Broken Legs and Breathing Exercises

Written by craig

The leg's broken. A beautiful hike through the woods became an emergency in the space of a few careless seconds. Suddenly a stranger rushes up to you and says, "Don't worry; I can fix you up. I'm trained and certified in Lamaze!"

Lamaze was originally developed in the 1950s by Dr. Ferdinand Lamaze to help women  through labor and delivery. It's designed to help women replace their negative preconceptions regarding pregnancy and the birth process with positive, learned responses and coping skills. Lamaze is unquestionably a great technique if you're having a baby. With broken legs, however . . . maybe not so much.

I know this seems like kind of a bunny trail but hang in there with me and it'll all make sense in a paragraph or two. Lamaze was designed around Pavlovian principles that, in essence teach you how to distract yourself from the pain of suddenly having eight pounds of baby pulled through what had minutes earlier been one or two inch hole. Part of the reason it works so well (Debbie and I used it with our two boys) is because you know that in most cases the total time, start to finish, will at most be a day or so. You can learn how to cope with the pain for a few hours.

Now, 'back to the broken leg. Lamaze  might be useful as a temporary measure to help you hold on 'til medical help arrives but it does zilch, zip, ninguno, zero, toward getting the thing fixed. You have to get the wound cleaned, the bone set, the leg immobilized, etc. It's not enough to just lern how to ignore the pain.

This is where I part with a number of my  clinical friends. You see, I believe that we are often hardwired to be depressed. If you've been happy most of your life, then your dog/wife/husband/parakeet dies, then chances are pretty good that you'll feel better as time goes by. But, if you can't remember ever having seven good days in a row in your life, if you explode all the time, if your eyes are red from tears more often than not, then all the cognitive-behavioral therapy and psychoanalysis in the world can only, at best, teach you how to better cope with the pain.

If your life has been a wall of tears and grief, it's ludicrous to think someone will be able to just talk you out of it. It's kind of like, well . . . like trying to treat a broken leg with breathing exercises.