Joy and Pain, Part 2

So it’s the end of the semester and guess what? I’m feeling exhausted. Depressed. Overwhelmed at the prospect of having to be there for one more person. Even if it’s my family. Especially if it’s my family, actually. It makes me feel guilty, but it’s much more incapacitating to deal with my family’s problems than it is to deal with my clients. I guess because I am much more invested in things getting better with my family. It has much more of an impact on my own well-being. Plus my clients listen to me more.

It’s not that I don’t love them. I mean, look at this picture of my brothers and me.

I think it’s awesome! Admittedly, we are not as joyful as we may seem in the photo. One of my brothers bemoaned the fact that I was making him jump, given that he had bad knees and a bad internal organ–a kidney, maybe? Although I’m not sure why that would be impacted by jumping. Yet in the picture, he looks quite athletic (he’s the one on the far right). And they all love the picture. An example of how it’s probably a good idea to do whatever I suggest.

There were actually an unusually high number of joyous events. We test-drove each other’s new cars,

toured the downtown where the movie Big Stone Gap was filmed,

and hung out with Big Foot at Flag Rock.

But being with my family is often a source of pain, as well. There is a plethora of mental illness to deal with. More severe than what I see in my job. At some level I think I became a psychologist in an attempt to heal my family, yet I have probably been the least helpful to them as a professional. I guess that’s why it’s better to see someone who can be objective.

People have lots of misconceptions about how feelings work. One of them is that positive and negative feelings are mutually exclusive. But that’s not true; joy and pain sit side by side. When your daughter or son walks down the isle, you may be crying both tears of joy and sadness. And when you visit your family, you may be jumping for joy and feeling dread and helplessness at the same time.

I often tell clients that being human requires us to experience the full range of emotions, and loving someone is a good example of this. Sometimes I find it overwhelming. When you feel other people’s feelings to the extent that I do, feeling twice as much joy and pain can be too much, even if they are people that you love. And when your job requires that you sit with pain every day, it can be hard to make it to the end of every term without crashing and burning.

But quitting my job and giving up my family are not an option. So I guess I will have to continue to wrestle with how to find the middle ground between joy and pain, closeness and distance, self-care and self-sacrifice.

Fortunately, blogging really helps.