I tried to reassure my wife, who was on the verge of panicking. She kept asking me if we needed to take him to the emergency room. I looked at his wound, shrugged, and said, "Naaaw!" All he needed, I thought, was a butterfly band aid and some Neosporin.
But my wife kept pressing me and, as you can probably predict, won. We took the little guy to what will likely be the first of many more emergency room visits.
You can also likely guess the next part. Yep, I was wrong and my wife was, again, correct. He needed stitches and got four of them (a separate horror story in and of itself!). He has healed completely. No scar.
Recently, an abscess developed on my gum line. I went to the dentist. He sent me to a specialist. I had a hairline fracture in a tooth that acted as a pipeline for bacteria. The dentist extracted the tooth and created a bridge, attaching it to the two teeth beside it.
The tooth is now fine, fully functional. He told me if I had waited longer, the decay could have spread to neighboring teeth and eventually could have eaten a gaping hole in my jaw. I'm glad I saw a specialist.
I have a good friend who found himself in a spiritual quagmire. He felt stuck and was even questioning his faith. He went to see a religious leader who counselled with him on several occasions. He reestablished himself and is now doing wonderfully, pursuing spiritual goals of his own making.
My car had electrical problems that needed attention. I took my car to a car professional. The mechanic and friend of my in laws found and fixed the problem.
About a month or two ago, I was downloading a few images from Google Image to paste onto a document I was creating. A window popped up indicating I had a virus that needed immediate attention. I clicked on the button that would begin the diagnosis.
Then I noticed the spelling and grammar errors in the message. Too late. I shut down my computer, but when I restarted it, I saw the scariest words a computer owner can see: Complete System Failure, in those eerie light blue letters against a black screen. My computer was completely dead. The mother board was fried.
I took it to a specialist who diagnosed the problem and an $80 mother board later, my computer seems to be operating just fine, better than just before the virus that destroyed it, as a matter of fact.
And yet when our emotional life is turned upside down, when our psychology is out of whack, when we experience something particularly traumatic (such as a divorce, or the death of a loved one, or a layoff from work, 7 months after which you are still looking for a job), we rarely think about going to a specialist of the heart for some fine-tuning.
If we can call a plumber without shame and embarrassment or an electrician to deal competently with the inner workings of the electrical wiring of the house, why are we not more accepting of the premise that the human heart is infinitely more complex than the wiring behind the walls of a house?
Some two weeks ago, we flushed a toilet in our master bathroom only to hear the telltale sign of problems when our toilets started gurgling. On the next flush, our bathtub and shower began spitting up blackish gunk, the content of which shall remain the unnamed! We called one of those smelly guys with the showing butt-crack.
We all knew what the problem was, so he snaked the main line. He pulled out a huge wad of roots that had twisted into an impenetrable clump. I asked if there was much likelihood that the pipes were cracked or worse. He told me it was unlikely and then told me how roots generally get into a pipes. It is at the joints.
Tiny hair-like roots slowly enter at the joints, spiraling around where they connect until they enter the pipe. There, they dip into a constant supply of fertilized water, and expand, growing larger and larger until the water traps the hair and other debris against the web of roots now in the pipe.
Life is more similar to our house's plumbing issues than most would care to admit, upon reflection. The infinite number of parental goof-ups by well-meaning parents. The tragedy of bad parents raising kids badly. The abuse, the neglect, the misspoken words, the anger and impatience, the attempt to protect that turns into control, all the wrong steps by parents who did a substandard job at parenting (and that's all of us to varying degrees!), leave tiny thread-like hairs along the inner workings of our hearts and souls.
They enter our system at the joints, where defences have not been widely developed, where we are soft and vulnerable. They enter at the heart, through the emotional cracks in the system. They can come in so slowly, so subtly, just tiny fractions of inches at a time, that they enter hardly noticed. And then they expand and spread into other areas of our lives, clogging up our relationships and mucking up or clarity, confusing our thoughts and feelings, getting in the way of so much of life.
Then we flush an emotional toilet, and the dark gooey flood of past things come oozing up into the open, where we can see the fecal debris and smell the stench of a life interrupted with an knot of twisted emotional roots. So why not call a plumber of the heart?
We call piano tuners to tune our pianos, the cable guy to fix our connection problems, an accountant to help us sort out and counsel us in our finances. Well, why not someone trained in issues of the heart to help us sort those things out, tune the strings of our emotional discord and fix the connections that have been damaged with others in our lives, especially spouse and children?
But what about dumping all that money into the pockets of an incompetent therapist? So what! Would you go without cancer treatment just because your doctor might end up being incompetent? The obvious thing to do is to scrutinize with more care and research the options out there. You don't have to pick the first plumber in the Yellow Pages, you know.
Besides, I believe most of humanity takes the shape of a bell curve anyway. Most of us are decent at what we do as employees, as neighbors, as parents, as children. There are the few at the upper end of the bell curve who are very accomplished and those at the other extreme who should not be allowed to impregnate women or operate heavy machinery. Such people are relatively rare. Most of us are merely average, filling the vast space in the middle of the bell curve.
So with all professionals. Most doctors are competent. Some should be arrested and some are incredible life-savers. So with cops, teachers, students, attorneys, politicians, clergy, electricians, and psychologists.
The answer to the what-if question above is to be sure you research the crowd enough to find someone closer to the small end of the bell curve to the right. Consumers are most satisfied when they shop around. If we don't like the way an IPod works, we take it back to the store for an exchange. Do the same with mental health professionals. Shop around and return it if it doesn't fit right. Then go shopping again.
In the end, trust me, your spouse, your children, your friends and neighbors, and everyone you work with will thank you for the time you took to invest in clearing the emotional debris that so often clogs even the best pipes under the best houses in the best neighborhoods.
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