A man I was adjusting the other day broke my heart–open. I swear sometimes when I’m working I wonder, Who is adjusting whom? Patients help me get an “attitude adjustment.” So, I was warned by the front desk that he is “weird” and I should watch out for him. This time (I’ve adjusted him before) he was very irate and talking super fast about how unfair the healthcare system was because they were cutting his insurance benefits off and he might not be able to get care anymore. He told me about his pain for the day as he plopped face down on the table. This should sound very familiar to my fellow chiropractors. He proceeded to tell me that for the past fifteen years chiropractic care has kept him out of the mental hospital. He tiptoed around an official diagnosis but mentioned that when given a choice to be on medication for the rest of his life he chose this instead and it has been working. He is very peculiar about the way he is adjusted so he proceeded to tell me what to do but as a vote of confidence he also added that I don’t adjust like a girl–I’ve passed the test apparently.
I didn’t even know how to introduce an adjustment to this discombobulated neurology! I only had a few minutes (just the nature of the practice I was working in) to make a difference here. I knew I had to connect to something higher and hopefully bring him there. At first, I asked him to just relax and breathe. I embraced him totally. Pain. Frustration. Anger. Fear.Vulnerability. Perceptions. Diagnosis. Tension. And, I chose to connect with grace. Mind you, it is not very easy to do sometimes when a person drops all-of-that-and-a-bag-of-chips on your table! That was my attitude adjustment. Grace. He totally got it! With an innocence of a child, he began to thank me for helping him relax. The things he said about the government and its policies border on conspiracy theories, and anyone hearing him would dismiss them because he has a particular diagnosis, a mental illness. He also happens to have a Ph.D. in some high-end physics. Why he was spewing them all on the table as I negotiated with C2 on the right? Overwhelm, I guess.
What touched me the most is how he thanked me for helping him, apologized for his attitude, took responsibility for his frustration and listened to my self-care recommendations. He was the most present person I’ve seen in that office all day. Supposedly, he is mentally ill. Right?
