Men Versus Women

Men are commanding

Women are controlling

Men are persistent

Women are stubborn

Men are sexually experienced

Women are promiscuous

Men are decisive

Women are manipulative

Men are ambitious

Women are scheming

Men can be emotionally sentient

Women are always emotional

Men are driven

Women are pushy

Men are altruistic

Women are victims

Men take chances

Women make foolish choices

Men are confident

Women are ballsy

Men can be President of the United States

Women are usually Senators

Men can be Popes, Rabbis, Imams

Women can be nuns and devotees

Men say there is no glass ceiling

Women hit their head on it everyday

In memory of the loss of our affirmative action rights as handed down today by the United States Supreme Court.

"It bars publicly funded colleges from granting "preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin."

Rage and the Stages of Forgiveness

     

        Forgiveness is a loaded word bogged down by actions most of us deem unacceptable. We equate forgiveness with letting someone off the hook, releasing the perpetrator from culpability, forgetting the pain they inflicted, feeling the offender has not been punished as much as we have, and so on. If I forgive my ex-husband for the years of hell he put me through by financially bankrupting me, he gets off scot free. That does not seem fair. But this is not about forgiveness, it is about being stuck in rage.

       “Untransformed rage can become a constant mantra about how oppressed, hurt, and tortured we were.  …Rage corrodes our trust that anything good can occur. Something has happened to hope. And behind the loss of hope is usually anger; behind anger, pain; behind pain, usually torture of one sort or another, sometimes recent, but more often from long ago.” –Clarissa Pinkola Estes

           

     

       What does Jungian therapist, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, recommend for handling rage:

·         Patience; recognize it; transform the fire into right action

·         Use anger as a creative force; bless it

·         Seek calm and the inner healer; contain it

·         Make a connection with a higher power

·         Forgiveness; release it

    

     How does one forgive? By the stages of forgiveness.

·         To forego-to leave it alone

·         To forebear-to abstain from punishing

·         To forget-to aver from memory, to refuse to dwell

·         To forgive-to abandon the debt.

    

      Easier said than done. The biggest impediment to letting go: “If I lose my rage, I will be changed; I will be weaker. (The first premise is correct, but the conclusion is inaccurate.)” -Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Feeling Taxed?

Happy Birthday, Dr. Janie

    Who is this phenomenal Aries birthday woman? A woman of many virtues and competences.

    First let me tell you about her on an emotional level from my experience of her for the last twenty-five years. What most impresses me most about Janie is her ability to attune to how people are feeling and offer compassionate feedback in a non-judgmental manner. She is a quick study on the power of emotion, effortless translating the complexity of  behavior into how to make more loving choices. Her insight-backed revelations, coupled with an extraordinary sense of dignity, enable anyone seeking her wise counsel to walk away feeling more motivated, empowered, and infused with positivity. Even when she is struggling with her own challenges, I never leave a conversation from her without gaining something. Energetically, she always deposits into my bank of friendship leaving me feeling like a millionaire.

     On a personal level she is one of the most accomplished artisans I have ever met. Whether she is spinning wool, weaving, beading, or knitting, she produces exquisite works of art. As a crafting artist she embodies the best of expression, communication, design and the sublime in her creations. I marvel at her talents. One of the pieces she gave to me is an iridescent purple bracelet. Whenever I wear it I feel the energy she put into it, reminding me how lucky I am to call her my friend.

     Ironically, I have never seen Janie speak in a professional capacity. As a doctorate in education, she is known worldwide as educational expert, author of nineteen books and countless articles, and an exceptional speaker on a variety of issues in education. Though I have never heard her speak, I have manned (or more appropriately womanned) her table at conferences for her when she spoke at conferences in my city.  I have watched numerous educators come up to her at her table requesting her autograph, gushing how the they were reinvigorated by her inspirational lectures. Janie’s heart and soul goes out to supporting teachers in an era when they are besieged by negative opinions, testing standards, and high burnout rates. From teachers to policy makers, she touches everyone with her extraordinary commitment to education.

     What I know about Janie professionally, besides from our discussions about her philosophy, is from her books. Just recently I gave her book, “High School is Not Forever” to a friend’s fourteen year old grandson who has been having a tough time in his school. Both he and his father were impressed how practical, timely, and insightful Janie’s book was. Another of Janie’s books I give out as a gift to my stressed parents (of teenagers) friends is, “Parent’s, Teens, and Boundaries”.  My friends who have received this book have sworn by its sage advice on how to manage the teenage years. To me, this is who Janie is: a woman who hears the needs of parents, children, and educators and responds by writing classic books on getting to the solutions that revolutionize and humanize.

     Happy Birthday, Janie. Thank you for being such a powerful presence in making our world a better place. I love you.

The Stigma of Being a Survivor of an Addict's Death

    Like family members of people who commit suicide, there is an unspoken stigma attached being a survivor of an addict’s death. Death by addiction is slow suicide. There may be a question of intent and control, but it is self-destructive behavior nonetheless. Whether it is acknowledged or not, in both there are unrelenting internalized feelings of blame, shame, guilt, and impotence. We could not change the course of the action our loved one took but we are still on the hook for it. These deaths never make rational sense, therefore, we are left pondering why. But it is the responses created by our peripheral network that condemn us more. Even if we work through the horror of it, our judgmental society obsessed with grisly details will not let us forget the tragedy. Every time the nightmare is shared with someone new, we relive the hellish story, gearing up for another round of sharing the morbid details. We are indicted by association of somehow being complicit in their death. It may not be directly implied, but every family member who has lost a loved one to either of these causes is vigilant to the nonverbal cues indicating our moral failing as the survivor. It's as if we could have done something, anything to stop the course of their decision making. 

     My friend Kathleen is a retired chemical dependency counselor. I have known her affluent family for years-I have always thought of them as a ‘Leave It to Beaver’ clan. Several years ago her drug addicted gay grandson deliberately took an overdose of narcotics rather than face another stint in rehab. He was only twenty-three years old. This young man was very bonded to her and left her a parting message in his final letter. To this day, she has been unable to read his departed note. Given her previous occupation, she lives with the grief that all of her knowledge and training could not have prevented his death. Over the years I have seen how her grandson’s suicide left her bereft with unresolved mourning. Though she puts on a brave face, I know she will go to her grave feeling a sense of failure for his death. Kathleen does not share her abject grief with many. She knows how painful it is to watch the reaction in others, let alone discuss her raw feelings about it. We have something in common. 

    Twenty years ago my ex-husband John died of the consequences of an addiction to alcohol at forty-seven years of age. To this day, even though we were divorced at the time of his death, I bear the same scrutiny when someone asks how my first husband died. Somehow his addiction is an indictment of my moral character. People have bizarre ideas of what he was like as an alcoholic and my role as his wife. Stupid questions I have had to withstand are, ‘Did he beat you?’, ‘Was he violent?’, ‘Didn’t they have rehab back then?’. What’s worse is when there are no questions but dead silence. I can see the wheels spinning nonverbal judgments which I cannot combat. The gory story of my ex-husband’s death by addiction and the conjecture about it is far more compelling than the reality. I no longer discuss it or offer any details. People frequently will assume I had been some doormat codependent wife who bailed my alcoholic husband out of every predicament, enabling him to continue his downward spiral. The truth is irrelevant. I have learned an honest discussion about this is futile unless the person to whom I am speaking has an addict in their life. It doesn’t matter, I am on the hook for it. My only saving grace is that John was not famous when he died.

     Whenever a celebrity dies from an addiction, I wonder how their family is coping. Recently, in Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s death, I was struck by the barrage of speculation by the media delightfully unflinching in its quest for the gruesome details. All I could think about was the loss of this brilliant actor and how his loved ones did not deserve the punishing glare into their private loss. He has young children who will wrestle with this sorrow for the rest of their lives. To see it spilled across the media so callously had to have been brutal for them. And we call ourselves an enlightened society.

     Currently the National Institute of Drug Abuse estimates the annual cost of addiction to be over $400 billion dollars a year. Last month 9.2% of our population has used an illegal substance. Sounds epidemic to me and I’m not even taking into consideration other addictive behaviors like porn, gambling, shopping, etc. Addiction is classified as medical condition not a disorder of will power. Then, where does that leave us as the survivors of addicts who die from their addiction? With stigmata.

Obsessively Yours

             
 ob·ses·sion  [uhb-sesh-uhn] noun

1. the domination of one's thoughts or feelings by a persistent idea, image, desire, etc.

2. the idea, image, desire, feeling, etc., itself.

3. the state of being obsessed.

4. the act of obsessing.

Immunizations and the High Cost of the Anti-Vaccine Movement

    I am from the generation who were exposed to childhood infectious diseases in the early sixties such as polio, measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, and chickenpox, because of lack of vaccines. Polio, in particular, was the most frightening disease parents of my generation were terrified their children would become infected with. I remember being in the first grade and being given sugar cubes with the oral polio vaccine, much to the relief of my parents. To my knowledge, no child at my school did not receive the polio vaccine because their parents objected to it for philosophical reasons. Every parent’s worst nightmare was to have their child come down with this disabling disease and be impacted by it for life.

    My generation lived through the consequences of having limited vaccines. Anecdotal stories from my life include a cousin who contracted meningitis at the age of four years becoming permanently deaf and a brother-in-law who contracted polio at six years whose treatment was placement in an iron lung machine for more than a year. I have personally seen the consequences of infectious disease and how profoundly it changed the lives of these two people. I, too, am also a survivor of an infectious disease: cervical cancer caused by the HPV virus. Fortunately, my disease was caught soon enough to be effectively vanquished by treatment. However, the three years I spent in treatment not knowing if I was going to have a hysterectomy or complications due to metastasis was nerve racking. This is why I work in and am an advocate for immunization.

     In the eight and a half years I have worked in immunization, I have heard countless stories from people who chose not be immunized and bore the consequences of their actions. One woman with whom I was training at a school, told me her daughter contracted measles as a child which developed into encephalopathy causing permanent brain damage. A good friend of mine did not heed my advice to get a PCV13 pneumonia shot (she has an immunocompromised condition); she nearly died from pneumonia last year. To this day, she is suffering from respiratory problems directly related to that bout of pneumonia. During the last pertussis outbreak, eight babies died in California after being exposed to whooping cough. Sadly, these stories do not make the headline news. No one wants to believe preventable infectious disease could happen to them causing, not just disruption, but disability and/or death.

     What does make the news and is spread via the internet is the infamous faulty study by Andrew Wakefield, a physician who lost his license and credibility, for falsifying data linking the MMR vaccine to autism. The damage this man did and continues to do is reprehensible. There are no scientific studies linking the MMR vaccine to autism and there have been many done all over the world. However, there is mounting evidence that autism has its roots in genetic, epigenetic, and in utero causes. For more excellent information about what is scientifically known about autism, one can visit the University of California, San Diego’s Autism Center for Excellence website at:  www.autism-center.ucsd.edu.

     Currently we have a measles outbreak in my city. Anti-vaccine advocates do not seem to understand the serious complications that may develop as a result of exposure, mainly pneumonia and encephalitis. What is even more heartbreaking is the infectious exposure to babies and the immunocompromised that end up hospitalized because of a parent’s erroneous beliefs about vaccines. Additionally, most people do not know the human and financial cost of having to quarantine people, by order of our Public Health Officer, to prevent further contagion of this highly infectious disease. People exposed to measles with undocumented immunity or vaccinations are placed in home quarantine for three weeks or more depending on the extent of the outbreak. In the 2008 Measles outbreak, we had 13 patients who came down with measles and 72 of their contacts in home quarantine for three weeks. This meant no school for children and no work for adults. Add the costs of this economic loss to the monitoring of this quarantine daily (which involves a team from both immunization and epidemiology) the price tag easily goes into the hundreds of thousands of dollars quickly. During the 2008 outbreak, many parents who waived vaccines for their children were outraged that the Public Health Officer had the authority to prevent them and their children from work and school. This is the price one pays for ignorance.

    When one looks at how medicine revolutionized the health of the world, the first thing that usually comes up is antibiotics, not vaccination. The reality is that without immunization, countless lives would be lost to disability and/or death.