Andygirl, I’m trying to empathize with what you’re talking about. I’ll offer two scenarios, and hopefully one of them will help you out.
First of all, if you mean “Who do I lean on when someone’s leaning on me?” then I’m a little lost too. The hardest three months of my life were when I volunteered at an abused womens’ shelter. Having grown up in a very similar situation, I found myself listening a lot to the women, trying to let them release everything. But it was terribly draining on me as well. I absorbed all their pain and they were better, but I was still holding it in. The best I could do was write; write in journals, write stories and work on my book and try to use the pain as inspiration. It was hard sometimes not to lose control, to get so angry over what we were put through, but it didn’t help. I never effectively solved that problem, and that’s what made me decide not to be a social worker. That was my goal for about 7 years, but after those three months, I knew it wouldn’t work for me. It takes a certain kind of personal strength and altruistic nature to give of yourself so completely, and I have neither.
If, OTOH, you’re talking about helping someone cope with pain…well, I can help you there, since it’s always been an issue with me. The best way I can talk about it is to explain this passage I read once, in a book called “The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” by Rebecca Wells. There’s one part where the main character Vivi remembers the worst day of her life, and she says that people are like earth, that they have these cracks and fault lines. Most people can’t see them, though, so they treat them less kindly than they would if they were aware.
I think there’s a lot of truth in that, for me. I understand that most people I encounter don’t know about my childhood or the issues I deal with, so I can’t really get mad when they hurt me, can I? But when I open myself completely to someone, when I explain what happened and how it affected me, well, if they don’t alter their treatment of me because of it, then they aren’t helping me at all. For instance, I hate being yelled at. If you scream at me, I immediately become catatonic, and I usually start crying. I shut down. So if someone does that not knowing, then I forgive them. But if a person knows that I am so sensitive, and does it any way, then they are not helping me or respecting my problem.
A lot of people try to sweep everything that has hurt them away, to make it not matter. That’s easy if you’re still pissed about not getting a bike when you were seven. But if it’s something bigger, like rape or abuse, then you can’t sweep it away, and if someone wants to love you, then they have to allow for that, for the fact that you need a little more love.
Remember that the person who is dealing with whatever will always, always be dealing with it. Huge matters like the ones that have been mentioned never die away. Just because you forget about it does not mean they ever will. I guess then that it does take extra effort to love someone with such problems, but that’s the price.
Hope I helped in some way.