We experienced a very significant trauma seven years ago. It often stuns people when they hear the story. There was so much pressure around that time…we had five children, including a newborn, and found ourselves facing a mountain of trauma and stress that is rather exceptional. I mean, I think it is? It was confusing even in the early years. I desperately needed a kind soul to see me. I could have used the sense of validation that comes when a person sees your pain and offers their tears and their ears. What we received, however, was often this weird avoidance or a gush of encouragement for how we were weathering the storm. It felt like we were rarely seen though. Not really. Very few people are able to enter in to that level of pain. And the time it takes to process and heal? People don’t stick around for that. We were just a few days into this story and we already had close family members leaving on their planned vacations while we remained in the PICU with one child and my due date with another loomed. The dissonance of it all, of watching people both shrink away from it and/or make it seem like we were so brave and triumphant (even in the very beginning), created a frustrating vortex of isolation and loneliness.
A few years ago we asked for pastoral counseling. We were just so stressed out. Trauma impacts you on all levels. Simple things like the regular noises of raising a family become major stressors. Legos rattling? Stainless steel snack bowls clanging? Shrieks and loud play? It can be hard, right? Parenting is hard. But when you’re experiencing all these normal things while your body is doing a darn good job keeping the score…it’s a next level hard.
So we attempted to unpack it all to this pastor and we told him about our stressors. Finances, extended family, the way even normal things felt very hard, how we feel so tender and raw even years into this journey. I think we hoped for validation? Maybe we hoped for intentional pastoral care? I don’t know. It just seemed like the right thing to do. So we poured out our grief to this pastor.
I think his response sort of shocked us. He compared us to other couples that he counsels and said we were doing so well. I believe he genuinely wanted to encourage us but when he left that night I remember feeling very confused. Am I supposed to be encouraged? What do we have to do to get people to understand that we’re hurting? Still. We’re still hurting.
I weary of the comparison game and often would have loved for the gift of a friend sharing THEIR struggles because I needed to know they had them too. But I also, perhaps, needed to hear the simple validation of the intensity of what my family has experienced. We needed the Church to recognize the impact of trauma and not offer us empty words but real help.
We have also needed presence. The impact of a person saying, “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. I’m with you. This is really intense. It makes me uncomfortable but I know you feel the discomfort in a deeper and more profound way so I won’t be put off by it. I’ll enter in and sit beside you. I see you.”
Anyway, I love this discussion and always appreciate the perspectives offered in this space.
I really do believe fellow Christians and pastors are doing the best they can with what they know, but these type of responses can really make you feel like you are so alone, drowning in a mess no one can control. The affirmations only make you more ashamed when you aren't as brave when you're alone. Do I just have to buck up and be like that all the time?? When will it get easier?? I think the best thing someone who doesn't know what to say to a friend in this situation can say is what you said in the 2nd to last paragraph. I'd also add, "I and our community may not know how to help you with this, so please don't be afraid pursue therapy with someone who has dealt with this type of trauma." I think religious communities in particular can be so resistant to admitting they don't know how to deal with someone's pain because they don't want them to think God doesn't. But God has many means of grace in this world and they may not all be in your particular church community.
Can't help but say "find yourself a different church!" It was eye (and ear) opening to me to go to a friend's husband's funeral at their Black church. Sobs and wailing! Truth. Yes, the faith in enternal life was there, and praise for his bravery (he had returned from Vietnam a broken man) -- and that's what ALLOWED for all the woe to be fully expressed. Zero pretense or "holding it together." Falling apart and letting the people next to you catch you. Makes me cry to remember it, because I think that's what we need.
I'm not saying, find a Black Baptist church that goes all out -- though if you've never been, I think visits are a great idea. But find yourself a church where you can be open, be where you are, so you can learn and grow for real.
I remember a woman in a confirmation class with me at St. Luke's Atlanta (way back when) who said she'd visited a lot of churches, wearing the same dress several times in a row. If she started feeling uncomfortable about it, she tried a different church till she found one where it seemed unnoticeable. I thought that was a brilliant test. Symbolic, and did the trick.
I have been in that place of backing off from someone else's extreme pain and difficulty. And even recognizing that I was making the choice to do it. I was ashamed but still did. Then eventually I changed. So I try not to judge people who back off, or minimize, or generalize ("Yes, life is hard.") even when my first impulse is to feel fury and grief. So I guess I'm saying yes, I judge, remember my own history, and come around to compassion for them. That said...this fine sequence happens when I'm not totally exhausted and overwhelmed. Then, hey, I'm just angry.
I love your last paragraph and also "not offer us empty words but real help."
This reminds me a lot of realizing (as an adult) that I have ADHD. People always said things like “studying is hard” or “staying focused is difficult” and I didn’t realize that what they meant by hard and what I was experiencing were not the same. I have since been able to improve my coping mechanisms and now that I’m done with school I have a lot more freedom to arrange my life in a way likely to lead to success. If I had known sooner that my experience wasn’t normal I might have been able to do a lot of this sooner.
I'm autistic, but growing up, it was exactly like that too. I've read that when people tell you "Quite complaining, everyone struggles with this" what they mean is that *they* struggle with it too (and have been told the same thing), probably because they've got what you have --- that makes them struggle with that thing --- only they don't know it either.
This is not precisely an answer to any of the questions, but a reflection on the theme/title. The way the title is phrased is a summary of our current cultural standard (or possibly even, "I can't ask for help because someone, somewhere, is worse off than I am,"). A better model, in my opinion--although i know people's instinctive reaction may be a shudder--is the baby-shower/wedding-shower model, applied much more widely. In a life-event shower, the community around a person all chip in to purchase a lot of stuff that the person may suddenly need (this is less obvious nowadays for weddings, when couples often already have a home together that is more or less furnished, but it's VERY obvious for babies). As a participant, you observe these natural life events of your friends by paying out $30 here, $50 there, and then suddenly when it's your turn, you don't have to spend hundreds or thousands all at once, because everyone else is chipping in for you! And you don't feel guilty, because it is an expected benefit/expense model that we all are used to. So if we expand this model, we would naturally expect to help out our friends and family with the normal difficulties of life (a meal delivered here, a load of laundry there, flowers watered when they're on vacation, an errand run on a busy day), and then, because we have happily chipped in for others over time, we don't feel guilty or inadequate by allowing for help when it's our turn, even if our "difficult situation" is completely within the range of normal life--just like weddings and babies, which so many people experience. Lower the bar of "need." Help in small ways as often as possible. Offer assistance cheerfully and don't let people wave you off. Normalize service!
And anecdotally, in my experience, wealthier communities are worse than others in this regard... because why bother a friend for help, when you can pay for a service to fix whatever service you need? Why assume a person needs help at all, when they could pay for a service they need? So there's more of a hurdle to overcome, but it's even more important to do so.
The math-y, logical, utilitarian part of my brain thinks of it like an unspoken social insurance contact. You pay your premiums over time in small services to other people, and then at some point you may collect a big service yourself. But i try not to think about it that way, actually, because I prefer a lens of mutual charity!
Yep, me too. That I couldn't afford a nursery school for my kids, and started a co-op play school instead, was so much better than if I'd sent them to nursery school. Turned into an extended family.
I'm often stricken, when hearing preaches, by the inescapable focus on giving, and the almost total absence of any allusion about receiving - be it the grace of God or the service and charity of a fellow human.
When I drove old trucks and couldn't afford AAA, I encountered so many helpful people who went out of their way to help me get going -- even on a Friday after 5 PM, or when my battery had died and I only had $10 in cash and was stuck in a rapid transit parking lot in Atlanta, 80 miles from home. (The taxi driver who got it going said "no, keep it, you might need it on the way home.) I had loads and loads of more examples.
I've encountered fabulous help in cities, and it's still fair to say, I think, that the culture here in my rural area takes this more for granted. Neighbors and strangers just help because that's what people do.
As more people from cities move in, it's changing more to the "normal" (not normative) modern ways -- more organized (read, "bureaucratic") and professional (read, "expensive"). I remember the shock, early on, of asking a plumber or some other construction helper why he didn't show up at 8 on the day we'd agreed on, and he replied with astonishment, "my brother-in-law came in from out of town, so we went fishing."
My city expectations were outraged, because family and friends were supposed to come second to a work appointment. Now I laugh and wish my area were more like that again. Party line ($4/month) and walking to get the mail twice a week at the end of the road.
I’m in the military. I had to leave my 10 month old baby for a three month deployment. I was an utter and complete mess and I was ashamed of it, because every mother in the military has to leave their children for deployment at some point. If anything I should have been grateful- most deployments are a lot longer than three months. Too ashamed to turn to anyone in real life, I turned to a Facebook mom’s group. I explained my situation and asked for advice, and I got crickets, except for one comment commiserating that my situation was indeed hard, and she’d pray for me. I took the lack of response as confirmation that my struggle to cope with leaving my child was pathetic. A few months later there was a post in that same group, a mom agonizing over whether or not she should leave her baby for an overnight work trip. The comments were many, with strong opinions, including people assuring this poor woman that being away for one night would “destroy her attachment” to her child. That was definitely not great, but it made the scales fall from my eyes - my situation was not normal. Just because every mother in the military has to face a similarly horrible situation doesn’t make it NOT a horrible situation. I think I got the response I did - “shrug, wow that’s too bad” - because people just didn’t know how to relate.
I don't have something very helpful to say besides, that *does* sound so hard. I would be distraught if I had to leave my baby (or even my toddler) for that long, and it's crazy people treated it casually.
So thinking about this more, it’s occurring to me that military service in general often falls into this problem. Everyone knows military service is hard… it’s why strangers come up to you and say “Thank you for your service.” So when people start buckling under the stress, its often “Well, yeah, deployments are hard” or “Family life in the military is hard” or “Sea duty is hard” or, my personal favorite, “You signed up for this.”
Oh my gosh, "you signed up for this" is just a terrible response to anything hard, isn't it? I had four children in four years - it was a terrible few years when they were all tiny - but I signed up for it. I am in my 14th year of homeschooling - sometimes it's very difficult - but, hey, I signed up for it. If that's the best we have, we are really failing to support people when things get tough.
This really strikes a chord with my experience with depression, especially in the couple of years before I got a proper diagnosis.
I would occasionally tell people about mornings where "I just had so little motivation to get up", and they'd nod and say "I feel that!" or "Ugh I hate that!" and I think all of us thought we were describing the same experience. But of course "I'm sleepy and want to stay in bed" and "I will literally lie here motionless and miserable for hours because I can't find the willpower even just to sit up" are not quite the same feeling.
I'm not really sure could have been done differently. Maybe making it normal to invite people to share specifics of problems they describe to you, even if you think you understand what they're talking about? It seems rough to put the onus of change on the person struggling to get through the experience they think is normal, especially if they have any sort of "you're just making this all about you" inner voice adding guilt to it all.
I had hoped that by now, this no longer applied to depression. Nuts. I'm so sorry that people still say things like "I usually snap out of it if I go for a walk," or (to a woman, "Scrubbing something always helps me"). Almost 60 years ago, when I told my boyfriend I often felt suicidal and was thinking I needed therapy, he said "Don't worry about wanting to kill yourself. You want to write, and it's normal for writers." Luckily, I had kids and didn't think it would be normal for them if I killed myself, so I got therapy. Now this memory just makes me laugh, but the thought that this kind of idea might still be current, isn't funny at all.
Part of the difficulty is that the ideas people offer to help have some truth to them. Scrubbing, volunteer work, more exercise, do often raise our spirits. The main trouble is that they all take energy and hope, and when those are missing, it just makes the "helped" person feel worse -- more tired, less hopeful. Now...to apply this to my own self-talk and attempts to force myself to do "something that everyone says will help," or "this person I so admire does and says it helps." Just came up against this earlier today -- busted!
I do think that things have come a long way, even though they are definitely not perfect yet! (and I am so glad you eventually got therapy and things worked out!) In my (very limited) experience, it seems like in my social circles if I mention suicidal ideation or use the word "depression" people have been very understanding and accommodating (if sometimes clearly struggling to figure out how to "best" react, which is fair), which I think is a big step forwards for society. For me it was the "well I'm not quiiiite suicidal" phase where it took a long time to realize my friends and I were using the same words to describe different things (or sometimes the same things when we were both depressed) and that's where I would get stuck in the problem Leah described.
I started to have heartburn when I was a senior in college, and it was unpleasant but I figured it was just what grownups dealt with. After all, my grandma kept Tums on her dresser all the time (turns out she was normally just taking them as calcium supplements). It wasn't until my local Walmart was remodeling and I found myself in the new heartburn aisle instead of the old toothpaste aisle that I saw a poster informing me that "frequent" heartburn was anything more than two times per week. Two times per week?!? I had heartburn at least that many times per day, nearly every day of my life.
I've so appreciated the community you've built here, Leah, and all the heartfelt comments folks have shared! One thing I will say on the flip of unhelpful commiseration is the joy of finding niche communities online of people who share similar experiences or (like this group!) approach others helpfully and with genuine feeling.
Yes, this is unlike any online community I've ever participated in. When I needed it, the Alzheimer's caregivers' forum was a nightly essential, but more on "how can I get through another day."
My husband is a survivor of domestic abuse and trauma. In the years since he has come into a religious community and has struggled with depression, anxiety, anger and a variety of other struggles, many of them related to processing his past, while preparing to serve in ministry. As he's reached out for help, he's been told that these struggles are normal temptations for everyone. Because he is so outwardly competent and high-functioning, it's taken us waay longer than it should have to realize that he needs more help and support than just the regular means of grace in the church. There's a such a stigma in some religious communities about seeking help outside the community. But too often, no one in the community knows what to do about these types of issues besides recycle the same advice that has only served to make people feel that these deep struggles are normal—and then feel ashamed that they can't be normal like everyone else.
There is often a deep suspicion inside Christian community about psychiatric treatment - for reason that are understandable from a historical point of view, but nonetheless detrimental to the mental and spiritual health of both lay people and ministry.
For sure. Psychiatric treatment can be necessary and helpful, but it can also be harmful. My MIL I think has been harmed by over-prescription of psychiatric meds. While they are sometimes necessary, I think other therapies have come a long way. I think the best approach in the church is to encourage people to seek therapy, but support them all the way and engage with them about it so they don't feel like they have to do it in the darkness away from community support.
I was 23 when I went to the doctor for my thyroid to get tested. In response to my complaints about years long fatigue, a PCP told me “it’s normal to get tired as you get older.” Of course he was wrong and it took me another year and a half to figure it out. I’m not sure I would have, if it weren’t for the church’s teaching on natural family planning. (My fertility signs showed further evidence of thyroid problems.)
I think one of the challenges is that we are told to try and be empathetic. To be a listening ear and to not “try to solve problems.” But there is an empathetic way to draw out more information that can help diagnose or repair instead of resigning someone to the situation.
Also a reason to switch doctors. Getting brushed off is just not acceptable, and the "it's what happens when you get older, end of story" is a brushoff.
Growing up, I heard a lot about "sibling rivalry" and how it was normal/usual for siblings to fight. In my case, I don't think it was normal for a sibling to throw hot liquids in my face, drinking glasses at my head, and hit me in front of my friends. Not to mention constant verbal abuse in person and over text and how I felt like I was walking around on eggshells around this sibling, knowing that the slightest thing could set off the abuse. I think things like "sibling rivalry" led my parents to downplay this as well, saying things like I must have done something to upset my sibling, how it takes two to make an argument, how we must be equally to blame, etc. I never stood up for myself because of this and thought that it was all my fault that these things happened to me. Probably many people who have been abused have felt similarly, that the abuse is just "sibling rivalry" or that "marriage is hard" or that "raising kids is hard."
The effect of this was that I never learned how to stick up for myself. In my first job after graduation, a colleague yelled and slammed the door at me. I didn't even think to report it, it felt so normal to me--but my other coworkers reported it, they knew it was wrong. And that was the canary in the coal mine for me: maybe what I experienced as a child, and the treatment I had come to expect as an adult, was not normal.
This may sound trite, but after reading your story on top of some others here, I just feel overwhelmed with the realization of how crucial it is that we take care of each other. This sounds dumb to say -- of course, and it's all through the Bible. Yet...these stories make it more real to me, dug in deeper in the hard clay of me.
Everyone said marriage was hard, that you have to sacrificially love your spouse over yourself, that you have to put your own preferences to death, that love needs work, and that you can’t expect to be happy all of the time. So, well, I figured I just needed to work on things, stop being so self-centered, and love him more. That was, after all, what my husband kept telling me.
I must really be selfish for wanting to go on a three-mile run a few days a week, and sit down with a book for a half hour after kiddo was in bed. I must really be lazy because I only loaded the dishwasher and started a load of laundry after my 12-hour shift, instead of cleaning the entire kitchen and sweeping the floors. It was unforgivably self-centered to want to go back to school. If I asked to stop during painful sex, I was clearly putting my needs above his and failing at self-sacrificial love. If I wanted to have dinner with friends once a month, I was selfishly abandoning my family and rejecting my marriage. So he told me, at great length, at every opportunity.
If I was crying almost daily because I was so routinely being berated for putting my selfish needs over those of my family, this was my problem to solve; marriage is hard! If it made me nauseous to be near him because he forced himself on me physically, I needed to learn to say yes; marriage is about giving! If I had to ask permission to move the toaster, this was an example of learning to put someone else’s preferences above my own!
I wasn’t able to articulate how abnormal this all was until much, much later. I didn’t go into details with friends because I knew “marriage is hard,” and mostly our conversations started and ended there. I actually left him *before* I realized how not-normal this amount of hard was, and blamed myself for my ultimate failure and selfishness of refusing to keep working on it.
Well over a year later, I was going round this little track of “it was horrible but marriage is hard; I just failed” with a dear friend who is also, it happens, a prosecutor. He stopped me mid-description to point out that some of the things I had experienced were so bad that they were *actually felonies.*
My comment falls short of your story, but I'm so sorry for your suffering and the added burden of thinking it was a normal thing to endure. Marriage can be a cross, but it's always really important for preachers who talk in those terms to make sure they aren't providing cover for abuse. Abuse not only disrespects you, it blasphemes Christ, since a husband is called to be Christ to his wife, and he presents a false, ugly image when he abuses her.
It strikes me that this is a particularly tricky area, because it can feel so nosy/instrusive to ask for details of someone else's relationship with their spouse, or how their marriage is going! I'm going to give some thought to develop a series of questions that would enable a friend to tell me if she is going through abuse like you endured. (Maybe beginning like, "How are you and spouse doing? How are you balancing your personal goals with your family needs? Is your husband supportive of (that goal)?" Would you have any other suggestions?)
I'm so sorry you had to go through such abuse, and feel so alone and guilty for so long.
I don’t know for certain that this is helpful, but part of my approach to PPD is talking about knowing people personally who had it, some of what they experienced, how grateful I am that they trusted me with their worry. It’s not done in a big “hint hint” way, but in the same spirit, talking about the line between hard times and abuse (including in novels), expressing disagreement with eg a homily that references an abused saint and treats the abuse lightly, etc is a way to indicate you see a difference and you’re open to talking about it.
The other advice I’ve heard is not to pressure someone to leave (even if they really really should). Don’t make someone feel like they’re failing for not being ready to do that yet. But make sure they know you’ll show up within an hour with a uhaul if they ask.
I really like the "ready to show up within an hour with a uhaul if they ask." In fact, a family member needed to leave her abusive husband after the police told her "next time you'll be dead" -- and old friends drove across the country, packed her things in a uhaul, and brought her and the kids back home.
It applies to other situations too. Doesn't have to be a uhaul and leaving situation. Can be the surgery they're not ready to schedule. "I'll go with you if you choose abortion, and if you decide to have the baby, I'll be right there with you from the get go." (Deep breath!)
I feel sadly short of suggestions. One part of being in that marriage is that it was such an internally self-consistent system. The dynamic I describe above, where every issue could be referred back to my own failures, is perfectly coherent, and “I’m not selfish; you’re the one being unreasonable” is exactly what a selfish person *would say* when confronted with the evidence of their own selfishness. And in fact my husband made exactly that argument whenever I protested! “Selfish people always hate it when other people point out their selfishness, and always think other people are the problem.”
I think trying to snip that loop might be the best way in. Many (most? probably most) abused women are told very similar things, and intimate friends are maybe the only people who she’ll be able to hear say, “that’s just not true about you.”
Most of my close friends are very empathetic listeners, and I think the impulse for them, and for many kind-hearted people in general is to always say, “mhm, mhm, mhm” in a gentle way when someone is laying out interpersonal issues, trying very hard not to pass judgment on the situation or jump in and take sides….because in general, one really *shouldn’t* jump in to take sides in someone else’s marital disputes!
But I think a clear place to object is if someone is saying something negative about themselves that is definitely not your experience of them within your friend relationship. I did have a few friends who did this, but they (fairly enough) tempered it by saying, “that really isn’t my experience of you….but marriage is so different from friendship, and we all can make selfish mistakes sometimes.”
This is all perfectly true, and I find it very hard to blame them because they were trying to be fair and I wasn’t telling them the most awful details….but I also think that the one thing that might have helped me get out sooner was someone holding the line there a little more firmly, along the lines of, “Rosemary, you can definitely be thoughtless sometimes, just like most people, but I have never known you to deliberately and repeatedly choose yourself over anyone you love, and I can’t believe that you are the only one at fault here. There has to be something else going on.”
I also think that someone being firm about it in that way (“there has to be something else going on here”) might have been a significant part of what I needed to hear before I coughed up the more awful details. Even though I blamed myself (maybe especially because I did), I wasn’t going to share things like “I can’t say no” until and unless I felt like the other person *wouldn’t* blame me.
When I finally *did* cough it up, it was to a friend whose main, and very effective, conversational technique was to absolutely not say anything at all when I was upset, just wait for the silence to make room for me. Idk if that would work for everyone but it helped me.
Everything was always hard and confusing. I got called melodramatic a lot. I figured I was just difficult like I was told. These days it would be "extra". I didn't know why social stuff was so complicated or why I needed some things just so. I was told I was weird, controlling, pretending to not understand obvious things. As an adult, when I tried to talk to other parents about how hard things were, they would sympathetically agree that yeah, x happened to them too. I would think sure, but it's not hard for me on some days. And I can see you manage more than I can on a regular basis. If I lived one of your days I would need days to recover. Turns out I'm autistic. All those things ARE harder for me. I can't do many things as much and as well as other people but when I'm in co-ops, I'm asked to take on more than someone with a visible disability or smh illness would because I don't look like I can't.
This is actually a problem in *super intense* undergraduate programs. I went to architecture school, where I was told all our problems would be solvable with "time management," and we just had to "use our time wisely." Turns out most other peoples' "all-nighters" are due to them not having done the work along the way, and usually involve four whole hours of sleep! They're not happening because your professor changed your project two weeks before the deadline and so you've seen the sun rise every day this week, and you were previously getting four hours of sleep a night until this project got scrapped and restarted. And because schools and cohorts like this tend to self-silo, it's not until you're long out of college before you start to realise that other people actually did have time to build real friendships and go on crazy adventures -- time that you didn't have, but everyone talked about how Hard College Is, so you thought maybe you're just having a harder time adjusting than other people do, especially when you used to be a straight-A student and now everything feels so much harder.
The weird side of this is then that you had, fresh out of high school, an experience most people don't have until their graduate studies, and even then it's not always the case, so the comradely commiseration starts to feel like a version of misery poker but where the other players can't read your cards properly. It also often results in an ingrained unhealthy mindset which inevitably transfers over into the professional world, where you're then expected to continue to Work Very Hard All the Time, so an enormous number of firms (not all, but a dangerous amount) exploit their interns and expect them to sacrifice their lives for their work.
Misery poker is the term I've heard, too! And I think it creates the sense you're doing *badly* if you're happy, or letting your friends down by admitting to having free time. When you might be giving them the chance to realize what's being asked of them is *bad*!
I was probably three years out of undergrad before I started to understand that most peoples' experiences weren't the "grind you up and spit you out in the shape we want you to be" variety -- because everyone else either 1. claimed their lives were Also So Very Hard And They Were So Busy or 2. made comments about Prioritizing. And now, I want to be able to offer my perspective and education to help *fix* those silo'd cultures of "grind until you (in some cases, literally) die"; it's not normal for a program to have a *casualty rate.*
Yes. I went to college at a university where only a third of freshmen ever graduated, and the suicide rate was quite high. Survival of the fittest, and this was also the "well, it's your thing, so...I won't say anything about it."
Yes! I also went to a really intense undergrad where really unhealthy behaviors were modeled by almost all of my peers. During my sophomore year I developed a pretty bad case of stress-induced insomnia, and I still feel kind of upset when I think about the fact that none of my friends told me to go to the doctor because it didn't seem alarming to them that I was waking up at 5 AM every day no matter when I fell asleep.
In the pandemic, it's hard to tell who's having an abnormally hard experience because there are so many potential axes of "hard" that seem apples to oranges. Did I have a hard early-pandemic experience because from March through June 2020 I had a barely-three-year-old (who started having a ton of potty accidents from the weird alterations to her daily life, but then threw kicking-screaming fits when my husband and I put her on the potty more) and an under-one-year-old at home because their daycare shut down for that time? But does it qualify as hard anymore if I tell you that for that period I got to drop down to half-time at work on FMLA coverage, do the rest of my work remotely, have a ton of childcare help from my husband (working remotely also), and have no money issues? Yet it felt super-hard compared to most of my colleagues where I work in higher ed...yet not as hard compared to my students, who (because I was working for a TRIO SSS program) were largely low-income students who suddenly found themselves either laid off or working front-line jobs, and had to endure a chaotic shift to remote learning on top of it. But they tended to be fairly young and often without children of their own, but some. helped care for other family members. So there was a lot of "this is hard for everyone," but there was no real way to determine what a normal amount of hard was...plus, even if you feel like it's abnormally hard, it's a pandemic. What exactly do you do, in Spring 2020, to fix it?
Yes, it's the relentless comparisons that get paralyzing, isn't it? And comparison (think ads, shopping, career ladder, politics) is so built into our environment that it's hard to stop. The comparisons can be with other people, or countries, or "how it used to be" or "how I want it to be."
Some thoughts on commiseration in general, from my experience... I think we feel like we need to have some sort of answer or positive comment on hand when we hear that someone's having a hard time. Or, as Leah says, we respond to a person's story of suffering by sharing what we believe to be a similar experience that has happened to us, or to someone we know, which inevitably boils down to either "Cheer up! Things will get better!" or "Cheer up! Things could be worse!" Both may be true, but 95% of the time they don't address the root of the problem.
I have been the recipient of much advice during an ongoing medical situation. Some of it has been helpful; some has definitely not. Ultimately I am thankful for people's desire to help, even if they haven't found the right words; in all fairness there is rarely a "right" response, and what works one day might be an epic fail the next. But I've learned some things in the process. People who are experiencing difficulty are mostly not looking for advice as such (they've probably heard it before, they know it, they may even agree with it - but it's not what they came for), but just for someone to share the weight of the burden they're carrying.
One instance stands out in my mind, when I was in tears and a friend put her arm around me and said simply: "I wish I could take it all away." Not pretending to know, not saying it will get better, not offering any suggestions. To me it was an embodiment of compassion, "to suffer with". This is the example I want to keep in my mind when confronted with the needs of others.
A young Black Baptist friend introduced me to the song, "Lean on Me," because he played it at the start of every group of young people he facilitated. I still love this and listen to it often. Also "He ain't heavy, he's my brother." These songs have helped me through rough times, and made me feel seen and heard even when I wasn't sure I had the strength and courage to carry on.
This sounds very similar to one of the techniques in “How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen” — I think it was called “give in fantasy”. The examples were centered on more everyday things, but the spirit of “I wish I could give you exactly what you want” is similar.
This really relate to something I'm living right now. I'm a PhD student (in mathematics). As everybody knows, PhDs are hard as students struggle with hard work (both in quantity and difficulty), dim career prospects, and feeling of inadequacy. Mine is going particularly badly, symptomatically because I'm currently reading your articles and commenting instead of writing my paper - I am almost unable to work seriously and efficiently without a strong deadline and PhDs don't have those. If my interpretation is correct, my problems comes from a personal weakness (and that would hint at a career in research just not being the right path for me).
However everybody says to me that it's normal to struggle, it's normal to understand almost nothing at conferences, it's normal to find it difficult to get ideas for proofs or to understand papers. But I still feel like my problems are on a different level altogether, and the general expectation of difficulty makes it really hard do understand if that's really the case.
This is a hard one to reply to, because it would be wrong for a complete stranger to tell you that you shouldn't be pursuing a career path that you've felt drawn to. You may be just talking yourself down. But, if you're looking for a sense of what is possible and what isn't, my son is a graduate student in math, and I would say that your experience is not like his. It's certainly normal not to understand everything that's said at math conferences--even long-time faculty members may not understand more than just a general outline when listening to papers outside their immediate field. And of course some problem sets are more challenging than others. But what you're describing doesn't sound at all like my son's experience, even when he took graduate classes as an undergraduate. There should be a real joy in tackling the problems, and a sense of spark and joy in solving them.
This doesn't mean that you don't have the ability to do those things. If you've got this far, the chances are that you are able to do the work, but something--perhaps depression--is dampening your ability to think clearly and creatively. If that's the case, you absolutely deserve to be free of that problem, and should get help for it. If it's not the case--if you've been forcing yourself to pursue a career path that isn't the best fit for you--then you deserve help in figuring that out, and finding a way to go forward that allows you to feel creative, intelligent, and successful, without any sense of defeat. Just remember that you ARE intelligent and creative already, whether theoretical math is the right career path for you or not.
Oh, and just to add another thought to this--I can't help wondering if you're working too much on your own. Some math departments take care these days to make sure their students spend time working collaboratively, but I suspect not all departments do that. Working in groups can really help offset a feeling of being overwhelmed, because it lets you see that everybody else isn't understanding everything perfectly all the time either; it lets you learn from others' insights; and it lets you see that you have something to offer, too, when they learn from your insights. If your department isn't structured this way, it's possible that there might still be ways for you to find other people to work with, either on your campus, or elsewhere.
This could still be because she's a woman, too. When my life partner was the only woman in a class of 60 in her graduate class at a Divinity School, all the men established study groups, but they wouldn't let her join one. I think her solution was daily letters to and from her best friend, and eventually good therapy from the university's counseling center -- and strong encouragement from at least one professor.
At the universities my son has attended, *no*--the study groups are organized by the profs or TAs, and include every student. I suppose such blatant discrimination could still happen at some schools, but it certainly didn't at his.
I'm a fellow STEM PhD (computer science) and I relate to a lot of this. It was a really good day for Leah to post this, because yesterday I was having one of those crazy near-meltdown days which culminated in me starting crying because I was trying to whip cream and it wasn't working. When I actually sat down and thought about what was happening, I realized I hadn't slept well for the past three days (for mundane, non-work reasons), so I lay down last night and slept for 12 hours straight.
Days like that always make me think about the intellectual life and the particular hardships associated with it. I think that one of those hardships is that when work is so consuming and mental, when it's going badly it affects you mentally. And research is almost always "going badly" in that your problem is hard to solve because if it wasn't, it wouldn't be research. So I think aside from the ability to be driven without many deadlines, there's also a degree of mental fortitude that's necessary just because you're going to be frustrated a lot of the time. And even though by some "objective" standard I'm dealing with it well--at least if "well" is measured in things like getting enough sleep, seeing friends often, and eating healthy meals--the reality is that often it's hard to push through the frustration and angst to actually even think about my research oftentimes. I've been in the program two years now, and it has gotten a lot better, but not to the extent that I'd be happy with this my whole life. But I do believe that it will keep getting better, and if it doesn't get better enough, I'm done after I graduate. I try to think of the place I'm in right now as part of the slow struggle to actually get comfortable in my career, and in doing research full-time.
The mid-PhD slump is very real. I spent much of mine putting together an a capella arrangement of "No Surprises" by Radiohead. It turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. Very cathartic.
As a fellow mathematician, I know what it's like to wonder if you're really cut out for this. Lots of us aren't; lots of us might be but still don't manage to make it into academia. I'm still figuring out my own career. Deciding not to attempt any more university positions was a hard choice, for me, but I think it was the right one. You might find you have more options out there than you think.
You're not "letting the side down" by doubting yourself, here. You're not even necessarily letting yourself down. I don't know if you're female or not, but, if you are, I think there's a lot to be said for letting go of the burden of representation. The future of women in mathematics does not depend on only you.
What would you do, if you took your doubts seriously? For me, the desire to widen my career horizons led to me auditing a lot of computer programming classes, in between PhD work. That was a good decision. On the other hand, though, I didn't want to give up on mathematics research without a fight. When I was able to obtain a research post upon graduating, I took it, doubts notwithstanding. I think that was also a good decision. I learned a lot from my postdoctoral post, even though it hasn't led to an academic career for me.
Would it be so bad if you tried to be a math professor and failed? Would it be so bad if you decided not to try, and did something else instead? I would like to suggest to you that neither of those things would be so terrible. Stay true to yourself. Try for as long as you want to. Learn as much as you can. Keep an eye out for opportunities of all types. No matter what happens to you and what decisions you make, I promise you that there are good ways to live out there, and you can find them.
I'm struck by the phrase "personal weakness." Way too many people have avoided therapy and otherwise getting the help they need because they think they're supposed to do everything on their own, or that their challenges are something to be ashamed of. Talk therapy has done wonders for me, and I recommend it highly for overcoming feelings of unworthiness!
I remember a book on how to get your dissertation done, that said most PhD candidates get stuck there and never get done. It recommended finding 3 others at a similar point (in your case, economics or some other graduate fields would be close enough) and meeting weekly to hold each other accountable. Each week the main focus would shift to one of the four, but everyone would have to report progress and make specific commitments for the following week. This is similar to Barbara Sher's "buddy system" in her classic book, Wishcraft -- which did enable me to write 3 pages a day and finish a novel. Without that system I'd probably have stopped after a few weeks at most. Later I did this with blacksmithing, with a woodworker buddy. (Note to self: so why aren't you doing this now, Cathy?)
I'm a PhD student in the Humanities, and I have gone through similar stages. I turned in a first chapter draft of a dissertation in the middle of my third year, and then the pandemic hit, and everyone kept saying it was natural that we wouldn't be able to focus on our work given the pandemic... long story short I ended up throwing that chapter and the whole planned dissertation in the trash after about a year plus of spinning my wheels, and have since finally started on a project I do love, with an advisor whose methods are better suited to mine, and am now, 2 years later, at the "same" stage as before, but with a clear plan of where to go and the motivation to steam full speed ahead. And I made all the choices here, but I wish I hadn't listened to the people who kept saying it was natural that I would be unable to work, because it kept me from hearing the resounding fact that I was never, under any circumstances, going to be able to write the dissertation I was trying to force myself to write.
Maybe there's no dissertation that works for you, no other advisor you feel better working with, no reason (for me it was teaching) to keep hanging on in your phd. I have friends who have dropped out to do everything from pharma sales to stand up comedy (which is a real out of the frying pan into the fire career choice, but more power to them).
It can be normal to struggle, and you can still decide you don't want to. It can be normal to struggle, and you can still be working on the wrong project, or with the wrong people, or even in the wrong field. It can be normal to struggle because the entire intellectual architecture of academia is toxic in a thousand ways and nobody should be putting up with it.
Also, very concretely: I also can't work without deadlines, and so finally I went to the people who are mentoring me and I said "you've been incredibly kind and accepting and flexible and now I need you to be strict and hold me accountable," and they said, "sure, awesome!" And it was a game-changer.
TL;DR think about things you can change- the structure of how you work, the topics, even your whole profession. Maybe start with the smallest changes, and try bigger ones if those don't work. If you're asking for permission to make changes, this is it.
We experienced a very significant trauma seven years ago. It often stuns people when they hear the story. There was so much pressure around that time…we had five children, including a newborn, and found ourselves facing a mountain of trauma and stress that is rather exceptional. I mean, I think it is? It was confusing even in the early years. I desperately needed a kind soul to see me. I could have used the sense of validation that comes when a person sees your pain and offers their tears and their ears. What we received, however, was often this weird avoidance or a gush of encouragement for how we were weathering the storm. It felt like we were rarely seen though. Not really. Very few people are able to enter in to that level of pain. And the time it takes to process and heal? People don’t stick around for that. We were just a few days into this story and we already had close family members leaving on their planned vacations while we remained in the PICU with one child and my due date with another loomed. The dissonance of it all, of watching people both shrink away from it and/or make it seem like we were so brave and triumphant (even in the very beginning), created a frustrating vortex of isolation and loneliness.
A few years ago we asked for pastoral counseling. We were just so stressed out. Trauma impacts you on all levels. Simple things like the regular noises of raising a family become major stressors. Legos rattling? Stainless steel snack bowls clanging? Shrieks and loud play? It can be hard, right? Parenting is hard. But when you’re experiencing all these normal things while your body is doing a darn good job keeping the score…it’s a next level hard.
So we attempted to unpack it all to this pastor and we told him about our stressors. Finances, extended family, the way even normal things felt very hard, how we feel so tender and raw even years into this journey. I think we hoped for validation? Maybe we hoped for intentional pastoral care? I don’t know. It just seemed like the right thing to do. So we poured out our grief to this pastor.
I think his response sort of shocked us. He compared us to other couples that he counsels and said we were doing so well. I believe he genuinely wanted to encourage us but when he left that night I remember feeling very confused. Am I supposed to be encouraged? What do we have to do to get people to understand that we’re hurting? Still. We’re still hurting.
I weary of the comparison game and often would have loved for the gift of a friend sharing THEIR struggles because I needed to know they had them too. But I also, perhaps, needed to hear the simple validation of the intensity of what my family has experienced. We needed the Church to recognize the impact of trauma and not offer us empty words but real help.
We have also needed presence. The impact of a person saying, “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. I’m with you. This is really intense. It makes me uncomfortable but I know you feel the discomfort in a deeper and more profound way so I won’t be put off by it. I’ll enter in and sit beside you. I see you.”
Anyway, I love this discussion and always appreciate the perspectives offered in this space.
I really do believe fellow Christians and pastors are doing the best they can with what they know, but these type of responses can really make you feel like you are so alone, drowning in a mess no one can control. The affirmations only make you more ashamed when you aren't as brave when you're alone. Do I just have to buck up and be like that all the time?? When will it get easier?? I think the best thing someone who doesn't know what to say to a friend in this situation can say is what you said in the 2nd to last paragraph. I'd also add, "I and our community may not know how to help you with this, so please don't be afraid pursue therapy with someone who has dealt with this type of trauma." I think religious communities in particular can be so resistant to admitting they don't know how to deal with someone's pain because they don't want them to think God doesn't. But God has many means of grace in this world and they may not all be in your particular church community.
Can't help but say "find yourself a different church!" It was eye (and ear) opening to me to go to a friend's husband's funeral at their Black church. Sobs and wailing! Truth. Yes, the faith in enternal life was there, and praise for his bravery (he had returned from Vietnam a broken man) -- and that's what ALLOWED for all the woe to be fully expressed. Zero pretense or "holding it together." Falling apart and letting the people next to you catch you. Makes me cry to remember it, because I think that's what we need.
I'm not saying, find a Black Baptist church that goes all out -- though if you've never been, I think visits are a great idea. But find yourself a church where you can be open, be where you are, so you can learn and grow for real.
I remember a woman in a confirmation class with me at St. Luke's Atlanta (way back when) who said she'd visited a lot of churches, wearing the same dress several times in a row. If she started feeling uncomfortable about it, she tried a different church till she found one where it seemed unnoticeable. I thought that was a brilliant test. Symbolic, and did the trick.
I have been in that place of backing off from someone else's extreme pain and difficulty. And even recognizing that I was making the choice to do it. I was ashamed but still did. Then eventually I changed. So I try not to judge people who back off, or minimize, or generalize ("Yes, life is hard.") even when my first impulse is to feel fury and grief. So I guess I'm saying yes, I judge, remember my own history, and come around to compassion for them. That said...this fine sequence happens when I'm not totally exhausted and overwhelmed. Then, hey, I'm just angry.
I love your last paragraph and also "not offer us empty words but real help."
This reminds me a lot of realizing (as an adult) that I have ADHD. People always said things like “studying is hard” or “staying focused is difficult” and I didn’t realize that what they meant by hard and what I was experiencing were not the same. I have since been able to improve my coping mechanisms and now that I’m done with school I have a lot more freedom to arrange my life in a way likely to lead to success. If I had known sooner that my experience wasn’t normal I might have been able to do a lot of this sooner.
I'm autistic, but growing up, it was exactly like that too. I've read that when people tell you "Quite complaining, everyone struggles with this" what they mean is that *they* struggle with it too (and have been told the same thing), probably because they've got what you have --- that makes them struggle with that thing --- only they don't know it either.
This is not precisely an answer to any of the questions, but a reflection on the theme/title. The way the title is phrased is a summary of our current cultural standard (or possibly even, "I can't ask for help because someone, somewhere, is worse off than I am,"). A better model, in my opinion--although i know people's instinctive reaction may be a shudder--is the baby-shower/wedding-shower model, applied much more widely. In a life-event shower, the community around a person all chip in to purchase a lot of stuff that the person may suddenly need (this is less obvious nowadays for weddings, when couples often already have a home together that is more or less furnished, but it's VERY obvious for babies). As a participant, you observe these natural life events of your friends by paying out $30 here, $50 there, and then suddenly when it's your turn, you don't have to spend hundreds or thousands all at once, because everyone else is chipping in for you! And you don't feel guilty, because it is an expected benefit/expense model that we all are used to. So if we expand this model, we would naturally expect to help out our friends and family with the normal difficulties of life (a meal delivered here, a load of laundry there, flowers watered when they're on vacation, an errand run on a busy day), and then, because we have happily chipped in for others over time, we don't feel guilty or inadequate by allowing for help when it's our turn, even if our "difficult situation" is completely within the range of normal life--just like weddings and babies, which so many people experience. Lower the bar of "need." Help in small ways as often as possible. Offer assistance cheerfully and don't let people wave you off. Normalize service!
And anecdotally, in my experience, wealthier communities are worse than others in this regard... because why bother a friend for help, when you can pay for a service to fix whatever service you need? Why assume a person needs help at all, when they could pay for a service they need? So there's more of a hurdle to overcome, but it's even more important to do so.
This reminds me strongly of tandas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanda_(informal_loan_club)) where people pool money each week for the benefit of one person in the circle.
The math-y, logical, utilitarian part of my brain thinks of it like an unspoken social insurance contact. You pay your premiums over time in small services to other people, and then at some point you may collect a big service yourself. But i try not to think about it that way, actually, because I prefer a lens of mutual charity!
Same! This is what I love about mutual aid groups (altho those I'm a part of deal with passing along old children's clothes, not $$).
Yep, me too. That I couldn't afford a nursery school for my kids, and started a co-op play school instead, was so much better than if I'd sent them to nursery school. Turned into an extended family.
"Offer assistance cheerfully and don't let people wave you off." Yes. And also, *accept* assistance cheerfully don't wave people off. <3
100%! That's sometimes the hardest part!
I'm often stricken, when hearing preaches, by the inescapable focus on giving, and the almost total absence of any allusion about receiving - be it the grace of God or the service and charity of a fellow human.
When I drove old trucks and couldn't afford AAA, I encountered so many helpful people who went out of their way to help me get going -- even on a Friday after 5 PM, or when my battery had died and I only had $10 in cash and was stuck in a rapid transit parking lot in Atlanta, 80 miles from home. (The taxi driver who got it going said "no, keep it, you might need it on the way home.) I had loads and loads of more examples.
I've encountered fabulous help in cities, and it's still fair to say, I think, that the culture here in my rural area takes this more for granted. Neighbors and strangers just help because that's what people do.
As more people from cities move in, it's changing more to the "normal" (not normative) modern ways -- more organized (read, "bureaucratic") and professional (read, "expensive"). I remember the shock, early on, of asking a plumber or some other construction helper why he didn't show up at 8 on the day we'd agreed on, and he replied with astonishment, "my brother-in-law came in from out of town, so we went fishing."
My city expectations were outraged, because family and friends were supposed to come second to a work appointment. Now I laugh and wish my area were more like that again. Party line ($4/month) and walking to get the mail twice a week at the end of the road.
I’m in the military. I had to leave my 10 month old baby for a three month deployment. I was an utter and complete mess and I was ashamed of it, because every mother in the military has to leave their children for deployment at some point. If anything I should have been grateful- most deployments are a lot longer than three months. Too ashamed to turn to anyone in real life, I turned to a Facebook mom’s group. I explained my situation and asked for advice, and I got crickets, except for one comment commiserating that my situation was indeed hard, and she’d pray for me. I took the lack of response as confirmation that my struggle to cope with leaving my child was pathetic. A few months later there was a post in that same group, a mom agonizing over whether or not she should leave her baby for an overnight work trip. The comments were many, with strong opinions, including people assuring this poor woman that being away for one night would “destroy her attachment” to her child. That was definitely not great, but it made the scales fall from my eyes - my situation was not normal. Just because every mother in the military has to face a similarly horrible situation doesn’t make it NOT a horrible situation. I think I got the response I did - “shrug, wow that’s too bad” - because people just didn’t know how to relate.
I don't have something very helpful to say besides, that *does* sound so hard. I would be distraught if I had to leave my baby (or even my toddler) for that long, and it's crazy people treated it casually.
So thinking about this more, it’s occurring to me that military service in general often falls into this problem. Everyone knows military service is hard… it’s why strangers come up to you and say “Thank you for your service.” So when people start buckling under the stress, its often “Well, yeah, deployments are hard” or “Family life in the military is hard” or “Sea duty is hard” or, my personal favorite, “You signed up for this.”
Oh my gosh, "you signed up for this" is just a terrible response to anything hard, isn't it? I had four children in four years - it was a terrible few years when they were all tiny - but I signed up for it. I am in my 14th year of homeschooling - sometimes it's very difficult - but, hey, I signed up for it. If that's the best we have, we are really failing to support people when things get tough.
This really strikes a chord with my experience with depression, especially in the couple of years before I got a proper diagnosis.
I would occasionally tell people about mornings where "I just had so little motivation to get up", and they'd nod and say "I feel that!" or "Ugh I hate that!" and I think all of us thought we were describing the same experience. But of course "I'm sleepy and want to stay in bed" and "I will literally lie here motionless and miserable for hours because I can't find the willpower even just to sit up" are not quite the same feeling.
I'm not really sure could have been done differently. Maybe making it normal to invite people to share specifics of problems they describe to you, even if you think you understand what they're talking about? It seems rough to put the onus of change on the person struggling to get through the experience they think is normal, especially if they have any sort of "you're just making this all about you" inner voice adding guilt to it all.
I had hoped that by now, this no longer applied to depression. Nuts. I'm so sorry that people still say things like "I usually snap out of it if I go for a walk," or (to a woman, "Scrubbing something always helps me"). Almost 60 years ago, when I told my boyfriend I often felt suicidal and was thinking I needed therapy, he said "Don't worry about wanting to kill yourself. You want to write, and it's normal for writers." Luckily, I had kids and didn't think it would be normal for them if I killed myself, so I got therapy. Now this memory just makes me laugh, but the thought that this kind of idea might still be current, isn't funny at all.
Oh, it definitely still applies. I was told I need to go do some volunteer work. :/
Part of the difficulty is that the ideas people offer to help have some truth to them. Scrubbing, volunteer work, more exercise, do often raise our spirits. The main trouble is that they all take energy and hope, and when those are missing, it just makes the "helped" person feel worse -- more tired, less hopeful. Now...to apply this to my own self-talk and attempts to force myself to do "something that everyone says will help," or "this person I so admire does and says it helps." Just came up against this earlier today -- busted!
I need to add: there are times when forcing oneself to do something is indeed the right thing to do. Like...that 2 AM feeding.
I do think that things have come a long way, even though they are definitely not perfect yet! (and I am so glad you eventually got therapy and things worked out!) In my (very limited) experience, it seems like in my social circles if I mention suicidal ideation or use the word "depression" people have been very understanding and accommodating (if sometimes clearly struggling to figure out how to "best" react, which is fair), which I think is a big step forwards for society. For me it was the "well I'm not quiiiite suicidal" phase where it took a long time to realize my friends and I were using the same words to describe different things (or sometimes the same things when we were both depressed) and that's where I would get stuck in the problem Leah described.
I started to have heartburn when I was a senior in college, and it was unpleasant but I figured it was just what grownups dealt with. After all, my grandma kept Tums on her dresser all the time (turns out she was normally just taking them as calcium supplements). It wasn't until my local Walmart was remodeling and I found myself in the new heartburn aisle instead of the old toothpaste aisle that I saw a poster informing me that "frequent" heartburn was anything more than two times per week. Two times per week?!? I had heartburn at least that many times per day, nearly every day of my life.
I've so appreciated the community you've built here, Leah, and all the heartfelt comments folks have shared! One thing I will say on the flip of unhelpful commiseration is the joy of finding niche communities online of people who share similar experiences or (like this group!) approach others helpfully and with genuine feeling.
Yes, this is unlike any online community I've ever participated in. When I needed it, the Alzheimer's caregivers' forum was a nightly essential, but more on "how can I get through another day."
My husband is a survivor of domestic abuse and trauma. In the years since he has come into a religious community and has struggled with depression, anxiety, anger and a variety of other struggles, many of them related to processing his past, while preparing to serve in ministry. As he's reached out for help, he's been told that these struggles are normal temptations for everyone. Because he is so outwardly competent and high-functioning, it's taken us waay longer than it should have to realize that he needs more help and support than just the regular means of grace in the church. There's a such a stigma in some religious communities about seeking help outside the community. But too often, no one in the community knows what to do about these types of issues besides recycle the same advice that has only served to make people feel that these deep struggles are normal—and then feel ashamed that they can't be normal like everyone else.
There is often a deep suspicion inside Christian community about psychiatric treatment - for reason that are understandable from a historical point of view, but nonetheless detrimental to the mental and spiritual health of both lay people and ministry.
For sure. Psychiatric treatment can be necessary and helpful, but it can also be harmful. My MIL I think has been harmed by over-prescription of psychiatric meds. While they are sometimes necessary, I think other therapies have come a long way. I think the best approach in the church is to encourage people to seek therapy, but support them all the way and engage with them about it so they don't feel like they have to do it in the darkness away from community support.
I was 23 when I went to the doctor for my thyroid to get tested. In response to my complaints about years long fatigue, a PCP told me “it’s normal to get tired as you get older.” Of course he was wrong and it took me another year and a half to figure it out. I’m not sure I would have, if it weren’t for the church’s teaching on natural family planning. (My fertility signs showed further evidence of thyroid problems.)
I think one of the challenges is that we are told to try and be empathetic. To be a listening ear and to not “try to solve problems.” But there is an empathetic way to draw out more information that can help diagnose or repair instead of resigning someone to the situation.
Ooof :( Also a common story for endometriosis, I think.
Also a reason to switch doctors. Getting brushed off is just not acceptable, and the "it's what happens when you get older, end of story" is a brushoff.
Growing up, I heard a lot about "sibling rivalry" and how it was normal/usual for siblings to fight. In my case, I don't think it was normal for a sibling to throw hot liquids in my face, drinking glasses at my head, and hit me in front of my friends. Not to mention constant verbal abuse in person and over text and how I felt like I was walking around on eggshells around this sibling, knowing that the slightest thing could set off the abuse. I think things like "sibling rivalry" led my parents to downplay this as well, saying things like I must have done something to upset my sibling, how it takes two to make an argument, how we must be equally to blame, etc. I never stood up for myself because of this and thought that it was all my fault that these things happened to me. Probably many people who have been abused have felt similarly, that the abuse is just "sibling rivalry" or that "marriage is hard" or that "raising kids is hard."
The effect of this was that I never learned how to stick up for myself. In my first job after graduation, a colleague yelled and slammed the door at me. I didn't even think to report it, it felt so normal to me--but my other coworkers reported it, they knew it was wrong. And that was the canary in the coal mine for me: maybe what I experienced as a child, and the treatment I had come to expect as an adult, was not normal.
This may sound trite, but after reading your story on top of some others here, I just feel overwhelmed with the realization of how crucial it is that we take care of each other. This sounds dumb to say -- of course, and it's all through the Bible. Yet...these stories make it more real to me, dug in deeper in the hard clay of me.
Marriage. Oh, Lord, marriage.
Everyone said marriage was hard, that you have to sacrificially love your spouse over yourself, that you have to put your own preferences to death, that love needs work, and that you can’t expect to be happy all of the time. So, well, I figured I just needed to work on things, stop being so self-centered, and love him more. That was, after all, what my husband kept telling me.
I must really be selfish for wanting to go on a three-mile run a few days a week, and sit down with a book for a half hour after kiddo was in bed. I must really be lazy because I only loaded the dishwasher and started a load of laundry after my 12-hour shift, instead of cleaning the entire kitchen and sweeping the floors. It was unforgivably self-centered to want to go back to school. If I asked to stop during painful sex, I was clearly putting my needs above his and failing at self-sacrificial love. If I wanted to have dinner with friends once a month, I was selfishly abandoning my family and rejecting my marriage. So he told me, at great length, at every opportunity.
If I was crying almost daily because I was so routinely being berated for putting my selfish needs over those of my family, this was my problem to solve; marriage is hard! If it made me nauseous to be near him because he forced himself on me physically, I needed to learn to say yes; marriage is about giving! If I had to ask permission to move the toaster, this was an example of learning to put someone else’s preferences above my own!
I wasn’t able to articulate how abnormal this all was until much, much later. I didn’t go into details with friends because I knew “marriage is hard,” and mostly our conversations started and ended there. I actually left him *before* I realized how not-normal this amount of hard was, and blamed myself for my ultimate failure and selfishness of refusing to keep working on it.
Well over a year later, I was going round this little track of “it was horrible but marriage is hard; I just failed” with a dear friend who is also, it happens, a prosecutor. He stopped me mid-description to point out that some of the things I had experienced were so bad that they were *actually felonies.*
I think that’s when I started my real recovery.
My comment falls short of your story, but I'm so sorry for your suffering and the added burden of thinking it was a normal thing to endure. Marriage can be a cross, but it's always really important for preachers who talk in those terms to make sure they aren't providing cover for abuse. Abuse not only disrespects you, it blasphemes Christ, since a husband is called to be Christ to his wife, and he presents a false, ugly image when he abuses her.
It strikes me that this is a particularly tricky area, because it can feel so nosy/instrusive to ask for details of someone else's relationship with their spouse, or how their marriage is going! I'm going to give some thought to develop a series of questions that would enable a friend to tell me if she is going through abuse like you endured. (Maybe beginning like, "How are you and spouse doing? How are you balancing your personal goals with your family needs? Is your husband supportive of (that goal)?" Would you have any other suggestions?)
I'm so sorry you had to go through such abuse, and feel so alone and guilty for so long.
I don’t know for certain that this is helpful, but part of my approach to PPD is talking about knowing people personally who had it, some of what they experienced, how grateful I am that they trusted me with their worry. It’s not done in a big “hint hint” way, but in the same spirit, talking about the line between hard times and abuse (including in novels), expressing disagreement with eg a homily that references an abused saint and treats the abuse lightly, etc is a way to indicate you see a difference and you’re open to talking about it.
The other advice I’ve heard is not to pressure someone to leave (even if they really really should). Don’t make someone feel like they’re failing for not being ready to do that yet. But make sure they know you’ll show up within an hour with a uhaul if they ask.
I really like the "ready to show up within an hour with a uhaul if they ask." In fact, a family member needed to leave her abusive husband after the police told her "next time you'll be dead" -- and old friends drove across the country, packed her things in a uhaul, and brought her and the kids back home.
It applies to other situations too. Doesn't have to be a uhaul and leaving situation. Can be the surgery they're not ready to schedule. "I'll go with you if you choose abortion, and if you decide to have the baby, I'll be right there with you from the get go." (Deep breath!)
I feel sadly short of suggestions. One part of being in that marriage is that it was such an internally self-consistent system. The dynamic I describe above, where every issue could be referred back to my own failures, is perfectly coherent, and “I’m not selfish; you’re the one being unreasonable” is exactly what a selfish person *would say* when confronted with the evidence of their own selfishness. And in fact my husband made exactly that argument whenever I protested! “Selfish people always hate it when other people point out their selfishness, and always think other people are the problem.”
I think trying to snip that loop might be the best way in. Many (most? probably most) abused women are told very similar things, and intimate friends are maybe the only people who she’ll be able to hear say, “that’s just not true about you.”
Most of my close friends are very empathetic listeners, and I think the impulse for them, and for many kind-hearted people in general is to always say, “mhm, mhm, mhm” in a gentle way when someone is laying out interpersonal issues, trying very hard not to pass judgment on the situation or jump in and take sides….because in general, one really *shouldn’t* jump in to take sides in someone else’s marital disputes!
But I think a clear place to object is if someone is saying something negative about themselves that is definitely not your experience of them within your friend relationship. I did have a few friends who did this, but they (fairly enough) tempered it by saying, “that really isn’t my experience of you….but marriage is so different from friendship, and we all can make selfish mistakes sometimes.”
This is all perfectly true, and I find it very hard to blame them because they were trying to be fair and I wasn’t telling them the most awful details….but I also think that the one thing that might have helped me get out sooner was someone holding the line there a little more firmly, along the lines of, “Rosemary, you can definitely be thoughtless sometimes, just like most people, but I have never known you to deliberately and repeatedly choose yourself over anyone you love, and I can’t believe that you are the only one at fault here. There has to be something else going on.”
I also think that someone being firm about it in that way (“there has to be something else going on here”) might have been a significant part of what I needed to hear before I coughed up the more awful details. Even though I blamed myself (maybe especially because I did), I wasn’t going to share things like “I can’t say no” until and unless I felt like the other person *wouldn’t* blame me.
When I finally *did* cough it up, it was to a friend whose main, and very effective, conversational technique was to absolutely not say anything at all when I was upset, just wait for the silence to make room for me. Idk if that would work for everyone but it helped me.
Everything was always hard and confusing. I got called melodramatic a lot. I figured I was just difficult like I was told. These days it would be "extra". I didn't know why social stuff was so complicated or why I needed some things just so. I was told I was weird, controlling, pretending to not understand obvious things. As an adult, when I tried to talk to other parents about how hard things were, they would sympathetically agree that yeah, x happened to them too. I would think sure, but it's not hard for me on some days. And I can see you manage more than I can on a regular basis. If I lived one of your days I would need days to recover. Turns out I'm autistic. All those things ARE harder for me. I can't do many things as much and as well as other people but when I'm in co-ops, I'm asked to take on more than someone with a visible disability or smh illness would because I don't look like I can't.
This is actually a problem in *super intense* undergraduate programs. I went to architecture school, where I was told all our problems would be solvable with "time management," and we just had to "use our time wisely." Turns out most other peoples' "all-nighters" are due to them not having done the work along the way, and usually involve four whole hours of sleep! They're not happening because your professor changed your project two weeks before the deadline and so you've seen the sun rise every day this week, and you were previously getting four hours of sleep a night until this project got scrapped and restarted. And because schools and cohorts like this tend to self-silo, it's not until you're long out of college before you start to realise that other people actually did have time to build real friendships and go on crazy adventures -- time that you didn't have, but everyone talked about how Hard College Is, so you thought maybe you're just having a harder time adjusting than other people do, especially when you used to be a straight-A student and now everything feels so much harder.
The weird side of this is then that you had, fresh out of high school, an experience most people don't have until their graduate studies, and even then it's not always the case, so the comradely commiseration starts to feel like a version of misery poker but where the other players can't read your cards properly. It also often results in an ingrained unhealthy mindset which inevitably transfers over into the professional world, where you're then expected to continue to Work Very Hard All the Time, so an enormous number of firms (not all, but a dangerous amount) exploit their interns and expect them to sacrifice their lives for their work.
Misery poker is the term I've heard, too! And I think it creates the sense you're doing *badly* if you're happy, or letting your friends down by admitting to having free time. When you might be giving them the chance to realize what's being asked of them is *bad*!
I was probably three years out of undergrad before I started to understand that most peoples' experiences weren't the "grind you up and spit you out in the shape we want you to be" variety -- because everyone else either 1. claimed their lives were Also So Very Hard And They Were So Busy or 2. made comments about Prioritizing. And now, I want to be able to offer my perspective and education to help *fix* those silo'd cultures of "grind until you (in some cases, literally) die"; it's not normal for a program to have a *casualty rate.*
Yes. I went to college at a university where only a third of freshmen ever graduated, and the suicide rate was quite high. Survival of the fittest, and this was also the "well, it's your thing, so...I won't say anything about it."
Yes! I also went to a really intense undergrad where really unhealthy behaviors were modeled by almost all of my peers. During my sophomore year I developed a pretty bad case of stress-induced insomnia, and I still feel kind of upset when I think about the fact that none of my friends told me to go to the doctor because it didn't seem alarming to them that I was waking up at 5 AM every day no matter when I fell asleep.
In the pandemic, it's hard to tell who's having an abnormally hard experience because there are so many potential axes of "hard" that seem apples to oranges. Did I have a hard early-pandemic experience because from March through June 2020 I had a barely-three-year-old (who started having a ton of potty accidents from the weird alterations to her daily life, but then threw kicking-screaming fits when my husband and I put her on the potty more) and an under-one-year-old at home because their daycare shut down for that time? But does it qualify as hard anymore if I tell you that for that period I got to drop down to half-time at work on FMLA coverage, do the rest of my work remotely, have a ton of childcare help from my husband (working remotely also), and have no money issues? Yet it felt super-hard compared to most of my colleagues where I work in higher ed...yet not as hard compared to my students, who (because I was working for a TRIO SSS program) were largely low-income students who suddenly found themselves either laid off or working front-line jobs, and had to endure a chaotic shift to remote learning on top of it. But they tended to be fairly young and often without children of their own, but some. helped care for other family members. So there was a lot of "this is hard for everyone," but there was no real way to determine what a normal amount of hard was...plus, even if you feel like it's abnormally hard, it's a pandemic. What exactly do you do, in Spring 2020, to fix it?
Yes, it's the relentless comparisons that get paralyzing, isn't it? And comparison (think ads, shopping, career ladder, politics) is so built into our environment that it's hard to stop. The comparisons can be with other people, or countries, or "how it used to be" or "how I want it to be."
Some thoughts on commiseration in general, from my experience... I think we feel like we need to have some sort of answer or positive comment on hand when we hear that someone's having a hard time. Or, as Leah says, we respond to a person's story of suffering by sharing what we believe to be a similar experience that has happened to us, or to someone we know, which inevitably boils down to either "Cheer up! Things will get better!" or "Cheer up! Things could be worse!" Both may be true, but 95% of the time they don't address the root of the problem.
I have been the recipient of much advice during an ongoing medical situation. Some of it has been helpful; some has definitely not. Ultimately I am thankful for people's desire to help, even if they haven't found the right words; in all fairness there is rarely a "right" response, and what works one day might be an epic fail the next. But I've learned some things in the process. People who are experiencing difficulty are mostly not looking for advice as such (they've probably heard it before, they know it, they may even agree with it - but it's not what they came for), but just for someone to share the weight of the burden they're carrying.
One instance stands out in my mind, when I was in tears and a friend put her arm around me and said simply: "I wish I could take it all away." Not pretending to know, not saying it will get better, not offering any suggestions. To me it was an embodiment of compassion, "to suffer with". This is the example I want to keep in my mind when confronted with the needs of others.
A young Black Baptist friend introduced me to the song, "Lean on Me," because he played it at the start of every group of young people he facilitated. I still love this and listen to it often. Also "He ain't heavy, he's my brother." These songs have helped me through rough times, and made me feel seen and heard even when I wasn't sure I had the strength and courage to carry on.
This sounds very similar to one of the techniques in “How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen” — I think it was called “give in fantasy”. The examples were centered on more everyday things, but the spirit of “I wish I could give you exactly what you want” is similar.
This really relate to something I'm living right now. I'm a PhD student (in mathematics). As everybody knows, PhDs are hard as students struggle with hard work (both in quantity and difficulty), dim career prospects, and feeling of inadequacy. Mine is going particularly badly, symptomatically because I'm currently reading your articles and commenting instead of writing my paper - I am almost unable to work seriously and efficiently without a strong deadline and PhDs don't have those. If my interpretation is correct, my problems comes from a personal weakness (and that would hint at a career in research just not being the right path for me).
However everybody says to me that it's normal to struggle, it's normal to understand almost nothing at conferences, it's normal to find it difficult to get ideas for proofs or to understand papers. But I still feel like my problems are on a different level altogether, and the general expectation of difficulty makes it really hard do understand if that's really the case.
This is a hard one to reply to, because it would be wrong for a complete stranger to tell you that you shouldn't be pursuing a career path that you've felt drawn to. You may be just talking yourself down. But, if you're looking for a sense of what is possible and what isn't, my son is a graduate student in math, and I would say that your experience is not like his. It's certainly normal not to understand everything that's said at math conferences--even long-time faculty members may not understand more than just a general outline when listening to papers outside their immediate field. And of course some problem sets are more challenging than others. But what you're describing doesn't sound at all like my son's experience, even when he took graduate classes as an undergraduate. There should be a real joy in tackling the problems, and a sense of spark and joy in solving them.
This doesn't mean that you don't have the ability to do those things. If you've got this far, the chances are that you are able to do the work, but something--perhaps depression--is dampening your ability to think clearly and creatively. If that's the case, you absolutely deserve to be free of that problem, and should get help for it. If it's not the case--if you've been forcing yourself to pursue a career path that isn't the best fit for you--then you deserve help in figuring that out, and finding a way to go forward that allows you to feel creative, intelligent, and successful, without any sense of defeat. Just remember that you ARE intelligent and creative already, whether theoretical math is the right career path for you or not.
Oh, and just to add another thought to this--I can't help wondering if you're working too much on your own. Some math departments take care these days to make sure their students spend time working collaboratively, but I suspect not all departments do that. Working in groups can really help offset a feeling of being overwhelmed, because it lets you see that everybody else isn't understanding everything perfectly all the time either; it lets you learn from others' insights; and it lets you see that you have something to offer, too, when they learn from your insights. If your department isn't structured this way, it's possible that there might still be ways for you to find other people to work with, either on your campus, or elsewhere.
This could still be because she's a woman, too. When my life partner was the only woman in a class of 60 in her graduate class at a Divinity School, all the men established study groups, but they wouldn't let her join one. I think her solution was daily letters to and from her best friend, and eventually good therapy from the university's counseling center -- and strong encouragement from at least one professor.
At the universities my son has attended, *no*--the study groups are organized by the profs or TAs, and include every student. I suppose such blatant discrimination could still happen at some schools, but it certainly didn't at his.
I'm a fellow STEM PhD (computer science) and I relate to a lot of this. It was a really good day for Leah to post this, because yesterday I was having one of those crazy near-meltdown days which culminated in me starting crying because I was trying to whip cream and it wasn't working. When I actually sat down and thought about what was happening, I realized I hadn't slept well for the past three days (for mundane, non-work reasons), so I lay down last night and slept for 12 hours straight.
Days like that always make me think about the intellectual life and the particular hardships associated with it. I think that one of those hardships is that when work is so consuming and mental, when it's going badly it affects you mentally. And research is almost always "going badly" in that your problem is hard to solve because if it wasn't, it wouldn't be research. So I think aside from the ability to be driven without many deadlines, there's also a degree of mental fortitude that's necessary just because you're going to be frustrated a lot of the time. And even though by some "objective" standard I'm dealing with it well--at least if "well" is measured in things like getting enough sleep, seeing friends often, and eating healthy meals--the reality is that often it's hard to push through the frustration and angst to actually even think about my research oftentimes. I've been in the program two years now, and it has gotten a lot better, but not to the extent that I'd be happy with this my whole life. But I do believe that it will keep getting better, and if it doesn't get better enough, I'm done after I graduate. I try to think of the place I'm in right now as part of the slow struggle to actually get comfortable in my career, and in doing research full-time.
The mid-PhD slump is very real. I spent much of mine putting together an a capella arrangement of "No Surprises" by Radiohead. It turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. Very cathartic.
As a fellow mathematician, I know what it's like to wonder if you're really cut out for this. Lots of us aren't; lots of us might be but still don't manage to make it into academia. I'm still figuring out my own career. Deciding not to attempt any more university positions was a hard choice, for me, but I think it was the right one. You might find you have more options out there than you think.
You're not "letting the side down" by doubting yourself, here. You're not even necessarily letting yourself down. I don't know if you're female or not, but, if you are, I think there's a lot to be said for letting go of the burden of representation. The future of women in mathematics does not depend on only you.
What would you do, if you took your doubts seriously? For me, the desire to widen my career horizons led to me auditing a lot of computer programming classes, in between PhD work. That was a good decision. On the other hand, though, I didn't want to give up on mathematics research without a fight. When I was able to obtain a research post upon graduating, I took it, doubts notwithstanding. I think that was also a good decision. I learned a lot from my postdoctoral post, even though it hasn't led to an academic career for me.
Would it be so bad if you tried to be a math professor and failed? Would it be so bad if you decided not to try, and did something else instead? I would like to suggest to you that neither of those things would be so terrible. Stay true to yourself. Try for as long as you want to. Learn as much as you can. Keep an eye out for opportunities of all types. No matter what happens to you and what decisions you make, I promise you that there are good ways to live out there, and you can find them.
I'm struck by the phrase "personal weakness." Way too many people have avoided therapy and otherwise getting the help they need because they think they're supposed to do everything on their own, or that their challenges are something to be ashamed of. Talk therapy has done wonders for me, and I recommend it highly for overcoming feelings of unworthiness!
I remember a book on how to get your dissertation done, that said most PhD candidates get stuck there and never get done. It recommended finding 3 others at a similar point (in your case, economics or some other graduate fields would be close enough) and meeting weekly to hold each other accountable. Each week the main focus would shift to one of the four, but everyone would have to report progress and make specific commitments for the following week. This is similar to Barbara Sher's "buddy system" in her classic book, Wishcraft -- which did enable me to write 3 pages a day and finish a novel. Without that system I'd probably have stopped after a few weeks at most. Later I did this with blacksmithing, with a woodworker buddy. (Note to self: so why aren't you doing this now, Cathy?)
I'm a PhD student in the Humanities, and I have gone through similar stages. I turned in a first chapter draft of a dissertation in the middle of my third year, and then the pandemic hit, and everyone kept saying it was natural that we wouldn't be able to focus on our work given the pandemic... long story short I ended up throwing that chapter and the whole planned dissertation in the trash after about a year plus of spinning my wheels, and have since finally started on a project I do love, with an advisor whose methods are better suited to mine, and am now, 2 years later, at the "same" stage as before, but with a clear plan of where to go and the motivation to steam full speed ahead. And I made all the choices here, but I wish I hadn't listened to the people who kept saying it was natural that I would be unable to work, because it kept me from hearing the resounding fact that I was never, under any circumstances, going to be able to write the dissertation I was trying to force myself to write.
Maybe there's no dissertation that works for you, no other advisor you feel better working with, no reason (for me it was teaching) to keep hanging on in your phd. I have friends who have dropped out to do everything from pharma sales to stand up comedy (which is a real out of the frying pan into the fire career choice, but more power to them).
It can be normal to struggle, and you can still decide you don't want to. It can be normal to struggle, and you can still be working on the wrong project, or with the wrong people, or even in the wrong field. It can be normal to struggle because the entire intellectual architecture of academia is toxic in a thousand ways and nobody should be putting up with it.
Also, very concretely: I also can't work without deadlines, and so finally I went to the people who are mentoring me and I said "you've been incredibly kind and accepting and flexible and now I need you to be strict and hold me accountable," and they said, "sure, awesome!" And it was a game-changer.
TL;DR think about things you can change- the structure of how you work, the topics, even your whole profession. Maybe start with the smallest changes, and try bigger ones if those don't work. If you're asking for permission to make changes, this is it.