Understand the boundaries of the relationship

Soon enough, Rob and I would pick up that heavy yoke of frustration, sadness and desperation as we, too, searched for answers to questions arising from a seeming breach of the laws of nature: as sure as a mother should be able to produce the milk her infant needs, parents should expect that their child will live a full and long life. How could this all have happened? Our initial, unending why? We knew from conversations Rob had had with the coroner in the first forty-eight hours after Lauren's passing that getting a response to this deeper question would not be a speedy process. There were numerous tissue samples to examine, tests to run and possibilities to rule out. Symbol in this sense no longer means symptom. As I have pointed out elsewhere,1 symbol returns to its original and root meaning of drawing together (sym-ballein). The problem--the neurosis and its elements--is described by the antonym of symbolic, namely diabolic (dia-ballein), pulling apart. Dreams are par excellence the realm of symbols and myths. I use the term myth not in the pejorative sense of falsehood, but in the sense of a form of universal truth revealed in some partial way to the dreamer. These are ways human consciousness makes sense of the world. Persons in therapy, like all of us, are trying to make sense out of nonsense, trying to put the world into some perspective, trying to form out of the chaos they are suffering some order and harmony. After having studied a series of dreams of persons in therapy, I am convinced that there is one quality that is always present, a quality I call passion for form. The patient constructs in his unconscious a drama; I have noted the forms in the dreams being repeated, revised, remolded, and then, like a motif in a symphony, returning triumphantly to be drawn together to make a meaningful whole of the series. A few triggers may be infection, tobacco smoke, and gluten in the diet. Both psoriasis and eczema, like other skin infections, can cause the scalp to flake, bringing undesirable dandruff. And there is acne, the bane of a teenager's existence (but adults can develop it, too). Basically, hair follicles fill with oil from sebaceous (oil) glands below them, bacteria finds its way in, and the follicle becomes infected. The face, shoulders, chest, and back, the areas most populated by sebaceous glands, are prime acne sites.

Hormones, medications, stress, and diet all may play a part in triggering acne. In all cases, practice skin health: shower quickly in warm, not hot, water (hot water dries it out); essential oils is developing rave reviews for skin support, too. WHAT essential oils CAN DO: Because skin has the highest number and concentration of CB2 receptors in the body, the ECS obviously plays a major part in skin health. Research shows that cannabinoids like essential oils can interact with the CB2 receptors to calm inflammation. But he couldn't take that in because anything below the bar enforced by the grandiose self was as good as nothing. This is the sad trick of narcissism: the responder's true feelings may be positive, but the solicited response robs the feedback of its authenticity. I longed for that real engagement with my dad and would sometimes pose theological questions that troubled me. More often than not, he saw these questions as a threat. Maybe the question would expose the limits of his understanding or doubts of his own. Maybe, in those moments, he felt less like an authority and more like a fellow searcher. Truthful discourse means relinquishing authority and control, and that just feels too dangerous. Better stick to the script. So, he would laugh at me--sometimes raucously--and then make a comment along the lines of, Isn't that cute? Supporting the grandiose self means relinquishing real engagement--including the real rewards that come with it. He personally dissected cadavers, sawing through bones and skulls, and he religiously attended autopsies so that he could see as closely as possible the structure of muscles and nerves. His anatomical drawings were far in advance of anything of his time for their realism and accuracy. To other artists, Leonardo seemed insane for all of this attention to detail, but in the few paintings that he actually completed, the results of such rigorous practice can be seen and felt. More than the work of any other artist of his time, the landscapes in the backgrounds of his paintings seemed infused with life. Every flower, branch, leaf or stone was rendered in intense detail.

But these backgrounds were not simply there to decorate. In an effect known as sfumato, and one that was peculiar to his work, he would soften parts of these backgrounds to the point at which they would melt into the figure in the foreground, giving a dreamlike effect. It was part of his idea that all of life is deeply interconnected and fused on some level. The faces of the women he painted had a pronounced effect on people, and particularly on men, who often fell in love with the female figures he depicted in religious scenes. It wasn't any obvious sensual quality in their expression, but in their ambiguous smiles and their beautifully rendered flesh the men would recognize a powerfully seductive quality. Those in the coroner's office promised to be thorough in their efforts to give us answers, and we have every reason to believe they were. But very early on, the coroner was examining whether a drug that Lauren decided to take in her desperation to augment her milk supply might somehow have interacted with an undiagnosed heart defect. She would have had no reason to be tested for any possible heart problems; Now, given that the drug she was prescribed, domperidone, is believed to interact with abnormal cardiac rhythm in some patients, we wish that the test had been run. Had those results shown a problem and been part of her medical records, she might not have received the prescription. I found out about domperidone's history only one day after Lauren died. My friend Lisa Brandt emailed and asked if, by any chance, Lauren had been using it. I remembered our daughter mentioning that her cousin was taking it for her own problems breastfeeding, and my own dad was on it for a short time because of a medical gastrointestinal problem. Its similarity to the name of a favourite champagne, Dom Perignon, had made it immediately familiar. When I called Lisa and told her that Lauren was indeed taking the drug, Lisa's response was Oh my GOD! I found that one fruitful approach is to take the dream as a series of spatial forms. I refer now to a thirty-year-old woman in therapy. In one stage in her dreams, a female character, for example, would move onto the stage of the dream; This kind of movement in space occurred in the Lesbian period of this particular person's analysis. In later dreams she, the patient, would enter;

I began to see a curious geometric communication, a progression of spatial forms. Perhaps the meaning of her dreams, and the progress of her analysis, could be better understood by how she constructed these forms moving in space--of which she was quite unaware--than in what she verbalized about her dreams. Then I began to notice the presence of triangles in this person's dreams. First, in her dreams referring to her infantile period, it was the triangle of father, mother, and baby. In what I took to be her adolescent phase, the triangle was composed of two women and a man, and she, as one of the women, moved in space toward the man. A 2006 study in Germany showed that cannabinoid-rich products applied to sites with eczema and other skin inflammations soothed itching. In the case of psoriasis, essential oils and other cannabinoids appear to inhibit the overproliferation of cells that cause the pileup of skin cells and plaque. natural pain relief seed oil has also been used on eczema with success. A 2018 report in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences backed up the lubricating and healing benefits of plant oils for keeping the skin barrier strong against environmental invaders, and for being antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antimicrobial; For acne treatment, essential oils has been found to specifically deliver antiacne activity by tamping down oil production from sebaceous glands and lowering inflammation. The supporting cast in the coffee plant includes the terpenes limonene, which fights bacteria involved in acne infection, and linalool, which works against inflammation. Topical: salves, balms, lotions, oils for inflammation, itching, and infection, depending on condition; According to the Centers for Disease Control, some 75 million Americans suffer from high blood pressure, or hypertension, which leads to the two top killers in the nation: heart disease and stroke. As we age, arteries lose flexibility and fatty deposits collect on artery walls, gradually making them stiff and narrow and reducing healthy blood flow. This causes hypertension, or high blood pressure, as the heart works harder to move blood through arteries. The Reassurance Dance The reluctant response. When a request for feedback is loaded with the demand for praise, the stench of manipulation and control taints our reasons for responding. The response is no longer a gift, but a duty, and an impossible one at that. So the responder often walks a thin line between pleasing the requester and withholding.

What often comes out is a dutiful, bland, and reluctant response. This isn't always the case; But as the cycle continues, as it did with my dad, the dance becomes boring, and it gets harder to muster up the same enthusiasm. As I look back, I see that I withheld responses as much as I forced them. Years later, in graduate school, I saw this dynamic from the perspective of the fragile bully. Leonard heard many stories of them finding their way to his paintings in various houses and secretly fondling the women in the images and kissing their lips. Much of Leonardo's Mona Lisa has been damaged by attempts to clean and restore it in the past, making it hard to imagine it as it originally appeared, and how its startling qualities shocked the public. Fortunately, we have the critic Vasari's description of it, before it became hopelessly altered: The eyebrows, growing thickly in one place and thinly in another, following the pores of the skin, could not have been more lifelike. The nose, with its ravishingly delicate pink nostrils, was life itself. The shaping of the mouth, where the red of the lips merged with the skin tones of the face, seemed not to be made from colors but from living flesh. In the hollow of the throat, the observant onlooker could see the pulsing of the veins. Long after Leonardo's death, his paintings continue to have haunting and disturbing effects on viewers. Numerous security guards in museums around the world have been fired for their weird, obsessive relationships to his work, and Leonardo's paintings remain the most vandalized in the history of art, all of this attesting to the power of his work to stir up the most visceral emotions. The primary problem for artists in Leonardo da Vinci's day was the constant pressure to produce more and more work. They had to produce at a relatively high rate in order to keep the commissions coming and remain in the public eye. Delivering what was the second biggest shock I would get that week, she told me that she had been taking it for a medical issue. Lisa also told me about a young woman at her radio station who said she had been taken off domperidone after heart tests had revealed a pre-existing murmur. The woman, who was Lauren's age and also had a young son, had been taking it to encourage breast milk production. The drug is approved in Canada for certain gastrointestinal conditions, but its use in stimulating lactation is off-label. Health Canada and the manufacturers have advised that the drug may have cardiac side effects in certain patients.