For the Babylonians and Romans the new year was a sobering event, a time to renew allegiance to pagan gods, emperors, kings. The consequences for making unrealistic and unkept promises to a pantheon like that had teeth, by Zeus! There’ve been no teeth for a long time. We might as well be gumming to death our intentions for all they mean to achieving concrete consequences. Pledges about mental health and wellness […]
“I can’t work with someone who’s broken,” he said calmly. The young man had just read my Disclosure, a description of rights that, as a Marriage & Family Therapist, I’m legally required to give all clients. Although it isn’t necessary, my Disclosure also relates that I have multiple sclerosis; I don’t want clients to wonder whether my stumbling is about a liquid lunch. Broken, he said. Broken. I never imagine […]
Who came up with this idea, anyway? Blame the Babylonians and Romans who used their new year to reaffirm allegiance to the gods as well as to lesser but still powerful mortals like kings or emperors. Much later, in 1740, John Wesley developed a religious alternative to holiday partying. These watch night services were held as a renewal of the covenant with God. Resolutions ran with a powerful crowd. Ironically, […]
Expectations. Say what you want about weariness, family dysfunction, commercialism, overeating and overspending. Or that the sun’s been AWOL for 7 days straight and what’s left of the snow looks like it fell from a volcano. Any number of stress disorders, worries about money, and disliking your own relatives (including Mother) count for nothing when a houseful’s coming, it’s your turn to entertain, and hubby’s at hockey with the kids. […]
This post was first published the first week of August, 2014 by the federal government’s blog Disability.gov. To date it has had over 1,500 hits. As a Marriage & Family Therapist with multiple sclerosis, I write for Disability.gov, my own blog, and others like it, getting the opportunity to be a source of strength for people and their families. That’s why I was surprised when one organization denied my professional […]
If you’re allergic to dogs, happiness is not a warm puppy. Metaphors about puppies, or anything else, are potentially dangerous. Even knowing where happiness — like any other emotion — occurs on the emotional spectrum doesn’t give the whole story. The only way to really know about someone else’s happiness is for you to ask and them to tell. Thinking in deep and different ways about happiness isn’t easy. Here […]
First published on Disability.gov For 70 years she put up with his (sometimes volcanic) rumblings. He doted on her with diamonds, and was a poorer father for it. The youngest of 5 much older siblings, she was babied into being passive and timid. He was a blustering bad boy who loved control; a lifelong natural at most things mechanical. He took seriously his duties as a man, a spouse, […]
Junk. That’s the name I give to those reams of paper already printed on one side, fit only for recycling. The remains of old binders of stuff from grad school account for this week’s batch of junk paper for my printer. Like a paper I’d written almost 20 years ago: Assumptions, Approaches and Issues in Marital Therapy: A Personal Definition. Amazingly, what I believed then, minus the naïveté and lack […]
Doin’ the do-si-do’s impossible to do by yourself. I spent lots of years hanging out with girlfriends or not hanging out at all, which was more likely to be true. Most times, none of us even had someone who filled in for love. I’m not ashamed to say there are times I would’ve settled – my need for affiliation was that great – at least for awhile. Although I did […]
My balance, isn’t. So when I head straight toward the bushes at the entrance to my building it isn’t surprising. Bushes are a trigger in picturing my first (and only) experience as a new MSer in an MS support group. Recommended by my neurologist, the group experience was meant to help me cope with the way-past-due-diagnosis of my disease. Instead, it freaked me out. Walkers, wheelchairs, canes, crutches – and me, invisibly […]
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