If it weren’t for the occasional snacks and the fact that I was still trying to figure out whether my boss was an android or just a white woman with power, I never would have attended those Wednesday afternoon staff meetings. The fluorescent lighting; the linoleum oval table; the Times New Roman, or worse – Calibri-typed, agendas; the go-around-the-table “check-ins” that only sometimes took place even though they were “an important part of our team culture” – all of it either numbed my insides or made me want to throw my things out the window, sprint to my car, and never be seen again.
We were chaplains, and our job was to care for the roughly three-thousand students at this elite, high-stress, New England college. Our offices were in a century-old brick building with comical green spires that adorned the once-shiny copper roof. Students did not know our offices existed, much less where they were, and meetings were often plagued by questions like: How do we make ourselves relevant? How do we make ourselves matter to students? How do we explain our role?
One day, someone introduced the phrase “non-anxious presence” to describe the chaplaincy, a term that sounded like it came out of a technical handbook, and my boss latched on. She began using it relentlessly to describe our work. As though we had finally found our answer, our reason for being.
The phrase bothered me. The very idea of trying to be a “non-anxious presence” gave me anxiety. I have been an anxious person for as long as I can remember. At age 11, I developed a form of OCD which led me to sleep between both my parents for the better part of a year, lest I “accidentally sleepwalk and kill someone,” as I imaginatively explained. In high school, I came down with a touch of body dysmorphia and started wearing oversized grey sweatshirts and corduroys to school. In college, a slight depression followed my first real breakup, and in grad school, I suffered a semester of anxiety attacks and racing thoughts. I was also, if you talked to most of my students, a good chaplain. I listened well, I asked open-ended questions, I got at the deeper meanings behind what they shared, I offered tissues when they needed them, and I wrote bomb-ass recommendation letters. They tended to leave my office feeling lighter and more grounded than when they came in. All this, and I was also still the person who got stressed about going on a mindfulness retreat because she was worried she would not be able to “meditate right.”
It was my intimacy with anxiety, not my ability to distance myself from it, that made me a good chaplain. I knew what students were feeling when they came into my office doubting themselves, worrying about the future, and not wanting to sit with their own feelings. I knew what it was like to be a perfectionist or a people-pleaser, to have a hard time being alone, or to only ever want to be alone. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a tinge of anxiety when a student came into my office to talk. What will I say? Will I be able to listen well? Am I really the person for this job? Am I even that spiritual?
During my second year of divinity school, I was a hospital chaplain intern, and I spent my days visiting patients who were on their deathbeds, in the cancer ward, and recovering from heart attacks. That same year, I began dating the man who would become my husband, and all the intimacy-related trauma I had pushed down for years resurfaced. I became more permeable than ever to others’ grief and fear; in the hospital, it wafted off my patients and lodged itself in my gut. My hospital routine quickly became: meet with patient, have an anxiety attack in bathroom, repeat. I came to know those bathrooms well – the white light and white walls, the metal railing beside the toilet, the tiny beige tiles that I counted as I caught my breath, trying to let the feelings pass from my body. I was a mess, but: I was a more attuned chaplain. I could sit better with people’s pain without worrying about how to respond. I could listen with real empathy, and people could feel it. I could affirm folks’ feelings and go behind their masks because I too knew what it was like to wear one.
Eventually, I got to the place of caring for others from a healthier place with the help of my supervisor, medication, and a therapist; but the year showed me that my own imperfection and humanness is where my ability to connect with others comes from. Not from being a put-together stoic presence. It was from my knowledge of how “brutiful” (brutal + beautiful, in the words of Glennon Doyle) it is to be human, that I was able to connect with others and help them feel less alone in the world.
Many of us in the helping professions feel pressure to set aside what makes us flawed in order to guide others. Who are we to be messy and human when we are supposed to be helping others make their lives less messy?, we ask. Not only that, but institutions that we work within often subscribe to white supremacy culture, which worships “objectivity” and perfectionism. This culture (which stresses detachment and “power over” rather than “power with”) tells those of us in the helping professions that we must keep our lives private and be the infallible, unemotional experts. This pushes us to perform our roles, pretending to be the “wise, unrattled chaplain”– otherworldly and unbothered by mundane human struggles – or the therapist who voyeuristically and unemotionally probes someone’s life without sharing helpful tidbits of their own experiences and struggles as well.
My last therapist, a straight white man, was my favorite example of how to counter this. He won my heart instantly when, during our first phone conversation, he listened, paused, and said: “Yup, trauma’s a fucking bitch.” (!!) There was no sugarcoating of the experience or pretending that he didn’t know what it was like. None of: “the pain you carry will one day become your strength,” or “without grief, there is no joy,” or somber nodding followed by: “this sounds like a time of spiritual growth and opening.” Rather than these phrases that we spiritual wannabes often spend our time parroting, there was a healing realness. He was in it with me, without it being about him.
Without centering ourselves, we can let our lives and experiences be a part of how we foster connection and healing in the world. Bringing the whole of who we are doesn’t take away from our power; rather, it can make us even more powerful builders of relationships, and therefore, more effective agents of change, healing, and justice. In fact, in a world plagued by forms of structural and interpersonal harm, it’s key to building a more equitable and relationship-centered world.**
**PS: There is a big difference between 1) letting our experiences inform our ways of connecting to others and 2) projecting our own stories and experiences onto others, thereby making it all about us!