This is a cause of illness in nurturing personalities and a major cause of burn out in the caring professions. I regularly come across people literally and physically making themselves sick, sometimes unto death, from what I call “jumping into other people’s whirlpools”. Little Sammy in the photo almost died from doing it.
In all the caring professions, you’re taught ways to detach yourself from your client or patient. However, sooner or later someone special gets past those defenses, then another then another until you’re exhausted all the time (burnout) depressed or even ill yourself.
Detachment rarely works and it’s contrary to our human connection with others.
The Whirlpool Metaphor explains how you can have your cake and eat it too. How you can have your empathy and use it for that person or animal’s best benefit – and the multiplying misery that happens when you don’t.
Here goes…
You’re walking past a deep and dangerous whirlpool. Someone you love or someone you feel sorry for is drowning in that whirlpool. They’re in serious trouble, glugging under the water, getting their hand up every now and again yelling for help. They’re gonna’ die if someone doesn’t help them.
You’re a really good swimmer, so without even thinking about it, you leap into the water to rescue them – holding their head out of the water and that’s going really well … until you look up at the edges of that whirlpool so high above you and think uh-oh… now how am I going to get out of here.
And when you run out of energy you both drown.
I’m going to explain what this means in practical terms in a minute. But first, how can you help someone without drowning yourself?
You stand on the edge of the whirlpool and throw them a life-line. When they catch it, you hold strong and steady while they climb out – maybe you can even pull a little bit while they’re climbing.
What does this metaphor mean in practical, real life?
You can tell you’re about to jump into someone’s whirlpool when you feel really sorry for them. I’ll bet you know the feeling I’m talking about. It’s “Oh you poor thing, I’d do anything to help you.” Feel my smile – at the beginning of my career in the healing modalities, I was a master at jumping into people’s whirlpools and mannn… I made myself so sick so fast. It’s the single biggest reason reason that so many people in all kinds of therapies train and then give up. Social workers do all that training and then just can’t take it any more. Doctors, nurses, ditto – any of the caring professions and a whole lot of nurturing people.
But I got into this work to help people and helping people is a good thing isn’t it? So how can I help them without hurting myself? How do I “throw someone a life-line?”
We throw a lifeline by showing people they’ve got choices. When someone’s sick or in trouble they’re often having difficulty seeing the next step in front of them, let alone seeing that there’s multiple choices here. We throw lifelines by showing them they’ve got choices.
And when they’ve made their choice that fits with their goals and dreams THEN we can support that choice. More on that in the next page.
But first Sammy’s story
One of the most dramatic examples of how much harm you can do to yourself “jumping into someone’s whirlpool” was a little dog called Sammy, a tiny chihuaha who was brought to my healing clinic dying – literally. He had a rapidly growing tumor on the adrenal glands, he could barely walk. They’d tried chemo but it had made him so much worse they had to stop.
The vet had said to his owner that he was in his last days and he certainly looked like that when he arrived – a grossly swollen little belly, tail drooped under, weird looking fur, barely able to move.
What I discovered during the healing session, was that he had spent 2 years on his dying owners lap keeping him company and what he had done, was to take on his owner’s illness in his misguided attempt to “do anything to help his person get better”. We fixed that in his healing session and he improved enough to walk out under his own steam with his tail up.
Then we spent the next 10 weeks (maybe 6 sessions from memory?) supporting his body to do the healing that was needed after we’d removed that cause of the problem. The photo you see here was taken 10 weeks later, the day after the vet had given him the “all clear” – no tumor anymore.
The point of telling you this Sammy story is that this whirlpool metaphor is not just some esoteric new age energy thing that just makes you feel worn out for a while – it’s physically dangerous as well, like it was for Sammy and so many other people I’ve come across over my 28 years as an alternative therapist. You can do this crap all the way to your own death.
When our animals like Sammy are dong this whirlpool thing, it’s pretty common that their human is doing it too. It’s a smiling observation here that when someone brings me an animal to work on, there’s almost always something to do for the human to help that animal’s recovery.
We tend to do this “jump into people’s whirlpool” thing for loved ones when they’re going through crappy times in their lives and it can happen easily when we’re the kind of person who wants to make a difference in the world – but specially for all the people who work in the caring professions this can be a major cause of illness and burnout.
When this is the cause of depression and exhaustion and illness, the recovery can be spectacular. Specially if you’re in a caring profession, don’t suffer burn out or depression or anxiety in silence. Bring your curiosity into a live event and let’s start shedding some more of this crap.
More about this important topic on the next pages!
Photo: dear little Sammy…
