Warmer

The day Clementine at the County Hospital told me about the eight upsetting things that had happened, I came home and told all of them to my mother on the phone, who said afterward, half joking, “I needed to know all of that.” Of course, she didn’t need to know any of it, and it’s not fair of me to dump that kind of stuff on her. I remembered one of my CPE supervisors saying she doesn’t tell her husband what happens at work: “He isn’t trained to deal with trauma.” Neither is my mother, so the next time I talked to her, I apologized and said I won’t tell her disturbing stuff from work anymore. She said, “Well, you can’t keep it bottled up! It’s OK to tell me.”

That was very kind of her, but caused me to start thinking about the bottling-up thing. Is it bad to keep stuff “bottled up”? My boss at work told me that listening to someone spew out a story they have told many times before does not necessarily constitute quality spiritual care. The person may just become even more anxious in the retelling. She said that she has noticed that when she obsessively retells a story of her own, she can feel increased anxiety. Even my therapist, for goodness’ sake, lately said that revisiting an upsetting story isn’t necessarily therapeutic. I’m perfectly capable of insisting on telling a story whether she thinks it’s therapeutic or not, but what if she is right? What genuinely is helpful in this regard, for me and for my patients?

I decided that spewing forth a story is the verbal equivalent of being lost in thought and that I wouldn’t do it anymore: I wouldn’t tell my mother and I wouldn’t tell anyone else. And within a couple of days, I felt exhausted and sick of the whole chaplain thing. It even crossed my mind that maybe I would actually rather sit in front of a computer at a bank, a very rare occurrence these days. Clearly I was no longer on the right track. I thought of that childhood game where the other participants tell you if you are getting warmer or colder. I was getting colder.

I decided that I need an appropriate confidante, but who? I decided it should be another chaplain, maybe one of my colleagues. I was paged that night to the emergency department at one of our campuses to say a prayer for a patient who, not yet 60, had died very unexpectedly, alone in his office. The next morning, doing turnover, I mentioned this to two colleagues, though there was nothing either of them needed to do about it. They both were kindly supportive. One reminded me to practice self-care as I integrated this experience. That was really nice of them. We encounter death so often, it in some ways comes to seem like no big deal, but it actually is. Maybe the colleague who said I should remember to take care of myself would be a good confidante, or, at the least, I should remember to tell my team what I’ve lately encountered and ask how things are going for them, so we can support each other. After my exchange with my colleagues, my enthusiasm for chaplaincy magically returned.