Managers and owners … I’m looking at you. It’s because many of us are burnt out and we transfer our anger, our bitterness, and our pain onto those we deem weaker than us … our employees and our coworkers. Funeral directors are good mediators except … except with it comes to their own work-family.ĭid you know that a large percentage of stress for funeral service workers is caused by their bosses and co-workers? It’s because we don’t understand our own stress management perspective and we don’t understand the stress management perspective of others. Even though it’s a joke, it’s often true. I sometimes jokingly tell people that the reason they pay me is because I can navigate and mediate their family disfunction. What matters, however, isn’t the generational differences, it’s that we try to understand each other. Some millennials hold to the PRIVACY = GOOD STRESS MANAGEMENT while some gen-xers, boomers and older hold to the TRANSPARENCY = GOOD STRESS MANAGEMENT view. These two perspectives on stress management aren’t always generational. For older generations, keeping our problems and stress private (or ignoring them entirely) is viewed as brave. Right now, your superpower isn’t being Superman, it’s being honest.įor millennials specifically, transparency and vulnerability with our stress are considered brave. It’s okay if we make policies at the funeral home that protect us as well. It’s okay if we tell people that we’re afraid for our families too. More than ever, we need to show our own humanity, even if we’ve repressed it for so long in an attempt to serve others. When we’re talking with families, don’t try to be the strong one. Yet, we usually hide our own feelings because we’re supposed to be the strong ones. We invite them to tell us what’s happened so we can feel their feelings, know their thoughts. When we meet with families, we want to hear their honest stories. I don’t know what the future holds and that’s okay.” It’s saying to ourselves, “I feel anxious and that’s okay. Whereas pain validation is giving yourself permission to feel and validating that your feelings are okay. Self-pity can too often be self-centered. Unknowingly and unintentionally, that minimization of our own feelings eventually diminishes our ability to care for those who need us.Īnd just so we’re clear, pain validation isn’t the same as self-pity. Just like we give compassion to the bereaved, it’s okay to give it to ourselves because the chef can make wonderful food and eat it too.Ĭaregivers often minimize our own pain so that we can focus on the pain of others. But, we’re too often like the five-star chef who makes unimaginably good and healthy food for her customers but will only allow herself to eat the scraps. We practice it every time we walk into a home for a home removal, every time we meet with grieving families, and every time we direct a funeral. As we all face this pandemic and the unknowns that come with it, we’ll have to focus our superpowers outwardly towards others AND inwardly towards ourselves. In fact, most of us only know how to use our superpowers for others, but we hardly ever use them for ourselves. If you’re in death care (or any type of caretaker position, paid or unpaid), you probably already have these superpowers.
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