My Journey Into Darkness

It has been my personal observation that most of us don’t have a clear idea regarding how to manage our stress. My tools from early high school were positive thinking and just being tough. I felt do whatever I set out to do and could get through any difficult circumstance. I would not allow myself to get angry. I did not even know what the emotion of anxiety was. No one could hurt me.

I now recall, as I am writing this, that my first wife while I was dating her in medical school, used to refer to me as “the brick”. I could put a wall around anything. I knew at the time from her perspective it was not complimentary. However, I took it somewhat as a perverse compliment.

Every summer and breaks though medical school I worked in the construction field. I spent most of the time framing, pouring and finishing concrete slabs, and doing some finish carpentry. One summer afte
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I was framing on a hot day in Napa valley. I had not had much sleep the night before. It was one on my personal challenges to consistently sink a 16-penny nail with two swings of the hammer and occasionally one. I was bent over holding a stud against the floor plate. I took a full swing with my 28-ounce framing hammer. On the way down it glanced off an upright piece of plastic plumbing. The hammer landed squarely on my left thumb. My boss was standing about ten feet to my right. The pain was so intense I almost passed out. I stood up, looked at my mangled thumb from the serrations on the hammer, wrapped it up in a rag, and went back to work without a word. My boss thought I was out of my mind. In retrospect I probably was. I was really tough.

Being tough, however, in the big picture of life does not yield a full satisfying life and there is a price to pay. Being tough is actually a variant of positive thinking. I will discuss later in detail that positive thinking is not a good solution to life’s stresses. It is similar to pushing a rock up an endless hill. Eventually, you just get worn out. It is particularly true in the presence of chronic pain.

With the combination of positive thinking, suppressing negative thinking, and being programmed that material possessions will make us happy we become focused on the positive side of stress management. We either don’t or choose not to look at the open drain of anxiety and anger.

In 1988, I started to go into a depression, although I did not recognize it at the time. By 1990, I started to develop severe anxiety reactions that progressed into full-blown panic attacks. I partially pulled out of it around 1993 but under severe stress, I relapsed around early 1996. By 1997, I had progressed into full obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD is the ultimate anxiety disorder. By 2001 I was seriously suicidal. I did not survive the ordeal because I had any ray of hope. My darkness was complete. I had two physician friends whose fathers had committed suicide during their teenage years and their lives were severely impacted. I simply made a decision not to abandon my son. By 2003 I had pulled out of it in a dramatic way and I have been given a second chance at a life at a level that I could not visualize prior to that time. Everything I am sharing with you I have learned through an extremely harsh experience.

I feel strongly that if I had been taught these stress management principles in high school or college, that my life would have been dramatically different. They do represent a dramatic paradigm shift and I am committed to helping you make that shift.