Only Connect

Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash

Being a doctor is a treacherous business. With higher rates of divorce, depression, addiction and even suicide, our patients aren’t our only priority. We have to take care of ourselves.

My husband and I took our youngest two out of school last year and flew 11,000 miles to Australia. Officially, the trip was about spending quality time with his 96-year-old mother. Privately, though, I needed a break. After years enmeshed in the ups and downs of a loved one with alcohol dependence, I’d lost my sense of joy. Therapy, yoga, and HRT had failed to lift my gloom. So, with our older two children conveniently abroad, the opportunity to escape felt irresistible.

Arriving from British midwinter into the technicolour blaze of an Australian summer was as glorious as I’d hoped. The racket of birds outside my window, the warmth of my antipodean family, daily swims and bike rides along the gentle contours of Port Philip Bay all brought joy I’d forgotten I was capable of. But hearing one morning that my loved one had been admitted to ITU in London with complications of alcoholism, I suddenly realised that being on the other side of the world could only protect me so much. In some ways, the distance made things worse, guilt now lacing my chronic despair.

As Aussie summer cooled into autumn, I racked my brain for a solution. And one morning, emerging from a lone sea plunge and noticing how my Australian counterparts gathered in merry groups to compass big swathes of the water together, I found myself doing something I’d never contemplated back at home, seeking connection with the crisis I’d been at pains to escape. Sitting on the deck of a Brighton beach box, hot-air balloons hanging like marshmallows in the pink Melbourne sky, I googled a support group a friend had recommended but which I’d previously avoided like the plague. And a few evenings later, I was nervously walking into my first meeting for family members of people with alcohol use disorder.

As a sceptic and introvert – a mother of four with no antenatal posse, a bibliophile without a book group - there was a lot I didn’t like. To start with, just sitting in a circle with fifteen other people felt uncomfortably intimate, and that was before anyone said a word. I also balked at the rules: I understood the need for anonymity and the egalitarian ban on stating one’s profession, but couldn’t fathom why no-one was allowed to comment on what someone else said. I recoiled from the idea of a higher power. Perhaps most of all, I railed against the assumption that there was something in me that needed fixing. At the end of the first meeting, as I forced myself to join hands with those next to me, I was certain I wouldn’t return.

Yet go back I did, for a second meeting and a third and for most of my seven months in Melbourne. I started to enjoy the freedom of knowing I could say anything, without fearing others’ judgement. I took comfort from being told that curing my loved one’s illness was not within my gift. I found a way to accommodate the notion of a power greater than myself by equating it, not with something holy, but the support and sympathy I felt from everyone else in the room, even when I wasn’t there. And though my apprehensiveness never completely disappeared, I realised that I always came away from the meetings feeling better: unburdened, connected, often moved by the details of others’ lives and struggles.

As doctors, we’re trained to subvert our own emotions so we can deal with the pain of those it’s our privilege to treat. But during those evenings in a quiet church in suburban Melbourne, I realised that the central principle guiding all my therapeutic efforts with my own patients, the desire to fix and cure was the exact opposite of what I needed to save myself. To manage my own sadness and frustration, I didn’t need more control but to learn how to let go.

My loved one’s situation hasn’t resolved. But my sabbatical in Australia taught me a lasting lesson: we don’t have to keep difficult feelings quiet. I wouldn’t have dreamt of talking to a group of strangers about my personal problems before that sun-drenched trip. Perhaps we should all be doing more of it.