From Your Minister
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Recently, at one of CLF’s online worship services, we featured a guest minister, Teresa Ines Soto, who lives with cerebral palsy.
Her story prompted several of our members to say that they also live with cerebral palsy, which caused me to reflect on the fact that I had not known that about them. I realized then that one gift of online worship for people who live with illnesses is that they get to decide exactly what the rest of us know about their health, and when and how they tell it. And with this choice, they get to decide when and how to interact with people about it.
It’s a human impulse, to want to help someone who’s in pain. And so we constantly offer our well-meaning tips to others about how they might manage their health, as we might suggest a good delicatessen or shoe sale, perhaps not understanding how sensitive a topic this might be. And how extremely wearying it can get for the people who are receiving these tips.
When my then-pre-teen daughter developed migraine headaches so severe that the fetal position and sleep was the only way to survive them, many well-intentioned people told me what we ought to do about this. After a while I wanted to hand out little slips of paper that read, “Yes, we have tried all the medicines the doctors have suggested. Also acupuncture, homeopathy, meditation, biofeedback, massage, physical therapy, and eliminating particular foods. I am sorry to learn that someone else you know also suffers from migraines. Thanks for your prayers and good thoughts.”
Someone I know, whose kid had life-threatening cancer, said that sometimes she felt that managing all of the suggestions people gave her rivaled management of the cancer itself. She wanted to scream when well-meaning people would aggressively tell her about what she must do—one person wrote her a note that said her refusal to try a particular therapy suggested she didn’t really love her kid!
Another friend, living with the ongoing uncertainty of chronic fatigue syndrome, faces not only a barrage of treatment suggestions but also (implicitly or explicitly) the implication that she might be making her symptoms up, that the whole disease exists only in her mind.
And yet, the suggestions come from good intentions. None of us wants to see someone else suffer, and if we can think of a way to help them, we want to!
And it’s hard to know what to say when we’re uncomfortable. So I was intrigued recently to read a system for considering what to say to people about illness. It was developed by a therapist named Susan Silk when she had breast cancer. I read about it in the LA Times.
Susan has developed a simple technique called the Ring Theory.
Here it is:
Draw a circle. This is the center ring. In it, put the name of the person at the center of the current trauma. For Katie’s aneurysm, that’s Katie. Now draw a larger circle around the first one. In that ring put the name of the person next closest to the trauma. In the case of Katie’s aneurysm, that was Katie’s husband, Pat. Repeat the process as many times as you need to. In each larger ring put the next closest people. Parents and children before more distant relatives. Intimate friends in smaller rings, less intimate friends in larger ones. When you are done you have a Kvetching Order.…
Here are the rules. The person in the center ring can say anything she wants to anyone, anywhere. She can kvetch and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens and say, “Life is unfair” and “Why me?” That’s the one payoff for being in the center ring.
Everyone else can say those things too, but only to people in larger rings.
When you are talking to a person in a ring smaller than yours, someone closer to the center of the crisis, the goal is to help. Listening is often more helpful than talking. But if you’re going to open your mouth, ask yourself if what you are about to say is likely to provide comfort and support. If it isn’t, don’t say it. Don’t, for example, give advice. People who are suffering from trauma don’t need advice. They need comfort and support. So say, “I’m sorry” or “This must really be hard for you” or “Can I bring you a pot roast?” Don’t say, “You should hear what happened to me” or “Here’s what I would do if I were you.” And don’t say, “This is really bringing me down.”
I love the simplicity of the Ring Theory. Shorthand for it is “comfort in, dump out.” If it works for you, I recommend it to you. Wherever your own health is now, and wherever it may go tomorrow, may you find places to comfort and be comforted, to kvetch and to listen to the kvetching of others. This is the very stuff of life, and what we’re on the planet to offer each other.
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