By Kevin O'Connor, VTDigger
As a psychologist, analyst and author, Vermonter Polly Young-Eisendrath has decades of experience counseling people on how to surf the waves of uncertainty and upheaval during unprecedented times.
Personally, she also has a firsthand story of riding a tsunami herself.
Young-Eisendrath rewinds back some 15 years to all the questions she once asked her husband: Why had he racked up some $70,000 in unexplained credit card bills? Written another $57,000 in checks to himself from their joint account? And, most disturbingly, anxiously defied her repeated call for answers?
“The bottom has dropped out of everything that promised security in my life,” she recalls thinking. “I no longer can count on marriage, finances, and any vestiges of control over my circumstances.”
Then Young-Eisendrath learned her now-deceased spouse was behaving strangely for a reason: He had early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
“The day he was diagnosed, I had to revise all my plans for the future,” she remembers. “I said to myself, ‘Everything has changed. There’s no way to fix it. What can I do now?’”
Like many clients blindsided by a death, divorce, layoff or other major loss, Young-Eisendrath faced a torrent of emotions. She nevertheless found reason to stay with every terrifying yet teachable moment.
“As long as I don’t deny my feelings,” she thought to herself, “I can investigate with a gentle awareness what my life is now presenting me.”
A longtime proponent of mindfulness, Young-Eisendrath has trained herself and others to bring such curiosity and matter-of-fact acceptance to any situation — even the seemingly unembraceable Covid-19 pandemic and accompanying political, social and economic strife.
Sheltering in place in her Worcester home some 10 miles north of the state capital, the therapist is taking to her website, podcast, YouTube channel and Zoom platform to share her wisdom.
“From the beginning of this, I recognized I was less afraid of the virus than I was of the human response,” she says. “Most of the time we feel like we’re in control, but in this moment there’s a tidal wave of change. We’re all faced with a situation that hasn’t been figured out. It’s likely to throw you into some very negative states of mind, very negative moods and very negative interactions.”
Young-Eisendrath points to the brain and its prewired “fight or flight” response.
“When you feel threatened, you have an automatic desire to predict, control and to push and pull on our experience to get an outcome that you want,” she says. “It wants you to look and say, ‘What do I do about this?’ We’re motivated to see what’s wrong and to try to fix it.”
That’s helpful if you’re a prehistoric human who senses a viper in the shadows. But it’s challenging for a plugged-in person living amid a virus whose arrival and after-effects aren’t easily foreseen.
“It is difficult for us to deal with uncertainty because we can’t hold it in the framework of ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen.’ We have a very hard time just allowing things to be.”
That’s where the therapist’s half-century of Buddhist practice comes in. She instructs people to walk through adversity step by step rather than wallow in past regrets or future worries.
“We can stop mid-sentence, mid-narrative, mid-pushing and pulling and return to the present moment,” she says. “Say to yourself, ‘What’s arising now? What’s possible now?’ You won’t do it perfectly, but stick with it and you learn that everything going on is teaching you something.”
That’s what the Vermonter discovered when her husband Ed Epstein, then in his 50s, began forgetting things like appointments, paying bills and putting the cap on the gas tank. It would take seven years before a neurologist pinpointed the problem as advanced Alzheimer’s-type dementia.
The doctor wasn’t the only one with sobering news. A lawyer, reviewing the couple’s shredded finances, advised Young-Eisendrath to divorce (to ensure her husband would receive Medicaid and she wouldn’t be liable for his debts) and file for personal bankruptcy.
It all gave her pause — in this case, the deliberate act of stopping and sitting.
“The narrative that’s running through your mind about what’s going to happen tomorrow, next week or next year is just a narrative,” she says. “You can pay attention to the present moment. What we’re trying to develop is the kind of awareness that combines concentration and equanimity — a friendly, gentle, matter-of-fact attitude towards your experience.”
Some may wonder if such a “Zen attitude” is just a way to avoid reality. Young-Eisendrath didn’t shy away from feeling a flood of emotions as she cared for her spouse — whom she had married after enduring divorce — or when she opened the door one day amid his problems to find her 77-year-old first husband.
He, too, had descended into dementia.
But as Young-Eisendrath chronicles in her 2014 book, “The Present Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Discovery,” she learned how “profound losses are also an opportunity.”
“When all of this unraveled, it felt like the ground was falling under me and I was going into a deep hole,” she says. “There were many situations when I felt afraid, confused and thrown. And in those moments, I would remember I had another way of perceiving. Mindfulness in the present moment means that we can keep our hearts open, even in the midst of difficulty, fear and loss.”
Young-Eisendrath is spreading the word through a growing series of platforms that include a Psychology Today blog and a Real Dialogue program that promotes communication amid conflict. She was rolling out the latter in New York City upon news of the Covid-19 shutdown.
Returning home, Young-Eisendrath moved her therapy and teaching online. Initially focused on curbing fears sparked by the coronavirus, she’s also concentrating on relationships — from household to those involving all of humankind — by encouraging people to speak responsibly and listen mindfully.
“I want to open a conversation about just being able to talk about different sides and different ways of looking at things,” she says.
Young-Eisendrath is set to do so June 25 during a “Real Dialogue for Opposing Sides: Ending Polarization” online discussion that’s part of UbiVerse's Humanity Rising United Nations 75th anniversary program week. With society unhinged by so many current headlines, the therapist says finding ways to connect is more crucial than ever.
“The problem today is we can’t talk to each other,” she says. “People get into these tangles of fight or flight instead of being able to step back. We don’t have to have consensus, we just need to work together. Researchers know that humans do not shift their frame of reference unless they are in a crisis. I hope this one will allow people to wake up.”