I'm waiting for the shoe to drop, I really am. Statistics and common sense tell me that I and my colleagues that also offer online counseling should get pretty busy here sometime soon. Admittedly, most of them charge and that is a problem for many of the people that are suddenly going to need their help.
You see, change brings stress. And any time a family that isn't used to being cooped up in the same house suddenly is, that's change and holds the potential to be an enormous stressor. So, how are we going to survive surviving? I've been a counselor for 6 years and was in industrial maintenance for 18 years before that. My specialty that gained me a reputation that reached to other countries was being able to communicate with and troubleshoot odd machines. I got a call from Puerto Rico once asking if I could come down, they had just acquired a machine that was obsolete and had never made it out of the prototype phase, so was extremely rare. They had poked around until they heard my name as someone that knew the machines and could likely get their's to run. The longer I did this, the more my ability to look at systems and find bottlenecks and problems increased. Eventually, I was called upon to look at entire factories and look for the bottlenecks an d either solve the problem or at least identify how the problem would be solved. I regularly was asked to speed up production equipment. First I would just watch operators run their machines. Usually I would have an idea of what needed to change pretty quickly. And their were times that by the time I got to the machine code I had a hunch that I could just write a new program for the machine and replace what was there. But I never, not once, let my ego cause me to jump in and just scrap what the previous programmer or programmers did. Before I changed a thing, I studied the code. I tried to get a feel for the programmer and how he/she thought, Because, you see, I understood that whatever the skill level of the original programmer was, they wrote the code the way they did for a reason. How arrogant would it be for me to just jump in and start redoing the work without first understanding why they did what they did? Sometimes I came away with tricks that I would use for years to come. Why am I bringing all this up now? As a society we are poor communicators and worse listeners. Sorry, It's just a fact. So, as you find yourselves trying to survive surviving, it will be important to take the time to listen to what your loved ones are saying, all of it, not just until you get bored or annoyed. And by the way, you'll get bored or annoyed less often if your attention is on actually listening and trying to learn something new. Secondly, remember that what your loved ones are doing is for their own reasons not to hurt or annoy you. And every time you speak remember to tell them what you need and are feeling not how they have failed you. They can't read your mind and if you want them to understand something, you will have to spell it out. Take your time, be patient with yourselves and each other. And remember to listen to learn, not respond.
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AuthorRev. Matthew Hogan is a Certified Temperament Pastoral Counselor, Licensed Pastoral Counselor and is a Professional Clinical Member of the National Christian Counselors Association Archives
March 2021
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