One of the cool things about being a therapist is that the insights and conversations you have with your clients get to bounce around in your brain and interact in fascinating ways with the things you’re experiencing yourself. Even though my counseling sessions aren’t about me (they’re about my clients) I benefit from them a great deal after the fact. I love that ever-present reminder that we’re all human beings and that there’s no situation I’ve fully thought through and have no new insight to gain or offer, no matter what my clients are going through.
A fair amount of my time as a social work educator is trying to convince my students that they are human beings and that there isn’t some magical process in their training and experience wherein they get transmuted into immortal omniscient superheroes. They need to know that they’ll still be human beings with all the baggage and failings (and failures) which go along with living a normal human life, even after they get an immense amount of trust put in them by their clients to be above the fray and capable of helping them move through and past the things which are causing them difficulty.
For some reason, the narrative which persists in most of our brains goes something like “I can’t help other people until after I’ve fixed all these terrible things in myself”. Since none of us is ever truly “fixed”, that leads us all to either come to the conclusion that flawed human beings can still make a positive impact OR come to the conclusion that they’d better pick another career. I prefer the former, but that’s your path to choose.
So often, I’ve been worrying about some problem I’m trying to work through in my head and a client comes up with a brilliant insight in a counseling session, or I see a theme developing across a whole week or month of sessions with multiple clients, that directly applies to my own situation. It’s great when that happens, because it’s a wonderful reminder of the universality of some human experiences, which tends to make me feel a little bit less alone sometimes. It also reminds me of how odd our pattern recognition abilities can be.
Human beings unconsciously seek patterns in things all around us, all the time. It makes us feel safer when we can analyze our environment and make a judgment that we’re not in immediate danger. That extends into all kinds of other unconscious decisions we make, too, which can lead to gross things like racism and sexism, etc. When we start categorizing people and things as “good” or “bad”, stuff gets out of whack quickly.
I’ve had this awful smell in my mud room since Monday night. It’s only gotten worse as the week has progressed, and has been causing me a great deal of concern. I tried cleaning out the fridge down there, but it had no impact on the smell. I tried emptying the trashcan, but no impact. I brought a bathroom air freshener down there, but the net effect only changed to being the bad smell with sweet stuff on top. I was so embarrassed to have Ashley come over to watch the girls on Tuesday and walk through the smell, and had to apologize to her preemptively and assure her that I was taking steps to try and fix it. I walked around the basement to make sure no dead animals were smelling up the place, but couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary. It’s been a real journey.
Have you ever had something that has been on your mind so long, so intensely, that you start to wonder if you’re making it up in your head? Sometimes I spend so much energy trying to figure something out that it loses its meaning when I take a step back to look at it from a different angle, like when you say a specific word in your head so many times that you start to doubt how you’re pronouncing it in the first place.
That whole pattern recognition thing kicks in, and makes you decide that maybe that smell is just in your imagination in the first place. Or that you shouldn’t be depressed, or mad, or anxious, because you’re just creating those triggers in your own mind out of nothingness.
The fall is my favorite. We’ve previously established that. Partly because of the weather—the brisk air is certainly a piece of it, and so are the beautiful leaves on the trees. I like when things change! Sameness makes me bored, and the boredom leads to sadness. I love novelty, which is one reason I like post-apocalyptic fiction. There’s a huge reset! Everything is different! We get to pick different jobs and loot grocery stores and wear cool armor! But I also love the fall leaves.
I’ve spent more time outside over the last six months than the last six years, I bet. I sit in Kellie’s garden and look at the trees across the street, or sit in my rocking chair on the back deck and look at the trees on that side of my house. I also drive all over the place now (often to Buffalo, apparently) and love to see the changing leaves on all of my adventures.
And how can I see those leaves without thinking about Kellie and all the previous fall seasons I’ve spent enjoying all of these things with her? I don’t have any objection to enjoying things without her—that’s something I did while she was alive as well, but far less of it. The problem is that we can never talk about those things afterward, and I can never show her pictures of those leaves or watch her eyes light up to see the dogs running through a pile of them. That’s what I think about when I see leaves, now. Not in a sad way, but a wistful one—with some sadness thrown in for good measure sometimes.
One insight that keeps popping up in a bunch of counseling sessions over the past month really clicked for me this week. That’s the idea that we definitely swap back and forth between minute-by-minute survival mode and longer-term survival mode, but that it sure helps us feel better if we’re able to take some agency over deciding when we do that.
If I’m just thinking about getting through a Wednesday and choose to eat a yucky (but comforting) supper, that’s a choice that serves me well in the moment. I’d much rather choose that than not eat or drink and feel a whole lot worse because I wasn’t able to get it together enough to cook for myself. But the reverse is true as well—if I’m so focused on my long-term goals and making a huge impact on the world but that means I’m not taking care of my day-to-day needs, I’m making a huge mistake. We all need to consider which serves us best in a given point of our lives, and it’s not failure if the best thing for us today looks like emergency cozy nesting mode.
A local prevention conference is happening tomorrow, and I have a lot of feelings about the fact that I’m not going to be there. I’ve been involved in some capacity with planning and carrying out this annual conference for at least fifteen years, but not this year. I have had to make decisions in 2026 about where best to allocate my energy, and that’s been hard for me. I still care deeply about prevention, awareness, recovery and treatment of substance use disorders, but I haven’t had it in me to be a part of this year’s event. The same goes for the One Life suicide prevention 5k earlier this fall—I wasn’t there for the first time in many many years. I feel badly about both of those things, but I know I need to save the strength I have, since I have so much less of it. I hope that changes someday. I only have so much of myself to give, for the first time, and I’m having to re-evaluate all of my commitments in that light.
A Mountain Goats lyric that has resonated with me for years, from “Choked Out” goes, “Everybody’s got their limits, nobody’s found mine”. That’s how it felt to be Matt for a long time. Until six months ago, when I very suddenly discovered my limits. Losing Kellie has taught me a great deal about humility, because I am not the same guy I was before her death, and I am not remotely capable of the same things.
Sometimes the smell wafts around the place and you get so used to it that you tell yourself you’re just imagining things, that there IS no smell after all. Sometimes that happens when your focus is on the wrong stuff, like the goals that will take literally years to accomplish, when you’ve completely forgotten to drink any water in the last six hours and cannot grasp why you feel so THIRSTY. Then you go for a walk and when you come back into the house you’ve gotten the reset you need, and you realize that there is DEFINITELY a smell. And you’d better address it.
I hope you’re able to make the healthiest possible choices for yourself this week, instead of feeling locked into a mode that doesn’t benefit you in the moment. I hope you’re able to tell the difference between the anxiety, or the sadness, or the smell, and what you should actually be focusing on right now. And I hope you’re feeling okay tonight.
Me? I’m feeling pretty great. Because last night (at approximately midnight), I figured out where that damn smell was coming from. On Sunday morning, I forgot to turn on the dryer after washing a bunch of towels. Oops. Problem solved.
XOXO,
Matt