I Should Be Able to Handle This

It’s time to take off our super-hero capes

It was a tough day. That morning, I was asked to step in and help a woman, Bertha, in crisis. I didn’t know all the details and frankly, I didn’t need to. Handling a crisis isn’t about solving the situation; it’s about helping the person calm themselves down so they are in control of themselves again.

It was now evening and the role had changed. Having successfully resolved the crisis, the goal now was to help Bertha process her experiences from that morning and create an action plan to get her moving forward on the road to mental health.

“I scared myself this morning,” Bertha shared with me. “I don’t ever want to feel like that again. I feel like I should be able to handle this, you know?”

There are a few statements that bring whatever plans I have to a full screeching stop, and Bertha hit on perhaps the biggest one: “I should be able to handle this.”

Life is chaos, and chaos destabilizes everyone.

Let’s take a step back and acknowledge that life gets too big for everyone at some point in our lives, regardless of the presence of a mental illness. Everyone hits a crisis point, a point at which they look around at themselves and their lives and wonder how they got to that point. Life is chaos…