By Jaime Sork, MSW, RSW
As a clinical social worker, my professional work has included
intimate witnessing of human suffering. I have seen the patients
I work with suffer, their family members suffer, and the health
care professionals caring for them suffer. I have seen individuals
become exhausted, their caring and compassion spent, burnt out.
I have also seen individuals who seem to walk directly into the
suffering and as a result I witness personal and professional
growth. They appear to gain strength or is it reduced fear of
suffering, I don’t know.
As a clinical social worker this question and many others, has
travelled with me over the length of my career. I wasn’t
sure if I would ever get an answer to these questions and am still
not sure of that. I have however chosen recently to focus some
specific energy in exploration and searching. This searching comes
in the form of work on an interdisciplinary doctoral degree.
I was one of those people who after completing each of my degrees
said, I will never do that again, and here I am again! My interest
has stemmed from my own experiences of transcendence at times
in my work, and also witnessing the transcendence experiences
of my colleagues. For me the experience of transcendence has been
significant and important, what I have also noticed is that the
sense of transcendence is impermanent. That just when I seem to
have grasped a sense of getting through a difficult time in my
work, I am often faced yet again with another situation that challenges
me and I struggle with it all over again. I want to try and understand
how this all works, in the hope that this understanding may some
how be useful in relation to education and preparation of health
care professionals in the future.
I am just beginning to formulate the process of investigating
this question. I plan to rely on interviews or written accounts
of health care professional's experiences of transcendence as
the foundation on which I hope greater understanding will develop.
It is a challenge I undertake with excitement and trepidation
as I wonder, is it really possible to understand this phenomenon,
is it possible to capture it in words, since I have experienced
it myself more as a sensation or feeling. How will this work fit
in an academic setting and is there really an answer to the question
of what is the experience of transcendence of suffering?
The choice of our work includes multiple exposures to human
suffering. What is our experience of this, what do we gain, what
do we lose? Ram Dass and Paul Gorham note in their book How can
I help? “It’s unbearable and beautiful at the same
time. How do you explain that? It’s just the part of you
that’s with them is getting ripped up. But the part of you
that’s, like trying to understand it all…well, that’s
beautiful because you see that you can be, we all can be, in the
presence of great pain, but still appreciate life, even in its
last moments. Especially then” (p. 71)
. For me this is the beginning of what I expect will be a long
and interesting journey. Given my uncertainty about the possibility
of finding answer, my goal is to do my best and to enjoy and relish
the gains and gifts of the process. Jaime is a social worker in
private practice.
