Balance

“Balance”

 

            I am sitting in a beautiful Victorian airbnb in downtown Pittsburgh.  It’s dawn and there is snow outside the bay window as I sit typing this and sipping coffee.  I am away for a girl’s weekend with one of my college roommates and her adult step-daughter…  It is blissfully relaxing and I feel my batteries re-charging with every giggle, every shared secret, every silly confession and every bite of chocolate.

            Back in November this friend and I were talking on the phone on the way home from work about our respective stressful days and wishing we could meet for dinner.  She lives in Indianapolis and I live in Philadelphia so a spontaneous meeting for dinner wasn’t going to happen, but we figured out that the halfway point was Pittsburgh so the idea of a girl’s weekend we could look forward to after the madness of Christmas was born.

            As I slowly move from the business world into the world of psychology, I am reminded by my colleagues constantly that self-care is essential to be effective as a counselor, but I am coming to think that it is essential to being effective as a functioning human being and we don’t underscore it enough in today’s society.  We have to put the oxygen mask on ourselves first if we are to be of any use to anyone else.  It is a principle I understand well in recovery.  I have to put my recovery above all else or else I lose all else.  However, self-care can look like luxury and it does not come naturally to me to put aside the needs of others to take care of my own.  But I must.

            I am on track to get a graduate degree in clinical psychology with a dual concentration in both co-occurring disorders and trauma.  The trauma concentration fascinates me and the classes and projects have been amazing, but the subject matter is obviously not always easy to take on.  This past semester I did a trauma project that partially involved me interviewing a number of people and hearing their traumatic stories should they care to share them with me.  It was heavy work to say the least.  When I presented it to my class they responded well and I got a great grade but one of the questions I got at the end of the presentation was, “What have you done to take care of yourself this semester while you have been doing this difficult project?”  I didn’t have a good answer because I really hadn’t done anything to take care of myself.  The point my peer was trying to make was that I am going into a field where I am going to be telling people that they need to take care of themselves and then giving them suggestions on how to do so, but I am not walking the walk.

            The first week of this year was heavy for me.  I won’t go into the details, but there were a number of people in my various circles who needed a lot of my time and a lot of my effort and a lot of my help.  I will always give help to those who need it but it can be overwhelming when many people need you at the same time and need a lot of you.  I was reminded that week that I would need to make sure that I took care of myself this year better than I have in the past.  I put into place a lot of little things for self-care and am making sure that I have something bigger to look forward to each month like this trip to Pittsburgh.

            All of this is a balancing act.  As a mom I want to be present for the kids when I am with them, which means clearing my schedule when I have them for the weekend as best I can.  As a student I want to make sure I put in the time and effort it requires to understand the materials and learn as much as I can to become the best counselor I can and help people and getting good grades is icing on the cake.  As an employee I want to put in my best effort to make sure that my company looks good as they have been good to me and supportive and they are my bread and butter.  As a friend, I always want to be available to my friends should they need me, for the good and the bad.  As a sponsor I take my job very seriously.  I credit my sponsor and other people in the program with showing me a better way of life.  The steps and the process of going through them saved me from myself and changed everything.  One of the principles I live by is being other-centered but that too has to be balanced so I don’t burn out.

I remember being asked not long ago by someone not in recovery why I go to so many events for my home group that involve getting people started on the steps.  This person wanted to know how many people actually stick with it and actually go through the steps from start to finish.  The answer is there are many more that don’t go through than do and that can, at times be frustrating.  It can, at times, be disheartening and even boring to be going over the same material over and over again not knowing if the person receiving the message is going to stick with it, but for all those that don’t there are those that do.

A friend of mine from my home group had one of these events for a new sponsee, where a number of us got together and did some reading with him and explained the process and got him started on doing the work.  These meetings that we hold take about four hours and I have been part of many over the past three plus years.  The new sponsee was very eager to get started and is one of those people you get a sense from the start is going to take the process seriously.  This man calls on time every day, takes each suggestion and does his step-work religiously.  He has been back at work and over the course of the past few weeks the people around him have noticed a subtle change in him and in his demeanor.  His shift in deportment and attitude has been significant enough that his boss has been praising him and asking him about his recovery and what it entailed from his experience in re-hab to his work on the steps in our home group.  This man’s boss went out on medical leave just recently for what was said to be surgery but called the sponsee from a rehab and told him he checked himself in to get himself better because of the change he had seen in his employee and thanked him for his example.  I heard this second-hand and was blown away.  I got to be a part of that man getting help and I didn’t even know him.  That is why I go to these events. That is why I give my time to other people.  I never know which of my actions is going to help another and in what way, but when it does it is a blessing I cannot explain. 

If I can help even one person to get a fraction of what I have gotten in my recovery, then it will be worth all the hours I have spent in recovery work.  If I can be an example for Dermot and Wren, then the re-birth into a different kind of mother than I envisioned I would be, will be worth it.  If I can learn all I can at grad school and be an effective counselor and help even one patient to turn their lives around, then I will have done something with my life.

So it is all a balancing act.  I want to continue to be a good mom, a good student and a good employee.  I want to be a friend that can be counted on and a sponsor who cares and group member who starts people on a journey that will hopefully change their lives if they let it.  But I have to remember that if I burn myself out then I am nothing to any of these people.