Overcare – Make Sure Your Care is Helping, Not Hurting
"Care is love in action," Institute of HeartMath founder Doc Childre once said. The capacity to care in human beings and other living creatures is an expression of love that is marvelous to behold.
IHM has cautioned for many years about the importance of balancing the care we feel or experience for family, friends and others in our lives, at the workplace and in issues related to our communities and the world.
You may wonder why we even need to balance our care: After all, isn’t caring as boundless as our capacity to feel it? That is true for many people, but it is not unusual for most of us to take our caring to excess from time to time.
When the care we give to a sick relative, a friend going through a rough patch or a cause dear to the heart causes anxiety, guilt, anger or a feeling of being drained, these are warning signs of overcare. It is quite common for any of us to occasionally overidentify and overattach ourselves to the object of our caring, especially if it involves someone we love.
"The draining cycle begins as we over identify with a situation, an issue, or a person we care about," the HeartMath book Understanding Care explains. "In other words, we identify too much. We begin to overcare and want to see things go a certain way. We get overattached to how we want things to turn out. As a result, we’re less able to let go and we become obsessive."
It’s important to check this draining emotion if it begins to overshadow our caring so it doesn’t adversely affect other areas of our lives. "Curiously enough, when overcare exists in one area, it usually results in a lack of care in another area," Understanding Care notes. "It’s like squeezing a balloon at one end so that it pops out at the other end. This lack of balance in care is causing much of the increased stress and burnout we see in individuals and society today."
What should you do?
Those who feel and offer genuine, balanced care will always be OK, so by all means never stop caring, for it is one of the great joys and rewards of life. A measure of balance is wise, however, as we seek to comfort another, promote our causes or advance in our relationships.
Should you find that you or someone you know is experiencing any of the symptoms of overcare, the HeartMath Cut-Thru® Technique can help. This technique is ideal for cutting through overcare, overidentification and overattachment and reducing the resulting stress. It can help you balance quickly and get back on a track of genuine caring.
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