Monthly Archives: August 2009

Aug 31 2009

A Slideshow and Some Observations

So remember this collage? I had given it to J, and he talks about it a lot. He pulls it out of his filing cabinet every once in a while so we can talk about it. He once referred to it as “your beautiful collage.” This collage is actually a slide show, with music, etc. I like to make slideshows. I thought since he liked the collage so much he would appreciate the slideshow, so I put it on a DVD and sent it to him. I could have brought it to our next session, but I didn’t want to watch him watch it. I wanted to post the slideshow here, but I can’t figure out how to do it. And when I put it on youtube they stripped the music, since it’s copyrighted. Oh well.

So I never wrote about my last week of hotline training. The last night was last Thursday and we had a pizza party and watched a movie about cutting. The pizza was going to be an issue for me. I don’t eat pizza – I haven’t in a couple of years I think. I don’t think there is anything wrong with splurging every once in a while, but when you haven’t eaten that type of food in a long time it’s not a good idea to splurge on it during a training session with lots of people. Spending the whole session in the bathroom didn’t seem like a good way to end training.

It turns out that one of guys in the group is a vegan. I love this guy and I’m so lucky because he is going to be my shift partner on the hotline every other week. I went online and found a vegan/vegetarian pizza restaurant 10 minutes from my home. So I picked up pizza for him and me from this place. It was great because my pizza was basically whole wheat crust, veggies and a bit of feta cheese. Nothing greasy or tomato-y to upset my stomach. And no one seemed to think it was strange that he and I were eating our own food, actually they seemed kind of jealous!

Then there was the cutting movie. It was specifically about teens and cutting, and it wasn’t too bad for me to watch. It was kind of nice, to be honest, to hear professionals who know what they are talking about when dealing with cutting. The hard part for me was the discussion afterward. One of the new trainees said, “I get the impression from the movie that if a cutter calls the hotline we don’t call the police immediately?” I thought, “UGH!” Can you imagine, I’m sure some of you can if you SI, calling a hotline because you are thinking about self harm, and all of sudden the police show up? At least the trainers set him straight. And the label “cutter” bothers me as well. Not everyone who self harms cuts.

The discussion was bothering me, and I forced myself to zone out. I ripped off parts of my pizza box, and tore them into little pieces, and made little nonsense origami things out of them. It’s surprising how easy it is to tune everything out.

As for being on the hotline, I don’t feel triggered. I had my first shift Sunday morning, and I was all alone with the telephones for four hours. I felt pretty confident, and I feel like I helped a few people.

Today I had a wonderful surprise. A blogging friend, Ethereal Highway, wrote a post for me! What an incredibly kind, thoughtful person she is. I’ve been writing about how people think it’s odd, or unusual, or just downright weird, that anyone would want to be a crisis hotline volunteer and she wrote a post about her own experience with a hotline. Go check it out.

Aug 30 2009

The Intensity Continues

Remember how I said things have been intense lately? Well, last night I had to walk out of a movie. We went to see District 9, I heard good things about it. It was so disturbing to me though. I couldn’t handle the way the aliens were being treated, and when the main character was in the research hospital and they forced him to use the alien weapons it was too much for me. I had to leave. My son said it got better for the aliens after that, but I didn’t want to stick around and find out.

So, yeah, that’s bizarre. I know aliens aren’t real. But if you were to see this movie you’d understand. The filmmakers make them real, and they were real to me. Not like schizophrenic real, but real in my heart. Hard to explain.

Then today we went to a memorial service. A friend of ours had a brother who committed suicide earlier this month. I didn’t know him, I’ve never met him but it was very emotional, I was crying. Seeing the family at this service, watching the faces of his parents, who are approaching 90 years old, well, let’s just say I could definitely see the impact suicide makes on the survivors. Can I do that to people I love? I’m beginning to question myself.

Aug 29 2009

Been So Busy

I’ve been so busy this week! Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings were crisis hotline training (the last week!), I worked, someone asked me to make and decorate 4 dozen cookies, I volunteered at the high school staff welcome back breakfast, visited my foster child, had my last observation for the hotline and took about 4 or 5 calls, had dinner with a friend, ran 6 miles this morning for the first time, went around town looking for new running shoes and finally got fitted for a pair I think might be really good, went to a fashion show, etc etc. These crazy weeks happen occasionally, and I think I do it to myself on purpose, but unconsciously. Like I don’t want to leave myself time to think.

Things have been intense lately. Everything seems to be magnified – thoughts, feelings, conversations with people. I’m not sure why this is, maybe it has something to do with being in therapy and the constant self awareness, and coming up with insights into why I do and think things. One interesting thing is yesterday when I worked on the hotline, I was with another volunteer who has been working there for 17 years. She was very talkative and the four hours seemed to go by quickly; we had some great conversation. As we walked out I asked her if her friends know that she works at the hotline, and she replied that some of them do. I said, “Yeah, I tell a select few.” She seems so confident in herself, and has been doing this for so long, and yet she is selective in who she tells. This made me feel a couple of things. First, sad that we can’t shout it from the rooftops, that this is the type of work we like to do and everyone should be glad we do it! Second, I felt somewhat more normal, I thought I was the only person who feels the need to be selective about who I tell.

And a therapist update. On Tuesday I send a short email to my therapist, J, saying I felt uncomfortable about how we left the session and wondering what he was thinking. He sent me back an email saying that he thought the first 80% of the session went very well, “but it seemed to fall apart at the end as you felt that I was minimizing, or devaluing, your feelings. I was trying to offer additional information (how/what others might be feeling) as a means of helping you understand your feelings within a broader context – not minimizing feelings, just looking at the situation from a larger perspective. I have some more thoughts that we can discuss on Tuesday…”

I sent another email saying “Yes, it was that 20% I was talking about. I’m sorry I did that, I know I’m too sensitive and you were helping me and I shouldn’t tell you how to do your job. And you had a lot of good things to say in the last five minutes before things fell apart, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to listen to you because I was trying to think. I really want to hear what you have to say, so I hope you remember what it was and maybe you can tell me again.”

He replied, “Yeah, we should talk about that again on Tuesday but, overall, I think it was a hiccup in an otherwise good process.”

I thought, a hiccup? It felt more like a full blown gallbladder attack to me. Well, I’ve never had a gallbladder attack but I hear they’re painful. I’m never sure if he is minimizing, or if I am blowing things out of proportion. I don’t know what normal is, what moderation is. Where’s the emotion guidebook, I must have misplaced it.

Aug 25 2009

Therapy Recap 8/25/09

I have so much to process from today’s session, I don’t even know where to start. I feel so uncomfortable with the way J and I left things at the end. I’m hoping by writing this blog entry I’ll have the backbone of an email to send him.

We started by talking about how I felt about what we talked about last week, and I expressed my anxiety about thinking he would “turn me in” due to my SI behavior. He assured me that he did not do that, he will not do that. Based on my history and pattern of SI he doesn’t feel that I am in danger of hurting myself (well, other than the type of hurting that SI causes, the non-lethal kind in my case) and he has no reason to think that I will in the future. And in our state he says that it takes more than a person to say “I’m going to kill someone” or “I’m going to kill myself” – the therapist has to believe the person will do it. He did mention a couple of times that if I said I was suicidal, or if he believed I was suicidal, things would be different, and I didn’t really confirm or deny feeling any of that.

Then we talked about what is going on with the crisis hotline training and I said I’m concerned about our last training night which is going to be Thursday. It’s a double whammy – a pizza party and a cutting video! We talked about my concern about the video. I mentioned how the trainer stated that cutting is a behavior associated with adolescent girls, and now, more frequently, with adolescent boys as well. No mention of middle aged women. We talked about what I thought would be in the video, and how I would respond if I got a cutter on the hotline. I think I would be understanding and empathetic if I did. I mean I wouldn’t say, “You’re a cutter, so am I!” But I think I bring a knowledge of the subject to the caller, more so than someone who isn’t a cutter. But I believe that anyone can be empathetic, one doesn’t need to have the exact experience in order to understand someone’s pain or emotions.

We talked some more about why I’m doing the hotline because I told J the story about my mother not being supportive of my decision to work on the hotline. I talked a little about my reasons for working on the hotline, but I didn’t want to delve too much into it for fear of discovering that the only reason I’m doing this is to make myself feel good, instead of because I really want to help people.

We talked about whether I feel competent on the hotline, and I said “Definitely not yet,” but J asked if I thought I was capable and I said that I do. I’m just concerned I might get too emotionally involved with the callers, but that is something that remains to be seen and I’m not going to obsess about it.

Then this led to a discussion about how people think it’s weird that I want to work on the crisis hotline, my mother included. J asked what I tell people when they ask why I’m doing it, and I replied that I say I want to help people. But there are very few people that I tell, so it’s not too much of an issue. J said, “Well how many people live in our county?” I didn’t know. He said, “Let’s assume there are 500,000 people living here (I looked it up, there are actually 950,000 people). What percentage of them work on the hotline? What percentage of them even know there is a hotline?” I said, “I think a very small percentage.” He said, “Perhaps that is why people think it’s weird.” He said that I feel very passionately about things – about the environment, about animal welfare, about human suffering, etc. He said based on my values it’s not surprising I would want to work in this type of job. I should just tell people that I think it’s a valuable service that the county is offering to people who are in distress and I want to keep that service available to these people.

At this point I kind of shut down. I was thinking during the week, that whenever I tell J about a situation where someone says something to me that hurts my feelings he comes up with excuses or reasons why they would say such a thing. This leaves me feeling like I’m being hurt because I’m too sensitive (something that’s been drilled into my head for 45 years) and that I’m wrong for feeling this way. Then today, when I say that people think I’m weird for wanting to work on the hotline, he comes up with another reason why people may think that. He doesn’t really validate my feeling that I’m hurt, or feeling like an outsider, or feeling weird.

Now there are 10 minutes left in the session and J is talking and talking and talking, and I’m trying to think back to what he was saying about the percentage of people in the county who know there is a hotline. I’m wishing he would shut up for a minute so I could think. I vaguely hear him in the background telling me that he thinks I’m going into the hotline job with a good attitude about why I’m doing it and what to expect, blah blah blah. I know that he talks a lot because I don’t talk much, but I really needed silence right then. I wasn’t listening, and it would be good for me to hear what he said, but just at another time.

Finally I guess he paused and I said, can we go back to when you asked how many people are in the county? He said, “Sure, I think it’s about 500,000.” I said, “No, I’m not concerned with the number. I’m trying to think. You said that a small percentage of people know about the hotline and that is why most people think it’s weird that someone would want to work there. It seems that whenever I mention an instance where my feelings are hurt you come up with excuses and reasons why they would say whatever it was they said. It makes me feel like my feelings are wrong, and you say that feelings aren’t wrong or right, they just are.” He said, “It’s true, feelings aren’t right or wrong.” Then he said a bunch of stuff, about why he comes up with reasons that people say things, he could say they are rude or ignorant, or he could just say nothing and let it be. I said, “What would be wrong with saying nothing and letting it be?” He said that he thought I needed to hear reasons in order to make things more logical, but there is nothing wrong with saying nothing. At the end I think he said, “I don’t want you to feel weird.” I can’t believe he would say that, but I swear that’s what he said. I replied, “I don’t want to feel that it’s wrong to feel weird.” And he said, “Good point.” Then I got up and said goodbye and left.

All of that took place in the last 5 minutes of the session and I feel very discombobulated from it. I didn’t like leaving things like that. I definitely caught him off guard, and it was very apparent that he wasn’t expecting me to come out with this. I feel badly, because I’m not expressive and there is no way for him to know what I need and I expect him to just know.

I think he really gets that I am passionate about things, and he gets that I am sensitive about things, and I appreciate that. He doesn’t make me feel weird or unusual for feeling strongly about my values, and I appreciate that also. But when someone makes me feel uncomfortable and I tell him about it, I don’t really want him to give me reasons why they would say that. I guess I want him to validate my feelings, and maybe later when I’ve processed my feelings about it, then I can logicalize the situation. I don’t know, does that make sense?

I wouldn’t go into a physician’s office and say, “I have a headache, I need a prescription for antibiotics.” So I don’t think it’s right to tell my therapist, “I have a hurting soul, I need you to validate my feelings.” I don’t want to tell him how to do his job. He’s been working with me almost a year and I think he might know best what I need. Maybe I think I know what I need, but I’m wrong.

I just don’t know. I only know I’m left feeling very uncomfortable with our session today.

Aug 23 2009

Carl Rogers – My New Hero

I’m reading a book called Between Therapist and Client: The New Relationship by Michael Kahn. It’s somewhat old – published in 1997, and I’m only on the fourth chapter, but I found chapter 3 fascinating. It’s about Carl Rogers, an American humanist psychologist. He was the proponent of genuineness, empathy and unconditional positive regard. It makes so much sense to me. Imagine if everyone in your life had those three qualities towards you, and you towards them. There would be peace on earth, I’m sure of it. But how to achieve those qualities –wow, that would be hard. Especially unconditional positive regard. Unconditional is a big hurdle there.

This paragraph really resonated with me due to my training for the crisis hotline. The other night we had a different trainer, and our focus was diversity. We did a few activities that were geared toward the diversity of the people who would be calling the hotline. At the end we had to complete an evaluation of the training, and one question was “What tools did you learn.” I felt that I learned about myself, I gained insight, and I learned about the other people in the group, but I didn’t really learn specific tools. So in this book Mr. Kahn writes,

“Training (for therapists) could be helpful, in fact very helpful, but that training would not consist of the acquisition of knowledge. It would be experiential training, the sort of training that would help therapists increase their self-awareness so that they might become more genuine in all aspects of their lives, sensitive to all the people they deal with, so that they might be more empathic with clients. And it would be a training that would enable them to come to terms with their buried prejudices and resentments so that they might be free to prize their clients.”

Wow, that’s great insight. What if everyone were to get that kind of training – in school, or in college. If everyone were to be self-aware and therefore genuine in all aspects of their lives. It sounds scary actually. There would have to be a shut off valve I would think. Being empathic with everyone, and prizing everyone, it sounds draining.

Here is what Mr. Kahn writes about Carl Rogers view on diagnosis,

“There is no therapeutic value in diagnosis…If you can be genuine, if you can communicate that you are managing to grasp your clients’ experiences, and if you can let them know of your unshakable regard for their worth as human beings – if you can do all that to a significant degree, then your clients will grow and change, whatever label might be applied to them.”

(Although Rogers did believe that people had to be motivated to change, or they would be unlikely to change.)

I like this. I suppose there is a value in diagnosis, but not a therapeutic value. Maybe that is why I hate the labels that my psychiatrist puts on me. I want a therapeutic experience that will lead to change, regardless of what he thinks is wrong with me.

And here is the most profound, in my opinion, view that Carl Rogers held, according to Mr. Kahn,

“Rogers believed the purpose of life is ‘to be that which one truly is’. Our clients are in trouble because they have been successfully taught that it is not acceptable to be what they truly are. Thus Rogers asked therapists to do their best to listen as carefully as possible in order to find out who the client truly is. As the therapist carefully attends, the client gradually learns that it is all right to be whoever he or she truly is, and since Rogers believed that being one’s true self is the purpose of life, it is easy to see why he thought self-acceptance is the most valuable thing a therapist can give a client.”

This speaks to me so loudly! I never really believed that one has a purpose for one’s life. We are born, it’s biology, and we go about our business. We make our choices, some good, some not so good, and then we die. But I think I can accept that our purpose is “to be that which one truly is.” Is there a therapist that can show me that it is all right to be who I am truly am? Can I get to that place? How can one person do that for me, when everyone else is doing the opposite?

I’m ordering Carl Roger’s book On Becoming a Person so that I learn more about his views about life and about therapy. And I’m hoping that I can use these ideas in my own encounters with the callers to the hotline.

Aug 21 2009

Wow! I’m So Honored

The most amazing thing just happened. I was reading one of my favorite blogs – Bubble Wrapped, and I saw that I received the Honest Award.

honest award

Here’s the description: This award is bestowed on a fellow blogger whose blog content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant. This award is about bloggers who post from their heart, who often put their heart on display as they write. There are three rules that need to be followed on accepting this award:

1. Brag about it.

2. Select seven blogs you find brilliant and link to them.

3. List 10 honest things about yourself.

So here we go. I am bragging to the world that I received the Honest Award for my blog. I am truly touched by this because I try to be totally honest in my writing on this blog. It’s the only place where I am completely and utterly honest, and I am humbled that people can see that and respect it and still actually like me!

2. Seven blogs that I find brilliant. The ones that e listed are in my list, as well as the ones Kim at Adventures in Wanting listed. So these seven are ones that have not yet been listed, I think.

Disjointed Thoughts
Imagine Namaste
November Blue
Pratfalls
Rachel’s Wide World of Lunacy
Take Up Your Bed and Walk
Vicarious Therapy

3. Ten honest things about myself.

a. I am 49 years old, and I don’t plan to become much older.
b. I hate emptying the dishwasher.
c. I am a perfectionist, but also lazy – a bad combination.
d. I feel passionately about things, but am also sensitive – also a bad combination.
e. I tend to be obsessive about things I’m passionate about.
f. I’m a people pleaser.
g. I am very creative, and have been since I was quite young. I love crafts, music, art, writing, photography, etc. My creative endeavors tend to come and go in phases.
h. I like to be alone.
i. I frequently have bad dreams about the ocean.
j. I wish I could meet my blogging friends. I sometimes wonder what it would be like if we were all in the same room together. Would we talk? Would we eat? Would we instinctively understand each other?

So there you have it. Thank you e, for bestowing this honor on me. I am really quite surprised by the whole thing, and of course, feel undeserving, but I am trying to accept your gift with gratitude and graciousness.

Aug 18 2009

Therapy Recap 8/18/09 and My Mom

Shouldn’t a person’s mother be their biggest supporter in life? I was talking to my mother tonight on the phone. I said, “I have to go, I’m in a training session.” She asked, “What are you in training for?” I said, “The crisis hotline.” She said, “The crisis hotline?” I said, “Yes.” She said, in a negative tone of voice, “You’re going to do THAT?”

I’m very careful about who I tell things to. And I tell her just about nothing. And this is why. Ironically we were learning about abuse tonight – domestic violence, child abuse, and emotional abuse. And how people’s self esteem can be lowered by very covert, insipid, abuse.

I know my mother is not abusive, not even close. But she’s not exactly supportive either. Or maybe I’m just too sensitive. That’s what people say about me.

In therapy today I told J about how I cut myself two weeks ago and “lied” about it to him last week. He wanted me to talk more about it. He also assured me that any emails I send him do not go into my file. He does keep them on his computer, but since they are not in my file they will never be seen by anyone. I guess I feel safe enough about that.

But, and this is probably going to sound crazy, I’ve just had a bad feeling all day about telling J about the cutting. Like he is going to report me to whoever it is that psychologists report dangerous people to, and the cops are going to show up at my house and handcuff me and take me away. It sounds so paranoid! I’m not a paranoid person in general. But I’m a little afraid to be at home, and that’s bad because home is my safe place. I really wonder if he will turn me in. I know he is obligated to report anyone who he considers a danger to themselves. Isn’t cutting oneself dangerous?

I talked to J about possibly quitting the hotline and the incidents that led to that thinking. He said I would be good at the hotline. He didn’t say “I think you’ll be good”, he said, “You will be good at it.” I asked him why he thinks so, what he is basing that on. He gave me the example I had given him – the caller who everyone wanted to report to child protective services because she had intrusive thoughts about her baby. He said, “You saw the big picture, you didn’t focus in on little details, you empathized with the caller, you looked at it holistically.” Wow, I did that?

So he said the only thing I need to decide is if this is too much for me emotionally, but this isn’t something I need to decide right now. I can do the hotline for a while and see how it goes. That sounds like a good plan.

Aug 17 2009

I Did Well!

Had a good day on the hotline today! It was my first day actually talking to callers instead of just listening in. I was pretty nervous, butterflies in the stomach, etc. The volunteer I was working with took the first couple of calls, then it was my turn. My first caller wanted to know if we could remove his refrigerator from his home. I reminded him that he was calling the crisis hotline. Oops, he must have called the wrong number.

I got a couple of regulars, and at first they were confused because they didn’t get their usual volunteer, but it didn’t seem to bother them as they talked profusely for their full 20 minutes. I also got someone who needed referrals, and a few hang ups.

I actually thought I did well! The other volunteer said I did well, and that I didn’t seem anxious at all. I did hear myself in some of these callers. Like the woman who went on and on about a book that she wanted from the library, and it was causing her a lot of anxiety. Later in the conversation I mentioned her anxiety about the book and she said, “I don’t have any anxiety.” Ha! I know that feeling. Denial. Like when I go to see my therapist and talk about my obsessive thoughts and he talks about my OCD and I say, “I don’t have OCD!” Gotta love denial.

I’m in a better mood, can you tell? You all probably think I’m crazy. I have such irrational thinking sometimes, I really need to fix that. I know I can do this job. I can do it, right?

Aug 16 2009

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Since I wrote yesterday’s post I’ve been seriously considering dropping out of the crisis hotline training program. Is it because my evaluation sheet said, “Be wary of judgments”? Maybe that is one reason. I think that comment is the catalyst for my thinking. But there is more than one reason, as is usually the case with me. There is never one thing I can put my finger on when I have an intuition about something.

The comment on my evaluation did evoke a strong emotion in me. More than one emotion really – anger, disconnect, confusion, feeling misunderstood, embarrassment. The evaluations were returned at the very beginning of the session, then we went on to be trained in the topic of the day – suicide. We split into three groups at one point (there are about 15 of us all together), and we were given a transcript of a fictitious call that we had to rate and describe what we would do differently.

My group’s scenario was that a woman calls the crisis line because she is feeling suicidal. She wants to kill herself because she is afraid of harming her children – a young toddler and a baby. She said that when she was cutting up carrots in the kitchen she got a thought that she could pick up the knife and stab the baby. Immediately one of the people in our group said, “Well we would have to call child protective services right away.” I asked why. She said, “the woman wants to kill her baby!” I said, “She doesn’t want to kill her baby. She got a thought in her head about stabbing her baby, but she doesn’t want to.” Then the caller goes on to say, “I was giving the baby a bath and he slipped under the water. I was frozen, I didn’t do anything. I saw the bubbles coming up in the water.” The counselor asks if the baby is ok, and the caller says he is.

At that point we had more of a discussion about whether we would call CPS. The fact that the woman didn’t immediately take the baby out of the water did raise some red flags, even for me, but I still think that she didn’t want to hurt the baby. In the transcript the counselor says, “You might be surprised to learn that many mothers think these thoughts, motherhood can be very stressful.” My group thought this was a terrible thing for the counselor to say to the caller, because they didn’t believe it was true. I said, “Lots of people get intrusive thoughts.” They looked at me like I was mentally ill. I started to get agitated and tried to get them to believe me. I said, “I bet 90% of people occasionally get an intrusive thought in their head. They may never admit it to anyone. And it doesn’t mean they will ever act on it.” I got a little adamant and they backed off, as though at any moment I would pull out a knife and start stabbing them, due to the intrusive thoughts in my crazy head.

Then we all reconvened as one big group and our trainers had us go over our scenario and discuss it. We talked about our ambivalence about calling CPS, and the fact that this woman wants to kill her baby. The trainer said, “She has post-partum depression. These thoughts are very common with this disorder.” Ha! That shut up some of the people in my group. I asked the trainer, “Do you think intrusive thoughts are common in regular depression as well?” She said, “Yes definitely. As a matter of fact, suicidal ideation can be an intrusive thought. These thoughts can come into a person’s consciousness totally at random and they might think they actually want to kill themselves. It can become an obsession.” I asked, “Do you think intrusive thoughts are a form of OCD?” And she said, “Yes, definitely.” Again, I went on a little too long with this line of questioning, in an attempt to get the people in my group to understand me. I said, “I heard that sometimes people get intrusive thoughts of a sexual nature, like an elderly woman picturing her priest naked.” The trainer said, “That isn’t uncommon either.”

One of the trainers felt that this was not a situation where CPS should be called, the other trainer felt that if we got a call like this we should discuss it immediately with a supervisor to get advice. Then I said, “I don’t think CPS would do anything anyway” and the trainer agreed. I said, “CPS would have to see physical evidence of abuse in order to take action” and the trainer agreed to that also. I learned that in my training as a court appointed advocate for my foster child. My group was very surprised to hear that also.

At the end of our fictitious call the woman had planned to call her sister to have her come over right away, and we decided that if the sister could come right away the situation would be diffused. If the woman hadn’t been able to find anyone to come stay with her, then we should send intervention.

After the session, I just was alarmed at how emotional I had become during this little debate. I’m sure it was triggered by the evaluation, even though there was positive criticism given to me as well.

I also feel that I might not be able to remain detached enough to deal with callers in crisis. Last week when I was listening in to real calls I got tears in my eyes at one point. A caller really caused me to get emotional. I don’t think I’m at a good place emotionally and mentally right now to take on other people’s emotions, and I’m not sure how to NOT take on their emotions. Maybe that will be a part of the training, but I kind of doubt it.

It feels like a relief to have that option – tomorrow I observe the hotline again and I’ll be taking a few calls. The next training session is Tuesday night. I’ll see how tomorrow and Tuesday go, and I’ll think about this some more. I don’t want to rush into a decision, but my intuition is telling me that working on the hotline is not the right thing for me at this time.

Aug 15 2009

Crisis Hotline Training

So I’ve mentioned a few times that I am currently in training to become a volunteer for the Crisis Hotline. What is so surprising to me is that the majority of people who call are not in crisis. They are regulars, some call every day, some call every week. Some call multiple hotlines in a day. For our hotline they are only allowed to call once per day and their calls are limited to 20 minutes, unless they are truly in crisis.

In a way this a relief, I imagine it would be draining to spend a four hour shift dealing with suicidal callers. I observed the hotline one day last week and I listened in to the calls. On Monday I observe again, but I am also going to be taking some calls. I’m not quite sure if I’m ready! We’ve only had 2 weeks of training. I’m definitely not ready to deal with crisis calls, so hopefully none of those will come in. I chose the noon to 4PM shift, and that’s usually fairly quiet.

The people that call the hotline mostly live alone or in group homes, are mentally ill or developmentally impaired, and have no one to talk to. They want someone to listen to them. I know I am good at that. Some might want some problem solving, and there is a huge wealth of resources in the hotline room that we can offer callers.

Last week we were doing role playing with current volunteers. We were being evaluated as well. I got my evaluation form back on Thursday evening, and one of the critiques was “be wary of judgments.” I was confused, because during the role playing none of the evaluators mentioned that I had been judgmental, so I asked the trainer. She said she noticed that the evaluator had written that on my form, but there was no clarification. Luckily the evaluator was at the session that night and we asked her to explain how I was judgmental.

She said that she wants me to be aware that the people who call the hotline are mentally ill, and I can’t be judgmental of the way they behave or speak. She said that after one of the role plays I had mentioned, “It seems like some of the callers are appreciative of the counselors and some seem very negative towards the counselors.” I was just stating a fact, I wasn’t trying to judge the callers. And I still believe it is true, some of the callers thank the counselors for listening to them, and some express frustration or anger at the counselors. I don’t know how she views this as me being judgmental, but when she was explaining I just nodded and agreed. I didn’t want to get into an argument about whether or not I was judgmental.

When I observed the hotline last week, the volunteer who was taking the calls did make some comments after each call that I felt were judgmental, for example after one call she said, “I had to get off that call, that guy is so boring.” I think it’s human nature to want to decompress after a call, and it doesn’t mean that we think the caller is a bad person. I guess I just better be careful about what I say and to whom I say it to! Although the trainer said that she encourages the volunteers to talk to each other and to her during and after their shifts if they feel the need, now I’m wondering exactly what is and isn’t allowed to be said.