how to patch up an empathetic heart

 

An empathetic heart should come with a lifetime supply of Band-Aids. It will be broken again and again, patched up over and over, and sent back out to witness, embrace, and tend to suffering in the world. At least, it would if it could.

"It is both a blessing

and a curse to feel everything

so very deeply."

~David Jones~

 

True story:

 

This past weekend I was lucky enough to be able to spend a couple of days with my daughter, son-in-law, and almost-four-year-old grandson, a child with boundless energy, a fearless spirit, and an unmistakable drive for independence. Saturday was a perfect winter day--sunny and cold--so we decided to give snow tubing a try.

 

Just like this: family tubing at Blue Mountain Resort 

 

 

There, tucked in the protective curve of my daughter's arm, her young son felt no fear as we careened down the hill, spinning faster and faster until we were breathless and dizzy. At the end of every run, he would jump out of the tube, begging to go again. No fear.

Three hours later we were headed for the lodge when he momentarily lost sight of his mother in the crowd. And even though I was right there with him, an expression of absolute terror crossed his face. He cried out , "Mommy! Mommy!" until I pointed her out to him just ahead of us. And in that moment he totally relaxed, ran to her, and grabbed her hand. Safe. Certain. Happy. Which is how children should feel.

 

In that moment, though, his fear transported me to our border with Mexico, to the thousands of children who were taken away from their mothers without explanation. Hungry, tired children who wept with fear and confusion. Children who would never find their mothers in the crowd again. A single moment in my life was magnified to reflect an immense humanitarian disaster.

 

That night, after a good supper and a warm bath, we tucked the child into his soft, warm bed, only to be awakened in the middle of the night by a cry for help. "Mommy! Mommy!" My daughter bolted up the stairs to him because she could tell by the tone of his voice that something was wrong. And it was. He was sick to his stomach, and proceeded to vomit throughout the night, while she laundered his bedding and sanitized his bedroom, and finally settled into bed next to him so he felt safe. Then she sat with him the next day and offered him sips of water and soup. She did everything a mother could do to help her child feel better. Which is how it should be.

 

"Nothing you do for a child

is ever wasted."

~Garrison Keillor~

 



 That episode, though, reminded me of the refugee camps in Syria and around the world where children suffer without hope. Without end. Children who are sick and scared. Children whose mothers and fathers grieve because there is nothing they can do to comfort them, to care for them, to save them. Places where there are no Band-Aids.

 

It is unsettling to contemplate the immensity of human suffering when just one moment of terror, one outcry in the middle of the night is enough to break an empathetic heart. To connect it to all of mankind, and make it cry out for some measure of mercy. 

 

"Every cry is a prayer.

Every prayer is for mercy."

~Neo-Kabe~

 

If you are a health care provider or therapist of any kind, a caregiver, or a parent, you have an empathetic heart. A broken heart. A million Band-Aids hold you together. Maybe you needed one the day your patient died on the operating table. Maybe you slapped one on when your colleague took his own life. Perhaps you needed several of them when your son overdosed. When the dog died. When they slipped the IV into your child's arm.

"The heart will break,

  but broken, live on."

~Lord Byron~ 



Hopefully, someone showed up with Band-Aids for you. Hopefully, you will show up with a few for somebody else.

 

jan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 



how storytelling heals





Much of what is written about the healing power of storytelling has to do with more or less intangible, warm fuzzy concepts like finding your truth, defining your purpose, or sharing your message. It has to do with attention, affirmation, and empowerment. However that happens.

From a more scientific standpoint, we know that storytelling causes the release of hormones such as oxytocin that governs empathy and social interaction, and cortisol that is connected to the stress response. We can measure the levels of these hormones so we have proof. That's what happens.

But the biological correlates of storytelling are far more complicated than that. Take this, for example:

"The coupling between speaker–listener and listener–listener brain pairings was assessed through the use of a spatially local general linear model in which temporally shifted voxel time series in one brain are linearly summed to predict the time series of the spatially corresponding voxel in another brain. Thus for the speaker–listener coupling we have

where the weights are determined by minimizing the RMS error and are given by Here, C is the covariance matrix and is the vector of shifted voxel times series, We choose , which is large enough to capture important temporal processes while also minimizing the overall number of model parameters to maintain statistical power. We obtain similar results with ."  (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2922522/)

 

"Maybe stories are just

data with a soul."

~Brene Brown~

 

 In plain English, this means that stories have the power to heal through the process of:

• Alignment: an unconscious process that enables communication between storyteller and listener so that their brains exhibit mutual temporal, coupled response patterns that synchronize over time. In other words, they are both connected by and engaged in the story.

• Coupling: the emergence of complex behaviors that require coordination of activity between individuals. In health care this is important because this factors into whether the patient will follow directions or change unhealthy behavior. If the health care provider doesn't attend to the patient's whole story, or the patient doesn't feel he has been heard, neurolinguistic coupling can't take place. Nor can healing.

• Dialogue: the exchange of ideas and information that leads to understanding, empathy, and interaction. 
   



~Cultural Detective Blog~

The interesting thing is that this can all be visualized by scanning the brains of storytellers and listeners with a functional MRI as they interact. You can watch the gradual alignment and coupling of electrical activity in specific areas of their brains as the dialogue progresses. And then you can observe the behavioral changes that follow.

This kind of information is important if you reject the validity of anecdotal evidence and instead, cling to hard data to make your point: that storytelling directly affects brain function and, in doing so, it affects the physiology of the body. It explains how storytelling heals.

"The truth is, in order to heal

we need to tell our stories

and have them witnessed."

~Sue Monk Kidd~



If your job is to assess the cost effectiveness and clinical correlates of thorough history taking in the clinical setting, this information helps make the case for improving physician-patient interaction by embracing the importance of narrative in clinical practice.

There is no doubt that:

.

"A story is a powerful, unifying tool

that connects mankind, breaks down barriers,

and heals wounds."

~https://www.nativehope.org/media~

 

jan

how stories bring us to wisdom

  

 

To really understand a story, you have to know something about the person who is telling it.

 

“It may take a doctor

to diagnose someone’s disease,

but it takes a friend

to recognize someone’s suffering.”

~Unknown~

 

Picture this: a four-year old is enjoying an ice cream cone on a hot summer day. But the ice cream is melting faster than she can lick it off. Suddenly the whole thing just gives way and ends up a pool of sticky sweetness on the hot sidewalk. She starts to cry. She is inconsolable because her ice cream is gone.

 

If she could tell her story, she might describe how happy she was when her mother bought her the ice cream cone, and how her heart was broken when it fell to the sidewalk. She might blame herself for being careless and feel guilty about having ruined it.

 

Depending upon her personality, her mother might see it two ways. It might upset her to see her child’s disappointment and to hear her crying. Or, she might be angry because her daughter was careless with it and her money was wasted. Two different stories.

 

Her bratty brother might describe his perverse delight in her predicament.

 

Everyone would tell the story differently.

 

Likewise, patients tell their stories from different perspectives depending on the situation. This can be misleading for the physician. Some people panic at the slightest ache or pain. Some people ignore a serious problem out of fear. A good example is rectal bleeding. Everyone knows it can be a warning sign of colon cancer…but no one wants to have a colonoscopy.

 

“Fear of illness

accounts for more deaths

than illness itself.”

~#marvinthegreat~

 

Others may be in denial about their symptoms. Chest pain is blamed on indigestion when the patient is actually having a heart attack. Or heartburn is blamed on stress when the problem is an ulcer. They try to convince themselves it isn't serious.

 

Stoic patients may minimize their symptoms. My mother was a stoic woman. I called her one Sunday evening, like I did every week, and I noticed her speech was slurred. When I asked her about it she said, “Oh, I think I might have had a slight stroke a couple of days ago.” Did she call the doctor? No. She didn’t think it was severe enough to bother him about.

 

“Listening is often

the only thing needed

to help someone.”

~Unknown~

 

The medical history, then, can be misleading. To get the whole story, the physician has to listen to the patient’s story while also observing his expression and body language. It helps to know what is going on at home and at work. It takes time to explore his beliefs, his fears, and his experience of illness.

 

It helps to know the patient. It helps us know his disease.

 

 "Facts bring us to knowledge

but stories bring us to wisdom."

~Naomi Rachel Remen~

jan