Urgency & Emergency
About 6 years ago one of my colleagues said to me one day, as I was stressing about not being able to meet someone else’s needs quickly enough,
“It’s ok- their urgency is not your emergency”.
Therapists have sayings, and “isms”, and refrains, but at that time this was a new one for me. I looked at her and said- “say that again” and she said “your urgency is not my emergency”.
How simply put, yet that was a lightbulb for me - do I so struggle with that! I operate on urgency. What fire is the brightest, whose need is the strongest, how can I be so capable of anticipating a need that it doesn’t even need to be felt?
What is this obsession and commitment to meeting other people’s needs so often and so much that we set aside our own?
I started to watch the instinct, to examine it, to see how it felt to me to be so activated by others that I easily neglected myself. I noticed my own discomfort in being unable to help or heal or soothe. The tension in my chest when someone could not be helped in a way that felt like an ease for them, a small release of their shoulders from their ears that I could then see and feel.
So, as with all things, I dove deeper. I thought about the fact that the other piece of this complicated puzzle is that sometimes the fixing and healing is really in the waiting. The urgency we feel to help can also be a reflection of our own discomfort in someone else’s pain. Maybe at times the job is not to fix but to stand by and hold the space as we watch our friends, colleagues, patients or children muddle through.
The real work may be in supporting them in their feelings and struggle as they slowly unwind a way through.
Allowing them to know that they can lean as hard as they need too, but the answers lie in them. Deciphering between urgency and true emergency allows the deepest needs to be met. Needs that are not refracted by our own discomfort or urge to fix.
I believe that when we can tolerate someone else’s needs and struggle we become better at learning how to be there for them in a way that is complete. Therein lies the distinction between fixers and healers. We can try to fix the moment or attempt to sit and allow the space for healing.
Urgency is not an emergency- but I will sit with you as we wind our way down the path.
