An Excellent Day with David Pitonyak
Good morning! Lookin good … we’re on track yet with the walking, though haven’t walked yet this morning. The GREAT thing is that we were at 267.2 this morning. Woo hoo … that’s exactly 45 pounds YAYYYYY!!! I was really pleased with that because we had two muffins in the morning while at the meeting with orange juice and we had their dinner that included chicken, potatoes, carrots and mushrooms, PLUS this heavenly dessert. Well, we didn’t eat all of it, BUT it was this dish that looked like chocolate cheese cake, but tasted like fudge. Whoosh that was something! I guess the walking really does make a difference.
Mostly what we want to talk about today is the meeting. We had a very nice day. We ran into a couple of people we knew directly, but mostly it is a sea of faces. There were about 100 people there. This is a pretty big meeting as far as these kind of things go. Nothing like the ARC Convention meeting we’ll go to in less than a month now, but pretty big. I think the general staff of people that goes to these things are like me and are tired of all the dumb financial planning meetings they’ve got scheduled. Not that they’re not valuable, but it’s the same people saying the same thing. Let us invest for you with your life savings. Yeek!
The speaker at today’s meeting was David Pitonyak from Virginia. He was introduced as someone with 16 years of experience who traveled a lot in support of people with DD and difficult behaviors and who supported the caregivers. He had a nice voice to listen to and a tremendous amount of energy. He did just the right amount of moving around, and as the day went on, he supplied himself enough coffee to keep up his caffeine buzz He defined difficult behavior as when people did things others wish they would change, or when of course they were hurtful to themselves or others. His major premise was that most of these people do the things they do, because they are lonely. These are the people who can’t wait for you to say hi to them when they enter the room, or when they start to give you a handshake, they can’t let go.
David talked about institutionalized people who were often separated from families or somehow traumatized, which makes everything worse. He said that after you check for physical problems, we should realize that on average about every nine months the regular caretakers of these people come and go and he teased us in thinking, “What’s the problem, we’ve got coverage!” Hehehe apparently it isn’t the same thing. He gave an example of himself walking in his front door to find a replacement wife at the front door who would tell him, “Don’t worry, I’ve got everything covered!” David said that to be well and grow fundamentally we need connections to social networks. He said that being in love boosts the immune system and there was overwhelming scientific information to back this up. “It is meaningful relationships; that are our work” and that often the other things we do are just smokescreens to avoid the loneliness of others, because it reminds us so much of our own loneliness. So our common solutions are to stay busy.
He talked about falling in love with his wife in a parking lot and the romance has gone on for 18 years. He said they weren’t church going people, but he was pretty sure that God had blessed them … hehehe he demonstrated being zapped from above, although he was pretty sure that God had intended two other people, just felt too bad to take it back. He didn’t let the audience back out of the problem of finding relationships that were significant just because it was difficult. He compared it to a doctor who was unprepared to give an appendectomy, so he cancelled the procedure … the appendectomy, however, didn’t go away by itself. He talked then more about being lonely and looking for people in all the wrong places. He told another story about inheriting two small boys with the marriage and the two year old being at first happy that he was going to live with them forever, before asking two days later, when he was going to leave. Now in his stories the boys were 19 and 21, so there were some nice stories in between. The majority of his stories though related to a young man by the name of Roland who had been pushed into an active pig pen and trampled when he was very young.
There was a lot of information I took notes on, but for brevity, I will skip some here, but he made a good point in saying that if practitioner’s were going to relieve the suffering of others, then they would have to be present and available. So, along this vein he discussed being real with family and relatives and peers and such and #1 you had to be nice to yourself. He teased about his shadow self that did and said all the wrong things and how hard it was to befriend this part of self, but the work was essential. We need to stop beating ourselves up and instead just be curious of ourselves. He gave a story of going to places in crises where the goal was to see the sweat of others before it hit their eyes.
After the first break he went into more detail about having a real life with people you loved. He acknowledged that you just can’t MAKE this happen, but that it was worth doing and that the people at work we cared about were vulnerable AND isolated and that was the matrix of disaster. Heheheh he teased the audience about not making it though into our next “project.” He said that it was important to create an architecture that promoted relationships. By the way, if anyone wants to read his material directly, he can be found at www.dimagine.com
I think that I should probably stop about here in giving his story away, because he does so well of presenting his thoughts on his own. By this time of the meeting … he had just warmed us up to the first break. The meeting though went on all the way to 4 pm that evening. It was simply terrific. I am a note taker as you well know, especially because I am not able to recall well. I started writing at the beginning of his presentation and never stopped. I think the last page ends on page 21 and I found myself going up afterward and asking him to autograph my writing. Somehow I felt it essential to keep him alive in my thoughts, maybe because he was so alive and helped me to feel so alive during his presentation.
I haven’t had enough time to put together in my thoughts how it is all going to work through my mind. I think it is one of those things that get incorporated as you go along. In general, I feel very positive about the work and its helped me this morning in shifting the matrix around a bit. Whoops, V’s here!!! Hold on!
AHA! V’s in the shower … I wonder if he’s left any extra spare Cherry Tasty-cakes around … going to check his kitchen! ……. Damn! NOTHING! HMPF. And, I thought we were friends! Hmm…
Well, suppose that means we are going to need getting on with our day … I just finished reading the last chapter and there is a supplemental reading this week. We are looking at GLBT (Gay, lesbian, bi-sexuals, and transgendered) issues, then following up the week, I think on women’s stuff. We just got a note from our instructor … I will only have now 12-13 days to write 4 small papers and one large. I won’t be having quite as much time to be playing around. But, I guess this is the nature of the beast. I’m going to need checking with Sr. to find out how much vacation time I have coming. I’ll need some days off to accomplish this feat! Ok, feet forward … better get this posted and back to that supplemental reading assignments .. think its about 20 pages … maybe I can finish it in this last hour … not sure though, because I’m going to want to get 15 minutes of walking in too. PSHWOO … what happens with my time???!!!
posted by Ann Marie @ 3/08/2006 05:18:00 AM
Comments: 2
