What Cards Never Say: Mothers Day 2010

There's a teary story to this perfect game. Dallas Braden's mom passed away when he was a senior in high school. That's her mother, his grandmother, hugging him after he pitched his perfect game.

I thought, who wants to blog on Mothers Day?

Last year's should suffice. Or the ones from years before, maybe. Not everyone likes this holiday because not everyone has a mom, and many people have more than mixed feelings about theirs. I'm crazy about mine, lucky in this way.

Yesterday she said to me:

You know. I tried to access my email like you showed me and I couldn't. But I did find the family blogs and I read your daughter's and it was really funny.

My daughter's blog hasn't been touched in six months. But Mom didn't care. She read the old posts and had a blast doing that. This tells us that if you're blogging, you probably should keep at it. But be careful about your identity, okay? And as long as I'm handing out unsolicited advice, even if you're anonymous, it's not really necessary to be offensive. Okay, I'll stop.

This morning I woke up to a Facebook message, a Happy Mother's Day from one of my d-i-laws. And THREE cards in the mail. Slow mail is really fun, you know? But that's it. It's over. So I'll blog. Not everybody's having fun, is the truth.

Saturday I flipped through the week's Wall Street Journals to see why one of my patients almost had a heart attack. As a broker he manages OPM (other people's money). The investments of most of his clients flew through the window within 3 minutes as the market dropped 1000 points. Brokers across America had a bad heart day. Why did it happen? We don't know.

This is disheartening, confusion about investments.

Families are investments, too, so I kept reading and found a piece about these by a Mommy blogger, one that I had missed while blogging and cruising the Internet for four years. She's WholeMama and writes for WSJ! So I visited her blog, of course.

The tagline in the header:

Before I got married I had six theories about raising children. Now I have six children and no theories.

You have to love that.

Anyway, I'm going to quote WholeMama, not to be confused with DaMama, Motherhood is Not for Wimps.

Amy Henry, WholeMama, writes this for WSJ

Mother. . .

Giver of life. Homework helper. Life saver. Hem adjuster. Maker of peanut butter sandwiches. All true, all real, all important. Even so, I was surprised-- and even fearful-- when my 16-year-old. . .

She goes on to tell us, basically, that her kid told her she wanted to be a stay at home mom, a SAM.

Ms. Henry mentions that SAMS get no respect. Networking, maybe at the playground, so enviable to someone like me, Amy hears:

One mother admits she's considered pretending to be her daughter's nanny in hope this would earn her some respect.

Another remembers telling people that she has five children, only to hear a woman respond, "Oh, horror!"

I missed this feeling of horror. I never felt it was a horror. Not even once. For sure, not once. Fear, maybe, when one was missing in action after school, but never horror or regret.

Every day is Mother's Day, my friends, whether or not she was good or bad. She's in your head, your psyche. Try it. Get her out. You can't. EMDR can't do it. No amount of hypnosis.

So if you had one, and she was marvelous, consider yourself so, so lucky. And if you didn't have one, try to be one to others, a good one, for so many need these, good mom-figures in their lives, mentors, people who care.

And if you're working outside the home, don't look back, because yes, you are a role-model, someone your daughter is proud of, someone who has probably saved the family home from foreclosure more than once. And if you couldn't, it didn't make you a bad mom, or a bad anything. You know that.

And if you're a SAM, a stay at home mom, then reflect upon what author and theologian G. K. Chesterton wondered in 1929, when he predicted the disrespect (thank you Ms. Henry, for reminding us what the little people are thinking when they blather on jealously about the mindlessness of parenting). He asked how society ever got the idea

that bringing forth and rearing and ruling the living beings of the future is a servile task suited to a silly person.

Happy Mothers Day.

The grandmother of my children has a bunch of these.


Can't give 'em away. Direct from the basement, original boxes. Actually did sell one on Amazon.

Here are more Mommie blogs, thanks to Radical Parenting (check her out-- I just found her). If I forgot you, please poke me. It's been a tough year.

therapydoc

My Mommy's Place
Busy Mom
The Mommy Blog
Mother Thoughts
City Mama
Mama Bird
Mommy Blog
Parenting Blog
Mom Logic
Decoder
Author Mom with Dogs
A Mother in Israel
Holly's Corner
Mother-Wise Cracks
Pinay Mommie
Project Subrosa

Upshot on EMDR

Let's slow it down, my friends. Before you go out and spend a lot of money on a therapist to treat your PTSD with EMDR, or embark on learning to how to use EMDR in your practices, wait until we talk about exposure therapies in depth (next week or the week following, please G-d).

It's the exposure that resolves the trauma, the visual focus on that snapshot memory, not the hocus pocus of eye movement. That's just my opinion, but you'll soon understand.

Sorry about the confusion.

therapydoc

EMDR

Last one 'til after Passover.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

I used to think a more apt description would have been, Rapid Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing, but R-E-M-D-R just doesn't cut it, and the procedure isn't necessarily rapid, to tell the truth.

Years ago I heard of this woman, Francine Shapiro. This is the late eighties, I think 1987.

Legend has it that Francine got tired of whatever it was that was dragging her down; maybe the est* movement disappointed. So she plopped herself down on a concrete bench to watch the Pacific waves crash into the sand. Some of the crazier sounding innovations start in California, and then come to find, they're not so crazy.

She's chilling, trancing out as anyone of us might. The waves get boring, and she's thinking about some terrible thing that has happened to her.

Keep in mind there are probably better legends about Francine, this is just the one I heard.

Anyway, my version has her sitting back on a concrete bench (not far from the concession stand), relaxing. She randomly stretches out her right arm, points her index finger up and to the right, and slowly follows her finger with her eyes as she waves first to the right, then to the left. She does this several times, watches her finger as it waves left and right, all the while focusing on something in her mind's eye, something annoying, an annoying snapshot picture, one of her traumas associated with all sorts of negative emotion.

And voila! All of the negative emotion associated with the snapshot dissipates. Gone.

Francine's theory is that eye movement somehow has a desensitizing effect on the affect associated with trauma. She has determined, with her single case design, that we don't need to delete our memories, zap them with lasers. We need to delete the affect, the negative emotion associated with it.

We already know that flooding, revisiting traumatic memories over and over again, desensitizes. It worked for Viet Nam veterans. Why wouldn't EMDR work then, in much the same way, for everyone else? EMDR makes clinical sense.

I had to learn it.

So FD found his conference and I found mine with the official EMDR training gurus, and together we took a trip west, years and years ago. It never rains in San Diego, you know, but for us, it rained. They told us, This is the first rain we've had for as long as anyone can remember. All weekend long, it rained.

Anyway, there's much to learn about EMDR. It's not as simple as it looks (I may demonstrate one day) and I recommend that you don't just go waving your finger in front of your face, like Francine Shapiro allegedly did, if she even did. You could get dizzy or sick, or unstable. Just don't do this yourself. Go to a trained professional. The therapist I refer to on my side-bar has certification, but we do hope she doesn't do this particular procedure virtually.

If you're going into the biz, maybe get some officious training yourself.

The training is initially didactic. First you learn the theory and the many, many reasons not to use EMDR with certain people. You learn the particulars of how to do it effectively. You learn what to do before you do it, and what to do afterward to debrief the patient.

Then you get to practice on another trainee. To get a feel for the work, you find a partner and perform, or execute the procedure on one another. You give it and you receive it, EMDR. As the subject you have to think of something or another, some memory that is disturbing, one you can pinpoint. A snapshot.

This is supervised, of course, and at the very end of the conference you get a cool certificate.

So during the training, a trainee receives the treatment, or what we might call a very brief, condensed treatment for a traumatic event, one's own personal PTSD. That's how it worked way back when at least, in San Diego.

Most of us have experienced some sort of trauma, and if you read earlier posts, you might know that the worst thing that ever happened to my family of origin might have been an episode out of Without a Trace. I've never watched Without a Trace (a person has to protect oneself) but I imagine the show is about people disappearing.

In my junior year in high school, that's what happened to my older brother, just twenty. He disappeared. A medical student on campus downtown, he had a medical condition. So when he didn't return one night his concerned roommate called my mother and told her. She panicked, like any mother would, but remained outwardly calm. We're stoics in my family, some of us better at it than others, and it is amazing the degree to which parents can control their emotions to protect their children when they feel they must.

Except I wasn't exactly a child.

When the body washed up at Oak Street beach in late February, nearly two months later, we were devastated, of course. It took me years to even drive by that beach. What you picture, if you're me, is a person drowning, fully dressed as you saw him last, and that person is your brother.

Fix THAT, Francine.

Anyway, when it was my turn to describe a trauma, it didn't take long to think one up, although it wasn't something I especially wanted to do, repeat my construction of a reality that had happened so many years ago. I could see the supervisor worry about complications, melt-downs, that sort of thing.

But tick tock, we did the procedure. And hickory dock, it worked. I was totally shocked, but the affect, the emotion, the shock, the fear, the sadness associated with that construction, all dissipated. The event lost its power. Remember, I had had previous therapy, group therapy, and there's nothing more powerful than a good group therapy. Except maybe, decent exposure therapy, like EMDR.

So that was powerful, what happened to me in San Diego, and as a result, I still use the procedure today in my practice. I find it useful to the degree that the research predicts its usefulness, fifty percent of the time.

I think at some point, as we age, distress over trauma comes back with the usual suspects, the triggers. Like for me, all I have to do is see a drowning on television (and for some reason these are very popular) and I'm out of the room, although I'll see how far I can go with it. So these therapies might need reinforcement over the years. There's no magic bullet for trauma, not yet.

But not everybody needs therapy. (Did I say that?) As we age, the snapshot can lose its power naturally, with or without EMDR. What once triggered negative emotion isn't necessarily going to do that, because over the years we've naturally desensitized. What EMDR does in hours, age accomplishes over the years.

Depending upon different variables. Everyone is different. Our histories, I feel, round us out in perspective, determine who we are, the stuff we're made of, how we will cope with our package and how we will approach others with theirs. For some, history demands an intellectual philosophical quest, a search for meaning, the gestalt of it all. But ask a Holocaust survivor and you might not get much of an answer about anything trauma related. Even thinking of revisiting is out of the question. It's that painful.

And they would tell you they had plenty of exposure therapy.

For those who remember even better than before as they age, who "telescope", who remember things they had forgotten altogether in later years, it is likely that the membrane of their hippocampus is thinning out with age; memories are more accessible to the cerebral cortex, that place we think. That surely makes us vulnerable to emotion and philosophizing about it.

For some of us, talking about memories dismisses their impact nicely, quickly. The envelope full of sensory data is sent back to the proper file in the brain, back to storage. For others, talking is unthinkable.

As for me, hand me that remote, if you don't mind. Gimme a little control, here. Happy holidays, whatever you celebrate.**

therapydoc

I know, I know, it's a lot of intimacy. So in your comments, if you don't mind, try to talk about you or your thoughts on the subject, not me. Much obliged.

*Erhard Seminar Training, est is Latin for "it is"



**If you live in Chicago you'll celebrate a little decent weather.