Holiday Traditions

Chocolates in the Advent calendar and reading the Christmas story day by day to my mom....fat, bald Santa in his little wooden sleigh (a much loved decoration in my house)....walking to the woods to pick a Christmas tree for my dad to cut down....unwrapping each little wooden figurine for the creche...Candlelight service culminating in singing "Joy to the World"....playing "The Little Drummer Boy" over and over in my living room while sipping fresh hot apple cider....my cousins ringing sleigh bells out in the snowy cold so I would go to bed thinking Santa had arrived...reading my Dad's Christmas letter....

These are the memories of my family traditions. When I recall them they are misty and faraway but warm and comforting. I don't remember feelings of running around, rushing to buy presents for everyone, feeling a need to go to every holiday party, or needing to get exactly the right decorations for the exterior of the house. I remember love.  I remember family.  I remember connection.  I remember happiness.

What I know is that traditions aren't about the things you did...they're about the people you did them with and the feelings they evoked in you. Every year is an opportunity to return to those loving feelings and to create new traditions in your holiday season. 

I don't need gifts, or parties, or cards, or anything else to maintain these traditions. All I need is family, friends, love, and connection. So in just about a week you will find me sipping hot apple cider, listening to "The Little Drummer Boy,"  in front of a warm fire with those I love.

In-Between

Death takes what it will, but it leaves us waiting in the in-between. In between our old life and the new. Crying over memories long gone, while avoiding making new ones without the person we've lost. In between a life of carefree assurances that nothing bad will happen and an existential dread of the next loss.  In between who we hoped we could be and who we are.

In the immediate aftermath of loss we try to maintain what was. We accept condolences and well wishes and seek comfort where we find it. As time passes, well wishers disappear and we're left with a world that seems to be not so patiently tapping its foot waiting for us to get back to "normal."

Normal doesn't exist in the in-between.

What was normal feels distant and sepia-toned.
What will be normal hasn't yet arrived.

There are glimpses of the life to come, but they are cordoned off by hazy reflections of the life that's gone.

Moving from the in-between into the future is a choice. A choice that some never find the space to make. It requires a careful balancing of the known value of our past experience and the unknown potential of the life we have yet to live. It requires a letting go of the intense feelings of loss and accepting the deep continued grief that goes with loving and losing others.

Balance as long as you need to in the in-between. There are many of us here. Eventually something will tip the balance and a spark of hope will begin to burn.  When you've sat long enough in the space of the in-between you'll know it's time to stand up and walk on. Your future self patiently waits for you to begin to live again. 

It's ok. Take the time you need in the in-between.
It's where healing begins.


   

Leadership in an Unconscious World

In this year of wildly partisan politics, it seems to me we are past due for a primer in the fundamental qualities we might look for in a leader. I used to love politics and spent hours discussing them with my late father throughout my lifetime. This year I cringe at the thought of anymore conversations involving the upcoming election. What has changed? The tenor of the argument. Somehow we have unconsciously decided to project all of our unmet needs, expectations, and fears on the candidates making for a thoroughly hysterical discussion at best.

I have yet to hear an argument from anyone about either candidate that seems well thought out, carefully considered, or rational. No matter my personal politics, even those whose views essentially align with my own seem unable to calmly discuss the matters at hand. I hear anger and accusations from all directions, and little concern for the perceived "other." The more each side tries to prove their point, the more they force the other side into defensiveness. Or so it seems from the sidelines.

I remember watching videos years ago of fights breaking out in the parliaments or ruling bodies of foreign lands, and I also remember wondering how they got to that point. Now I understand. When we are so attached to our own beliefs, we lose sight of the humanity of those who believe differently. At some point we become seemingly unable to truly have a discourse and we devolve into the  current state of affairs - anger and attacks abound....compassion and kindness evaporate.

We have offered up candidates who align with our ideas of our best selves and our unconscious fears of our worst selves, or the parts we relegate to the shadow of the psyche. If you ask a Trump supporter what they like about him, you hear echoes of the best of the masculine - strength, directness, family, protection.  If you ask a Clinton supporter what they like about her, you hear traces of the best of the feminine - relationship building, compassion, understanding. If you ask a Trump detractor what they don't like about him, you hear projections of the worst of the masculine - anger, bigotry, bullying, fear of the other.  If you ask a Clinton detractor what they don't like about her, you hear projections of the worst of the feminine - liar, shrill voice, bitch.

What if they are simply canvases upon which we are projecting our hopes and fears? What if our lack of attention to our own personal and collective unconscious has left us unable to see them for who they are - people, with pros and cons, like us all.  I imagine that were we more in touch with our own inner feminine and masculine we would have no need for projecting the disowned parts of ourselves onto our political candidates.

The narrative of the media is that the choice we make will change the world - and in ways too many to count, it will. However, the world has changed before and will change again regardless of our specific choices. This narrative serves only to force us into a collective fight or flight response that shuts down our ability to reason and to collectively move towards compromise and collaboration. As a psychotherapist the only role I have in this melee is to calm the reactive brains. When we allow ourselves to move into the primal parts of our brain we lose the ability to reason and rationally approach the issues at hand.

Whatever happens in November, we can begin a new dialogue down here in the trenches that includes respect for differing ideas, more listening than talking, and a movement towards a compassionate discourse of the complicated issues that face us as a society. If we do the work to own our own shadow qualities along with accepting that we too can be the heroes in our daily interactions, only then will we move towards a respectful, collaborative political environment.

"A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say:  we did it ourselves."  Lao Tzu

Why I Walk for Suicide

On June 27th I will participate in my 2nd annual American Foundation for Suicide Prevention's Out of the Darkness Overnight Walk.  The Overnight Walk is an event geared towards promoting awareness around suicide. It is a walk of 18 miles this year which begins in the early evening and continues throughout the night.  Walkers raise $1000 each which goes to fund AFSPs efforts to promote awareness, provide support, and encourage preventative measures in the fight against suicide.  

Every year suicide claims the lives of more than 40,000 people in this country.  It is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S. and, in fact, is the 5th leading cause of death for adults age 18-64.  To put it into understandable terms, every 12.8 minutes someone takes their own life....about 112 per day.  Every minute someone is making an attempt to end their life.  Thankfully about 11 of those people's plans are intercepted and they are given the care they need to live a fulfilling life. 

Ninety percent of people who die by suicide have diagnosable psychiatric disorders at the time of their death.    Why is that number so important?  It tells us that many of the people who choose to take their own life perhaps are in a state of shifted perspective which may affect their ability to make choices that fit with who they are when they are not suffering with mental health issues.  For at least some of these people access to mental health services may make the difference between life and death.  For many of these people just connecting with a mental health professional who can help them understand how to manage their mental health may change their perspective. 

I am a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor in Maryland and I own a private practice which strives to meet the mental health needs of the community. Suicide matters to me because it's my business, but it mattered long before I ever started counseling.  Suicide is professional to me, but it's also very personal.  I have lost eight first-degree relationships (meaning I knew them directly) to suicide, and I understand that I cannot look away from this tragedy.  I am drawn to work directly in the path of suicide in the names of those I've known, loved, and lost. And so I walk.

My grandfather, my father's father, took his own life in his 50s.  He suffered with mood disorder issues that eventually led to some type of psychosis during which he made the choice to kill himself.  I never knew him, and I learned very little about him through my father.  He was not talked about.  His death was talked about even less.  As for many people, it was introduced to me as an accident, when I started asking questions.  The gun had "accidentally" discharged.  He had "accidentally" shot himself.  He was "accidentally" no longer with us.  That didn't make sense.  I didn't understand how it was possible.  Being a questioner...I questioned.  Not my father, because I knew.  Somehow I knew that he wouldn't...or couldn't...talk about it.  The silence on this topic was deafening.  I learned much of what I know through my mother.  I pondered it for hours...days....weeks...months...years. 

I went through the stages of grief for someone I didn't even know.  I was in denial vicariously.  By not telling me the truth, my family denied the death.  I bargained with the universe, with my dead grandfather, saying "if you'd only known me, you would have wanted to live,"  "if you'd waited it would have been worth it."  But he didn't.  There were no grandchildren then, and given the stories I've heard, he wouldn't have been very involved with us anyway.  It wasn't his thing.  I got angry.  I cursed him in my mind, wished him into hell.  Common knowledge said people who kill themselves go to hell.  So I envisioned him there.  And I wanted him there.  I was angry that not only did he deny me the right to know him, he denied me the right to know about him because no one talked about him. 

He was a big empty hole in the family.  A big, dark, scary place that no one wanted to visit or mention.  My father once said, completely offhandedly, "you're just like my father."  I held my breath when he said it.  He had never mentioned his father....at all.  And now this.  I was like him.  I didn't know what to do with those feelings.  I went from anger to fear.  What if he meant I'd do something like that too?  What if he thought I'd kill myself.  Reviewing that comment over and over I finally recognized that he meant simply that I loved animals, as did his father (I think I had just saved a field mouse from the cat or something).  He wasn't comparing me entirely to his father, but connecting a piece he loved in me with a piece he loved in his father.  

Years later in my adulthood,  I became sad for this loss.  All of the anger I had expressed internally shifted to a profound sadness.  I was sad for not knowing this man who was more than his suicide.  I was sad that nobody could help him. I was sad for my grandmother who had found him.  I was sad for my father who couldn't speak of such an important person in his life. I was sad for my siblings and I for never having known our grandfather.  And I was most importantly sad for a world in which this was stigmatized and shut off from our experience as a collective people. I walk daily with this sadness.

My grandfather was the first suicide I knew.  The first suicide I had to grieve.  It was in some ways easier as I hadn't known him, so my grieving was held in the imagination rather than in the actual day-to-day experience of my world.  He was not the last.  In 6th grade a classmate took his own life and we were given very little to no support in grieving his death.  In a class of just over 30 this was a tremendous burden on myself and my classmates, and I still recognize effects in my life 30+ years later.  After graduating, three more classmates took their lives.  Did they do this because the door opened with the first?  I don't know.  Part of me wondered how they could do it when they knew how much it hurt to be left behind.  Each of these four people was suffering, and suffering far more than any of us around them could recognize. I realized early on that suicide takes the pain of one suffering being and multiples it then divides it by the people who love that person.  I walk daily with the pain of these losses.

So I became a counselor.  I remember my father telling me once that he had one worry about my future work.  This worry was that someday a client of mine would end their life in suicide.  My father was accurate in his prediction that this would happen.  Two of my clients took their own life years after leaving counseling with me.  One client took his life five days after a visit with me.   Grieving these losses has been a long and lonely road, but one I must walk. 

Talking about my experience of the deaths of  my clients was the closest my father and I ever got to talking about his father's death.  He was supportive and I strongly relied on him as I worked through my feelings about these losses.  There is something about talking to another person who has suffered loss by suicide that is comforting.  I didn't have to explain to him how I felt; he already knew.  I longed to ask about his father, but I kept putting it off for another day.  I had planned to ask him specific questions about his father's death when I was to visit him on his birthday October 13, 2015. 

My father left this world on October 3, 2015.  I never got to ask.  However, he did not take his own life, and for that I am thankful to him.  He breathed until he could breath no more.  And I like to think there was heroism in his last years which were difficult for him with a chronic illness.  I believe that perhaps my father endured those difficulties for us, so that we wouldn't have to bear the burden he did of losing a parent to suicide.  And so I walk in memory of him too, for being quietly brave in the face of many sources of pain.

On June 27th in Boston, I will walk.  I will walk 18 miles in honor of the eight I've lost, in honor of the others who are lost to people I know, and for the thousands who I never knew.  I will walk to shine a light in the darkness that is clinical depression, suicide, and the after-effects of such tragedies.  I will walk for change by bringing the topic of suicide to the forefront where it belongs.  I will walk to honor the idea that we all struggle, that we all push through much more than anyone will ever imagine, and that we are all connected. 

I will walk because I can and for all of those who can't. 

This post is in memory of John, Geoff, David, Joe, Jamie, Brian, Keith, Travis, 

and my dad, Samuel Dunham Fairchild.  

 May you all walk with me in spirit always and forever. 

Be still

"Men cannot see their reflections in running water, 

but only in still water."  

~Chuang-Tzu

I stumbled upon this quote the other day when I was feeling particularly irritated with someone in my life who seemed hellbent on not listening to what I was trying to say.  I was pointing out this person's way of being in the world and how that affects people with whom he interacts.  I was giving it the old "this is my experience of you in the world," but it was not finding a comfortable place to land in his psyche.  I was fairly well fed up. 

And then this quote happened.....and I almost overlooked it (because I was so intent on getting someone else to hear my wisdom).  And then this quote began to sink in.....and I realized I was much like the running water.  And then I recognized that I was making it impossible for this person to see his own reflection....because he was too busy defending himself against my words. 

As always it was much easier to see how I could use this with others.  I became quiet and stopped saying my piece.  I became still and waited.  It took a while, but eventually a conversation happened (not at my behest, but in a very organic, natural way).  That conversation was much more fruitful than any of my talking ever would have been.  Simply because I became still. 

Then the quote happened again....and I realized it wasn't just about me with others, but it was about me with me.  How often do I avoid sitting in stillness because I have much to do?  How often do I go running off at the mouth rather than inviting myself to a peaceful, calm, still place where I can really learn something about myself?  How often am I trying to find my reflection in running water and finding it hard to piece it all together?

And so I'll be still. 
I hope you'll join me. 

Awaken to your best self.  

Improving Sleep

More and more of my clients seem to be complaining of insomnia or difficulty sleeping these days.  It's one of the questions I try to ask regularly, as sleep is such an important component of our mental and physical healthiness, but we seem to always to put good sleep habits on the back burner for another day. 

Why is sleep so important anyway?

Sleep rejuvenates and refreshes us.  It keeps us healthy in body and mind.  New information gained in a day needs to be incorporated into memory and part of this process happens while we're sleeping.  So if you're cutting back on sleep you may be making it more difficult to retain what you've learned throughout the day.  In addition, difficulty sleeping can both indicate underlying mental health issues or can exacerbate them. Lack of sleep is highly correlated with  mood fluctations and the onset of various cyclical mental health issues.  One of the first things I try to regulate with patients in a mental health setting is their sleep habits.  One we're able to do this, many of their symptoms begin to dissipate. 

Physically, not getting enough sleep can wreak havoc with your body, disrupting hormones and causing weight gain and cardiovascular issues.  In addition, our immune response is affected by how much quality sleep we get; therefore, lack of sleep can lead to increased illnesses.

There are safety issues at play as well.  If I'm not sleeping well at night, my body will try to regain rest during the day.  Many daily activities can become highly dangerous if the person performing them isn't well rested. 

Why aren't you sleeping?

Finding out the source of your sleep difficulties may be almost impossible, but you can often narrow it down to a few potential areas of concern.  Depending on which areas are issues for you, the solutions will vary.

Are you experiencing discomfort or pain that keeps you awake?  If you have chronic pain issues these will definitely disrupt your sleep.  Dealing with those issues is a must and there are many options such as relaxation exercises that sooth sore muscles, more comfortable bedding, and medication if necessary.

Do you struggle to sleep because your mind is racing?  An anxious mind can wreak havoc on a sleep schedule.  Many of us no sooner lay our head on the pillow than we're planning the next week's activities and mentally rehashing today's events.

Is there a medical condition that contributes to your poor sleep?  Weight gain, sleep apnea, Restless Leg Syndrome....these and many other conditions can make sleep near impossible.

Are there external interruptions to your sleep?  Crying baby, restless barking dog, loud neighborhood, leaving the TV on.....all of these external factors can interrupt sleep cycles keeping you from getting the best night's sleep possible.

Create a relaxing area in which to sleep

For any and all of the sleep disruptions listed above, the first step in improving sleep is to create a relaxing sleep environment.  The bedroom should really only be used for sleep and sex (topic for another week!), and there are ways to make it conducive to both endeavors.  Think about what's most comfortable to you.  From a puffy mattress to a firm mattress, there's something for everyone.  Adding many pillows, or having just one....whatever is most comfortable to you is what you should create.  Colors in the bedroom should be muted.  Bright colors stimulate the mind, while a more muted palate encourages relaxation and sleep.  Using rugs and wall hangings to quiet sounds from outside or in the rest of the house can lessen external interruptions to sleep.  Lighting should be dim.  Again, the goal is to create a quiet, relaxing haven in an effort to tell the brain its time to relax and sleep.

Create a sleep routine

Our brains like to know what's coming next, and using the lull of a routine to lead us off to sleep is a great place to start.  Create a nightly routine that tells your brain you're getting ready to relax and sleep.  Do all of your nightly hygiene tasks in the same order at about the same time nightly.  If there's a particular type of music that's relaxing to you, put it on nightly to trigger your bedtime routine.  Avoid various technology that uses bright screens.  Working on the laptop, iPad, phone, etc. before bedtime can intensify brain activity leading to poor night's sleep.  If your mind starts working through anxious thoughts, keep a pad of paper handy to write down the thoughts quickly in an effort to save them for tomorrow, when you can actually do something about them.

Start this week by trying to create a relaxing sleep environment and a sleep routine....next week I'll share some tried and true relaxation techniques to help improve your sleep even more.

Sleep well.


Awaken to your best self. 

Whole Healing Model

I believe there is something very wrong with our medical system. Although I work in behavioral/mental health rather than being a medical doctor, the systems are almost identical. The influence of managed care has had an effect on both systems, and while I am grateful both personally and professionally for the access to healthcare afforded by health insurance, I believe it is corrupting the effectiveness of care.

Did you know that if you expect your insurance to cover a medical or mental health service, you must have a diagnosable condition? Did you know that some managed care organizations then dictate the terms of treatment based on diagnosis? It is a disease/disorder based system. Generally speaking medical professionals don't ask what's going right in your world, they ask what's wrong. At an initial intake in my office I want to take the time to understand strengths and weaknesses, to be able to use a client's own skillset and personality traits to help lessen problematic symptoms and to increase positive interactions and feelings. When managed care is involved, I have less freedom to do this. I am required to find a diagnosis... A Problem.

But what if we're looking at this backwards. In the medical model we are becoming more and more aware that it makes sense to provide preventative treatment rather than to respond to crises of disease. It makes more sense to lower cholesterol through diet and exercise rather than providing services to someone suffering from resultant heart disease years later. Managed care is coming along but they still lag behind. I'm not sure most insurance plans would pay for ongoing nutritional counseling or exercise programs, even though both promote good health. Nor will most insurance companies cover alternative treatments like massage or acupuncture even though these types if treatments have proven to be helpful for many conditions and in reducing overall stress.

The behavioral health system faces the same dilemmas. Managed care will cover office visits, but there are no organizations if which I am aware that will cover ongoing counseling without a diagnosable disorder. Grief counseling, career counseling, ongoing therapeutic support are not options unless you have a diagnosable condition or choose to pay out of pocket.

I think we would be a healthier and happier society if we focused on prevention and wellness rather than crisis and illness in both the medical system and in mental health services. I don't want to be limited to symptoms and disorders when I could be joining clients on a journey to psychological wellness and growth. The only way this system changes is by the consumer demanding change. We pay the premiums for health insurance and we can continue to push the system in a healthier, more sustainable direction.  We need to be putting a premium on preventative services and ongoing relationships with Primary Care doctors and mental health professionals.  These relationships are the building blocks for healing the entire person, not just treating symptoms.

Awaken to your best self.