an off day/self care

Yesterday felt like a bit of an off day for me.  Maybe it's this creepy, blustery, pre-Halloween weather.  It could also be the fact that you can only study so many depressive mood disorders without analyzing the way that those very same symptoms are so often manifest (albeit to a significantly lesser degree) in your own life.  Low self esteem, excessive guilt (I was raised Catholic, I can't always help it), feelings of worthlessness, fatigue, depressed mood, restlessness...from time to time I experience all of these things.  Yesterday I had limited patience with my classmates, with the other drivers on the road, and with myself.  I said things I probably shouldn't have, and gave my roommate a hard time about something that really didn't have much to do with me.  It's days like this that just make me feel like if I'm not careful and intentional about how I do life, I can be someone I'm less than proud of.  It's also days like this that I feel like writing.  I get frustrated with my short fuse (enter excessive guilt) and find myself needing to sit down at the computer and sort things out.

We all have off days, off weeks, off seasons.  But for me, right now, I am fully aware that a lot of the heaviness weighing on my heart is a direct result of what I am filling my mind with.  It seems in my experience and in that of other students around me, that significant mind games are temporarily to come part and parcel with working so closely with the information contained in this quarter's course load.  As students who are training to be therapists, my classmates and I are sponges for this knowledge.  We spend hours and hours each day reading and talking about all of the painful and scary and confusing things that can happen in us, fragile human creatures that we are.   We watch vignettes and videos and do role plays, we read case studies, and write papers about our own experience.  And as we seek to analyze, familiarize ourselves with the symptoms and diagnoses in the DSM and the patterns and theories of psychology available to us, we are bound to get caught up from time to time in the weight of some of these issues.  We question our own sanity, our own interpersonal relationships and dynamics.  We take into consideration our own communication styles, strengths and weaknesses, fears and defense mechanisms and families of origin.  In the long run, we hope that this will make us better therapists; but in the present, it makes for a bit of a messy process.

Today, I think, I am feeling myself buckling under the weight of some of this stuff.  We watched a hard video in class that got my mind reeling about how painful life can sometimes be and the high calling of being a good therapist.  We will be repeatedly invited into the innermost parts of our client's lives.  They will share with us and often trust us to hold onto their burdens and fears and secrets and hurts.   They will look to us for answers, for healing, for a kind and listening ear.  Sometimes we will be scared out of our minds, or feel totally helpless and inadequate.  But there will be other times, too.  Times when we know that we have helped someone to feel validated and understood.  There will be those "aha!" moments when the client comes to terms with something they are working through, makes a major breakthrough or achievement, or experiences empathy and love that they have been craving and searching for within the walls of our offices.  We will be used, if we are willing to be obedient.  I'm terrified, yet honored, that it will be my job to sit, without judgement, and offer support and love to someone else who is scared or hurting, lost, confused, and everything in between.  On some days, I know, it will be a challenge; but on others, I think, it will be such a great joy.

So it is in this time that we are graduate students, juggling as much as we can possibly handle, that we are also encouraged by our professors and advisors to learn about self care.  They stress to us the importance in this field that we have chosen of being intune with our own needs.  Of course, I think that everyone in every field ought to be aware of their own limits and boundaries and have an artillery of tools that they employ to keep themselves healthy.  But I do love that in the mental health field "self care" is built into our training and job description if we are to do what we seek to do, well.  There is an ebb and flow in this learning season as I work hard to seek ownership of this knowledge, this vocation, this life.  Sometimes I am great at self care, better than most, I'd hazard to guess.  But other times, the most I can do is make a box of macaroni and cheese and zone out to whatever has shown up in the mail that week from Netflix.  So it goes.  I am learning so much right now.  But I'd be lying if, on days like today, I didn't acknowledge that this graduate school journey feels equal parts scary and overwhelming and lonely as it is thrilling and wonderful - but I am truly, deeply, grateful when it comes down to it, that I am being forced to come to terms with those very real things too.