lean in, lean back
Have you or someone you known ever dealt with a chronic illness? It’s a complex and painful process in which the person experiencing it tries to sort through all kinds of emotions, beliefs and thoughts. Some days are better than others. Friends and family try to support the person but often, it’s hard to know what to do. Trauma and addiction are very similar. Discerning how much pain and suffering is understandable vs. allowing people alleviation from the pain is a complex process.
As a society, we love to live in extremes. We have trouble staying in the middle, and holding the tension. Instead, we bow out and give some generalized form of sympathy and continue to talk about “how terrible” it is that people suffer or completely enable ourselves to be fully defined by it. We even do this to ourselves. Maybe I’m being too harsh and critical. It’s not so straightforward but in my work with people struggling with addiction and trauma, there seems to be this leaning back and forth process.
Leaning In
This stance moves toward the person or the suffering. It empathizes, intimately engages and attempts to be in the experience. It compassionately understands and embodies that which is the root or source of the pain. It’s what makes us feel connected, together, a part of something.
People who naturally hold this stance tend to work in the “caring professions”. They score high in empathy, emotional intelligence on personality tests and find peace within the hardship. The word compassion in the Greek means “one who suffers with” and those who lean in tend to see the world through this lens.
The issue with leaning in too much is we can start to over identify and become overwhelmed by that which we are attempting to love. We can get lost in the suffering and start to belief we or the person experiencing it are nothing more than it. This is where burnout happens or a feeling of resentment and bitterness when reflecting back can happen. This stance has a hard time separating emotions from facts. The subjective needs to overpower the objective.
Leaning back
This stances moves away from the person or the suffering. It disassociates, analyzes, strategizes, and theorizes. It conceptually understands that which is the root or source of the pain. It’s what makes us feel isolated, alone and independent. Doctors have to
People who naturally hold this stance tend to work in “math, science and law professions”. They score high in conscientiousness and low in agreeableness. They are skilled at processing and getting a sense of where them or the person they’re supporting is at in a clear manner. They can know what is right or wrong in a situation more easily. By removing themselves from the immediacy of a situation, they can see it for what it is and what it isn’t.
The issue with leaning back too much is that we can start to disassociation and distance ourselves from that which we are trying to understand. Suffering becomes a matter of fact instead of a matter of experience. We can start to see things as black and white and categorize or label that which is unexplainable. This stance can try to fix problems, but it can’t fix paradoxical truth that some things just simply can’t be explained.
It’s important to vacillate between this posture of leaning in and leaning back. This rocking approach to life allows us to sway with life in all that it brings.
We must accept without enabling address without being overwhelmed
Questions
Do you tend to lean in or lean back?
What can you do to learn to do the opposite stance of what is normal for you?
What practices can you try to do both?
Quote
“Our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.” – Martin Luther King Jr.