The Hemp Connection:
gratitude

We’re now in the thick of the holiday season, and we’re socializing, eating too much of the wrong things, and talking about gratitude and miracles. At Thanksgiving, in particular, we gave thanks for the year’s blessings. Our loved ones, homes, jobs, and perhaps our health were on the list. For me, this has been a dramatic and miraculous year, when it comes to health.

In August, I was accidentally infected with pasteurella as a result of the bacteria entering my hand through some broken skin while I was pilling my cat. Although I cleaned it and put antibacterial ointment on it, a large purplish black welt quickly formed on my finger, followed by heat, redness, and streaking up to the knuckles, which are classic signs of infection. By the time I reached the emergency room, the streaking had gone to my elbow. This was a terrifyingly quick-moving infection that was threatening to go systemic. The only possible treatment was antibiotics, and lots of them — immediately.

Now, I am loathe to resort to antibiotics unless they’re absolutely necessary – but it did occur to me that I could actually lose my hand, arm, or life – which is exactly what would have happened a hundred years ago. I surrendered to four types of IV antibiotics, a six-day hospital stay, and emergency surgery to save the function of my right index finger. Although my hospital stay was fraught with complications, I am eternally grateful for the miracle of Western medicine and its powerful antibiotics. I have faced other extreme infections in my life, but this was the most serious I’ve ever dealt with. I really do feel it’s a miracle I’m alive.

However, it’s not just these big drama moments in our lives that are miracles. Every moment, I’m a miracle, and so are you. We survive trauma, abuse, bad upbringings, alcoholism and other forms of addiction, PCOS, incompatible spouses, cancer, sick children, and elderly relatives with dementia. We work, we care for ourselves and others, and we do what we can in spite of often seemingly insurmountable obstacles. We struggle through challenging courses in school, minor or major health crises, mental illness, financial downturn, and intense disappointments. We get through the day when it seems as if the day will never end. We restrain our tempers, our tongues, and our appetites. We drive ourselves forward, making giant strides on some days, or crawling on our knees on other days. We survive. We try to thrive.

Instead of lamenting your weight, the size of your thighs, the incredibly annoying behavior of your ADHD child, the way your husband never brings you flowers, your highly imperfect boss, or the fact that you’ve got this damn thing called PCOS, I wonder what it would be like if you instead asked yourself, “How am I a miracle today?” The shift will be powerful. You’ll appreciate yourself more, and love yourself a little more easily. Your self-esteem will soar, when you realize precisely how miraculous you are, right here, in this moment, and always.

Gretchen Kubacky, Psy.D. is a Health Psychologist in private practice in West Los Angeles, California. She has completed the inCYST training. She specializes in counseling women and couples who are coping with infertility, PCOS, and related endocrine disorders and chronic illnesses.

If you would like to learn more about Dr. HOUSE or her practice, or obtain referrals in the Los Angeles area, please visit her website at www.drhousemd.com, or e-mail her at AskDrHouseMD@gmail.com. You can also follow her on Twitter @askdrhousemd.

I’ve done a great deal of volunteer work for an organization that helps the families of those who have died by suicide. In their newsletter, there’s a column called “The Gift.” At first, I thought, “how crazy, how obscene, how downright blasphemous – there’s nothing connected to suicide to be grateful for!” But as I read the column for a while, I began to see that even in the darkest acts, there are many unexpected things to be grateful for.

And so it is with PCOS. When I suggest to my clients that there might be something about PCOS that they can be grateful about, I usually get a similar response to the one I described above – or at least a look of disbelief and wonder. Then I explain that there’s always something to appreciate in a medical condition, a job loss, a car accident, or anything else you find unpleasant or undesirable. Sometimes, though, you have to look hard – but if you try hard enough, you can start to name the gratitude items. And when you’re feeling grateful, you’re feeling more positive, and less mired in the depressive, negative thoughts.

I’m going to start the list for you, with some of my personal gratitude items, and then you can continue from there with your own list:

*Some men like curvier women more than skinny women – score one for the plus-size women of the world!
*PCOS isn’t exactly a hot topic yet for the rest of the world, but there’s vastly more research interest in 2011 than there ever was, and that means HOPE.
*There are so many delicious, healthy, PCOS-friendly foods to eat, shop for, explore, and experiment with – today, I made an awesome salad plate out of Italian olive-oil packed tuna, heirloom tomatoes, farmers’ market fruits, and half an avocado with a lemon vinaigrette. That’s not suffering, by any measure. Quite the contrary.
*We have this amazing support system called the internet (and I’m old enough to be able to compare that to a time when I was stuck going to the local library and searching the card file and the dusty biology books to try to figure out what was wrong with me).
*There ARE some people out there who really do get it – especially inCYST’s very own Monika Woolsey, and her team of supportive, interested, and educated psychologists, dieticians, dermatologists, and exercise physiologists who comprise the balance of the inCYST crew.
*We have allies in the most surprising, unexpected, and, dare I say FUN places – how about that hottie Hollywood trainer Craig Ramsay who’s doing the fundraiser for us in August?
*PCOS has made me assert my health as a priority. If I didn’t have PCOS, it’s unlikely that I would be practicing this level of self-care – and I know that what I do is only going to benefit my PCOS in the long run.

I hope my list has given you a couple of laughs, a little inspiration, and a shift of perspective. I encourage you to start your own PCOS gratitude list or journal, and see how it shifts you into a more positive mindset.

Gretchen Kubacky, Psy.D. is a Health Psychologist in private practice in West Los Angeles, California. She specializes in counseling women and couples who are coping with infertility, PCOS, and related endocrine disorders and chronic illnesses.
If you would like to learn more about Dr. HOUSE or her practice, or obtain referrals in the Los Angeles area, please visit her website at www.drhousemd.com, or e-mail her at Gretchen@drhousemd.com

What is hopelessness? Simply, it is a loss of hope and optimism, and a failure of belief that the future will be brighter and better. Hopelessness takes your energy and trashes it. It contributes to and even defines depression to a great extent. When you’re feeling hopeless, that’s often a point at which you give up trying to do anything, and it all gets worse. Sound familiar?

Life in general is pretty stressful. We’ve all got a giant list of “shoulds” in our heads already, about family, romantic partners, children, work, religious and social commitments, and a myriad of other things. We’ve got bedrooms to paint, dinners to make, children to shuttle around, bosses to satisfy, cars to wash, craft projects to complete, vacations to plan, and chin hairs to pluck! My goodness, we are busy! The list is endless.

Add PCOS to all of that, with the reminders about proper eating, exercise, supplementation, fertility enhancement techniques, stress reduction, and everything else, and you’ve got a big old heap of overwhelm festering in your brain. That’s your brain, by the way, that’s already over-taxed by the hormonal imbalances caused by PCOS – so it’s a double whammy. You may already be feeling sluggish and lethargic mentally, and now there’s even more you’re supposed to read, understand, absorb, interpret, and apply. And it’s feeling like you can’t possibly master this condition, or ever really have a perfect plan (or even a half-way decent plan that’s effective) for managing it.

I want you to know that PCOS doesn’t just feel overwhelming, stressful, and depressing – it actually is overwhelming, stressful, and depressing. It’s entirely normal to get overwhelmed by it, be angry at it, ignore it, hate it and everything associated with it, and just want to wake up and find that it’s disappeared. It’s also normal to be bored, irritated, and not want to cope at all. And it’s normal to struggle with it, find some peace and balance, and then struggle some more.

In the struggle, you may find a place to focus on that actually has some positive aspects to it, and that will allow you to shift your attitude, and shift out of hopelessness. Your mind is a powerful thing, and a source for positive thoughts as well as negative ones. It’s pretty clear that focusing on negative thoughts produces more negative thinking – but the same is true of positive thoughts. That’s why it’s often recommended to focus on what’s good in your life, as a way of starting the shift toward the positive. In support of that concept, next week’s “Mental Health Monday” post will be about the upside of PCOS.

Gretchen Kubacky, Psy.D. is a Health Psychologist in private practice in West Los Angeles, California. She specializes in counseling women and couples who are coping with infertility, PCOS, and related endocrine disorders and chronic illnesses.

If you would like to learn more about Dr. HOUSE or her practice, or invite her to speak at your event, please visit her website at http://www.drhousemd.com/, or e-mail her at Gretchen@drhousemd.com. You can also follow her on Twitter @askdrhousemd