Trauma Points

A revamp of workplace budgeting and case assignments recently hit me like the proverbial truck. I was splayed by it and unusually so--an "old" therapist by now by any accounting, these things usually rolled off me--just tell me what to do. But when the news came that I'd see more children and more teens, i caved.
It will make me crazy.
I can't do it.

Then a few days later I'm in here writing about events in my career fresh out of grad school, when I worked with more children and more teens. The flashes of trauma points were almost blinding. Suicide pacts, hurricane devastation, organized crime and pseudo-Satanic cults, etc, etc. Those were the early days of my career in Houston all the while I'm focusing upon the children and there was more: suicide after suicide just for starters and then my own crash and into rehab with alcohol poisoning. There it was. The "It will make me crazy" and the "I can't do it". It had nothing to do with my patients. It was my alcoholism.