“Remember what the dormouse said: Feed your head.”
-Grace Slick
Much harder to feed your head than, say, feeding your body. Despite temptations—lookin’ at you, Christmas cookies—we can consciously choose what goes into our mouths. Physically that’s possible, but often difficult. Philosophically it’s harder to comprehend. For instance, if we are what we eat, are steers vegetables? Gets complicated.
But not as complicated as what we feed our heads. We have far less control over that. Knowledge, experience, prejudices, external stimuli, simply being, all go into the soup of our thoughts, both conscious and unconscious. All our angels and daemons live in our heads, not often in harmony. And not infrequently with troubling battles.
Sometimes those conflicts lead us to dark places filled with darker thoughts. Sometimes we can find our way out by ourselves. Sometimes we need help. That’s when it can get tricky.
Twice in my life I needed help to find the light. Once in university when a longish-term relationship crashed and burned—okay, I got dumped—I couldn’t seem to shake the depression I found myself in using my tried and true coping mechanisms: denial and repression.
A few sessions with someone wiser than myself lifted some of the darkness and replaced it with a renewed sense of resilience and a nascent understanding I had a deeper pool of inner strength than I thought. Lessons that have served me well for years now.
I needed help some years later when I was hit with a one-two punch realizing I had no desire to stay in either my marriage or my career. The marriage I could rationalize. But viewed from the outside, friends thought I was crazy to give up a career aimed squarely at executive status and a fat paycheque.
I was awash with guilt over not being able to make the marriage work, but I was really struggling with walking away from a future I’d invested so much time and effort to build, even though I knew I was the proverbial square peg in a very tight, round hole. That took more sessions with a therapist over a longer period of time than I’m completely comfortable admitting.
But it paved the way for becoming a corporate dropout and a happy ski bum. It also doubled down on plumbing that pool of resilience, the depth of which I was uncertain.
So why in the world am I relating this?
Because these are troubling times. All is not well in Tiny Town, or anywhere else in the world for that matter. Too often recently, we’ve lost good friends, good people, sometimes because they couldn’t find their way out of the darkness overwhelming them.
The amount of pain and stress right now is higher than many have faced in their lives. It seems each time the food bank opens its doors, it posts record numbers of people needing help feeding themselves and their families. Aside from food, the Whistler Community Services Society (WCSS) is helping record numbers of people cope with the stresses and strains of just getting by.
We’re hammered by inflation-driven increases in prices of everything we need, let alone what we might want. Walking into a grocery store is shock therapy. If we rent, we live with increasing costs and the very real possibility of losing our homes if they’re market rental.
We live in a mountain resort, and most of us live here because we have a serious addiction to sliding down snowy mountains. But where’s the snow? Patience is wearing thin. And, oh, another atmospheric river is here to inflict another blow.
And somehow, December has crept up on us. Pop psyche stress tests always ask if you’ve experienced any of the following in the past 12 months. Near the top of the list is Christmas. Duh. It’s a stressful time of year. Just what we need with everything else we’re trying to balance.
I don’t have words of wisdom to offer. So I asked Greg McDonnell for those words. Greg’s a well-respected therapist and counsellor in town. He’s been helping people in that role for 18 years, and prior to that as an outreach worker and executive director of WCSS. And like WCSS, Greg’s busier than he’s ever been. The need is great.
“We have this cultural armour we carry around that says, ‘Nothing affects me.’ But we know events we experience affect us, the body carries this charge of trauma around in our nervous system and we don’t necessarily recognize it. If we don’t find healthy ways to discharge it, our nervous systems will find unhealthy ways to deal with it,” he says.
“Some of those ways might be depression, anxiety, addictions, anger management, physical violence, theft, affairs, something to make us feel different. We need to find healthy ways to discharge. The ways we often discharge in Whistler are drugs and alcohol. But if we’re profoundly numbing, that’s not good either.”
Greg mentions better avenues to discharge that load, including WCSS, which can offer counselling assistance funds; Vancouver Coastal Health; the Sea to Sky Safety Net (seatoskysafetynet.com); and Canada’s new suicide crisis helpline—988.
Not to mention the tried and true. “If you have close friends or colleagues, people who show up for you and who you can talk to, reach out, name your experience and help normalize it. By naming it you may not solve it, but at least you discharge of bit of it,” McDonnell says.
“Chaos, no matter what it is, is not unexpected. It’s important to fact check the tough stuff we’ve already dealt with in our lives; we usually come out the other side of those experiences. Our difficulties tend to be pretty transient in nature, so it’s important to find some short-term solutions, some good therapies to treat them.”
With a nod to the holiday season descending on us, Greg says, “This time of year can trigger things for us. They can be family of origin, childhood traumas, high expectations we feel we can’t achieve. Christmas can be really triggering.”
All of which is made more difficult because so many of us don’t have family in Whistler. If you feel the holiday blues, Greg has a couple of thoughts.
“Connect with your personal values and if you can, those with like-minded values. Connect with something that gives you purpose and meaning. And connect with your community, people who pick you up,” he says.
From personal experience I’d add this: If, like many of us, you don’t have any family here, make your own. There are others you know in the same boat. Pull them in for an orphan’s Christmas, a slapdash potluck dinner that will likely become one of your favourite holiday memories in the future.
Feed your head... the good stuff.
