It's axiomatic that you get what you pay for. On observation, however, I believe that there are times we get more than we bargain for, not all of it good. In the case of current media-incitements, we get much more and we are rarely aware of it.

Viral fear, that generalized anxiety induced and spread by the media in all its forms, is evident not only in advertising but in most television programming. There's the famous It Could Happen Tomorrow series on the Weather Channel and that important reminder Armageddon Week on the History Channel. For the thoroughly inured and brain-injured there's also a 24-7 fear channel on cable in case someone needs to scare themselves to sleep. Of course, it's not enough to watch horrifying dramatizations of our last days on earth. Advertisers do their duty when they alert us to the more imminent dangers to life and limb if we don't buy their ________ (insert one or all of the following: security system, flu vaccine, dietary supplement, colon cleanser, or SUV).

There are statistics that suggest that while our diets are no good (by in large, they're awful), they're not the sole culprits in our poor health. While our intake of alcohol is high, that too is not the bullet that hit the artery. Same with cigarettes.

The Europeans eat and drink and smoke and suffer fewer heart attacks and less cancer. The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than us but the Mexicans eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than us. The Chinese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.The Italians drink a lot of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.The Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of  sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.

Something else is at work, then.

I've been a psychotherapist for 25 years. Licensed in five states at one point. Seen hundreds, if not thousands of people. The one thing that seems to be the most prevalent and devastating to the most people is the constant fear, the unrelenting stress to perform to some impossible standard, and the agonizing inability to meet those standards and resulting inadequacy. This is just observation, not analysis.

But I did have a question or a thought on the topic. Is it possible that part of our cultural nature as adventurers and conquerers has something to do with it? When we are not scaling sheer cliffs, jumping out of planes, or conquering the west, where does that energy go?

There's a truism in Homeopathy that a remedy exists on a polar spectrum. It can be bright red (for instance) with heat or appear to be so white it looks cold. It can be enraged or as silent and coiled as a snake. It can be delighted or deranged. Each one existing within the same remedy state.

Could the same be true for Americans? That when we're not engaged in the extremes of conquest, we're trapped by our televisions? That the kissing cousin of adventure–fear–grabs us as soon as we stop leaping off of cliffs. And one thing I DO know is that fear kills us faster than anything else I've seen.

Just a thought to consider.

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She was 15 and  had been sick for a year. Homeopathy had kept her miraculously vital and calm throughout that time even though she had been diagnosed with both bilateral cardiomyopathy and metastasized carcinoma. I knew it was coming. I thought I was prepared. In these last few weeks as I had to help lift her up to go outside so she could urinate, I tried to tell myself–as so many others were telling me–that when the time came I would be relieved. I would know it was the right time and it would be okay.

I know they meant well, truly. But I was not relieved. And it did not feel right. It was not okay.

When the doctors gave me the news more than a year ago, I made a committment to myself and to her that I would see her through it all. I would minister to her while she was here and when it was time for her to die, I would be fully present. It was the least I could do. She had been my truly faithful companion for more than 11 years since I'd rescued her. She was my first dog, my mentor, and my trusted  guardian. So when the time came I did what I promised I would do. I held her and I watched her die.

In the back of my mind I held out hope that the people who'd talked to me about the "naturalness" of death were right. I had prayed for comfort in the way they had promised. But I didn't feel it at all. I know that when I let go of her body, limp and without any of the fight she had in life, the Angie I loved and trusted and trained and struggled with for all those years was simply not there anymore.

As I held her and felt her chin go limp against my thigh, the strangest though popped into my mind: I'd heard people speak of dead weight before, but she seemed terribly light, nearly weightless to me as if the greatest part of her, her ballast, had departed with her last heartbeat. She–Angie–was not there anymore. Just a brief moment ago she had been there. But then she wasn't.  It was stunning. And I do not understand it. I find that no matter what I do or how I appeal to reason and the modern, scientific schema I cannot understand that disappearance. Where is she? Where did she go? She was just here. The first night I paced the house like a child as I whined a mantra, "I want my dog back."

It must sound awfully naive for a therapist and homeopath to be so surprised by death. I have seen death before, though luckily not very much. But I don't think the exposure has helped me understand or accept it much better any more than the platitudes about the cycle of life have helped to ease the pain.

When I was a very young psychotherapist, not two weeks out of graduate school, I worked at a hospital in New Rochelle on the med/surg unit. There were 30 some-odd beds and all of them were filled all the time with very sick people. I was only there for two months, but I watched several people get covered in sheets and rolled away by stretcher.  It was a hospital. I was saddened by it, but I expected it.

There was one woman who was different. She never had a visitor, not a family member or a friend. She was a quiet person with short, brown hair who always asked for books to read. Most people got in and out of the unit within a week or so. But she was in her room a long time, always propped up in bed, never in a chair or walking around. She was not assigned to my caseload, but I spent time with her anyway. She seemed so lonely. She didn't talk much when I visited because she found it difficult to breath, but she seemed to like it when I read to her or talked to her about the news, offering her some connection back to the world outside the window.

Once when I sat by her, she lifted her fingers straight up, though her arm remained flat on the bed. Because she was suffering with terminal lung cancer,  I thought she was restless or uncomfortable and offered to move her pillows or adjust her bedding. She shook her head until I realized she just wanted me to hold her hand.

It only took a few days from the time I first held her hand to the last time. Her spiral downward was quick, as if she could leave now that she had company. Or maybe she needed a witness. I don't know. I never really got to know her. But I came to care about her and never forgot her. I still think about the changes in her breathing as her time approached, how the muscles in her hand would occasionally contract as if to make sure I was still there, how thin she looked but how firmly her jaw was set as she finally let go.  I stayed with her till the end but I can't even remember her name. In my mind now, she was more than any name or any identity that could have ever been assigned to her.

Mostly what I remember now is what I didn't understand and what I still don't.

Peter Kreeft, one of the brightest and best when it comes to writing about the great mysteries, said, "We are shocked at the irreversibility of death although it is utterly familiar, utterly universal, utterly natural. We find the natural unnatural. Why? Let us be shocked at our shock…'This is our natural state and yet the state most contrary to our inclinations.'"

I AM shocked. I am stunned by its finality, its emptiness, its contrariness–not only to everything my senses can fathom but to what my heart holds truest, that He has "put eternity" in us and no matter how we try to rationalize, empiricize, or explain it away with, "well, that's the cycle of life," it never, ever feels right. And I, like Kreeft and many others, believe that it can't feel right because that is not what our souls–or our hearts–were created for. There is something in us, or to be more precise, we are made of something which is not temporal, which does not bow its head in acceptance to the last breath, which does not feel at home in the mortal, time-bound world and never will.

It is why, no matter how many times I hear from people "it's the way of nature", it will never feel natural to me. And if Kreeft is right, then that gives me the most hope of all.

"Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned."  (Edna St. Vincent Millay)

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There has never been a nation of more deliberately sculpted beauty or a culture that has spent more money on beauty because it is convinced that it is ugly.

Women starve themsevles, men fill themselves with toxins in search of the on-command erection and everyone spends hours in front of mirrors terrified of being unattractive as if our sexual desirability determined our worth in the world and our chosen-status by God.

The truth is we haven't a clue about what is really attractive or beautiful. And we miss all the real opportunities for love which have far less to do with plumped lips than we'd like to think. After all, if it were just a matter of a little collagen, that would be a relatively easy fix. No one would actually have to work at intimacy, forgiveness, or sharing.

This disease has American by its chinny-chin-chin. And we're spending a fortune "fighting" it.

The last disease we'll talk about in this series is the "I'm-1-N-1" Virus or the Centerless Self.

This is the deepest expression of all the above pathologies. Because of all the others–the distortion of self and body-loathing, the sense of never being or having enough, the constant fear–we've also become exceedingly self-centered. Which is actually much more disastrous than it sounds because in our cultural psyche, there is no self and there is no solid center. We've become painfully insecure AND entitled. And when we don't get what we want–because we have no center, believe that we need that thing to fill up our emptiness, fear what may happen and loathe ourselves without it–we become violent.

The evidence for that is all over the news on a daily basis.

All these diseases, these cultural, collective delusions form a sort of intellectual and emotional breast milk for us and our children. They are the formula for how we think and how we live.

So what heals these delusions?

The first and most important antidote is Love. A spiritual Love. We have to know and learn to experience that we are not the center of the universe. Something else is and that IT centers us. We have no center without a relationship with the creator.

The second is Faith. When we can put our faith in something beyond ourselves, there is nothing to fear. When we can trust that a God who literally loves us is running the show, we can relax in the moment. We don't have to buy anything. We don't have to run away anymore.

The third and perhaps most difficult for Americans is a Correctness of Desire. The medicine for unrestrained want, irrepressible fear, and self-loathing is gratitude.

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This, from the article and one of the books it is reviewing:

A mother in British Columbia wrote ironically on Twitter earlier this year that she wanted to smother her 3-year-old daughter because she wouldn't go to sleep, and a few hours later, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police showed up at her door. They checked on her child, who was safely tucked in bed, and left. "Maybe I should've put a little smiley face on it or followed it up with 'Just kidding,' " says the woman, who requested anonymity.

One book was inspired by a backlash the author received after she wrote an essay for the NY Times in which she admitted that she loved her husband more than she did her children.

She calls her book an attempt to calm the "frenzy of maternal anxiety" among self-critical moms. "It's a step in the right direction to say, 'Yeah, I'm a bad mother, so what?' " says Ms. Waldman, who has four children in Berkeley, Calif. "If we all simply refused to engage and said, 'What we're doing is good enough,' I think we'd all be a lot happier."

All that seems to matter to that writer (and the people she writes about) is how she feels about herself and whether she can hold on to her belief in her own adequacy whether or not she deserves to feel adequate. Indeed, whether or not she even really feels adequate. And I believe Ms. Waldman knows that.

It’s worse than a recipe for psychological disaster. It's a roadmap for the decline of civilization.

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There is an old story about a young man who was known in his town for being criminally corrupt and selfish, although he made a big show of piety, attending his church in his finest clothing, sitting in the front, and kissing the hand of the priest.

He decided to go to confession and to make sure everyone knew he was going. He went as a pretense and had no desire whatsoever to either be forgiven or change his ways. He thought, “I can just go, tell him everything, he’ll forgive me, then I can do what I want again.”

Somehow, the priest sensed the young man’s heart and when the man asked, “Father, forgive me,” the priest answered: “You will be forgiven when you fill this bucket,” and handed him a milking pail.
The man looked at it, shrugged, and figured, “What’s the big deal? I can fill that and come back in 5 minutes. Then I’ll be forgiven and that’ll be that.”

So he went to the town well and began pouring water in it. When he picked it up to carry it off, it was empty.

Confused, but not deterred, he went to his own home and pumped water into it until it was overflowing. When he went to lift it, it was empty.

Now as angry and determined as he was originally confounded, he went from town to town filling up the bucket. And every time he lifted it to bring it back to the priest, it was empty. He became enraged and swore he wouldn’t stop until he filled it. He struggled for a year until he was forlorn, filthy and broke.
Finally, having failed utterly, he returned to the priest, holding the empty bucket. “I am so ashamed. I don’t know what to say. I tried to fill it but it’s empty. I failed. I’m so sorry.” Whereupon two tears fell from his eyes and into the bucket.

The priest took the bucket from him. “It is filled now. You are forgiven.” And he showed the young man the bucket, filled to the brim.

We are so sensitive in this country about shame as if it were the worst thing anyone could ever feel. But after twenty five years of faith-based counseling people from all walks of life—from veterans to politicians, housewives to addicted prostitutes—I have observed that there are two types of shame. There is what psychotherapists call “toxic shame.” This is the shame that is foisted upon a person by hurt, pain and trauma. It is undeserved and undermines their health and wellbeing. But there is another kind. And it seems to me that it usually precedes a huge breakthrough in therapy. If there is nothing to regret, to be ashamed of, if we have no complicity or responsibility at all in the things that go wrong for us, then, de facto, there is nothing for us to change and no way out. Sometimes, an appropriate shame for misdeeds, for hurts perpetrated in moments of selfishness, is the beginning of healing and sets us free.

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