Two friends of Vince, in different helper professions, join us to continue our discussion of societal burnout

(Cartoon by Bruce Mackinnon)

Message

Burnout, wk 4: A therapist, a chaplain, & a pastor walk into a bar…

Well, I mentioned we have some special guests to help us continue our church’s discussion of societal burnout.

We’re calling today “a therapist, a chaplain, and a pastor walk into a bar…” (and you can insert whatever joke you like here)

Please welcome my friends Brandy Laurencelle & Natasha Huang

::Hello! from them::
Brandy is a therapist and supervisor of therapists, in North Carolina
Natasha is a chaplain and educator of chaplains, in California
The three of us are part of a weekly contemplative prayer group together — that’s how we know one another —
And I’m SO THRILLED they’ve accepted my invitation to share from their experiences and expertise in their own helper professions
Helper professions, like ours, or teachers or other health care jobs for example, end up getting a unique amount of perspective on societal burnout because we're the folks people often come to when they're burnt out
(And we’re prone to burnout ourselves as a result)

I have some questions to pose these two, but if you have a question as we go…

::CHAT QR CODE — put it in Discord and I’ll take a look at the end::

One of the things you mentioned to me when we talked this week was that addressing societal burnout requires holding such a hard tension of (a) compassion & grace with (b) responsibility & boundaries… Can you speak to that a bit?
Can you speak to the overlap of social anxiety & societal burnout? I know that you, as a clinician, will have an understanding of anxiety as a diagnosis that might be different from the way we use “anxiety” in every day language, but if we consider a spectrum of social anxiety, I know many people in our church would self identify that way — they feel the desire/pressure to connect but the simultaneous feeling of “I just don’t have it in me” and that’s debilitating.
::chat?::

You and I talked this week about this concept of ::sacred time:: (light burden but heavy with purpose and substance — not focused on being light and fast like most of accelerated modern life), and how a great example of keeping sacred time is our weekly Zoom with our contemplative prayer group… Can you speak to that for a bit?
Thinking about your experience creating space for people to grieve or process loss or change — Accelerated modern life trains us to see things like death or sickness or injury or trauma as disruptions, but how can communities like ours help each other see these things more appropriately as the most important/shaping things in our lives?
::chat?::