Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
OUR NERVOUS FRIENDS
Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness
BY
ROBERT S. CARROLL, M.D.
Medical Director Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina
Author of "The Mastery of Nervousness," "The Soul in Suffering"
NEW YORK
1919
HEARTILY--TO THE HOST OF US
CHAPTER I
OUR FRIENDLY NERVES
Illustrating the Capacity for Nervous Adjustment
CHAPTER II
THE NEUROTIC
Illustrating Damaging Nervous Overactivity
CHAPTER III
THE PRICE OF NERVOUSNESS
Illustrating Misdirected Nervous Energy
CHAPTER IV
WRECKING A GENERATION
Illustrating "The Enemy at the Gate"
CHAPTER V
THE NERVOUSLY DAMAGED MOTHER
Illustrating the Child Wrongly Started
CHAPTER VI
THE MESS OF POTTAGE
Illustrating Nervous Inferiority Due to Eating-Errors
CHAPTER VII
THE CRIME OF INACTIVITY
Illustrating the Wreckage of the Pampered Body
CHAPTER VIII
LEARNING TO EAT
Illustrating the Potency of Diet
CHAPTER IX
THE MAN WITH THE HOE
Illustrating the Therapy of Work
CHAPTER X
THE FINE ART OF PLAY
Illustrating Re-creation Through Play
CHAPTER XI
THE TANGLED SKEIN
Illustrating a Tragedy of Thought Selection
CHAPTER XII
THE TROUBLED SEA
Illustrating Emotional Tyranny
CHAPTER XIII
WILLING ILLNESS
Illustrating Willessness and Wilfulness
CHAPTER XIV
UNTANGLING THE SNARL
Illustrating the Replacing of Fatalism by Truth
CHAPTER XV
FROM FEAR TO FAITH
Illustrating the Curative Power of Helpful Emotions
CHAPTER XVI
JUDICIOUS HARDENING
Illustrating the Compelling of Health
CHAPTER XVII
THE SICK SOUL
Illustrating the Sliding Moral Scale
CHAPTER XVIII
THE BATTLE WITH SELFIllustrating the Recklessness that Disintegrates
CHAPTER XIX
THE SUFFERING OF SELF-PITY
Illustrating a Moral Surrender
CHAPTER XX
THE SLAVE OF CONSCIENCE
Illustrating Discord with Self
CHAPTER XXI
CATASTROPHE CREATING CHARACTER
Illustrating Disciplined Freedom
CHAPTER XXII
FINDING THE VICTORIOUS SELF
Illustrating a Medical Conversion
CHAPTER XXIII
THE TRIUMPH OF HARMONY
Illustrating the Power of the Spirit
A REMARK
Vividly as abstractions may be presented, they rarely succeed in
revealing truths with the appealing intensity of living pictures. In
Our Nervous Friends will be found portrayed, often with photographic
clearness, a series of lives, with confidences protected, illustrating
chapter for chapter the more vital principles of the author's The
Mastery of Nervousness.
CHAPTER I
OUR FRIENDLY NERVES
"Hop up, Dick, love! See how glorious the sun is on the new snow. Now
isn't that more beautiful than your dreams? And see the birdies! They
can't find any breakfast. Let's hurry and have our morning wrestle and
dress and give them some breakie before Anne calls."
The mother is Ethel Baxter Lord. She is thirty-eight, and Dick-boy is
just five. The mother's face is striking, striking as an example of
fine chiseling of features, each line standing for sensitiveness, and
each change revealing refinement of thought. The eyes and hair are
richly brown. Slender, graceful, perennially neat, she represents the
mother beautiful, the wife inspiring, the friend beloved. Happily as
we have seen her start a new day for Dick, did she always add some
cheer, some fineness of touch, some joy of word, some stimulating
helpfulness to every greeting, to every occasion.
The home was not pretentious. Thoroughly cozy, with many artistic
touches within, it snuggled on the heights near Arlington, the close
neighbor to many of the Nation's best memories, looking out on a noble
sweep of the fine, old Potomac, with glimpses through the trees of the
Nation's Capitol, glimpses revealing the best of its beauties. It was
a home from which emanated an atmosphere of peace and repose which one
seemed to feel even as one approached. It was a home pervaded with the
breath of happiness, a home which none entered without benefit.
The husband, Martin Lord, was an expert chemist who had long been in
the service of the Government. Capable, worthy, manly, he was blest in
what he was, and in what he had. They had been married eight years,
and the slipping away of the first child, Margaret, was the only
sadness which had paused at their door. Mrs. Lord had been Ethel
Baxter for thirty years. Her father was an intense, high-strung
business man, an importer, who spent much time in Europe where he died
of an American-contracted typhoid-fever, when Ethel was ten. Her
mother was one of a large well-known Maryland family, fair, brown-eyed
too, and frail; also, by all the rights of inheritance, training and
development, sensitive and nervous. In her family the precedents of
blue blood were religiously maintained with so much emphasis on the
"blue" that no beginning was ever made in training her into a
protective robustness. So, in spite of elaborate preparation and noted
New York skill and the highest grade of conscientious nursing, she
recovered poorly after Ethel's birth. Strength, even such as she
formerly had, did not return. She didn't want to be an invalid. She
was devoted to her husband and eager to companion and mother her
child. The surgeons thought her recovery lay in their skill, and in
ten years one operated twice, and two others operated once each, but
for some reason the scalpel's edge did not reach the weakness. Then
Mr. Baxter died, and all of her physical discomforts seemed
intensified until, in desperation, the fifth operation was undertaken,
which was long and severe, and from which she failed to react. So
Ethel was an orphan at eleven, though not alone, for the good uncle,
her mother's brother, took her to his home and never failed to respond
to any impulse through which he felt he could fulfil the fatherhood
and motherhood which he had assumed. Absolutely devoted, affectionate,
emotional, he planned impulsively, he gave freely, but he knew not law
nor order in his own high-keyed life; so neither law nor order entered
into the training of his ward.
Ethel Baxter's childhood had been remarkably well influenced,
considering the nervous intensity of both parents. For the mother's
sake, their winters had been spent in Florida, their summers on Long
Island. Her mother, in face of the fact that she rarely knew a day of
physical comfort and for years had not felt the thrill of physical
strength, most conscientiously gave time, thought and prayer to her
child's rearing. Hours were devoted to daily lessons, and many habits
of consideration and refinement, many ideals of beauty, many niceties
of domestic duty and practically all her studies, were mother-taught.
Ethel was active, physically restless, impulsive, cheerful, fairly
intense in her eagerness for an expression of the thrilling activities
within. She was truly a high-type product of generations of fine
living, and her blue blood did show from the first in the rapid
development of keenness of mind and acuteness of feeling. Typically of
the nervous temperament, she early showed a superb capacity for
complex adjustments. Yet, with one damaging, and later threatening
idea, the mother infected the child's mind; the conception of
invalidism entered into the constructive fabric of the child-thought
all the more deeply, because there was little of offensively selfish
invalidism ever displayed by the mother. But many of the concessions
and considerations instinctively demanded by the nervous sufferer were
for years matters-of-course in the Baxter home; and these demands,
almost unconsciously made by the mother, could but modify much of the
natural expression of her child's young years.
Another damaging attitude-reaction, intense in its expression,
followed the unexpected death of Ethel's father. The mother, true to
the ancient and honorable precedents of her family, went into a month
of helplessness following the sad news. She could not attend the
funeral, and for weeks the activities of the household were muffled by
mourning; when she left her room, it was to wear the deepest crepe,
while a half-inch of deadest black bordered the hundreds of responses
which she personally sent to notes of condolence. She never spoke
again of her husband without reference to her bereavement. Then, a
year later, when the mother herself suddenly went, it seemed to
devolve on the child to fulfil the mother's teachings. Her uncle's
attitude, moreover, toward his sister's death was in many ways
unhappy, for he did not repress expressions of bitterness toward the
surgeons and condemned the fate which had so early robbed Ethel of
both parents.
Thus, early and intensely, a morbid attitude toward death, a
conviction that self-pity was reasonable, normal, wholesome, a belief
that it was her duty to publicly display intensive evidences of her
affliction, determined a lasting and potent influence in this girl's
life which was to alloy her young womanhood--disturbing factors, all,
which before twelve caused much emotional disequilibrium. She now
lived with her uncle in New York City and her summers were spent in
Canada. The sense of fitness was so strong that during the next two
vitally important, developing years she avoided any physical
expression of her natural exuberance of spirits; and habits now formed
which were, for years, to deny her any right use of her muscular self.
She read much; she read well; she read intensely. She attended a
private school and long before her time was an accredited young lady.
Mentally, she matured very early, and with the exception of the
damaging influences which have been mentioned, she represented a
superior capacity for feeling and conceiving and accomplishing, even
as she possessed an equally keen capacity for suffering.
She was most winsome at sixteen, a bit frail and fragile, often spoken
of as a rare piece of Sevres, beloved with a tenderness which would
have warped the disposition of one less unselfish; emotionally
intense, brilliancy and vivacity periodically burst through the habit
of her reserve. A perfect pupil, and in all fine things literary,
keenly alive, she had written several short sketches which showed
imaginative originality and a sympathetic sensitiveness, especially
toward human suffering. And her uncle was sure that a greater than
George Eliot had come. There was to be a year abroad, and as the
doctor and her teacher in English agreed on Italy, there she went. At
seventeen, during the year in Florence, the inevitable lover came.
Family traditions, parents, her orphanage, the protective surroundings
of her uncle's home, her instincts--all had kept her apart. Her
knowledge of young lovers was but literary, and this particular young
lover presented a side which soon laid deep hold on her confidence.
They studied Italian together. He was musical, she was poetic, and he
gracefully fitted her sonnets to melodies. Finally, it seemed that the
great Song of Life had brought them together to complete one of its
harmonies. Her confidence grew to love, the love which seemed to stand
to her for life. Then the awful suddenness, which had in the past
marked her sorrows, burst in again. In one heart-breaking, repelling
half-hour his other self was revealed, and a damaged love was left to
minister to wretchedness. Here was a hurt denied even the expression
of mourning stationery or black apparel--a hurt which must be hidden
and ever crowded back into the bursting within. Immediate catastrophe
would probably have followed had not, first, the fine pride of her
fine self, then the demands of her art for expression, stepped in to
save. She would write. She now knew human nature. She had tasted
bitterness; and with renewed seriousness she became a severely hard-
working student. But the wealth of her joy-life slipped away; the
morbid made itself apparent in every chapter she wrote, while
intensity became more and more the key-note of thought and effort.
Back at her uncle's home, the uncle who was now even more convinced
that Ethel had never outlived the shock of the loss of her parents,
she found that honest study and devotion to her self-imposed tasks,
and a life of much physical comfort and rarely artistic surroundings,
were all failing to make living worth while. In fact, things were
getting into a tangle. She was becoming noticeably restless. Repose
was so lost that it was only with increasing effort that she could
avoid attracting the attention of those near. Even in church it would
seem that some demon of unrest would never be appeased and only could
be satisfied by constant changing of position. Thoughts of father and
mother, and the affair in Florence, intensified this spirit of unrest,
and few conscious minutes passed that unseen stray locks were not
being replaced. It seemed to be a relief to take off and put on, time
and again, the ring which had been her mother's. Even her feet seemed
to rebel at the confinement of shoes, and she became obsessed with the
impulse to remove them, even in the theater or at the concert. A
sighing habit developed. It had been growing for years into an air-
hunger, and finally all physical, and much of mental, effort developed
a sense of suffocation which demanded short periods of absolute rest.
Associations were then formed between certain foods and disturbing
digestive sensations. Tea alone seemed to help, and she became
dependent upon increasingly numerous cups of this beverage. Knowing
her history as we do, we can easily see how she had become abnormally
acute in her responses to the discomforts which are always associated
with painful emotions, and that emotional distress was interpreted, or
misinterpreted, as physical disorder. Each year she became more truly
a sensitive-plant, suffering and keenly alive to every discomfort,
more and more easily fatigued by the conflicts between emotions, which
craved expression, and the will, which demanded repression.
Since the days in Florence there had been a growing antagonism to men,
certainly to all who indicated any suitor-like attitude. In her heart
she was forsworn. She had loved deeply once. Her idealism said it
could never come again. But her antagonism, and her idealism, and her
strength of will all failed to satisfy an inarticulate something which
locked her in her room for hours of repressed, unexplained sobbing.
Her writing became exhausting. Talks before her literary class were a
nightmare of anticipation--for through all, there had never been any
weakening of the beauty and intensity of her unselfish desire to give
to the world her best. The dear old uncle watched her with growing
apprehension. He persuaded her to seek health. It was first a water-
cure; then a minor, but ineffective operation; then much scientific
massage; and finally a rest-cure, and at the end no relief that
lasted, but a recurrence of symptoms which, to the uncle, spoke
ominously of a threatened mental balance. What truly was wrong? Do we
not see that this woman's nerves were crying out for help; that, as
her wisest friends, they were appealing for right ways of living; that
they were pleading for development of the body that had been only
half-trained; that they were beseeching a replacing of morbidness of
feeling by those lost joyous happiness-days? Were they not fairly
cursing the wrong which had robbed her of the hope and rights of her
womanhood?
A new life came when she was twenty-eight, with the saving helper who
heard the cry of the suffering nerves, and interpreted their message.
She had told him all. His wise kindness made it easy to tell all. He
showed her the wrong invalidism thoughts, the unhappy, depressing,
devitalizing attitude toward death. He revealed truths unthought by
her of manhood and womanhood. He pointed out the poisonous trail of
her enmity, and she put it from her. He inspired her to make friends
with her nerves, who were so devotedly striving to save her. Simple,
definite counsel he gave, for her body's sake. Her physical
development could never be what early constructive care would have
made it, but from out of her frailty grew, in less than a year of
active building-training, a reserve of strength unknown for
generations in the women of her line. Wholesome advice made her see
the undermining influence of her morbid, mental habits, and resolutely
she displaced them with the productive kind that builds character.
Finally, new wisdom and a truly womanly conception of her duty and
privilege replaced her antagonism to men, as understanding had
obliterated enmity. It would seem as though Providence had been only
waiting these changes, for they had hardly become certainties in her
life when the real lover came--a man in every way worthy her fineness
of instinct; one who could understand her literary ambitions and even
helpfully criticize her work; one who brought wholesome habits of life
and thought, and who could return cheer for cheer, and whose love
responded in kind to that which now so wonderfully welled up within
her.
Her new adjustments were to be deeply tried and their solidity and
worthiness tested to their center. Little Margaret came to make their
rare home perfect, and like a choice flower, she thrived in the glow
of its sunshine. At eighteen months, she was an ideal of babyhood.
Then the infection from an unknown source, the treacherous scarlatina,
the days of fierce, losing conflict, and sudden Death again smote
Ethel Lord. But she now knew and understood. There was deep sadness of
loss; there was greater joy in having had. There was an emptiness
where the little life had called forth loving attention; there was a
fulness of perfect mother-love which could never be taken. There were
no funeral days, no mourning black, no gruesome burial. There were
flowers, more tender love, and a beautified sorrow. Death was never
again to stand to Ethel Lord as irreparable loss, for a great faith
had made such loss impossible.
And such is the life of this woman, filled with the spirit of beauty
of soul--a woman who thrills husband and son with the uplift of her
unremitting joy in living, who inspires uncle and friends as one who
has mastered the art of a happy life, who holds the devotion of
neighbors and servants through her unselfish radiation of cheer. Ethel
Lord has learned truly the infinitely rich possibilities of our nerves
when we make them our friends.