by Gwen Olsen
Learning to love myself has been an ongoing task. I can still be my own worst critic. Occasionally, I allow negative self-talk to filter in but, now, more likely than not, I catch it. It took embracing the wounded child I had been and forgiving her for being afraid, being calloused, running from those who hurt her, from judging herself so harshly, and for hurting herself and others. When I had finally dealt with the pain and dysfunction of my childhood, I was able to move forward as a healthier adult. I was prepared to take care of myself with fewer self-defeating habits and healthier relationship boundaries. I was better capable of being a parent to my son and an advocate for other children, as well as the protectorate and caretaker of my own inner child. Love truly does heal all wounds. Even self-love is a miraculous tonic!
I have accepted the fact I march to the tune of a different drummer. I think that has made me more tolerant of other people’s differences. I seem to notice the things I have in common with others rather than the things that separate me from them. Maybe that is because I have felt excluded for the majority of my life. When I wasn’t excluded, I felt like a fraud. I am at peace now with who I am as well as who I am not.
Someone once asked me, if I had it to do all over again, would I make the same choices? I didn’t even hesitate before I responded, “Yes, I would.” There was a good reason. The journey has been irreplaceable.
I saw a segment of 60 Minutes about a young hiker, Aaron Ralston, who amputated his own arm in order to save his life in a hiking accident. It was a miraculous story of courage, faith, wisdom, and strength. This brave soul survived six days without food and three days without water. He lost forty-five pounds and twenty-five percent of his blood supply while he was trapped between a canyon wall and a boulder. He further had the presence of mind and inspiration to break two bones in his arm, amputate the arm with a dull pocket knife, tourniquet the wound, hike several miles, and rappel a 600-foot canyon wall in order to be rescued.
To me, the most remarkable thing Aaron said in his interview was, if he had it to do all over again, he would choose to have the experience he had in that canyon rather than not. The experience had molded him, rebirthed him into the human being he is now.
I understood exactly what he meant. As horrible as his ordeal was, he would choose to do it again because of the gifts of spirit he received for having overcome his obstacles with faith, prayer, inspiration, and ingenuity. As a result, life was much richer and fuller as well as appreciated by Aaron. He had been reborn in that dark night of the soul and would always have his so-called disability as a humbling reminder of the battle he had so bravely fought and won. It would serve as his trophy of triumph.
When we are faced with our own mortality, we can touch depths of the psyche that were unattainable before. We question all of our previous concepts and judgments for the basis of reality as we know it. We acquiesce to spirit, in other words, surrender, and ask for a miracle. The miracle then manifests as a by-product of the energetic shift in consciousness that had faith in a miraculous outcome.
“God’s Call to Loving Arms” is a call to action, not war. In fact, as I write this, I am gently reminded that war is war, regardless of the cause. I try not to be as guilty of polluting the world with my own negative thought forms about the warmongers and sorcerers (be they in the White House or in the ivory towers of corporate America), as they are of polluting our minds and planet with their propaganda.
Sometimes the best way to make a difference is to be the difference. As Norman Vincent Peale said, “Change your thoughts and you change your world.”
Shattered Lives, Broken Dreams, and Hell on Earth
As I look at the photographs, it is so sad. Four generations of women.the lost potential…the shattered dreams.the broken marriages…the drug and alcohol abuse.the wounded children. The repercussions just go on and on.
Some will say, “Well, this was bound to happen. It proves that mental illness is genetic.” I can’t help but wonder to what degree psychiatric drugs contributed to the breakdown of my family structure and its stability. I am even willing to say it was not the fault of the drugs, per se, although we all reacted negatively and had brain dysfunction following psychiatric therapy. However, I do think it is the fault of a society that thinks the dis-eases of the spirit can be solved as though they were medical issues and treated with drugs as solutions, the quick fix, pill-popping mentality the pharmaceutical companies propagate. I do blame a society whose ignorance makes mental illness carry such a heavy stigma. Not only do people suffer from the ravages of the damn illness itself, but they must also hide in shame for fear of discovery. I further feel indignant about the fact that bipolar illness is considered a serious disease, but those who live with it rarely have medical benefits comparable to other serious illness coverage. Society has consistently discriminated against those labeled as mentally ill. As a result, most people diagnosed as such have become outcasts of society (Whybrow 257). The loving support of family, friends, and the community is the only hope for a person who suffers from a mood disorder. Again, love heals all wounds of the spirit. Drugs are a Band-Aid at best!
Psychiatry leans too heavily on the prescription pad and ignores the root of the patient’s problems by treating only the overt symptoms. Few relationships are formed with the modern-day psychiatrist. He generally monitors your medication progress in fifteen-minute appointments and leaves the talk therapy to the psychologists. I believe it is essential in healing to have what is referred to as a therapeutic alliance. There must be a mutual respect and trust in the relationship with your therapist. Hmmm, that means, if mental illness were disproved to be a biochemical imbalance of the brain, then most psychiatrists would be out of a job. That might explain why doctors are still doling out scripts for everyday emotional issues that need to be dealt with rather than sedated, huh?
Any of the brave scholars who currently dare to speak out and challenge the ethics of biopsychiatry are quickly discredited by their peers, and their reputation is bashed in the scientific community. Psychiatrists are, after all, in competition with psychologists who cannot prescribe drugs. To have one of their own suggest there may be more humane treatments than drug restraint is not only insulting to their training, but it is also a threat to their economic security!
You cannot medicate away the dis-ease of a disquieted spirit. Depression and other forms of mental illness can be tremendous catalysts for spiritual transformation, just like other life-threatening illness or trauma. Remember the old joke about the patient who tells the doctor, “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” and the doctor replies, “Well, then don’t do that!” There is a ton of practical advice in that joke. Depression is a form of mental pain. If we take away our ability to feel that pain by medicating ourselves into states of euphoria and/or catatonia, then we are not able to intellectually discern what not to do that is hurting us! It is necessary to feel our experience and integrate it into our awareness in order to have good mental health. It is experiencing our feelings that make us vital human beings. If we do not turn off our hectic outer realities occasionally and get in touch with our inner being, we miss valuable opportunities for self-renewal and growth. If we never get to the root of what actually hurts, how can we ever hope to fix it? Depression can be the spirit’s way of demanding physical rest, emotional introspection, and spiritual change. It is an invitation to explore what you are doing that hurts you and to stop doing it.
In my own experience, I have found fear to be the most destructive, malignant contributor to my mental and emotional dis-ease. It may be human nature to be greedy, self-righteous, self-serving, and fearful of other men, but that is not our spiritual nature. When life’s experiences teach us as children to be guarded, secretive, suspicious, and afraid of our fellow man, then we set ourselves up to attract to us our greatest fears in life. It is a metaphysical principle. Whatever we put great mental and emotional energy into, we manifest into our reality. What we expect, we get. Caught in the boomerang of our own dismay and
disillusion as children, we can begin a downward spiral early in life that dictates the bulk of our adult experience later on. Any internal chaos that goes unchecked will eventually wreak havoc in one’s outer reality. Even the sharpest, most brilliant mind is at risk if it occupies space with destructive emotions. You can create your own nightmares, or you can manifest your dreams. It is up to you. Heaven is a state of mind and can be lived here on earth if you so choose…but then, so can hell.
Maintaining Healthy Boundaries in Relationships
The truth is, no matter how much you love someone, it is sometimes necessary to end toxic relationships. You know a relationship is toxic to you when the other person rarely contributes anything positive to your life or mental well-being. When you are around that person, you feel uncomfortable, anxious, or depressed because they emit a negative energy or are otherwise self-absorbed or self-destructive. If you find yourself involved in the drama of someone else’s life to the extent that it negatively impacts you and your immediate family, then that is a toxic relationship! People who trigger our own issues are often attracted to us in order to teach us valuable lessons. Usually, part of that lesson is learning to set healthy boundaries with others that may not be good for us or learning to lovingly let go of those relationships. It is impossible to help someone who will not help themselves, and wisdom cannot be taught. However, it is entirely too easy to fall into the trap of viewing the world from the negative perspective of someone else, thereby subjecting ourselves to the same pitfalls in life they are creating.
Emotional Cutoff
In psychological terms, withdrawing from relationships with loved ones without resolution is referred to as emotional cutoff. Dealing with emotional cutoff in family relationships can be very painful. Family members generally utilize this strategy when they are unable to resolve serious conflict. The people involved normally care a lot about one another, but they do not know how to constructively deal with that love (Bradshaw 69).
Over the years, when I have felt violated to the point of no return, I have severed a number of close relationships. As a child, I feared reprisal or isolation if I expressed my anger. So, because of that, I learned to shove my anger down inside and redirect it toward myself. When I was exceptionally angry, I would separate myself from the person I was angry with, often never reestablishing contact. In spite of all the years of therapy and healing work and after having read more than 150 self-help, theology, and psychology books, I still withdraw from emotional conflict in relationships. This is also a learned behavior. The emotional cutoff appears to increase in intensity with each generation in my family, which makes our history both strange and secretive.
I don’t pretend this behavior makes me any healthier than any other family member. In fact, the opposite is true. I know intellectually that the person who runs from their family-of-origin is as emotionally dependent as the one who never leaves home. To this end, I am continually trying to establish boundaries in all of my relationships that do not threaten my health or emotional well-being. Those attempts are frequently met with contempt by family members who wish to keep me enmeshed in our dysfunctional family dynamics.
12
Birth of a Child Advocate
“I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and, behold, service was joy.”
—Tagore
The buyout and merger frenzy of the early 1990s finally caught up to me in 1994 when Roche Laboratories purchased Syntex. I had just completed five years of tenure and gotten vested with Syntex, having survived two previous corporate downsizings. In 1991, I had been promoted to a specialty rep. In 1993, I had been awarded district rep of the year for the ob-gyn sales team. I was also invited that year to interview for a lobbyist position. (I didn’t get it, thank God!) Just three weeks before Christmas, I got my walking papers from Roche via Fed Ex. After all my hard work, I was stunned! My whole identity had been wrapped up in being the “Syntex rep.” I had no idea what I would do next. Fortunately, this would turn out to be a huge blessing in disguise. My severance package provided me with a full year’s salary, and I was eligible for unemployment benefits as well. That allowed me the luxury of taking time off to do some intensive healing work and to redirect my focus and energy into helping others. That’s when I heard about Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA).
Frankly, I never really cared much for kids when I was one. I was an only child for six years before my sister was born. It was difficult for me to identify with other children because I had to grow up so quickly in order to survive.
But, armed with the firsthand experience of how family dysfunction can harm a child, I decided to make a difference for someone else. I volunteered and was trained to be a CASA for the Travis County court system. A CASA volunteer is assigned to abused and neglected children removed from their parents and caught in the state’s foster care system. The CASA serves as the child’s voice in court advocating for the child’s best interests and follows the child’s case through the system until its completion.
At the final disposition, sometimes I, as the child’s CASA, would be the only remaining constant in the child’s case after a parade of welfare caseworkers, student attorney-ad-litems, and foster families traipsed through their lives. The system was inept and cumbersome, frustrating me to the hilt at times!
My choice to be a CASA was a special calling and was some of the most excruciating, yet rewarding, work I have ever done. The rewards of the heart are so much greater than those of the ego. Even in the midst of such despair, one feels heady from the joy of giving in this way. I advocated as a CASA for five years. During that time, I helped seven children find safe, permanent homes.
The most amazing thing about the service work I have done is how therapeutic it has been personally. As you reach out to help others and shift your focus from your wants, needs, and problems to those of the less fortunate, it has a remarkable healing effect on everyone involved. I literally felt embarrassed I had ever considered myself an abuse victim. The children I worked with had suffered unspeakable neglect, abuse, and abandonment. Sometimes, we must get knee- deep in the muck of human catastrophe in order to learn life’s most valuable lessons. It is true that light shines its brightest in the darkest places.
As a CASA, part of my responsibility was to follow up on the progress of parents and the recommended treatments ordered by the court in the Child Protective Services (CPS) service plan. Alarmingly, I began noticing rampant use of psychiatric drugs with children in the system. Children as young as three and four years of age were readily given antidepressants, antipsychotics, and stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall.
In one case I was assigned with five little children (four boys and one girl ages infant to seven years), all except the baby boy and the little girl were taking major psychiatric drugs. These boys struggled daily with their foster families and teachers drugging them to subdue their emotional outbursts. During our visits, sometimes they would fall asleep upright in their chairs. Other times, they would run about the room wildly out of control, screaming, kicking, biting, and cursing at their mother or caseworker.
I will never forget the first time I saw the children, particularly the oldest boy, who was then five years old. I had arrived in the CPS parking lot for a meeting with the children’s mother after their visit. When I pulled up, this little boy was screaming and flailing his arms as the caseworker attempted to stuff him and his siblings into the back seat of her car. He managed to escape, rolled down the window, and then bellowed at his mother, “Fucking bitch!” as she retreated into the building. Suddenly, both of his little hands flew straight into the air, extending their middle fingers. I was flabbergasted!
After reading the extensive case history on this family, I learned the children’s parents had also been in the system and were themselves the products of abusive, neglectful environments. They had met in a juvenile detention center. The father was a gangbang
er that had been habitually in and out of prison. Both parents had issues with alcohol and illegal substance abuse. The mother had been diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder and ordered to take Prozac by the court psychiatrist.
For two years, a picture of the oldest boy (age four at the time of the photo) adorned my desk as a reminder why I had become a CASA. There was a purplish bruise from the imprint of a cowboy boot heel that covered the entire left side of his face. It was a gift from his drunken father for intervening in a fight between his parents! This little boy had become the self-appointed protectorate of his mother and younger siblings at a very early age. It certainly explained to me why he was outraged with his mother for having abandoned him.
I would face a number of my own demons working with these children. Their mother would vacillate between docile and explosive moods in my presence, which sent me reeling emotionally. The father would beat the mother during drunken rages, only to have her take him back.again and again. The children were utterly helpless at the hands of their doctors and caretakers, and they were forced to take drugs that were obviously restraining rather than helping them. It all distressed me greatly. I tried to get the court to listen, but who was I to challenge the psychiatrist’s recommendations? These were very angry, deeply disturbed children that required medication in order to function at home and in school. Yes, they were deeply disturbed indeed, but they were also three-, four-, and five-year-old little boys that needed to feel loved and secure, not drugged and betrayed! They were not even old enough to understand, let alone verbalize, what the drugs they took were doing to them. Of course they were angry. I was angry, too!
