You're thirty minutes early

There's an old story about a Bedouin who wakes from a dream of his imminent death. Believing in the symbols of dreams, he does the reasonable thing. He runs. He gets on his horse and rides and rides for hours to get to the next town so he can escape death. When he reaches the edge of that town, he faces ominous arches leading to a threshold. Through those arches, he sees Death waiting on the other side. Death leans in, and says, just loud enough for him to hear: “You’re thirty minutes early.”

I think about that story when I sit with clinicians.

When you’re a witness to a clients grief, you’re meeting their burnout, as well. You are meeting them at their threshold. Something they didn’t choose or wish for. Something that terrifies them. Though you are well trained, it may terrify you, to be the one greeting them at a threshold that holds so much fear and agitation. You may carry a felt sense of your own fear, but being in the role of clinician somehow keeps the terror at arms length.

Grief and burnout are two potent aspects of the work the client wants to outride, and chances are, you may know the presence of those feelings from within your own personal story.. For the client it’s often avoidance, for you, you’re probably trying to outride or get ahead of the presenting pain so you can let grief and burnout know they are seen, heard and held. They show up like troublemakers. They are often tricksters, disguising themselves as simple anxiety, or deep malaise, and they make a mess of work, marriage, and yes, sleep: Affecting the overall emotional and personal affect of the client and sometimes, sadly for us, as clinicians. And you’re good, so you run and play a continual and often exhausting game of hide and seek.

Running may be easy for the client, right up until it isn’t. Hiding is easy too, right up until it isn’t. The threshold, when the client reaches it, has you standing there, ready to partner with the abject fear only grief and burnout can offer. But, what if you are also tired of the game. Because even with all of the tools for coping, and self-care you’ve learned over the years, the burnout creeps in, and the insistent call within the grip grief has over the self, focuses not on the loss of someone other than the self, rather, its about the loss of what and who you believed you could embody.

Here’s what most of us might not know. When you scan a grieving brain and a burned-out brain, there are many neurological overlaps that occur.

Though they stem from different external events, they share what is commonly referred to as ‘brain fog’. The exhaustion of working with grief and the subsequent burnout, can cause you to feel “just tired” or uninspired. While the rituals of seeing one client after another, needing to meet a certain number so you can live, make a difference or perhaps borrow your clients wins so you can feel good. These experiences can create a sense of living in liminal space, as if you are standing at a threshold with no beginning or no end. .

This particular kind of grief feels like an internal vacancy. Nobody died. There’s no body, no service, no casserole on the porch. You don’t get the week off. It’s the loss of the emotional interruptor you thought you’d be, the version of you that got the acceptance letter and believed ordinary life would never feel ordinary again. That loss has a name in my work: disenfranchised grief. The grief no one lets you have, because it doesn’t fit the way we are programmed to think about grief; the emotion felt after the loss of a loved one. The programming creates a fixed state of being, keeping you from accessing an understanding of what you have been feeling all along; the depths of grief that interrupt your creativity, stamina and outside of the box thinking you once had.

You’ve been trained to face the hard thing in your patients. Take off the veneer. Look straight at it. I want to ask you the question you ask everyone else. When did you decide the signs didn’t apply to you?

That’s the whole conversation I’m starting here. You are not invisible. There is nothing to be afraid of or to hide. Grief and burnout, held together, named honestly, without the platitudes and without pretending, or acting in the role of ‘knowing therapist” while your world is blowing up or unstable. If that’s a conversation you want to be in, subscribe. I’ll be writing it out loud, one piece at a time.

With you in it,

Edy