Covid Quarantine - Week 6: A Letter To My Patients

Hey all,

As we go into week 7 of the stay-at-home self-quarantine masked-walker-if-you-go-out-but-please-keep--washing-hands-fiendishly experience, I have been thinking of a phrase spoken by James Finley, PhD (psychologist/spiritual director guy). He says that "we each need to be the fierce protector of our own wholeness." 

I can't think of a better sentence to meditate on and to be about as we go into Week 7. Having vulnerabilities is not pathological, it's human. In fact, as Madeleine L'Engle writes in one of her novels, "to grow up is to grow into our vulnerability." And you thought growing up was about figuring out how to finally be invulnerable... Ah-- if only. 

It's our relationship to our vulnerabilities which tend to be pathological. Indeed, our survival mechanisms from childhood, though incredibly useful to protect us from psychic devastations big and small, cease to work. Without help developing a better relationship to our vulnerabilities, we tend to become our own worst enemy. Therapy can be said to be about developing this better relationship. That is, we attempt to answer the question: why do we (both you and I) treat ourselves so badly sometimes, when what we need to offer ourselves is a soft place to land: a land of kindness, understanding, playfulness... even forgiveness?  

Why do we not give ourselves what we know we need to fully thrive in our own specific personhood? One answer to that is that we treat ourselves as we have been treated-- your family of origin dynamics, the bully at your high school, the abusers, the group of "mean girls" in junior high, etc... Those experiences work us, and without help in digesting these, we create assumptions about who we are. Hint: not the good (or right) ones. 

So we need to learn to relate to ourselves differently, and in Jim Finley's words:  "be the fierce protector of our own wholeness"-- even as, and especially when, no one did that for us. What are ways that we find ourselves inadvertently assaulting ourselves in various subtle and not-so-subtle ways, rather than being fiercely determined to protect ourselves and our own integrity as a person? Is "assault" too forceful? Maybe. But then again, maybe not.

I want to encourage you all, myself included, to practice being a little more protective of our own wholeness this week. Exercise? Meditation? Silence? Sleep? Better diet? Those are some important go-to's. But how about deeper still: Less self-hatred and more kindness. Less seriousness, and more playfulness. Less noise, more silence. You get my drift. Whatever it is, it'll be specific to you.  

And I bet that, as you read this, something specific to you and your wholeness came to mind. Do that.

We are living in a crazy time. Protect your own wholeness as best you can. I'm here to help you with that, because your wholeness is gold to me. 

Deborah