“Sometimes we can do more for people in our absence
than we can do for them in our presence.”
— Ruth Haley Barton
Having endured the past few very challenging years, and perhaps having also endured some variety of other challenges or hardships in life, you may have arrived in a season where your emotional vulnerability bleeds out from within into your external world.
It may be frustration, irritability, fear, sadness, loneliness, a loss of hope, the need to withdraw in ways that neglects those who depend on you or, just as bad, violent behavioural responses of rage.
Not all our emotional vulnerability is due to exhaustion, but a lot of it is. Exhaustion comes from ‘being strong for too long,’ from being too accessible, from saying ‘yes’ too much, from being unbalanced for an extended period, from compromising far too often.
Exhaustion drives down into our soul and ultimately it leaves us spiritually dry, and it all manifests in patterns of emotional vulnerability.
There’s a good reason why Jesus often withdrew into the wilderness. He needed to reconnect with himself and be in communion with his Father. Jesus modelled what we all need to do. We all need our “ME” time, and we need a rhythm of it. Such timeout isn’t just for introverts. Such timeout isn’t selfish. It’s a spiritual discipline we sorely need to engage in.
“ME” time can sound like selfishness, but if I don’t look after me, I have little resource left to care for the person who depends on me—and we all have people who depend on us, just as in any healthy life we depend also on others.
So, we can look at this “ME” time in the frame of whatever it is that replenishes—noting that much selfish “ME” time is NOT oriented toward renewal but sloth. Time to reconnect, be it with a book, or time in nature, cherished fellowship with a mentor, exercise, journalling, or any other productive use of time is vital for each of us. Good self-care requires diligent effort to plan and execute. Blessed are those who take responsibility for organising this time.
When we find ourselves in a pattern of emotional vulnerability—and this is most underscored in the final analysis as anxiety and/or depression—we might be genuinely encouraged to identify the reason: exhaustion.
I say encouragement for this reason: we customarily condemn ourselves as less-than when everyone undergoes the same thing when exposed to a sustained overload of stimuli, whether it’s burnout, a cacophony of loss, conflicts that can’t be reconciled, abuse and trauma, and the like.
There’s no reason to feel alone in being emotionally vulnerable. Given the same circumstances that you face, the next person would feel the same way. And besides, there are just so many people who are emotionally vulnerable, again, because of degrees of exhaustion.
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Here are ten sources of exhaustion, which is an adaptation of the work of Ruth Haley Barton’s Invitation to Retreat: The Gift and Necessity of Time Away with God:
1. BEING TOO PLUGGED IN
It’s the curse of the modern social media and email age. Most of us spend far too much of our lives connected to devices. Without tempering this excessiveness of electronic stimuli, we risk burnout simply because we have a fear of missing out (a.k.a. FOMO).
2. TRYING SO HARD AND JUGGLING SO MUCH
Few of us truly want to disappoint people, because, let’s face it, even if we’re selfish, keeping people happy makes life easier. We’re often prepared to do more just to keep the peace. And just because we do this doesn’t mean we’re “people pleasers.” It’s often just strategically wise to keep people happy. But the more we say yes, the more exhausted we become, unless we ensure that we always chisel out time to replenish our resources.
3. FUNCTIONING OUT OF A SENSE OF OUGHT AND SHOULD
This is about listening to our language, or even what we’re saying to ourselves about making needs out of wants. We place a lot of pressure on ourselves. We should do this, or we ought to do that. If you’re exhausted, you know how it goes.
4. FINDING IT DIFFICULT TO RECEIVE HELP FROM OTHERS
It is far easier for us to do things for others than to “owe” people. But if we can’t receive others’ help, we will find life exhausting. It takes humility to allow others to love us.
5. LIVING MORE AS A PERFORMER THAN THE PERSON GOD CREATED YOU TO BE
We are human beings not human doings, but all the same, we act as if all that matters is our performance. I know how hard this can be having had employers that I found impossible to please regarding performance—yep, just didn’t know how. I know that conditioned me to see my worth in what I do and what I have to offer rather than seeing my worth as who I am. God is far more interested in who we are than what we do.
6. FEW OR NO BOUNDARIES ON OUR SERVICE AND AVAILABILITY TO OTHERS
Priding ourselves on saying yes to everything, without ensuring we have recovery time, is the sure road to burnout. Let me just leave that there!
7. ALWAYS FEELING YOU SHOULD BE DOING MORE BECAUSE THERE IS ALWAYS MORE TO DO
There will ALWAYS be more to do, and the more we do, the more we SEE the things that need to be done. We don’t need to be the ones to do what needs doing.
8. CARRYING THE BURDEN OF UNHEALED WOUNDS – SADNESS, UNRESOLVED TENSION OR CONFLICT, TOXICITY IN RELATIONSHIPS
This one’s loaded. Grief, unforgiveness and untenable relationships will do us in if we let them. We will have grief. We will. We must take our sadness to God. And we must find ways of resolving tension (which takes intuitiveness and courage) and putting in place boundaries in toxic relationships—or ending them.
9. INFORMATION OVERLOAD WHERE MORE IS NOT BETTER
Just about every adult alive at this time knows a world where information bursts toward us like out of a firehose. We need to protect ourselves against the relentless deluge. We need to be discerning about what information we let in. Not only are we to say ‘yes’ less to people, we need to say ‘yes’ less to the plethora of information
10. JUST BEING PLAIN WILLFUL (AS OPPOSED TO BEING WILLING)
This speaks to our pride. Yep, it’s in us all. Only the ones who can see it, who acknowledge it, who are aware of it, are those who are probably low on the narcissism scale. Most of us know what we want and, if we’re honest deeper down, we insist upon having it. Rather than being insistently willful, a reflection of good mental, emotional and spiritual health is simply having a willing attitude—being willing nurtures gratitude, hope, joy... peace.
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