Tag Archives: Beloved

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Demon Chainers

And you thought the hard work was over
Finding your demons
Facing them
Adopting them
Comforting them
Learning to love the parts that no one loved
That you hid as a child
Mothering your own unloved self
Fathering the parts he couldn’t love
And to surface knowing that you are a child of God
And lovable
Only to be attacked
With a concerted effort
To return you to what you were before

Don’t be frightened enough to give up
You are right
You are still a child of God
Lovable
In your wholeness
Talents and faults

Those who attack
Feel their demons
Clamoring at them
Clawing
When you learned to love your demons
Theirs want to be loved too
So badly
But their keepers are frightened
They are pressing their demons back into the depths
Desperate
Attack you for you have made them feel their sorrows
All unaware

Seek those who have also
Dealt with their demons
And they will welcome you
You are not crazy
To feel the euphoria
Of surfacing
But do not get carried away
And be kind to the demon chainers
Remember where you were before.

8/16/05

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Trust in the dark

Writing201’s prompt today is trust. This article in the NY Times about how there is no right way to grieve moves me: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/10/getting-grief-right/?_r=0

Trust in the dark

Oh Beloved
   Help me to trust in the dark
      Help me to take each step
         Down into grief
            As needed
Oh Beloved
   Help me walk in the caverns of despair
      Each step slow
         As if I walk through molasses
            The air is thickened
               My chest hurts
Oh Beloved
   Help me to trust you
      That just as I descend into grief
         That just as I move through despair
            That the steps will someday lead up again
               That I will rise and spring will come
Oh Beloved
   Help me to thank you
      For tears and joy
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Weekly Angel/Devil Fight: Love everyone

This is my weekly (biweekly, snarls my devil) blog about the arguments between the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other.

Do I really see an angel and a devil? Well, no. But we all use archetypes and we all have all of the archetypes within us. So when I have a dilemma or something comes up, I call the angel and the devil to the internal conference table of my mind and ask for their advice. They are going to give it to me whether I ask or not, so it’s more effective to be polite!

Ok, sometimes it isn’t a conference table. Sometimes it’s a hell scenario with bubbling lava or the fire forest from A Princess Bride… or it could be a field with daisies and a blue sky….

Today I am thinking about what we are supposed to do: Love everyone.

How good are we at that? Not very! Or are we?

My angel: You can love everyone. (The angel is kind and completely confident.)

My devil: Yeah, til they knife you in the back. Right. Go ahead, love them and they’ll treat you like dirt!

My angel: You can love them anyway.

My devil: Paula Pell said, “Be nice to all assholes because it disables them!”

My angel: Yes. You should be nice to those people too. (She doesn’t approve of swearing.)

Devil: sulking.

In my job, I get to love everyone. That is, as a doctor I want to be able to treat everyone and anyone who walks in my office. They can be talking about aliens or refuse to do what I suggest or they can say, “I hate doctors especially YOU.” and I am still supposed and do try to help them. Sometimes it doesn’t work very well. Sometimes we don’t connect or they are going to do the opposite of whatever I say or they return to using heroin. But I still get to try.

In my personal life, I would like to be the same. I am not there yet.

Devil: yeah, and don’t want to be….

Angel: keep trying….

But I can bring something from my job to my personal life. I don’t have to love what people DO and they can be MEAN and I don’t have to LIKE IT. But that is separate from the person themselves: I can still love the person even if they seem to be acting like an idiot and my devil wants to strangle them…..

Devil: oooo, strangle, I like it

Angel: separate the person from the action. Love them anyway.

Keep on trying…..

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Please allow me to introduce myself

I have joined blogging 101 and missed yesterday’s assignment: to introduce myself.

Hello. I curtsy, but have to look up the spelling, because I spell it curtsey initially. So: I am not a great speller.

Hello. I am a mom, divorced, with two children, one over 21 and in college and one in 11th grade.

I am a rural family doctor.

I had strep A in my lungs and muscles in June and am just now getting permission to return to work part time. I had more time to blog.

I have been writing on everything2 since 2007. My sister started there in 2001 and became an editor. She married a Brit that she met on line. He was a “god” on the site. She was diagnosed with breast cancer between when they were engaged and when they were married. She died in 2012. I only had one sibling.

I write poetry, fiction and non-fiction, the latter mostly about medicine.

I am a madashell doctor, and traveled across the US in 2009 with the Oregon madashell doctors, giving talks about single payer health care, medicare for all. The United States health system is a terrible mess, geared for profit not people. It is amazingly awful and unfair. My sister had all the care in the world because she worked for Cal-trans, so was part of the largest Union on the planet, the California state government union. But she could have worked elsewhere, lost her job, lost her health insurance and died much sooner.

I have a cat and a fish.

I am very interested in the sufis and the zen buddhist teachings and some of my poems reference the Beloved.

Thank you.

http://madashelldoctors.com/

http://everything2.com/

<a href=”http://Blogging U.” title=”Blogging 101: Introduce yourself”>

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Adverse Childhood Experiences

I went to a sparsely attended lecture about the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, or ACE Study, in 2005 and it blew my mind. I think that it has the most far reaching implications of any medical study that I’ve read. It makes me feel hopeful, helpless and angry at God.

The lecture was at the American Academy of Family Practice Scientific Assembly. That year, it was in Washington, DC. There are 94,000 plus Family Practice doctors and residents and students in the US, the conference hall had 10,000 seats and the exhibition hall was massive. At the most recent assembly, there were more than 2600 exhibitors.

I try to attend the lectures numbered one through ten, because they are the chosen as the information that will change our practices, studies that change what we understand about medicine.

The ACE Study talk was among the top ten. Yet when I walked in, the attendees numbered in the hundreds, looking tiny in three joined conference rooms that could seat 10,000. The speaker was nervous, her image projected onto a giant screen behind her. My experience has been that doctors don’t like to ask about child abuse and domestic violence: I thought, they don’t want to go to lectures about it either.

The initial part of the study was done at Kaiser Permanante, from 1995-1997, with physicals of 17,000 adults. The adults were given a confidential survey about childhood maltreatment and family dysfunction. A simpler questionnaire is at http://www.acestudy.org/files/ACE_Score_Calculator.pdf, but it is not the one used in the study. Over 9000 adults completed the survey and were given a score of 0-7, their ACE score. This was a score for childhood psychological, physical or sexual abuse, domestic violence, or living in a household with an adult who was a substance abuser, mentally ill or suicidal, or ever imprisoned.

Half of the adults reported a score over 2 and one fourth over 4. The scores were compared with the risk factors for “the leading causes of death in adult life”. They found a graded relationship between the scores and each of the adult risk factors studied. That is, an increase in addiction: tobacco, alcohol and drugs. An increase in the likelihood of depression and suicide attempt. And an increase in heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease, fractures and liver disease. The risk of alcoholism, drug addiction and depression was increased four to twelve times for a score of four or more.

The speaker said that the implications were that the brain was much more malleable in childhood than anyone realized. She said that much of the addictive behaviors and poor health behaviors of adults could be self-medication and self-care attempts as a result of the way the brain tried to learn to cope with this childhood damage.

I left the lecture stunned. How do I help heal an adult who is smoking if part of it is related to childhood events? From there I went to a lecture about ADHD, where the speaker said that MRIs and PET scans were showing that children with ADHD had brains that looked different from children without ADHD. I thought that speaker should have come to the other lecture. And I did not much like my ACE score, though it does explain some things.

I feel hopeful because we can’t address a problem until we recognize it.

I feel helpless because I still do not know what to do. The World Health Organization has used the ACE Study in their Preventing Child Maltreatment monograph from 2006. But it is not very cheerful either: “There is thus an increased awareness of the problem of child maltreatment and growing pressure on governments to take preventive action. At the same time, the paucity of evidence for the effectiveness of interventions raises concerns that scarce resources may be wasted through investment in well-intentioned but unsystematic prevention efforts whose effectiveness is unproven and which may never be proven.”

Do I do ACE scores on my patients? With the new Washington State opiate law, we do a survey called the Opiate Risk Tool. It includes parental addiction in scoring the person’s risk of opiate addiction. But not the rest of the ACE test. At this time, I don’t do ACE scores on my adult patients. I don’t like to do tests where I don’t know what to do with the results. “Wow, you have a high score, you will probably die early,” does not seem very helpful. But I remain hopeful that knowledge can lead to change. And it makes me more gentle with my smoking patients, my addicted patients, the depressed, the heart patient who will not exercise.

I am angry at God, because it seems as if the sins of the fathers ARE visited upon the children. It is the most vulnerable suffering children who are most damaged. That does not seem fair. It makes me cry. I would rather go to hell then to the heaven of a God who organized this. I stand with the Bodhisattva, who will not leave until every sufferer is healed.

1. ACE study   http://www.cdc.gov/ace/about.htm

2. American Academy of Family Practice   http://www.aafp.org/events/assembly.html

3. ACE questionaire   http://www.cdc.gov/ace/questionnaires.htm

4. Score correlation with health in adults   http://www.ajpmonline.org/article/PIIS0749379798000178/abstract

5. WHO preventing child mistreatment   http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2006/9241594365_eng.pdf

6. Washington State Opiate Law   http://www.agencymeddirectors.wa.gov/

7. Opiate Risk Tool   http://www.partnersagainstpain.com/printouts/Opioid_Risk_Tool.pdf

First published on everything2 November 2011.

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Weathering emotions

Just before Christmas, I was describing the present I had gotten for a friend’s son.

“Wait,” she said, “I’m not sure he’ll like that. I want him to be happy.”

……

Oh, I thought. I reassured her, “I think that he will like this a lot.”Β and he did.

But… I don’t want my children to be happy.

WHAT! HORRIBLE MOM!

No, wait. Let’s play with the idea.

Say that your goal is for your child to be happy. You want them to be happy, as much of the time as possible.

Your child will pick up on what you want. Your child wants to interact. Your child loves you. So your child will try to make you happy. Even when they aren’t happy. Then you are in a vicious circle, with you wanting your child to be happy and your child valiantly attempting to be happy or at least act happy whenever you are around until finally they hit the teen years (or possibly age 3) and scream at you, “Go away and leave me alone!” Then they will be sullen and guarded and only show up when they want food, transportation and money.

My goal is NOT for my children to be happy.

Are adults happy all the time? Well, don’t be silly. Of course not.

So why do we want children to be happy all the time?

I want my children to be able to handle the full spectrum of emotions. Happy, sad, grumpy, confused, brave, scared, apathetic, all of them. I want them to be able to name each one and tolerate it. Because my children will be adults and they have to be able to handle all of those emotions. I strongly suspect that they will encounter each and every one….

How do I model this? I tell them how I am feeling AND they don’t have to fix me. My sister died in 2012. I was very sad. I cried a LOT. Sometimes I would be sitting in the kitchen crying and my daughter would wander through the room and stop and hug me. She is not a natural hugger but she knows that I am and that I find it very comforting. She wouldn’t cry with me. She had her own emotions.

I came home from work once and said that I was furious and hurt. Ok, more than once. But once I described a meeting which turned out to have me on the agenda. The other five people knew that and I didn’t. I felt jumped and attacked. It hurt.

My son said, “Five against one?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then they didn’t have enough people, did they?” He grinned at me and I felt much better. Still mad and hurt, but he was so funny. We went out for pizza because I didn’t want to cook.

Our US Constitution includes the pursuit of happiness. We are free to pursue it all we want. But I don’t ever think we will catch it. We will and we should still have times when we are sad or afraid or feel confused or hurt. I would go to work and tell my nurse, “I am in a really bad mood because something in my family is a mess. My mood is not about anything at work.” She would nod and then through the day I would cheer up, because I had to think about work.

Emotions are like the weather. We don’t control them. My mother died fourteen years ago. I see an ornament on the tree that reminds me of her and I feel sad and miss her. Next morning I change from writing Christmas cards to writing Valentines and I am using a stamp set and stickers and it reminds me of her and I think it’s funny. I am happy then remembering her. Let the emotions come in like the weather: name them, acknowledge them, don’t try to control them, let other people know you are in a storm, accept help, and let them pass. And let your children have their full range of emotions as well.

The photo is me and my younger sister, in 1965.

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Voice lesson

The picture is my father in 2009. We went sailing on his friend Paul’s boat. My father loved to sail and loved to sing. He taught me to sing from when I was tiny….

I had five voice lessons in the spring. The teacher is a woman who comes into town to see her mother, from New York. When she comes, she teaches many of the best soloists in town, including people I’ve taken lessons from. One of our soprano soloists gave her my name.

She started by asking my singing history. I explained that my family had sung folk songs since I was tiny and that I’d been in a chorus for the last 14 years. That my father had been in the chorus and that he had recently died. We are working on the Faure Requiem and the Rutter Requiem. Our director asked me to work on the Pie Jesu in the latter and I was having trouble with the high notes. She asked about my father’s voice. I said that he was a very fine bass, who had died from cigarretes. In the last few years he couldn’t sustain, but his entrances kept the bass section on track.

She took me through the lesson. There were five things that she had me work on. It was hard to keep them all in my head at once, since they were all a change.

1. To breathe in so that the back of my throat felt cold, like the feeling you get in icy air. This opens it.

2. To think of the breath as circling along my jaw when I sustained a note or phrase. This made the notes feel alive and stay alive. Richer.

3. As I went into the passagio, to think of the sound going out the top of my head and then directly out through the back of my skull.

4. On the very high notes, to press down more with my lower ribs in my back. This increases support.

5. To open my mouth dropping my jaw, but keeping it narrow. This changes the quality of the vowels tremendously.

The lesson was so helpful that I scheduled a second one two days later and had the sense to tape it. I can practice it with my tape. She will come back within a year and I hope that I’ve improved in all five.

first published on everything2 April 2014

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Painting Angels II

Painting Angels II

After my mother died, I wrote a poem called Painting Angels. It was about my kids’ comments about her death, but also about her being an artist. I wondered whether she was painting the sky or sunsets or clouds. She loved watercolors.

I was driving to the Boiler Room yesterday and came to the hill going down to Water Street and the sunrise was glorious. The leading edge of the front caught fire and there were yellow and orange and pink streaks up into the clouds.

I think my mother and my sister helped paint that sky. I stopped and took photos with my phone until I got too cold and the sun was up.

Thank you, mom. It was a beautiful show in the sky. I lost my mother in 2000, my only sister in 2012 and my father in 2013. I feel that the show has been blessed, and that getting my mother’s artwork out of storage fourteen years after her death and showing it is the right thing to do.

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Say yes

In the improv tryout
for Lark in the Park
Joey said

Say β€œyes” to everything

He said

It is easier to say β€œno”
But then the improv ends

He made us try
Saying β€œno” to everthing

Each skit was a fight

He made us try
Saying β€œyes” to everything

Yes

We bloomed

And is that it?
All the Beloved wants?

He said that you learn
To say things
Without a question
With a hint
With an idea
With a suggestion
And the other actor responds

I’ve noticed
People don’t respond well
When I say
Don’t do that

I have to learn
To lead
Without leading
To suggest
To let them choose
To change their path
It doesn’t work
To drive them
Offer
Offer
Another idea

Say β€œyes” to everything

Is that what the Beloved wants?

I say β€œyes”
β€œyes”

published on everything2 August 2009