The Right Word

The Right Word

 

I am listening to a podcast called On Purpose with Jay Shetty. I’ve been listening to several of Jay Shetty’s works now, and he’s a person of interest for me. He has a lot of interesting things to say about being present and saying the right words at the right time. It’s also a bunch of therapy type stuff which is right up my alley. My therapist sent me this podcast because I asked her about communication because I’ve been having extra trouble communicating since my diagnosis back in March, but mostly with the people I know the best. The episode I believe is called “You Are Not Responsible”, and of course it’s about things you are not responsible for, one of which is helping other people.

I know, I know. I’m super guilty of this. I’ve been trying to work on it. I even just stopped communicating to people altogether “until I could get a handle on it.” That’s a bunch of crap, right? You can’t just “get a handle on something” without trial and error! So with a lot of error, I’ve been trying not to save people but to just be there for them. I stumbled onto this trick that he happened to mention in his podcast which was getting to the root of the problem as to why they can’t solve the problem on their own.

In social work, there are many “perspectives” you can go from, one of which is called a strengths-based perspective. I’ve had it used on me once, and it left me completely speechless, and I wish they had written it down for me. It was the intake session of the second time of Partial Hospitalization where I basically tell them what brought me here, where I had been, etc, etc. In that hour long session, this complete stranger had picked up on not one or two, but a list of strengths that I hadn’t recognized in myself when I said I wasn’t good at anything. She said my intelligence was one of them, and I teared up. She asked why, and I told her that basically since the last few years of college, I felt like my brain had turned to mush. My intelligence wasn’t what it used to be. I kept forgetting simple words. By that point I was so burned out that everything just seemed too difficult, and for her to recognize the one thing that EVERYONE had valued me for since my youth meant the world to me. It meant that the small core of me was still there.

One of my friends has been going through bad event after bad event and was saying he was being a bad parent, a bad husband, a bad everything. I started listing off the things he was overcoming, picking out his strengths, and encouraging him. I think that’s what I’m meant to do. I think I’m pretty good at finding people’s inner strengths sometimes and giving advice in the moment. But sometimes people don’t need advice. They need to believe in themselves. We need to believe in ourselves.

Do you believe in yourself?

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