What holds us together? How do we avoid guilt and regrets?
I've been thinking about how to avoid regrets. I like the Al Anon/AA saying "when wrong promptly admit it," and once I learned this valuable piece of advice it resolved many of my own problems that I'd caused in my life. It also worked wonders in counseling my clients. However, coaxing the client to see their errors required a particularly subtle tango. First to know how far you can go with the bald-faced truth, which requires that you get to know and understand your client. This avoids defensiveness rearing it's ugly head. Then with kindness and a generous sense of humor you might parrot back to them what they did to be offensive. We're looking for the dawn of awareness here folks. It's always better if the client volunteers, "well, I wish I hadn't spoken out of turn, been so critical, ignored my spouse, etc." In my work with children that subtlety wasn't so important and the obvious, "how would that make you feel if this was said/done to you?" I usually cut to the chase. They would answer rather hang doggedly, "not very good". Empathy for others is the duct tape of humanitarianism.
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| Kathleen 2017 |
When someone you love dies unexpectedly sometimes this brings up many regrets. This happened to me when my sister Kathleen died in April, 2019. I went through days of regrets and feeling guilty that I hadn't done more for her. As I mentioned in another post it took talking to my sister Sally and me finding some old supportive emails to Kathleen I'd written and forgotten about that helped assuage the regret and guilt. Sudden death of a loved one has occurred several times in my life and seemingly the older all of us get, the more it's going to happen. No one gets out of this world alive, that's the sad truth. Interestingly, my father died also of a heart attack also at age 67 and they shared a birthday. Fate or coincidence, they also ignored the advice of many of us to attend to their health. Go for a checkup people! Vigilance is the duct tape of health.
Many of the clients in my practice came because they wished to do the right thing and avoid worry about a friend or loved one. They expressed fear that they would regret deeply if anything untoward happened to the one they cared about because they were unwilling or didn't know how to intervene. One of the people was "Tara"* who was consumed with worry about her son who lived in a city and was practically homeless because of his drug and alcohol addiction. To a person everyone, her friends and family told her to let him fail, "tough love" they righteously cried. Tara told me that in his case she felt that he would die without her help. "What is it you want to do for him?" "I want to bring him here and have him live with me to heal." This was contraindicated by my training at the time and yet, and yet. Tara described her son to me as full of humor and life and they had always had a great relationship. I told her to make some stipulations to their living together and I secretly realized that as a mother I would be unwilling to let my child just drift. Tara brought him home. I'm not going to say it was all sweetness and light but he did eventually get sober and thrived in this small town. Tara listened to her head, heart and guts. Courage is the duct tape of conviction.
*Tara is a pseudonym
What holds us together? What is most important in life? It seems to me that anyone who keeps the idea and the ability to see beauty and kindness never grows old. That beauty can be in nature, children, your friends, your pets and your mate. It also helps if, that said, one diligently works to bring beauty, joy and cheerfulness into everyone's world. You can't "make" someone happy but you can try to provide it. Generosity is the duct tape of togetherness.
On that note, here's a poem I wrote years ago and fiddled with to bring it up to date.
Duct Tape
Belief is the duct tape of religion
Insight is the duct tape of psychotherapy
Fearlessness is the duct tape of skiing
Fluidity is the duct tape of ballet
Compost is the duct tape of gardening
Surprise is the duct tape of comedy
Communication is the duct tape of peace
Harmony is the duct tape of marriage
Laughter is the duct tape of friendship
You are the duct tape of me. Susan R. Grout
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