The clinic’s lobby ebbed and flowed of people. A mother and her son came in one door. A teenage girl came out another door and left through the door the mother and son came through. A therapist stuck his head out of another door and looked around the room. He saw his next client and said “Hi, come on in.” A man, his wife and their son followed the therapist through the door. A woman came in the front door and proceeded over to the glass window to check in with the half-door receptionist. This flow of traffic continued for thirty five minutes while I read a year-old garden magazine. I was waiting for my therapist to stick her head out of a door and say “Hi, come on in.” I was paying her to open the door, stick her head out and say “Hi, come on in.” She would listen to me. I paid her good money. Everyone else I talked to, those I didn’t pay, would just shrug their shoulders and go about their business. My life had come to this: paying someone to listen to me. I, of course, didn’t know for sure if they were listening, but at least the door was closed and they faced me while I talked. They sometimes nodded, too. They looked like they were listening, anyway. “You get out of it what you put in it.” is what they told me when I began counseling at Hope Well Clinic.
The door opened and Melody stuck her blond head out the door. She saw me, smiled and said, “Hi, Denny, come on in.” I replaced the garden magazine back on the small table between two doors. I followed Melody and went through the door that separated the outside world from the ’inside’ world. On the other side of the door was a long hallway with many closed doors. I knew what was going on behind those doors: The mysteries of life being sorted into sanity, into something someone could use, something for people to get handle on. I followed her down the hallway past the closed door sanctuaries and entered her small corner office. Melody was new to the clinic so she didn’t have a window, just a reproduction of a Kandinsky, Composition X, I believe, hanging on a four foot wide egg shell painted wall. A floor lamp hung its one light over a love seat. A lava lamp on a small table in front of the Kandinsky provided a pink glow to Melody’s right cheek. I sat down on the left side of the love seat and nestled a burgundy pillow behind the small of my back. I leaned back into the shadow cast by the lamp and rested my head on my hand.
Melody is a five-foot-two gorgeous blond with a petite figure that appeared to bubble out from her effervescence. Her clothes were fashionable, maybe from Saks or Von Maur or Nordstroms. Her look spoke volumes. I appreciated the care she took in her appearance. She didn’t look clinically challenged at all, just “peachy keen”. A bevy of natural blond hair framed her oval cherubic face. She appeared so angelic that it was easy for me to ‘see’ her every two weeks. The visit with her provided for my own emotional ‘face lift’.
Melody and I had developed some positive transference during our bi-monthly visits over six months I was able to talk to her openly about most things and yet at the same time I held back on the one piece of the puzzle that confronted my daily life. The reason for this resistance was the fact that a previous counselor, Jim, at the same clinic had told me that if I wanted to live as a woman and follow through with the surgery the Clinic, the Christian Clinic, couldn’t help me. They couldn’t say why they wouldn’t help me only that they wouldn’t. I was left to assume that they weren’t sure what do with the issue or that they just thought it was sinful or destructive. They couldn’t say why. I later learned that Jim died from lung cancer. I found this out when they cancelled my sixteenth session with him. That’s when they turned my case over to Melody, a licensed clinical counselor who had just joined Hope Well Clinic. During my time at the clinic I saw a psychiatrist, too. His method of dealing with me was to medicate me and then to take five minutes during the next appointment to ask how I was doing and then charge another $250.00 for another script. I later decided not to medicate the pain. I decided that the financial pain was worse than the emotional pain of not being able to live as a woman. My impending personal financial recession brought about by his incessant billing was causing me severe emotional depression. I quickly put a lid on the meds.
There were reasons to talk to someone: a 14 year long divorce that started as a marriage to Marybeth; my leaving a successful business partnership in hopes of saving the dissolving marriage; the accidental death of our eighteen year old son during the marriage, the everyday loss of my two children to an angry alcoholic woman because of the divorce; the loss of two significant jobs, long term joblessness and the financial collapse of my life. A page of scripture verses or a bottle of anti-depressants was not what the doctor should have ordered. Instead, someone just needed to listen to the pain being cast out of me like a demon from the recipient of the personal holocaust.
“How are you doing this week, Denny?” Our dialog began with Melody’s opening line.
“Alright, I guess. No major tragedies the past two weeks.”
“Good.”
“Marybeth is being a jerk again.
“How so?”
“You remember how I told you that always threatened me that she would take my kids, take 28% of my income and make me pay?
“Yes.”
“That is what she is trying to do right now in the divorce agreement. She wants me to agree to this arrangement and I am saying no. It is costing me a small fortune to pay a lawyer to fight this. My own lawyer keeps telling me that I can’t do this and that I can’t do that.” My own lawyer is pretty useless if you ask me. My lawyer expects me to just lay down and give Marybeth sole custody and I refuse to do this. These are my children, as well. I lived full time with my kids until this… this…this person decided to break up our marriage and our home with her perfectionism and her alcoholic rage.”
“I thought last time that we agreed that we weren’t going to keep talking about Marybeth.”
“I have to. I am so angry at what she has done to our family, to the kids and to me. Now she is living with some guy who looks like her father. All of this in front of my two kids.”
Melody lets me talk about the Marybeth situation but I realize that she has an agenda and is waiting to move on. She just nods and looks dolefully at me while placing both feet on the floor in front of her rocking chair. Her feet didn’t touch the floor unless she rocked forward to make a point.
“I would like to get a different lawyer but I can’t get the retainer money together again. I am deep in debt because of this whole divorce business.”
Melody leaned forward. “Yeah, that is hard.” “Well, we have to get you through this, past Marybeth.”
I leaned toward Melody and spoke directly to her large green eyes: “I don’t understand it when people make vows and then they don’t fulfill them and just walk away from them. How can you just walk away from a vow?”
“”It happens every day.”
“Then it isn’t a vow, is it?” Denny crossed his arms against his chest.
“It is at the time.”
“What?!” His threw his arms open into a wide questioning flare.
“People say things and things change.”
“What?! “For better or for worse” are the words we said to each other. “To death do us part.”
“Things change, people change.” Melody uncrossed her legs and then crossed them the other way.
“Vows don’t change.”
“Let’s move on and get past Marybeth. You have to go on with your life.”
“My vow to her was my life!”
“That has changed.”
What?!” Denny was incredulous.
“The divorce is going forward and you must get past this and move on with your life.”
“I can’t get past this. Vows are serious things.”
“She is with someone else. You can’t make her love you. You have to let go.”
“I didn’t want the divorce. I wanted reconciliation. I wanted to work through these things. She was always pointing her finger at me and she never once took responsibility for our marriage. That’s why I went to counseling in the first place. She said that I was the problem. I was supposed to please her and if I didn’t then she said I was the problem – because she wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy but I thought I had a vow to fulfill and that I must keep working at it. Happiness would just have to wait.”
“People sometimes need to go away to realize what they left behind.”
“What?!” Denny’s face was bright red, flushed with anger. “Once she sleeps with this other guy, her father, it is over for us. I don’t want that to happen. We had children together; we have fourteen years of trying. We made vows.”
“She changed her mind. I don’t know why. Let’s move on to talk about you.”
“This is me!” Denny returned.
“OK, but she is not going to change. Let’s talk about what you can change instead.”
“She and I were one. How can you change that except by splitting one into two? Don’t you understand? We are getting a divorce because she is not happy! That’s the reason!”
“I understand. She has changed for whatever reason.”
Denny fell back into the glow of the pink lava lamp, his cheeks flushed red against the soft rose light. He knew that Melody’s ‘agenda’ took precedence over anything that he had wanted to say regarding Marybeth. He had come through the labyrinth of doors, rooms and hallways into her office so that he could talk to her about these things and she had already moved next door.
“Denny, remember when we first talked and I asked you about the Healing of Memories Prayer? We talked about what it was and about bringing up the past. You said that you were open to praying with me this prayer. Is that still the case?”
Denny shifted his legs and then leaned forward putting his hands on his knees. “Yeah, I’m open to that. I don’t see why not.”
“Good, well if you are in a good place then we can try it today. I wanted to make sure there is enough time to pray and to work through whatever comes up.”
“Alright.”
… My previous therapist, Susan, was a psychologist. Her office was in her home in a northwestern suburb of Chicago. Susan was very friendly and approachable. So much so, in fact, that she saw me once a week, charged me only $30.00/hour and we talked for two to three hours at a time – costing me only $30.00. I would not call her a typical therapist but we did enjoy talking with each other. We talked about everything: her dog, her son, her friends, her life, church, spirituality, movies and so on. I didn’t know who was more pixilated: me or Susan. After a year or so of sessions with Susan I traveled closer to home, to Hope Well Clinic in Wheaton. I did that for post-marriage counseling and because I was giving Susan more counseling then she gave me in return. I later found out that Susan had some serious health issue that resulted from her breast implants leaking silicone. The silicone had affected her brain. She became mentally handicapped as time went on. During one session with Susan the year before I learned that she had dated a plastic surgeon and that he had done her breast implant surgery. That relationship apparently had deteriorated over time…
“Why don’t we pray and see what the Lord brings up from the past. Are you ready to have these things come up?” “Do you feel OK about this?” Melody leaned toward me and folded her hands.
“I’m not worried about the past. I’ve been there before. It’s right now that has me bothered.”
“OK, let’s get started. Father, we pray for Denny. We ask that You would bring Denny to a place in the past, a place that You want to heal.”
We waited in silence. The room was quiet except for the low hum of the lava lamp. The hallway was quiet except for the closure of a door somewhere. I didn’t know what was going on in the lobby. I was deep in thought and the prayer was reaching even deeper into my soul. After ten minutes of silence I began to see an image in my mind: I was standing in the doorway of my bedroom. The bedroom was in the house I had lived in since I was eight years old. I understood that the house was empty, no furniture and no people. I was alone.
I began to cry softly. The aching pain of being alone had followed me throughout my life. A rush of sadness came to my head and poured out into tears which fell from my bowed face. In my vision I stood in the doorway looking into the bedroom. It had now become pitch black. I was enveloped in darkness within an empty house looking into an empty room. It was then that I heard a voice say to me, “Run free.” I instantly saw a little Indian boy running around without a shirt. He was happy and utterly free. He didn’t have a care in the world. I knew then that the Lord had given me this understanding because this vision was so intimate to my understanding. This image of this shirtless Indian boy was something I had immediately recognized in my spirit. I realized that God had set me free from my past and had given me freedom to go forward with my heart’s desires. Only the Lord knew exactly what was in my heart – the desire I had not mentioned to Melody or to anyone since I told Jim. The spirit of the little boy now lived in me – the spirit of freedom. The past no longer pinned me down. People would no longer be able pin me down with their prejudice and fear. I was free to go forward with my life.
Melody asked what I had seen and I told her about the empty and dark bedroom in my childhood home. She asked me if I had heard anything and I told her, “The Lord said, run free!” She looked at me quizzically and I kept my thoughts to myself. She asked if I was OK and all I could say was, “Yeah.” I knew that if I had told her my understanding of the vision that she would seek to negate my vision and suppress my perception of it because of a Hope Well Clinic policy based on ignorance and bias and, perhaps, fear. My heart was dancing but my eyes didn’t move from staring at the floor.
I wiped my face and fell back into the loveseat with a sigh. I sat in her office with a red face and a growing smile. I knew that I was loved by the Lord and that I was heard by Him. I was not alone anymore in my very personal struggle. The session ended with Melody saying, “Well it’s time. Let’s get together in two weeks and see how you are doing.” I went through her door again, down the hallway of doors and into the lobby of many doors where I paid my bill. I left the clinic and found my car in the parking lot. I would return just two more times to see Melody. Everything had a different perspective now. The Lord had heard me and He had answered my prayers. I had gotten out of it what I had put in it. And, more.
© Sally Paradise, 2010, All Rights Reserved
Cindy Wity 
And the Beat Down Goes On
May 4, 2026 Leave a comment
“. . . the terror of the night
or the arrow that flies by day
or the pestilence that stalks in darkness
or the destruction that wastes at noonday.” Psalm 91
Fires, floods and extreme weather will imperil a third of all life on land in the next 60 years.
Nobel Physicist Predicts END DATE For Modern Civilization: And it’s quite soon…
The New York Times’s Resident Catastrophist Delivers Another Subscription to the End of the World
You wake up in a news cycle that never sleeps. With a cup of coffee, you read what ‘doomcasters’ are saying about end-of-life scenarios appearing on the horizon. Now you are fully awake and wondering what to do with these high alert headlines? Do you let existential crisis into your life?
You sip your coffee and remember that not long ago the world was subjected to pandemic hysteria. Coronavirus, the “global crisis of unprecedented reach and proportion,” started making headlines at the beginning of 2020.
You recall the WHO declaring the coronavirus a “public health emergency of international concern.” And the headlines declaring surges in COVID-19 cases attributed to the Omicron variant, a “tripledemic” – COVID combined with flu and RSV, and of overwhelmed hospitals and healthcare systems and dancing nurses.
How could you forget that Biden imposed OSHA vaccination and testing emergency standards on your business or the reality-warping restrictive policies involving mandated lockdowns, masking, social distancing, fines, and vaccines, or the CDC predicting people will die?
You pour yourself another cup of coffee and look out the kitchen window. You see the couple next store – Vivian and Zoe – walking their dog Baxter. The other day, when you took the garbage can to the curb, the apoplectic twosome accosted you with “Democracy is threatened by the likes of you extremists, fascists, racists, homophobe Christian nationalists!” and “Trump is Hitler!” They saw you going to church last Sunday.
You drink your coffee troubled that Viv and Zoe had been beaten down by another media existential crisis campaign, akin to the rollout of the COVID-19 marketing campaign that told us to worry about it, and how to worry about it.
Under the spell of the “Democracy is threatened” campaign, Viv and Zoe were in a state of emotional panic. And that had them beat down on the closest person who didn’t share their views or the views of the commercial-sponsored media. The media’s inordinate influence has you very concerned about the collective fear and confusion its campaigns were causing to psyches.
The beat down goes on . . . in our heads.
~~~
How shall we then live in the context of existential dread?
Day after day imagination is battered with dire predictions– the end of this and that unless we do this and that. The steady beat of amplified headlines overwhelms one’s patience, strength, and soul.
Climate change, pandemics, wars, “Democracy!” AI Could Make Humans Irrelevant!
How do we respond to headlines telling us that we are done for? Should we let fear and helplessness dominate our lives? Can we live in terms of “accepting disharmony from the outset and defying it”? This last way of going forward is the directive C.S. Lewis prescribes in his essay “On Living in an Atomic Age.”
Published in post-war 1948 and at the beginning of the atomic age, the essay provides a reality-check perspective and presents a scenario of how to live in life-ending times.
The following is an excerpt from the opening of Lewis’ short essay. During COVID the excerpt was passed around on the internet, with “atomic” replaced with “coronavirus.” Certainly, the essay can be applied to any dire life-threatening circumstances.
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors — anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
The full essay, in the document below, contains questions and positions Lewis maintains, such as
Are we “accepting disharmony from the outset and defying it?”
Do we “hold up our own human standards against the idiocy of the universe?”
Are we the product of blind physical forces and therefore unable to provide answers to questions of a fatalist existence?
“But suppose we really are spirits? Suppose we are not the offspring of Nature…?”
“We must go back to a much earlier view.”
“We must simply accept it that we are spirits, free and rational beings, at present inhabiting an irrational universe, and must draw the conclusion that we are not derived from it.”
“If there is no straight line elsewhere, how did we discover that Nature’s line is crooked?”
“Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs.”
https://www.matthewaglaser.com/living-in-an-atomic-age
“On Living in an Atomic Age” (first published 1948) by C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) From: Present Concerns: Essays by C.S. Lewis (edited by Walter Hooper; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), pages 73–80
Born a few years after the above essay was published, I became well aware of ‘doomcasting’ headlines. I recalled some of the headlines in my January 2025 post Surface Readings.
The post began with the words of poet W H Auden – “Now is the age of anxiety” and my own take on things: “Impending doom has been in the news during my entire lifetime.” I wrote about the headlines and pronouncements of those anxious times which included the book The Late great Planet Earth based on the modern and heretical notion of dispensationalism.
~~~
Imagination Reset
Taking in the spirit of the times, imaginations are exposed to the negation of life and dire predictions often made for political ends that use fear to move power into the hands of the few.
Taking in the digital tabloid times is the “WHAAM!” of a Roy Lichtenstein Ben-Day dots painting. Imagination is amped up and ready to pop with a Pow!
What happens to our imaginations when we are constantly confronted with crisis? And, how do we live with dire predictions?
With the 24/7/365 news cycle, it’s little wonder that “News Avoidance” is becoming a common way to deal with the constant specter of troubling things, as Thaddeus G. McCotter writes in I Didn’t Read the News Today, Oh Boy: Embracing the ‘News Avoidance’ Pandemic
“If you live today, you breath in nihilism … it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.” ― Flannery O’Connor
What we shouldn’t avoid are resources such as poetry, art, classical literature and music to help us cope with and see beyond the terrors of the modern age. We need the signal of those who came before and dealt with all kinds of things and not the clamoring noise of influencers.
Poet Wallace Stevens, in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” writes that poetry, as it interacts with reality and the imagination, can shape our perspective and provide meaning and comfort in a world that often feels overwhelming and harsh.
Wallace emphasizes the role of imagination in countering the beat down of life. If you are a Christian, you already know that the poetry of the Psalms does just that, e.g., Psalm 91.
In the video below, Dr. Jason Baxter, author of The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis discusses his book, Why Literature Still Matters.
Why Literature Still Matters: An Interview with Dr. Jason Baxter | Classical Home Education
~~~
If you need a quick antidote to climate hysteria, Itxu Díaz provides his take on the news of impending doom: Climate Change Scientists Set a Date for the Arrival of Hell on Earth: the Year 2085.
~~~
Naomi Wolf with Outspoke: “I’m here tonight to talk about a huge news story that broke in the last couple of days. It could be thread that unravels the whole COVID virus/vaccine perpetrator issue.
“A criminal syndicate, essentially.
“Even just this initial gesture is so transformational. It breaks the spell of, “No one can be held accountable, no one can be investigated from the untouchable third rail COVID vaccine rollout, COVID virus rollout.””
“The Shocking Story of NIH Secretly Funding COVID”
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Filed under 2026 Current Events, Climate change, COVID-19, Death, Depression, journalism, media, nihilism, pandemic, Political Commentary, social engineering, war Tagged with apocalypse, art, books, C.S. Lewis, Climate change, COVID-19, death, Democracy, entertainment, journalism, media, nuclear war, pandemics, social media, writing