Emotional Exhaustion

After week three of working at the hospital, I feel emotionally exhausted from the sheer volume of information and encounters I’ve experienced… I’ve cried every week. At least I am in touch with my emotions and can do that; one lady related that she and her husband are emotionally frozen and she can count the # of times she’s cried in her life… I laughed inside, since Los and I are both big criers. It’s so cathartic, I can’t imagine not being able to cry! Thank God my mom always encouraged that when I was a kid. I cry at movies, when I talk to friends, wherever- out of sadness, joy, love, whatever. This weekend I cried b/c one of my pastor’s 2 year old has cancer. I want to go to the blood drive in his honor in November. I can’t imagine the pain that family is experiencing.

One of the major foci in my experience as a chaplain is getting in touch with deep buttons within yourself, so that when they are pushed, you don’t react from a place in the past, and can identify the situation for what it is. One of my buttons is needing to achieve/belong, so when I heard the 6th person (in 3 weeks) remark on how young I was (“you are my kids age!”), it began to get to me… What I heard was, “you’re too young/not qualified to be here…” which I took offense to. But when I brought it up to people, I heard the exact opposite. They all said how jealous they were of me for being “wise beyond my years” and wished they’d known how to be more confident/assertive/perceptive at my age. Funny how communication erases misunderstandings.

When you are living out of your ‘true self’ then you can be present for others, to hear beyond their words. This great speaker we listened to said to pay attention whenever you feel ‘resistance’ inside of yourself. Exploring that resistance can shed light on what you might need to change to be fully available to another.

Thinking about that I realized that even though I’ve done a pretty good job (I think, so far) as a chaplain, I identified that I have a desire to assure people, or fix people, rather than to stay present with them in their pain. So I’ll need to explore that some. For example, one of my favorite people just lost a sibling to suicide, and I lost my grandpa to suicide, so when in the ICU today, there was a 25 year old guy who had just attempted suicide, I wanted to go in his room and tell him so much stuff, “You’re not alone!” and so forth. But a seasoned chaplain asked why I had that need, and encouraged me not to impose my needs on the patients, to be more of a listener, etc.

It’s SO hard to leave my own stuff at the door and not to say everything I’m feeling. I’ve always been more of a speak-first, think-later person, a terrible flaw at times… So I have lots to work on. But first, I’m going to lay down on the couch.