Quitters NEVER Win

I had some pretty frustrating anxiety yesterday. I know I posted a bit on Facebook so some of my might already be familiar. Here’s the situation:

I had been feeling that knot in my stomach since the minute I woke up. It is that sense that tells you that something is wrong, very wrong. Even when you can’t figure out for the life of you what it is, you know there is something you forgot to do, or did wrong, whatever.

So I ran through my new drill of coping skills. I had a headache as well, so I put an ice pack on my head. I worked out. I showered, I meditated. I talked to a friend. And then went through my phone book and called just about everyone, just to try and see if someone was available to help me get the hell out of my house.

I ate, I drank tea and extra water. Then (because I forgot it was Saturday for a bit) I started calling medical providers so I could start to work on establishing my next level of care and make sure my current docs know exactly what is going on for me.

Anyway, I pretty much went through my repertoire.

And yes, if you’re wondering, I do have meds for anxiety. I have a prescription for up to 2mg of Klonopin 3 times a day. But I clearly don’t need anywhere near that much – the only reason I’d need that high of a dose would be if I was having serious muscle spasms approaching seizure level or if I was hyperventilating so bad that my O2 saturation was dropping into the 80% range.

And none of those “crises” are likely to happen at this point.

I worked out a new system with my Aunt and Uncle because they have gotten sick of distributing meds to me and I’ve gotten sick of having to ask for them every time I need them. And I think I’m reaching the point where I can self-manage at least a bit.

So my aunt has just been putting three of my pills in a little container on the counter in the morning. That’s half my prescribed dose, but it is usually all I need. Personally if I think I need more than that then there is probably something else going on that I need to address.

Anyway, back to yesterday. I went through all the coping mechanisms I could think of before finally taking one of my pills. And I am convinced now more than ever that medication has its best effect when you do other things to your system simultaneously. So all the other relaxing things I did, all the mental/emotional work I did, reaching out to friends and family – the medication worked better AFTER I did all those things. I used to think that medication was a replacement for all that.

Like if I took a pill then I wouldn’t have to worry about any other coping skills. After all, why meditate when you can just ingest a substance that relaxes your body and calms your mind?

Why indeed?

My answer? Because they have a complimentary effect on one another. And in truth, medication doesn’t work very well at all unless you are really supporting the health of your entire being.

Over the past few days I’ve been developing a theory. My theory is that when medication is used (even in absolutely necessary situations) and a patient is not given the support and taught techniques to promote their spiritual, mental, and emotional well being in addition to their physical selves, that is when addictions or dependence is prone to develop.

Because giving someone a pill and telling them, “here, this will fix it” is as good as saying, “you don’t have to do anything to be healthy but take this pill”. When in fact all doctors worth their MD’s will tell you that meds don’t work well without what is called adjutant therapy. Pain won’t go away after an injury just by taking pain killers. You need physical therapy. My lungs won’t clear themselves out just because I inhale my nebulized medications; I have to do my chest physiotherapy.

More importantly, none of this stuff works without some sort of connection to the rest of the world. Spiritual, social, whatever it is for you, I don’t care. All I know is that when I didn’t have people around me and I didn’t believe there was anything out there bigger than myself, I felt isolated, alone, and helpless.

Now that I know that there is an energy that runs through me that touches the whole universe and that I can tap into that energy, I feel so much more alive, so much more able to move through pain and adversity.

I’m not cured. I’m still recovering. Who knows how long it will take? But I have to commitment now. All I need is the time.

Quitters Never Win – Truth

Peace to you,

-Nathan

Killing Shame

This evening around 5pm I had a conversation with my aunt and uncle about how things are going, and what needs to change. We all had some similar feelings, especially after the incident yesterday. We talked for the best part of two hours, although it actually went by quickly for me, and had a lot of great insights.

Most of it is too new for me to be able to write about. I haven’t had a chance to process it all yet. But there is once piece that I feel capable of writing about –

Over the past couple weeks, I have spent more and more time by myself, and I was sort of withdrawing into myself. My uncle likened it to a cocoon. I think that was a very accurate comparison. Because at first, the isolation and sameness of my routine was comforting, protective; it made me feel safe. But in the past couple of weeks, it started to feel confining and restrictive. In that semi-isolation, it became easier and easier for me to lose touch with reality. Now, I’m not saying I was losing my mind or anything. I’m just saying that my awareness level of my internal dialogue and its relevance to the world around me started to become less accurate.

The analogy I used in the conversation with Richard and Kate was that it was like I was a boat, coming into the harbor at night. I was used to being able to read my course by the lighted buoys. But after a while, with no contact with the outside world, the buoys all began to look alike, at it became harder and harder for me to see where I was going.

That detachment from the world around me made it easy for me to start feeling one of the most toxic of human emotions: shame. It started out as guilt, which has a purpose.

Guilt is the knowledge or awareness that something you have done is wrong. It might be something as little as forgetting to take out the trash. Or it might be something as big as cheating on your spouse. Either way, you have a nagging feeling that pushes you to make things right. Usually, once you do set things to right, the feeling of guilt goes away.

But sometimes, there is a problem. If that guilt persists long enough, it can turn into shame.

Now you might think guilt and shame are the same. And in fact, the difference between them is quite subtle. Here is the way I was taught to distinguish them by one of my counselors:

“Guilt tells you that something you have done is wrong.

Shame tells you that something about who you are is wrong.”

Guilt may not be a pleasant feeling, but it does have its place. It is a bit like pain in that way. Many of us probably wish that our bodies couldn’t feel pain. But we have learned by studying those with a condition called “CIPA” – Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis – who can’t feel pain at all, that pain is actually a good thing. Pain develops when an area of our body is injured or ill. It helps us diagnose the problem, helps us know how to care for our bodies. Just like guilt helps us know when there is a problem with something we have done (or left undone).

But pain, if left untreated for too long, or in certain circumstances, can become chronic. And when that happens, even though the injury or illness was treated long ago, the nerves in the body continue to send pain signals to the brain, for no reason at all except that that is what they have been doing for so long they don’t know anything else to do. That is what happens with guilt if it becomes a pattern. Eventually it is subverted and turns into shame. Then it no longer has a purpose. It makes you feel miserable, even if you no longer have anything to feel miserable about.

Shame is toxic. It can lead us down the road to despair. It sabotages every good feeling in our life. It makes us feel like our accomplishments are worthless, while our failures are monumental. Shame occupies the space inside us that ought to be reserved for love and compassion. When I was full of shame, it was impossible for me to accept the love of others. In fact, I couldn’t ever believe that anyone truly loved me. Because that toxic shame made it impossible for me to love myself. I had no compassion for me. I was constantly telling myself what a stupid, incompetent, loathsome person I was. And if anyone tried to contradict me, I just brushed it off, saying “they don’t really know how awful I am, so what they say doesn’t mean anything”.

Over the past couple of weeks, I think that I began to over-identify with my guilt to the point that it began to form a complex of shame. And that led directly to the incident yesterday, when I actually felt guilt for something I hadn’t done, and in fact, for something I had not even consciously thought of doing. Yes, as I acknowledged in yesterday’s post, I am unsure what my true, underlying intentions were when I picked up those keys. But I did not really have anything for which to feel guilty when my aunt walked into the room, and yet the guilty impulse was so great that I thrust the keys into my pocket and tried to pretend like it hadn’t happened. That action is the mark of someone who thinks they have something to hide. And yet, I had nothing to hide except for my own shame.

Over the past two weeks I had begun feeling dissatisfied with my routine. Dissatisfied how I was going about things. Most of all, I had become dissatisfied with myself. I began to feel guilty that I wasn’t as gung-ho as I had been two months ago. Then I started to feel like there was something wrong with me because it seemed like I was losing momentum. That gave me the impulse to want to hide, to isolate myself even more. When you have shame inside of you, sharing yourself with other people seems completely impossible. You think, “how can I share myself with anyone, they would just see how awful I am and then they would not want to be around me”. And of course, that is a self-perpetuating cycle, because the more you stay away from others, the more your shame can grow. Shame cannot live in the light. It is a secret, and if it stays in the darkness it becomes a monster that can devour your very soul.

But when you shed the light of truth on shame it withers and dies. Perhaps not all at once, especially if it is rooted deep. But over time, when exposed, shame will diminish until it finally is gone for good. That, is how you truly kill shame.

I am so grateful for what happened yesterday. It helped us to have the conversation that I needed to have, to draw out what was happening, and to help us figure out how to move forward. We decided to make a few adjustments to help me combat those feelings of guilt, shame, and isolation. I decided that putting more focus on my self-awareness will benefit me greatly. But the most important thing of all will be starting to share myself again. To open myself back up to my family, my friends, and to all of you.

That isn’t to say I haven’t been honest with you on my blog. I have. But over the past couple weeks I have not been using my awareness to its full potential, and therefore I have often just written about what happened to be on my mind at the time rather than thinking through what I really needed to write about.

Thank you all for bearing with me.

I look forward to really opening up more in the days ahead. I’ll warn you, the things that go on beneath the surface inside my mind are not always pleasant. But hopefully we can all learn things from these experiences I am having as I try to sustain these positive changes I am making, and as I progress ever further toward my goal of optimum wellness.

Goodnight, and peace to you,

-Nathan

Related articles

• Guilt Gets You Nowhere (sharpenher.wordpress.com)
• On Shame and Guilt (perspectiveandwords.wordpress.com)
• Blame, Shame and Guilt…a Big Fat Waste of Time and Energy (karentarnopolschultz.wordpress.com)
• On Guilt and Shame (jadescastle.wordpress.com)
• Words: What drives you? Guilt, Fear & Shame (ryanadnin.wordpress.com)

Connection and Compassion

Cover of The Keys of the Kingdom

I wish I had some really cool insight or story to tell you about today. But it really just seemed like a pretty normal, uncomplicated day. I got up this morning and went through my normal routine. The rest of the day was pretty much uneventful.

The only thing I can think of to talk about is how to deal with life when it seems the same, day after day. Fortunately for me, each day (although similar) doesn’t feel exactly the same as the one before, or else I would probably be getting pretty bored. But I keep finding things to do, things to think about, ways to exercise my body, mind, and spirit.

One thing that I have been doing a lot of is reading. Now, those of you who know me can attest that this isn’t new. I’ve always liked to read since I was a little boy. As a child I asked an adult (I can’t remember who) if there was a job where I could be paid to read and talk about books. I said that if there was, that was what I wanted to do. The adult came back with a placating response, something along the lines of, “well honey, there are lots of jobs where you get to read, just make sure you go to college”.

So I did. And I studied English. But I found out during my time at the university that I also liked to write. And I soon switched my major from standard English to Creative Writing (a subset of the English major which basically just includes more…you guessed it: creative writing).

Anyway, that’s a tangent. I’m trying to keep these posts more concise.

What I wanted to talk about is how I used the idea of reading and writing to make today a different day. I’ve been toying with making some additions to this blog. One of them, which you can already see, is the Book Club page. Right now, there isn’t anything on it except a couple of book titles. But soon, you will be able to use it to find the book of the week, and, in addition that you will find links and embedded videos with me reviewing each book. Of course, I have to read them first. So to start there will only be a single video on there.

Today, I started making the first video, which is my review of a book my uncle Richard recommended to me called Keys of the Kingdom. Written by AJ Cronin in the 1940’s, it documents the life of a Scottish Catholic Priest, Father Chisolm, who ends up in a remote mission in China. It has all kinds of drama from death and suicide and illegitimate birth to conversion, redemption, loss and restoration of faith, plague, war, intrigue and church politics. Cross-cultural relations also play a significant role.

But the reason I decided to make this book my first “review” for the Wellness Quest is that the main character has an enormous compassion for the men and women around him. So much so that he often ends up getting the short end of the stick. He is kind, gentle, and humble to a fault. But he doesn’t appear as a caricature of a priest. No, instead his character is deep, real, and true to life. He has doubts, but he overcomes them. He questions dogma, and preaches love. In short, if Jesus Christ were walking the earth today, I believe he would want to hang out with men like Father Francis Chisolm.

So I chose this book because its themes resonated with me and with the journey I am on. I was raised in a protestant Christian home. But after about age 16 I lost touch with the church I was brought up in for many reasons. Probably the biggest was that it was inconvenient. Christianity has so many rules, and I, as a teenager, had a natural aversion to rules. There were also some glaring inconsistencies and hypocrisies that were evident in the church I went to. I felt alienated and I just wanted out. So once for a while I lived a double life, pretending to still be a Christian on Sundays and in my parent’s home. But as soon as I was out with my friends or on my own, I became someone different. At that time, I didn’t know how to tell my parents that I didn’t believe in god. Because at that point in my life, I really didn’t. Or, I suppose, I didn’t care if there was a god or not, because, I thought, if there was one, he was doing a pretty bad job at taking care of things on earth.

The point is, for the last 5-6 years as I have been walking through my nightmare of illness, addiction, depression and demoralization, I have found that my spiritual beliefs have altered significantly. I may not believe in a traditional “man up in the sky with a great big beard”, the sort of celestial santa claus trope. Instead, at this moment, I believe in a universal energy source from which flows the foundation of all life on our planet and throughout the cosmos. I believe that that source is connected to us all, and that we can communicate with each other and with that source, should we choose to. And most of all, I believe that most religions are a means to that end – namely, that religions have attempted to create a path that will lead its followers into communion with the source. It doesn’t matter that the many world religions call this source a hundred different names. What matters is that they are trying to help people find that connection. I see them all as brothers and sisters, trying to achieve the same thing through different methods.

When I look at religion in that light, it is hard for me to be critical of any of them. In my belief, they are all on the same track, and it is only when individual religions become too extreme and believe that their individual path is the only correct one, and use that belief to justify the extermination of people who have different paths that religions create problems. But that is the difference between a believer and a zealot. While faith is good, blind, dogmatic faith can become dangerous.

That brings me back to Father Chisolm in Keys of the Kingdom. His faith was pure, because he constantly questioned himself and he consistently showed the same compassion for protestants and even followers of Confucius as he did for his fellow Catholics.

What I think best describes him though, was his actions as his friend, an atheist doctor, lays dying of the plague in a makeshift hospital deep in the interior of China. He stays by his friend’s side and at the end, when a nun who works with him at the mission asks him why he didn’t perform the last rights so that his friend might possibly still be saved instead of going straight to hell, he responds that if God didn’t take into account the life that this man lived, where he was constantly helping others just because he didn’t say a few words and sit under a church roof on Sundays.. well, if that was the case, he didn’t think that kind of God had much going for him.

At first the nun was horrified at his heresy, but as they worked together more and more, she realized that his sincerity and compassion made him love everyone despite their beliefs.

And that, my friends, family, and those who I don’t yet know…that is who I want to be.

Goodnight,

-Nathan

Honesty

The last few nights I have written posts that I honestly consider to be almost prohibitively long. In other words, they are so long that some of you might have taken one look at them and said….wow, I don’t have time for that. I’ll read it later. Or maybe some of you looked at it and said, “wow, what does this guy have to say that takes him over a thousand words?”. I’ve been told before that traditional blog posts ought to be 1000 words or less, and that 500 words is preferable.

Too bad I don’t have that kind of self-control. I was the kid in college that when I required page length for a paper was listed I asked the teacher if it was okay if I exceeded it. (ok, well….I only did that in some classes i.e. the ones that I liked) (for a description of how to use “i.e.” click here)

Anyway, I am going to make a sincere attempt to make this post a more manageable length.

So I have two things to talk about tonight. First, as I was about to go to bed last night (which, in reality was actually this morning because it was past midnight) my phone started to ring. Now, last night was only the second night during which I have had my phone with me. Before that I was giving it to my aunt and uncle to place in a locked drawer at night. But in our conversation a couple days ago we all agreed that I deserved/was now able to handle keeping my phone on me.

So, right. Moving on. My phone rang. I looked at it and it was some strange Massachusetts number. I was considering not answering. But I had this sense that I needed to pick it up, so I did. And it turned out to be my friend Abbas. We met my first year at college in Denver, but we didn’t really become friends until my sophomore year. And we had a lot of things in common. We were both high energy and easily distracted (read: ADHD). We both liked similar music. We liked to read, liked to learn, and, at the time, liked to drink. There was one point where I actually set up a fully stocked bar in my dorm room and one night when we had people over, Abbas helped me mix drinks. I remember getting in our friend Adam’s jeep and driving to Kona Grill while bumping Panic! At the Disco. Both of us were singing along at the top of our lungs. I also remember sitting with him late into the night, talking about everything from how to combat depression and anxiety to peace in the Middle East. One night, he, our German friend Artin and I went out to the campus fountain/garden area at 1am to smoke massive cigars and talk.

In short, Abbas was a friend with whom I shared some very formative experiences. I had not talked to him in several years. I actually am not sure how long it had been. But he called me from Pakistan!!! He is there studying youth culture/music etc. as I understand it.

We had a conversation that lasted a little less than an hour, and I could have gone on with him for half the night. I had almost forgotten how much I enjoyed our interactions. Most of our conversation was actually spent discussing mindfulness and the practice of meditation in our lives.

I believe that our conversation last night was no coincidence. I think it means something. I think it was a reminder to me, that there are people out there that I share a connection with, and that I would benefit from reengaging with them. Or maybe it was just the universe reminding me how great Abbas is. (Sorry Api, if this is embarrassing to you. But I had to write about it, it was just too serendipitous)

So that was part one.

Second part is that today was the first day I spent time in the house by myself. My uncle is on a business trip. And my aunt had her painting class from 10am-1pm. I was alone from 10 to about 11:30 or 12pm when my cousin Lindsay came over. Even though that time alone was completely uneventful, I felt it was important to mention it. Because in truth, I didn’t do anything differently that I would have had both my aunt and uncle been here.

My aunt, uncle and I have talked a lot about how things are working with this journey we are all on together. One of the things that I have realized is that part of what’s most important is for me to develop the confidence in myself that will allow me to eventually break away and continue this quest on my own. And little, incremental steps like this – being able to spend short amounts of time on my own – are the building blocks of the wall of confidence that I am only starting to build.

Honestly, I’m not incredibly pleased with this post. But I promised myself that once I decided what I was writing and once I had written it and laid it out on the page, I would only change it if there was some glaring error or if I realized what I had written was patently untrue. Unfortunately, tonight, this isn’t the case. There aren’t any major errors in this post. I just feel like it isn’t living up to the standard I have set with my other posts. Also, it is way longer than I had intended it to be.

Why am I telling you this? Because I promised myself that what I write for this blog will always be honest and authentic. If it isn’t, then that entirely defeats the purpose for which I am writing. Wow, I was wondering what the heck to title this post. Then I looked over it and realized how many times I had used the word “honest” or “honestly” or some other synonym. I went through and made them all bold. So I guess the theme of this post is honesty. Being truthful in my communication with those around me, being honest in what I write on my blog, and being honest with myself about why I do or don’t do certain things. So maybe this post isn’t so bad after all.

Thank you all for reading.

-Nathan