![]() ![]() When you are talking to a person in a ring smaller than yours, someone closer to the center of the crisis, the goal is to help. She can kvetch and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens and say, “Life is unfair” and “Why me?” That’s the one payoff for being in the center ring.Įveryone else can say those things too, but only to people in larger rings. The person in the center ring can say anything she wants to anyone, anywhere. One of Susan’s patients found it useful to tape it to her refrigerator. When you are done you have a Kvetching Order. Intimate friends in smaller rings, less intimate friends in larger ones. Parents and children before more distant relatives. In each larger ring put the next closest people. Repeat the process as many times as you need to. In the case of Katie’s aneurysm, that was Katie’s husband, Pat. In that ring put the name of the person next closest to the trauma. Now draw a larger circle around the first one. In it, put the name of the person at the center of the current trauma. She calls it the Ring Theory.ĭraw a circle. It works for all kinds of crises: medical, legal, financial, romantic, even existential. Susan has since developed a simple technique to help people avoid this mistake. And it was wrong in the same way Susan’s colleague’s remark was wrong. This woman loves Katie, and she said what she did because the sight of Katie in this condition moved her so deeply. “I wasn’t prepared for this,” she told him. A friend came and saw her and then stepped into the hall with Katie’s husband, Pat. She was no longer covered with tubes and lines and monitors, but she was still in rough shape. ![]() She was in intensive care for a long time and finally got out and into a step-down unit. The same theme came up again when our friend Katie had a brain aneurysm. “My breast cancer is not about me? It’s about you?” ![]()
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