People feel safe, comforted, and inspired around you. You are the glue to your friend group, you listen beautifully and help to heal the pain in others. You are haunted by experiences of significant hardship and disruption early in life; you have responded by providing the care to others that you wish you had received yourself. Your loved ones praise you for your care taking, people pleasing, and self sacrifice. You are so incredibly funny that people do not realize the constant, immense pain you experience.
My clients are proud of their accomplishments but feel unsupported and unvalued for their hard work. Maybe they’re the first in their nuclear family to get a college degree and feel apologetic and guilty for their education, or undermined for their education and experience. It feels heavy to feel the social responsibility to correct the negative and harmful ideas people they may love the most still carry.
Your family and friends may not see how these things impact you. They also don’t know about how little you sleep, or how much you drink each night, or that you feel like a shell of a person sometimes. While you genuinely care about other people, sometimes you are worried because while you seem to make others feel so good, you somehow still feel a lack of connectedness. Maybe you develop relationships where you take on the bulk of emotional labor and while you don’t like it, you seem drawn to these long held patterns. You want to develop meaningful relationships that feel satisfying, even if it’s one with yourself.
Maybe you did not want anyone else to ever feel pain the way you did growing up, and so you went into teaching, social work, human rights law, union organizing, or some other ‘do gooder’ field. You want the world to be a joyful and genuinely safe place for everyone. You feel pain, isolation, and overwhelmed, and yet you feel guilty because ‘your pain is not as bad’ as someone with historically marginalized identities. In comparing your pain to those who you are trying to support, you have kept yourself in a space where you can continue to sacrifice and fall deeper into self destruction.
Your messy, complicated, unpolished, wise, brilliant self needs a place to heal. We can explore your trauma, and heal. We will dismantle and reimagine what life could look like. At first you may do it for those you serve, eventually you will be able to feel what it means to exist from a transformative, actualized place.