Journal of Sacred Work

Some of us wear physical disabilities visible to all. The rest of us can hide our troubles from public view. – Erie Chapman

    My younger brother (in the foreground in this family photo from the ’50s – we are nine years apart) must have felt so isolated growing up. Intensely shy, he clung to our mother as Linus to his blanket. When he reached school age, he fought getting on the school bus every day for years – as if it were a dragon come to gobble him up. By age thirteen, he knew there was something else different about him, but he wasn’t clear what that was.
   After several years of silent struggle and torment, he grew confused and depressed. By age seventeen, he had reached a painful decision. He would seek psychiatric help. With tears and trepidation, he found the courage to approach our father…

    Years later, he recounted the story of that night’s encounter. "I need help, Dad," he told our father. "I’m depressed, upset, confused. I really need
help. I want to see a psychiatrist."
   This was the 1960s. Our parents had grown up in an economic Depression, not an emotional one. Dad was conservative and skeptical about depression as mental illness.
   "He just looked at me with sort of a baffled stare," my brother told me. "Then he shook his head, smiled and said, ‘Just get a good night’s sleep, son. You’ll feel better in the morning.’"
   Parents do the best they can with what they know at the time. Perhaps we all do. But I’m grateful my brother survived this shallow dismissal of his trouble.
   Two years later, my brother faked a drug overdose in college so that he could get the help he needed. It’s hard for people today to understand that homosexuality was still classified as a mental disorder well into the 1970s. My brother went through years of therapy to "treat" his disorder. He was even pronounced "cured" around 1976 and married a woman the following year, a marriage which should never have happened and ended a few years later in divorce.
   But this meditation is not about homosexuality. It’s about the difficulties we face with truth and the devastating isolation so many feel so much of the time when others pass judgment on our problems and brand us.
   Between my brother and I (in age) is our sister Martha (in foreground, above, from early ’80s photo.) My younger sister was born with a visible disability know as achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism. The obvious difference in her appearance was a hard thing for her to deal with at many times in her life. But there was no hiding her disorder.
   In spite of her disability, she developed a cheerful, charming, and likable personality and has always been popular. She is a caregiver today at a large hospital. There has never been any faking for her: no masks, no trying to hide a physical problem which everyone could see. Is this why she seems so emotionally well-balanced today?
   I don’t know the answer to this question. And I don’t really have any idea what my younger brother truly went through before he finally achieved the happiness he has today with his long time partner. And I don’t truly know if my younger sister is as happy as she so often seems.
   It’s funny how little a photograph of four smiling siblings (like this photo from the ’80s) reveals. We’ve been a pretty lucky group, but I know that my older sister and I, like every other human, have had our share of heartache – times of isolation when we needed the help of caregivers and wanted those caregivers to understand that loneliness is its own kind of affliction. One that calls for empathy.
   It is so difficult for all of us, including caregivers, to discover the importance of differentiating between diagnoses and judgment. All caregivers need an ability to analyze a problem that needs treatment and loving care. It’s quite another thing for us to attach a moral judgment to our diagnosis.
   "Jane is a paralytic. Alice is a stroke. Bob is a quad, and Jake has ‘totally lost it.’" I have heard caregivers describe patients in their care with these words – as if the patient had become their diagnosis.
   Sometimes, I hear in caregiver’s voices something even worse than pity. It is a sort of accidental judgment which marginalizes their patients. The paralytic has become "less than." The "quad" has somehow slipped down the hierarchy of humanity. The "stroke" no longer has a full membership in the human race. The implications of this thinking for caregiving are profound.

   Fortunately, most caregivers, especially the angels we know as physical and occupational
therapists, maintain a beautiful sense of appreciation for the humanity of those for whom they care. Yet many of us need reminding that the occurrence of illness, injury or handicap is a signal that a patient needs our love and our empathy.
   To fail to treat patients with special respect is to  drive them further into an isolation and a loneliness no one should have to endure. An afflicted person is no less human than a healthy one.

Spiritual Exercise:
Consider the implications of Diagnosis versus Judgment.

• Evaluation: That patient is suffering from a drug overdose and needs treatment
• Judgment: That guy is an addict and addicts are bad people.

Who are people you know who suffer from challenges you know about – alcoholism, divorce, physical disability, mental illness? How do you think about them when they enter your mind?
What are disability you currently have? Are you forgiving toward your own troubles? How would you like others to respond if they knew all of your troubles? How can you practice this approach to others?

-Erie Chapman