Lately I've been having more clergy anxiety dreams. Last night a person I don't recognize came to me in my dreams and accused me of having broken confidentiality by telling a story about him in a sermon without permission and without having changed identifying details. I felt regretful and ashamed in the dream and woke up relieved to realize that I had done no such thing. I've also had had dreams in which I have had to make difficult decisions that would make at least some people angry. And then there was the dream I had recently in which I wrecked my father's rare sports car. Or the one in which I was falling from a great height and woke myself up before I hit the ground. These kinds of dreams are common to ministers, and I've been told they happen to people in other stressful professions, as well. What meaning, though?
Bishop Frederick Borsch -- whom I first met when he was Bishop of Los Angeles and then again when we lived together in the Berkeley House at Yale and he was my Dean -- gives a famous sermon about these. He calls it simply "Clergy Anxiety Dreams" and has a version in his book The Magic Word. His point in that sermon/essay seems to be simply that these things happen in dreams but not in real life, because in real life liturgies come to end, eventually, whether or not we find the right page in the prayerbook or our sermon notes or whatever. It's a sign of God's grace that we don't have to perfect or always find our sermon notes or our vestments or whatever.
But I think that these sorts of dreams also function as an outlet for the anxiety of change. Bede once told me that dreams of death are good because they presage renewal and transformation. I'd go ever further to say that the anxiety surrounding change is not only a by-product, but also a necessary ingredient of change.
One of the key skills one learns in pastoral care training is the ability to regulate the anxiety of the person(s) you are with. If they are too anxious you have to relax them, and if they are not anxious enough than you need to provoke their anxiety a bit. The appropriate level of anxiety depends on the circumstances. But often caregivers betray their own anxiety when they attempt to eliminate that of their clients. Anxiety is often a perfectly natural and appropriate response to life's troubles. And often that's the place where we have to do our work.
I'm reflecting on this partly because I just got through a long visit with a mentally ill person I sometimes see. It's hard work to be with someone who is truly psychotic because you spend so much energy controlling yourself. What I can offer to this person is unconditional positive regard, empathy, and appropriate emotionally intimacy. In order to give that I have to suspend a lot of my normal reactivity. Not easy to do, and I greatly admire the people that do this sort of work all day, everyday. When you are talking to someone and they are going up and down the emotional ladder and swaying from side to side in delusional thinking, it's not helpful to be dragged up and down and back and forth.
So now I'm coming out of that and just needed to do a bit of grounding--and that's the kind of thing blogs are good for.
Cheers!
-t
No comments:
Post a Comment