An Acceptable Level of Need

Who helps you when you are too much?

In the summer of 2024, I celebrated my newly healed brain by promptly trying to break myself all over again. The habits of a lifetime….

In my last years of being adjacent to Catholicism, I became someone who people kept seeking out. I was known to be available to listen. I think it would be completely fair if people thought I was an insufferable busybody at the time. For me, in a state of flux and uncertainty, I was simply trying to know as much as possible. To take the temperature not just of the room, but my whole world. To know where hurt was happening and try to address it so that everything and everyone around me would be safer and more stable. At the foundation of my participation in society, I was still the little girl who tried to solve the problem of taking care of my brothers in a park by taking responsibility for the whole park. Still the teenager who would always regret not paying attention to the noise in the next room. I had not yet found healing.

I mostly just listened, but one story needed more than listening. I mentioned before, at the end of college, I did what many sheltered, Catholic girls in my circles did and found a husband because I did not know how to survive in the world. There was more to it than that though. There was also the pressure of the whole culture. We were all supposed to start a family as young as possible while engaging in traditional gender roles.

This can go poorly.

By the time 2024 had rolled around, my husband and I had met people who were genuinely, successfully called to have large families. They were fewer than the people who had them. I know a couple with five children who manage to provide each of them with a full, active, individual life while both working and being there for each other and their friends. Amazing. A friend who continues to inspire me has ten children for whom she and her husband have managed to do the enormous mental labor of moving homes and schools to meet their needs and interests while still setting an example of being complete human beings who pursue their own passions. An incredibly rarity.

We knew too many people who had been broken or were breaking in the culture we grew up in to think otherwise. Too many people who thought they had to have children. Had to have a certain kind of family. Like the young woman who came to live with us the summer of 2024 with her five children.

My husband is a saint by the way.

Their story is not our story, so I won't be telling it. But, in telling our story, I can say that we saw in her what we had seen in so many people we had grown up with and went to school with. The loneliness and desperation of doing everything you thought your culture wanted and finding that what you tried to serve has no answers when it fails you. We did our best to be present for them for two and a half months while they lived with us. We were not enough for what they needed. Learning that was another important step to healing. My husband and I do not regret trying to set something against the damage we had seen in our world. But in the attempt, I maxed out myself, my husband, my children and my friends. When I say there is too much need and damage in the world, I am not without experience.

I was also too much.

According to the Catholic Church, Christ is the answer to too much. I wish they did a better job of demonstrating how that is supposed to work.

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

The reason I wrote about my experimental healing experience with little reference to my faith is because by the time I was taking my first dose of MDMA, I had already come to understand that in most of Catholicism as I had experienced it, there was an acceptable level of need. Whatever that acceptable level of need might be, I was far beyond it.

And that is okay.

It is okay to find the people, the support, the example, and the kindness, we need wherever we find it. I found the final steps of what I needed in a group of committed scientists who are trying to find answers for harm that they are not responsible for. I found a level of accompaniment that I rarely glimpsed in the Church.

This ends up being my problem. It would be fine if the Church told everyone that they are not the answer to all the problems in the world, and everyone should be unashamed of needing to seek answers elsewhere. There are absolutely individuals in the Church who do this but it needs to become part of the culture.

In my almost forty years of Catholicism, here is what I experienced. There is plenty of visible support and accompaniment for the ideal and everyone who is trying to reach it. There is very defined, compartmentalized support for the not ideal that Catholicism is not responsible for. There is little to no support for those whom Catholicism has failed, and if it's there is it's not well advertised or supported. This is why I keep coming back to Simcha Fischer's “Why we must leave the ninety-nine.”

“Some American Catholics haven’t learned a damn thing from our ordeal. Some American Catholics, when they hear about new victims of sexual assault and abuse by Catholics, are still dragging out all the old defenses:

Well, but look at all the good fruits.
Well, but look at all the energy we waste if we focus on the tiny minority.
Well, but we have to think of our reputation.
Well, but no one will trust us if we admit there’s a problem.
Well, why would you even dare to criticize us? Is it because you hate shepherding and want anarchy?

Well, but it’s just one sheep. It’s unfortunate, but . . . we’re in the fold, and we’re doing all right.”

I have met far too many priests and Catholics who have been comfortable telling the broken and the bloody to just take their problems to Christ and the saints. There is something very clean and sterile about this for everyone else. If problems are too big and too messy, if they are too uncomfortably adjacent to guilt and responsibility, they can be sent off to sit with the messy, uncomfortable, bloody stories that are safely in the past. By themselves. Come back with your trauma also in the past, please, and contribute to our pantheon of success stories. It feels very prosperity gospel.

As human beings, we already have enough trouble with the stories we tell ourselves about how we are supposed to be and where we are supposed to get support. I have seen people trap themselves with their own nightmares because they believe they can't ask for any support at all. I have also seen people burn out themselves and everyone around them because they have a story about how they should only have to or are only allowed to get support from their parish, their friends, their priest, their sacramental marriage, their therapist. None of us is enough for anyone else and all of us are too much for anyone else.

It is therefore a serious matter to claim to follow Christ. If you are going to claim that and fail to be present, fail to accompany, fail to even listen, don't send someone to a building with a presence you might believe but that they clearly don't know how to reach by themselves. I listened to people tell me that clearly I was special because my experiences with trauma allowed me to be present for others in a way average Catholics and priests couldn't be expected to be. Someone should be Christlike. Someone should push the limits of what they can hear, hold, do. Someone else.

Why can't it be something people work on?

Why can't it be something Catholic specifically learn?

I do know Catholics who take that on. I do know men and women who break themselves while others "protect their peace." They might do this because something inside of them responded to something they were taught in a way that is truly what people claim to be Christlike. But it's the exception not the norm. I really do believe the Church should look into that.

My family and I found healing outside of Catholicism, and if we find our ideal I am sad to say most of us will likely keep it elsewhere. We have our limits. I don’t know for certain. I don’t even think the Church would want me back at this point. I do not have a success story for them. I would not give my story to the Church for it to claim. It would be a lie if I did. I know that the people who are most able to see me and be present for me now are those who have also known what it is to walk away. Not necessarily from the Church but from something.

I still love listening, and I am still available to listen. I listen now because I want to. Not because I need to. I'm not responsible for anyone else's problems anymore, and I don't intend to be put in that position again. But, I am happy to show up and be present for those authentically seeking their own solutions, wherever that may be.

At the end of last summer, my middle children both had days where they cried at me because they were so very tired. My teenagers informed me that they would like me to look into pursuing an advanced degree. They told me that they loved me and that they understood that I was someone who was going to keep caring but there needed to be bounds on caring. There needed to be limits. If I became a professional, I would not, for example, be allowed to give out our home address to anyone except friends. Friends are okay. After everyone recovers.

I love them. None of us is limitless. And none of us should have to be.