Show Notes:

Today we are finishing up our On Leave series – we are going to focus on managing guilt and other tough feelings that tend to come up when we’re away from the work we have loved and been committed to doing. Whether we’re off work due to injury, illness, mental health concern or some other reason, being off often comes with a host of emotions – big and small, obvious and more innocuous, that can disrupt our ability to focus on recovering and can force us to struggle more when we’re trying so hard to pick ourselves up. 

When I first sat down to outline the On Leave series, I intended for this episode to be a conversation about self-care and how this needs to adapt when we’re off work. But as I started getting into the details of the series and this episode, I realized that while self-care is a piece, what we actually need to talk about is bigger – deeper. We need to talk about the yucky stuff that lives underneath that tends to make the time off really tricky, and can prevent us from being able to utilize self-care strategies and adapt them to our needs. What is the dark underbelly I’m referring to? Well… guilt, shame, neglect, abandonment, loneliness, identity… these are the heavy hitters on the list.

Let’s take these one at a time and talk about how they tend to show up most commonly in being off work, and then we’ll work at talking about how we try to move through them and make our way to something more recovery-oriented. 

Guilt. Guilt is a feeling whose job it is to let us know that we have done something wrong. Appropriate guilt shows up when we have violated someone else’s boundary and behaved in a way that is contradictory to our own values. It’s the emotion that causes us sufficient discomfort to move us toward apologizing, making amends and being accountable. It is what helps us drive change within ourselves in order to live more in alignment with who we see ourselves as being and how we wish for others to experience us. Guilt, when appropriate, is actually a really helpful emotion that allows us to have morality and ethic – it guides us in engaging in ways that are principled and grants us the capacity to have a relatively functioning society. 

Now, you may have noticed that I used the word “appropriate” a couple of times in there to describe guilt that is meaningful and helpful. The challenge with guilt is that we can have a tendency to inappropriately generalize it to situations where it doesn’t belong. We can “feel badly” for what we perceive to be a problem, even if it’s not – or if it’s not our problem to feel badly about. Here’s an example: I often hear people who are in First Response and Front Line Work roles share that they feel guilty for going off work when they are fully aware of the staffing crisis their specific workplace and profession are facing. The guilt weighs heavy on them and the wrestle to use the time off to focus on their own wellness and recovery because they are wracked with the emotional burden of guilt surrounding removing themselves from the staffing rotation. The problem with this is that going off work isn’t violating anyone’s boundary. Feeling guilt for going off work doesn’t serve anyone in terms of having accountability and amends and repair and moving forward with changed behaviours. The guilt for this is not yours – it belongs with the system that fails to staff appropriately, or under recruits; it belongs with the upper-level directors and managers who have failed to offer more support and manage staff retention; it belongs to the professions that have limited access to entering the field; it belongs to the government level funding limitations… guilt for the staffing shortages belongs in a lot of places, but it doesn’t belong with you.

Look, I get it. It’s hard to be off work and hear from co-workers about how they are drowning. It’s hard to not be emotionally connected to that. We’re empathic and we feel a sense of awareness of what it feels like to be in their shoes. Yet we, as one singular person, are not going to be the difference between drowning and thriving. And we can’t help others if we’re not ok. 

The trickiest thing about guilt is that we have culturally tied it in many ways to another feeling: shame. If you haven’t read Brené Brown’s work yet, do it. This is her wheelhouse. She and others who research shame have identified over and over again that shame is the one feeling that offers nothing. Guilt communicates something to us, it says that that thing I said or did was hurtful and not ok, and I need to work to repair that. Shame says that because I said or did that thing that was hurtful, that there must be something wrong with me, that I am bad. Guilt gives us the discomfort to move us toward repair. Shame just undermines our sense of self, and it can rob us of feeling like we have worth. Guilt has the power to move us toward an outcome that is connective and healing. Shame serves zero positive function, it only erodes.

I often find myself drawing the difference between guilt and shame for clients, and it frequently feels revelatory to consider that guilt – an uncomfortable emotion – serves a meaningful function; and that shame – an all-too-familiar and even more uncomfortable emotion – only serves to harm us and others. When I allow shame to have a voice in my head, it not only undermines my internal sense of worth, value and meaning, but from that place it impacts how I am likely to show up in my world – which vicariously robs others of what I might otherwise bring to the table. Shame makes us play small and fearfully. It makes us worried about how others will see us and terrified that they might see what I fear is true of me. It makes us pull back and hide in the shadows for fear of being fully seen and exposed. This feels simultaneously protective of my shame and totally isolating and lonely.

When I talk with people who are off work, especially from helping professions, there is a lot of pride that comes with the work they do. It feels like it means something about them that they do the job they do. And that’s cool…mostly…but then it also feels like it means something about them when they CAN’T do what they did for a period of time, or perhaps ever again. This has a tendency to elicit self-judgements and a shit ton of shame. It means I can’ hack it, I’m not strong enough, I failed, and so on. When we think about sitting in these feelings and self-thoughts, it doesn’t seem like the greatest place from which to experience healing and recovery, does it? 

On top of guilt and shame connected to being off work and how we make meaning of ourselves for being off work; we can also face another set of emotional challenges: neglect, abandonment and loneliness. All too often I hear people who are off work share about how they wrestle with the discrepancy between what their work team meant to them when they were working, versus how that same team ghosted once they went off. Unfortunately this is a really common experience. First response and front line workplaces tend to language concepts like “brotherhood” and “family” into their workplace identities. They focus heavily on “having each others backs”. They are often professions where we spend a disproportionate amount of time together compared to other kinds of job, and we spend it entrenched in stress where it is an “us against the world” approach to interacting with whatever comes our way today. While all of this can contribute to really bonded workplace teams, it can also feel really difficult for those who exit this dynamic to take a leave from work. We can feel out of the loop, not included and forgotten. Some workplaces are...