Snapshots: The a.m. and the p.m. hug

(1) I understand that New York therapists take off the entire month of August.

But my habit, being a Chicagoan (as opposed to a New Yorker) is to take off Jewish holidays and an occasional mental health day.  Or week. 

This is Jewish holiday season, which includes: (a) the Jewish New Year (Rosh HaShana) contemplations, regrets, mainly, about the old year; (b) the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), that fast we'll talk about later, and (c) a couple of lesser known chaggim (hard "ch", festival in Hebrew),  Succot and Shemini Atzeret, or Simchas Torah.  So I haven't been to work all that much this October.  Anyone trying to reach me at the office heard a variant of this:

Hi, it's Dr. ____. I'll be out of the office until __(date)___.  You'll hear from me then if you leave a message.

If this is a life threatening emergency, call 911 or go to an emergency room. Have someone contact your primary care physician.

If you feel it's urgent, but it is not an emergency, you can call
_(first name) (last name)__ and ask him to call you back. (First name)__ is on call for non-emergencies.  Thanks so much.

In other words, See ya'.

As a younger therapy doc, the only way not to make a mistake in this recitation would be to read the message from a scrap of paper, not unlike scripting a phone conversation with a patient suffering from social anxiety waiting to hear about a job or a date. 

Reading from a script only empowers a person so far.  In my case, the wrong inflection requires re-recording the message as many times as it takes to get it right. The tone of the voice-mail can't sound too happy or too glib, and certainly not self-satisfied.  The only humane way to get it right is to try to empathize with callers, to guess how they'll respond.  My hunch is many respond like this:

Uh, duh! Like I don't know about 911?

Or

No freaking way I'm calling someone I've never met just because it's "urgent".

Or

What's a primary care physician?

Or

She never told me she was going on vacation!  The chutzpah!  (Chutzpah rhymes with puts-the, hard "ch", Hebrew for gall, or nerve).

(2)  If you know me, then you know I never take real vacations, not the kind where you go whitewater rafting or see monkeys in rain forests; not kicking back vacations, drinking margaritas or whatever the cool drinks are these days, or sight-seeing in Peru or Italy.

Having successfully launched most of our children, FD and I think of a vacation as seeing family, feeding them or being fed, and taking the little ones off on urban adventures.  Or just playing cards. The cards are tossed in the trash after the kids visit because we find them everywhere.  Without the kids around, there's no point in trying to make decks.  And my father left me an entire duffel bag of unopened decks, anyway.  No fool. 

Combine the family vacay or in this case, stay-cay with a Jewish holiday or five, and you have many, many people, most of them first or second degrees, under one modest roof, with visitors.

The toughest decision I generally have to make is this: Do I go to services? (Meaning the synagogue).  Or would it be better to whip up batches of pancakes and french toast?  This decision all depends upon the seriousness of the particular holiday. The pancakes are blueberry, the french toast pan fried with the brown sugar, butter and maple syrup.  

This year the kids visited us, meaning that cooking, sweeping, straightening up, and throwing an occasional baseball or tennis ball occupied most of my time.  If you do this with a  future major league pitcher, wear gloves.

(3)  Just to switch gears, before I started writing this post I glanced at AOL news to find that experts are okay with patients taking a break from ADHD meds (we call this a med-vacation).  

That the online expert is only okay with the med-vacay is disheartening.  The thinking, never mess with what is kind of working, paired with a long list of possible physical, social, and emotional consequences for messing with it, essentially marries the patient to medication.  And it makes a baseline comparisons impossible.  Over the years, who knows what normal is anymore?

That said, if you are considering going off medication, of course discuss it with your doctor first.  But keep in mind that how you feel at any given moment depends upon a host of variables, like maturation, events (history), things that may have nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not you're taking medication.

And that laundry list of warnings (in the AOL article), the dire consequences that might transpire should you go off prescription medication, is bloated.  Anything can happen and probably will, but it may have nothing to do with missing doses, although it is possible, which is why you first talk to your doctor. Find out what anything is, if you can.  Maybe it's not so bad, and maybe it is something you need to work on.  And talk to your doc.

My most memorable adult patient with Attention Deficit  Disorder was a middle-aged male who had been on ADD meds his whole life.  He had no life, not one after work.  First visit he fell asleep on my sofa, didn't budge for 45 minutes, a 5:30 pm appointment.  When at last he woke, he complained to me that he usually falls asleep on a sofa at home by 7 pm, literally waits out the night until morning when he can dose up again to face the next day.

More than one med-vacay might have served him well. 

There was no keeping me quiet forever.

(4) We do love our drugs, and that can be a good thing.  Most of the time it is.  Here's a Facebook status* I posted before taking off for the holidays.
:

Today, at noon, it seemed like such a good idea to make that pot of coffee (5 cups, half caf, choc milk for creamer) and drink it all.   Now I'm not so sure.

At 2 a.m., if anyone read that, the third batch of vegetarian gumbo tasted just right, much better than it looked.  We would need it for the coming onslaught of eaters.

(5) As long as we're talking about eating.

Let's talk about Yom Kippur, the Jewish fasting holiday, 25 hours, no food or drink

Parse out the word, holi-day, and you get it.

It can be annoying, especially not drinking any water, but by the end of the fast, the following evening, the light-headed, feint feeling, the emotion, the chorus of hundreds of voices, one of them is yours, everyone is singing, everyone in tennis shoes**, light on their feet, voices rising, rousing the most serious cynic to return to the fold, this has to be the most powerful moment of the year, certainly for some of us.  Sheer soul.

Probably all religions have this, some kind of parish sing along, but on the Jewish high holy days, the greatest hits, for us, are second to none.  There's healing in the community choir, and of course an incredible rendition of a song you only sing in the church, or the synagogue once a year, has to make you happy.

A cancer survivor told me she can't even go to the synagogue, it's so emotional. (Jewish kids grow up on  Barbra, *** who does a nice job with Max Janowski's Avinu Malkeinu, Our Father our King.)  Not as powerful as hundreds of voices live, but it will do.

On the way home from the airport on Sunday morning, the first run, alone in the car, I flipped on the radio to hear a mass.  Mr. Bach understood the power.  

Oh.  And FD reminds me, every year, that the day proves that we all eat way too much every other day.  We really don't need it.   And he's a doctor.

(6) Accountability

The whole thing about the serious holidays, the Jewish New Year and  that crazy fast day, is that we're supposed to introspect, retrospect, and consider our flaws.  We're supposed to think, Hey, I'm really NOT that good of a person, not nearly the person I should be.  I should change! 

Not a bad concept, truly, unless you already have low self-esteem.  And even then, doing things to raise your self-esteem, consciously making an attempt to do better deeds, be a bigger person, a better person, can't be bad.

A few days after those high holidays, at an early morning circumcision (a new baby, he'll pay dues!), I was yenty-ing (rhymes with gently-ing, Yiddish for chatting) with another friend when she noticed a piece of paper on the floor.  She picked it up and we studied a list of things someone actually considered changing about himself in the coming new year.

We were blown away.  People do this! They even write it down, they don't just give it a passing thought, change. So if you lost it, take heart that you inspired at least two people, which has to be a good thing.

(7) Apropos of Hugging: The a.m. and the p.m. hug

Cooking the gumbo, on the Adelle station Pandora blasts a song by Christina Perri, Arms. Here are some of the words.

You put your arms around me
And I believe that it's easier for you to let me go
You put your arms around me and I'm home . . .

I hope that you see right through my walls
I hope that you catch me, 'cause I'm already falling
I'll never let a love get so close
You put your arms around me and I'm home

You put your arms around me and I'm home

It's another one of those walls song! But that's not why we're talking about it today.  The song made me think of an intervention we use (okay, I use) in couples therapy.

It is a common complaint in therapy that our culture focuses way too much on sex in relationships, and that simple touch, affection, is interpreted as a prelude to sex.  And it shouldn't be that way.

Sex isn't what everyone wants.  Some, maybe most people prefer pure, unadulterated affection.  Not that sex isn't nice.  But it shouldn't be the only thing, and maybe shouldn't even take precedence over physical affection.  Not all of us learn it at home, and many of us are afraid of rejection, afraid of looking wimpy, even. But as an added relationship seasoning it can make everything feel better. Kiss the proverbial emotional boo-boo, we all have at least one by the end of the day, surely.

But the intervention isn't a kiss, it's the twice a day hug, morning-time and evening-time, if at all possible. This is a standing, full-frontal, full body hug with a main squeeze, partner, lover, or mate. If you have no partner, hug yourself, and keep the intervention, or relationship-skill, if you will, in mind for when you do.

(8) Fall in Chicago 

It's here. And I'm back to work, crazy as that feels.

See ya'.


therapydoc

*I don't use Facebook for anything but communicating with family.  If you're a TherapyDoc facebook friend, it's because I never got around to deleting that account.  When I remember the password, I'll get to it.

**We don't wear leather on this holiday, or gold and silver, either.  Why some people lost that part of the observance is a mystery to me.

***I'm not obsessed with Barbara Streisand, but acquired every song, every album, as a kid, and for some reason, I learned every word.  On Sunday, visiting my mother at Independent Living (for lack of a better word, we need a  contest on this) heard someone belting it out, Don't Rain on My Parade.  I went to the common room to hear a cabaret singer who did a really nice job.   The whole place was hopping.

Self-denial and Fasting

Remember those days when I said that I wouldn't talk about my religion? And yet,

All over the world readers are asking,

How did you break your fast after Yom Kippur, TherapyDoc? Please tell us what you ate. We know how health conscious you are.

Ah, breaking the fast. We just completed a powerful day at the synagogue, a 25 hour fast, no food, no drink. All to atone for our sins and everybody else's (Meaning all Jews are in it together. It's one of our enmeshed things we do, atone as a people).

But it's still a lot of sins, no matter how you cut it. I hear, by the way, that the Catholic priests are sending letters home to members of their congregation to come back to confession. Is this because therapy's not working? Is it working for us ethnics? Ya' have to wonder.

Back to the fast. At first I thought I'd title tonight's post Self-Denial. But then I thought, no, you don't deny "self" when you don't eat or drink. If anything, it's all you've got.

Then I thought, perhaps Self-Deprivation. That made more sense. But I asked FD, just to be sure, and he said, "Well actually, it's about resting from food. We take a break from the physical stuff. Oh, and it's about afflicting the body by not eating/drinking." Those are the reasons the Torah gives us for the commandment to refrain from these things on the 10th day of the 7th month. (Don't ask me to explain our calendar).

Right.

So we give it a rest, always a good thing. And at the end of the day, we say, It was worth it. The fast is worth standing all day, praising the Old Mighty, hoping He'll look askance at who we really are. The fast makes us tired, but not so tired. We roll our eyes at one another and point to our watches, feeling pretty bad until it's about to end, then we perk up.

We think about life, and how it hasn't been easy for us. We figure it out that easy isn't what it's all about, probably. Probably people who think that life is about making it easy or just being happy needs to rethink the concept.

We're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. And it will for everyone. The other shoe drops eventually. It HAS to. It's suspended on a thread up there somewhere, getting heavier and heavier until. . .

Kabam!

But even though life's not about being happy, I still hold by the idea that Happy Is Better and that's what we have to shoot for. That's what I keep telling all of the depressed people in the blogosphere. Let that lighter part of the brain reign as often and intensely as possible.

But it's still a sometime thing, like all emotional states. We aim for it daily, but like that song, that Porgy and Bess song, A Woman is a Sometime Thing, Being Happy is a sometime thing.

Anyway, back to the fast and After the Fast and food. Self-deprivation (you can try to relabel it as rest, but come on, really, we're stretching here) self deprivation is good for the character. It's another one of those, What doesn't kill you makes you stronger things (another TherapyDoc world view under the condition that you get therapy to work out the what didn't kill you).

Self-deprivation is the way to feeling grateful. Take away what you've got, take away your usual physically pleasuring comfort-props like food, water, AND sex, and Wow, Are We Ever Grateful To Merely eat, drink, and you know.

But the fast of Yom Kippur is really about atonement, which you do better when you're resting. The fast helps us atone, become more self-reflective. We get a wider lens by fasting, ironically, we think about bigger pictures.

And we regret regrettable deeds of the past year, and self-adjure for incredible laziness and lack of ambition, for not doing the things we'd promised we'd do at this time the year before. The apologizing to others thing can be brutal. But yes, we have a built in Fifth Step into this religion. (12-steppers know what I'm talking about). If we hurt someone, we have to make amends before Yom Kippur. He doesn't forgive us if we haven't tried to get forgiveness from people who matter.

People matter.

Anyway, at the end of the fast the prayers at the synagogue are so loud, so powerful, so full of emotion and meaning, they probably put Gospel meetings to shame. But ours are only once a year.

And as my son said, "And everyone is actually happy those last few minutes of the holiday, looking forward to food."

Chammie turned to me in the middle of the fast and said, "I could go for nachos."

Not skipping a beat, I added, "With the sourcream, avacado, green onions and tomato, right? Maybe add a pinto bean dip?" (People wanted to shush us, but you could tell they also wanted to tell us what they wanted to eat).

She wasn't so sure about the onions and brought up yellow toffee. Anyway, I have no idea what Cham ate after the fast (see, we're not enmeshed, okay?), but FD made me pancakes and I squirted real whipped cream from a can on the rest of a banana cream pie, and am now feeling no pain.

What was that about self-deprivation again?

Moving right along, a quick update on Tante Fela.

If you recall, last year she sat next to me for the High Holidays, a total stranger, a Holocaust survivor. We made friends, enjoyed being connected. I like meeting new people. And she had prayed, with fervor, Al tashichaini. Don't throw me away. (The root of that word, for those of you who are interested, is tashlich/to throw, the very same as in the ceremony some perform on Rosh Hashana, throwing symbolic sins into a river using bread crumbs or stones).

So this year (yes, she sat next to me, it was arranged) I listened to her and heard her emphasize, Al tashlichaini b'ais ziknah

Which means, Don't throw me away in my old age.

I turned to her and said, You? You're not old. She nodded and said, "I'm old, I'm old."

But both of us had kvetched about our backs hurting, so I said, Maybe not so old. And she smiled.

therapydoc

One Year Later, Tante Fela

I called her Tante Tela when I wrote about her last year in the Yom Kippor post, worried that someone would actually recognize her if I used her real name, Fela, which means miracle, you should know.

So I originally worried someone would tell her about that Yom Kippor post, which is why I changed her name, I didn't want it to somehow get back to her before I told her about it. Maybe it would upset her. But of course, one of my best friends actually told Tante Fela's nephew about the post and he thought it was a good thing and he showed it to her, and she did read it and thought it was a good thing, too.

So maybe it was a good thing.

But you want the upshot, right? A year later?

Well, it's not good.

I got to the synagogue bright and early on Thursday, New Years Day, Rosh Hashana and took a look at the seating chart. I already had a feeling that Tanta Fela wasn't going to be sitting next to me. We have assigned seating for the High Holidays and she's relatively new in the shul. Last year some of the regulars weren't there so she had a seat right next to me.

But this year the regulars were back and she was ousted from that seat. I looked for her but couldn't find her. She must have come a little late, because when I looked again, there she was, about six rows in front of me. I noticed her looking back once or twice, confused.

After services I ran over to her, kissed her and wished her a happy new year.

"WHAT HAPPENED?" she cried. "Why did they move my seat?" She was really upset.

I tried to explain it to her, but she kept shaking her head. She couldn't believe it.

When I told F.D. the story he reminded me of the original post (which I guess you have to read for this to make any sense whatsoever).

Al Tashlichaini, he said.

OMG. That's what she had said.

So I asked around, and guess what? At least one other person in my row won't be there for Yom Kippor this year. So we'll do some shuffling around and Tante Fela will get her seat back, please G-d. I'm calling her first thing tomorrow.

The sign on and sign off this week, the week before Yom Kippor (the day all judgement is sealed), is

Gmar tov (the end should be good). But we have to make it that way, I think.

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