Embody Mental Health

Posts Tagged ‘empowerment’

Glamour magazine’s August edition published an article “Endometriosis & Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome: Two Women’s Diseases Doctors Miss Most: Could You Have One?” by Hallie Levine Sklar.  The subheader read “As many as 20 percent of women have one of them, but it can take years to be diagnosed with endometriosis or polycystic ovarian syndrome.  If you or anyone you know is suffering, this piece is required reading.”  I, and many people I know are suffering, and so of course, I read further.  As I did I pondered the people I know with this condition.

All of us had suffered for an average of 10 years with the pain and side effects of our respective conditions {mine, as I have disclosed before, is endometriosis}.  All of us had, had symptoms going back as far as middle school or early high school.  All of us had been told by professionals and trained gynecological and other specialists for years that it was “normal” and “just part of our regular body functions” and had been shuffled off or sent home with pills or heating pads {I personally have burnt out innumerable heating pads, yes, they can burn out}.  All of us had to lobby and be our own advocates when the pain and effects became too great to ignore or just hide in bathrooms on floors crying for nights on end.  All of us only got “diagnosed” after much personal research, seeking out of the proper experts ourselves, and even more lobbying to be tested and checked for more than just a “normal” woman’s bodily function.  All of us were right.  All of us were ignored.

So, as I read further in this article in a popular women’s magazine I sighed that sigh of relief you get when you can put down your picket sign and let someone else talk about the issue for a moment.  And I thank you Hallie Levine Sklar for doing just that.  This article was full of all these truths that so many women I know and myself have suffered through.  It talked about the average decade from onset to diagnosis that went unheard for many, I would say most, women with these conditions.  I know all the women I can think of diagnosed with this condition are in their 30′s or older and all have received their diagnosis in the last 1-5 years at most.

Empowerment.  Advocacy.  Strong words with strong images conjured up of picketing, signs, and a lot of riot grrl roaring.  We often forget in the mix of it all to lobby for ourselves as much as anyone else.  Even if it means being our own champions against the “experts” and saying how we feel and not backing down when we aren’t being heard.  Even and ESPECIALLY when it comes to our own health.  I learned this the slow and painful hard way.  I spent years in certitude that the professionals in the medical community that I went to time and again when the pains increased, the ruptured cysts persisted, and the nights spent on the bathroom floors crying multiplied, all told me that it was “normal” and to go home and use my heating pad.

Finally, three years ago, and after a month spent more out of work than in the office, I began to research, and research, and research because I realized no one was going to listen to me until I had something specific I wanted to say besides, “It really doesn’t feel normal, isn’t there anything else you can check for?”  I self-diagnosed in one afternoon between the wonderful forums and information rich sites of EndoResolved ,  Endometriosis.org , The Endometriosis Association , and The Endo Research Center.  By the end of one day I had assessed that all my symptoms from gastrointestinal to bladder to ovarian all linked up and all the questions about what was wrong with me was answered…with one day of google searching.  After I got through my stages of grief..skipping denial {everyone else had done that fairly well for me} and straight into anger and zipping through into acceptance.  Acceptance of the way I had been ignored about my own body for so many years.  Acceptance of the fact that my anger, while justified, would not change the past or the responses I had faced.  Acceptance of the knowledge that if anything proactive was going to be done on my behalf, on behalf of my wounded body, I would have to do it and not take “normal” as a response to my issues any longer.

I advocated and was forced into a role of empowerment in a medical system I did not understand all the way to the surgery table.  One of the major issues with endo is the fact that no MRI or scan will show it.  You have to do a simple laproscopy to look for it and assess if it exists or not.  I was never one ready for invasive medical procedures but 10 years of pain made me want to know, and all my research made me need to know if I was right, my body was right, and the medical professionals all along my journey were wrong.  They were.  Once I finally had the procedure they found a pretty severe case of Stage 3 (out of 4) endometriosis which had, in 10 years of growth and damage while statements of  ”normal” were leaving it alone to do its dirty endo business, eaten away at parts of my fallopian tube on one side, and adhered itself to my bladder, ovaries, and bowels.  ”Told you so,” just didn’t seem to bring satisfaction.  But getting all that garbage out of my body definitely did.

Reading Ms. Levine Sklar’s article and hearing the statistics yet again, the stories of many other unheard women’s voices, and many oblivious professionals, stirred up some of my old picket sign grumbles.  I felt a need to highlight the well written article and this issue which is pervasive in the female population.  Both with my condition {endometriosis} and that of many friends of mine {PCOS; polycystic ovarian syndrome}.  Both which, left untreated, can lead to issues with fertility as well as a variety of organ damage and a gamut of painful symptoms not only for the female organs but many other parts of the body including bowel, bladder, appendix and others.  Just scour the forums on EndoResolved for a day and you will begin to see the number of illnesses linked to endometriosis and the ways it can exacerbate a number of medical issues.

I am finishing up a series on SELF CARE as an E-COURSE over at www.wishstudio.com this week and last week’s course material was about EMPOWERMENT {I will be offering this course in full and in pieces in my new products page shortly}.  Reading this article reminded me how important empowerment can be not only for our feelings of self-worth and confidence but ultimately and in extreme cases, can be vital for our health, longevity and quality of our lives and bodies.  We can be the one voice for ourselves {as well as others} when no one else, even professionals, will listen.  There are, I will say, a number of very well-educated and well-versed endometriosis and PCOS medical professionals out there whom I respect greatly and, when I finally found them, were very helpful in my further understanding of and treatment of my endometriosis {a chronic illness that will be with me at least until I have  hysterectomy one day, possibly, based on some data, even after that}.  I will also say that I had to find them myself after years on a medical journey that others were steering off course.  I had to take the reins of my life and take the steering of my own ship before anything was done.

Know that your voice does matter.  Your instincts and those pangs in your gut are telling you something important.  Don’t discount yourself just because someone else does, even if they have letters after their name {I say this being someone with letters after my name and knowing I am human, not perfect, and although I am not a doctor I would not say I was the authority on your life even if I were your therapist}.  Listen to yourself.  Be the voice for your own causes.  Know that sometimes the battles for self are the most important and need a champion.  You are not wrong just because someone, and sometimes many someones, tell you you are.  Believe in you.  I finally did in the case of my own long battle with chronic illness and although I am not “healed” in the biological respect from that ailment I am stronger for having fought and my body thanks me.  Now I have the information to move forward informed on what is best for my condition.  My thoughts go out to all the women battling endometriosis, PCOS, or any other painful condition or issue in silence.

I was thinking about words that I keep coming back to, professionally and personally, that resonate with me at so many levels.  The words that I come to all seem to be connected in a web of healing and I wanted to share them with you and see if any resonate with you in your life now or in your aspirations going into January of this new year.

TOP 10 WORDS of INSPIRATION for 2010:

1 Mindfulness:  A point of weakness for almost everyone, mindfulness reminds us to constantly be aware of what is going on inside us and in the external world in any given moment.  I find that the more I work on this concept with my clients the easier it is for them to manage their daily existence and the more I work on this concept for myself I find the same.  When I am in the moment driving, acknowledging the sun and the color of the sky, thinking only of the bumps on the road and the car in front of me somehow the world beyond that melts away–the past, the future, and all the worries entangled in each melt away when we are in the now and mindful of that experience. 

2  Resilience:  Ah, forever a key concept in emotional wellness or the lack of it, resilience is our capacity to–like the iguana–bounce back from difficulty  and traumatic emotional experience.  Resilience is something that can be widdled away at over time.  Each additional difficult emotional experience weakens  our wall of self-protection, like rocks being thrown at a wooden fence, the stability will become shakier and it has more potential to break and fall down altogether.  Resilience is critical to be able to weather emotional storms and return to a healthy emotional state but there is work to be done to get there….but, see #3, there is hope….

3 Neuroplasticity:  I love this word for what it means…although it sounds overwhelming it brings a hopefulness to healing, resilience, and wellness in every way.  Neuroplasticity, simply stated, is the scientifically tested truism that THE BRAIN CAN CHANGE.  This brings hope to any obstacle and every internal roadblock in our mind because neuroscience has taught us that any dog can learn a new trick–young, old, traumatized, or otherwise.  We can relearn a sense of resilience, find new coping mechanisms, and rebuild our wall of safety so that we can weather anything with the right tools. 

4 Present-Centered:  This words in tandem with mindfulness practices as it symbolizes living in the moment of our daily existence.  Present-centered existence means really being able let go of our hold on  yesterday, our worries about tomorrow and visualize today for what it is.  Mindfulness teaches us the attunement of living in the now while present-centered philosophy embodies the very nature of being in the now.  If we can work just on being in the moment for a brief period every day we might find a richness and truth imbedded in where we are that we never expected.  When I have brief moments of really being present where I am there are rich spiritual and emotinal rewards–but it is a very difficult thing to embody and a practice I am working on….meditation, for me, is a way of training myself to keep in the moment a little longer every day. 

5  Somatics:  The essense of embodiment, somatic means that we feel and experience things in our physical self.  Our body holds, as many people I think have discovered in their practice of yoga, pockets of hidden secrets and rich emotional material.  We can feel our navel and be reminded of pleasures and pains in our psychological and emotional past.  For someone traumatized their body becomes the triggering point for many painful memories and our body responds along with our mind to what we are afraid of, sad about, happy for.  The somatic experience, meaning a body attunement and discovery, can unlock hidden pains that talk alone could have never explored so deeply.  In every way we emBODY our feelings, stories, and aches. 

6 Integrative:  The word integrative, along with complementary, has been linked within the medical and mental health community to symbolize the umbrella of holistic treatment approaches and therapies that are being discovered to be a great help for people in healing from emotional and physical ills.  Such fields as acupuncture, massage, yoga, creative arts, animal-bond, tai chi, and others are being explored and studied in relation to how they can help us heal.  I believe this year is going to continue to be exciting and invigorating for the study and practice of amazing programs incorporating all these wonderful healing practices–I truely cannot wait to see where it all leads, for me personally and within the field of mental health and trauma therapy!

7 Yoga:  Each moment I spend delving deeper into the world and practice of yoga the more I see it as a sincere life path that seems to walk parallel and stand as a great  metaphor for so many of my core beliefs both personally and professionally.  Life, birth, death, and transformation all seem to begin and end with a breath.  In my new book I explore breath as the mark of both my descent into my trauma, PTSD, and my renewal and rebirth of recovery.  For me yoga was a pinnacle point of my changing life perspective, my renewal of resilience, and learning to be strong in myself again.  Yoga begins with breath and from there it can be applied, karmically, physically, emotionally into our practice and methods of living in the world at large.  I look forward to continue my exploration of yoga and learning new ways to stretch myself, literally and metaphorically, through this upcoming teacher training. 

8 Soul:  The soul is “the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life” as I quote e.e. cummings in one of my favorite poems.  Soul is the essence of what we are when we take away flesh and bone and mind and even heart we are soul in the beginning and in the end and at our very core.  Souls can become damaged in this thing called life and the tribulations within….sometimes we just need some soul renewal.  I think mindfulness, yoga, meditation, and just time of reflection can give us some insight into and attention towards the often neglected root of the self–the soul.  I have to remember to care for myself, we all do, as I work at so much of this mind and body “work”.  We cannot neglect the root of the root and the bud of the bud as we wander through our lives.

9 Equine:  I have begun to dream about horses.  They are entering my consciousness at a new level and it is a comforting and inviting experience to find them nestled in the pages of my unconcious stories.  I find my dreams with equines to be much softer and calmer than my other, more restless nighttime machinations.  In dream interpretation it is said that horses represent strength, power, endurance, and a strong physical energy.  I hope to be able to wrangle some of that equine spirit of my dreams into a stronger physical self in 2010–one that can defy the limitations of my endometriosis.  I hope to imbibe some of that overall strength inherently found in horses and breathe it into myself and my life in this upcoming year…and beyond. 

10 Empowerment:  In working with a few more clients heading into this year with severe self-esteem and body image issues (male and female) I find that this word has ever increasing importance in my vocabulary and the way that I think in terms of helping people.  Empowerment is a key element to any human’s will to persevere in their own lives–we must feel strong, proud, compitent, and confident in our own bodies and minds in some way to be motivated to take on the difficulties of life.  I think, perhaps, empowerment of the self can be one of the greatest keys to emotional wellness.  My hope, in 2010, is to start to create some workshop programming helping people with just this piece–finding a sense of empowerment and strength of self.  I believe that horses can be a great co-facilitator in this regard.   With their symbolic linkages to strength and their yogic-like attunement to emotions and the present they seem just the therapists to assist in the challenge.