The River: An analogy for high-achieving helpers

It’s no secret that burnout among helping professionals is a full-blown emergency. In my home state, over half of teachers in our largest districts are emergency-certified, meaning that professional teachers have either left the profession or left the state, largely due to burnout and hostile legislation. There’s a notorious therapist shortage that’s only getting worse, and the statistics for physicians are alarming, too. Among faith leaders, chronic stress and burnout are literally killing people.

What does this look like in your life?

Do you leave work completely depleted? No energy for family, let alone friends or social time?

Is it hard to explain to family and friends the realities you wrestle with all day in your work?

Do you feel irrationally angry in ways that simultaneously wear you out and make you feel guilty?

Are you worried about the future of your profession, the people you serve, your state, or your country?

That’s a heavy load to bear in addition to the burden our work entails automatically.

So how do we understand this? How can we possibly explain to our loved ones, let alone senators and policymakers, how we deal with the “end users” of broad social issues daily?

There’s an analogy that can help us with this. I use it a lot in my work with abortion care providers, whose work has been under literal and legislative attack for years, escalating recently to unprecedented levels. No one seems to know exactly where this analogy originated, but Desmond Tutu famously used it and is widely quoted for having done so. My take on it is slightly different than his.

The analogy goes like this: A person is walking along and comes to a river. As they draw closer, they notice a child struggling in the water, drowning. Without thinking, the person runs to the river, dives in, and rescues the child, pulling her back to the riverbank. Immediately, the person hears splashing and cries of distress behind them. They turn around—another child is in the water! They swim out and bring that child to the bank. No sooner do they deposit that child safely on land than they hear another child struggling in the river. Again and again, they dive in and fish the drowning children out, all the time wondering: what is happening upstream? Why are these children winding up in the water? But they can’t stop jumping in to save the children to find out.

This analogy can help us situate ourselves accurately in the social landscape. First of all, if you’re a jumper-in, your job is stressful in a different way than the job of someone “upstream” whose role is, say, counting the children in the river or alerting someone to the fact that there are children in distress.

Others are involved in decisions about creating railing to keep children out of the river, or creating bridges so that children have safe ways to cross the river, etc. Still others are involved in professions that don’t seem to have anything to do with the river or the problem of children being in it. Those are essential jobs, and yet they are essentially different from jumping into the river to save children. The toll that “jumping in” takes on our bodies and psyches is different and more direct.

Secondly, when “upstream” conditions worsen through legislation that deconstructs safety nets, economic downturns, loss of body autonomy and other rights, increasing poverty, increasing violence and instability, etc., the children in the stream are in worse shape. There are more of them, for one thing, and they’ve been battered against rocks, have breathed in more water, are thrashing harder and fighting to survive (which sometimes manifests in ways that look like they’re fighting us).

Finally, when portions of the public have been manipulated into thinking that somehow the jumpers-in are the problem (think of how they turned against “healthcare heroes” and how inflammatory the rhetoric around teachers is in some states), they may be screaming abuse at you while you’re jumping in to save their kids. They may even be pelting you with rocks or going upstream to make your job harder.

So what do we do? This analogy can get overwhelming fast. First, take a deep breath and remember: in order for someone to need us to jump in and save them, they must have already been failed by multiple layers of systems upstream.

It’s easy, as a person who’s watching in horror while children struggle to survive, to feel that we alone are responsible for whether those children make it or not. If we have to stop and catch our breath, that means we’re going to watch a couple of kids drown. But if we don’t, at some point we won’t make it back to the riverbank. We’ll wear ourselves out and drown, and then we never help anyone again.

We have to say no sometimes, or we won’t make it. But in order for our “no” to be the last no, many, many systems must have failed that drowning child before they got to your part of the riverbank. That does not make it okay. It’s just a more realistic perspective than “that child died because I personally failed.” It’s still hard.

Because I work with high-achieving jumpers-in, I sometimes hear, “well, I’m just going to keep jumping in until I die. I can’t stop to catch my breath if kids are drowning.” All good and well, until you come to that critical moment when you know that this trip out to the river will be your last, and that neither you nor the child you want to save will make it safely back to the riverbank. What then? After you sacrifice yourself, children will still be drowning, and your family and friends have lost someone whose life meant more than jumping in the river over and over.

Sometimes it’s hard for high achievers to believe that you matter more than your accomplishments. It’s hard for helpers to believe that you are more than the people you’ve helped. If this doesn’t feel true to you—if your mattering in the world feels completely dependent on your performance in your work or your achievements—maybe it’s time to talk to someone about it.

 Therapy can help you reconnect with the parts of you that matter outside your work, as well as the parts of you that make your work contributions so special. You can recapture joy and meaning in your work and in your life outside of work.

Click here to email me for a free consultation to see if working with me would be a good fit for you!