Throughout my training as a counsellor I was told to know your limits. While I can accept that there will always be cases that are beyond my help and experience, at the same time I have always been driven to push the limits slightly, in order to achieve more.
I'm not the type to submissively stay within the limits that someone else has defined for me. I'm the type who pushes against them, to see if I can do just a bit more. That's how you learn and grow. You cannot learn a new skill if you simply know your limits. You have to look beyond your limits and be willing to try something you've never done before. You have to be willing to move outside of your comfort zone.
Occasionally life will throw something at you that will test your limits. Over the years I have been faced with situations that have tested my abilities and my compassion. In various jobs, I have done difficult things that might have been beyond some people - I have laid out the bodies of dead people when I worked in the nursing homes; put the bodies of dead pets into the deep-freeze cold-storage in the veterinary surgery; given life-saving first-aid to a man in a pub; disarmed a man with a knife in the street; held my beloved cat as he was put to sleep; even been a key witness to a murder. These are all things which some people would not have been able to bring themselves to do.
I have never found these situations easy - far from it. They can be extremely unnerving and anxiety inducing. I am not a robot or an android. I do feel the pain and upset of others, so there are frequently tears afterwards and a bit of shock for me to work through my system. But when something needs to be done, somehow I have always found the courage to do it. In each situation, I have been able to put my own discomfort to one side and think about the person I am trying to help.
Usually, I am helping strangers or people that I don't know that well. Last night, I helped my mother - that was much harder! She's just had an operation and I went to collect her from the hospital.
She had been discharged, handed a pre-filled injection and told to inject it herself at 11pm. This was an important post-operative care injection designed to prevent post-op blood clots. It should be administered by a qualified nurse. Neither my mother nor I are trained nurses. Personally I think it should have been a job for the doctor on call that night, or the district nurse. But no, we were pretty much left to our own devices with it.
So there we were, at 11pm, staring at one one another in disbelief at the situation we found ourselves in and trying to laugh our way into the procedure gently. Giving my mother the injection was the most nerve-wracking thing I have ever had to do. I felt woefully inadequate to the task - but the alternative was watching her trying to do it herself and four hands are better than two! So after a couple of deep breaths and a 3-2-1 countdown, I gave her the injection. It was very much a team effort and I think that we were both very brave.
As soon as it was done, I did what I always do when the crisis is over - I burst into tears and started shivering like a proper wimp! That's just my coping style. Some people fall apart before a crisis, some during the crisis; I fall apart afterwards when it's all over. Sometimes this can be weeks, or even months, afterwards. Delayed shock seems to be my thing. But that's okay, because it means that when I need to be strong and alert during the crisis, I am. Once the danger has passed, I allow myself to fall apart for a day or so.
A crisis is just one of the ways in which life will test out your limits. If you stay within those limits, the crisis will beat you. If you push outside your comfort zone and do whatever needs to be done in the situation you're in, you will be expanding your limits, developing skills and growing as a person. If my Mum ever needs another such injection, we now know that I can do it and vice versa. So our limits have expanded.
Often the limits we place upon ourselves are false limits. We are capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for. We hide behind the fear and let it control us, instead of pushing against it to become a more capable version of who we were before. It's okay to be scared by a challenging situation, so long as you do what needs to be done. It's okay to fall apart afterwards, to take a couple of days to yourself so you can process what just happened. And its okay to give yourself and your team-mates a pat on the back for a job well done!
A moment of crisis is life testing your limits and giving you the opportunity for growth. You don't have to like it. You just have to do it and when you've done it once, you will know that you can do it again. You will come to realise that the sky isn't the limit - because there are no limits to what you can do if you put your mind to it. But hopefully, you won't have to inject anybody any time soon! Blessed Be.
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