'Overcoming Compassion Fatigue'

This book was SUPER quick.  I was rather disappointed by how brief it is.  It’s also a workbook...so while it requires more time to get through, it does not have a real depth of information.  It’s something to become informed, reflect, and ideally, I would say come back to it periodically for reinforcement application.  

This is something I have worried about for years...*cues anxiety*...only I didn’t have a real name for it.  I have been worried about the weight I bring to Caleb...and again, I look at this topic two ways...so I think about the idea of his weight on me. 

I think we all do this before marriage, we think to the ideas of ‘what happens if there’s an accident and he needs to be pushed around in a wheelchair for decades...what happens if there is an unknown force that changes us individually...how are you ready to meet that change and walk through it together so he’s not alone’.

However, knowing you are signed up to support someone else in a life that is yet to come, there is a neglect to questioning yourself.  What if you are the one in need of the support, and in what way, and for how long, and what if it’s too much, and can you take it on individual changes alone within a partnership?  (The answer to that last part is a hard ‘no’ btw).

Calling things for what they are can be difficult, especially when interwoven with the people you love the most.  It’s tiring to care for someone in a way that you are not prepared to, or just the takeaways of feeling you are not enough in doing the caretaking, or what life would be if ‘x’ situation was not present, it did not happen, it could be eliminated from the long term factors of life.  Learning what to do as it comes is an experience of continued unknown chaos...bringing with it, constant stress.   The next step is taking this information and talking about it head-on at home; ‘caring for you is hard’. Not a romantic topic, but an honest one...and the support from the honest is definitely appealing/sexy. This book should be passed out for adult education as well as worked into health classes for adolescents.

#53books52weeks #compassionfatigue #honesty #communication #love #difficultconversations #dothework #mentalhealthandmarriage #reflection #yourjourneyisthedestination