How Can I Help?

This week we discussed family life stresses and how people cope. Everyone has different circumstances and goes through different things in life. We all have different things we need to learn while we are on this Earth, and our Father in Heaven has a different path for all of us to go through. Some of us go through harder things than others, but I also know that we can get through anything that is put in our path if we have the Savior with us.

Personally, I feel that my life has been pretty easy, but I see so much that others go through and struggle with. That is part of the reason I want to be a Marriage and Family Therapist. I want to help people through those tough things that they experience. Obviously, I can not do everything, but I hope that I will be able to be helpful to some.

At first, I started to think that maybe because I have not experienced even close to some of the terrible things that other people have had to go through and feel in their lives that maybe this is not really a career that I can do. My teacher talked about how his family experienced the loss of siblings and children more than once, and I have never felt that. I wondered how I could even begin to understand and know the feelings someone else is having in a time like that. After really thinking about it, I realized just knowing that I do not understand completely what people are going through is better.

I can focus more on being compassionate and empathetic and listening. Listening is a very important thing that not a lot of people always remember to do. As I strive to do these things, it will become easier to help them find their own solutions, rather than giving all the answers. I think that is really what I should be trying to do anyway. Trying to give someone an answer to every problem they have can be problematic anyway. I think of the often-heard idiom, “If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.” In the same way, if someone always has answers handed to them, they do not learn to overcome these struggles later on if they come up again.

I guess what I am saying is that if I can help people to see where the problems lie and find their own answers, they will be more likely to be able to do it again in the future. They will be much better off, and they will realize that they did not really need me anyway. I just led them in the right direction.

I hope that I can be as loving and empathetic and compassionate in this career as I would like to be. I hope that others can also seek to see outside of themselves and look for how they can help others, even if they do not understand what they are going through. And I hope this post made sense. I am excited to work with families and help them through struggles and hard times to overcome those things and see how strong they really are.