Seeing patterns from a different perspective
One evening, I was chatting with my daughter when she shared some information about her friend's mean boyfriend. I listened for a few minutes, then made a remark about his "transference" issues. After a pause, she exclaimed, "How did you know! I was just going to say that! How did you know after just two sentences?"
I laughed and quipped back, "Well actually . . . it's how could I not know after two sentences?" We joked and laughed about my analytical abilities for the next five minutes. My understanding of people as a psychiatrist struck both of us as being eccentric and hilarious as if I had antennas on the top of my head.
Today, I want to continue from where we left off in our conversation and explore the topic of understanding: how it developed in my work and how it evolved over time to help me as a healer.
From Understanding to Compassion
Shifting consciousness to insight
I didn't always have the ability to understand people. What I had, in the beginning, was a deep interest in people's thoughts and feelings (probably because I didn't understand people!). I discovered how extreme my bias was when I took a career assessment questionnaire associated with the NMSQT test in high school.
The assessment resulted in each student receiving a number located on a graph among potential matching careers. My result showed such a focused interest in people and thinking (rather than in things and doing) that I was given the number 99. However, it was located in the center of the graph where no careers existed. Imagine how I felt to find there were no jobs that focused on people and thinking! But here I am, 40 years later as a psychiatrist, thinking about thinking and using thoughts to heal thoughts--the perfect niche for me!
The level of understanding I needed to be a psychiatrist took ten years of training and practice (4 years of medical school, 4 years of adult psychiatry residency, and 2 years of child and adolescent psychiatry). I learned a lot during that time about how to use psychotropic medications and psychotherapy to help patients.
But to become a holistic psychiatrist--helping patients stop being patients--required something else entirely: compassion. And for me, Life had a curriculum on compassion that also lasted ten years.
In 1992, during my third year of psychiatry residency, I mentioned to my training psychiatrist/psychotherapist that I wanted to stop my training because I didn't like my experiences working in VA inpatient hospitals. I said that life wasn't worth living and that I felt suicidal. I wanted to pursue something more soul-enriching like being a writer. The psychiatrist picked up on the "feeling suicidal" part, missed the "I want to pursue my life-long dream of being a writer" part, and decided that what I really needed was an antidepressant.
He persuaded me to take Zoloft. It worked. The medication took away my angst and stopped me from leaving psychiatry. More importantly, over the next five years, Life taught me three valuable lessons: 1) how much I hated having a diagnosis/being a patient, 2) how much I despised taking a medication, and 3) how crippling withdrawals can be.
Once I understood the nature of antidepressant withdrawal (several times), I stopped taking Zoloft and moved through three additional important lessons: 1) there are natural alternatives that can mitigate medication withdrawal, 2) there are significant (infuriating) differences between brands, and 3) there are nutritional supplements that could correct deficiencies that herbals could not.
In 2002 and 2003, ten years after starting Zoloft and five years after stopping it, I ran across information on orthomolecular/functional medicine and energy medicine. Because of my experiences, I was open to tentatively use one supplement on one patient at a time in my practice. Positive clinical outcomes convinced me to keep moving forward with my holistic healing journey. Fortunately, I had supportive patients who encouraged my fledgling holistic efforts and helped me to develop into the holistic psychiatrist I am today.
In order to be a holistic psychiatrist, I had to walk in my patients' shoes. I had to experience the bondage that came from dependence on a pill and the body-bending effects of withdrawal. I had to release my role as a prescription-pad carrying savior and rededicate my life to a different cause. To be a holistic psychiatrist, I needed the power, insight, and determination that only compassion could provide.
I know there are many smart conventional psychiatrists out there who are fully capable of understanding the concepts that are a part of holistic medicine. They may even see the many benefits of a holistic, natural approach.
Patients ask me, "Why aren't there more holistic psychiatrists like you?"
I don't know. All I know is that it took ten years of heartbreaking, soul-crunching experiences for me to become one.
Antennas aside, there are two ways of knowing: compassion and understanding. Of the two, compassion is like the sun and understanding like the moon. May your path be guided by both.