My nurse got a phone call from a woman who told me that her husband was missing.
Her husband was my patient and she wanted me to know in case he somehow contacted me or was ill. I thought it was an odd question but didn’t think that much more about it and went on with my day.
It was over a year later when he called me. He was having some symptoms and wondered if he could come in to be checked out. I agreed to see him and worked him into my schedule promptly.
I had a lot of questions. What had happened? Where had he gone? Was he still “missing”? It was going to be an interesting office visit.
I saw him in the examination room. We talked through his medical problem, I did an examination, and I ordered some additional testing.
And then it was time to ask some more questions.
I sat down in the chair across from him. I looked him in the eyes. “I had a call from your wife about a year ago. She said that you were missing. She asked me to let her know if you contacted me. Are you still missing?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“Can I let her know that I saw you?” I asked.
He thought for a minute. “You can let her know that you saw me and that I am okay.”
“What else?” I asked. “Where have you been? What have you been doing? What is going on?”
“One day I was driving home from work,” he replied. “Things were not going well with my business. I had a lot of stress at work, with my family and in my life in general. When it came time to make the turn to drive home, I didn’t turn. I just kept driving.”
He just kept driving. Where?
“I didn’t really know where I was going to go. I just kept driving and driving. I ended up in another state. I eventually got a job and found a place to live, and I have been there ever since.”
“Where did you end up?” I asked him.
“It is okay for you to tell my wife that I am alive and that I am okay. But I’m not ready for you to tell her where I am living. It is far away – in another state.”
That was it. I later heard that he eventually went home to his wife and family. He ended up going to counseling and working through a lot of the issues that initially drove him away.
“I just kept driving,” he had said.
I think everyone sometimes thinks about this response to stress. Could you just run away from home? Imagine ignoring everything that pulls at you or weighs you down. Imagine just hitting the cruise control button and sitting back and driving away from it all.
I read a number of sailing books. The common theme in these books is for people to sell all their possessions, quit their jobs and sail off into the sunset. “If you’re fond of sand dunes and salty air, quaint little villages here and there…”[1] is a repeated line in a song that I like.
I reassure Sarah that it is good for me to read these books. The concept of sailing away from all responsibilities sounds amazing. The execution is never quite so easy. They inevitably run into troubles and complexities. It is not just that they escape. They really just trade one set of problems for another.
But in this case he ran away from home. He had an enormous weight of responsibilities on his shoulders. He just left them all behind. Is that the answer?
It didn’t solve any of his problems. In fact, it created a lot of new ones. I am sure they had a lot of trust issues they had to work through going forward. His relationships could not ever have been the same. I know that they worked through it and lived on. It had to have been hard however.
It would have been so much better if he had just cried for help before he ran away. The counseling would have likely been easier without all of the abandonment issues he left his family with. It wasn’t like he fixed his problems by leaving. He was certainly not without anxiety, stress or guilt while he was away. He may have hidden it in his mind[2] or tried to do so. But it was always hanging there in the background. Driving on didn’t actually fix anything. It just made it all a lot more complicated.
The vast majority of us will never do this. We will consistently every day make the turn and drive home. But we do act a little bit like this when we face obstacles or barriers to forward progress.
Let me explain.
All of us face obstacles all the time. You are working on a project. You run into a barrier or something hard to do or overcome. Our natural tendency is to turn away from it and work on something else. We know that the issue is there. We may even feel a sense of dread about it. We know that somehow and some time we are going to have to face it. But we prefer to hide or turn away. We work on a myriad of easier tasks that we want to do instead. The bigger problem sits in the background and festers and grows until eventually it explodes into a crisis or becomes such a problem that we are forced to deal with it.
Sometimes the problems are really big. It might seem like there is no way to get through the problems. You might not know what to do. You might think about escape as the only option.
“I can’t deal with this.”
My patient should have:
- Made the turn toward home.
- Sat down with his family and asked for help.
- Worked through the hard questions and issues that needed to be addressed.
- Gotten help in that process. Maybe he needed financial help. Maybe he needed to sell his business. Maybe he needed help to talk through it all with his family. Maybe they needed to make dramatic changes. Maybe he needed treatment for the stress or depression that was creating the dark (and overwhelming) cloud over his life.
Your obstacle might be something at work. It might be a small thing that you are putting off dealing with. It might be something big. You might have to swallow hard and step up and face it.
Your obstacle might be something in your personal life. Eventually you are going to have to deal with it. Are you going to push through and deal with it? Or are you going to run away?
There is always a way through. “This too shall pass.” Sometimes it is not possible to get there on your own. That is okay. Get help.
The vast majority of the time the best thing to do is to face it. You should just walk into the barrier and start working on overcoming it.
- Make the turn. Don’t run away. Turn so that you are intentionally going toward addressing the obstacle.
- Sit down with others involved and if you need it, ask for help.
- Don’t shy away from hard work or having to make hard decisions. It doesn’t help to run away from it. Face it.
- Get help in the process. You are really and truly never alone. There are people who can help. Ask for the help you need.
Hit the blinker. Make the turn. It is going to be okay.
[1] “At the River” by Groove Armada, Tummy Touch Records, 1997
[2] https://manmedicineandmike.com/compartmentalization-how-putting-thoughts-aside-can-be-both-constructive-and-destructive-in-your-life/
