I read yet another article the other day talking about the facts that there
are many types of "IQ."  Some people just have a knack for effective
communication, the way some others are good basketball players, or good test
takers.  That being said, I think there are ways to cultivate empathetic
communication, and to learn to be more effective in sharing information in
ways that invite people to listen with openess rather than to feel they must
defend against an on-slaught which will end up making them feel stupid or
inadequate.

The Buddists have a saying I like:  Work without doing.  In the present
discussion, I think that refers to the idea of just saying what you want to
share without getting all attached to the idea that its your one chance to
rock someone's world.  We aren't here to control anyone else, but to share
our experience, strength and hope.  If I offer some information in that
light, clearly accepting the other person's right to accept or reject the
information, then I tend to do it more courteously.  I know that in my life,
there have been people who have told me things that I just wasn't ready to
accept when I first heard them.  Maybe later the information proved to be
right, and my decision to initially reject it proved very wrong indeed.
That is often just the way it is.

So how does this work in practice:  I rely a lot on humor.  Or I "blame it
on the experts".  In other words, I might have said, "You know there are so
many interesting stories in the anthropological literature of beliefs about
food connected with breastfeeding.  Some cultures believe you should never
eat "cold" foods, like fruits during early bfg.  Some cultures, like the
Chinese never drink dairy, but they believe cabbage and pickled pigs feet
soup will really bring in a whopping milk supply.  So it looks like nature
makes pretty good milk no matter what moms are eating.  Of course allergies
are idiosyncratic.  Some people are terribly allergic to stuff very few
others are.  Since this tendency is inherited, it's possible this mom and
baby really had a terriffic dairy protein sensitivity.  Maybe she could
experiment on giving up the glass of milk and try the pickled pigs feet soup
and see what happens.  Or she could just take calcium tabs for a few weeks."

In the same vein, I just heard Armand Goldman give a talk and he said
something incredibly interesting.  He remarked that the rapid changes in
human food sources and in human food processing have way outstripped our
evolutionary adjustment capabilities.  He said we only started growing and
eating grains a mere ten thousand yrs ago.  It is entirely possible that
some of the foods we are eating (and in the past 100 yrs all the ways we've
revolutionarily changed PROCESSING them) has created an instability in our
capability to adjust to our diets which explains what is referred to as food
allergy.  He feels this may contribute to the occasional phenomonon of an
infant who appears to be allergic to his or her own mom's milk, and winds up
doing better on formula.  It's really, really rare, but I've never had a way
to explain it before, and I wouldn't have accepted it as a possibility
coming from anyone else but Dr. Goldman.

Barbara Wilson-Clay, BSEd, IBCLC
Austin Lactation Associates, Austin, Texas
http://www.jump.net/~bwc/lactnews.html

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