Step Outside Box for Self Care
Self-care is a buzzword in the field of mental health and it’s time to question what it means.
Typically self-care seems to mean being alone, reading, taking a bath, listening to music and possibly having a beauty treatment. This ME time is useful when you’re a busy working mom or law student. But a rigid version of “me” time doesn’t speak to most people fighting with loneliness, depression, anxiety.
Many forms of illness circle the brain. The truth is this: women thrive on connection. Even misery loves company, perhaps “miserable company,” but someone bearing witness. Even introverts thrive on it just not on small talk, but on deep essential core connection. As Jean Baker Miller wrote from The Stone Center, many years ago, “We need ‘zest.'”
When we talk about self-care, let’s broaden our definitions and recommendations. A weekend in the sun. A day volunteering. A group yoga class. Reading aloud at a library hour. At a week-long retreat I supposedly filled to the mindful brim with relaxation; instead I heard my brain chattering like teeth in the cold. The only time it stopped was when someone absently stroked my hair, someone with whom I’d talked about feminist issues in third-world countries.
All the yoga, the sharing, the food and light were nothing compared to that unsolicited gesture.
Valentine’s Day and Universal Love
Just when you thought the holidays were over, Valentine’s Day arrives. Depending on your attitude you either sneer politely at the explosion of pink and red in the card aisle or begin to anticipate, plot and plan.
This sneaky holiday is, I know, a Hallmark event. I know that if you love someone you don’t need one day dedicated to roses, champagne and chocolates. I certainly never enjoyed dressing up during the slushy epicenter of New England winter to freeze quietly at a small table. But here’s the thing: I LOVE Valentine’s Day. Here’s my favorite book on the subject.
Frankly—and I know I may be making enemies—I’ve always loved the holiday. I like making cards. I love sending them. I like the whole pink-red-gold-confetti “here is my heart on my sleeve” gesture of them. A vintage valentine postcard hangs by a pale blue ribbon in my linen closet. A new one reads I LOVE YOU MAMA in letters that straggle across a crimson shape. The table on the night before is spread with sequins, scrap paper and scissors.
Why is this holiday different from Christmas and New Year’s? Both those holidays long outlived their magic for me? Unlike the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, I always felt my heart. Family may be unwelcoming at Christmas and New Year’s has never made sense to me. New Year’s should happen in September redolent with the smell of pencils, fallen leaves and kids buying books or, at least upgrading their iOS?
Valentine’s Day speaks to universal hope. We all have hearts. We all can love. When my daughter was 5, I hung Disney Princess costumes down the banister of our small staircase. Those pastel dresses in yellow, pink and blue were a scratchy mix of tulle and love. I covered the stairs with confetti and hid the 3-inch plastic mules that matched the dresses underneath each gown’s skirts.
I think I heard her gasp that morning.
The heart keeps beating. We sow new traditions without trying. Years later my daughter’s dad lives down the street. This year she will be with him on Valentine’s Day. But I’m glad she says “Mom loves Valentine’s Day.” Glad I’m not bitter. Glad that what is beautiful still moves me, not romantic love but the joy of connection. Hold someone dear and it doesn’t matter what relationship they have to you. Tutors. Babysitter. Old friends. New friends. You may be between loves, but we do not stop loving.
My brother’s heart is recently mended after a week of holding our familial breath. My dead parents lie together forever. Tradition is as old and newly minted as my grandparents waiting online in Ellis Island, the pile of orange life jackets discarded by Syrian refugees. Hope, like love, springs anew.
Hungry For The Holidays
One population dreads the time from Thanksgiving to New Year’s: people with eating disorders.
Consumerism explodes at the holidays, so, too, does literal consumption. People with eating disorders, often students returning home from college, are faced with a double-whammy. They have to navigate the usual regression to family dynamics we all feel but also, have to figure out food.
I’ve spent hours these past 10 years planning someone to get through cracker-and-cheese time without binging. Guiding and wondering and counseling someone who has not eaten dessert in years and faces a buffet piled high with pies and cakes.
For a few years I worked on at a psychiatric unit for the holidays. I loved Christmas there; we kept the spirit of it well in that old wooden-raftered building in the woods. Surrounded by snow and bowed evergreens, the small group of patients and staff were polite and hushed on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Day. Insanity seemed to have taken a small vacation. We were an isolated group out there, needing the containment of the hospital or the distance from our families to stay sane.
The lines between patient and doctor changed as we clustered in the snow for a rushed cigarette or marveled to see our footprints appear in each luminous dusting of the night. Fellow travelers, we were all at this inn for the night.
I’ve frequently thought about renting an inn for the holiday season. We crave community but one that is compatible. What if we could be assured that behavior,) around food at least, will be regular? What if the focus were on talking, thinking and doing rather than consuming?
Hiding food, eating leftovers, doing the dishes, midnight refrigerator raids can turn holidays into a desperate time. Patients return in January like tired anthropologists out in the field for too long. They often want to punish themselves by binging and purging relentlessly; some are worn from trying to appear cogent when they are starving in plain sight of their families.
From where I sit, holidays haven’t changed much in 20 years.
Few people in America eat because they are hungry. We eat because we are bored, sad, angry or anxious. We browse the bright refrigerator shelves looking for something that will not be found there. Food is everywhere–now in pictures on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and more. Surrounded by this overload to the senses we are supposed to buy ‘zen’ or ‘mindfulness’ as easily as purchasing a yoga mat. It’s not that simple nor that easy.
Breaking bread with people with love is wonderful. Proust knew that a Madeline brought back childhood. Holiday smells and tastes are the same. But hungering for childhood is not the same as eating it. Whatever we want will be there today, tomorrow and next week. Remind yourself as you eat:
Do I want this or is this rather a socially condoned binge?
We confuse feeling full with filling ourselves. Try connection instead. Interview your grandparent. Pretend you are an anthropologist visiting our culture. Observe the family traditions and taboos. Stay in touch with your outside life. Use the nearest Starbucks or the public library in your town as place to regain perspective. Step outside your family into nature and be absorbed in something larger.
Invite a family member to make a new tradition with you. My brother and I started going for a walk after a particular tense Thanksgiving. We stopped at a lovely hotel with a piano bar not far from where the Boston Marathon ends. We went inside and sat down. Two newly-minted adults breaking free.
Holidays are not a cage that holds your family rules and a bowl of food. They must be recreated and reinvented to hold meaning.
The most cherished Christmas holidays I made was in Mexico. All I had in that tiny town was a Walmart and my ATM card. But I had my then-husband and our daughter. The small village was thrilled by the new Walmart and buzzed with activity on Dec. 24. Dazzled by the sequins on the swimsuits, the toothbrushes that lit up, the candy in exotic flavors I went up and down the escalators in a daze. We scattered mango chips and guava candies that night for the reindeer. Christmas morning we opened stockings on the roof in the morning after our daughter trundled up the spiral staircase.
We ate that day, of course, but it was the newness of Mexico that drew my small family close like a small silk sack. I was reminded of the holidays at the psychiatric hospital. We make our happiness when we can and where we find it. We cannot capture it with things and we cannot consume it. Make it new.
Hunger To Read
I identified myself as a reader at the same time I understood I was a self. I was at a sunny day camp which seemed quite far away from the city though it was not. I remember holding a book open before me under the sheltering high pine trees. Suddenly the words made sense. I saw pictures where I had seen dark code.
Now my daughter struggles to read. After waiting for her to catch fire, I realize that reading may not be her thing. Not that she can’t, or often won’t read, but at any moment the sheer delight of dipping into a a book does not compel her. Like dipping into a perfect body of water. I watch the laborious unnatural training of her mind and it surprises me. I find myself revisiting the lifelong companionship, luxury, addiction and pure pleasure of reading.
I want to open the world of my childhood. I want to introduce her to the families I knew. The words unfurl as I read to her, stored in the place age has not decayed. I cannot remember this morning’s ride but I can remember what comes next in Rush’s “First Saturday” or how the “All of A Kind Family” slept in cracker crumbs traded in the dark. She does, however, love for me to tell her stories. And so I grow with her. We create a new language, the Oliver stories. Marissa and Melissa, good and bad mermaids, Yoshi. a Japanese girl with a penchant for mischief.
The hunger to read has been, for me, like the hunger to practice medicine or be in nature. Only in the books of childhood do I see plots free of the romance tale. Girls are thinking and talking and feeling; they are using all their senses to become known in the world and explore history, cities, fields, cattle, spiders, farms.
Before “happily ever after” looms, featuring a princess and prince, or king and queen. run these stories. Many childrens books remind me of a time when my deepest being was absorbed in an enterprise of pure imagination. As I read I see girls wondering what they will be, or dancing on desks, or bossing their brothers. It is all about what we can be or do.
When I wait online at the school she attends, my daughter bursts out of the line with excitement. I wonder how long it will be before she peppers her definite needs with “like,” before she asks friends if she looks “fat” in her clothes, before she finds her anger terrifying. These books which guide girls quickly turn from exploration of self, other and the world into one story: a romance quest. The Holy Grail.
If there were one thing I wish she could grasp, it is that she is already complete. Everything which comes next will be misunderstanding. Books deepen and enrich us, they mirror and extend the understanding we already have. They also distort our goals, and our sense of an ending. Perhaps her body and dextrous hands will give her more pleasure than her imagining.
Perhaps she will be freer than I was. I could not imagine having a book and choosing to sew a satchel or go rock climbing. Her own extroverted nature may force her away from the distortions of introspection. She has so many friends she does not hide behind a book. Perhaps her knowledge will serve her better; she will grow like a tree, with stronger roots.
Piercing, Cutting and Tattoos: The Body Speaks
I started small, noticing and ignoring body art. One girl with a small diamond stud in her nose had a huge diamond engagement band on her finger. We spent a lot of time discussing the enormity of her ring. No mention of the nose stud. Then came a girl from outside the city, a suburb so conservative that I’d imagined it as filled with horses. Her therapy was long and complicated, involving many family members. Somewhere during therapy she got a tattoo- the most popular sort at that time. Chinese characters were inscribed in black at the base of her spine. They showed only when you might bend over to give a customer change, or if you were scooping ice cream for a summer job.
Then an artist came to see me with forearms decorated like a Minoan snake goddess from Crete. We discussed the tattoos. The why, the when (a break-up), the choice of subject matter.
Later I saw a drug addict in remission- a girl with a straight spine and a pierced tongue which flicked like a snake, in and out as she talked. I had to ask. The piercing was unnerving to me. She had chosen to pierce the visible juncture between speech and silence. Not to ask her about this choice seemed like denying part of therapy. Then I began to ask more, much more. The foot covered with henna that looked like a fortuneteller’s palm.
The second recovered addict saved her money working retail to tattoo installments of Alice in Wonderland all over her body. Not somewhere subtle, the nape of her neck, a shoulder blade wing. She was writing on her body- the body as slate, the body as book. She said it was a constant reminder ” not to fall down the rabbit hole.”
All signs have meaning. If someone shifts and exhales- I ask. I shied away from discussing piercing and tattoos- though I had always asked directly if a patient cut or burned themselves. As the world spins on its axis the culture changes. I can make no assumptions. To assume that body art is culturally neutral is, itself, a convenient assumption. So I ask. Everyone wants to be known. What they inscribe, what they cut, what they pierce, needs translation. Use your words, we teach our children.
Make no assumptions. Do no harm.
The oath of the psychologist.