. I am a good driver and it is not that I feel really anxious when I am driving. It’s mostly that I have to think so hard. And it’s not that figuring out bus schedules and directions is that hard, especially with the Internet. It’s hard to remember to do it and to make sure my daughter has the information she needs and understands where she is supposed to be at what time and how to get there. (This is one time when I kind of wish we’d allow her to have a smartphone, but I digress.) Riding the bus involves a surprising number of steps and also, some background knowledge that a non-driver doesn’t necessarily know. Consequently, I need to break it down in my mind and then make sure she knows things I would otherwise take for granted. For example, “You have a parade after your appointment. It is north of where you will be. Do you know what side of the street to be on to take a northbound bus?” The answer is “no”. And she does not yet know north, south, east, and west. When I was her age, I didn’t either. Then there are the fragmented questions I throw out, “Remember your bus pass!” “Remember to pack a lunch!” “Remember your phone!” “Remember your band uniform. You’re not going to have a chance to come back home before the parade!”

If you are a long reader of this blog, you will know that I live with some rather forgetful people who actually need frequent reminders, even if they are not always happy to receive them, in the moment. And by the way, it is not enabling if your child is actually getting better at remembering these things on her own, which is the case for her. But she is only up to remembering these things about 50% of the time. Think about what your daily life would be like if you were not where you were supposed to be with the what you needed, half of the time. Also, you carry your bus pass in an old eyeglass case and your money in a ring box. And this is a major improvement in organization from years past. Finally, you don’t drive. See, having a nagging mom would be annoying but handy.

About two paragraphs, I was telling you about one example day. Then I veered off course. What you don’t know if that while I’ve been writing this post, I’ve stopped and started it many times. I actually wanted to write it last week when I had the dream. Right at this moment, I am fighting the impulse to walk out and investigate the bird sounds I am hearing.

When I am switching gears too much, coordinating multiple goals, I find that it is hard to stop switching gears. I find even more goals and they aren’t priority either. Instead of being a two-headed cat, I turn into a creature with an ever changing number of heads, all on one body. There is effort to do things but none of the cohesion required to get things done in an efficient way.

The first thing that happens to me is that I start getting forgetful. Then I start making mistakes. Then I start getting anxious that I am making a lot of mistakes and I am so distracted that my level of self-awareness waxes and wanes. Then I make more mistakes. Then I start a flurry of unecessary reassurance seeking. “Are you sure you have the bus pass?” “Hey, friend, did I just treat you badly?”

There is an expression that people use referring to feeling “centered”. It is a positive thing but honestly I can’t exactly articulate what it is. But what I can tell you that at this time, I don’t feel centered or “grounded”, another common description that people use to refer to a state of balance.

I don’t feel centered. I don’t feel grounded. I feel like I have an infinite number of heads and none of them contain good working brains. Now, these are subjective feelings. In reality, I am functioning. I am carrying out my life with competence. But I feel icky in the process.

My natural inclination is to think of the happy, balanced, reasonable, bright, organized, empathetic, and energetic version of myself as “the real me” and the other times are aberrant.

I am becoming increasingly, aware, however of how unreasonable this belief really is. I am always me. Who else would I be? The person who gets irritable with her husband because she is overwhelmed and fragmented? That’s me. The person who asked her husband to take care of a responsibility this morning because she was exhausted, even though she’s been irritable with him? That’s me. The real me is not that perfect and it is unhealthy for me to maintain a vision of myself as needing to meet that standard in order to be “real”.

The person who is feeling a little more grounded and centered after having sorted through her thoughts and feelings while writing this post?

That’s me, too.

I have goals in my life. Some day, my life will end. But my life, itself, is not a goal or an end point.

My life is an experience, with lines of continuity as well as flux.

What else would it be?

Tags identity, Marriage, mindfulness, Parenting, stress management

Categories Breast cancer, Family, Feelings, Marriage, Mindfulness, Parenting

The pay off

July 21, 2014 //

It has been two years and three months since my cancer diagnosis. Cancer treatment is expensive. Fortunately, I have very good insurance. However, the biggest financial cost for me was missing time from work. As a self-employed person, I have no sick leave, no disability leave, no vacation leave, and no holiday pay. Also as a self-employed person, I am not eligible for unemployment benefits. In other words, when I don’t work, I don’t earn money. The end.

I accrued a significant amount of debt. As a person who had paid off credit card balances in full every month, for decades, this was disconcerting. My husband and I work hard to have our house mortgage be the only debt that we have. And even our mortgage was refinanced a few years ago so that we could change from a 30 year to a 15 year pay off time. When I bought a new car in 2010, I put down half of the total price and then paid off the rest within 14 months, on a 36 month long loan. Again, we don’t like to be in debt.

Today I paid off my credit card, in full, for the first time in at least a year.

I think I will go celebrate by buying something expensive! (I kid, I kid, I kid.)

Seriously, health care costs are out of control in our country. I am in a much better financial situation than most people. I don’t know how other people do it.

Tags debt, financial impacts of breast cancer, health care costs, self-employment, U.S. Healthcare system

Categories Breast cancer

Beautiful

July 19, 2014 //

One of the recent activities on Facebook has been for women to post five photos of themselves in which they feel beautiful. It is framed as a challenge.

I think it is good for women to recognize their beauty as we so often do not appreciate it in ourselves.

But what is beauty, anyway?

I didn’t feel beautiful for the majority of my life. There were moments, of course, during which I did.

But what is beauty, anyway?

Is it aesthetics?

What are aesthetics, anyway?

Well, most people agree on a certain set of guidelines for determining who and what is “good looking”. Looking healthy has something to do with it. Looking youthful has something to do with it. Looking fertile has something to do with it. Looking just enough out of the ordinary to be striking but not too much as to look alien, has something to do with it. Tradition has something to do with it. Looking non-threatening has something to do with it.

We could say that human aesthetics don’t really matter. But is that really true? Look at Michelangelo’s David. Look at Boticelli’s Venus. One only has to look at two pieces of art to realize that there are aspects of the human form that are aesthetically superior to others, at least as aesthetics are subjectively defined. Plus, if we are to say that aesthetics in the human form do not exist, then it is fair to argue that aesthetics in other forms, also do not exist like in trees, mountains, or other natural forms.

Beauty, though, is not the same as aesthetics. It can include aesthetics but it can also go beyond the visual. Beauty has meaning as well as looks. Beauty is also not the same as “pretty” for the same reason.

Beauty has meaning and the meaning is usually related to a virtue, like love. Love of people, including ourselves, love of animals, love of nature, love, couched in marvel of the best aspects of our planet Earth.

Love is always beautiful but it is not always pretty. Conversely, what and who are aesthetically pleasing, are not always beautiful.

Now, coming back to the Facebook challenge. It was to post photos of when one FELT beautiful. I have never felt beautiful when I was unhappy. It wasn’t that I necessarily felt ugly, though at times that was true, it was just that the unhappy feelings predominated.

The times I have felt the most beautiful, are mostly times that I also looked pretty. It was like the aesthetic aspects were the icing on the cake. But I’ve felt beautiful without the icing. Here is an example:

Here she is, Miss America!

Do I look pretty in this photo? No, I don’t and I’m not going to go over the reasons for that. But I felt beautiful. That photo was taken by me last September. I had been walking six days a week for nearly a year. It was pouring down rain that day. I didn’t want to go for a walk. But I did it and it was actually really fun. I felt beautiful because I had taken care of myself and not just survived my walk but thrived in it. This felt like a triumph of my body and mind that had been through so much through my cancer treatment and reconstruction. I felt strong and there are few things that feel more beautiful than feeling strong and capable in one’s own body after a cancer diagnosis.

But there have been times in my life when I felt beautiful and looked pretty. I have written about a number of those times in my blog, times that have been captured on film. A photo of my kissing my newborn girl on the cheek while she smiles blissfully. The photo I shared recently that my husband took during a lovely evening out. Those were times, incidentally, when I was totally in the moment with a person whom I love.

My aesthetic beauty will continue to fade. I would be lying if I said that this is 100% okay with me. But it’s still okay. I have a lot of beauty in my life. I have a lot of meaning in my life. I have a lot of love and I hope you do, too.

Tags aesthetics, beauty, love, women and beauty

Categories Family, Feelings, Flora and Fauna

Thinking tall

July 18, 2014 //

My husband is out of town this weekend. He left this morning. I came home from driving my daughter around town this evening. The kitties were hungry. I couldn’t find their food. It wasn’t where I had left it earlier today when I last fed them.

They were pestering me for food. I knew that we were not out of kitten food, having bought a large bag of it just last weekend. I spent about ten minutes looking all around my kitchen, in the cupboards, on the counter, and on the small tables that are there. Then I thought, “John must have moved it. John is a very tall person.”

I lifted my head up to the plane of my husband’s vision, where he sees and where he can easily reach in our kitchen. There it was, the kitten food. It was set on a high cupboard above the microwave. I got out a stool to stand on so I could reach it to take it down.

Perspective taking is an important part of marriage. It is not just putting oneself in the life situation of another. Perspective taking requires thinking and feeling like another, as if you were that other person, with that other person’s life view, attitudes, capabilities, likes, wishes, strengths, weaknesses, and feelings.

My husband is a very tall person. I am tall for a woman but much shorter than he. My experience of our kitchen, what I can see and what I can reach, is much different than his, just because of a basic difference between the two of us. It doesn’t matter that the kitchen is the same. We are NOT the same.

That’s just a simple example of a difference in physical stature and how that impacts our perception of the kitchen in our home, as well as what consequences that has on our kitten food storing behaviors.

Intimate relationships can be extremely complex. There are many differences between people in a relationship and mind reading is not yet possible. And honestly, I think that mind-reading abilities would make healthy relationships even less possible. I have some pretty dumb thoughts and feelings on a regular basis. I don’t want people knowing about them! Further, sometimes, my thoughts and feelings are not completely expressed, they are disorganized and incomplete. I don’t want to communicate them until I have time to process them.

John and I are currently working extra hard to communicate better with each other. We are also trying to understand one another better. This is a time of transition for us. My level of functioning has been in flux for over two years now due to my cancer, it’s treatment, and my physical and emotional recovery. My husband is dealing with his own issues, some of it related to my cancer. We both navigate the shifting tides that are our teen daughter’s unpredictable ups and downs.

The logistics of our lives in the past two weeks have been particularly challenging. We are getting better at working things out. Right now, I no longer feel like I’m jugging water, as I was a few days ago. We are talking and listening. I am working hard to focus on what I can do as a wife and my own responsibilities instead of focusing so much on how I think my husband should be behaving differently.

I am working on thinking tall.

Tags Breast Cancer, empathy, marital conflict, marital roles, Marriage, Parenting, perspective taking

Categories Breast cancer, Family, Marriage

The Shock of I’m New

July 16, 2014 //

As you may recall, I completed about 90% of the requirements for an art history degree in addition to my B.S. in Psychology. (Yes, I’ve heard all of the jokes about my “B.S.” in conjunction with “psychology”. Believe me, I had to take calculus, among many other hardcore classes to get that degree. It was no B.S.) One of my professors often referenced Robert Hughes’ book on modern art, The Shock of the New.

Modern art didn’t come from nowhere but it was still a shocking departure from the familiar. Art had been representative, rather than abstract for a long long time. It was often idealized but always recognized.

The shock of newness does not just apply to our external world but also to feeling new. A fellow healthcare provider and dear friend shared a blog post about being a novice in healthcare, in other words being a trainee and new professional. The post made me think about being a psychology trainee in grad school as well as when I was a post-doctoral fellow.

In most measures, I am much better at my job as a clinician than I was when I was less experienced. But there were advantages of being a novice that were therapeutically advantageous.

For one, I was supervised so this made me extra conscientious to do things “by the book”. Supervision, by the way, meant doing my work with a supervisor either in the room with me or in a separate room, observing me on video monitors, all of the while commenting to other students or interns, also in the room, about the rightness or wrongness of my actions. So, I stayed sharp and kept on top of what I was supposed to be doing.

The largest advantage, however, was that my lack of experience as a parent made it much easier to deliver recommendations and teach parenting strategies, with a straight face. During my post-doc, I was a mother of an infant, but I still did not know how hard it would be to rear a child who could walk and talk. And disobey. And not perpetually vote me to be her favorite person in the world in a tie with her father. I didn’t know how parenting touches us in tender places, at our identity, and at the hurts we’ve held with us our own lives. I just said, “Do this!” I had a wonderful optimism. And most parents did what I recommended.

Once I got to understand what I was asking parents to do, I had to make adjustments. Every parenting situation is different. But as a parent, I can empathize with the fact that parenting is never easy and for some, it is incredibly hard.

Even so, I still ask parents to do a lot. I now understand the magnitude of my recommendations, in my gut. But now, because I am no longer a new parent, I have learned that just because something is really hard to do, doesn’t mean that it is not necessary to do.

Tags child psychology, Parenting, psychology, training of psychologists, working with parents

Categories Parenting