A start...

At one point, this afternoon, I found myself screaming at a supervisor from the Medicare company because she was insisting that all my doctor had to do to submit the tier reduction request paperwork via fax.  Since January 27th, the doctor's staff has been doing just that.  Finally, last Friday, the paperwork was faxed back with a hand written note saying it wasn't the way to submit the paperwork.    Two weeks, more than a dozen phone calls, more than a dozen faxes, four different phone numbers, three different fax numbers and I was nowhere.  I just lost it when she told me that I was lying about how many calls I had made because "one call is sufficient" and that my doctor's staff was lying about faxing the paperwork.  I screamed.  She hung up on me.  I wept.

I very, very, very much dislike my absolute and utter inability to handle great frustration.  I get to a tipping point and I find myself screaming.  And then I find myself wanting to die, filled with self-loathing.

Granted, it was two weeks of beating my head against a brick wall.  I did not scream immediately, but I did scream.  "I AM NOT LYING!"  I know that her callous and careless words are a trigger for me.  With dyautonomia, being seen as "faking it" is par for the course.  And, as a child trying to talk to adults about the bad things happening to you, you oft hear that you are imagining things or making things up.  You are disbelieved because to believe is to admit the unthinkable.

But I didn't used to scream.

SIGH.

I called my friend Mary so ... sad and embarrassed and defeated and disappointed in myself.  I bewailed my misery a bit, wending my way to saying how much I miss hearing the Word of God.  I was just about to ask her what she thought if I had my counselor read it to me before I leave each week, if that would be weird or wrong or whatever, when Mary interrupted me and asking me if I wanted her to read to me.

I did.

She did.

My tears dried.  My body relaxes.  Peace washed over me.  Five chapters of John later, I was ... better ... and past the moment of overwhelming feelings.  Such mercy.

I am always welcoming of Mary's  ... input ... when I talk with her.  I oft seek it.  But, whilst I may be forgetting elsewhere, I believe this is the first time I had my heart's desire:  no words of trying to "fix" me (Mary doesn't do that) or well-intentioned human words, just the Word.

I've said it before; I will say it again:  The Word of God is sufficient unto all times and places. It is powerful and performative and will not return void.  It is not just comforting; it will actually actively comfort a person.

After such a boon, I Googled and Googled and Googled until I found a number for my doctor's nurse to call.  She did.  The requests were submitted.  Something like two hours later, they were denied.  All three.  I had hoped for respite on at least two of them.  I shall appeal, however the nurse told me that the technician said that the hormones and the inhalers are two classes of medications that never get tier reductions and that Celebrex/Celecoxib will not either.  

It was such discouraging news.

Later, I gathered my frayed and sorrowing nerves together and started reading the second chapter of the book on shame research.  I am just a third of the way through it, but already I have much to ponder.

Do you remember the petri dishes from high school science lab—those little round dishes? If you put shame in a petri dish and cover it with judgment, silence and secrecy, it grows out of control until it consumes everything in sight—you have basically provide shame with the environment it needs to thrive. On the other hand, if you put shame in a petri dish and douse it with empathy, shame loses power and starts to fade. Empathy creates a hostile environment for shame—it can't survive.

When I asked women to share examples of how they recovered from shame, they described their shame with someone who expressed empathy. Women talked about the power of hearing someone say:

"I understand—I've been there."
"That's happened to me too."
"It's OK, you're normal."
"I understand what that's like."

Like shame itself, the stories of resilience shared a common core. When it comes to shame resilience, empathy is at the center.

Real empathy take more than words—it takes work. Empathy is not simply knowing the right thing to say to someone who is experiencing shame. Our words are only as effective as our ability to be genuinely present and engaged with someone as she tells her story.

...They describe empathy as "the ability to perceive a situation from the other person's perspective. To see, hear, and feel the unique world of the other." I believe that empathy is best understood as a skill, because being empathetic or having the capacity to show empathy is not a quality that is innate or intuitive.  (Dr. Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me [But It Isn't], pp. 32-33)

Dr. Brown breaks empathy up into four components and begins to explore them.  I have yet to really absorb that part, but I was glad to see that she views empathy as a skill that can be learned, honed.  Reading through the components first off, my thought was how very much I have to learn.

She also begins the chapter with a very vulnerable story about herself, one with a whopping lie and spiraled her into shame abyss.  She reached out to a friend and that woman responded with empathy.  Dr. Brown talks through the whys of her response but she also concludes with:

I kept asking, "Are you sure?  Are you sure?"  She finally said, "Look, I know you don't think you're going hold it together for the next three days, but you will.  You may not do it perfectly, but you're going to do it. I  know that was probably really hard for you, but we've all been there and it's really OK."

In that split second, the shame turned into something else.  Something I could handle.  Something that moved me away from "I'm so stupid—I'm a terrible mother" to "That was pretty stupid—I'm an overwhelmed mother."  She dropped just enough empathy in my petri dish to make it start fading away.  She wasn't judgmental.  She didn't make me feel I had to keep silent about my misstep.  I really felt she had heard me and cared about me.  She validated my fear of "barely hanging on" and she acknowledged how much I like Ellen's teacher. Most importantly, she saw my world as I was experiencing it and she was able to express that to me. (pp. 35-36)

I found all sorts of comfort in reading this, especially the specificity.  But what comforted me the most was seeing that Dr. Brown needed to hear the words she was seeking more than once, that she asked again and again.

Who does that sound like?