Category: Kay Bruner

“Over the years, we’ve said goodbye to so many friends and colleagues.  What can we do about all the loss and grief that’s piled up?”

It’s that time of year again in the expat universe, when the Great Migration takes place.

You’re coming or you’re going.  You’re leaving or you’re staying.

It’s your first move, or your tenth, or your 27^th.

And it just hurts.

So what do we do, with all the loss and grief that’s piling up?

We grieve it.

That is a really awful answer, I know.  I hate it myself.

But the only way through it is through.  Anything else—avoidance, denial, minimization–is just going to come back to bite us later.

So we grieve it.

What does that mean, exactly?

The best description I know of grief is what Anne Lamott says in Traveling Mercies:

I was terribly erratic: feeling so holy and serene some moments that I was sure I was going to end up dating the Dalai Lama. Then the grief and craziness would hit again, and I would be in Broken Mind, back in the howl.

The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it, like a nicotine craving, I would discover that it hadn’t washed me away. After a while it was like an inside shower, washing off some of the rust and calcification in my pipes. It was like giving a dry garden a good watering. Don’t get me wrong: grief sucks; it really does. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit. Mostly I have tried to avoid it by staying very busy, working too hard, trying to achieve as much as possible. You can often avoid the pain by trying to fix other people; shopping helps in a pinch, as does romantic obsession. Martyrdom can’t be beat. While too much exercise works for many people, it doesn’t for me, but I have found that a stack of magazines can be numbing and even mood altering. But the bad news is that whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you. A fixation can keep you nicely defined and give you the illusion that your life has not fallen apart. But since your life may indeed have fallen apart, the illu­sion won’t hold up forever, and if you are lucky and brave, you will be willing to bear disillusion. You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to keep on crying; and then, finally, grief ends up giving you the two best things: soft­ness and illumination.

A few tips for processing emotions during transition, loss, and grief:

• Be gentle with yourself. You are wounded.
• Allow yourself extra time for rest as you work through the loss. Grief is hard work.
• Spend time with friends and family. Don’t isolate.
• Get out into the sunshine for a few minutes each day, if possible.
• Do something fun/enjoyable/creative every single day.
• Watch funny movies, TV shows, YouTube videos.  Read some P.G. Wodehouse.  Listen to comedian Brian Regan, who is hilarious with no cuss words.
• Journal, 20 minutes each day.

When do you need to seek help for processing through grief?

• You’re not bouncing back. Every loss feels like a terrible blow.
• You’re experiencing a decline in functioning—it’s hard to do what you need to do.
• You feel exhausted or emotionless for extended periods of time.
• You can’t think of anything fun or creative that you’d like to do.
• You’re angry, especially at people who are leaving.
• You cry a lot, and can’t seem to stop.
• Your appetite has changed: you binge-eat, or you have no appetite.
• Sleep is a problem. Either you have trouble falling asleep, or you wake up at night with racing thoughts and can’t go back to sleep.

Helpful resources

Check our resource tab, which includes counseling resources for expats.

The Way of Transition, William Bridges (If you’ve read his first book, Transitions, you’ve got to read this one, which he wrote after his wife died.  It’s beautiful and painful and amazing.)

Recent series at Velvet Ashes on Leaving and Staying 

Podcast on loss from Dan Allender

 Photo Credit (changes made)

“Would you talk about domestic violence on the mission field?”  That’s the question I got last month.  “Wow,” I replied, “I sure would.”  And then, my friend shared the story that follows.  I’m passing it along with her permission, and with a few changes made to protect identities.

CASE STUDY

There is a suitcase in my home where my dear friend, a fellow missionary, puts items she has sneaked out of her house in case she needs to initiate her “safety plan” and leave with her two small children, escaping her abusive husband.

From the time they moved to this area, I could see things going on that indicated probable relational problems. The wife had little freedom to make decisions, even little ones. The husband restricted her finances and her activities. There was significant imbalance in the weight of responsibilities. All the housework, taking care of and disciplining the kids fell to her. He was free to come and go and had copious leisure time and she had very little. He would often interrupt what she was doing and her conversations with others, causing her to stop what she was doing to do what he was asking her to do.

These would have been red flags in my American culture, but these folks aren’t American. I don’t speak their mother-language tongue to know what was being said. And of course, as missionaries, we’re taught to not judge cultural differences too quickly. My husband and I considered that their culture may have distinctly different gender-roles than those we are familiar with. But something felt wrong.

In time my relationship with the wife deepened. I began to see signs that she may, in fact, be being abused. She lived as if she was unworthy of having any wants, desires, or needs of her own. She blamed herself for their marital difficulties; she sincerely believed that if she could fix herself or God would do a work in her life (to change her), then their marriage problems would be resolved. She defended her husband and protected him, at times taking responsibility for his shortcomings and bad choices. She was afraid of displeasing him, and so on.

My husband and I read the book Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft. It gave us invaluable insight into what was going on, and we knew that she was being abused. Eventually, I was able to suggest that my friend read the book. She did, and she began to recognize the abuse for herself. That was the beginning of something new. So very hard, but good.

I’m going over and over the events that have transpired, and aside from all the grief I feel for my friend and the sadness at the likelihood of her leaving, I’m struggling with guilt that I didn’t say something or do something sooner. I feel this huge weight that there are probably other missionary women out there in abusive situations and other friends like me who don’t recognize abuse, who don’t do something about it for a long time, and who may have even enabled the abuse!

These are some of the things that I think would be helpful for missionaries to be aware of:

• Abuse can be hidden behind culture and language. We’ve got to trust the voice of the Holy Spirit when He prods us with the sense that “something is wrong here.” Even if certain cultural norms are generally accepted, practices that oppress women or other societal groups should absolutely be questioned and measured against Scripture.

• Abuse hides and even thrives behind Christian doctrine on gender roles. This topic is a mine-field, isn’t it?

• Abusers are masters of maintaining their public reputation. Likeable men who contribute to ministry can be abusers. So we all need to be able to recognize the signs of abuse and be familiar with different kinds of abuse. *

• On the mission field, abused women have little access to resources. In their home countries, they could flee to a family member or friend’s home. Overseas, escape can be very difficult, especially if a woman is financially dependent on her husband.

• There is one thing I should have realized a long, long time ago. If I (and others in the missionary community) are tip-toeing around a man, expending effort to avoid any kind of disagreement or confrontation with him because I am afraid of inciting an angry or unpleasant response, there is a good chance that his wife and children are afraid of his responses too.

• We are concerned with justice for those we are ministering to, but can so easily miss (or ignore) the injustice happening right under our noses. By not addressing, questioning, or confronting the abuser for injustices carried out in public, we have been enabling the abuse to continue.

I am so thankful we’ve been able to receive some help from an American counselor with extensive experience working with abusers and the abused. He and his wife were able to spend some time with my friend (but not her husband). We learned from him that this is not the first case of domestic abuse that he has encountered in our organization in this region.

The story continues to play out. The family is returning to their home country; the elder board of their home church is calling them back. They don’t see or acknowledge that there is abuse going on; they only see my friend’s emotional instability. Our hope and prayer had been that the husband would agree to work with the counselor I mentioned, but he refused.

RESOURCES

*For more information on the signs of abuse, visit the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

Here is a resource that identifies how power and control contribute to various types of abuse.

Here’s a Mud Stories podcast from a woman who survived domestic violence overseas.

IDEAS TO CONSIDER (from Kay)

Let me just share a few notes with you on how domestic violence is usually treated in the States.

• Domestic violence may include verbal abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse. Economic abuse is often a factor in these scenarios, when a woman is not allowed the financial independence that might lead to her escape.
• It’s extremely important to understand that issues of abuse are NOT conceptualized as “marital problems.”
• While we understand that the victim of the abuse is not a perfect person, abuse is never an acceptable response to any provocation whatsoever.
• Abuse is something for which the abusive person needs to take responsibility and seek treatment.
• Therefore, abuse is not primarily treated in couples counseling.
• If someone recommends couples counseling when abuse is part of the relationship, this is not best practice.  Seek help elsewhere.
• The abuser would usually attend a Batterer’s Intervention Program.
• The victim would benefit from attending a group for battered women (often offered at local woman’s shelters) and personal counseling for trauma recovery.
• Women’s shelters are available in many communities, and many shelters provide services for accompanying children as well.
• Separation is a very common and healthy boundary during treatment.

I have been asked by clients if I believe that domestic violence is grounds for divorce, and my answer to that is yes.

I do believe that domestic violence is grounds for divorce.

While divorce is never what we hope for, sometimes it is the most just and merciful outcome we can humanly facilitate.

The church has been careful to tell people that the only ground for divorce is adultery, and I am aware that this is the boundary stated in Mosaic law.

While the Mosaic law may be well-meant as a deterrent to divorce, to abusive people it becomes a boundary that allows them to skate on the side of “righteousness” while perpetrating all kinds of sin and abuse on their families.

I believe that we are held to a higher standard than the Mosaic law.  We are held to the standard of justice and mercy, as Jesus warned:

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others.  You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!”  Matthew 23:23

“And you experts of the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.”  Luke 11:46

Justice and mercy matter most.

May we never forget.

Photo Credit (changes made) 

What do I do if I feel like I am struggling with cynicism and hardheartedness?

Also, where is the balance between finding your voice in the hard stuff and not developing tunnel vision for it? For instance, I have been recently being more open about how often I take all the advice to be brave and step out in obedience to God and then feel like he pulls the rug out from under me. It is hard not to feel angry and frustrated about it. But as I try to be honest about that, it can also be that I begin to filter everything through that lens and see it happening in places where it might not be.

The question I’m hearing here is:  what am I supposed to do with difficult emotions?

Many of us grew up thinking that emotions are problems we should get rid of.

Instead, I want to offer you this idea:  emotions are indicators.

Like the flashing red lights on your dashboard–“Empty” or “High Heat” or “Maintenance Required”—your emotions are telling you something is wrong.

So what should we do with our emotional indicators?

I think we always have two choices:  assimilation or accommodation.

These terms come out of the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget.

Assimilation means that I have a framework, and everything has to fit into that framework.

Accommodation means that I will adapt my ideas and practices to new information I receive.

A young child assimilates when he learns the word “dog” and then calls every animal a dog.  He has one category for animal, and everything fits into that category.

The child accommodates when he learns that there are also cats, horses, elephants, and charging rhinos.  He learns that you can pet some animals, and that you should run from others.

As adults, we still have our frames of reference, our expectations.  As long as we live, we’ll be receiving new information and deciding what to do with it:  assimilate or accommodate?

In the world of missions, our framework includes expected difficulties:  separation, inconvenience, language-learning, culture acquisition.  You know there will be challenges.  That’s all part of the deal.

We also have expectations about how we’re going to deal with those challenges:  well!

Right?  We’ve read the books, we’ve taken the training, we’ve got the information, and we’re going to deal with this stuff well.  Other people haven’t, but we will!  That expectation is a huge part of our framework.

But then reality hits, and here it is:  you don’t know if your framework is going to work long term, until you test it.

You don’t know how heat and dengue fever and interminable nights of barking dogs are going to impact your mental health.  You don’t know that your parents will get sick at home or that your child will turn out to have learning disabilities or that your teammates will struggle and bring their struggles down on you.  You don’t know that your husband will become addicted to porn or to his work.  You don’t know what kinds of difficulties are going to come, and what those difficulties might mean in the real world.

Our normal response is to keep assimilating as long as we can, because our framework feels safe.  We’ve built our lives on this framework and dismantling threatens us, and often times, many other people who are heavily invested in the status quo.

Like Cinderella’s stepsisters, we keep trying to cram our foot into the glass slipper, because there’s only one prince and the only way to get him is with this one glass slipper.

We don’t think about the fact that there may be other stories, other possibilities, other things just as good or even better out there for us.  (Why Disney doesn’t do that story, instead of putting out that same old worn out Cinderella thing over and over and over?  As a matter of fact, why don’t WE?  But I digress.)

When the indicators of cynicism and anger and depression and anxiety and frustration start flashing, it may be tempting to yank the lights out of the dashboard and throw them away, but that’s not really a solution.

Instead, let’s honor the signals, and accommodate to challenging circumstances with appropriate new responses.

To get started, assume that emotions are saying something important, and listen to them:

• Identify the feelings: sad, mad, scared.
• Write them down. Journal them out.
• Don’t judge the emotions. Just listen to them.
• You’re not going to be ruled by your emotions. You’re going to understand them as legitimate indicators of a problem.
• What other symptoms am I seeing in myself:  sleeplessness, agitation, distractability, intrusive or obsessive thoughts, compulsive behaviors, loss of appetite, loss of interest in normal things, fatigue, social isolation, high levels of conflict with others?  Those are important indicators as well.

Then, get all the other pieces of information out into the open:

• What are the stressors?
• Who are the stressors?
• How long has the stressful situation been in progress?
• What solutions have I tried, and how have those attempts impacted the situation?
• What am I afraid to try? Why?
• Am I in the right job?  Am I in the right place?  Am I with the right organization?
• Be brutally honest.  You need to know.

Next, think about your boundaries:

• What is your responsibility in this situation?
• What is the responsibility of God in this situation?
• What is the responsibility of others in this situation?
• Where are you taking responsibility that belongs to God or to others?
• How can you step back into your own realm of responsibility?
• What consequences do you fear, when you stop taking responsibility for God and other people?
• What would freedom look like for you in this situation?
• Where have you abdicated your freedom in Christ to someone or something else in this situation?
• What would this situation look like, if it were healthy for every single person involved? Men, women, children, colleagues of every nationality?

Finally, be open to what accommodation might mean in your particular situation:

• Accommodation may mean recognizing that stress and perhaps even trauma have impacted you, and you need maintenance:  time away, a visit to your doctor, work with a therapist.
• Accommodation may mean that you rearrange your work life:  reduce work hours, find help for tasks, accept that this job/location/organization/career is a bad fit.
• Accommodation may mean that you create more margin:  say “no” to some things, keep a Sabbath, take more holiday time.
• Accommodation may mean that you go for counseling to work through issues of addiction, depression, perfectionism, workaholism, or marital conflict.
• Accommodation may mean experiencing that God loves you with an everlasting love, even when your framework has crashed and burned into oblivion and you have no idea what happens next.

Accommodation can be scary stuff, but:

Be strong and courageous.  The Lord your God is with you, wherever you go. 

Even way, way, way outside the box.

Photo Credit (changes made)

Good self-care is a lifestyle of regular, ongoing, non-crisis activities that promote good spiritual, emotional, and physical health.

What feeds your soul?  Reading, running, painting, playing a musical instrument, watching a comedy, a week at the beach?  Whatever feeds your soul, brings you rest, refuels you for the journey, those things constitute good self-care for you.

Self-care gets talked about a lot.  Most of us, I think, agree that self-care is something we ought to do.

However, when it comes to taking the actual steps necessary to care for ourselves well, roadblocks mysteriously emerge.  I find this is especially true in missionary communities. Right where good self-care is most necessary, there are enormous roadblocks to its actual implementation.

People ask me things like this:

How can we possibly do self-care when . . .

• the needs are so great, and our budget is so small?
• we’re so isolated, and we have none of the resources we’re used to?
• we need help, but going someplace to get it would create even more complications?
• _______________ (fill in the blank with your difficulty)?

These roadblocks strike me as strange, quite frankly.

In missionary culture, forget cleanliness.  It’s getting things done under difficult circumstances that’s next to godliness.  Small budgets, isolation, and complications?  We eat that stuff for breakfast around here.

So why do these roadblocks present such a challenge to self-care?

Perhaps it’s a simple failure to prioritize self-care as important.  We’d rather do other things with our time and money.

Maybe it’s that we think God will magically protect us without the maintenance routine of self-care. After all, everybody says that “The will of God will never lead you where the grace of God cannot keep you.”

The truth is, some of us have never needed to think about self-care before.  We just don’t see a need.  (The problem is, by the time you see a need, you may need crisis care, not regular self-care.)

Some people, frankly, are workaholics.  It’s easier to work than stop and deal with the emotions, the relationships, the complications that arise without the diversion of busyness.

Sometimes there can be an element of pride.  Amy Carmichael went 53 years without a furlough.  We can do it, too.  (Of course she was in bed for 20+ years. Which sounds good some days.)

Maybe we’ve been the teensiest bit judgy about people who can’t cut it, and we don’t want to be needy.  We like to be seen as competent, successful, and strong (all for God’s glory, of course).

Maybe we think we won’t be good enough for God if we can’t keep going and going.  Maybe we forget how God tenderly cares for Elijah, who’s fallen in his tracks after doing just what God asked him to do (I Kings 19).

Maybe we’ve got a mission agency or a church or even family members that don’t support the idea of self-care.  (If this is true, find a better support system.  Now.)

Finally, I wonder about our need to be in control, and our ability to ultimately trust God.  Do we, bottom line, trust God enough to stop our so-vital work, and take care of ourselves and our families on a regular basis?  Or do we, deep down, believe that it’s all up to us?

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about this “Ask A Counselor” series.  You can ask me all kinds of questions, and I can give you the best answers I know of, but if you’ve got an underlying belief system that says things like:

• The job matters most
• Other people are more important
• We can’t spend money on ourselves
• We shouldn’t have needs
• Only weak, unspiritual people need help
• If I don’t do this, right now, today, the world will come to an end…

…well, your questions and my answers won’t make any difference at all.  We’ll never get past the roadblocks.

Getting past those roadblocks, I think, comes only when we

• experience that God loves us and is for us;
• trust that God loves and is for others;
• trust that God has the capacity to work and move and redeem even though I have stepped away from my work, in order to receive rest and renewal in regular self-care.

It’s easy to assent to these things verbally:  of course I believe God loves me and others and is ultimately in control!

But I want to ask you, what happens in the doing?

The book of James puts it this way:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds?  Can such faith save them?  Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food.  If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?  In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.  (James 2:14-17)

Some of us desperately need to say to God, “I trust you enough that I will lay this life of mine, including my precious ministry, down at your feet.” 

And then accompany those words with radical, self-caring actions.

What most restores your soul?

When was the last time you experienced that kind of restoration?

What roadblocks do you experience with self-care?

How does your experience in self-care reflect your relationship with God?

 Photo Credit: www.flickr.com/photos/jan1993/4453411457/  (Changes made)

 

 

Welcome to the first in a new series here at A Life Overseas:  Ask A Counselor!

(It sounds kind of like a game show title.  I feel like there should be flashing lights and funky music.)

Let me tell you just a little bit about myself before we get started this first time.  I’m 48 and have been married to my husband Andy for 27 years.  We have four children, a daughter (25), and three sons (23, 20, 18).  Andy and I are both Third Culture Kids.  Andy was raised in Nepal, Papua New Guinea, and the wilds of North Carolina, while I’ve got Brasil, Nigeria, and Kentucky in my blood.  We met in college, got married, and hot-footed it back overseas as fast as we could go.

We worked on a New Testament translation in the Solomon Islands from 1993-2005.  During those years, Andy medicated his stress with a pornography habit while I suffered from severe anxiety and depression.  I’ve written about this in a memoir called As Soon As I Fell.  After recovery, we lived in Papua New Guinea for a couple of years, and now we’re in the Dallas area.

When we moved back to Dallas, I went back to school for a Masters in counseling.   These days, I’m in private practice.  I really enjoy working with adolescents as well as adults, but if you need couples counseling, I’ll refer you to someone else.  “One at a time, please” is my counseling mantra.

(Here’s a link to my website, where you can read more if you like.)

A while back, some of you wrote in with questions, and I thought I would start with a cluster of questions about counseling in general.

Missionary friends have been asking me this question for years:  “Do I need counseling?”

After hearing this question repeatedly and answering it repeatedly, I finally realized this.

If you’re asking this question, the answer is always YES.

Here’s why:  if you’re just going through life and everything’s dandy, you won’t be asking this question.  It won’t cross your mind!  It’s only when things start to get hairy that you realize (rightly so) that you might need help.

Now, maybe you can wait until your next scheduled visit to your passport country.  Or maybe you need to get help sooner, rather than later.

Here’s the next question: how do you know WHEN you need help?

That decision, I think, is based on your level of FUNCTIONING.  Ask yourself these questions:

• How are my relationships? 
  • Causes for concern:  lots of conflict, ongoing isolation, a sense of disconnection from others
• How am I functioning at work?
  • Causes for concern:  frustration, boredom, over-work, putting work above family needs
• How am I sleeping?
  • Causes for concern:  sleeping too much or too little, insomnia, waking at night, nightmares
• How am I eating?
  • Causes for concern:  eating too much or too little, being obsessed with food or exercise
• How is my mood?
  • Causes for concern:  outbursts of emotion (anger, crying, anxiety), numb or shut down
• How functional is my daily life?
  • Causes for concern:  unwanted habits or addictions, inability to accomplish normal tasks

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, ask a friend.  (See, told you it was like a game show!)  Get feedback.  And listen to the feedback.  It’s not easy to say hard things to other people, so if somebody cares enough to tell you hard things, pay attention.

Now, everybody can have a bad day.  I myself, living in suburbia, have bad days.  The problem is, if all the bad days are getting strung together without a lot of good days in between, that might be a problem.

So if I’m having trouble sleeping, I’m drinking 5 Cokes a day to stay awake, if my marriage is unhappy, if my children are not doing well, if I’m spending 50-plus hours a week working while feeling like nothing is ever good enough for my supporters who don’t pay me enough of a salary to live off of anyway—then I’d say functioning is on the decline.

If you’re not functioning well, you’ll probably be asking this question:

How do I get counseling overseas?

I personally think that it’s hard to get good counseling overseas.  Your options are limited. Even if you have a local counselor, that person may or may not be a good fit for you.

(How do you know if the counselor is a good fit?  You’ll LIKE the person and feel SAFE with them.  It’s really just that simple.)

You can try Skype or phone counseling, but I find that dynamic to be more a consultation than therapy.  You may get good direction and find good resources via distance counseling, but there’s something healing about being in a room with the real, live person.  Just think about how different it is to talk with your mom on the phone vs. seeing her in person after years away.  Therapy is like that, too.  At its best, it should be a very personal, intimate relationship, which I think is best accomplished face-to-face.

Another complication with therapy overseas is that you’re still living in the stressful situation.  Nobody does therapy on the battlefield, because there’s a job that takes priority over the wellbeing of the soldier.  A counselor friend of mine who worked overseas for years said, “Really, the only thing I could do was triage.”

We tend to run on adrenaline, and to not feel how bad it is, while we’re in the situation. Then when we arrive in our passport countries, there are a million other things that take priority over recovery.  It seems like there’s never a time to treat the wounds until they are absolutely septic.

This is a sad, terrible, long-standing pattern in mission work that needs to CHANGE, but I believe that the only way it will change is when individual missionaries start taking responsibility for their own well-being.

It would be nice if your home church would take this on for you, but I don’t see it happening.  It would be nice if your mission board provided great services for you, but again, not a thing I see a lot of.  There are good intentions in lots of places, but extremely weak follow-through.

In the end, you will be responsible for locating and accessing the resources for your own emotional and spiritual care, and you need to be prepared to do so.

Here’s what I wish every missionary would do.

Establish a relationship with the counselor of your choice before going overseas.  Get some recommendations from your church or from friends.  Talk to a few counselors on the phone.  Go visit one or two, until you find someone you like.

Go to several (6-10?) counseling sessions, so that you and your therapist know each other well, and you feel like you’ve processed through your backlog of issues.

Stay in touch with your counselor while overseas, via Skype, phone, and/or email.

Go back to see your therapist every time you’re in your passport country.

Here’s a place you can check for counselors who get it:  International Therapist Directory

What challenges do you face when it comes to good self-care?

What resources have you found helpful?

What questions would you like to see addressed in future Ask A Counselor columns?

Photo credit: Eflon/Flickr/Creative Commons