I spent my life quitting. I quit jobs, relationships, school. Hitting walls made me want to run. So I did. I ran so quickly I never had a proper chance to say goodbye.
I’ve shunned goodbyes. They are emotional and uncomfortable. They can be messy and embarrassing. Goodbye means you’re done. Endings haven’t seemed worth the effort — until recently.
A single mom self-employed for a decade as a yoga and mindfulness teacher, I went back to school and pursued my Master’s in counseling degree 2 years ago. I graduated in this past August with my degree and started my first position in September.
I was in need of a job — living off of leftover student loan money, I took the first position I was offered. I became a chemical dependency counselor in an all men’s inpatient facility. Addiction wasn’t a niche I wanted to focus on for the long-term, but I was in need and I trusted that this one fell into my lap for a reason.
Sometimes the reason things happen reveals itself in bits and pieces over time. I’d spend the next three months discovering why this job came to me.
I’d learn about my strengths and my weaknesses. I’d learn to set hard boundaries. I’d learn, I don’t have to compete with myself — to prove I can do something that feels out of alignment with my highly sensitive nature.
. . .
I learned to say no.
I learned it’s okay to follow your heart and listen to your gut and get out because getting out is the right thing to do for the soul.
This job seemed like a gift wrapped up in a difficult exam. Could I listen to and honor my integrity? My competitive, people pleasing self wanted to stay in the chaos to satisfy others — and prove to myself that I could do something that felt grueling and draining.
. . .
People, places and things are put into our lives for a reason.
I had a very difficult client that was verbally abusive to me on several occasions. Instead of building me up, it broke me down. I sobbed in my supervisor’s office after it happened.
I frantically researched how to handle clients that were abusive. I was given a few days away from him. None of it changed the situation. The client was acting out — because he felt safe with me.
We had established a good therapeutic rapport and he began to feel safe enough to release his rage. This client had never been told no. He had never experienced hard boundaries. Thus, he didn’t respond well to “No, this kind of behavior — those kinds of words are not okay.”
He didn’t respond well and neither did my agency — they should have discharged him based on our policies and his behavior with myself and with other clients and staff, but they did not.
After some cajoling by a co-worker, I called human resources and told them I felt unsafe around this particular client. At the time, I felt he was a curse. Little did I know, this client was a blessing in disguise.
He pushed me to look elsewhere, to pursue the type of environment that would help me grow in a healthy way as a therapist, nurturing my end goal of obtaining my license to start a private practice.
In my heart, I didn’t want to go back to work, but I went.
In between clients, my gut pushed me to start to look for open positions that were a better fit with my degree.
Within a few weeks, I had the first interview, and then a second, with an agency that focused on individual mental health sessions — a place where I was told I’d get to actually do psychotherapy instead of police clients behavior.
This was the reason I went back to school. In a field where most clinicians are drowning in paperwork and short, check-in sessions, the thought of doing what I got into thousands of dollars of debt to do, was enlivening.
I’m highly empathic and highly sensitive. I desire to counsel those with similar natures. My job as an addiction therapist reminded me that I need to honor my nature just as much as I would encourage a client to honor theirs.
If an environment is toxic, you can put up with it and make the changes you have the power to make to survive there or get out.
. . .
Having someone validate your feelings is sometimes all that is needed to give you the courage to act from your gut.
Rewind to a few weeks prior to the incident: I’m sitting on my therapist’s couch, complaining about this abusive client (who was not yet abusive towards me) and the dynamics I put up with in chemical dependency daily.
Her words of validation — That sounds so hard — rang through me like a gong. Those words reverberated inside of me. I had said that, hadn’t I?
Don’t we often say important, meaningful things about how we feel and then brush by them in a moment of fear or insecurity? Sometimes the reflection of another makes us stop and take inventory. Sometimes hearing our very own words come out of the mouth of another empowers us and sets us free.
I don’t like quitting. I spent my life quitting. But this time was different. This time I went against my own rebellious grain and followed the company rules. I contacted human resources after I received an official offer from another mental health agency and asked them how much time I was expected to give to resign from my position.
HR replied to me a day later with a copy and pasted a blurb from the employee handbook that told me I was expected to give at least 2 weeks notice to leave on the company in good standing. I read the email, took a deep, cleansing breath and stepped up my game.
My heart beat fast in my chest as I emailed my supervisors with 3 weeks notice.
Mentally and emotionally I was done. But my spirit was committed to sticking it out for the long haul. It was more than acquiring a paycheck to support my 8-year-old daughter and myself.
It was more than proving I was a good employee, a hard worker and a person of integrity. It was about manifesting a happy ending, through conscious intention and loving action.
In my 40 years of life, I can’t remember a time when I felt stressed, overwhelmed and disrespected and kept going just to do the right thing.
In the past, those feelings felt like they were pushing me into a dark, suffocating closet — confining me in my own distraught. In those moments, my desire for fresh air pushed me to say: I’m out. See ya.
In those moments of no breath and no light, I walked away and never looked back (well, physically). Emotionally, of course, there were still remnants of regret or guilt or lack of closure that lingered like dust on my skin.
This time was different. My last three weeks at the all men’s inpatient facility took a lot of mental and emotional effort. Every day I resisted going. Each morning, my resistance, welled up around me like a dense cloud I had to walk blindly through.
. . .
Being entrapped in old patterns is like being immersed in a dense cloud.
It’s the act of moving through that begins to break them up. Each day my cloud got a little lighter. By the last week, I was bringing the intention to stay positive, expansive, and open with me into the group I ran.
I often started with meditation or mindful reading to set the tone. What helped me also helped my clients. Their faces looked lighter and their bodies appeared more relaxed after the grounding practice.
During this time, another client who had been “mad” at me for reports I had given to my supervisors on his behavior in the group (part of my job was playing bad cop — reporting behaviors to my supervisors, court liaisons, and parole officers) came to me with a big apology and took ownership of his behavior.
We had a heart to heart conversation. He said he felt guilty about me leaving — thinking it was his fault. Inwardly, I smiled. Little did he know he was a gift to me, just like all the other difficult clients that had crossed my path.
On my last day, there was a lightness around me. My supervisors threw me a going away lunch. My coworkers gave me gifts and hugs. In the daily process group I ran, each of my clients shared their appreciation for our work together.
I gave them all stones with encouraging words on them. Each person shared the word they picked and why. During this group, the youngest member — a young man I felt an affinity for (I know we are not supposed to have favorites, but the connection with this client was easy and the role I played for him was that of a nurturer) — was rubbing his stone, wiping tears from his eyes.
I told this young man I would find him later to say goodbye, as he was leaving group early for a dentist appointment.
. . .
I don’t like quick goodbyes, despite my past record of running away.
My courageous self likes to treat goodbyes as a ritual. That’s what I did to make my happy ending complete.
That night, after all my coworkers went home, I packed up my office and wrote each of my clients a personalized card — about their strengths, something meaningful they brought up in the group or individual session, and offered words of support and encouragement.
Before I left, I went into their dorm area and found each one of them and handed them a card and said goodbye and thank you to them. Most of them initiated a hug. All of them said thank you and that they will miss me.
When I walked away, I started crying.
There was a pang of sadness. Mixed feelings of grief and relief swept through me like a wave washing out all of the overwhelm and fear and drain I held onto for the past few months.
I walked out smiling in between tears, wheeling all my office furnishings behind me in a big purple suitcase.
That was how to say goodbye.
That was how to resign.
I was no longer a quitter.
The dense cloud had turned into light.
I had created a happy ending.
I have no doubt that I will create many more.
—
This post was previously published on Live Your Life On Purpose and is republished here with permission from the author.
—
◊ ◊
Have you read the original anthology that was the catalyst for The Good Men Project? Buy here: The Good Men Project: Real Stories from the Front Lines of Modern Manhood
◊ ◊
Talk to you soon.
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project and want to join our calls on a regular basis, please join us as a Premium Member, today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
—
Photo credit: Unsplash