Calling All Hands

20201211 Calling All Hands

A desperate plea for anyone facing an addiction or mental health issue and all those that love them.

You can overcome your addiction, and you can effectively manage a serious mental health issue …

… BUT you will never do that alone, you need others.

Recently I read a book about an innovative Psychologist named Hilde Bruch. She was unique in the way that she approached the care of people experiencing mental health issues. She did this in many areas of mental health but focused on one area that had actually been diagnosed nearly 100 years before the book came out in 1978. The book is called “The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa”

Hilde Bruch had a wonderful compassion for girls with anorexia. When most psychoanalytic texts of that time were condescending toward girls, suggesting that such characteristics as a desire to manipulate, connection to some sexual dysfunction and basis in fear (this part may be true) were behind anorexia. Bruch’s language was refreshingly respectful of girls. The writer of the books forward, Catherine Steiner-Adair says “Like Bruch’s patients, many of mine, who had been referred to doctor after doctor where either terrified or humiliated by the way Professionals had spoken to them: “I’m going to put you in a hospital and stick a tube down your throat and fatten you up if you don’t gain weight immediately!” “Just eat!”

Sadly, while my daughter LaLa (Lauren), worked with mostly people who were very caring, respectful and compassionate. She did encounter several that were heartless and insensitive. It does not help! For a parent in pain watching our daughter hurting this was heart wrenching.

Another part of the book highlights the great impact Bruch had on the care of anorexics, and by extension addicts. “Not only did Bruch help us understand the inner world of girls with eating disorders. She led the field in envisioning how to treat these patients. She set a kinder tone of working with them, with her beautiful way of teaching these girls about the nature of there illness”. This is happening more and more in the treatment of addiction, and all areas of mental health. It is a great step in the right direction.

Johann Hari in his book “Chasing the Scream” expresses a similar idea relating specifically to addiction when he offers some closing thoughts about how the way we may be thinking about addiction and its treatment is not necessarily correct or helpful.

He writes: “Now I could see why. He coped with his childhood by cutting himself off. He obsessively connected with his chemicals because he couldn’t connect with another human being for long. So when I threatened to cut him off—when I threatened to end one of the few connections that worked, for him and me—I was threatening to deepen his addiction. The desire to judge him—and my relative, and myself—seemed to have bled away. The old noisy voices of judgment and repression were only whispers now. I told him to call me anytime. I told him I’d go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings with him. I told him that if he was tempted to relapse I’d sit with him, however long it took, until his urge to use passed. I didn’t threaten to sever the connection: I promised to deepen it. As I write this, he is passed out on my spare bed. He has been bingeing on heroin and crack every other day for the past few weeks: he’s worried he might lose his job, so he wants to break this pattern. He asked yesterday if he could stay here for a little while, to get through at least that first forty-eight hours without relapsing. After that, he says, it gets easier. I think I understood something for the first time. The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection. It’s all I can offer. It’s all that will help him in the end. If you are alone, you cannot escape addiction. If you are loved, you have a chance.”

In every field that connects and works with human beings, respect, dignity, and love is being heralded as a new innovation. The reality is we have known this for a long long time, but it is hard to stay focused on it when we are experiencing our own pain and fear. But focus on it we must! Calling All Hands!

This weeks featured image is by Brooke Shaden, it is called “Calling All Hands”