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Title: Our Nervous Friends

Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness Author: Robert S. Carroll

 

Release Date: June, 2004 [EBook #5994]

[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]

[This file was first posted on October 9, 2002]

 

Edition: 10

 

Language: English

 

Character set encoding: ASCII

 

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR NERVOUS FRIENDS ***

 

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 Recreation 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,

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