mind the gap

A colleague is counseling the husband of my friend.  He has not met with my friend but apparently feels qualified to diagnose her as “borderline”.  My colleague (a psychologist) thinks my friend has abandonment issues and has in fact suggested that her husband end the marriage for his own mental health.

This infuriates me.  As a couple/family therapist I am trained to look behind the client’s narrative at the hidden perspectives it may eclipse.  Even with that training, I can only hypothesize, speculate and surmise about someone’s perspective if they’re not in the room.  There will be gaps.  If my advice is based on a bias, as in the case of my colleague, it will be misguided, if not harmful, to my clients and their significant others. 

Without the input of persons’ attached to our clients, therapists cannot see the big picture.  We are not qualified to give third part diagnoses or relationship advice based on assumptions which fill in the gaps. 

We should get out of the way.

getting sober

I had the good fortune of speaking to the wife of my dear friend today.

She told me about what it was like for her as her husband struggled with getting sober.  She was really happy he was committed to the process, she said.  She was very proud of him.  But she felt unhappy.  “I’m always waiting. I’m always second. Before it was to his addiction and now it is to his recovery. I’m as imprisoned by his addiction as he is.” 

My friend's wife was beginning to understand the meaning of co-dependency; when you enable someone just by waiting for them to change. She came to the conclusion that she couldn’t do it anymore, “I will lose myself”, she said, “I have lost myself. I cannot wait any longer.”  She wasn't going to leave him, just stop waiting for him to get on with her life.

Often codependents are reenacting something learned in childhood, maybe a struggle for independence which leads to a lifetime of waiting for others to set us free.  The funny thing is: when you stop waiting for others to change, they start taking more responsibility for changing themselves. You leave the prison together.

take heart

A dear friend is struggling with an addiction.  He has remarkable self-awareness but still slips and falls sometimes.  Like we all do...

Today he was angry at himself.  He said he didn't know why he kept failing. He knew what his goal was, he explained, but felt like a "loser" for not being able to reach it.  "I want to win", he said, tearing up, "I have been working on this for years and I should know better".

Rarely have I seen such ruthless honesty, and I found him brave.  He didn't choose his life, his challenges or his addiction- but he was facing them all and choosing freedom.  I had only admiration for his quest.  Yet he was so hard on himself.  Talk about setting yourself up for failure.

Then I realized that part of the "loser" mentality was framing sobriety in terms of a battle you win or lose.  I saw something else and told him: courage.

The root of the word "courage" is heart, the ability to face obstacles especially when you feel pain or fear.  It is not winning.

It's keeping on keeping on.

calling all men

The other day on Facebook, someone posted a sexist comment on a friend's timeline, something to the effect that he was sending him a dozen naked pitounes for his birthday.  Beyond the comment being insulting to the man, I thought it especially humiliating for his wife.

The comment was met with a few likes and guffaws by men but the large majority of the man's friends remained silent.  Only his wife attempted a humourous reply to the effect that pitounes would be promptly disposed of.

I was outraged and wanted to get up on my soapbox. But I knew it would do no good, just as the wife's comment did no good. I felt helpless and simply "liked" the wife's comment.  Weak.

I spoke to a male friend and asked why other men didn't speak up.  He said it was the woman's battle to fight, that she needed to defend herself; that it would take something away from her dignity if men intervened on her behalf.

Hm.  I imagined the woman flailing her skinny arms about in protest while a dozen churlish men laughed in her face.  It didn't look very dignified to me, let alone a battle she was winning.

We think it is the victim's battle to fight oppression.  It is not.  It is the bystanders'. The victim's cries can be strong and rational and brave but, unless others stand with her and outnumber the bully, the oppressors win.

You need power to fight power!

When it comes to sexism, men have the power.  Period.

Men, without you as allies, feminism will remain a muzzled and muted truth.  Would you please flex your muscles and mouths and stand up for us!

stunned

That is the word a friend used to aptly describe her response to losing her elderly mother: stunned, like by a bee that at first pricks and burns you, the sting of death soon numbs and even renders unconscious.

From the old French estoner, astonished... stoned!... it's hard to think or even breathe. Stunned.  An anaphylactic reaction to unprotected death.

They talk about the stages of grief, healing and "acceptance"; yet there is no recovery of how things used to be.  It is more like a gradual coming to (if you come to at all, because some never do); waking up to life with missing parts. You're "in shock", they say, as though you are missing something.  But, really, it is a new normal.

We think of grief as a chapter in life, as though loss were a moment on the continuum of something greater, but birth and death both dissolve in a mystery somewhere in the heart of that numbing, dumbing, stunning fact "your mother is dead".  That is the unavoidable truth.

communication; two sides of the mirror

There are two parts of good communication: sending and receiving.

Most people think receiving, otherwise known as listening, is the hard part and, in a way, it is; because in order to really listen, you have to put yourself aside.

Mirror listening is one way to do this.  By pausing to reflect back the messages we receive ("You said X, Y and Z"), we remain present to the person who is sharing an experience without being swallowed by our own.  We show the speaker we "got" him or her instead of contaminating his message with our own reactions in the form of interruptions, questions or comments, or any other verbal and non-verbal reactions to what is being shared.

By eliminating reactivity, mirroring connects people in conflict, and tension just melts away.  It is very soothing to be heard in this way.
 

But listening is just one half of good communication. The other half consists of course in successfully sharing or sending a message.

Any thought or feeling can be shared but, if we want to maintain connection to another human being, we must take great care in how we share, using a form that neither hurts nor offends the person we are talking to.  (It is in fact the form, not the content, of the message which is most important).

This can be done using I-statements which indicate that we know that everything we share (every thought, impression, feeling or reaction) belongs to me and me alone, and is a mere reflection of my own subjective experience, and not a fact I am imposing on you or something you have to agree with.  (Questions and you-statements, i.e. "why are you asking me now?" or "you are talking too much" instantly deflect attention away from me and can create conflict and disharmony, especially when experienced as attacks or criticism, which they usually are).

To show you humbly acquiesce to the reality and separateness of another human experience, it is necessary to both put yourself aside to mirror someone else and use I-statements to describe what is going on in yourself.

There are two sides to good communication: sending and receiving.  But the hardest part is humility.

Look after me and I will look after the rest

Recently, an exhausted caregiver came into my office wanting desperately to understand what well-meaning friends and family meant when they urged her to look after herself.  She said that she was confused because, if she looked after herself she was not looking after her loved one, abandoning her role as caregiver and, in her own mind at least, not caring for him.  She simply could not do that. 

Similarly, she found herself unable to delegate.  She said, “If I ask for help, and someone steps in for me, I will not be there for him.  I have to be there for him”.  She teared up, at a total loss.

Caregivers cannot just set aside their dependents without ceasing to be who they are.  They are attendants to someone else’s needs, other-centered, not self-centered.  For a caregiver to care for himself is… an oxymoron.  He cannot focus on himself.  It may not be for a lifetime, but it may well be for the duration of someone else’s life. 

Our conversation reminded of what my old mentor, Robert Misrahi, said about responsibility; that it comes from the word respond, to answer.  When one answers with one’s heart, it is a complete, whole person kind of experience.  It is an embodied gift, not the dry, robotic and rather empty offering which comes from a sense of duty or impersonal obligation.

If you are a caregiver and a friend asks you to look after yourself, explain that you cannot do that right now but maybe your friend can look after you a little so you can continue to be there for someone else.