Rumination as a digestive disorder is the bringing up of partially digested food and re-chewing it. Sounds disgusting, doesn’t it? For the black dog it is the bringing up of partially digested thoughts & experiences and re-chewing them in a negative light. Disgusting deja-vu all over again. It is spinning your thoughts as only a black dog can.
Today is my father’s 87 birthday. As he likes to say, “I’ve been in WWII, Korea and Viet Nam. I’ve seen a lot and got shot at a lot but they never hit me!” He and mom were married just a month shy of their 64th anniversary when she died last year.
Here’s a video of him doing his favorite toast which he says he learned in WWII (text follows).
Here’s to it
and from it
and to it again.
And if you get to it,
but don’t do it,
you’ll never get to it
to do it again.
If you’ve ever doubted the importance of sleep and its connection to health, please take a look at these two clips. A very good, eye-opening (pun intended) story about the value of sleep.
60 Minutes story - The Science of Sleep part one
60 Minutes story - The Science of Sleep part two
Yesterday I traveled to the great city of Wichita, Kansas to help my son move. He just graduated from barber school and is moving back home to work in an old school barber shop downtown.
As with most trips I found myself worrying about my truck breaking down. Not that it’s prone to that. It’s just that it has 127k and seems due for a major repair and well, I tend to catastrophize. Black dogs tend to not see things as they are, but imagine things as they might be for the worse.
So much of what we do to avoid the pain and suffering of walking a black dog is simply to withdraw. We withdraw from friends & family, pleasant activities, from life itself. It’s very easy to justify. We tell ourselves we don’t feel up to it, don’t deserve it, don’t have the psychic energy to do it. Of course you don’t feel like doing anything, your black dog is smothering you, but by giving in to it you’re actually making it worse.
So how do we stop accommodating the beast?
I took the day off so that my brother Jim, sister Chrissy and her husband Tom and I could all drive up state to the little town our mom is buried in and pick out her tombstone. It’s been almost a year since she passed and we wanted to get it done before the anniversary of her death and in time for memorial day when we’ll take our dad up to put flowers on her grave. It was a two hour drive through a lot of winter weary Kansas farmland to get to there.
For those of you unfamiliar with Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (aka Cognitive Therapy) you can get a good idea of what it’s all about here - Three Minute Therapy.
Don’t let the title fool you. There’s a lot of very sound advice here.
In researching ways to combat stress I came across this site with some pretty wonderful ways to deal with stress. It’s directed towards mothers but don’t let that keep you from reading and implementing the strategies - they’re for everyone.
In light of my recent job woes I’ve been reading a lot of books about changing your career and finding your life’s calling. A lot of the techniques that career/life coaches use are very similar to aspects of TLC. The following are just a few of the insights I’ve picked up from these books and how they fit in with TLC and other anti-depression strategies.
