 THE UNDEFEATED MIND Fall 2012 |
 Photo: beatplusmelody Human beings are the only living creatures endowed with a full awareness of their mortality, a wound so painful that they’re driven to pull every cognitive trick in the book to deny it. As with any skill, some of us are far better at this than others, yielding a wide range of conscious reactions to the notion of personal non-being. Continue reading…  Photo: amyelyse How often do you become irrationally angry, and even though you fully recognize you’re overreacting, still find yourself unable to stop? Do you find yourself hurt by a careless word or gesture and find yourself acting petulantly in hopes the person who hurt you will recognize the damage they’ve done without you having to tell them how you feel? How about feeling jealous or insecure and showing off for someone you want to impress or make like you? Continue reading…  Photo: George Eastman House Do you ever long to take a break from your life? Are you sometimes so tired of managing its daily stressors that you find yourself wanting to pitch your entire existence, move somewhere else, and start your life again? Do certain relationships sometimes cause you such distress that you fantasize about running away from them and never coming back? Would that running away permanently was a viable solution. Unfortunately, no life we would ever create somewhere else for ourselves would be free of stress, and nowhere we go can we ever escape ourselves (that is, our way of reacting to stress). Continue reading…  Photo: SuperFantastic Two weeks ago, my son came home from nursery school with a splinter in his palm. It was so small, though, I wasn’t sure if it was really there. “It’s there,” my wife said. She’d tried to squeeze it out before I’d come home but had only succeeded in hurting him terribly. He’d shrieked and cried and tears had poured down his face. Continue reading…  Photo: rjhuttondfw The notion that dying is a right seems nonsensical to argue: death is given to all of us equally without the need of anyone’s sanction. The right to die well, on the other hand—well, that’s another matter entirely. A good death is, in many cases, something our fellow human beings have great power to grant or deny, and is therefore, sadly, a right for which we must indeed fight. Continue reading…  Photo: Keoni Cabral I remember thinking when I was lying on my bedroom floor, bleeding internally so badly that I’d lost the ability even to crawl, that if I hadn’t been married I would have bled to death. I was home after a laparoscopic appendectomy, had awakened at 3 a.m. with projectile vomiting, and had found myself unable to move (due to rapid blood loss). Luckily, my wife could do so normally and called an ambulance. I was transported to the hospital and ultimately saved by a second operation later that afternoon. Continue reading…  Photo: jekert gwapo In one sense, the battle to be happy is a battle against negativity. Bad things happen all the time but how we internalize them, how we react to them, is what ultimately determines their final effect on us—and over that we have simultaneously more and less control than we realize. More, because we assign the meaning of events, not the events themselves, even though it feels as if that meaning is somehow assigned for us. Yet less, because we can rarely simply decide when confronted with a negative life event that is is, in fact, actually positive. To do that, we have to find a way to actually believe it, and that requires a process of continual self-reflection and attitude training; a program designed to strengthen our life force, so to speak. Continue reading…  Photo: Kal111 I recently had a patient of mine undergo surgery to remove his gallbladder due to acute cholecystitis. He’d been out to dinner with some friends and had started to feel nauseated, then developed some right upper quadrant abdominal pain that necessitated ending the evening early. After a sleepless night, a morning episode of vomiting, and developing a fever, he came in to see me. I made the diagnosis, called a surgical colleague, and his gallbladder was taken out later that afternoon. Afterwards, I talked with the surgeon, who reported the operation had gone well, with almost no blood loss. The gallbladder had looked “as if it was about to burst,” suggesting they’d gone in just in time, he said. Continue reading…  Photo: kretyen In the past, I’ve been humbled to discover things about myself I didn’t want to know: as I wrote in The Good Guy Contract, that I believed I needed other people to like me to be happy, and as I wrote in Keeping Romance Alive, that I was warm when in fact I wasn’t. As surprising as learning these things was, perhaps even more surprising was that learning them surprised me. Why wouldn’t I always have known these things? Why do the things we discover about ourselves so often run counter to our expectations? How is it our view of ourselves so often turns out to be entirely wrong? Continue reading…  Photo: 28misguidedsouls When I was a resident working in the intensive care unit (the ICU) at the University of Iowa, one of my responsibilities was to communicate with the family members of my patients. However, an intensive care unit, as its name suggests, is an intensely busy place, and I often observed among my colleagues a tendency to think about communicating with families as the last thing on their list of things to do. And though I too often found myself making it the last task of my day, I tried to make it a consistent one, knowing, as I did, that not knowing is perhaps even more anxiety producing than knowing that something is bad. 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