As of August of 2017, I will have lived in St. Louis, Missouri for 19 years, having arrived here in 1998 to complete the second year of my Master of Social Work at Washington University. I note this with a combination of professional angst and personal pleasure.
Prequel to Moving to St. Louis
I had begun to work on the Master of Social Work in 1995 at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico [the 'other Las Vegas', as we always emphasized - very different from the one in Nevada - much smaller and far more economically challenged]. Since I was living in Albuquerque, NM at the time, Highlands represented a 'commuter school'. A fellow student and I would drive the 120 miles to Las Vegas on Monday morning, attend classes all day, stay overnight in a motel, attend classes all day on Tuesday, then drive back to Albuquerque on Tuesday evening. Then each student would earn gradate credit at a practicum, Wednesday - Friday, in our home city (most of the students were from cities other than Las Vegas). Personally, I worked at the New Mexico Advocates for Children and Families [NMACF].
After that first year of the graduate program, due to a number of difficulties with the program's other students [most of them were only there to get a degree, with minimal effort, whereas I, being an older student, was very invested in getting a quality education, and that difference caused some major clashes between the most of them and myself], I decided not to return to Highlands University for the second year of graduate studies. My supervisor at NMACF, Jerry Ortiz y Pino, willingly arranged for me to obtain a full-time contractual position in the agency (working on the Shaken Baby Syndrome Project, which I totally revamped, with a focus on men's emotional wellness), at which I continued for the next two years. Jerry encouraged me, though, to continue the MSW program somewhere (though clearly not at Highlands). Hence, after the first year of full-time employment, I began to apply to social work graduate programs around the nation where I could feel sufficient academic challenge. After applying to 12 different programs, New Mexico State University, University of Denver, University of Minnesota and Washington University offered me admission, and I was waiting to hear from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (they finally, belatedly, offered me admission, though unfortunately six weeks after I had already accepted a position at Washington University in St. Louis).
I traveled to the 4 graduate programs that had offered admission by February of 1998, interviewing with each of them, and finally decided upon Washington University (in large part because they offered an Academic Scholarship that paid half of my tuition, plus a further small Minority Scholarship, with the combination paying 2/3 of the tuition cost). They were also fairly assertive about encouraging me to apply for their doctoral program, given that I was a straight-A student. The graduate program somewhat ran into problems, though, due to some issues with the practicum that I started with, and by the end of that second year of graduate studies, I was only too happy to be finished with the school. I successfully earned the MSW in May of 1998. By then, the desire to continue on, in the doctoral program, no longer motivated me.
Then I hit the 'lack of employment' wall, hard. I ran smack into several major roadblocks: (1) as a male graduate, in a field that was primarily female staffed, I was often given interviews, I suspect, solely so that the agency could check off the 'diversity' requirement on their EEOC forms, with the intention, all along, to hire only female graduates; (2) the overall American economy was going through a significant recession at the time, which made gaining employment, for any graduate, difficult; and (3) I had just turned 50 and, though it was technically illegal, I was negatively impacted by the 'over 50' age discrimination. On top of that, I had two graduate degrees (having earned a Masters of Public Administration from the University of New Mexico in 1978), and therefore ran into the 'overqualified' paradox.
Finally, though, after significant job hunting, I secured a position as the Project Director for a Missouri statewide smoking cessation program. However, I learned later (after being hired) that the Board had wanted to hire a female candidate, but that she had received some inside information on the answers to the interview questions, and I was hired, even though I was the 2nd choice candidate, to avoid a potential lawsuit. The dynamics behind that became obvious when my supervisor kept demanding favoritism for a female colleague of hers, who later, after I had resigned from the program (under a cloud of dissension on my part and disagreement with the Board about the job requirements of the position) was hired into the position. Hence, once again, the agency really wanted a female candidate, and I only got the position by default. I left the job in April 2002.
During my time at the agency, I had additionally earned a Graduate Certificate in Nonprofit Management at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. I greatly enjoyed that graduate certificate program, at least in part because I had the chance to develop a close collegial friendship with John McClusky, the NP Management Program Director, and to meet and become friends with Kathryn Nelson, who had a wonderful reputation in St. Louis for her work on early childhood education.
At first I was quite overjoyed to be out of that toxic environment. But it quickly became obvious that obtaining employment, of any sort, anywhere in the nation (I was applying for positions as far away as New York and Hawaii) was going to be difficult. Between 2002-2008, I sent off over 2000 resumes and had something like 300 interviews. In many cases, I was interviewed for positions where the agencies were looking for an Executive Director, for which my experience and education made me qualified, but in every case, either I didn't have 'enough' experience or I was 'overqualified', and in almost every instance a female candidate was hired instead. I finally 'hit the wall' in 2008 when I applied for a position in St. Louis where the female candidate who was hired had less education, less experience, and fewer skills, and yet was hired at a salary which was $10,000 a year more than I had ever made in my life. (So much for the 'lie' about "we can't hire you because with your excessive qualifications we'd have to pay you too much"). At that point, I 'threw up my hands in total frustration', realizing that I had no idea how to gain employment, at any level.
In the two years that I had worked after gaining the MSW, I had earned approximately as much in salary as the MSW had cost me in tuition and living expenses, though no more. Here I had gained a vaunted social work degree from Washington University in St. Louis, which turned out to be basically damned worthless to me.
Paradoxical Success
I used the title "paradoxical success" for this blog because although I had come to St. Louis to finish the MSW (and had graduated with a 3.95 GPA, which I was quite proud about, having just barely scrapped by with a 3.08 GPA during my first graduate degree in 1978, when I was a younger and considerably less serious student), the value of the MSW, in combination with the previously earned MPA, and the NP Graduate Certificate, turned out to be a myopic fantasy.
I had managed to survive, albeit with a major struggle, the boom/bust economy of New Mexico, largely because I had entered politics in 1978, knowing full well that the Masters of Public Administration was likely only going to have value in that kind of government environment (and because I came from a family legacy, on my maternal Hispanic side, of many decades of government service and political involvement). By the early 1990s, the Democrats were no longer in the governor's office, and my employment prospects were dim at best. Many people had encouraged me to believe that the MSW, along with the MPA, would make me a "highly qualified job applicant". As it turned out, the reality was quite the opposite: all that education, combined with the poor state of the national economy, made me toxically 'overqualified'.
In many ways, I had used the application for a 2nd year of graduate school (along with the scholarships and loans) as a means to 'escape from New Mexico'. That's not to say that New Mexico isn't a great place to live, for some people, but for me, it was a frustrating experience. I had grown up in a military family and moved around the U.S. and had lived in a couple of foreign countries, so while New Mexico was a state where many of my Hispanic relatives lived, I wasn't 'from' there 'originally'. In fact, most military kids of my generation weren't 'from' anywhere in particular. And New Mexico, as beautiful and culturally vibrant a culture as it is, has had a historically miserable economy. 76% of the graduates of the University of New Mexico leave the state upon graduation, given that few professional jobs are available, and the ones that are around pay poorly compared to almost every other state in the nation. I felt a sufficient sense of frustration that in 1982, after being laid off from an employment position in the New Mexico state government, I tried to obtain employment in either Texas or Louisiana, but to no avail. Again, while New Mexico has worked out well for many of my friends there, I personally needed a bigger playground, which St. Louis has provided me.
Whenever I say to friends that the MSW was a disaster, they point out -- quite reasonably -- that although professionally coming to St. Louis was a bust, there have been a wealth of other ways in which my residence here has been an unmitigated success.
In the 19 years that I've lived here, I have:
- Founded a nonprofit focused on men's emotional wellness (though, albeit, I've never obtained funding for it, so it has been more a 'labor of love' rather than a successful nonprofit organization).
- Matured by living in a city where my family-of-origin wasn't around me, and I had to learn how to survive on my own.
- Worked with and found great pleasure in the First Unitarian Church of St. Louis, where my efforts and leadership have been and continue to be valued and respected.
- Bought my second house, which I've now owned for 13 years.
- Mutually manifested a loving, equitable and respectful intimacy with a female partner for 9 years.
- Had a very vibrant -- and inexpensive -- cultural life, as a result of ushering, at first, at 6 different venues in the city (though, at this point, I'm down to only two, having largely 'burned out' on the overzealous effort). In addition to the ushering, Linda (my intimate partner) and I have had season tickets, for the past 6 years, to the Opera Theater of St. Louis (though, albeit, they are the least expensive seats in the house).
- Greatly added to my philatelic stamp collection, because I'm in a city that has stamp shows and where I can obtain stamps without resorting, as in a small city like Albuquerque, to gaining them primarily through the mail.
- Had the services of several very qualified mental health and yoga therapists, which has greatly assisted my PTSD recovery/healing from childhood sexual trauma and physical torture.
- Traveled to many more places around the country and internationally than I ever did when I lived in New Mexico (at least in part because I now have a pleasurable traveling companion in Linda, who is more than willing to equitably share expenses).
- Had access, for 12 years, to a 'welfare' medical system that provided me with good, no-cost healthcare, and have lived in a city which has one of the finest medical delivery systems in the nation.
At this point, I haven't had a full-time professional employment situation in 15 years. I survive, adequately though, with the financial assistance of my brother and some saved funds. I joke that I retired at 52, though the larger reality was that I was 'made redundant' by the state of the American economy. But, I continue to foster my unfunded men's emotional wellness nonprofit [Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute], which has had federal 501c(3) status since 2003, mostly via this MMWI Blog and the maintenance of the MMWI website. And, last year, I became a Credentialed Minister at the First Unitarian of St. Louis, and promote (as my health permits) a Men's Wellness Ministry within the congregation.
The years have flown by! Though Albuquerque was my 'first home', having lived there for 32 years (between stays as a child, and 29 years as an adult) -- and I still call myself a 'transplanted New Mexican' -- St. Louis is my 'second home' and likely the place I will spend the balance of my years. Friends in New Mexico ask if I will ever return to live there, in my old age (older than I am now!), and I note that, since St. Louis has provided me with a culturally rich and inexpensive home, and my intimate partner is from here, remaining here is the greater likelihood.
One of the frustrating things about living here, though, is that my New Mexican friends rarely ever visit me, and I can only make contact with them if I return for visits to New Mexico. (It isn't that they never travel; rather that when they do, if they come to the Midwest, they'd rather visit Chicago -- even though, as I point out, I live here and it's a great city to visit!) I truly miss the tall mountains, the rich Hispanic and Native American culture, the arid climate, and the rich topography of New Mexico. If I had enough funds [it's unlikely that this will ever be more than a fantasy] to have a home in both cities, I'd spend a couple of months of each year in Albuquerque, with the majority of my time in St. Louis. But I can still do that anyway, to some degree, because my brother and his wife live in New Mexico, and they have a place for me to stay when I visit.
Hence, while the original, primary rationale for coming to St. Louis -- to complete an MSW at Washington University and, with that degree and my other education, gain more lucrative employment in this part of the country -- was largely a bust, coming here, quite paradoxically, has in fact been wildly successful, for very different reasons. It has been one of the larger paradoxes of my life, yet one that I greatly appreciate, for the reasons I enunciated above. It sort of addresses the "be careful what you wish for" cliché, in that the target shifted the longer I lived here. Paradoxical success, indeed!
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
Sunday, January 15, 2017
The Darkness Before The Dawn
I haven't written a blog for a while because my medical situation went from tenuous to quite bad, and I have only, in recent weeks, been slowly 'coming back up for air'. It has been frightening, to say the least, and there have been points along the journey when I, frankly, did know whether I'd was going to 'be around' for much longer.
First Surgery, Then A Blood Clot
As I noted in my previous blog, I had surgery for a melanoma cancer, on my arm. The surgery took out a chunk of my left forearm, but thankfully the dermatology doctor called the following week to let me know that 'all the edges were clean', meaning that they had successfully removed all the cancer. He stressed, though, that given that melanoma is a serious cancer, he wanted to 'keep track of this situation' with regular visits.
The surgery resulted in a major wound, which took 3 months to fully heal, and my arm still is very sore and has not recovered fully. Within two weeks, though, I had another major setback. I woke up early one morning in mid-October, and upon trying to stand up, nearly collapsed on the floor in excruciating pain. There was severe anguish in my left leg [almost all my medical issues have occurred on the left side of my body] and I could not walk, at all, without the assistance of a cane. My left thigh was swollen. Two days later, with the condition not having resolved itself, Linda [my partner of 8 1/2 years] took me to the ER on a Sunday evening. After a 7 hour wait (and they call these 'emergency' rooms?), we were admitted and the doctors determined that I had a blood clot. After another 5 hour wait, I was given an observation room. A couple of hours later (it was now mid-morning of Monday), they were going to give me some anticoagulant medicine and send me home. But I was having some major fears about the medicine [both because I have significant problems with almost all medications, and because I had major anxiety about ever having another blood clot], my internist recommended that I be admitted to the hospital; it took another 6 hours until I was finally given a patient room in the hospital.
I was in the hospital for 3 days, with the doctors running various tests and interviewing me about those anxieties. Eventually, I was given, to start with, an anticoagulant drug [Xeralto] and sent home, but by then I felt much more 'at ease' with the medication and the seriousness with which the healthcare system took my fears. I was on the initial 15 mg. dose twice a day for 3 weeks, but then they wanted to transition me over to a 20 mg. dose once a day 'for the rest of my life'. However, upon taking the 20 mg. dose, it felt like someone had slammed my head with a sledge hammer and my intestines went into peristaltic cramps for two days. Clearly that was not going to work. I called the doctor's office, asking if I could take 15 mg. once a day instead, but their concern was that I would be in a 'less than optimal' medication situation, so over a couple of weeks they suggested two other anti-coagulant meds, neither of which were satisfactory (the side effects were too severe and debilitating, even after one dose). I even tried to take 10 mg. tablets of Xeralto twice a day, but the accumulated effect was just as debilitating as taking a 20 mg. tablets once a day.
Hence, I ended up with a situation where I was not taking any anticoagulant medication, therefore not having a method of counteracting the blood clot. That was quite simply unnerving, because I knew that having a blood clot without a safety net was foolhardy and extremely dangerous, and could result, potentially, in a stroke or pulmonary embolism. This went on for 2 months; I had to wait until I had a scheduled appointment with the doctor in the Hematology Department before I could move forward.
I sank into a very fatalistic mood, and became intensely concerned about my morality. I started reading a lot of books on 'end of life issues', fully expecting to either end up medically incapacitated or dead. In my attempt to gather further information, I searched the Internet and asked several medical colleagues from my congregation about what was possible. One person suggested an inferior vena cava (IVC) filter and I engaged in some major research on that. While I was afraid of having a device in my veins, I also didn't want to die (not just now, anyway, knowing that we all die eventually, from something!).
Finally, I attended the appointment with the hematology doctor in late December. After a most tortured conversation (I had high anxiety about the whole of the situation), the doctor said, first, that a vena cava filter was not a good option, due to the many complications with the device, and that he was agreeable to my initial request that I take the 15 mg. dose of Xeralto once a day, agreeing that the 20 mg. dose, while therapeutically advisable, was not something that was tolerable. Plus he emphasized that the real danger to not taking any anticoagulation was either the threat not of a stroke but a pulmonary embolism, or the very real possibility of chronic veinous embolisms that would make walking quite painful. After an initial period on that dose, wherein I experienced a couple of hours of intense nausea each day, within about a week I began to 'acclimate' to the medication. It has now been 3 weeks, of what the doctor said would probably be a 3 - 6 months period of having to take it. He also agreed that taking it 'the rest of my life' was not advisable, in my case, given my hypersensitivity to medication -- and that taking it long enough to assist my body in dissolving and encasing the blood clot would be sufficient. I'm now feeling far more 'confident' about 'having a future' and a more or less 'regular life' for another decade or more.
The downside of this positive news, at least temporarily, was that just as my cancer surgical site had fully healed (it was somewhat delayed due to the anticoagulant medication) and I was looking forward to the opportunity to get back into swimming exercises, I was hit with a significant bronchial virus, which has kept my activities limited for the past two weeks. People who've had it say it lasts, including aftereffects, for about a month or more. Coughing, wheezing and a chronically runny nose are not pleasant. Yuck!
A Positive Corresponding Development
After having polluted all of my underwear and getting down to the point of having only two pairs of shoes and three pairs of jeans to wear (plus one dilapidated belt that was tolerable), I was in a heightened state of anxiety related to my hypersensitivity to materials. My initial reaction was to ask the assistance of a medical allergist. After running through a number of possibilities, she suggested that I might be suffering from Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, and ordered some tests to determine the efficacy of such a diagnosis. At first that felt like a 'valid answer', though I was quite anxious when she described the medically required method of counteracting it -- mainly, ingest some fairly toxic medications, which even at pediatric doses were going to be difficult to tolerate. Two weeks later, her office called and informed me that MCAS was not a viable possibility.
By this point, though, I had, in my desire to find some modality which would be effective on the materials hypersensitivities, asked a female friend, who teaches yoga, if she had any suggestions. To my surprise and delight, it turned out that she specialized in 'yoga therapy', with some recent experience with a client who was suffering from Bosnian War-related trauma. She suggested that the yoga therapy could be helpful in dealing with my PTSD issues, which my MH therapist believes are quite likely the cause of my materials anxiety.
Hence, when I had the followup appointment with my allergist, and she gave me the news that MCAS was not the cause of my symptoms [which, she said, was good, because the treatment was admittedly quite harsh], I noted that in the meantime I had started engaging in yoga therapy. Her face brightened considerably, and she exclaimed "better health through natural medicine!" She was quite enthusiastic about that approach and wished me well.
Both Linda and I have been engaged in the yoga therapy since late October, after I had returned home from the hospital [Linda wanted to actively participate in my healing, and felt the yoga would also be helpful for her]. On a daily basis, we engage in various breathing exercises, poses, mudras, and yoga. My yoga therapist, Pamela, suggested that we start with upper body stretches, to get the body into a shape that 'let it know that help was on the way' [fully being aware of the way in which the body retains its own memories and that the most effective way to assist it in releasing those memories is through movement and meditation]. We have slowly moved from the head to the upper body, and, starting tomorrow morning, we are going to begin moving into the stomach/pelvis/genital region, which constitutes the body's 'core' and is likely the place where my body has retained the memory of most of the sexual trauma experiences I was subjected to as a result of my parents' dissociative behavior. She has warned me, though, that when we start working on that region "plenty of emotional pain may arise", which is why we are going to go very slowly.
The Most Effective Way To Go Beyond The Pain Is By Going Through It
What I have learned, after 30+ years of mental health therapy related to PTSD issues, as a result of being a survivor of sexual rape and physical torture in childhood, is that the best way to get beyond emotional pain is by going through it. It can be [and often is] intensely painful, but there isn't much of any other way to heal from the pain except to release it. This is especially true for someone, like myself, who experienced much of this trauma in infancy, before I either had verbal communication skills or suffered from a quite normal development limitation of 'infant amnesia'. Because much of this occurred before my limbic system had fully developed an ability to construct clear cognitive memory retention, the 'memory' of the abuse was retained in my body tissues. And it is those body memories which I have, for good reason, avoided most of my life [due to their horrific nature and the fears that they evoke], that I am now having to confront in order to move beyond these materials allergies and a lifetime of terrified reactions to what most people might consider to be 'normal' experiences.
And it is all part of the 'dark night of the soul' that I have been confronting for the past two years. The very nature of that journey is that using ones cognition to predict the eventual outcome is the last method that is helpful; it is far better to allow meditative practices which set aside the ego and allow the 'body to speak' though a 'witnessing' process. It requires one to 'listen' in an intuitive manner, because the body, not having an audible 'voice' of its own, speaks to us in a quite different manner. It requires, a priori, that one 'set aside' a cognitive analysis, at least long enough to allow the body/mind to generate the information we need to assist our moving forward on a healing pathway. I still allow myself to write down the information that arises through meditation, so that I can 'document' my enlightenment for later review. But I've learned, though trial and error, to set aside that 'ego awareness' long enough (sometimes for a couple of days of more or less continuous mediation, but at the least 20 minutes of mediation twice a day) to allow the 'witnessing part of Self' to listen to the messages my body is generating about what occurred, so long ago, in my infancy.
It has required -- as a former girlfriend, with whom I still have a warm and positive friendship, often said to me -- "to allow the Universe to have an opinion". The very nature of a 'dark night of the soul' is that one must step back from ones intellectual urge to use cognition to answer most of the questions of life, either through extensive thinking and/or research, and intuitively 'listen' to the ways in which the body speaks to all of us. It's about 'emotional language', not 'verbal language'. And while it is not easy to achieve, its achievement is critically necessary in order to heal from traumas that occurred before the cognition had a chance to 'remember' anything, in the way we normally use the term 'memory'.
Along with the deep meditation daily, the yoga movements assist the body to release its memories. In addition to other positive and healing messages, I have been motivated to finally confront the lifelong discomfort with my male gender, which was generated by the combination of mixed messages resulting from the sexual trauma long before I had any 'mature' notions of 'what love meant', and the dysfunctional messages my parents generated due to their own confused concepts of love and gender acceptance. It has been difficult overcoming the 54 years of internalized gender confusion that was the outcome of that trauma, but I've finally been able to start re-conceptualizing my self-acceptance and, in the process, apologizing to my body for the ways in which I discounted it and often hated it for the confusion that had resulted. That alone has been most enlightening, and has already generated some serious gender enlightenment, which will, no doubt, assist the process of releasing many of the 'core' body memories.
Hence, that's a recapitulation of the events of the last several months, since the most recent MMWI blog. Where it will all go from here is anyone's guess. I know some intense memories are going to start arising from the yoga therapy; while I'm a bit anxious about that, I know from past experience that that is the only way to move beyond them, so I'm fully prepared to face them (or at least am willing to face them, knowing full well beforehand that while the experience may be enlightening, it may not be pleasant). And in many ways, as I have emphasized, it is anyone's guess and has to be so, because to 'know the answer beforehand' will limit what needs to be fully known for healing to take place. The 'dark night of the soul' has its own internal logic and pathway, and one has to allow it to unfold organically.
First Surgery, Then A Blood Clot
As I noted in my previous blog, I had surgery for a melanoma cancer, on my arm. The surgery took out a chunk of my left forearm, but thankfully the dermatology doctor called the following week to let me know that 'all the edges were clean', meaning that they had successfully removed all the cancer. He stressed, though, that given that melanoma is a serious cancer, he wanted to 'keep track of this situation' with regular visits.
The surgery resulted in a major wound, which took 3 months to fully heal, and my arm still is very sore and has not recovered fully. Within two weeks, though, I had another major setback. I woke up early one morning in mid-October, and upon trying to stand up, nearly collapsed on the floor in excruciating pain. There was severe anguish in my left leg [almost all my medical issues have occurred on the left side of my body] and I could not walk, at all, without the assistance of a cane. My left thigh was swollen. Two days later, with the condition not having resolved itself, Linda [my partner of 8 1/2 years] took me to the ER on a Sunday evening. After a 7 hour wait (and they call these 'emergency' rooms?), we were admitted and the doctors determined that I had a blood clot. After another 5 hour wait, I was given an observation room. A couple of hours later (it was now mid-morning of Monday), they were going to give me some anticoagulant medicine and send me home. But I was having some major fears about the medicine [both because I have significant problems with almost all medications, and because I had major anxiety about ever having another blood clot], my internist recommended that I be admitted to the hospital; it took another 6 hours until I was finally given a patient room in the hospital.
I was in the hospital for 3 days, with the doctors running various tests and interviewing me about those anxieties. Eventually, I was given, to start with, an anticoagulant drug [Xeralto] and sent home, but by then I felt much more 'at ease' with the medication and the seriousness with which the healthcare system took my fears. I was on the initial 15 mg. dose twice a day for 3 weeks, but then they wanted to transition me over to a 20 mg. dose once a day 'for the rest of my life'. However, upon taking the 20 mg. dose, it felt like someone had slammed my head with a sledge hammer and my intestines went into peristaltic cramps for two days. Clearly that was not going to work. I called the doctor's office, asking if I could take 15 mg. once a day instead, but their concern was that I would be in a 'less than optimal' medication situation, so over a couple of weeks they suggested two other anti-coagulant meds, neither of which were satisfactory (the side effects were too severe and debilitating, even after one dose). I even tried to take 10 mg. tablets of Xeralto twice a day, but the accumulated effect was just as debilitating as taking a 20 mg. tablets once a day.
Hence, I ended up with a situation where I was not taking any anticoagulant medication, therefore not having a method of counteracting the blood clot. That was quite simply unnerving, because I knew that having a blood clot without a safety net was foolhardy and extremely dangerous, and could result, potentially, in a stroke or pulmonary embolism. This went on for 2 months; I had to wait until I had a scheduled appointment with the doctor in the Hematology Department before I could move forward.
I sank into a very fatalistic mood, and became intensely concerned about my morality. I started reading a lot of books on 'end of life issues', fully expecting to either end up medically incapacitated or dead. In my attempt to gather further information, I searched the Internet and asked several medical colleagues from my congregation about what was possible. One person suggested an inferior vena cava (IVC) filter and I engaged in some major research on that. While I was afraid of having a device in my veins, I also didn't want to die (not just now, anyway, knowing that we all die eventually, from something!).
Finally, I attended the appointment with the hematology doctor in late December. After a most tortured conversation (I had high anxiety about the whole of the situation), the doctor said, first, that a vena cava filter was not a good option, due to the many complications with the device, and that he was agreeable to my initial request that I take the 15 mg. dose of Xeralto once a day, agreeing that the 20 mg. dose, while therapeutically advisable, was not something that was tolerable. Plus he emphasized that the real danger to not taking any anticoagulation was either the threat not of a stroke but a pulmonary embolism, or the very real possibility of chronic veinous embolisms that would make walking quite painful. After an initial period on that dose, wherein I experienced a couple of hours of intense nausea each day, within about a week I began to 'acclimate' to the medication. It has now been 3 weeks, of what the doctor said would probably be a 3 - 6 months period of having to take it. He also agreed that taking it 'the rest of my life' was not advisable, in my case, given my hypersensitivity to medication -- and that taking it long enough to assist my body in dissolving and encasing the blood clot would be sufficient. I'm now feeling far more 'confident' about 'having a future' and a more or less 'regular life' for another decade or more.
The downside of this positive news, at least temporarily, was that just as my cancer surgical site had fully healed (it was somewhat delayed due to the anticoagulant medication) and I was looking forward to the opportunity to get back into swimming exercises, I was hit with a significant bronchial virus, which has kept my activities limited for the past two weeks. People who've had it say it lasts, including aftereffects, for about a month or more. Coughing, wheezing and a chronically runny nose are not pleasant. Yuck!
A Positive Corresponding Development
After having polluted all of my underwear and getting down to the point of having only two pairs of shoes and three pairs of jeans to wear (plus one dilapidated belt that was tolerable), I was in a heightened state of anxiety related to my hypersensitivity to materials. My initial reaction was to ask the assistance of a medical allergist. After running through a number of possibilities, she suggested that I might be suffering from Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, and ordered some tests to determine the efficacy of such a diagnosis. At first that felt like a 'valid answer', though I was quite anxious when she described the medically required method of counteracting it -- mainly, ingest some fairly toxic medications, which even at pediatric doses were going to be difficult to tolerate. Two weeks later, her office called and informed me that MCAS was not a viable possibility.
By this point, though, I had, in my desire to find some modality which would be effective on the materials hypersensitivities, asked a female friend, who teaches yoga, if she had any suggestions. To my surprise and delight, it turned out that she specialized in 'yoga therapy', with some recent experience with a client who was suffering from Bosnian War-related trauma. She suggested that the yoga therapy could be helpful in dealing with my PTSD issues, which my MH therapist believes are quite likely the cause of my materials anxiety.
Hence, when I had the followup appointment with my allergist, and she gave me the news that MCAS was not the cause of my symptoms [which, she said, was good, because the treatment was admittedly quite harsh], I noted that in the meantime I had started engaging in yoga therapy. Her face brightened considerably, and she exclaimed "better health through natural medicine!" She was quite enthusiastic about that approach and wished me well.
Both Linda and I have been engaged in the yoga therapy since late October, after I had returned home from the hospital [Linda wanted to actively participate in my healing, and felt the yoga would also be helpful for her]. On a daily basis, we engage in various breathing exercises, poses, mudras, and yoga. My yoga therapist, Pamela, suggested that we start with upper body stretches, to get the body into a shape that 'let it know that help was on the way' [fully being aware of the way in which the body retains its own memories and that the most effective way to assist it in releasing those memories is through movement and meditation]. We have slowly moved from the head to the upper body, and, starting tomorrow morning, we are going to begin moving into the stomach/pelvis/genital region, which constitutes the body's 'core' and is likely the place where my body has retained the memory of most of the sexual trauma experiences I was subjected to as a result of my parents' dissociative behavior. She has warned me, though, that when we start working on that region "plenty of emotional pain may arise", which is why we are going to go very slowly.
The Most Effective Way To Go Beyond The Pain Is By Going Through It
What I have learned, after 30+ years of mental health therapy related to PTSD issues, as a result of being a survivor of sexual rape and physical torture in childhood, is that the best way to get beyond emotional pain is by going through it. It can be [and often is] intensely painful, but there isn't much of any other way to heal from the pain except to release it. This is especially true for someone, like myself, who experienced much of this trauma in infancy, before I either had verbal communication skills or suffered from a quite normal development limitation of 'infant amnesia'. Because much of this occurred before my limbic system had fully developed an ability to construct clear cognitive memory retention, the 'memory' of the abuse was retained in my body tissues. And it is those body memories which I have, for good reason, avoided most of my life [due to their horrific nature and the fears that they evoke], that I am now having to confront in order to move beyond these materials allergies and a lifetime of terrified reactions to what most people might consider to be 'normal' experiences.
And it is all part of the 'dark night of the soul' that I have been confronting for the past two years. The very nature of that journey is that using ones cognition to predict the eventual outcome is the last method that is helpful; it is far better to allow meditative practices which set aside the ego and allow the 'body to speak' though a 'witnessing' process. It requires one to 'listen' in an intuitive manner, because the body, not having an audible 'voice' of its own, speaks to us in a quite different manner. It requires, a priori, that one 'set aside' a cognitive analysis, at least long enough to allow the body/mind to generate the information we need to assist our moving forward on a healing pathway. I still allow myself to write down the information that arises through meditation, so that I can 'document' my enlightenment for later review. But I've learned, though trial and error, to set aside that 'ego awareness' long enough (sometimes for a couple of days of more or less continuous mediation, but at the least 20 minutes of mediation twice a day) to allow the 'witnessing part of Self' to listen to the messages my body is generating about what occurred, so long ago, in my infancy.
It has required -- as a former girlfriend, with whom I still have a warm and positive friendship, often said to me -- "to allow the Universe to have an opinion". The very nature of a 'dark night of the soul' is that one must step back from ones intellectual urge to use cognition to answer most of the questions of life, either through extensive thinking and/or research, and intuitively 'listen' to the ways in which the body speaks to all of us. It's about 'emotional language', not 'verbal language'. And while it is not easy to achieve, its achievement is critically necessary in order to heal from traumas that occurred before the cognition had a chance to 'remember' anything, in the way we normally use the term 'memory'.
Along with the deep meditation daily, the yoga movements assist the body to release its memories. In addition to other positive and healing messages, I have been motivated to finally confront the lifelong discomfort with my male gender, which was generated by the combination of mixed messages resulting from the sexual trauma long before I had any 'mature' notions of 'what love meant', and the dysfunctional messages my parents generated due to their own confused concepts of love and gender acceptance. It has been difficult overcoming the 54 years of internalized gender confusion that was the outcome of that trauma, but I've finally been able to start re-conceptualizing my self-acceptance and, in the process, apologizing to my body for the ways in which I discounted it and often hated it for the confusion that had resulted. That alone has been most enlightening, and has already generated some serious gender enlightenment, which will, no doubt, assist the process of releasing many of the 'core' body memories.
Hence, that's a recapitulation of the events of the last several months, since the most recent MMWI blog. Where it will all go from here is anyone's guess. I know some intense memories are going to start arising from the yoga therapy; while I'm a bit anxious about that, I know from past experience that that is the only way to move beyond them, so I'm fully prepared to face them (or at least am willing to face them, knowing full well beforehand that while the experience may be enlightening, it may not be pleasant). And in many ways, as I have emphasized, it is anyone's guess and has to be so, because to 'know the answer beforehand' will limit what needs to be fully known for healing to take place. The 'dark night of the soul' has its own internal logic and pathway, and one has to allow it to unfold organically.
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