On The Whole

Who Cares? Self-care for caregivers program at Sewanee TN retreat center June 2016

In April 2014 I moved my mother out of a nursing home, where she was miserable aftera badly-healed broken hip confined her to bed and wheelchair, to live with me in Nashville, Tennessee. Since then we've had many challenges, and as many blessings. Caring for her as she approaches her 92nd birthday helps me remember each day is a gift.

But it can be exhausting to juggle caregiving with other responsibilities, and it's easy to let self-care fall by the wayside.

That was recently brought home to me again after my mother spent three days in a hospital with me parked in a recliner beside her. My focus was on her and her doctors and nurses and patient care technicians and tests, and only after getting her settled back home again and getting her prescription antibiotics and arranging for followup care did I realize that during the past few days I'd forgotten to take my own daily vitamin D and other supplements.

So when Michele Tamaren, co-author of ExtraOrdinary: An End of Life Story Without End, reminded me of the program she will be offering for caregivers this June in Sewanee, TN, I knew I wanted to help spread the word.

Michele will present "Who Cares? Caring for Ourselves as We Care for Others" June 10-12, 2016 at St. Mary's retreat center. The program offers a spiritual and scientific pathway to wholeness and healing centered in the research-based field of Positive Psychology.

From the program description:

Who Cares? offers opportunities to explore the healing power of positive emotions, loving relationships, humor, healthy eating, rest, relaxation, meditation, mindfulness, rest, relaxation, meditation, mindfulness, music, movement, and more. As we explore the studies on health and happiness, we will listen to out own stories and the whispers within. The voice of God, our intuition, and current research will lift us to care for ourselves, as we compassionately tend to those in our care.

The program is designed for clergy, chaplains, spiritual directors, social workers, nurses, physicians, psychologists, counselors, and professional and family caregivers. A certificate of completion and 10 continuing education hours will be offered upon completion. Click here for more information and to register.

Michele Tamaren is a spiritual director, author, inspirational speaker, and positive psychology and life coach. For more than 25 years she was a special educator working with youngsters challenged by physical, learning, neurological and behavioral disorders. Her book ExtraOrdinary, a spiritual memoir and love story about a man who became a healer and teacher in his mid-nineties as his own life was coming to completion, was published by my Pearlsong Press in 2012.

I remember editing ExtraOrdinary and readying it for publication while at my mother's bedside in another hospital, after surgery to repair several compression fractures in her spine. After rehab she was in an assisted living facility for a couple of years. I gave her a copy of ExtraOrdinary  when it was published, and she and another resident took turns reading it to each other.

Who Cares? is being held the week my mother turns 92 and I turn 60, so we'll probably be spending time with family that weekend. But I'll be there in spirit with other professional and family caregivers, seeking balance in caring for self while caring for others.

Related articles

Pearlsong author Michele Tamaren to lead program on happiness & well-being February-March 2015

Publisher's Note: A Year of Challenges and Changes

Deconstructing a Body of Lies -- Review of Harriet Brown's Body of Truth: How Science, History and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight -- and What We Can Do About It

"Each of us thinks our obsession with weight and body image is ours alone.
We blame ourselves for not being thin enough, sexy enough, shaped just the right way. We believe we’re supposed to
fit the standards of the day.
And if we’re not in the 1 percent of
the population born with the body du jour,
we feel it’s our fault.
We believe we can get there if only
we eat less, eat differently, work out more,
go vegan, throw up what we eat,
give up gluten, take laxatives, fast,
give up sugar, fill in the blank.
But the reality couldn’t possibly get any clearer: This is not a personal issue.
This is not about your weakness
or my laziness
or her lack of self-discipline.
This obsession is bigger than all of us.
It’s become epidemic, endemic,
and pandemic.
It comes from all around us,
but it’s dug its way deep under our skins,
and it festers there."

Harriet Brown
Body of Truth

Implicit in the title of Harriet Brown's new book, Body of Truth: How Science, History and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight -- and What We Can Do About It, is the idea that there is a body of lies. As a clinical psychologist who has been following the research on weight and health for more than 30 years, I can tell you that the framework on which purported weight loss "treatments" are hung is scientifically shaky and ethically problematic. Body of Truth does an excellent job documenting the fat hatred, diseasemongering and profiteering feeding obsessions with weight and the conflation of weight and health.

Brown teaches magazine journalism at Syracuse University. She is also the author of Brave Girl Eating, which chronicles her family's fight to save her daughter from anorexia nervosa. In Body of Truth Brown reports that a sixth-grade "wellness" class triggered her daughter's eating disorder -- and that when her daughter was a gaunt 14-year-old appearing near death, women came up to her on the street and asked for diet tips.

Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, according to the National Association of Anorexia and Associated Disorders (ANAD).  But government agencies and the medical establishment are focused on waging a "war on obesity" -- a war being advised by those who profit from selling weight-loss drugs, surgeries and devices,  diet programs and diet books, and so-called workplace "wellness" programs, as well as researchers and agencies whose funding is tied to perceived public health threats. (Brown was told by many researchers that "the easiest way to get a study funded now is to include the word 'obesity' in the proposal. Even better, cite 'childhood obesity.'")

Body of Truth skewers the myths and misconceptions conflating weight and health, including the assumption that fat is unhealthy.

"We have fat on our bodies, all of us; you can't be alive without it.
More than half your brain is made of fatty acids; without enough fat,
your brain deteriorates, leaving you vulnerable to ailments
from depression and anxiety to fatigue and cognitive decline."

Another misconception is that there actually is an "obesity epidemic." The average American is only about 20 pounds heavier and 1 inch taller than in 1960, Brown notes, and in contrast to the fearmongering, "the rates of overweight and obesity leveled off around 2000."

If you still assume that weight gain and weight loss are simple matters of eating less and exercising more, or calories in vs. calories out, you may be surprised by Brown's reporting of the additional factors associated with weight gain and Type II diabetes, the latter frequently -- and erroneously -- assumed to be due to weight gain, rather than weight gain in some people being a symptom of insulin resistance. Such factors include persistent organic pollutants, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, psychiatric drugs, and artificial sweeteners. Yes, you read that right -- recent research suggests that artificial sweeteners (which, of course, are pitched as weight-loss aids), alter the bacteria in our guts, which in turn alters metabolism and can lead to weight gain.

By the way, while people have gotten somewhat heavier (and, remember, taller) in recent decades, guess what? Animals have, too. Not just family pets, either -- lab animals, whose diet and activity are carefully regulated, and wild animals have been found to be heavier now than they were a few decades ago.  Scientists suspect these animals' weights are being affected by environment toxins, viruses, and other factors besides overeating or inactivity -- just like human beings.

Body of Truth should be on the shelves or the e-reading devices of all those who have been told they should lose, watch, or manage their weight. Or better still, all those who police others' weight or diet or exercise. Fat activists and proponents of the weight-neutral Health At Every Size approach (which Brown endorses) should add Body of Truth to their arsenal of weapons for fighting external and internal fat hatred.

You can point to Body of Truth for Brown's debunking of the often-cited "obesity epidemic" claim that today's children will have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. You may also find useful her explanation of why the words "overweight" and "obese" are problematic:

"The word overweight, for example, implies excess; to be overweight suggests
you're over the 'right' weight. The word obese, from the Latin obesus,
or 'having eaten until fat,' handily conveys both a clinical atmosphere
and that oh-so-familiar sense of moral judgment."

Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight --and What We Can Do About It is available in hardcover from the usual retailers (including BookDepository.com, a store whose free shipping worldwide may be of interest to those outside the U.S.) and in ebook formats including Kindle and Nook. Get a copy now!

"We experience the world through our bodies, our skin and neurons and nerves.
Other people see us only and always in the context of our flesh and bone and blood.
How can you feel good about your essential self when you hate what contains it?"

Harriet Brown
Body of Truth

Loving Kindness for survivors of brain injury -- and others

Louise Mathewson, author of the poetic memoir A Life Interrupted: Living with Brain Injury, has written and posted a loving kindness meditation in honor of Brain Injury Awareness month.

I think it can be appreciated by survivors of any kind of trauma or life challenges. I certainly can resonate with it!

Read & share it here.

Related articles

A Life Interrupted: Living with Brain Injury author Louise Mathewson interviewed on Brain Injury Radio

Take a ride into The Forbidden Zone with a sexy Valkyrie

Review of Gravitas: Valkyrie in the Forbidden Zone by Lynne Murray

In Lynne Murray's new science fiction / fantasy novel Gravitas: Valkyrie in the Forbidden Zone, Earth has been declared off-limits to extraterrestrials (and interdimensionals) due to its human population's habit of "spinning religions around strange visitors from other planets."

One such planet has been nicknamed Valkyrie.  Its people are "broad-framed and powerfully built, taller and stronger than most humanoid races," says the novel's heroine, Val-Sybilla. "Size is much admired on our world."

So are women. Valkyrie has a matriarchal society in which women are expected to have many husbands to help them stabilize their Gravitas, the powerful pheromone the women manifest. Excess Gravitas is quietly sold to certain traders for use in an aphrodisiac that affects most humanoid species. The chemical is so potent that even a small amount released in an open market would wreak havoc.

Val-Sybilla is carrying her planet's secret export of Gravitas to a conference and bazaar near Earth when she accidentally falls through a portal and is stranded on the planet whose mainstream culture no longer worships the Great Mother. Did I mention she happened to be naked when she fell?

I'm tempted to say more about Val-Sybilla's adventures on Earth, and her culture, but won't in order to prevent spoilers. Suffice it to say that Gravitas is a fun read, heartily recommended. It's not Fifty Shades of Fat -- there's less sex than I expected from a novel centering around a pheromone so powerful it could be used as a weapon -- but that's fine by me.

I'm hoping Lynne Murray is writing more novels and stories set in Val-Sybilla's universe. I'd love to spend more time in the Valkyrie Zone!

Gravitas: Valkyrie in the Forbidden Zone is available as a Kindle ebook and for the Nook. Links to purchase other ebook formats, including a link to the iTunes/iBook listing, are available from Draft2Digital here.

 Enjoy a musical ride below courtesy of Richard Wagner and the Berlin Philharmonic. And, of course, YouTube.

Snow days, multiple identity, and ancillary gender

While "snowed in" this past week I read the novel Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. I may be coming late to the party in commenting on this Hugo and Nebula award-winning science fiction space opera, but can't resist....while trying to refrain from spoilers.

The main character (or protagonist, to any other former English major) in the novel is an artificial intelligence (AI). At the beginning of the book the protagonist is occupying a single human body, one of myriad over millennia that were captured by imperial Radch forces, brainwashed, augmented, implanted and enslaved as ancillary soldier-and-servant extensions of the starship Justice of Toren.  

How Justice of Toren's consciousness and identity shifted from multiple to singular, and her mission as the individual ancillary traverses an icy planet and encounters a human officer from her distant past,  is revealed as the book shifts back and forth from present to recent past. The reader becomes aware that multiple identity and dissociation of identity comes into play for more than Justice of Toren. As a psychologist and therapist with expertise in dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder, that interested me. But that's not what interests me most about Ancillary Justice. What I find most fascinating about the novel is how it employs gender and pronouns.

Justice of Toren's Radchaai culture and language is not gendered. That's not to say the species (which considers itself human) is not gendered -- just that the culture and language do not notice or refer to gender. Instead, they (and author Ann Leckie) use feminine pronouns and terms for everyone. Every person is referred to as "she," described as "daughter of ____ house" or clan or the like, with little or no indication of whether the body of the person is male or female.

As a result I  went through the book imagining most of the characters as female, which I found pleasantly different from most other SF I've read. (Joan Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean being a notable exception.) However, at times I had to remind myself that earlier in the book character X was referred to as having a male body and thus was physically male even though the character was referred to as "she" throughout the book and sometimes acted and was treated like a damsel in distress. My perception of the gender of the singular Justice of Toren identity also shifted from female to male to neutral depending on the character's thoughts and actions. All of which made me consider my own assumptions and stereotypes about gender.

After finishing the book, I was still uncertain -- and curious -- about some major characters' gender.  So of course I searched online for info about Ancillary Justice and gender.

In this interview author Ann Leckie says that while she was writing Ancillary Justice she mentally assigned a gender to some characters but not others, and that even characters whom she started thinking of as one gender "ended up being a bit...slippery by the time I was done writing." Leckie likes that there's discussion about the characters whose gender is ambiguous, and has declined to say the genders she initially envisioned. She reveals that at least one central character  started out as gendered in her mind and then became more gender-fluid as her writing, and the story, progressed.

Leckie was asked to change the "confusing" pronouns before the book was published by Orbit. She refused. (Yay, Leckie!) The book went on to win Hugo and Nebula awards, and Orbit has signed her to write two more novels in the same gender-ambiguous Radchaai universe. 

And amazingly, Ancillary Justice has been optioned for TV by the production company and studio who created The Killing and Burn Notice.  Before agreeing to the deal Leckie made clear her concerns about maintaining the book's approach to gender, and "was very pleased at their response." Of course an option doesn't mean a series or film will actually happen, but it's fun to think about how gender might be portrayed -- and, I hope, a lot of female and gender ambiguous actors employed -- in any subsequent series or film, and it's nice that Leckie's vision is respected.

If the gender ambiguity in Ancillary Justice interests you, you might also want to check out John Scalzi's 2014 SF novel Lock In, in which the protagonist's gender is not specified.  

Touchpoints in personal and societal development

On the Pearlsong Press blog just now, I shared noted pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton's praise for the book Soul Mothers' Wisdom: Seven Insights for the Single Mother, which Pearlsong is publishing in March 2015.  While researching Brazelton to update my knowledge of him, I came across this May 2013 USA Today interview in which he discusses his concept of touchpoints in development (emphases mine):

"When we were being trained as pediatricians, we were taught that babies develop in a straight line upward, but I realized they develop in spurts and then leveling-off periods. Just before each spurt, there is a period of regression when the child falls apart (the touchpoint) and the family falls apart. The child is irritable and won't eat or sleep.

"For example, just before children walk, they wake up at night and they scream during the day. The falling apart is a time the child is energizing himself to take the next step. These are predictable times and they are opportunities for helping parents understand the next step of development. They can see the falling apart as something positive instead of negative."

I don't have children, and as a psychologist don't work with young children, so I can't speak from experience about this process in the way Brazelton applies it. But I can certainly see it applying in adult development, and in my own life.

Many times it's right after I've experienced a period of overwhelm and things falling apart (cue memory of Yeats' "The Second Coming": "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold") that I realize some shift in  awareness -- another step in personal healing or growth, a reorganization of my psyche around a different -- or larger -- perspective.I can see this happening in the world at large sometimes as well, with a period of upheaval following (or leading to) some cultural advance.

Ultimately I may be appreciative of the shift in consciousness while still disheartened by the events preceding it.

What about you?