Why is this stress affecting me?

It’s a conundrum for many who are suddenly afflicted with mental ill health — “why is it that this [that has never affected me] is affecting me?”  “Where is my control, my strength, my confidence — I feel shattered.”  “Where on earth did this come from?”  “Why am I defenseless here?”  

Whatever the diagnosis is or could be, there is a growing impending realisation —  as quickly the situation of crisis has descended is almost as bad as the affliction itself.  

It can feel like a chicken-and-egg scenario: what came first?  

Grief as a response to the circumstance 
we’ve been cast into, or the mental health crisis
that arrived without warning that casts us
into the grief process outbound of loss?  

In many ways, the grief process mimics every malady of mind and spirit imperilling the soul.  This is because the descension always feels like a plummet, the floor of our hope has fallen away as much as we feel we’re sinking without resistance.  

This is about the scariest existential reality known to humankind.  

This is because our whole person feels the presence of interminable dread.  

It doesn’t help us when a person will tell us that “what doesn’t kill us will make us stronger” however true that is.  

It also doesn’t help much that a person would simply sit there with us — it helps us helpers to know and accept this.  Then we do not bother with endeavouring to ‘fix’ anything.

It means something that a person sat with us, because it shows how much they care, but the limit and strength of the help is precisely that: it matters more that a person genuinely cares than it does they try to help.  

This stuff that is suddenly affecting us that never did before reveals to us an important truth, a crucial learning — we never believed it could get THIS bad until we, ourselves, experienced it.  That’s the importance of ‘lived experience’.  We attest to a thing so many attest to — our compassion and empathy grows as a result.  

If only 2 percent of our focus, or 10 percent, or better still 50 percent, can be on the value of the adversity for later — for what is being learned, and can be learned no other way — then our hope is girded up and we have a way of surviving.  

A final word on the value of knowing someone truly cares, which is care enough in a world where so many arrive with knowledge and skills but not the power to help.  Humanity in a word — not contrived, no schadenfreude, no box ticking.  

There is something about authentic engagement with another human being who serves us with what Carl Rogers called unconditional positive regard — warmth, empathy, patience, kindness, etc, in the moment of peril.  

Simply Sitting with the Suffering

Care is an interesting phenomenon.  It isn’t important until it is.  Until we need it ourselves, we’re unconvinced as to its true value.  

Then, when we’re in the deepest need of our lives, one person’s care is enough to convince us that we, too, want to be able to offer this care when we get strong again.  

Having been convinced of the power of simply a caring person’s presence, engaging in the practice reminds us every time we do it.  

It is an eternal space, a liminal space, we enter, when we encounter a person suffering, having empathy for their carriage of pain.  

We know we have no power to change the suffering person’s circumstance, but we also know the power in care to hold space for the person — it’s the potential for significant growth that takes a person from adversity to a more fortified resilience over time.  

To sit with someone who is facing either a lot of self-judgement or the judgement or perception of judgement of others, and bring lovingkindness, is just what they need.  

To sit and be present, there is an intrinsic validation of their worth, which is especially powerful for a person who may with little doubt, or at times, be questioning their worth.  

To sit there when we may have other things to do is also refining our patience and empathy, and helping us practice otherness, which is the love endemic of a mature and whole person.  

We may not feel we have all the answers, and indeed more power is resplendent in the moment when we sit there accepting our powerlessness in and of ourselves.  Such a cosmic paradox, indeed.  

To sit there witnessing our own powerlessness and yet see the difference it makes to the vulnerable is powerful and humbling.  

Little wonder we can see the value we make for seemingly doing very little.  

As we sit there, together feeling rather inept for what to say or how to be with one another, there is courage on display, amid the chaos, to face the tyranny head on — knowing we do not need to ‘fix it’ but merely bear it.  

At one level nothing seems to change, and it shouldn’t be that much of a help, but for the one being helped, the legacy of being cared for is its own evidence.  

If you have suffered at all in life, and especially if you have received the help of someone simply sitting with you through it, and have grown as a result, you are perfectly suited to helping others.  I would argue it’s the noblest of all roles.