Sunday, September 15, 2019
Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech
I had a walk around a reservoir and lunch outside with a friend, as a birthday celebration. We spent a lot of time discussing our compulsion to rescue, or rather attempt to rescue our friends. She has a friend who is trapped by a spouse who is needing round the clock care, and the friend is spiraling downward into depression. She has expressed suicidal thoughts, and is on an antidepressant that is working negatively, not helpfully. I lived through my best friend, in my late twenties, killing herself, and I agonized for years about my failure to save her. I had begged her husband to get her help, offered to take care of their two kids, and yet she died exactly as she said she would. Then another friend asked me, "What makes you think you have the power to save her?" and I gradually realized I did not have that ability, but I'd been shoved into the position in my family where I was the rescuer for them and my brother, so it took a lot of therapy to see how complex, and often biological, depression is. In my sixties a dear friend took her life, and I knew by then just how powerless I was. And six years ago my brother killed himself. He had tried in his teens and twenties, then seemed recovered for decades, but his note explained he loved me and just didn't want to live with illness. I could hear his choice, though I didn't agree with it and I wish he had tried therapy. But I knew there was nothing I could do. I knew I couldn't save him, and I'd had a lifetime to try, and fail, and love him anyway. I feel that way about all the clients in the safehouses I wanted to save. I hope I helped with some of them, but I knew it was not about me. It was about the culture, the disease of battering, the disease of devaluing women, the disease of not protecting the helpless. And it takes a village, a state, a country to change the isolation and despair that some of us experience.
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