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Listen to the barking dog – on instinct

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Say your dog is barking at night. All you want to do is go to sleep, yet the dog keeps barking and keeps you awake. You want to go outside and yell at the dog “Hey! Shut up!”

But then you forget this is why you bought the dog to start off with.

The dog is letting you know that there is an intruder around. The dog is letting you know that there is something wrong happening and you need to attend to it.

Our feelings are the same way. They are the barking dog. But we silence them and we ignore them.

We tell them to shut up when we stop paying attention to them. Now of course we didn’t buy the internal dog – that is part of the standard package that comes with being human. We were given it for free when we were born. It is a gift to us from God. These thoughts and feelings are there to keep us safe.

Remember how they say you should always trust your gut? Your gut is where your dog lives. Always pay attention to it if you feel like something is wrong. Follow that feeling.

Now this doesn’t mean to let your fears rule you. It doesn’t mean to always hide and run away from problems.

Sometimes the problem isn’t the person or the situation in front of you. Sometimes the problem is what you think about the person or the situation in front of you. You may be having a reaction or a memory to some bad thing that happened to you in the past. You may not remember what the problem was to start off with. You are having a reaction or a reflex.

You should always heed your feelings because your feelings will let you know that there is a problem that needs to be dealt with.

This is called projection and it is important to deal with. It is important to understand and face. Now, instead of running away from the situation, sometimes what you need to do is lean into it.

Sometimes you may need to look at it sort of sideways and not necessarily face it head on. Sometimes facing it head on is very scary. But more importantly, don’t run away from it. If you’re running away from it then you’re telling the dog to shut up.

Ignoring the problem and running away from it are both dangerous they seem opposite but really they both involve not dealing with the intruder. You have to deal with the intruder because otherwise if you ignore it then it is simply going to come in and steal everything in your house. Your house represents your safety and your sanity. If you run away from it or tell it to shut up, then you’re not using this as a valuable lesson to strengthen up your defenses.

My inner skunk

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Today I’m getting in touch with my inner skunk.

They don’t attack. They just hold their ground. People tend to leave them alone and not cross them, because their bold coloring warns who they are.

I’m getting tired of people thinking I’m a pushover. I’m getting tired of feeling like I’m doing it all and everybody else is slacking.

Today I told the annoying page to pull her cart out of the walkway. I didn’t even care if she got mad. She gets mad all the time. She can say “Excuse me?” in a way that sounds like she is saying “Screw off!” She says “Excuse me?” when she wants you to repeat what you have said. She says it in just such a way that you never want to ask her anything ever again.

But today was it. I’d patiently waited for her to pull the cart out of the way on her own before, and thanked her for it, and explained how it is totally in my way when she puts her cart there. I did it that way because otherwise there would have been a confrontation. It went well for a while, but today it was halfway into the walkway again. There is at least ten feet of space she can work in, and she chooses the worst possible section that is totally in the way of traffic flow.

I am desperately trying to not say what I’m thinking too. This has been going on all day.

I don’t have any patience for people who only get movies. I’m jealous of all that time that they have. Then I wonder why they waste it the way they do. Then I wonder at the people who are there all day, who are my age. Don’t they have jobs? If not, why not? I’m jealous.

I’m angry that I’m angry. I’m in a bad mood about the fact that I’m in a bad mood.

I think about the teachers and counselors who have told me that I’m angry, when I didn’t feel like I was. The fact that they said that I’m angry when I don’t feel like I’m angry makes me angry.

Maybe “angry” is my normal, and I need to get used to it. I need to learn that this is who I am, or at least who I am right now. I spent so long letting people (especially my brother and boyfriends) walk all over me and push me around. I’m waking up from that stupor.

Skunks are seen as antisocial creatures, but they aren’t, really. They just don’t want to put up with anybody’s nonsense. They don’t start fights, but they don’t walk away from them either.

Not letting the disease win.

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Sometimes my motivation to do something is simply so that the disease will not win.

I have bipolar disorder, which is a polite way of saying I am manic-depressive. I’ve noticed that I tend to become unbalanced when I stop taking care of myself. The biggest thing I can do to take care of myself is to make sure I get enough sleep and avoid stress. Eating well and exercising also help a lot.

It is easy to equate avoiding stress with not doing anything that is difficult. But to me that is letting the disease win. It is very important for me to not let it win so I set goals and reach for them so that I get stronger. And every time I achieve one of these goals it makes it easier for me the next time.

It makes it easier for me to look at this disease when it says “No, you can’t do that” or “That is too hard for you.” and say “But look at these four other things I’ve done and I did them just fine.”

That is why I take classes. One of the hardest classes was the pastoral care class that was downtown on Tuesday nights. It was hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of taking a class every Tuesday for nearly three months. Then it was hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of having to drive myself downtown at night. It was hard for me to even imagine asking my boss for that time off to do it. But I did it, and I did it because I knew that what I was doing was important. I did it because I didn’t want the disease to win.

While I knew that what I was going to learn from the class was going to be important, what I was going to learn from just attending the class was going to be even more important. It was going to teach me that I can take care of myself.

I used to be really good at driving. I used to drive myself everywhere alone for hours at a time. I drove by myself to Washington, DC work one summer. That was a 10 hour drive, one way.

But then something changed when my bipolar disorder manifested. Shortly after I was diagnosed, I went on a camping trip and I got so unwell that I had to be driven home. Everything I owned had to be packed up for me by my friends, and I had to have someone else take me home.

It affected me, not only because it was embarrassing, but also because I don’t want to be a burden to other people. I don’t want to get to a point where I have to have someone else rescue me. So it is important for me to not put myself in situations where I think I’m going to fail.

But that sometimes meant that for years I didn’t put myself in any situations at all. It meant that sometimes I only did things that were safe. And when I only do things that are safe, I don’t grow or get stronger.

And that is letting the disease win.

And I can’t let it win.

Payoff

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What is the payoff?

If you are constantly stuck in a rut, doing things that you don’t want to do, there has to be a payoff. Discover what that is and address it, and you’ll fix the problem.

Say you want to get in shape, but you keep overeating and “cheating” on your exercise routine. You “forget” to walk or go to the gym. You eat three pieces of pie when really you only wanted half a piece. You eat too much at the buffet, even though you say you don’t want to, again and again.

You feel guilty after you do these things, but you keep doing them.

They are symptoms, not the source.

Dig down further.

Who first taught you what to feel about yourself? What did they say? How did they make you feel?

Perhaps your family ignored you most of the time. Perhaps the only time that they even talked to you was to complain about your size or how you “were eating them out of house and home.” You were called fat, lazy, worthless.

Negative attention is still attention.

So as an adult, you still need attention.

But you’ve been taught that the only way to get attention is to be fat, lazy, or worthless.

So you keep repeating that message to yourself.

So you’ll overeat, and skip the gym, and fail, over and over, because that is how you were taught you should be treated. Even though they aren’t telling you this message anymore, you are now telling it to yourself.

Time to learn a new message, and retrain your brain.

Time to create a different payoff – where you get happy that you have achieved a goal. Maybe the goal was only eating two plates at the buffet, instead of four. Maybe the goal was parking the car further away in the parking lot so you had to walk further to get to work.

Little goals count. They add up.

Just like coming off being addicted to a drug, relearning how to treat yourself with kindness takes a lot of work. You have to rewire your brain. New healthy habits don’t have the same kind of payoff that the old bad habits do – not yet. The old habits were wired into you for years – and the work was done by people you should have been able to trust – your family or friends.

It is hard to go against the feeling of loyalty to your family. It is hard to treat yourself differently than how they treated you, even if it is healthier.

But if they weren’t kind and loving to you, they were your family or friends in name only.

Your first and best obligation is to yourself. Your body and your mind are your first and truest homes.

It is time to remodel.

It is going to be messy.

It is worth it.

You are worth it.

True mental health hospital

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I envision a new kind of rehab hospital for people who are mentally ill. Perhaps better said, it will be for people who don’t know how to be human. It will teach people how to take care of themselves. It will teach them how to live on their own in a healthy way.

Rehab shouldn’t just be about getting off drugs but about how to get on life.

People would be there to learn, so they would be students, not patients. “Patient” is a passive word – something is done to you. You are sick, an “in-valid” – a “not-true” person. The word “student” implies an active engaging in learning for self-betterment. Teachers, not therapists, are there to help students help themselves.

One of the most important things will be that students will learn how to have a healthy relationship with food. They will learn what food is healthy and how to buy and prepare it. Every person will learn how to cook. Every person will learn what foods are best for them. There will be a blend of nutritionists and home-economics teachers.

The teachers will find ways that the students can exercise in a way that they will enjoy and are able to do. Exercise is essential to mental health and happy bodies. Not every exercise is possible for every person, and not every person likes every exercise. The trick is to find one or two that the student likes and will stick with. Then they have to commit to doing it daily. Every little bit counts.

This whole idea that I’m envisioning is to teach people how to live in their own bodies as their own homes. Your body is your first and best house. If you don’t take care of it you will be miserable. I have learned from my own personal experience that mental health is directly related to physical health.

It is also important that they discuss what happens when you fall off the wagon. Perhaps the stigma needs to be taken away from falling off the wagon, because falling off the wagon is part of the journey.

For some people it wouldn’t be “re-hab” because there was no “hab” that happened to start off with. They never learned how to take care of themselves in the first place. It isn’t that they forgot, it is that that they never were taught.

Ideally, everyone would learn how to take care of themselves early on in life. Ideally, people wouldn’t have to wait for a crisis in order to learn that they have to take care of themselves.

Perhaps that is just simply part of our society. We seem to fix things after they are broken rather than prevent them from breaking in the first place. This is a habit that should be unlearned. People need to become pro-active about their lives.

Rehab needs to teach people healthy coping mechanisms for life. Students would learn about codependency and enabling and boundaries. They would learn how to be helpful in a way that is safe for them and for the person they are helping.

They would learn the value of volunteering. It is a way to put your own needs and problems into perspective, and to feel not only a part of the community, but a part of the solution to problems.

They would learn how to take care of their bodies and their minds at the same time and learn that they are not separate things. Through books, they would be introduced to teachers from all over the world and all across time. They all have useful information about this thing we call life. Most importantly, they would be given the tools to be able to learn more on their own.

My biggest dream is that rehab hospitals aren’t ever needed, because everyone has already been taught how to handle life’s ups and downs in healthy ways. But until then, we have some catching up to do.

The best medicine you can ever take is to not get sick in the first place. And the best way to do that is to learn how to take care of yourself through eating well, exercise, and learning to establish boundaries.

Twist and Shout

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There is something very valid about getting out anxiety by shaking and making noise. Keeping it in leads to big problems. Emotions are like water – too much pressure and the dam breaks.

In the case of humans, the dam is wherever the weakest point is. Emotions and feelings that aren’t dealt with lead to neurosis and addiction.

Shachar Bar, an art therapist who teaches in Sderot, came up with a song and a dance to help children deal with their feelings during a missile strike in Israel.

From the article that accompanies the video explaining the song, she says –

“I am giving validation and legitimization to my fear and my body’s reactions,” Bar explains. “It is OK that my heart is pounding, I am even singing about it. It is OK that my body is trembling – I am afraid. Along with the words ‘boom-boom’ and ‘doom-doom,’ the movements of arms crossed and pounding on our chest borrowing from the EMDR method of treating trauma and anxieties. The movements help to break out of it and dissolve the anxiety, improving the mood.”

Our body we shake, shake shake
Our legs we loosen, loosen, loosen
Breathe deep, blow far
Breathe deep, now we can laugh

“We breathe deep and release – a yoga method, even a yoga laughter method when we release the laughter,” Bar says. “Laughter releases endorphins into our brain and into our entire system.”

Most of all – acknowledge the feelings. It is OK to be afraid or sad or angry. It is what you do with those feelings that matters. You can shake it off, like a dog. You can roar like a lion. But you have to deal with your emotions, or your emotions will deal with you.

Vicious circle – on codependency

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I know a few people who are having a hard time accepting what is happening to them right now. I’m really worried, and I want to help them. If only they could accept the reality of the situation they are in, things will start to get better. If only they could stop hoping and wishing that things were different, they’d start to heal.

Sometimes we are the ones who have to make a change. Sometimes we are in bad situations that are presented to us because we are the ones who are supposed to fix them.

But sometimes things just can’t be changed. Sometimes things are just as they are, and there is no getting around them.

Sometimes the only way is to go through the grief and the pain, and to see it for what it is.

But then I realized I’m doing the very same thing. I’m not accepting the reality of the situation. I’m not accepting that their pain and inability to face it is in fact the reality.

It is all a great big circle of codependency.

Food abuse

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I see obesity as a symptom of food abuse. It is the same as alcoholism and drug abuse. It is a sign of an abuse or mis-use of food.

I used to be obese. I’ve had to work hard on relearning what (and how much) is healthy to eat and how to incorporate more movement and exercise into my life. But I’ve also had to work hard on addressing the root cause of why I wasn’t taking care of my body and my soul.

The problem is, we have to eat. We can’t just stop eating food. We can’t drop it like we can alcohol or cigarettes or any other addictive substance.

So we all need to develop a healthy relationship with food – and to address the issues that are causing us to use food to (not) solve our problems. Food can heal us, but it can also harm us if we use it improperly. It can be too much of a good thing, but it can also be the wrong thing.

Food wasn’t the only substance I had a wrong relationship with. Back when I smoked pot, I would smoke it to feel better. I’d have a bad day at work, or my family was hassling me, or there was some other stress to deal with. I’d smoke pot to numb the pain. It would ease the pain long enough that I’d forget about it, until I’d sober up again and the problems would come back. The thing is, the problems never went away in the first place. I just anesthetized myself to them. Instead of dealing with them, I ran away from them in my head. When I got sober, I’d still have those problems, and I’d still reach for pot to “fix” them.

It was a terrible cycle of stupid.

Plenty of people do the same thing with food. Because food isn’t seen as a drug, and because it is not only socially acceptable but normal to eat, food abuse is an easy addiction to pick up. And it isn’t like our society in general has a healthy relationship with food. Everything is super sized and fried. It is too much of a bad thing.

Is this fat shaming? No. Not any more than pointing out that someone who drinks to solve their problems is an alcoholic. This isn’t “blaming the victim” either. It is pointing out that when we use food to solve our problems, we are creating our own problems.

Victims are people who have things done to them. They are passive agents in the story. A person who gets hit by a car, or lightning, or something falling out of the sky is a victim.

If you hurt yourself, you aren’t a victim. You have done it to yourself. Thinking about why you do it is the wrong direction of thought. Blaming your parents or society or your friends for your action is self-defeating. You choose your life and your actions. You have control of what you do. You can also make a choice to change.

We need to start naming our demons so we can slay them. If we pretend like everything is fine then we will continue to kill ourselves bit by bit and bite by bite.

Food won’t fix our problems. Facing them will. No, it isn’t easy.

We have gotten into the habit of shoving our feelings and anxieties down, ramming them into our mouths with food. We have to learn how to let them out rather than shove them down. We have to learn that it is OK to speak up and be heard.

Jealousy leprosy

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Jealousy is a terrible emotion. It makes you think that you are not in control of your life. It makes you think that other people have stolen something from you that is yours. Rather, something that you think should be yours. But the bad part is the reason you are stuck in the place you are is because of your jealousy. When you start to blame other people for your problems, that is your problem.

Eleanor Roosevelt said “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Likewise, all of your emotions are up to you. Someone else cannot make you feel angry or sad or upset or even happy. You choose to feel these feelings when they say or do whatever they say or do. You are entirely responsible for how you feel, not other people. For you to make your happiness or sadness dependent on someone else is to give away all of your power.

Thug and duke life

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I see trends where I work, and patterns. They aren’t always good ones. I see so many women reading books that actually make their lives worse. The library is full of good books that can help them make their lives better.

But, it is kind of like a buffet. There are a lot of choices. Not everybody makes the healthy ones. Sadly, the unhealthy choices just perpetuate the holes that they are in.

I see so many black women reading “Urban erotic fiction” and they are all single mothers. They haven’t caught the connection.

Oprah says “What you focus on expands.” If you put garbage into yourself, that is all you’ll get.

If you read “romance” novels where the guy treats you like a piece of meat and leaves you, you’ll imprint that pattern on yourself as “normal”. It isn’t normal, and it isn’t healthy. So when you finally get your “baller” or your “thug” – just new words for “bad boy” – and you get hurt by him, why are you surprised?

He beats you and insults you. You have sex with him to appease him or to get him to stay with you. Then you get pregnant and he leaves you. And all of that matched the pattern in the books you’ve been reading. This is what you have come to expect, and this is what you have been seeking.

Then you are left trying to raise a child by yourself, stuck in poverty. You both are at the bottom of the pile.

But then again, it isn’t just black women. I’ve noticed that the most common thing that obese, single white women read is “romance” novels. They get an idea of the “perfect” man who is going to sweep them off their feet and take them away to a better life.

Real men never match up to the men in the books that these women read. They are never ruggedly handsome, or dukes, or princes. They are average, and have faults, and are human.

So when these women do get involved in a relationship with a real man they get let down. He isn’t awesome or wonderful. He farts. He curses a bit. He has a temper. His parents are jerks. So they leave, because he isn’t up to their ideal picture they have stuffed inside their heads.

And their lives continue to be miserable.

It is just like with food. If a person eats artificial food, jacked up on extra sugar and fake flavors, they won’t know what real food looks like. They will think that real food tastes terrible when they come across it. They will get sick from all the chemicals they have been eating, but they will continue to eat them because they have ruined their taste buds for what is normal and healthy.

It is time to stop checking out romance novels.
It is time to start checking out reality.