Treading Water: The Work of Healing That No One Sees |
During my years of psychiatric practice, patients would often tell me of their hard work in dealing with psychiatric illnesses or meeting the demands of damaged lives. Handling a mental disorder or arduous life situations had taken a lot out of them. This, by itself, wasn’t what they wanted me to know. Rather, it was the sense that all the work did not seem to get them anywhere.
Unfortunately, this is often how you feel having a recurrent illness or the terrible luck that befalls so many. What I would tell my patients left them both surprised and validated. I would say they were “treading water.” Surprising, because it was not encouraging or complementary of their efforts. And validating, as the patients felt I understood their plight.
My intention here was to point out just how much effort could seem pointless, but in fact kept them (and perhaps their families) from drowning. This is never permanent but could last a long time for those with severe medical or psychiatric illness or those with devilish life problems (e.g. divorce, unemployment, poverty, sick family members).
Little did I know that treading water would come to define much of my own life when several medical problems would swallow up my career and most of what I thought of as my