New Article on stress, anxiety, and self care for activists

I sat in front of my clinical supervisor for my fortnightly meeting in which I was supposed to talk about how I was coping, and how my work helping others was going. “I’m feeling really stressed at the moment.” I started off by saying. This was not an unusual way for me to start supervision sessions. I was hesitant to even bring this up, because I’d talked about my work stress often before and things didn’t seem to be any better for doing so. “How would you rate your stress from 1-10 at the moment?” She asked me in response. “I’d say an eight.” “Eight’s pretty high.” She said, then asked: “What are you doing for self care.” I rattled off a few things I was already doing, meditation, running, spending time in nature. All of the right answers, but I was already doing these things, and was still feeling stressed, and truth be told, pretty unhappy. I quietly despaired, pretended that I’d have a go at the further suggestions for self care that she made, and changed the topic to the work I didn’t want to do with drug and alcohol addicted citizens of West Auckland, who mainly didn’t want to get state mandated help from me, either.

Eventually, sick enough of the work and the workplace that skipped over the surface of the real social and personal issues, I left, a decision I never regretted for an instant. Looking back, I see this experience of so-called self care as actually being the managing of both clinicians and citizens - a substitute for real connection and healing, and certainly a substitute for addressing the disempowerment of both workers and the poor of West Auckland.

Read the rest of the article by Michael Apathy here...