self care

How Not to Say or Do the Wrong Thing

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I chaplain friend of mine passed this article along from the LA Times:

How not to say the wrong thing

It works in all kinds of crises – medical, legal, even existential. It’s the ‘Ring Theory’ of kvetching. The first rule is comfort in, dump out.

Susan Silk and Barry Goldman

April 7, 2013

When Susan had breast cancer, we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan’s colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but Susan didn’t feel like having visitors, and she said so. Her colleague’s response? “This isn’t just about you.”

“It’s not?” Susan wondered. “My breast cancer is not about me? It’s about you?”

The same theme came up again when our friend Katie had a brain aneurysm. She was in intensive care for a long time and finally got out and into a step-down unit. She was no longer covered with tubes and lines and monitors, but she was still in rough shape. A friend came and saw her and then stepped into the hall with Katie’s husband, Pat. “I wasn’t prepared for this,” she told him. “I don’t know if I can handle it.”

This woman loves Katie, and she said what she did because the sight of Katie in this condition moved her so deeply. But it was the wrong thing to say. And it was wrong in the same way Susan’s colleague’s remark was wrong.

Susan has since developed a simple technique to help people avoid this mistake. It works for all kinds of crises: medical, legal, financial, romantic, even existential. She calls it the Ring Theory.

Draw a circle. This is the center ring. In it, put the name of the person at the center of the current trauma. For Katie’s aneurysm, that’s Katie. Now draw a larger circle around the first one. In that ring put the name of the person next closest to the trauma. In the case of Katie’s aneurysm, that was Katie’s husband, Pat. Repeat the process as many times as you need to. In each larger ring put the next closest people. Parents and children before more distant relatives. Intimate friends in smaller rings, less intimate friends in larger ones. When you are done you have a Kvetching Order. One of Susan’s patients found it useful to tape it to her refrigerator. Continue reading →

What are You Fasting From?

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Ok, maybe my grammar is a bit sketchy title-wise, but I like it.

I never fasted in my life, save for bloodwork or the occasional operation. Most of this came from my Presbyterian/Calvinist upbringing, which saw fasting as something a bit too “Catholic”, which is code for works-oriented. It was spiritually good but unnecessary at best, idolatrous at worst. Lent tends to be interesting at times because, as I’m the hospice chaplain in a secular company, I’m seen by some as this pillar of sacredness. Especially by our Catholic staff. It freaks them out when on a Lenten Friday I pull out a ham sandwich and dig in. It has provided some opportunites to teach what I know about grace and works.

But I’m rethinking things a little this year. Not so much about abstaining from food or drink or whatever. I understand why fasting from things that are pleasurable is supposed to connect us with the suffering of Christ. However there have been plenty of folks who, rather than fast from something, try to increase the good that they do. I think that’s a good way of looking at things and not quite so self-centered. But I was thinking today that if I’m going to fast, I’d rather fast from the things that pollute my life…worry, fear, self criticism. Life without chocolate only promotes misery and desire. But life without worry for 40 days? Hallelujah! What would it be like to not be afraid for 40 days, or critical of myself or others, or anxious? What can be more enriching and spiritual than that?

So I’m going to fast from worry. What are you fasting from?

Dealing with Anger

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One of the challenges some chaplains face, myself included, is the need to be liked and avoid conflict.  We want people to feel good and comforted, and this is what often leads us into the profession.  We’re the Rogerians in the room: providing that unconditional positive regard to all comers. Trouble is that when conflict takes place, it can feel like failure. So when conflict is on the horizon we dodge it. I can talk myself into twists trying to avoid or minimize whatever the problem is. Which tends to make the problem worse. Then when that conflict does erupt I tend to look at myself as the cause of it, as if conflict and anger are wrong and my fault. In doing so I take responsibility for their feelings and reactions, which isn’t healthy or logical.

One of the harder parts of my own development as a chaplain is raising that emotional boundary between myself and others. It’s easy in the caring professions to open one’s self up too much and to care too much for the other person, which neglects ourselves. This isn’t just chaplains but nurses, social workers, and on down the line. Sometimes this self-neglect takes the form of taking on what the other person needs to do – the “fix-it” or “savior” mentality, an outward focus that neglects the self’s boundaries. However I also see that this self-neglect can be inward focused as well, where I don’t try to fix the other person as much as make their problem my own – their problem is a bad reflection on me, so I take it personally. This can happen a lot with handling anger. This still avoids the problem though, and all I end up doing is taking their anger and internalizing it because it’s directed at me.

What I fail to do though is see that even though it’s directed at me it is still their anger, their emotion. How they choose to express it is their issue, not mine.

Surviving Hospice

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I often hear people, when I tell them what I do, respond with something akin to “I don’t know how you do it”.  Some days I can respond with “I enjoy what I do” or “I meet so many interesting people” or something similar.  Other times I think “I don’t know either!”  So I brought up this question to myself – how does one survive working in hospice?

Self-care self-care self-care self-care…

Easy to say and harder to do!  But that’s precisely the core of survival here.  There’s lots of good material out there on ways to take care of yourself to avoid burnout: art, time off, reframing, maintaining good boundaries, etc.  All of these are good and beneficial.  However two other things are required and are even more important.

First, you have to know you need to take care of yourself.  More often than not, it takes a meltdown or crisis situation to show me that I need to take care of myself.  When I’m stressed I tend to pull in and try to shove through whatever storm is blowing in my face.  My concentration is usually on going forward, not stopping to rest.  In the middle of stress I think our tendency is to do just that – get out of it as quickly as possible by surging onward even when we’re exhausted.  I’ve read more than one account, though, of mountaineers who ignored their own internal warning signs of exhaustion and fatigue and, rather than stop to rest, pushed on through the stress only to walk off the mountain.  I can fall in to that same trap.  But it’s amazing how even just a brief adjustment – for me it was a day working at home rather than the office – can rejuvenate and reframe.

Self awareness comes only with time and honesty with yourself.

Second, I must actually do what I need to do to take care of myself.  There are many times where I’ve stopped and said, “boy I’m exhausted!  I need a break!” and then never do so.  This is the pain of inertia that hits when we know we need to stop but don’t for fear of never starting up again.  I think that fear, rather than pride, keeps us from doing those things that we recognize that we need to do.  I fear letting things go, I fear appearing lazy while others (who aren’t taking care of themselves) push on, I fear lots of things.  Overcoming that fear again only comes with time, honesty, and practice.

When the world doesn’t fall apart when I let go of it, or when I stop caring what others think of me, or when I stop comparing myself to the “saints” around me, that itself is self-care!

Sound like grace to anybody?

Hard Lessons

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This has been a tremendously taxing last month and I’m glad it’s over.  July seemed long and tedious, and the fact that the AC on my car has been dead for some time didn’t help matters.  Neither did the “check engine” light that just won’t go off.  Neither did the fact that I traded territories with another chaplain as she was doing far too much traveling, only to find now that I’m doing a lot more traveling than I like now.

I kept up with everything and CPE was going great.  But last week killed me.  I had a very busy week with my new caseload and also had to manage the house and kids on my own as my wife was out at a conference.  I plugged through because I had this big goal at the end that I was looking forward to – being an extra in the new Batman film.  But then that got yanked and I felt like I ahd just run a marathon for nothing.

I got really mad and was emotionally all over the place.  Then I felt that I should just never count on anything good happening – that maybe I was holding on to things too hard anc counting on outside things too much.

And that was when I realized that I was exhausted and not taking care of myself.

This was why I was having such a big reaction to something that would have been disappointing but not a crisis event.  Self care for me is really hard, as I just don’t feel like I have the time to do so.  However failure to do so just makes me burn out faster.

Today I had trouble with one of my CPE reflection papers, as I found it really hard to “reflect” on the visit that I was supposed to be writing about.  What was going on spiritually during the visit?  Hard to tell, because right now I don’t feel spiritually connected to myself or anything else, just the stored-up pain in my shoulders that I can’t neck-crack away.

So all this to serve as the reason why I’m taking the rest of the afternoon off!