Quick and Dirty Tips

A Heart Surgeon's View of the Heart
De-stress Back-to-School with Trauma-Informed Parenting
Never Use Secret Tests in Your Relationship

Posted: 30 Aug 2021 06:00 AM PDT

In this excerpt from Reinhard Friedl's The Source of All Things, the author introduces his facination with the heart.

Most of the time you don't hear it, but if your heartbeat were suddenly to stop, you'd stop too. You live from one beat to the next. In between, death resides. If after one heartbeat there isn't another, the clock of life stands still. It might happen while we're sleeping — or shopping. None of us knows the hour of our death.

Your heartbeat is my profession. Sixty to eighty times per minute, this sound creates life. Most hearts beat calmly and strongly, some in a constant rush. Even if the heart stumbles occasionally, it always tries to go on. I have seen many hearts laboring with their last ounce of strength. The heart knows no weekend, no holiday. On your seventy-fifth birthday, it will have beaten about three billion times. It started its work eight months before your birth, twenty- two days after procreation. The heart is the first organ to develop, long before the brain and the first breath. Nothing works without the heart. It throbs through the years and decades, unnoticed—until something ceases to function. Or until a high-tech scan, by accident, discovers a defect that has not yet been felt.

Afflictions of the heart are always dramatic. A pain in the chest is completely different from a pain in the hip. We perceive everything to do with the heart as an attack on our lives, on our inviolability. Even if later it turns out not to be life-threatening, an aching heart is a cause for concern and often triggers a fear of dying. A headache can also be a harbinger of danger; it can eventually lead to death by stroke or brain hemorrhage. Yet a severe headache worries us less than a light pressure in the chest. Deep inside, human beings sense that the heart is the source of all life.

As a heart surgeon I have held thousands of hearts in my hands. I have operated on premature babies and repaired the heart valves of patients well advanced in years. I have implanted artificial hearts and stitched up knife wounds to the heart. As an organ, the heart has been investigated down to its smallest parts. We seem to know everything about it—and yet we know nothing. Every week there are hundreds of new scientific findings published about this organ that has not changed since Homo sapiens emerged 300,000 years ago. It seems that the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal is still correct: "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing."

All great cultures, from the Stone Age to the present, and all religions and spiritual movements perceived and continue to perceive the heart as a symbol, as the biological center for love...

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De-stress Back-to-School with Trauma-Informed Parenting

Posted: 29 Aug 2021 10:08 PM PDT

Everyone has experienced increased stress in the last year because of the constraints of COVID-19 and ever-shifting CDC guidelines, which only makes this year's back-to-school period more intense.

Ever since the pandemic began, parents in my practice have described aggressive, impulsive, or "numbed out" behaviors in their children and in themselves as a response to this stress. Isolation and inequitable access to basic needs like food, housing, healthcare, and education, all took a toll on mental health. Parents struggled to work from home while monitoring remote learning. Other parents had no options but to travel to work—potentially putting their whole family at risk—and felt exhausted by the hypervigilance involved in keeping everyone safe.

Black and brown people have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Police brutality and the historical trauma of racism led to anti-racist uprisings and conflicts. As if that weren't enough, families have dealt with contentious divides in political ideologies, especially the politicization of pandemic safety measures. The new Delta variant only adds to the stress and uncertainty.

While we know there are mental health benefits to children returning to school, for some parents it can still feel like choosing between your child's emotional health or their physical well-being. Kids and families may be overwhelmed with the fear that someone they love might get sick or die, or that they could lose resources allowing them access to food, housing, or health care. Younger kids not yet eligible for a vaccine may be worried about their own safety and that of their unvaccinated peers or siblings.

How can parents help children with their stress or trauma as they transition back to school in such uncertainty, while also managing their own anxiety at the same time?

What is trauma?

Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother's Hands, explains that trauma is not an event or an emotional response, but a bodily experience. He describes it as a "spontaneous protective mechanism used by the body to stop or thwart further (or future) potential damage."

Your body's protective response to a stressful event or a series of stressful events—real or imagined—overwhelms your ability to cope. Your brain senses danger and tells your body to engage your nervous system's survival mode. In survival mode, your brain perceives and responds to the world only in terms of good or bad; the ability to perceive nuance and think clearly goes offline....

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Never Use Secret Tests in Your Relationship

Posted: 29 Aug 2021 10:07 PM PDT

It can be frustrating when a partner, or potential partner, behaves in a way that makes you feel uncertain:

"Why aren't they texting me first? I am always the one texting first. What if they are interested in other people when they are out with friends? Do I have to worry about them flirting with other people? If another romantic opportunity presented itself, would they actually flirt with them, or worse, try to pursue something with them?"

This uncertainty is normal as feelings grow in a new relationship, or as you start to become more serious with a romantic partner. But watch out: these feelings can sometimes manifest in some pretty unhealthy behaviors as we try to understand our partner's intentions or how they really feel. One of these behaviors is known as a "secret test."

What is a secret test?

If you're worried about a partner's lack of interest, a common piece of advice you might hear is to withhold sending that first text. If you feel like you always make the move to initiate conversations, try to force their hand! If your partner reaches out to you, then it's a sign they're interested, but if they don't, then they aren't actually interested in you and you should move on.

This is an example of what researchers call a "secret test." Secret tests are when you behave in a predetermined way to see how your partner will respond in order to assess the state of your relationship.

Don't follow this advice! Secret tests can be harmful to your mental health and to your relationship. They can make you ruminate about your problems, make up scenarios in which your partner fails, and then stress about whether your partner is going to live up to your expectations. Secret tests are often a sign of a deteriorating relationship, one where trust isn't present, or the self-esteem of the partner creating the test is low.

Secret tests can be harmful to your mental health and to your relationship.

7 categories of secret tests

What behaviors actually qualify as secret tests? Here are seven categories of secret tests researchers have identified:

Asking third parties. Going to a third party, such as a friend or family member of your partner's, to ask them how your partner feels about you is a secret test. Although indirect, you are seeking out information about how your partner is feeling about you...

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Food And Recipe Fusion

Monday, August 30, 2021