Puppy Love (aka: "Eat me, Paul Anka")

skip the intro

There's a saying I quite love, which is "each time I become the person I needed when I was young, I heal just a little bit more."

As a parent, and in my own career as an advocate and service provider for vulnerable folks in crisis, one of my fundamental values is honoring individual agency, and creating a safe space for authenticity and being truly heard.  It can be difficult to respect someone enough to allow them to make their own choices, and even mistakes, when our experience and/or expertise compels us to project what we know to be "better."

Am I really serving anyone well if I simply prescribe their journey based on my own?  My own experiences quite unanimously lead me to conclude a hard "no."  As service providers, it is exponentially more time consuming, and often messier generally, to allow our clients to be their own person and navigate their own journeys. When it comes to our children and loved ones, it can be excruciatingly painful.  Currently, the fentanyl epidemic makes all of this all the more terrifying - and too often, heartbreakingly tragic - as never before.

But we all also know that "do it because I said so" doesn't work either.  If we really want honesty and genuineness from others; if we really want those we love to develop their own internal gauges and understandings, we must be willing to hold space for our own discomfort, and even pain, along the way.  Life has a unique way of pairing our own growth and strength specifically with conflict and pain.  When it comes to government policy and resource allocation, we absolutely can (and should) demand change in prescriptive ways (aka: actual democracy).  But when it comes to interpersonal situations and the people we love and/or serve, we can never change "what is" - our power lies only in our response.  And it is a profound power that carries through our entire beings and lives.

Puppy Love recalls another favorite quote of mine: "the map is never the territory."  One of the things it ended up showcasing is a fiercely incongruent interplay between an internal and external dialogue.  As a parent, and in my profession, awareness of this kind of incongruence is fundamental to the support I strive to provide, always. 

Survival and self-preservation, after all, is never more than juggling precarity and all the infinite spaces between when disclosure and nondisclosure is safe or dangerous.