My first case

You wear mostly neutral colors: whites, grays, browns and blacks. Your face is pale and tired. It is hard to get a sense of you at first: you speak mostly of strange dreams, and of your efforts to get pregnant. Your social worker fears you may be depressed. You tell me you're afraid your boyfriend will leave you if you can't have children. You have been to doctors, healers, herbalists. You may have been pregnant once, as a girl, but your boyfriend's parents forced you to get an abortion--though no one ever did a pregnancy test. "I'm from Mexico," is your explanation. You later married that boyfriend.

I record your affect as "down" rather than "sad"--in fact you look as if everything about you were falling downward. You voice is flat, you do not cry, and you speak little of how you feel. The first couple of months your attendance is sporadic. I decide to tell you I think our work would be more successful if you came to see me more often. I worry my pressure may push you away.

But you come to your next session, and you keep coming. I say, "We haven't talked much about your history, your childhood..." and all at once, you divulge to me your absent parents, your caretaking role for five brothers, the multiple people who sexually abused you. Your husband couldn't make love to you after you married. You list your many efforts to save your marriage. Your sadness materializes not when you discuss your husband's multiple affairs, but when you describe how grieved he was at his own predicament.

My supervisor points out that my insistence, perhaps, was what you needed. I let you know you were important.

My instinct with you is to step back, to allow you space. For a while, it is as if I'm speaking to a self who's not yet there with us. She betrays herself in little peeks. Once, you say, you punched one of your husband's mistresses. I smile in surprise, and you smile too, before telling me you later apologized.

You start to recall things you had forgotten, like the "healer" who also abused you--and I'm relieved to see you scowl in anger.

"What is wrong with people who do that? Are they sick?" You ask me.

Good question, I say. Certainly something is wrong with them.

Patriarchy stares at me straight-faced. Alive and well.

"Am I getting better?" You ask.

Good question, I say. What is 'better'?

As time passes, you seem slowly to come to life. You show up wearing exercise outfits. Your posture straightens, your face brightens. You make more eye contact. You take a new stance with your boyfriend, weighing his strengths and his faults, considering whether you want to be with him. You see him as immature. I offer that he may rely on the caretaking you provide. You say Yes, he never had a mother...and a swell of power rises in you. Quickly, you get way ahead of me in your insights. I try to reflect back the woman I see emerging.

Soon you don't really need me to say much anymore--you even interrupt me when I speak.

That's when I think you're getting better.

On God

"What is it you hope to gain from these pursuits?"


I was asked while strolling in a field, talking about religion, as I am wont to do.


I was stumped. The question, honestly, had never occurred to me. I've been asking about God since I could talk. Why not?


Several times in the last week, I have found myself in long, winding, oddly social conversations about religion.

Usually, I can't articulate a coherent belief system, so I clam up and go back to my reading and thinking and secret moments of quivering revelation.

First there were my roommates, from Israel and China. We spent all of a Tuesday evening talking about Judaism and Christianity and the Chinese exclusion of religion. A couple Bud Lights with Lime (so delicious!), and I found myself arguing for the scholarly evidence to scripture, the leaps of faith we all (even scientists) make, the importance of keeping the baby without the bathwater.

This stuff has sat with me since I was little. No matter where I go, when I hear it again I think, "You're right!"

Then Tamar talks about the exquisite complexity of Judaism, Xianmin the Chinese commitment to country and self-sacrifice ("We don't matter," he says), and I think, "You're right!"


I just finished reading The Bhagavad Gita:

“There is neither this world nor the world beyond nor happiness for the one who doubts.”

"Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is."

"Still your mind in me, still yourself in me, and without a doubt you shall be united with me, Lord of Love, dwelling in your heart."

"I desire neither victory nor pleasure nor kingdom, O Krishna. What is the use of the kingdom, or enjoyment, or even life?"

"For those who wish to climb the mountain of spiritual awareness, the path is selfless work. For those who have attained the summit of union with the Lord, the path is stillness and peace."

My heart lets loose, "You're right!"

Then at a rooftop party, beers in our hands (a theme here...?), I ran into a guy who grew up in a Church of Christ, the same type of church I went to. He talked about how Christianity often takes the joy out of faith, creates too much exclusion, focuses on meaningless details. I find myself arguing vehemently that we must focus on the central message of religions, not dismiss them for their problems. I think, "We're both right!"

Eventually, I was able to articulate the glorious cognitive dissonance in my own brain. And the strange joy of living in it.

Revived!

Did the reunion eat me? You may ask. Where have I been? I do not know. One thing I do know: I haven't given up on Robo in Rockville.



Lesson of the day: we have more of an impact than we know. Recently, my coworker and I conducted groups in a local middle school. They were for families who had been separated and reunified--in most of them, parents came to the U.S. first, then brought the kids 2, 5, even 11 years later.

At the end of the groups, we did a field trip to Great Falls National Park. We hiked, grilled, ate enormous Costco cupcakes, made t-shirts, raffled off Subway gift cards. We laughed at me mistakenly calling a "waterfall" a "puddle" (FYI: a waterfall in the Dominican Republic is a puddle in El Salvador: charco. "Look at the giant puddle!" they guffawed), and other glorious moments of cultural integration.

Jason and his big, warm, culturally competent heart joined us. Even without the group leaders around, the families told him how much the groups meant to them. And what struck me most were the T-shirts the kids made at the end:

It says "El Salvador" and "I love my family." The kids each made T-shirts, on their own, displaying pride in their heritage and in their families.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.

That is not it, at all.”

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be...

(T.S. Eliot, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock)

I used to live there. That mass of columns, palm trees and sunlight is my alma mater, Pomona College. In a few weeks, I'm going to attend my five-year college reunion. Dun dun DUN!

It was a very formative place to be. Challenge. Friendship. Ideas. Food (oh, the food!). But what does that mean? A room of talented, ambitious people debating male homosocial desire in medieval literature. Anti- and pseudo- and post- and more post-. Discovering coffee. Anglo-American vs. Continential philosophy. Beer. Pink Floyd. Fake snow. Flip-flops. A thesis on Nietzche and Dostoevsky. Have the courage to be offended. T-shirts that said Harvard: the Pomona College of the East.

My thesis advisor once told me, "Sometimes elitism is good. You have to be elitist to be a leader."

Now most of the alumni I know have gone on to higher education or to service fields. And now something in me wants to run the other way from academic ego and ambition. I love having my ideas checked minute-by-minute by the person in front of me, ready to say, "Nope. You've missed it. That is not it, at all."

Need a reminder of the world's goodness?

My niece is here to help!

Bio-psycho-whats-its-name

The more I dabble into psychopharmacology, the more I am convinced by the biology behind mood. Dr. Kramer will even say that many relationship problems can be traced to mood disorders--that a man who falls "out of love" with his wife is actually experiencing depression, or that a woman who leaves her husband for a thrilling new love affair has some form of mania. But the more you do that, the harder it is to trust yourself.

Several years ago, I made an appointment with my old therapist for a "tune-up." I was dismayed. "I had another panic attack," I said as soon as I sat down.

"Well, what was going on when you did? Where were you, what were you doing?" He asked.

"I was on a date, kind of. It was mortifying."

"Tell me about the date."

"We'd only gone out a couple times. I was driving, and we were in a place I don't know very well. We were trying to find a couple of his friends, so we could all go out. I was uncomfortable and I freaked out."

"And what did you do when you freaked out?"

"I took him home and went home."

He paused, and his eyes got wide. "So you were out at night with a guy you don't know very well, in a place you didn't know very well, about to meet up with other strangers. Seems to me that panic attack was the best thing that could have happened to you!"

He gave me a huge gift. He taught me to listen to my feelings and my physical reactions, that they were my friends, that they were sending me important messages and trying to protect me. I never forgot that moment. And I haven't had a panic attack since (knock on wood). It made me feel more whole. I no longer needed to fear the parts of my self that were hard to bear. I could move toward them instead of push them away.

I still want to believe that hard-to-bear stirrings in my heart are there for a reason, and that I should listen to them. I hold to my hope that they carry a deep wisdom, not just a defect. I kind of have to, anyway, or else I'd be out of a job. :)

Please sign this!

Nisgua, an organization that works for human rights in Guatemala, is orchestrating a campaign to put pressure on Guatemala's president Alvaro Colom to work toward justice. There are pivotal genocide cases going on now, as well as thousands of human rights violations awaiting legal proceedings. It really does make a difference for the international community to let Guatemala know we are watching and are ready to take action in support of those who have suffered victimization.

Here is the e-mail with the link Nisgua sent me:

Support Guatemalan war survivors’ right to justice! This is the FINAL PUSH for NISGUA’s action! We are calling on President Colom to ensure that the victims of the armed conflict achieve justice for the crimes committed against them.

http://nisgua.org/get_involved/action_alerts/action_alert_colom.asp

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Thanks your ongoing support of NISGUA and the struggle for justice in Guatemala!