Suffering is not Strength…

During my five years of intense suffering, I ultimately learned to surround myself with people who could focus on what was working, not ONLY what was broken. Maybe you need someone to kick your ass and get you into gear. I did not. The world was already kicking my ass. My father was already breaking my heart into a million pieces. My community, thanks pandemic, was in a state of flux and not everyone handled that well. All of it was TOO MUCH. But even in the midst of a fair amount of bad behaving, little lanterns of light were present.

This is a moment where I want to be brutally honest with you. I honestly have come through this tunnel with the strongly held conviction that no one needs an ass whooping. No one. I do not think it works. So maybe you think you need that, I would ask you to reconsider. I once had this young woman in my life who went off to college and came back....different. She had found a church near her college campus and she was thrilled with it. She reported to me saying, "You know, I realize that I need to go to a church where the pastor makes me feel ashamed each week so that I can be inspired to do better during the week." My heart sank. These were the days before I myself was a pastor, but even in all my ignorance, something about that just felt off to me.

This is a powerful human in her own right. She is assertive and strong and hears the cries of the marginalized and hopeless and DOES SOMETHING to alleviate their suffering. If anyone could take a licking and keep on ticking it's her. But this is not sustainable, in my opinion. One day, she will feel her vulnerability. And when that day comes, she may need something quite different. And if I may be so bold, she needs something quite different even when she feels strong and in control. Because all this shaming and her certainty that she can rise to the challenge actually strengthens her weaknesses. It makes her less vulnerable. It makes her more judgy and critical and I could see my younger self in her intense and sincere features. So I went home from our coffee date and cried.

Reawaken Your Life

I've been promising a series of posts about my breakdown and waking up experience, but I want to throw in a couple more pre-remarks. When we are exhausted, lose our compassion and feel hopeless, we acclimate to the climate of this dark and dreary existence. We may not realize that this is not "us." Maybe we think this is the way life works. I want you to hear me: this is NOT true. There may be many reasons we feel "off" or bad, and I'm not suggesting that my "off" is the same as yours. I do not know what your pathway through the tunnel and back into the light might look like or what you need.

I just want you to know that you may need to reawaken to your life and it may take a LOT more time, effort and exploration than feels reasonable to you. Also, I do not want you to look for the magic bullet because I do not think there is one. I suspect that it is more likely a series of small steps forward, backward, to the left, to the right, over and under and around.

When my mother died my body tried to tell me that this was not a normal grief process. My usually sturdy, healthy body got sick. I caught every virus that floated in the environment. My joints felt creaky, my workouts were half-hearted. My sleep was off. I asked my husband, "Do you think I will ever feel happy again?"

I started my road to recovery by finding a primary care physician who believed in wellness. This required spending money on myself, lots of bloodwork, a nutritionist, an exercise guru and more. It was a decent start but did not immediately come with a side order of joy. What it did accomplish was return my body to a baseline of wellness with a regular monitoring system to warn me if something physically was moving in an unhealthy direction. I also found encouragement. My physician, looking at my numbers, asked me if I practiced mindfulness and meditation and I said, "I do." She told me that my cortisol reflected my good work in that area.

I was practicing my self-care routine even though it did not FEEL like it was helpful. Hearing that my body was getting the message even if my emotions were not exactly falling into line was an encouragement. Who knows if I could have sustained the efforts around self-care without my physician's encouragement?

When you consider human giving and human being - obviously, balance is key. How is your balance? Does one need more attention than another right now in your life?

When We Know Better, We Do Better

Most people who know me understand that after years of teaching about "codependency" as a dreaded disease that needed to be eradicated, I have changed my mind. Again, more on that later, but for now, let's clear something up in terms of assumptions.

When we know better, we do better. Codependency was a word that was created to describe the dance treatment professionals noticed between family members and loved ones with their "dependent" - a person with a substance use disorder. I'm sure those early observers didn't mean it to become a cuss word or a term of condescension - but this is what happened.

Families were soon getting "blamed" for their loved ones choices even as the experts told them that they did not cause, nor could that cure or control the disease that had overtaken their beloved. But honestly - if anyone has ever said to you, "Wow, that's pretty codependent." You felt blamed. At a minimum, you felt judged.

In Emily and Amelia Nagoski's book, Burnout The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, they discuss the role of science in their introduction - and it is brilliant. They remind us that science is a particular way of being wrong. This certainly would have been good information for us to remember as various ones of us have railed against "the experts" during the covid crisis. Science is SUPPOSED to get it wrong; that's how they figure out how to get a bit better at a problem that no one had ever resolved before! Scientists are trying to be a little bit less wrong than the ones who came before them. They want to be wrong in a particularly helpful way. They want to be wrong in a manner that can be tested and proven.

Codependency language was a first step; it was picking up on something that addiction researchers understand better now, because, well, science. Addiction is a family disease - and various family members "break out" in different symptoms. The person with the use disorder looks one way; their loved ones look another. All of it is fairly predictable.

We could think of it like this. The family members become the "human givers" and the used disordered represent the "human beings" - because, duh. When someone has a use disorder, their brain is greatly compromised. They are fighting to survive and do not have much capacity for giving. This disparity is not limited to families with use disorders, but I just want to make note of the similarities because...as we walk through what happened to me and how I found my way through the tunnel of darkness, maybe others will find common ground and (I hope and pray) maybe their own way "through."

Today, take a few minutes to see where you are in life. Are you giving or being?

Human Giving or Human Being?

Philosopher Kate Manne wrote in Dawn Girl: The Logic of Misogyny about a system with one class of people she called the "human givers." The human givers were expected to offer their time, attention, and affection to another group of people called the "human beings." She implied that the "human beings" had an obligation to express their humanity while the "human givers" were required to GIVE their humanity to the human beings. As we can guess, the givers were the women. I am blessed to know many human givers who are male: my husband, my sons, my nephews, my brother, both my brothers-in-law and a bunch of guy friends. But her point is well-taken. I do believe that in our culture, we are trying to address the lopsided role of "giving" versus "being" as it relates to gender differentials.

Regardless, if you feel like you are a "human giver" surrounded by "human beings" - you may be onto something pretty ugly. In the last five years, with the help of people who I learned to trust, I had to come to grips with the fact that I was not supposed to need anything. This was a pattern that was ingrained in me. My personality seems to be vulnerable to this false belief AND my family system certainly supported this belief.

Human givers are supposed to be able to anticipate the opinions and preferences of others and behave accordingly. If they do not figure out how to give the people what they want, they will be shamed, punished or even destroyed.

There could not be a more perfect plan devised to achieve a state of complete breakdown of the human spirit.

Our body, with its instinct for self-preservation, knows that giving up our preferences in favor of serving the opinions and preferences of the collective is a recipe for disaster. Our body tries to alert us to our need for change - it gets sick, has trouble sleeping, starts ruminating, has panic attacks, and loses its capacity for joy. But within the system of "human giving" versus "human being", the system is rigged to teach the helpers that they are SELFISH if they have a political opinion, or a preference, or a need to express their own anger and disappointment.

If this sounds a lot like codependency to you, you are sort of right. But that's for another day's discussion. I wonder, do you think you struggle more with giving or being?

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?