Wake up calls

A couple of highlights from things I’ve heard today.

As I posted earlier, a client texted me this morning and after discussing his case, told me he hopes but I have a good social support system considering the stressful nature of what I do for a living, and of course I didn’t have much to report on that front.
Next, I spent a couple of hours driving and listening to CLE presentations. CLE I believe stands for continuing legal education, and New York like most states requires all lawyers to go through 24 hours of lectures every other year on various legal topics. The topics that has recently been growing in prominence is our own well-being and stress management. And I listened to this presentation by the Pennsylvania lawyer who recounted the story of how on his very first day in court, his boss/mentor suddenly died of a heart attack in the courtroom. At age 43, an odd detail that he mentioned, and of course, my present age. Not just my present age, but not terribly inconsistent with the pattern of mysterious medical difficulties I’ve been having, probably the scariest keyword being several different practitioners suggesting the possibility of coronary artery disease. That of course is not yet proven, but perhaps a promising direction for further testing. A coronary problem would actually explain a lot; my chronic shortness of breath, my rapid fatigue on even relatively easy exertion like a single flight of stairs, and my consequential difficulty remaining active enough to keep my weight under control. The lecturer then recounted his own story about trauma transference and how it wasn’t all that long before he found himself falling into toxic behavior patterns because of the inherent difficulty of managing the stresses of this particular profession. Ultimately, the main theme of his presentation was the importance of seeking proper social support and asking for help, things that frankly I have been profoundly bad at. The strangest manifestation of that of course is how my efforts to seek support and healthy outlets usually just result in people being mad at me for the vice speaking about myself and my own issues far more often than people would prefer.

There’s a real vicious spiral aspect to stress management in my life. One of the best tools of stress management is exercise, which has become increasingly difficult for me in light of whatever the heck is going on with my body, between joint pain, chronic shortness of breath, and easy fatigue, a casual day day on the upper Yough is just not accessible the way it used to be for me. And on the social side, what really happens is the depth of my need creates this well neediness that most ordinary people find repellent, and that’s kind of a death spiral as well; the greater my need gets, the harder it is to connect with people in ways that remotely meet the need without those people feeling like I am an energy vampire. And so I get this social experience that is Larson marked by people not wanting to be around me because I’m a downer in various ways and I talk to too much and I’m negative.

This is something where the answer seems simultaneously obvious and completely out of reach. Perhaps even a little repetitive coming from me. I need a healthy stress outlet, not just once but continually, daily even. This intern will probably help me get back to the level of productivity that I would like at work. I do what I do because I see problems all around me and people in need that I would like to help, but I’m not a very effective helper when I am too deeply broken to get done what I need to do on a daily basis, and honestly, it’s been showing in my work lately, a lot.

This isn’t really news. I unambiguously hit the point of burnout and/or compassion fatigue at least a year ago, if not a number of years ago. And I’m not sure I can really ever remember a time in my life when I ever felt but I truly had an effective social support network. No, in fact, lately a lot of my inner work has been processing past trauma going all the way back to early childhood, and even though I’ve been in some form of therapy for decades now, a lot of it still has not been worked through. Most of it hasn’t. to this day I’ve never really had an in-depth conversation with anyone about the experience of being told as a child that it was my job to save the family and feeling like a failure for that when the direct result was three years of my mother in and out of the hospital. I have talked a little about how childhood sexual abuse affected me, even though as a man, it’s still very stigmatized to acknowledge being a victim of such a thing, possibly even more so than before with the recent emphasis in our culture on misogyny. i’ve been gradually working up the courage to start to talk through the strange trauma that I experienced in the US Navy, trauma which because of cultural norms associated with military service I have always felt just made me inadequate and weak. Of course, my experiences of the traumas themselves have been barriers intimacy, and as a result I’ve never really manifested the vulnerability and intimacy that I probably would need for truly meaningful support. I have always felt that it is my job to take care of myself, to minimize the burden I am to others (not with standing my chronic verbal diarrhea), and at all times to be the strong person in the room when there is trauma or crisis to be dealt with. That needs to always be the strong one is probably a large part of why vulnerability has always been off the table for me, why I dump these thoughts that should be shared one on one with an intimate partner or friend into this quasi public space where nothing really matters instead. Frankly, my fake vulnerability on social media is ultimately just another way of fixating on ideas of always being strong; saying, look at me, I’m so strong I can openly share this stuff with the world, even though the reality is I’m actually so broken but I can’t get through any of it except by looking past it to whatever job needs to be done. Fake vulnerability like this really just serves as another kind of Band-Aid to stay off the need for emotional surgery. No, I don’t think that metaphor holds up; what I need isn’t surgery, it’s Support. Surgery implies that all I would need is a little adjustment and alignment in order to allow for things to heal on their own, when the reality is what I need is actual long-term stabilizing support. A cast, crutches, a wheelchair.

It’s funny to me how we use the term crutch in a stigmatizing way. When we want to invalidate someone’s reliance on a person or activity or object for support, we use the phrase “it’s just a crutch“ to diminish the validity of that thing. I think that’s wrong, and I think there’s nothing wrong with crutches. Crutches by their nature help you heal, by supporting you, although really, mechanically, crutch does not support a person but instead gives them an alternate way to support themselves. The use of a crutch inherently requires the sacrifice of dexterity in return for mobility. The use of two crutches is of course even more of a compromise, which leads people to wheelchairs – less of a sacrifice to dexterity, but more of a compromise to free mobility, and arguably less likely to promote healing versus stagnation. All the same, I NEED something and I don’t want to have to feel bad about it, but that’s usually what I get. Asking for help is seen as being needy or selfish or just “a downer.” And I guess I really do need to learn how to seek and accept that somehow.