Right and wrong. Good and evil. It is so easy to think in the language of opposites and see life through the lens of "us vs. them." Especially now during a pandemic when we perceive the "other" as murderous idiots (infections vectors that refuse to stay home, or ridiculous radicals who are destroying the economy), and we can't understand why others are being so stubbornly selfish, insensitive, and stupid.
No matter which side we're on, the same smell of fear and hate flows through the air, landing inside everyone like viruses. It's our innate reactions that mount the defensive barriers, between the flow of air to the blood, between the flow of love to the soul. Before the coronavirus was created, before isolation became law, the energies of fear and hate dehumanized and separated us.
Is it possible to recognize and transcend fear and hate's hold over humanity? Can we reconnect with each other despite the pandemic of us vs. them? Today, I'll share a story of my own journey as a physician with an us vs. them mentality and how my heart taught me the true essence of integration.
What’s better than being right?
Lessons from Us vs. Them
When I immigrated to Salt Lake City, Utah at the age of seven, my sense of belonging disappeared like oxygen being vacuumed out of a bag—one moment I belonged, and the next, it was gone. Which is to say that I had to work really hard to get to an us vs. them mentality. As a child, there was no "us" for me; there was just "me, myself, and I," so I lived with a "me vs. them" mentality. The outcast, pariah part of me thinks it's terrific that I've come so far as to even have an "us" and doesn't care that it comes at the expense of a "them."
However, my healing journey as a physician has shown me how to evolve beyond us vs. them to something better. Something better than being right. Something better than being better.
On my first day of medical school, the attending physician lecturing to 100 of us new medical students said that chiropractors were quacks—a sentiment that immediately became my position as well. I believed that I belonged to the best and only right form of medical treatment, and all other alternative forms were just quackery.
During medical school, I wondered why I needed to learn about other parts of the body when all I really needed to know as a psychiatrist was the brain. Who cares about the liver, the gastrointestinal tract, or the kidneys? And why should I study about other cells when only the neuron was worthy of a future psychiatrist's attention?
A year after I began my own private practice, a man and his wife came to visit my office to share their knowledge about healing mental illness through nutritional interventions. I became angry and told them that their approach was "dangerous." Don't they know it's not possible to cure mental illness?
Once I became convinced of the advantages of a functional approach to mental health, I took up the opposite position. Psychiatric medications became poisons, and I wanted to help everyone to taper off them as soon as possible. I couldn't understand why other psychiatrists were so close-minded about functional medicine, and I had a "holier than thou" attitude towards them.
Ditto the same us vs. them perspective when I learned about energy medicine. But now it's us (energy practitioners) vs. them (functional physicians who won't do any energy medicine).
Then came a call from my patient in Arkansas. He had driven there from Maryland in the middle of the night due to his fear that he would be killed, and he begged me to prescribe an antipsychotic medication to him. I had treated him for months with both functional and energy medicine interventions. However, for years he had smoked a lot of cannabis which had made him increasingly paranoid. He then decided to quit it suddenly, which created more paranoia. CBD oil just made things worse.
I heard his fear and stress over the phone, and I put aside my "holier than thou" attitude. We found a pharmacy that was open late, and I prescribed a low dose of Risperidone for him. It helped him to sleep, and he quickly stabilized on the medication. Over the next few months, he safely tapered off the Risperidone. Thankfully, he has done beautifully off Risperidone and cannabis. Of course, there were other circumstances similar to his where psychiatric medication was the only thing that was helpful under the circumstance, and for the patients' sake, I used it to help them stabilize.
In time, I let go of the us vs. them mentality in my integrative work and embraced all the tools that I learned along my training process. I've come to recognize how foolish I was to assume that only the brain and neurons mattered. I value the liver and kidneys, the heart and lungs, and I like every cell equally well, no matter where in the body it belongs. I've stopped believing that allopathic medicine is better, or functional medicine is better, or energy medicine is better. I've stopped thinking of being better and think of all that I have yet to learn. I have come to know so much and yet, I know so little.
Recently, I wrote to David Kopacz, MD, and asked if a person could believe in good and evil and not have an us vs. them mentality. Here's a short excerpt from his thoughtful response:
"The us vs them mentality is what makes possible the existence of evil, because it allows one to project off one's own shadow on another and to dehumanize them." His entire response is linked here. And here is his recent blog post on the us vs. them mentality called Words Create Worlds, Part III, published in the Badger, April 10, 2020.
I would like to take what I learned from my healing journey and apply it to everyone and everything. The evil of us vs. them is a real sickness. I've suffered from it for so long that I hardly remember life without it, but I believe it's curable. I want to live in a world where I belong simply because I am human and not at the expense of anyone else. I will work to keep my compassion whole and complete and resist the urge to carve it into a thousand pieces, to be served only to the worthy. Perhaps then I will understand the oneness that enlightened people speak of.