What I Learned From My Breakdown...

First and foremost, I learned I am not alone. In helping professions (these are pre-pandemic stats), 20% to 30% of our nation's teachers have moderately high to high levels of burnout. These rates apply also to humanitarian aid workers and university professors. Among medical professionals (think about this - this is pre-covid) the stats are grim - a whopping 52%.

I did some research and tracked down some experts and asked them about what they thought the percentage of burnout would be for someone who spent their whole life trying to get families riddled with substance use disorder and mental health challenges the resources they needed to heal. One laughed and then suggested I read a book on burnout. So I did. But she also shared a perspective that I clearly had not considered. She said that gender makes a big difference in the study of emotional exhaustion. More on that later, but first, let's break down emotional exhaustion.

The first element of burnout is emotional exhaustion and its negative impact on our health, relationships, and life satisfaction - especially for women. Now, before you say to yourself, "Yeah, women are just so emotional." Don't go there! You'll just embarrass yourself. This is NOT about women being more emotional. Again, more on that in a bit. Emotions at their most basic level require the brain to release neurochemicals in response to a stimulus. This morning, at sunrise, my son Scott and I met at a lovely park in our area so that he could take pictures for a new website he's building for me. He asked Pete, my husband to come along. Pete assumed he would be there to watch our granddaughter Norah. He was quite disappointed to find out he was there to try to make me smile and carry the camera bag. Nevertheless, the experience was indeed more fun with the three of us. And Pete did fulfill his responsibilities with flare. The guy still makes my heart beat faster and my joy blossom - even after decades of marriage. Scott expects that to help with the photos, but we also know it also changed my brain chemistry. That's emotion for you - it's automatic, instantaneous, and happening all the time.

Emotions come and go, on their own. They just stop. When they do NOT go, if we get stuck in an emotion, we will experience exhaustion. This problem could be as simple as too much exposure to a stimulus that keeps eliciting the same emotional response - like a stressful job, or ongoing family conflict. Sometimes we get stuck because the most difficult feelings like rage, grief, despair, helplessness are so terrifying that we cannot move through them alone. Finally, we may get trapped because we are not free to move through them.

Are you exhausted? Could it be that you are stuck in an emotional storm?

On The Verge…

The last couple of weeks have been short takes on how we influence one another - for good or...not. I am a lucky duck in that I am surrounded by influencers who are lovely supporters. But sometimes - even with the best support in the world - we find ourselves emotionally exhausted, depleted of our capacity to show compassion and with a relentless, nagging feeling that nothing we do will ever make any difference.

This happened to me. In hindsight, it all makes perfect sense. First, my mother died. That would be difficult enough but the circumstances surrounding her death knocked me flat. I responded as I do; I came home from the funeral and tried harder. But, what I could not ignore was that everything I had done to keep our family together as a unit and to avoid the possibility of our dysfunction splitting us apart was futile. As a young girl I made two vows:

1. I would never want my family of origin to be broken apart by dissension and jealousy (as I had seen played out in previous generations.)

2. I wanted to create a family when I grew up that was a few steps removed from pathological.

Is this too much to ask? It turns out, it was. Of course you, dear reader, see the problem. I am but one human in a family system comprised of many humans. I was doomed to fail. To be clear, I think I managed to not birth any serial killers - my kids are awesome! But families are all complicated in their own way.

The second thing that occurred, was this blasted pandemic, right smack in the middle of a cultural revolution. If you don't know this, maybe I could give you some context. It has been extremely difficult to be a pastor during a pandemic and political upheaval. If you are not a pastor, I suspect this won't mean much and I will not bore you with the heart wrenching angst of it all. But it was - and is - pretty unbearable in some ways.

Maybe I could have kept paddling my boat if I faced either one of these events, but two of them? I did not have a chance. Self-care, therapy, super influencers, a family this is loving and not pathological? These things probably kept me out of in-patient treatment, but just barely.

But I learned a ton along the way, and I want to explore that for awhile with you. Stay tuned.

Too Much Positivity?

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." Charles Darwin

If I can be a Debbie Downer, there are other influencers who look like they take massive doses of puppy uppers. They reframe every negative into a positive, which I am sure is much appreciated by anyone who has spent too much time with me. But too much positivity can keep us from considering real obstacles and taking them into account. If we want to be helpful, we do have to consider the possibility that Pollyanna was not always correct.

Could this be you? Does your positivity ever cause others to feel as if you are not paying attention to details?

Anticipate the Positives

"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

Thomas A. Edison

For people like me, we do not ever think much about success. We expect things to go wrong; we anticipate failure. This is certainly a good trait to have when you find yourself going up a curvy, two-lane mountain road in Colorado with a huge trailer in front of you dropping large pipes. Walls of rock are on one side, a cliff on the other and cars headed down while the cars behind the truck are bobbing and weaving, trying to miss the pipes without hitting a rock wall, an oncoming car, or taking a nosedive over the cliff. True story. It happened to me and I was cool as a cucumber. I've been telling Pete for years to watch out for this car or that truck. The poor man has had to anticipate so many dangers that never occurred, that we were lucky he was not driving that snowy afternoon on a mountain pass. He would have never believed me! Anticipating problems can be a good thing - if there are real problems. But I can get so focused on what might happen that I forget to articulate the positives that are accomplished each and every day. This is not inspiring. People like me need to do better at expressing good news!

Could this be you too? How can we get better at this?

Too Much Attention to Detail!?

"To be content means that you realize you contain what you seek."

Alan Cohen

Dr. Spock was a Star Trek super hero, know for his lack of emotionality and his vast capacity to hold vast stores of data and information between his two pointy ears. Since he was a movie character, this did not hold him back from being an influential part of the Star Trek team. But for the rest of us mere mortals, it is important to not only have expertise, it is also necessary to engage others and make relational connections. Influential people leverage their personal relationships. They pay attention not only to the data, but to the people to whom the data applies.

Could this be you? Are you sometimes too much in the weeds of the details and fail to notice the people in your life who may need your attention?