Dealing with Crisis 4 of 4 (Dr. Brent Lindquist)

Hello.  Today I’m finishing up my series on crisis.  I’m talking today about balance as a caregiver. I think that that’s a big problem for those of us that really want to help people.  We have a problem with boundaries and balance when we’re helping people.  The relief and development people like the United Nations Commission on Refugees, the Red Cross, World Vision or any of those organizations have well-developed strategies and policies to ensure that the caregivers that they employ try to take care of themselves as much as possible.  Those people don’t work on open-ended assignments.  They work for limited periods of time and then get away to recoup, refresh, reanalyze and then go back in.  Yet those of us that are running in and trying to help in the crisis, we probably are very vulnerable to overdoing it and getting out of balance.  Balance is an important subject to talk about today.

First of all, during your caregiving activities it’s important that you live a normal life. Now, how can you lead a normal life if you’re in the midst of this?  What I mean by that is that you make sure that you eat right, sleep right and well, and that you give yourself time to diffuse and de-escalate some of the stuff that’s going on.  How can you do that in the midst of all this?  Well, you have to be creative.  Don’t use the fact that you’re in the midst of it as an excuse to prevent yourself from doing that.  For example, you may have access to fairly nutritious foods, but it requires you to walk a ways or go somewhere and take some time away from your caregiving. Therefore, you instead eat less nutritious stuff just so you can stay in the environment longer.  I don’t think that’s a good idea.  It may get you through today, but 2 weeks of that will really produce some significant changes in your ability to sleep, your nutritional needs, etc.  So try and have normal times.  You may have trouble sleeping.  That’s probably okay, but make sure you give yourself the opportunity to sleep.  I know when I’m dealing with a non-normal situation such as traveling, my tendency if I can’t sleep is to get up and go with the jetlag and do work.  I get really exhausted when I do that.  I may have gotten work done, but over time it really bothers me so I try to stay in bed even if I’m not sleeping.  I focus on things, I meditate on Scripture or something like that to give me a chance to at least have a restful period.  That’s something you need to remember and focus on.

The next part of balance is to keep your own personal boundaries.  Don’t promise more than you can deliver.  People who are going into or are in the disillusionment phase have already been promised a lot and for you to promise things that you can’t deliver will make it harder for you and harder for them.  Don’t promise more than you can deliver and don’t give away more than you have to give.  It’s important that you do only what you can and that you try and not take over everything. I was doing a phone consultation following a crisis – an earthquake in central Califournia, on the coast – 8 years ago.  I had a guy call me and as soon as he started talking to me he started crying.  He said, ‘See?  I don’t know what’s going on.  Every time I try to talk I start to cry’.  I said, ‘Wow!  How long has that been happening?’  He said, ‘Oh, probably the last 3 or 4 days.’  I said, ‘Tell me what you’ve been doing’.  He said, ‘Well, I have this job that I’m doing and it wasn’t messed up by the earthquake so I keep doing it, but every night  I go to church or the Red Cross and I pick up things and I help distribute.’ I said, ‘Well how long do you work on that?’ and he said, ‘Oh, until midnight probably’.  ‘When do you have to get up?’  It turned out that this man was getting 4 hours of sleep at night, he wasn’t stopping to eat, and he was surprised that after 3 weeks of that he couldn’t cope. I sent him home with the strong admonition that if he couldn’t take a couple of days off from his employer, just to do his job for a couple of days.  I said, ‘People will manage without you’.  It was like he understood  because he was in the midst of his own crisis but you know, he needed somebody to give him permission for that.  I think that’s another important issue of caregiving and balance.  Listen to what other people are saying around you. Make sure that you give each other the opportunity to be in balance and to have time for yourself.  Sometimes that may mean just sitting on your cot reading but you need to take that time.  If you’re a non-professional crisis helper you don’t often know that that’s what you need to do.  If there are those professionals around you, I’d ask them to go out for coffee with you to give you some feedback to see if there are some things that they can tell you. I learned so much from just picking the brains of those people around me and just finding out that, Wow!  That’s an incredible stress management tool that doesn’t require much time, that doesn’t require equipment or anything and it really works.  Even something as simple as doing some stretching exercises can make a big difference.

Now as you work on all of this, you’re thinking, Well here I am.  Indeed, most of the people listening to this are going to be far away from the action, if you will, in the South Asian part of the world.  You’re not anywhere near South India , Indonesia , Sri Lanka , Ethiopia or Thailand .  So what should you do, or how do you provide balance?  I think balance also goes in terms of not fixating on all the news you can find.  Don’t hover over those kinds of things.  But you say, ‘But we want to pray for these things’. I think that’s absolutely wonderful and essential, but let’s try and focus your prayer in ways that don’t overwhelm you.  For example, what are some issues that you might think that people need?  Think about you.  Let’s say, if you were in that crisis, what were some of the issues, concerns and fears that you would have?  Pray for that.  If there are names of people given out, pray for those people specifically.  If there are friends of yours in other organizations that are working pray for them in specific ways.  The behavioural prayer can be a very good thing for them but it also is very good for us because it helps us to see what we need to do.  I find when I pray like that, I’m thinking, Wow, Lord, I need to do more of that or I need to be careful of that.  So I get to benefit as well from this prayer.

What else can you do from a distance?  Certainly you can have memorial services, you can gather together and collect things or funding to send.  It used to be that everybody would send food or whatever, but now with the way distribution is and expenses, organizations want money.  This might make you think, Well, if I can’t send these extra clothes that I have, what should I do?  One way that is symbolic in that it doesn’t help the survivors in the tsunami region, is to take some of that activity and help those people around you.  Everybody needs a hand up everywhere.  It’s not just only in that part of the world, but as you try to think through, pray and ponder about the survivors down there, also keep your own neighbourhood in mind and you may have an opportunity. Gathering together to share what some of your concerns are can be very helpful.  Some people have real fears that come out that they’re embarrassed or ashamed to talk about because they think that they’re so far away.  Yet, I find that just talking about those can really help people feel more comfortable.  It can reduce the sense of embarrassment and shame and other people are probably thinking about the same things.  If we’re open and honest with each other, I think we’ll see that a lot of that is going on.

I hope this series has been helpful for you as you process through things.  As I said, most of you listening to these programs are probably not going to be in the middle of the crisis, but there’s a lot that you can do to take care of yourself and to think about and pray about the other people in the midst of the crisis.

Talk to you next time!