The Sabbatical, Week 2

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I've told this story before - the one where Jonathan came really close to dying after a double-punch of pancreatitis led to a cascade of painful and terrifying medical issues. Where it felt like we spent most of a six-month stretch of life at Duke University Medical Center. The kids trick-or-treated there on Halloween, played by the giant Christmas tree in the courtyard, and visited (with their new doctor kit in hand) on Christmas morning. On New Year's Eve, I snuck in a tiny bottle of champagne and counted down at midnight, texting with my mom friends and wishing good riddance to 2013 while Jonathan slept attached to a central line, various IVs, and a continuous suction pulling fluid from his stomach. Evelyn was 3, Gideon was 1, and Jonathan and I were 30.

I'd just started going to therapy, for the first time ever in my adult life, the week before I got the call that Jonathan was in the intensive care unit and doctors used phrases like "touch and go" on their daily rounds. I was suddenly in this place where it was logistically and in every other way impossible for me to do everything on my own. So I went to therapy, and I wept. For fear and for helplessness, yes. But mostly for, as I remember lamenting to Neil, being so damn needy. It's one of a handful of times I can clearly recall when the therapeutic poker face gave way to genuine bewilderment. He said something like, "Of course you need things right now. If you can't receive help from people now, then when would it be okay to?" (I actually don't remember whether he said that. Eyewitness accounts and autobiographical memory are notoriously less reliable than we'd like to believe. But that's what I think he was communicating. He was essentially saying, "Wait, what?! You're judging yourself for needing and accepting help and support right now? Seriously?")

Of course now it's abundantly clear, and I can't help but give 2013 Chelsea some side-eye. Yes, young one, it's okay to accept help when you have two toddlers and your husband is in the ICU and you're up all night listening to monitors and alarms. It's not selfish, or weak, or greedy. It doesn't mean you've failed at all the things. It's okay. Of course it's okay. It has to be okay. And ssshhhhh, don't start panicking about how to adequately repay everyone for their kindnesses. It's okay.

It only took me, what, four years to let that sink in?

Wait - didn't I say I was going to talk about self-compassion this week? Well, I'm thinking perhaps they're related. But bear with me, I've only been making a concerted effort to not hate myself quite so much for one week, so I'm a bit green and sometimes I take the long way to connecting the closest dots.

Last week I mentioned being good at protesting. It's true, I get a thrill from fighting the man. I'm not patient with perceived injustice. As with everything, this proclivity to rise up is both good and bad. This week, I'll own being good at research. When I want to learn about something, I'm on it. So what have I been doing to try to figure out this whole self-compassion stuff? Research.

This week I'll give you what I've learned in head and in heart so far, and I'm guessing the self-compassion theme will continue for a while because I surely haven't sorted it all out in one week.


 Step One: Learning with the head

This is the part I've got down to a science. Read and research. I've had both of these books for a while, and had read bits and pieces, but this week I read them each in earnest. Highlighter in hand, pen and notebook at the ready for transcribing important passages and reflecting on ideas.

I also read as much as I could get my hands on from Dr. Kristin Neff, a self-compassion researcher. I have queued up her TED talks and plan to watch them, to re-watch Dr. Brene Brown's, and to watch what I can of Pema soon. But this week it was all about the reading and re-reading.

 What did my head come to understand?

I'm not sure I can clearly articulate it just yet, but I have bits and pieces of awareness.

  • I took Dr. Neff's Self-Compassion Quiz and got the following results: 
    • Overall Score = 2.27
      • Average overall self-compassion scores tend to be around 3.0 on the 1-5 scale, so your overall self-compassion score indicates you are low in self-compassion. 
    • Subscales in reverse order of self-compassion scores (i.e., scales at the top of this list are those where I have the least amount of self-compassion and scales at the bottom indicate more self-compassion)
      • Isolation: Frustration at not having things exactly as we want is often accompanied by an irrational but pervasive sense of isolation – as if “I” were the only person suffering or making mistakes.
      • Self-Judgment: Ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism
      • Over-Identification: We are caught up and swept away by negative reactivity.
      • Self-Kindness: Being warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate.
      • Common Humanity: Recognizing that suffering and personal inadequacy is part of the shared human experience – something that we all go through rather than being something that happens to “me” alone.
      • Mindfulness: Mindfulness is a non-judgmental, receptive mind state in which one observes thoughts and feelings as they are, without trying to suppress or deny them.
So, what does that mean? My strongest scores (i.e., closest to the margins) were for Isolation and Self-Judgment. This means I'm really good at feeling/believing that I'm the only person who makes the mistakes I make (Isolation). I'm also pretty amazing at self-criticism. I literally say things like, "You're an idiot" to myself for the most minor perceived mistake. Pretty accurate. I hold myself to an impossibly high standard and then endlessly beat myself up for not reaching or maintaining that standard. 

Also known as: perfectionism. 

Which brings me to Dr. Brene Brown, who has piles of research to back up her assertion that "Shame is the birthplace of perfectionism." It's all related. But, perhaps, there's hope? It's as simple as this! "To overcome perfectionism, we need to be able to acknowledge our vulnerabilities to the universal experiences of shame, judgment, and blame; develop shame resilience; and practice self-compassion." EASY PEASY! 

I'll save some of the details on that for later, because I'm trying to not hate myself too much for not getting all that down yet. Onward!


Step Two: Learning with the heart

That high score for Mindfulness on the Self-Compassion quiz? That's all the intellectual ("head") understanding. It's a far cry from getting it in the felt sense. So, meditation.

I have a bit of a history with the Loving Kindness meditation (also known as Metta or Maitri). When Jonathan was coming out of the metaphorical near-death woods, in the winter of 2014, I signed up for the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course at Duke Integrative Medicine. (I'm not paid to recommend this, but I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone who's ever experienced stress. They have scholarships, and it's worth every penny.) So, every week for 9 weeks I went to my MBSR class and learned different forms of mindfulness meditation and yoga. One week we learned about Metta. Riitta, our teacher, explained that many people find Metta the most comforting, peaceful form of mindfulness meditation.

In formal practice, it has seven steps. As Pema says, "We begin by engendering loving-kindness for ourselves and then [...] We gradually widen the circle-of loving-kindness." It typically involves aspirations - short phrases we repeat in our minds to wish ourselves and then others happiness, health, peace, and safety. It sounds pretty benign, no?

The first time I practiced Metta, I was in my MBSR class, sitting in a big, cold, open room with 30 people I didn't really know. We closed our eyes and found our breath and waited for the first instruction from our teacher. "Now, gently imagine yourself, just as you are. You are sitting in the center of a circle comprised of people who love you dearly. Friends, family, teachers, mentors, all sending you their love and aspirations."

NOPE. 

My reaction was immediate. It was emotional and physical flooding, completely overwhelming, this chasm of what I could at the time only register as pain. I sobbed as quietly as I could, and promptly zoned out of the guided meditation. I emailed my teacher about it afterwords and she said something about people finding comfort in Metta, so I naturally concluded that I was a complete failure and shouldn't even try to love myself. Obviously!

I didn't try again in earnest until this past Monday. I've practiced with the following guided Loving-Kindness meditations this week:


The first one there, led by Mary Matthews, has been the most historically painful for me. The last one is my current favorite, largely because his voice is so dag relaxing (it's also the only one guided by a man, which is interesting to me and probably reveals things about my psyche). But none of them come easy and certainly none of them leave me feeling peaceful or loving or happy or other positively-valenced emotions. In reading Pema's teachings on Loving-Kindness, I think I understand at least a bit of why.

There was this one passage, as I was semi-mindlessly reading Pema's teachings, that shook me awake a bit. She said, "The irony is that what we most want to avoid in our lives is crucial to awakening bodhichitta [a completely open heart]. These juicy emotional spots are where a warrior gains wisdom and compassion. Of course, we'll want to get out of those spots far more often than we'll want to stay. That's why self-compassion and courage are vital. Staying with pain without loving-kindness is just warfare."

One more time for the people at the back?

STAYING WITH PAIN WITHOUT LOVING-KINDNESS IS JUST WARFARE.

Um, whoa.

That's it, right there. That's what's been happening in therapy and in life. That's why it's finally become really, truly important to me. Not just in the head sense (can't pour from an empty cup, secure your oxygen mask first, can't love others more than yourself, etc.), but in the heart sense. And that's a pretty important place to start.

More next time, friends. Until then, be kind to yourself. I'll be beaming loving-kindness your way.

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