What’s the biggest threat for a social worker or other persons working in a likewise business?

Bingo. Emotional entanglement.

This has been one of my nemeses (is that a plural?) ever since: Getting emotionally entangled when other people suffer or have hard time in an emotional sense.

Yes, I have nonetheless, or rather, because of it, chosen to work in education and the social sector. Maybe I have a heightened sense of empathy (just a guess), or I am outright masochist.

Joke aside.

I do deem my heightened sensitivity and (at least I think I do have) my empathy one of the reasons to have chosen this profession (or, in my earlier job life, chosen to be a teacher).

This comes with a couple of upsides, but also downsides.

I have always considered my jobs as some sort of self therapy, at least the more I got into classical pedagogical fields apart from teaching. Helping other people helped myself. And that is true to the present day.

The downsides, however, are, for one thing, emotional entanglement. Caught in this maelstrom, you feel compelled to help others out of their misery so vainly, as if it were your own misery.

And, what is even worse, if the person had had parallels to myself, I would start to compare in what way their way could be my own: Losing relationships, losing my job, losing my health.

I don’t need to tell you that, now in retrospect, it was all exacerbated by my ADHD accompanied by depression and anxiety. That led straight into my alcohol addiction.

Luckily, in my career and my personal life, I have learned a very helpful concept: detachment.

This helps either way: In my job, it helps me not to get too entangled in a way that I will give my self away to solve the problem for other people or suffer the same problems they suffer from up until a nervous breakdown (I have been down that road and I have bitterly learned from this experience, but for the good). It also helps, as of today, to prevent burnout.

The other thing is the problem when I start comparing myself to other people I “parallel” myself with: They start having problems (e.g. in their job) and I start thinking the same might happen to me. Also, detachment helps: instead of anxiously searching for parallels, I nowadays start trying to reason and detach myself from emotionally distressing thoughts. That is a good way of preventing myself falling into the maelstrom.

And, I finally have a good pool of resources and resilience to at least sustain a longer period of emotional stress before falling into the maelstrom or taking substances. Hopefully long enough to solve the problem rationally.

However, it will be something to accompany me all my life.

I have made my peace with it.

Until next time, keep up the faith in yourself and take one step at a time.