The hero doesn't think he needs saving

Do you remember the show on the Discovery channel Naked and Afraid? Two strangers get dropped off onto a hostile landscape without food or water or clothes. For 21 days they have to find the tools they need to survive and confront the unknown: the terrain, a partnership with a stranger and their own abject fears. Every single one of them, on some level, believes the same thing walking in. I’ll be the one who makes it. My fear won’t run me. My hunger won’t run me. I’m different.

Sound like anyone you know?

You chose this field to work with mental health, maybe trauma, or grief, or sexuality. Maybe you pictured yourself as someone who could help shift the pain points that created obstacles that prevented people from living their best lives. Imagining yourself as a change-agent or a hero in the trenches was part of the story line and maybe your survival.

We don’t come into this work without our own set of wounds. Some are open and some are closed, at times tentatively so. What you may not have pictured was your own variety of burnout. Your own grief. The way exhaustion quietly rewires you until intimacy with the self and others, thins out and mistakes, like forgotten appointments, or saying too much about yourself, creep into sessions. It’s not what you do, rather it’s what you skip over, or stop hearing.

Did you ever see the program MASH? Set in South Korea during the Korean War, the series follows the eccentric doctors and nurses of the 4077th MASH unit as they use irreverent humor and pranks to cope with the grim realities of warfare. I think of the old MASH unit and barbed wire around a small patch of ground, not to keep the doctors in but to keep the war out. They wait. They calm their hands with coffee, dark humor, a little flirtation, a lot of denial. And then the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of the helicopter, and they have maybe ten seconds before the wounded arrive and the walls come down and everyone goes to work while their brains rewire under the pounding of necessity.

How many times have you lived a version of that? On call, clients calling and needing an immediate response. There’s little room to think or process or laugh or be close to anyone. And you keep going. Even when some part of you knows. I need to stop. Do you listen?

That knowing, buried and unspoken, is the grief. Not ordinary grief. Nobody died. There’s no body. Which is precisely why it goes unnamed, and why unnamed is where it does the most damage.

Please, take a quiet inventory. Think about the times when you’ve gone missing. It’s a symbolic metaphor, when the phone, the IPAD or computer spend more time with you than the time you spend with your kids, your friends, and your joy. When the tools used to disappear are taken away, what’s there within your mind, your brain and your soul. How does the silence feel? What do you find?

I’ll keep writing toward the answer. If you want the rest of it, subscribe, and forward this to the colleague you were thinking about while you read it.

Edy