Don't Worry. Be Happy: The Alternative

“Don’t worry. Be happy: The Alternative”

I recently read that 1,000 books about happiness have been released on Amazon in the past three months.  “Don’t worry. Be happy” is not only a catchy song; it has become the meaning and goal of life. But what happens to the increasing segment of society where the individual and his/her loved ones must confront the reality of a cancer diagnosis? What do we do with this push toward maintaining happiness at all costs?

               

Each of us has a personality structure that in some sense foretells how we and our families will react. I spoke with one woman while volunteering with Cancer Hope Network who asked me how to hide her diagnosis and hair loss from her family and closest friends. I didn’t argue with her.  This was her way of coping. She had resolved to continue not worrying and being happy externally as a way of avoiding dealing with her and others’ fears. Another woman refused to ask her oncologist what surgery she was getting, what stage cancer she had, and whether she needed chemotherapy. She told me she instructed her doctor to just tell her when to show up and do what he felt he had to do for her.  She returned to her active social life directly after finishing her treatment.

What about those of us who have experienced suffering, and can’t just put on a happy face to fool ourselves or others? “It was a blessing for me,” some tell us.  Are they being honest with themselves?  I believe they are, if their suffering sends them beyond the external image we share with one another, and deeper into our unique selves. What of our religious or spiritual beliefs?  Do they hold up under the stress of not knowing how this situation will resolve? What about the life we had been living the day before our diagnosis? I recall leaving the doctor’s office that night and realizing most of the plans on my busy schedule would have to be shuffled or erased while I dealt with this new aspect of my life. What limitations would illness place on my future?  What could I control, and what was outside of my control?  I made several mistakes in predicting this part of my “new normal” life.

                                           

I also felt a new call.  I had to make meaning of this suffering, this horrible experience, as so many other men and women have managed to do. We have plunged down into the basement of our being and discovered that there is an “up” from that dark place.  We will give of ourselves to others.  We will volunteer, we will be more empathetic, we will write a book, create a foundation, or fund new research. We will cut ourselves some slack and nurture ourselves as we have done over the years for others.  We will draw new boundaries around what we now consider acceptable treatment of us.  We will leave old friends who were toxic for us, and find new ones who fulfill our new desires and goals.

                                                                                        

This is a blessing or gift not sought by any of us. But we can see ourselves more than just folks rushing after the next happiness experience.  We can feel ourselves joining with others, across all sorts of cultural, religious, and national boundaries. We can feel ourselves connected to so much more.

As columnist David Brooks phrases it, “The suffering involved in their [experiences] becomes a fearful gift and very different than that equal and other gift, happiness, conventionally defined.”

                            

        (I first published this blog on the Cancer Hope Network)

The Wounded Storyteller

 The Wounded Storyteller

I am reading a wonderful book by Arthur W. Frank with the title noted above. The second edition was released just last year, and I highly recommend it to anyone who feels that they fit into the description.

Its profound value to me has been in eloquently articulating the drive behind my writing INTEGRAL HEALING, which is part memoir/biography and part self-empowering guide to constructing one's own Integral Healing Practice. There is a fair amount of resistance to writing memoirs and biographies.  They are often considered self-aggrandizing vanity projects. Either the author feels that his life merits more attention than others, or his is worse than others for some unique reason. This may be true in part and for certain authors, but we are finding that such memoirs/autobiographies bring forth extraordinary healing potentials.

As I've previously noted, more and more hospitals are sponsoring writing programs for their past and present patients. It is not merely the idea of catharsis of writing about one's bout with illness. Any act of writing presupposes a reader, and others need to read these stories as well. The gift flows in two directions.

Frank defines the wounded storyteller as anyone who has suffered and lived to tell the tale.

But telling is joined to listening, and those who listen have the potential of forming a community so that none may feel alone.

                                          

This blog and the fall publication of my book are the two trumpet calls that I hope have the power to create community. They signal my desire "to widen the circle, to amplify and connect the voices that were telling tales about illness, so that all of us could feel less alone". (Frank, xi)  My desire and intention is to provide a guide, a companion, and a truth teller to the journey through illness. 

I was born in 1945; my father newly arrived back home after being injured in the Pacific Front of World War II. I am the first of the huge demographic wave of Baby Boomers, and we are soon heading into our 70's. We have been renamed the Silver Tsunami, and our concerns about health care, rejuvenation techniques, and hearing about others who have succumbed to their illnesses will only focus more of our attention and funds. My husband, born in 1938, is receiving daily calls about friends' passing. He has become one of those people who scans the obituary section after perusing the sports scores. We spend more and more time visiting  hospitals and paying our respects at funeral homes. 

All of us at some time or another will become wounded storytellers. There is nothing wrong with this. Indeed, I see it as paying homage to times of  significant transition. 

I am winding up my seminar that will result in my becoming a clinically-trained integral minister. I have submitted many case studies of those I am working with during their transitions. Some involved death struggles; others, the grief over more predictable life transitions. Being fully present to another's telling of the story about his transition is one of the most important things that a chaplain can do for another fragile human. It certainly differs from my two other careers, that of teacher and lawyer.

During my long tenure as both teacher and lawyer, I discovered two human truths in tension, which we know from the Integral framework is a both/and situation:

  1.   No matter how many "drugs in a car" cases I represented, each one was singularly differentiated from the others. No matter how many bright females I had in class, each one was bright in a dazzlingly individual manner. Thus it is with suffering through illness. Every one of us getting chemo suffered through the treatment, but in unique ways. The drug I got during one infusion put me to sleep for 19 hours. No one else had ever responded to that drug in that manner. But my unique bodily constitution did.

   2.  Yet every one of the cases I handled, students I taught, or as I went through cancer and its treatments, depended upon a cultural context. The conduct of my defendants, hopes of my students, and choice of treatments had an invisible boundary selected for them by their cultures. I could consolidate my clients, students, and patients into categories with similarities depending on their backgrounds.

My story is unique, AND it can be grouped in with others of  a similar culture. I am interested in those who have used some part of the Integral framework to cover both of these aspects: Their unique stories, and how the use of an Integral framework worked for them.

But I do not wish to limit my mission to just those who are already using an Integral perspective. I want to form as large a circle of wounded together to support one another through their personal narratives so that we may all benefit from them.

                                                         

Bridge Over Troubled Waters: How to Deal With Difficult Circumstances

“Bridge Over Troubled Waters:

How to Deal With Difficult Circumstances”

                You’ve been diagnosed with cancer, or MS, or lupus, or another serious illness.  You’ve naturally reacted with sadness, grief, fear, feeling that you face this alone, or perhaps hopelessness.  These feelings resonate throughout our bodies, our minds, and our spirits as if a gong had been sounded. Once we feel that danger has entered our lives, we react in one of three predictable manners:

1.    ----- We fall into negative emotions.

2.     -----We escape our emotions by racing into pleasurable activities to distract us.

3.      ---- We use our personal defenses like denial to avoid facing the unknowable.

When I was diagnosed first with breast cancer, I felt as though lightning had struck me.  After a while, I had metabolized this dreaded news enough to come to terms with the implications of my diagnosis.  A longer period of time elapsed and I felt that I had come to adapt well to the new realities with which I would forever after have to accommodate.  Finally, after working hard on my psychological background, I came to a state of gratitude for what I still had.

                                           

Unfortunately, I was diagnosed with lung cancer a month later, and a month after that came down with a near-fatal infection that required the third serious surgery in three months.  

Each time I had a new diagnosis, I found myself back at the first phase of lightning strike, and then realized that I had to cycle through the rest of the phases until I could come back to gratitude.

What good did all of this do for me, when I had bodily suffering that lasted over eighteen months including five months of chemotherapy?  The good came from eliminating unnecessary, or useless, suffering. 

I learned that when fear caused my stomach to contract and my muscles to tighten, my body was reacting as if I had actually been physically attacked.  

I learned that when my hands shook from apprehension during my medical testing, my entire body began to shake, since it thought there was actual physical danger before me.  The old “fight or flight” response is still within us, even when the dinosaurs and woolly mammoths have long ago departed.

My surgeries, my difficult physical reactions to chemotherapy, those were true and factual responses.  But my fear and how my body responded to it, was within my control.  I could work with them.  I began to distinguish between how things appeared to me, and the objective, factual truth of how they actually existed.  Using the insights of author Elliott Dacher (www.elliottdacher.org) I learned to work with this distinction by learning a few important skills: intention, gentleness, attention, mental stability, meditation, and insight.

                                  

The first one, intention, means that I had to work diligently so as not to fall back into old patterns of believing that I would forever have bad luck.  It took some effort.  But then I learned that if I hadn’t been diagnosed with breast cancer, they never would have done the scan that discovered my lung cancer which would have killed me in three years.  How lucky was I to have gotten breast cancer!

                                                                         

Attention was next, and that involved quieting my busy-busy mind so that my inner guide could center me in the “now.” Fear of tomorrow’s test, or rumination over the pain of yesterday’s surgery would rob me of the quiet and openness I could access in the moment.

                                 

Gentleness was a rude awakening to me, as I realized that I had been far more loving, gentle, and kind to others than I had been to myself. Instead of considering it narcissistic or selfish, I began to see that I needed to fall in love with my core self, my unique self, rather than the ego-constructed mask I and others adorn to be among people.

                                                                                            

Mental stability also involves emotional stability.  As I faced new and painful tests, I had to learn to accept that this too would pass, and I needn’t fall apart while enduring the momentary hurt.  I also learned that pain and negative emotions have a cascading effect, where once begun, it is often too forceful to stop them until they dissipate like a ferocious hurricane.

         

Finally, through learning mindfulness through meditation I gained insight and wisdom into how to deal with the fear I felt about my diagnoses and treatments. These skills take time and patience, but when looking for a bridge over troubled waters, we need to build a sturdy and lasting structure one plank at a time.  It is well worth the effort.

And what else offers us the promise of reaching the other shore with deep gratitude for our journey?

(I first published this blog at Cancer Hope Network)