What's Normal?

"I'm stuck", she tells me, a little tearfully. This is an utterly unknown condition for her. She doesn't recognize herself lately, and neither do her friends, who are encouraging her to "snap out of it" and get back to the familiar, capable, get-things-done person they know. She doesn't understand why she can't seem to do this, and she believes they're right: she should be able to simply snap out of it, whatever "it" is.

In the course of our first conversation I learn what the last three years or so of her life have been like: major stressors, family emergency, a medically predicted child death (which didn't happen), uprooting and moving across country, a challenging new marriage. She's always been the "strong" one, doing whatever needed to be done, taking care of others, having no time to stop, or to fail, or to be needy herself. A survivor.

"I don't have time to break down" she tells me, so instead she has become depleted emotionally, physically and I suspect spiritually. She is experiencing multiple symptoms of depression, and can't "move forward" with her life as she's known it. She cries easily and "all the time", and feels that something inside of her has died. She derives no pleasure or satisfaction from anything, and her creative activities have dried up. Coming to see me is the first time in her life that she's ever talked with anyone about her distress, and it's because she feels scared, powerless ("For the first time in my life I'm dealing with something I can't handle on my own") and defeated that she has finally sought help.

One of the first things I have started to do with this client is to begin to frame her experiences in ways that will tend to "normalize" them, that is, help her to see that, given the challenges she's been up against, and the circumstances of her current and past life, her responses are pretty predictable, if not guaranteed; connecting the dots between circumstances and "normal" human needs and reactions; validating the sense of overwhelm that exists; reassuring her that she's not going crazy, but rather is needing to learn what it means to have a complex emotional life, and what it might look like to begin, very probably for the first time in her life, to have good support, and to take good care of herself emotionally.

\There is hope.



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