March 2021 – Spring is arriving (at least on the West Coast) with a sense of hopefulness

sense of hopefulnessAfter the horrendously dreadful days of 2020 and the recently attained milestone of 500,000 Covid deaths, topping the combined totals of WWI, WWII, and Vietnam, we are devastated by a monumental sense of loss. We mourn and grieve for the families with empty beds, vacant places at the dinner table, shrouded in memories of the departed; the brothers and sisters, best friends and lovers who have left us prematurely. We miss our elders whom we cherished, who did not survive.

We could scream in pain, but we have been crushed under its weight. Our energy is still low. We have been plagued with chronic anxiety, panic attacks, smoldering depression that wakes us up in the night and pings us with insomnia. There is a name now for the nightly battle, “Covid insomnia”. These are our hardships.

Unemployment, loss of income, homes forfeited. We battle to stay afloat and to maintain a sense of hope. Teens have struggled with rising suicide rates. Children have contended with a strangely unnatural world.

We mourn our isolation, our desire to hug and be hugged by our friends and associates, as a natural course of relatability that had been our lives. We have lived in a nostalgic remembrance of things past: the trips we took, the fun we had on those trips, places, people, events – all vivid in our minds as we have so long sheltered in place, stuck in the now.

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February 2021 – Challenges and Progress with Vaccination

Progress with Vaccination

The roll-out of the vaccines has been arduous and grueling due to our past president’s negligence in procuring sufficient vaccines, his cavalier attitude, toward the virus, and blatant disregard for the mounting deaths. Most people have had a hellacious struggle spending infinitely long hours on the phone, investigating, and hunting for sites to procure a vaccine.

Biden is doing everything he can to enable sufficient doses to vaccinate as many people as possible.

Across the country, the death toll of the coronavirus is horrific — and it’s worse than many experts expected. (Dudding, Payadue, 2021) Now we are threatened with serious variants that have entered the US from many parts of the world. We are looking at adding booster shots on top of 2 doses. We are running as fast as we can to outfox the virus lethality, racing to get to the other side. (Zraick, 2021) The variant from South Africa, B.1.351, may also blunt the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Novavax. It has spread to at least 31 countries, including the U.S., where the first two known cases of the variant were identified in South Carolina this week. (Tumin, Bogert, 2021)

We are beginning to make progress with vaccination:

In the 2/1/2021 NYT Morning edition, Leonhardt says, “Here is a key fact: All five vaccines with public results have eliminated Covid-19 Deaths. They have drastically reduced hospitalizations.”
Beste-Potenzmittel.com
“Of the roughly 75,000 people that have received one of the five in a research trial, not a single person has died from Covid and only a few people appear to have been hospitalized. None have remained hospitalized 28 days after receiving the shot.” (2021, Leonhardt)

Our World in Data (2021) says “To bring this pandemic to an end, a large share of the world needs to be immune to the virus. The safest way to achieve this is with a vaccine.”

Cumulative COVID-19 vaccination doses administered per 100 people: 0.17

Start of vaccine administration: December 2020

So far 25.6 million shots have been given, according to a state-by-state tally by Bloomberg and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the last week, an average of 1.21 million doses per day were administered. (2021, Bloomberg.com)

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September 2020: Historic California Fires

California fires

As of 8-25-20 1.2 million acres have burned forcing 170,000 evacuees (Ruiz-Grossman, 2020). These statistics do not tell the story but indicate the magnitude of these historic California fires. The worst yet. And we are not finished, as this is the beginning of our fire season.

Fires have endangered our oldest growth redwoods in Big Basin, yet I read they are surviving in spite of being viciously burned. The state park, California’s first, has the largest stretch of old growth coastal redwoods south of San Francisco, with trees that are, in many cases, more than 1,000 years old (Cowan, Hubler, Patel, 2020). What a statement of the potent power of trees to reach beyond current threats and survive. We must listen to their message. Now.

The fires are devouring and destroying our states natural riches: vast swaths of forests, grasses, ecosystems. Our seashores, and national parks surrounding them: our places of refuge, destroyed, as fires rage for miles close to the sea.

Our towns, communities and families are forced to evacuate across Northern California and other areas of the state. Families run from fires while losing their homes, memorabilia — possessions embodying lineage and the safety of hearth and home.

A Deadly Reality

There are deaths.

Air quality is unbreathable, uninhabitable, and extremely dangerous as winds spread the fire smoke across the Bay Area. I look out my window to the dystopian vista of settled haze and stinking pungent odor.

The inferno is the price of climate change and our neglect to turn emphatically toward our reality. We are now experiencing the effects.

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Profiling Mass Shooters

mass shooter profileWe watched – again – nauseated, stunned, horrified – hearing the grief-stricken wail of dying innocence — a six-year-old, a husband, a mother gunned down — for what? Communities — again – face the loss of precious life randomly killed, en masse, so that one sick shooter could play out his deluded fantasy and make it big — a final violent hateful suicidal splash that he knew would flicker across the news like an impotent light before it was extinguished, bleeding into darkness.

We speak our outrage and despair: “DO SOMETHING!”

(I will not discuss our negligent, reprehensible senators blocking responsible gun legislation in this blog).

I have culled snippets from the NY Times and other sources on the days the mass killings took place, to focus attention on the profile of the shooters. You will see similarities amongst all of them. These individuals have serious mental health issues that do make them dangerous. To be clear, most individuals with “serious mental illness” are not dangerous; many are medicated appropriately and others are simply not inclined to violent acting out.

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Mind-Body: Our Gut-Brain Connection

mind-bodyOrgonomy is a mind-body analytic approach that understands the functional relationship between the two; it does not hold a dualistic conceptualization of mind as separate from body. Orgonomy treats the problematic character defenses and how those very character patterns translate as body “armor”, and manifest in a variety of biophysical symptoms.

A relatively new area of research is making strides in the microbiome-brain connection and its relationship to mental health disorders. This research is illustrative of the profound interconnectedness of the mind and the body. The research into the microbiome-gut-brain axis, as it is referenced, is attempting to solve the riddles of how gut bacteria within the microbiota may affect our mental/physical states. Using fecal transplants and other research designs with both mice and human subjects, the edges of the puzzle are beginning to form. A decade ago, this idea was seen by scientists as hogwash and was emphatically rejected, but now international researchers are peering into the microbes within our microbiome to isolate specific ones that might correlate with certain diseases.

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Addicted to Your Devices?

We live in a brave new world of people walking with heads down, being led by their screens – as they float through space distracted and preoccupied. I am amazed at their ability to cross through busy intersections while barely looking up. We can be with our mates, our family, our children or our favorite friend yet continue to engage in a ‘conversation’ with our devices rather then converse with whom we are with. We dine out, witnessing couples and families with one or both mates glued to their screen and, even if sharing a photo or input, there is little sustained contact or conversation that goes uninterrupted.

Supposedly, social media and our devices express our desire to stay connected and that can be a good thing. We want to share with our extended communities our experiences told in photos or shared ideas, view others, converse through text etc. We can engage in a way that supports connectivity. Yet we need to be attentive to our present situations so we don’t miss valuable opportunities for face-to-face exchanges, meaningful conversations, humor, casual talk and physical tenderness in a sustained way, without distraction.

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A View of Character – the President-Elect

We have endured an extremely long and difficult election and transition season. The polarization of the two sides has resulted in strife within our families, relationships and communities. How do we reconcile what seems irreconcilable for many? There are deep divides related to differing value systems that, at the moment, seem challenging to cross. Yet we are one people and embrace a tradition that honors our differences and shows respect for multiple points of view. It is with that spirit that I write this post.

My comments in this post may be controversial and I invite dialogue. Civil discussion and debate are essential as we venture forward at this critical time in our history.

I have written multiple posts about character types on my website over the past few years as a way to facilitate understanding of our own styles and coping patterns and as an aid to understanding those around us. I will use character typology as a point of reference as we think about the election. President-elect Trump has been a highly controversial figure who has evoked feelings of idealization, hope and excitement as well as feelings of alienation, repugnance and disdain. His character type, his life-long defensive structure, incites strongly polarizing sensibilities. As president-elect, he is in a position to lead the country and the free world – yet his personality problems have overshadowed, for many, any sign of inherent potential to be an effective, gracious and respectable leader.

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Attachment Dyad Grows the Brain

My favorite section of the NY Times is Science Times published every Tuesday. I learn a great deal from their small segments that highlight the latest research in medicine and science. I will discuss a recent segment entitled Mothers’ Sounds Help Babies Brain Grow, found in the printed newspaper’s Neurology section and online under Parenting (February 23, 2015) I will also discuss the research and conclusions of Allan Schore, M.D., leading researcher in the field of neuropsychology influencing the fields of affective neuroscience, neuropsychiatry, trauma theory and developmental psychology.

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