Help Yourself by Helping Others

I have a client who's been dealing with a lot of changes and loss over the past year. She's a bright and very intelligent young woman and is very motivated to help herself. One strategy I deploy with clients is to help them focus on troubles other than their own.

My client was very receptive to this idea. I suggested that maybe she consider volunteering. Locally the possibilities are rich; the Mission, Vandy Children's Hospital, Food Not Bombs, Hands on Nashville etc. She said she would consider these options and even gave herself the assignment of making a choice by the next session.

She came into to her last session and told me she had made a decions: She's going to Haiti. For seven days she is going on a relief mission trip. She will be helping build temporary shelter. I was amazed. She had investigated and researched organizations going to Haiti and found a local group that had an open spot on their team. She will be sleeping in a tent and working hard every day in an environment more unlike Nashville than I can imagine. My hunch is that the symptoms she is dealing with will be absent for the week she is in Haiti.

Volunteer work, focusing on the needs of others, is not a panacea, but it is very helpful when we have become overwhelmed with our own struggles.

For anyone dealing with chronic health or mental health issues there is a built in self centered-ness that can be stultifying. Getting out of our comfort zones seeking to be of service to others, or better yet to be of service to a greater good, can be amazingly therapeutic.