Thanks for the brilliant advice. I am taking each day as it comes. Trying to set routines
Hi
@bumblebee95, That is really great. Bringing some order to the chaos we all live in!! And day at a time, living each day as fully as you can. Desiderata, what I marvellous, uplifting piece, prayer, inspiration!
You may have heard me mention
@Mel dCP as an inspirational person and a part-time teacher amongst many other talents.
Well, a tale from another extraordinary teacher.
I read a book called Teacher Man by Frank McCourt. His family had emigrated from Ireland to USA and Frank had trained there as a teacher. His first teaching post was in a New York school with a reputation as one of the toughest in the State.
He relates his various experiences, but one that stands out was when he was having all sorts of trouble inspiring his students to write an essay, an essay about anything they wished even,.
However he noticed how well-written the so called 'notes' from parents were about why their teenager had absent from school.
So he set an assignment for each student to write the best excuse they could for why they were or would be absent from school.
It worked !! Now just from what I have read and not as a health professional, soothsayer or seer:
Empathy you have. A truly precious ability but one that needs protecting sometimes from the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" to quote Hamlet. How to best explain what I mean? From others' wisdom: Here goes:
I imagine I am speaking with someone face to face (and that phase' to speak with' is so much better than ' to speak to"):
There are three different reference points, places or positions that my mind and being can be in during that time. (I cheated and looked up a Thesaurus for those three words, i always try to use everything and every form of help available)
Not just 3 separate loci (showing off here )!! but 3 reference points that part of my mind and being can be in. Like a percentage thing that may change second to second, minute to minute. No one place/reference point/position is absolutely more important than another so the use of first, second and third is not about importance but because we need some way to talk about them.
First place/reference point is totally 100% within myself: I hear and know what I am thinking, how I am breathing, that I am in my own shoes. Very little of what is happening outside me is detected by me - self-absorbed might be a description of it - you may well think of other descriptions!! Some printable, some not (and I know a few of the later)!
Second place/reference point is like being 100% totally in the other person's shoes. Imagining what they are feeling, taking in every word and expression, unaware of my own discomfitures (unless full bladder sensation intrudes, say)!!, or about any thing else around me - description ? over-sympathetic, maybe, some more cynical might say 'sucked in to their world".
Third place/reference point is about being totally detached from both myself and the other person. Like a 'fly on the wall', an observer who is watching a movie through a glass window of two people interacting. So description: detached, disconnected maybe?
What in fact I am doing face to face is a bit of being in all these places. Why talk about a juggling act?
If I get 'stuck' in second position or place, I risk being swamped by the other person's emotion, problems, unable to help them because they have grasped my hand and I am drowning with them. (apologies for the over-dramatisation)! I cannot breathe, I feel overwhelmed and lost.
Stuck in first position or place might mean that I have no time for any advice, feedback because I know what is right and best. Narcissistic maybe - dunno what the slang term is. But we have all read about them or met them. Often secretly unhappy, destructive to other's feelings etc. almost totally unsympathetic and not empathic.
Stuck in third position/place (starting to sound like gears on a car)!! detached, unaware of other's feelings or one's own.
Might be good working by themselves but not a team player.
Finding the 'goldilocks' amount of each place or element is the key to handling situations between people and not allowing your own personal space/being/feelings to be harmed, not the other person's. So say the pundits !!
To be empathic and not let that tilt over into sympathy is a challenge. I need just enough ego from first position to stand grounded, and enough from third to see the danger between myself and the other person to keep the boundaries clear. I need enough of those other positions (this is not a precise way to actually do it, but a rough analogy) to be able to help that person.
Bringing order to things can also mean working at how to keep those boundaries between reference points clear.
Also empathy and sympathy can create attraction between people. Really finding the other person attractive, becoming infatuated with them, falling in love with someone is maybe at its least romantic about loss of perspective and 'diving into each other's shoes'. Omph! no poetry prizes for that expression.
Anyway, I hope that in your day to day, week by week you can build order, a sense of security, a fortress/boundary//frontier um.. cross out 'brink'!! against despair.
Always know who and what your life lines are of course. Do you know how to tie a bowline knot??
Bestest Wishes (please allow the spelling error).