No Shortcuts

Attempts to find professional psychological care in this town yielded little in the way of encouraging results. But since that is what my doctor and I have determined I need, I am not willing to give up my search after a single afternoon.

I spoke with the doctor who prescribed the Celexa to me and it was clear that he felt responsible for what happened and was shaken by how badly I had reacted to what he had considered to be a “safe” drug. In his words, I’ve given him “a lot to think about”. Gee, he has a lot to think about? In any case, he agreed with me that treating what was almost certainly episodic anxiety with long term anxiety medication had been a mistake and that seeking counseling from a certified psychologist was a far more rational approach, and that if they became necessary, it would be best for me to consult a psychiatrist about using psychiatric drugs. Thanks Doc…kind of had that figured out already given the events of the prior night. :P

But at least it seems that he learned a valuable lesson about willy-nilly prescribing SSRI’s to his patients without really thinking it through first. So perhaps remembering my case will improve his general practice and there is some good to be gained from this after all. (Especially since, regardless of whether he feels bad or not, I’m still the one that has to pay for that ER visit…*grumble*)

For my part, I have learned something too: there are no shortcuts. There is no pill for grief. There is no pill for the natural stress of living and dealing with death. It is still valuable to seek professional help and to rule out physical causes of symptoms before addressing them as psychologically based manifestations of personal fears. But getting help is not the same thing as getting “cured”. This is not an illness—it’s a natural process. Uncomfortable and difficult, but natural.

I am not an advocate of faith based medicine or “self-help” style counseling for serious chemically or hormonally rooted psychiatric disorders, nor am I saying there is anything wrong with medicines like Celexa—I have several friends on the drug who do very well with it—but my current issue is not a long term mental health disorder. It’s coping with a single event: my mother’s death. Even my five years of stress ultimately all root back to that underlying fear of her imminent passing—I could have handled any of what happened to me over the last half decade much better than I did had I not also been dealing with the ramifications of her diagnosis and ongoing treatments and the aftereffects of them.

I think prayer is appropriate here. I think generalized grief counseling or perhaps a support group is appropriate here. I think talking to people and letting myself be a bit “crazy” for a while and allowing myself to take a “sick day” from work now and then when I need to spend some dealing with things is appropriate here.

I don’t have to fight this so hard.

I used before the analogy of trying to swim to shore against a current and being too tired to swim anymore—I said that I needed help to make it or I’d drown. But it didn’t occur to me that maybe I was missing the point. Maybe swimming is the wrong approach to take—with or without help. Maybe it’s better to just float and let the current wash me down stream.

The struggle to be normal again may, in fact, be futile. Normal has changed. My mother is dead and life is different because of that. I may not be able to return to what was “normal” because things will never be quite the same. The trick now is to define a new normal and to redefine myself in light of what I have experienced.

 I was close to my mother, and for better or worse, she was a big part of my personal identity and a major figure in the life I was living. But now I have to relate to her in a new way, through honoring her as an ancestor, and she can’t fill the role that she used to fill for me. That is going to change how I do things and think about things and react to things. It is going to change me—as it should. If losing a person I love doesn’t change me, than how good was that relationship in the first place? The pain is just a sign that there was genuine love between us.

That’s not wrong.

That’s not an illness to be fixed.

That’s just the human experience.

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“Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in its spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.”
― Viktor E. Frankl