Everyone is different when it comes to their addictions.

There was one woman who needed surgery.

Se was in her 80's when he went to see a colleague of mine for an unrelated ailment. She had been beaten and cut by her husband for years. To deal with it, she took up drinking. She took it up so well, that she forgot about the abuse but became physically ill. She finally succumbed to the alcohol and had to go in for surgery for her gall bladder.

"They told me my liver was so soft, they almost couldn't do the surgery at all. So, I said to myself, 'Barbara Ann [name changed], you may not be very smart, but you ain't dumb enough to drink yourself to death neither.' So I just quit."

That was in 1981. She's been sober since.

Fear, as they say, can be a great motivator.

According to experts in neurobiology, when we are afraid we are at our least intelligent. Literally. We stop thinking like grown human beings with our cortex and frontal lobes and start thinking with that small walnut of a lizard brain we call the limbic system.

The other day I had a personal experience of just how foolish fear can make a person. With all my training in psychotherapy, trauma, and crisis counseling, with all my years in the trenches seeing the very worst that humanity is capable of, with all the professional composure and philosophical peace I have made with the suffering and idiocy of the world, I still acted like an ass in a thunderstorm. One little peel of thunder and off went my adrenal glands, madly galloping away with my cerebral cortex, disappearing into the sunset, never to be thunk [sic] of again.

It’s all about a small insect…well, he wasn’t very small at all and that was where the first problem began. He was a six inch, armored tank of a whip scorpion, what locals in New Mexico call the Vinegaroon.

Baby Whip Scorpion

My husband and I were sitting outside in the morning with our teas, watching the slow trickles of last night’s rain slide from the roof into the canals and down the side of the house. It was a cooler morning than we’d had in weeks of 103 degree temperatures and we were relaxed in the western breeze.

I watched the rain and thought about a catchment system, following the water upwards to the canal when I saw him.

I nearly dropped my mug.

“SCORPION!” I thought.

I pointed. That was the only word that came out of my mouth for about 3 seconds, which is a long time when you’re trying to speak.

My husband looked where I was pointing, saw nothing (it was still early and the sun hadn’t fully risen) and kept asking “What? What?” The more he asked, the less I could speak.

I’d seen and reluctantly dispatched scorpions before. But they were less than an inch long and pale, seeming somehow less threatening. This one was on our portale, it was about 6 inches long if you don’t count the whip at the end of his thorax, it had an exoskeleton to make a Hummer jealous, and it was MOVING.

“It’s a scorpion!” I finally eeked out.

How pathetic, I thought even as I was being pathetic. A damsel in distress over a bug. But I was already in the hooks not of the bug but of my own neurobiology. My limbic system had been turned on, the adrenal glands were on red alert, and all I could think of was that damned thing could kill our little dog and do some serious damage to our bigger one. In my fear, I forgot about everything I ever said I believed in–the sanctity of all life, the intricate balance of the ecosystem, the divinity and love of God in all His creatures. And I do feel that way, now. Then, I had all the philosophical wisdom and forethought of a swamp croc.

After we both went over to look at it, my husband, being the saner of us, asked, “Are you sure it’s a scorpion? It kinda looks like that bug we found by the garage that time and it turned out to be a big nothing, remember?”

“NO! What about the dogs?”

“Well, I don’t know…what if we put him in a bucket?”

“How?”

“A shovel.”

As he went to get a shovel and a bucket, I herded the dogs inside and kept a watchful eye on what I thought was the most venomous creature I’d ever seen.

By the time Dave walked across the house, into the garage, got back out and crossed the courtyard, my fear had infected him and his limbic system had apparently kicked in. So, instead of scooping the poor fella into a bucket, he picked up a shovel and swung hard enough to crack the stucco. The bug never knew what hit him.

While knowing his death was quick and hopefully painless gave me some measure of absolution after my adrenalin crawled back to the walnut whence it came, it didn’t make me feel less stupid or remorseful when I found out that he was in fact not a scorpion at all, but a vinegaroon—a rather harmless, non-toxic night stalker that eats crickets and other unpleasant pests. So not only was he not a scorpion, not only was he not harmful to my dogs or me, he was an asset to our garden.

They say it takes 1/12,000^th of a second to go to red alert but that it takes a lot longer to think a situation through.

Stupid is fast. And, as I found once again in my life, fast is also pretty stupid.

Through their work, they attained great status as healers. They were revered as the “anargyroi,” the Unmercenary physician,s because they decided to stop charging for their services and to offer the gift of healing purely out of their devotion to God.

They never starved or lacked for anything, although they were brutally tortured and beheaded in 287AD   during the persecution under Diocletian for not recanting their beliefs.

After I heard their story–despite their unfortunate ending–I made a decision about my practice as a holistic psychotherapist. From that point on, I would slide my fee scale and that if someone truly wanted help and I could honestly help them, I would. Period. No forms. No hidden agendas. God gave me the tools. I give them to you.

This is not easy in a world where standards of care are generated by committees composed of people from pharmaceutical conglomerates and insurance companies. Or where doctors get sued for malpractice when diabetics won't stop drinking alcohol. The tort laws in NM have scared most medical practitioners to Texas.

When I was being interviewed and had a site visit conducted by NM medicaid, in order to become a provider I had to post exit signs over what were clearly doors AND have a map of my house drawn according to scale and post it where patients could see it. It had to have a "YOU ARE HERE" mark and show them the way out.

Mind you, my private office is in my home and the office has a separate entrance. There's no mistaking it.

At one point in the interview, the insurance rep was so adamant about it I had to ask, "If there's a fire, do you think I'm going to run out and leave my patient here?" He, by the way, was sitting right next to the door!

He just shrugged, "Those are the rules."

I shrugged, too, and decided after two months that I wanted the exit signs off my walls and that I would not leave my patients to burn.

So, now to a more pointed story of modern medicine under the thumb of big business:

Someone I know who was injured on the job was sent by the Worker’s Compensation insurance underwriter to one of their approved rehabilitation physicians.

The patient was examined and at first it revealed nothing, so they said it was a muscle injury and pushed pain killers, particularly vicodin, which is a known hazard  (tendency for addiction, narcotic bowel syndrome, irritability and mood disturbance, motor function disturbance and so on and so forth). The patient  refused all of their suggestions but took a bottle of ibuprofen.

Finally, after much complaining and only after the 90 days for a lawsuit had passed, the insurance company begrudgingly ordered an MRI which found several bulging discs including an impinged S1. They also found moderate to severe neuropathy along one leg, hip and buttock.

Nothing worked to help except one thing: physical therapy. So what did the modern doctors do?

They discontinued treatment, declared the patient MMI (at “maximum medical improvement”) and told him he really should "reconsider the vicodin because it was never going to get better." He was told he was permanently disabled.

The patient couldn't believe what he'd heard. They were taking away the only treatment that had helped? “But that was the only thing that worked. How can you do this?”

“Yeah,” the doctor said, “but you had your 8 weeks.”

“But you’re a DOCTOR!” the patient leaned forward, raising his voice.

“I know. But that’s the system."

The patient was furious. He pointed his finger, “No. YOU’RE the system.”

The doctor went on to earn a lot of money and live very comfortably.  So far he has not been beheaded.

For the rest of this article on the choices involved in becoming a healer, on the amazing healers I have known, and what insurance companies have done to the practice of medicine, please take just a short click to: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Modern-Medicine-Healing-o-by-Judith-Acosta-100715-534.html. It's worth the trip. We have some serious thinking to do about medicine and what we expect from our physicians. And, practitioners: we have some serious, serious work ahead of us if we're going to get back to the real business of healing.

In one of my talks on Verbal First Aid™, I make a point of bringing up the stethoscope as one of the inventions that truly changed medicine and the art of healing. Because where once the physician had to lay his or her ear on the patient’s chest to hear the heart beating, now there was over a foot of distance between them. We need to rethink this.

While traveling north on the railroad from New York City, we were seated comfortably by a window seat watching the east river slowly move past us back out to sea.

My husband and I spoke quietly to each other about nothing terribly important but we were happily enjoying each other's company, watching boats and seagulls float by. There were several passengers nearby, one of whom was starting to nod off. We figured he had a way to go and didn’t mind missing a few stops.

At about the tip of Manhattan, a crew of 10 people, including 5 kids under the age of 10 got on the train. It felt like we had been suddenly dropped into Disneyland. Squealing, yelling, jumping up and down, hitting, and crying filled the passenger car, bouncing off every hard surface they could find.

The fella who was sweetly asleep, was jarred awake. He nuzzled back down into his seat, but finally gave up and leaned against the window, frowning.

The conversation between my husband and I was over.

The adults in the group did absolutely nothing to either calm or correct their children. Nothing.

Worse. They encouraged them, high-fiving every jump that enabled them to touch the ceiling and every song they sang at the top of their lungs.

Does anyone else see anything wrong with this scenario?

My husband, who is a 4^th-generation Montanan, was brought up in a restrained culture in which guns usually spoke louder than words and politeness, respect, and manners was absolutely expected. Once again, he became not only fairly irritated by the behavior of both the children and the adults, but confused and a bit shocked.

Mostly it was the adults that confused him because he couldn't understand how the parents allowed what was going on. Even though I was born andraised in NY and people screaming out of tenement windows to gather their kids for dinner is not alien to me,  I think this situation was different. It was an utter absence of authority and true adulthood. If children can't count on their parents or other grown ups in their world for guidance in new situations—social or otherwise–who are they supposed to learn from?

Restricting a child’s behavior in public does not have to mean they are joy assassins, which I believe a large number of parents are scared of being. They often explain to me that they want their children to be free to express themselves and be happy.

Do manners preclude that? Does setting limits preclude that?

I don’t think so. I think that consideration for the happiness and comfort of others is actually a prerequisite for real joy. You cannot be selfish and entitled and ever find peace or true love.

As my husband said after we left the train, relieved to be away from them, “They were having a good time and they thought everyone else should know exactly how good a time they were having and how cool they were.”

Parents are so worried about how they’re perceived now, that they sometimes forget to be parents. One of the basic tenets of Verbal First Aid is the ability to take a position of benevolent authority and lead a person who is scared, confused, sick, or shocked to a more healing mind-set. Without this foundation–this authority–that says, "I know what I'm doing. I know where I'm going. Follow me." there is no way to establish rapport and guide a person through a crisis so he or she comes out whole.

Authority has gotten a bad rap–often with good reason–in this and other countries. But we ought not throw out the baby with the bath water.  A true king, a true healer, a true parent must always have a measure of authority.

The other night a neighbor’s son had a party in the middle of the night in his parent’s garage. The floods were on, the music was blaring, the giggles, the beer, the smoking—all of it for everyone’s enjoyment, whether they were sleeping or not.

Finally, we had to call them and bring the party to the parents’ “attention.” My husband believes they had to know what was going on, but I think people can be unaware of the most obvious things, if it serves them on some level.

Good parenting still includes good limits. Limits and love are not mutually exclusive. Love and limits relate to one another the way bones and flesh do. The structure is necessary for its proper expression in the world.

Babies come into the world crying, cooing and clinging. They need—food, warmth, love, and safety.

They are born with the innate capacity to feel fully, scream for us, hold onto us.

They are born with the potential to develop and think.

But they are not born with the ability to feel and think at the same time.

That is what we—as grown-ups, parents, caretakers—are there to teach them to do.

This is a formidable task, hopefully made easier with Verbal First Aid.

When kids are left to their own devices—or worse, are taught they are unloved and are made to feel unsafe—they do not develop normally. And that holds true in both the cognitive and emotional arenas.

At a Christian Counseling Convention, Gary Sibcy, in exploring the effect of the emotional environment on development, talked about a study that was done with monkeys. Interestingly, monkeys have the gene for alcoholism though it remains dormant unless activated.

Not only are our relationships important in the moment in terms of how we make others “feel,” but as the research is leading us to conclude, it is pivotal in our development on every level—mental, emotional, and genetic. What we say and do with others matters in ways we are only just beginning to appreciate.

The Verbal First Aid Relationship

According to many experts in the field of interpersonal neurobiology, there are certain types of relationships that are healing, nurturing and developmentally pivotal. They can even help a child who has been repeatedly abused and hurt to rewire those learnings so he can go on to have good relationships in his life.

In Verbal First Aid with children, there are three essential principles that are utilized to both facilitate physical healing in the moment as well as long-term wellness and proper development:

1. Recognizing The Healing Zone
2. Developing and Utilizing Rapport:  Centering and the ABC’s of Rapport
3. Leadership: Healing Suggestion

For the full article, please go to http://www.opednews.com/articles/Verbal-First-Aid-and-Attac-by-Judith-Acosta-100629-216.html

She understood. She said, "It sounds like you're talking about Cesar Milan's way of handling dogs."

I was so excited. "YES! It's a form of kid-whispering but with a very specific intended outcome–healing."

I thought about her comment and this idea of kid-whispering all day and then suddenly remembered an article I'd written when I first started rescuing dogs back in the 90's. I didn't get puppies that were easily trained or could be sent to puppy class for simple socialization. They were big, hurt, and aggressive. And my learning curve was steep. I had to get it fast or lose them.

So, I learned.

And I compiled the following ideas back then to help the parents and kids I was working with at the local school system. This article was probably written several years ago. 

This is it:

Leading With Love. What Training My Dogs Taught Me About Working With Children.

I’d just finished a particularly grueling two-hour session with a family and an 8-year-old boy who was defiant, angry and acting out with abandon. Everyone was frustrated—the parents, the children, the teachers. And by the end of the session, so was I. I left the school and went outside to sit by the ball field and clear my head. I’m missing something, I thought when I noticed a young man with a large dog in the corner of the field. The dog would sit, wait, then with a single hand motion from the young man, jump and sit down again. That dog’s eyes never left the young man as he waited for his next cue. That’s it. That’s the look in that child’s eyes…Tell me what to do. Teach me how to do it. I’m clueless. And no one was teaching him. All we were doing was talking about everything that he was doing wrong and asking him to come up with a solution.

From that point on, I was on a mission. I rescued two large dogs—both willful, strong, and quirky—and set myself to training them. What I’ve learned from them has forever changed my work and helped countless families. What it requires of us to train dogs are the same qualities we need to be effective parents.

For the full article, please see Huffingtonpost.com. You can either search under my name or in the archives.

I recently met a man whose wife cheated on him repeatedly. As he told me the long and circuitous story of suspicion, denial and revelation, he moved through a snake pit of emotional confusion—anger, hurt, longing, disbelief, shock. And as I watched him weep, rant, deflate in despair only to bound back in self-reproach (“how could I have been so stupid?!”), I saw that he was still in shock, in the trance of his own disappointment. He was only bodily in the office with me. Most of him was lost in the torment of his recent past and his fear about the future.

Those shock states can continue for moments, for months, for years or a lifetime. And while they have good reason for being there to start with, after the moment is past, they can become huge impediments in a person’s life.

The question I am faced with when I meet people with any kind of trauma is two-fold:

One, how to bring them out of the trance they are in and two, how to work through the suffering and move to healing.

For more on this topic, please go to Huffingtonpost.com and search Trauma, Judith Acosta.

The other day a patient told a story of how she got her first kitten. It wasn’t anything like what one might expect—found a litter in the alley behind the house, or a stray wound up on their porch. Her family doctor was over for dinner with his wife and he had found a kitten.

“Your doctor came over for dinner?” I asked.

“Yeah, he always did. He was like part of our family,” she sat back.

“He was your doctor and your parents’ doctor?” I asked stupidly.

“Yeah, why?”

The last time I heard about a doctor visiting a patient’s house to celebrate a socialoccasion was the last time I watched Little House on the Prairie.

When I went to graduate school and in every agency I’ve worked since, those boundary crossings were utterly verboten. I know of one social worker (who’s really an administrator, not a therapist) who won’t even acknowledge a patient in public unless the patient comes up to him first.

There are rules and regulations about these things now, privacy laws and confidentiality acts that can put a therapist or doctor in jail for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

So, the caution is understandable.
But it’s also lamentable.

Because this past week I left the cloister and went to see a client graduate.  She invited me to do so and there was no doubt it meant the world to her. In my mind and heart it was the healing and loving thing to do. I could have said no, that the regulations strictly interpreted limit our interaction to the office setting and that leaving those four walls could pollute the therapeutic relationship. But I didn't. I went. And we both wept.

To be fair, there are some good reasons for people being careful about leaving a traditional and "safe" setting. Many “healers” have taken terrible advantage of people by forcing unprofessional relationships on them with highly improper dynamics. And I don’t just mean sexual ones. I mean ones in which the therapist is the needy one. And people like that sincerely do need lines drawn around them that read: “so far and no farther.” But I suspect that we may have gone too far in our tentativeness and become fearful. In so doing we may be losing something truly precious—the healing relationship.

My father is a doctor. He no longer practices, but he is and always will be a doctor. When I was growing up it was not unexpected for the phone to ring and it would be his answering service.  I distinctly remember more than a couple of occasions when the call came in the wee hours of the morning and he picked up his leather medical bag (just like in the Jimmy Stewart movies) and left the house not to return until 4 or 5 in the morning.

In fact, one of our family’s closest friends—Aunt Irene and Uncle Harry, we called them—were his patients.  It was winter when I was an infant and Harry had contracted a bad flu which took a turn for the worse one night. They called in, my father went to their apartment on Decatur Avenue in the Bronx, where he sat with Harry as Irene paced until the fever broke. He sat there all night. Harry lived. Irene never stopped pacing, but she was eternally grateful and thought my father walked on water.

First they came to major family events—birthdays, funerals, the like. But then they started coming over just to come over. He still took care of them medically. And they lived into their 90’s, hale and happy.

It never occurred to anyone in my family–immediate or extended–that there was anything untoward or unethical about it. In fact, if that question had even been raised, they would have heard a resounding “Are you CRAZY?” from all of us.

I think the patient who got her first cat from her family internist would have said the same.

Doctors, therapists, priests, rabbis, pastors—healers and helpers of all sorts—used to be part of the community and a part of the lives of the people whom they served. Doctors didn’t have to find different churches to attend because one of the congregants came to see them for a yeast infection. It was confidential, the relationship was sacred, yes. But there was other life to live, too. And people did.

In one of my talks on Verbal First Aid, I make a point of bringing up the stethoscope as one of the inventions that truly changed medicine and the art of healing. Because where once the physician had to lay his or her ear on the patient’s chest to hear the heart beating, now there was over a foot of distance between them.

In our zealousness and fear, we have substituted machines for people and strict rules for sensible relationships. We have literally taken the heart out of healing. I think that is something we cannot afford to do.

Be still…It’s really such a simple request and such an impossibly difficult task for so many of us as we get older and more acculturated.  It certainly has been for me. I can barely talk on the phone for 15 minutes without washing the dishes or multi-tasking in some other way. America is a culture of action.  We do. We don’t sit.

The problem is that with constant busy-ness comes chronic spiritual insensibility. We can build things, accumulate things, and get from one point on a line to another faster than any other group of people on Earth. We are the cleverest, quickest, and most acquisitive culture in our planet’s history. But we see, feel, and understand less. We have collected data and sacrificed wisdom. We have built colossal glass cities and relinquished our sight.

By the time we are in high school, probably earlier, most of us are set into a rhythm of living. Our eyes are focused ahead and our peripheral vision shrinks with each passing year until we can barely see the tips on our own noses. And unless we can see not only ourselves but ourselves in context, the truth is that we can know very little. It becomes more and more difficult to see any evidence of God, no less know Him. Unless, of course, we’re in deep trouble and a sense of urgency is dramatically renewed.  As one Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has said, “Unless there is thunder, people don’t make the sign of the cross.” The American equivalent: “Everyone believes in God in the trenches.”

Yet, we are continually surrounded by the evidence. We are in a world filled with miracles. Clues are in every corner of our lives. Amma, the Hugging Saint of India, exclaimed that God is everywhere: “If you ask me who is God, I tell you, you are my god. The lion is god. The flowers are god.” Yet most of us don’t see it. Or don’t recognize these clues as such if we do see them. Some of us just forget to look.  But miracles are not empirical. They do not present themselves in the linear, organized manner of double-blind studies. We try but we cannot collect miracle data to analyze. Most people think they will believe it when they see it, but the truth is that we see it when we believe it or are at least willing to entertain the possibility. This is what is meant in Mathew and why we must be as little children to see the truth in the evidence that is all around us.

Two experiences have illustrated to me the urgency of keeping my eyes and mind open.

The first experience occurred when I was 12 years old and I was allowed to take an after-school art class. It was a small, unpretentious event held in the backroom of an old woman’s apartment in the Bronx but it changed the way I saw everything. Instead of looking at a thing and seeing its function first (how it pertained to me, how I could use it, eat it, play with it), it now had a life and a charge all its own. I saw light, form, color, shade, placement in its surroundings. If I tilted my head this way or that, the thing—and all those aspects of it—also tilted. I was suddenly in relationship with the world in a new way.

The second was studying for nearly five years to become a homeopath after already being a psychotherapist for about ten years. Classes would not start until we had all closed our eyes and sat still for a period of time, sometimes for as much as a half-hour. Even as I write this some years later, it hardly sounds like much—what’s a half-hour? But for me sitting still and letting myself be quiet so that I could receive impressions from my patients without actually collecting them, without any judgment or interference on my part was initially as easy as teaching a puppy not to run after a rabbit.  But by my last year (and it was a struggle every time) I began to notice something odd—I started to see more. Information was not just more available, it was clearer and more understandable. This, I began to understand, was where the miracles were to be found.

But understanding was far from enough for me. Humans are a complex and mixed bag of needs, desires and defects. Poised precariously between good and evil, heaven and hell, life and death, dangling between light and dark, the human heart is by nature a busy place, a shifting ground where there is both endless dance and relentless battle.

Stillness does not come easy for me.

I do not sit with much grace.

I have had to find a way to be still of heart and let my body move as it will. So, I do yoga. I walk in meditation and I pray as I hike. Sometimes on those hikes I talk. Sometimes I listen. Sometimes I’m hurt and fearful. Sometimes I’m grateful and delighted. All I can do is bring myself—all of me—to Him, assuming that He can handle it, the awe, the anger, the confusion, the good, the indifferent, all of it, all of me, from the loftiest impulses to the darkest corners of my soul. And what I found was unexpectedly simple: Finding God was like being married. You have to show up for the relationship. All of you. Build it and they will come. The same is true of God.

Be there and He will come.