Tiny Buddha

Tag: Pain

  • How I Healed from Gaslighting and Found Self-Love After the Abuse

    How I Healed from Gaslighting and Found Self-Love After the Abuse

    “I smile because I have survived everything the world has thrown at me. I smile because when I was knocked down, I got back up.” ~Unknown

    Had you asked me only two years ago I wouldn’t have even been able to tell you what gaslighting was, nor that I had been a victim.

    That’s the thing about gaslighting, it can sneak into your life unknowingly, and before you know it, it can lead you to breaking point where you are doubting your sanity and your life is spiralling out of control.

    Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse, where an uneven power dynamic is created by an abuser, leading their victim to doubt their reality.

    Gaslighting is insidious in that it can begin subtly, then, as the victim’s confidence is chipped away, can lead to further forms of abuse, where the victim is coerced into submission of the wants of the abuser.

    I was in my twenties when I met Chris* (*name changed). He was charming, he complemented me, he made me laugh, and the chemistry between us made us virtually inseparable. I was in love, my life was perfect, and there was nothing that could bring me down from the loving high I felt.

    It did, though. Things came down, crashing down, and only three years later I was in the midst of a breakdown and contemplating suicide.

    I can’t exactly pinpoint when the gaslighting started; I had what I thought were misunderstandings—me just being “stupid,” forgetting things or making a “big deal” out of nothing. Chris was always the “brains” of the relationship, and I was “fortunate” that he corrected me when I made these errors. I had no clue this was only the beginning of what was to come.

    Then one day I was about to confront Chris for cheating on me, after finding evidence on a phone of mine he had used, when he uttered the words that were my undoing: “You do know that imagining things is the first sign of craziness, right?”

    Staring at me was a man with a cold stare. “You’re crazy, I don’t know how I can be with someone who makes up lies about me like that.” I looked at the phone, which was empty, no evidence of messages showing he had been unfaithful. They had definitely been there, and I had seen them, or at least I thought I had?

    I no longer lived with the Chris I loved; instead, he was replaced with a Jekyll and Hyde, who on some days was loving and on other days was calculated and manipulative.

    These changes in character were another form of ammunition in the mind games of gaslighting, allowing the gaslighting to go undetected. By granting me good days, it lured me into thinking things weren’t as bad as they were, a form of control to avoid me leaving the relationship.

    It also gave Chris further power by accusing me of being “ungrateful” when I attempted to protest later unacceptable behavior. “After what I did for you the other day, you accuse me of this?” How could I think negatively about him after all he was doing for me? And so the abuse continued.

    Each day I walked on eggshells not knowing what I would do wrong by Chris, and as a result I became a shadow of my former self, losing all confidence. With my loss in confidence I lost my ability to defend myself, and as a result was subjected to other forms of cruel abuse.

    Despite feeling my life was falling apart, I rarely considered leaving; instead, I clung onto the relationship, attempting to repair the damage I was made to believe I had done.

    Even if I had decided to leave, I felt I had no one, or nowhere to go. For over two years he told me I was crazy, so I had started to believe that was my truth. I thought if I tried to turn to someone for support, they would only reinforce that I was crazy or not believe me.

    It still brings a tear to my eye that I couldn’t open up to my sister, one of the closest people in my life. After seeing the dark circles under my eyes and weight loss, she asked if I was okay. The only response I could utter was “I’m fine.” The sad truth was that I wasn’t fine, I was far from it; my life was in chaos and I was starting to feel I couldn’t cope much longer.

    The strain of living in fear finally took its toll, so I hit my rock bottom. I felt that if I didn’t leave, there was no other option than to take my own life.

    Somewhere inside I took the last ounce of strength I had to leave. I was faced with a barrage of message from Chris, which switched from messages of promising to change, to messages of hate, having lost his control. How, I don’t know, but I managed to maintain no contact, blocking him out of my life forever, and for the strength I had during that time, I am forever grateful.

    Despite how low I had gotten I still was unable to identify that the relationship had been abusive, whether out of denial or lack of knowledge, and so did not reach out for support. Instead, in the years that followed I’d experience panic attacks, never felt safe, and had a gut-wrenching fear of certain people.

    I’d been so manipulated that I assumed these behaviors were just further evidence that I was “crazy”, and so I lived in this shame for another ten years.

    Finally, two years ago I did one of the bravest things I could have done: I listened to the small voice inside of me, the small voice that for the past twelve years had told me things weren’t right. The small voice that had been silenced by my abuser, that had been my apparent “crazy.” The small voice that knew I should have left, but that I didn’t have the confidence to listen to.

    I now realized that small voice was my gut instinct, and it was telling me that my life could improve, but I needed to open up and seek professional support.

    It takes an enormous amount of courage to open up and engage in important healing work after abuse. In asking for support we are opening ourselves up to be vulnerable, when it was our vulnerabilities which have been exploited.

    We are putting our trust into people, after having put trust in people who have hurt us.

    We are allowing opportunities to feel emotions and have a voice when our emotions and voice were ignored or silenced.

    Without support, though, we risk remaining in abusive relationships, or repeating patterns of attracting toxic people into our lives.

    This is by no means an exhaustive list, but these are some of the things I have learned and done as part of my recovery, which has allowed me to begin to love and trust in myself again.

    I’d like to note that I refer to “abuse” in this section, because that is what gaslighting is, a form of emotional abuse. I’d also like to note that in realizing we have experienced abuse, it is important that we don’t state this to the abuser. Accusing a person of abuse can put us at increased risk of negative consequences. Instead, seek support from those who are trusted/professional support.

    I’ve acknowledged the abuse.

    Acknowledging the abuse has been a long, and at times difficult but necessary process.

    Due to the manipulation I experienced I’ve been challenged with frequent questioning if what I remember was correct. I’ve also spent many a sleepless night trying to rationalize what happened, making excuses for Chris.

    These rationalizations and questioning were a coping mechanism, to avoid the pain of admitting someone I loved could hurt me. Being patient with myself and being willing to trust the process together with my therapist, I’ve slowly come to terms that I have been subjected to abuse.

    Frequently I would utter the words “but he wasn’t like that all of the time.” I’m learning that regardless of the amount of the time, even it’s only 20%, abuse is abuse. As we begin to heal, we find a newfound respect for ourselves and become unwilling to accept any form of abuse in our lives.

    Throughout the process of acknowledging I’ve experienced abuse I’ve been gentle with myself. I had to allow myself time to grieve the relationship with the person I had loved and who at times I still love.

    I’ve given myself permission to feel any emotion I’ve needed to feel; I’ve cried, felt immense sadness, fear, and I’ve felt anger. While raw, each emotion has been necessary, and now that I’m coming out of the other side, I have a newfound love and acceptance of myself without the shame and guilt I had once lived in.

    If we want healthy relationships, we need boundaries.

    “Boundaries” is another term that entered my vocabulary shortly after I began therapy. A boundary sets a personal limit on what behavior is acceptable or unacceptable with us. Boundaries can represent our emotional, physical, or spiritual needs; they may be different for various people in our lives, e.g. family, friends, partners, colleagues, and can be adapted according to the trust we develop in a person.

    Before I learned about boundaries, I had felt selfish for having my own needs. What I hadn’t realized is that setting boundaries is in no way selfish, and instead come from a place of self-love, self-respect, and self-worth.

    I also feared that setting boundaries would lead me to be abandoned and rejected, not realizing that people who respect our boundaries are the ones we should keep in our lives, and those who don’t we should remove.

    With a better understanding of boundaries, I have been able to understand the role I have played in relationships; by not being clear about how I wish to be treated. As an example, I would say to Chris I needed space when he would shout and swear at me, yet I never followed through. Unintendedly I was communicating to him that I had low self-worth, and so made me a target for abuse.

    To set a boundary we need to communicate our needs and if necessary, implement consequences when they are not respected. This can be hard, particularly if we have experienced any form of abuse that has led us to lose our voice, but with time and practice it gets easier.

    To assist in communicating my boundaries, I have spoken to trusted friends and my therapist about things going on in my life and what I needed from a person. By listening to me these people have given me the opportunity to practice what I would I like to say.

    In time I’ve begun to communicate things that are important to me and my well-being; I’m no longer feeling forced to do things I don’t want.

    Boundaries are of course two-way, and my ability to respect other people’s boundaries instead of feeling abandoned has also improved. I’m not perfect at it, but it is empowering to honor my needs, and in doing so my relationships have also improved.

    I’m learning to have fun again.

    How ironic is it that you leave an abusive relationship only for your life to still feel controlled; only this time it is by an inner bully, the internalization of all the abuse you have experienced?!

    For years my internal voice was relentless: “You’re worthless, you’re dumb, you’re so stupid.” At times it was as bad, if not worse than the abuse. I also had an incessant fear that “something would go wrong,” and as a result was hypervigilant constantly scanning for threats and risks. As a result of the inner critic and hypervigilance I lost the ability to have fun, not being able to let my guard down.

    Realizing these inner attacks were flashbacks and emotional scars from years of constantly being belittled and gaslighted gave me relief.

    I’ve learned that while they can be scary, they are just thoughts, they are not true and cannot hurt me.

    Mindfulness has been a powerful tool in overcoming these attacks; when an attack has been brought on, I’ve noticed it happening, not reacting, just noticing. I’ve then been able to introduce thought-stopping, where I have been able to interrupt the toxic thoughts at their first sign with a counter thought such as “stop,” or “I’m safe now.”

    Learning to have fun again is one of the hardest parts of my recovery; there are times when it is harder, particularly when I have a lot of stress going on in my life. It is a journey and takes time, but my inner bully has decreased, and I am allowing more fun into my life.

    Above all, I’ve treated myself with love and compassion for what happened.

    My therapist has repeatedly reminded me “You did the best you could in the situation with the resources you had available to you.” Prior to hearing this I judged myself incessantly for not leaving the relationship sooner, and for waiting so long to seek support. I felt I had wasted years of my life and felt like a failure.

    By judging myself, I realized I was continuing to hurt myself. As I’ve begun to heal, I have been able to reframe my experience from self-criticism to self-compassion.

    Emotional abuse is destructive both in the short term and long term, evoking feelings of fear, confusion, hopelessness, and shame. It comes as no surprise that during the abuse I had been unable to look after myself. Again, as with anything there are harder days than others, on days where I am unable to provide myself with kindness, I ask myself how a loved one would respond to me in the circumstances?

    Each person’s experience will be different, with mine being only one example. In writing this article my desire is to raise awareness of the devastating impacts of gaslighting and to share a message of hope.

    To anyone reading who is experiencing, or who has experienced abuse, we can have a better life where we no longer live in fear. While our trauma begins in relationships, having access to trusted and healthy relationships can also help us heal.

    It isn’t a quick process, but with each day things can and will get better. Having been forced to the deepest lows of my life, and made it to where I am now, I am living proof that we can have a better life.

    You are beautiful, you are loved, and you are a survivor. Be kind to yourself.

  • Why I Was Desperate to Be With an Unavailable Man

    Why I Was Desperate to Be With an Unavailable Man

    “If you don’t love yourself, you’ll always be chasing after people who don’t love you either.” ~Mandy Hale

    In January, a couple of years ago, I had been declared unfit for work, suffering from anxiety and mental exhaustion. For too long, I had not listened to my body and soul complaining about all the heavy burdens I had been carrying.

    Out walking at this time, the bitter cold and relentless rain felt like a blessing to me, grateful to at least feel something. It was on one of these walks that I first bumped into an old school friend, hearing him call my name before I saw him smiling hello at me.

    To begin with, I felt reluctant to chat or attempt to return the happy smile as he asked after my brothers, having known us since we were all kids, but I began to walk away feeling a bit less tense and felt an urge to see him again: “Call in for a cup of tea if you’re passing.”

    And he did call. But I wasn’t in—I was out battling the elements again, trying to walk through my confusion and melancholy. My adult son called me: “Some weird guy with a ponytail has just knocked on asking for you,” he voiced with scarcely concealed outrage.

    I’m not sure whether the outrage was caused by the fact that a man had knocked on our door asking to see his mom or whether it was at the audacity of the man’s long, graying ponytail, at his age.

    A week later, he called again and this time I was home. I welcomed him in and shut the door against the winter blackness. The house felt cosier somehow since he was there, noticing my daughter’s artwork on the wall before he had finished taking off his shoes.

    Sat together in the lounge, I was struck by the way he curled his feet up easily on the chair as I sat upright and uptight on the couch opposite. Before long, I had confessed my inability to work. He shared that he was off work too as he had recently lost his father and that his mother was now terminally ill.

    The next time he called I was out again, so he pushed his mobile number through my door. I lingered looking at the bold handwriting in crimson ink. I do remember I hesitated before I put his number in my contact list.

    Why did I want or need his number? Maybe I had identified that he was a troubled soul too. I sent him a text saying: “Thanks for your number. This is mine.”

    Now we had both admitted that we wanted to be able to contact each other. From this point the texting became more frequent, and so did his visits to me. But then he told me that for the past year he had been living with somebody and her three children.

    Classic rebound stuff—he had moved in with her immediately after the end of a twenty-six-year relationship. Of course, I did the decent thing and said we couldn’t see each other anymore. I wished I could have been angry and indignant, but instead my vulnerable self crumpled a little more as he took me in his arms to give me a hug.

    I rebuked myself for being in this position when I was in the middle of so much mental and emotional turmoil. I had survived the break-up of a marriage and another long-term partnership—I told myself I could certainly recover from a few-week-dalliance.

    “I need a hug,” the message bleeped. So do I, I thought, but steeled my resolve to not return his message. Some time elapsed and then came another message, “My mum has little time left.”

    His pain was tangible. So I put my needs on hold and arranged to see him. A pattern began: talking through the night when the rest of the town slept; trips to doctors and hospitals; visits to see his mum together; soup-runs to him at the nursing home. And I suppressed the nagging question about where his ‘partner’ was in all this.

    In March his mum died. Our intimate bubble was burst by the grief, practicalities, and conventions of death.  It was his ‘partner’ that stood by his side at his mum’s funeral in April while I sat home alone, bereft at the thought of his loss and facing the reality that I had been cast aside.

    I decided I would go away to visit friends for a month to get some distance. I needed to iron out my crumpled life, to see what was worth holding onto and what needed to be discarded.

    I also hoped it would give him time to decide if he wanted for us to share a future. Looking back now, I wonder if I was so desperate to be with him because dealing with his pain was a distraction from my own.

    “I will be ready for our future when you return.” I was relieved that he was resolved to sort the situation after all of the emotional angst of the previous months. “Only collect me from the airport if you are sorted,” I urged.

    The night before my flight he still hadn’t confirmed that he had left her. I needed to know the situation I was walking into: “Sorted?”

    “Not quite.” I know, not very fair of him, right? Not just to me, but to his partner who must have felt painfully his constant distraction. I had a long-haul flight to dwell on how another month could have elapsed during which he had made regular and frequent contact with me, promising me a future together, only to have let me down again.

    Jet-lagged and sleep deprived, I sat dejectedly in his car—hardly the homecoming I had hoped for. I might be a programmed people-pleaser, but even I could see this was going to dent my damaged self-esteem even further.

    “There is no relationship until this is sorted.” I stopped contact with him, but emotionally I hadn’t let it go since the promise of a relationship was still on the table.

    Eventually, he decided he would see a hypnotherapist. He began telling his painful tale. But it was still not completely told: he gradually moved his stuff out from her place but couldn’t quite tell her the final line of their story: “I have to leave you now.”

    I didn’t see him for over a year as he tried to muster his final resolve. I knew we three were squirming our way through lonely nights and taut days, as we crawled, emotionally spent, toward the end of our story. I knew that it would involve a final, painful telling of, “It’s over,” from one to the other of us caught in this mess.

    I had always imagined that it would be him that would make that call to either her or me. This shows just how powerless I felt. It is evident to me now that the three of us were caught in this web for one striking reason: we each didn’t love ourselves enough to withdraw from this damaging situation.

    I am so grateful that I eventually gave myself enough distance to heal myself properly. I now really understand what people mean when they say you have to be ready for a relationship. I became strong and I learned how to love myself first.

    So strong that I moved away from my old, unhappy life and took myself on an adventure where I had time and opportunity to listen to my own needs. I had spent months trying to fix a damaged and broken man instead of fixing myself.

    Many, many months later, when I had a new life and was at the beginnings of a new relationship, he turned up, out of the blue, and asked me to marry him. He hadn’t quite left her yet but would be leaving her that night. It was me who said, “You’re too late. It’s over.”

    I’m not proud of my part in all of this. But I have forgiven myself as I know I was so emotionally vulnerable when he first came into my life.

    Following this emotionally exhausting experience, I have learned:

    • You can only heal yourself, you can’t fix others.
    • You will be treated by others as badly as you allow.
    • You are responsible for your own happiness.
    • To let go of the people who have caused you pain.
    • Above all, never wait to start living your life.

    It was painful to tell you this; to be reminded of how little I valued my own needs, putting his pain above my own and hers too. I am happy to say I now don’t recognize the me that was so damaged and broken.

    I love myself everyday and I’m delighted to know that “nothing can dim the light that shines from within.” (Maya Angelou)

  • How I Found the Gift in My Pain and Let Go of Resentment

    How I Found the Gift in My Pain and Let Go of Resentment

    “Change is inevitable, growth is intentional.” ~Glenda Cloud

    How much time slips by when you’re living in the pain of resentment? Do you ever question if your bitterness has held you back from living your true destiny? Is blaming everyone else sabotaging your life and future?

    It’s only now that I can admit to the years I wasted pointing the finger at everyone else. It was easier for me to say it was their fault than accept responsibility for my own decisions. For me, attaining perfection was validation of my success. If it wasn’t achievable, then it was obviously someone else’s fault.

    Until one day, I took the time to watch the Tony Robbins’ documentary movie, Guru, for the second time. Amazing when you watch something again or read a book twice, you get something different out of it.

    There was a young girl struggling with the lack of love she received from her drug-addicted father. After admitting that it was her father’s love she craved the most, Tony Robbins led her to a breakthrough perspective.

    He told her if you are going to blame him for everything that went wrong, like not being Daddy’s girl, then don’t forget to blame him for making you a strong woman too. He reminded her that she was allowed to blame him for not being around but not to forget to blame him for teaching her how to cope at such a young age.

    Suddenly, I felt a shift within me. I connected to the anger deep within me, and somehow it no longer felt so heavy. What was happening? Unexpectedly, I realized the pain of my resentment was actually a gift.

    I have carried a lot of emotional weight in my heart, some of which still remains. My heaviness is rooted in childhood memories of hurt and confusion. At the blissful age of eleven, just when I thought life was pretty safe and stable, I had the rug ripped out from underneath of me.

    Infidelity and unfaithfulness had crept into our home and turned everything upside down. Everything I knew faded away as my mother threw his things around, screaming and crying. She was so emotional, and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. Her anger was wrapped up in sadness as she packed up all of my father’s belongings into black trash bags.

    One by one out the door, like little pieces of my heart that she was just bagging up and throwing out. She set them out on our front lawn, and I stood there grieving.

    She didn’t see the little girl in the corner crying along with her. Someone forgot the little soul who was being traumatized by these big emotions. No one stopped the chaos for a minute to realize my heart was breaking too. My memories of Christmas traditions and Saturdays at the grocery store never came back.

    Everything changed, and I hated this new life.

    From then on, everyone always seemed sad around me. I recall listening to my grandmother try to comfort my mother as she wept in her bedroom for weeks. I can still see the shame in my father’s face as he came and visited us every once in a while.

    The raw vulnerability and pure helplessness I felt during those years were probably the most painful parts. The sense of being abandoned and left with all these intense emotions to deal with was so demanding. The pressure of trying to figure things out with no sense of direction left me with an underlying sense of unhappiness all the time.

    It was then a seed of undeniable pain was planted. I would spend years nurturing this seed like it was my life’s purpose.

    Growing up, I appeared to be okay with the change, but the days of confusion were simply endless for me. My new normal was abnormal, and the finality of the chaos ended when I accepted the idea that my parents would never get back together.

    My mother was left trying to hold it all together, and it was a struggle to watch over the years. For the sake of her children and with the little strength she had left, I watched her work tirelessly to preserve the memory of a good life.

    Despite her dedication to her children, the inevitable happened: Her little children grew up. We created our own version of our childhood memories, and our seeds of hurt began to bloom.

    It’s a shame how pain, resentment, and fear have a way of spreading like wildfire within us. It shows up in the friends we hang out with, the partners we choose, and the weaknesses that destruct us.

    When things fall apart, it’s hard to think clearly, let alone follow a path of success. It’s far easier to point the finger and hand out slips of blame to anyone close to you. But after years of feeling heavy, I was tired. I was ready to let this baggage go.

    That evening, I reflected on what Tony Robbins said to the girl: “If you are going to blame people, then blame them for everything.”

    This is how I transformed my resentment into gratitude:

    If I was hardened by the things I didn’t get as a child, then I must be grateful for the life skills I now possess.

    The resourcefulness I’ve gained throughout the years is immeasurable. I don’t say that out of arrogance, but out of pride. I used to resent the lack I grew up with, but now I’m so thankful because it nurtured my resilience. The desire for more fostered an enormous amount of determination within me.

    If I blamed my parents for a tough childhood, then I must also thank them for teaching me how to be a great mother.

    The insatiable craving to feel loved, noticed, and important gave me the skills to connect with my son on the most fundamental level. I know the value of establishing and maintaining this relationship with him because that’s all I ever wanted growing up, a close connection to my parents.

    If I was saddened by the years of confusion in my life, then I must acknowledge the beautiful clarity present in my life now.

    The tears shed were not in vain. Instead, they washed away a distinct path for me to travel. I can see the gift of my writing. The dreaded confusion gave birth to my innate ability to connect to others’ pain and articulate what they feel.

    If I allowed the pain of my sadness to grow, then I must not forget to appreciate the goodness in my life.

    I know what it feels like to be sad, but this led me to experience happiness on a whole new level. I find joy in really simple things, like a good cup of coffee. I can feel bliss when I am with my husband doing absolutely nothing. Most of all, I can live with a sense of true contentment in my life.

    If I found fault in everyone for all the things I thought went wrong in my life, then I’m indebted to all these people eternally.

    The agony I perceived as targeted was destined to be part of my life. The people I couldn’t forgive, who fostered hate within me, I now love even more. It’s because of them that I now live a fulfilled life with more to come.

    You see, this is all part of life’s plan. The people we despise, the rage we harbor, and the bitterness we nurture are actually the tools we need to grow and evolve. The goal of transformation is to gain a higher level of awareness in our lives.

    There is no achievement in staying stuck when the goal is to walk through these milestones. The problem does not lie in another person; it’s the fixed perspective you are perpetually protecting. Do not prolong experiencing real joy. Time is fleeting.

    Transform your bitterness into sweetness, and your purpose will reveal itself to you. Dig deep, not to find fault in others, but to find the gifts within your soul; therein lies the gift of your pain and the beauty in all that you have suffered.

  • Why This Will Be the Year I Stop Running from Pain

    Why This Will Be the Year I Stop Running from Pain

    “One has to accept pain as a condition of existence.” ~Morris West

    This may seem sounds counter-intuitive, but this year I want to let go of trying to avoid suffering.

    It doesn’t mean that I am a masochist and plan to spend the next year being miserable. It’s more a question of learning to accept life as it is—uncertain, full of surprises, and with its full quota of difficult circumstances.

    Our Wish for Happiness

    The thing is that we all want to be happy. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if we fear not being happy, then we have already undermined ourselves. We get so focused on chasing things that we think will make us happy that we forget the bigger picture.

    Parents tend to raise their children telling them they want them to be happy. We are surrounded by advertising images of what a happy life looks like. When we feel down and unhappy, we tend to feel that somehow, we are letting people down, that we are failing in some way. No one wants to feel like a failure, and so we double-up on our strategies to avoid suffering.

    Our Strategies to Avoid Suffering

    We keep ourselves busy so that we don’t have time to sit and reflect. There are a million ways to entertain and distract ourselves. If we get bored, we can surf social media. When we feel down, we can go shopping, watch a movie, go out for a meal—whatever our preferred escape route is.

    When suffering gets past the distraction and forces us to pay attention, then our avoidance goes deeper. We push it away. We pretend it’s not there. Suffering becomes the enemy to happiness and something to be avoided as quickly as possible.

    When avoidance doesn’t work anymore and the suffering is staring us in the face, then we go for fixing it as soon as possible. We talk about putting things behind us, of moving on. Rarely do we give ourselves the time to lean into our pain, discover what it is showing us, and try to act on that.

    Pain is Inevitable

    The very nature of life is that we don’t know what is going to happen from one moment to the next. Everything is in a state of flux, however much we try to pin things down and organize them. Our bodies can be damaged. We grow older, get sick, and eventually die. People change, relationships blossom and then fade away.

    Look into any aspect of your life and see how it is continuously moving and changing. Think back over the changes that have happened in your community just in the time you have lived there. Go back further in your mind—fifty years, a hundred years—small changes, big upheavals are happening all the time.

    In the midst of all this we get hurt. Loss, disappointment, broken hearts, worries, and anxieties are all part of the package. Although we want to be happy and we don’t want to feel pain and suffering, deep down we know it is inevitable. Suffering is part of life however much we don’t want it and what’s more, it happens to everyone.

    My Reminders for Changing my Habit

    This is the basis for changing my habit of trying to avoid suffering. I want to remember that it is simply part of how life is. It’s not a conspiracy against me; everyone has problems and worries. We are all in the same boat in that respect.

    If I spend a lot of time worrying about how something could go wrong or a situation might get worse, then I am already making myself unhappy. What I am worrying about might not even happen. In fact, I could be worrying about one thing and in the meantime another unforeseen problem creeps in.

    Like many people, I want my life to count for something. I want it to have meaning and purpose. If I am honest, much of my deepest learning has come through times when things are hard, and I am struggling.

    In trying to cope with challenges we can be motivated to look really deeply into ourselves. Our avoidance tactics don’t get us anywhere, so we kind of let go and try to understand what is going on. When we can do this, suffering and pain can be our greatest teachers.

    When we are tired and weary with it all, then we can at least try to find a place in ourselves for acceptance. Instead of crying, “Why me?” we simply accept that this is what is happening right now and all we can do is work with it.

    Personally, I find this kind of patience very hard, but I am a meditator and so I can put some distance between a situation and my reaction to it. When it works it brings such relief. It is so much more nourishing than fighting against things and trying to hide away.

    Lastly, perhaps one of the most precious aspects of facing suffering is the appreciation that we gain of how things are for other people. Just as we suffer, so do they.

    If I am struggling to come to terms with a friend who has become increasingly distant, the chances are that there arehundreds, perhaps thousands of other people going through something similar at the very same time. So, with the acceptance and patience come a strengthening of compassion, which can become part of our deeper learning.

  • How to Ease Your Suffering and Confusion by Deciphering Your Emotions

    How to Ease Your Suffering and Confusion by Deciphering Your Emotions

    “The symphony of bodily feeling, mental thoughts, and images is emotion. It is the symphony on which people must learn to focus, to understand their inner stirrings and to harness its message.” ~Dr. Leslie Greenberg

    Like most people in our Western culture, I didn’t learn to read the language of emotions growing up. I had no clue that our emotions are purposeful information about ourselves, our relationships, and our experience in the world around us. They actually carry messages about what to do—what actions to take to meet our needs for safety, balance, and contentment.

    Like all people, my parents were a product of their generation and their family dynamics. Both of their childhoods consisted of emotional deprivation and trauma.

    Like all humans, they did their best to survive.

    Their intolerance to deal with the transgenerational trauma they carried led them to numb themselves through partying and drinking every weekend to avoid their pain. In the eighties this resulted in relying on pretty much any kid from the neighborhood to babysit me and my brother. One of those babysitters sexually assaulted me when I was seven.

    I had no skills to deal with all of my feelings from this and other life experiences. Like all kids, I adapted quite automatically and unconsciously to my environment.

    Like many victims of abuse, I tried to numb out and not feel. I started experimenting with drugs at age fourteen, not having any insight that I was drawn to teens doing the same because we were all trying to self-medicate—to cope. When I didn’t have drugs to help me zone out, I ate. And ate and ate and hated myself for it.

    Of course, the uncomfortable feelings would be only temporarily anesthetized, inevitably reappearing with equal or more intensity. I felt like an open funnel where any soothing, satisfaction, or peace I experienced siphoned through, leaving me again faced with my vulnerability, like a dark cloud I couldn’t shake that brought with it more anguish than I could bear.

    The illusion of love and care from boyfriends became another way to detract from the shadow within and distract myself from negative feelings.

    A history of ignoring and trying to avoid my feelings meant that I also couldn’t hear their messages telling me “This relationship isn’t good!” I heard the whispering inner voice that said “leave this jerk,” but I stayed far too long, not trusting or believing my feelings mattered.

    The earlier abuse and unresolved trauma I carried had eroded my sense of self-worth. Without knowing how to read the cues of my emotions that told me otherwise, the internalized belief that I didn’t matter, that I wasn’t worth protecting, was the one I acted from.

    Although I was desperate to just feel better, the choices I made because of these unconscious beliefs and disconnection from my emotions left me feeling worse and worse, running from a dark shadow that followed me always with mere momentary lapses of relief.

    Like for many people, it took a level of pain and despair that was no longer tolerable for me to change the course of my life.

    The means I used to numb myself lost their effectiveness to numb the pain. The emotional abuse I endured by my boyfriend put me in a trance of darkness so far from myself that “brainwashed” is the closest descriptor that comes to mind.

    It took the depth of this darkness before I finally listened to the inner whisper—the voice of something or someone inside me that said “Enough.” I woke up out of what seemed like a trance and left the dysfunctional community I was in. But still a dark cloud followed me.

    I made many steady positive changes towards being healthy. I cut out the toxins—both substances and relationships. I went back to school and exercised regularly (to feel better, not just to look better).

    I learned about mindfulness and began meditating daily. I ate healthier food and slowly and steadily started to treat myself like my own close friend. Though smaller, and with breaks of light, the dark cloud continued to follow me.

    I was accepted into graduate school to become a therapist and I met my soul mate, but I still didn’t understand my emotions.

    The aha moment came while sitting in a training course to learn about emotion-focused therapy from its developer, Dr. Leslie Greenberg. The missing piece of the puzzle that had eluded me finally landed.

    Dr. Greenberg taught that emotions are actually purposeful, important, and meaningful information. Like data, when understood and translated, emotions can help us connect with our needs and values. They are the clues to the path to find meaning and happiness in our life.

    I had spent my life avoiding, pushing down, and viewing feelings as the greatest nuisance—something to try to shut down and get rid of. It rocked my world to learn that they are actually purposeful, natural, and wise—they are there for a reason!

    “How is everyone not freaking out right now?” I wondered.

    How is this knowledge not everywhere, in every school, so we can all learn the skills to deal with our emotions and not suffer so much? Why is knowledge about emotions so esoteric?

    After that epiphany, I became a devout emotion-focused therapist, training as a clinician and finding true healing working with Dr. Greenberg as his student and client. I finally rid myself of the hanging cloud by learning how to process my deeply suppressed emotions and resolve my unfinished businesses of the past.

    Transforming my relationship to my emotions was the missing piece that allowed me to fully heal. Learning to be with my emotions, investigate them, and process them was like letting go of 100-pound chains shackled around my body all these years.

    I felt free and empowered, knowing I no longer had to run from myself. I could decipher the inner sensations of my emotions and actually use them to get out of life what I want and need for peace and happiness.

    For the past decade, I have taught hundreds of people how they too can ease their suffering and confusion by relating to their emotions differently, with mindfulness and compassion, and by processing the unresolved emotions that have been stored as their own personal shadows.

    Here is a brief synopsis of my knowledge about emotions, as well as some practices that can help you transform your relationship to—and experiences with—them.

    The Different Types of Emotions

    All emotions are not equal. There are different types of emotions—some are healthy and helpful, while others, linked with social conditioning and internalized from negative experiences are less healthy. To complicate things, emotional expression can also be used as a tool to try and get our needs met.

    Understanding the different types of emotions is a great first step in being able to read what type of emotion we might be feeling.

    1. Core Emotions

    Core emotions are a source of intelligence, hard-wired into us and available from two months old. These emotions tell us about what to get more of, what to avoid, and about the state of our relationship with others in the world.

    For instance, core anger informs us when we are being violated or our boundary is being crossed. Sadness is a core emotion we feel with any loss, and fear is a hardwired survival emotion to let us know when there is a threat to our safety.

    Core emotions tell us what action to take (e.g., core anger wants assertive empowered action, sadness typically wants acceptance and comfort, whereas fear will tell us to flee for safety).

    If they are responded to well (considered valid, without added judgment or resistance), they leave the body fairly quickly.

    But if core emotions are not responded to well by others in childhood, and especially if there is trauma, the emotions can be imprinted in a skewed and negative way.

    This is where people tend to feel stuck in painful emotions, which can last long after the situation that caused them—sometimes for years (e.g., feelings of shame, destructive rage, and unresolved grief).

    For me, feelings of shame and unworthiness were imprinted as a result of abuse. These core emotions (that include thoughts and beliefs) needed to be experienced and activated in order to access the adaptive and healthy emotions to help heal, such as core anger and self-compassion.

    2. Secondary Emotions

    Secondary emotions mask the core emotions. They are influenced by our judgment about emotion. They include internalized messages from culture about what is permissible (e.g., “boys don’t cry”). They can also be a form of self-protection or as a defensive mode (e.g., afraid of one’s anger or ashamed of one’s fear).

    These are the feelings that are created from thoughts. For example, if you have a negative thought about yourself, this will trigger a negative feeling, which in turn triggers another negative thought and there you are, caught in a negative ruminative loop.

    3. Instrumental Emotions

    This is a type of emotion that small children try on to see if they can get their wants met by expressing emotion, like the toddler who cries when Mommy says “No” to a second cookie (i.e. “Crocodile tears”).

    If Mommy gives in and gives the child the second cookie, the child learns that by using certain expressions of emotion, one can get what one wants. This reinforces the use of instrumental emotion, which is basically expressing certain emotions to manipulate others to get one’s wants/needs met.

    Anger, for example, can also be instrumental, like when people walk on eggshells around a family member and give into their demands in order to avoid the consequences of their anger. Here, anger is not primary, but is instrumental and as you can imagine, a big problem for all involved.

    Practices that Help You Get Better at Feeling

    While it may take some time, following these steps is a good start to change your relationship with your emotions and help you feel better by become emotionally literate.

    1. Meditate

    Practice mindfulness meditation or yoga to help build your capacity to stay present in your body. Mindfulness meditation has been proven to help expand your “window of tolerance,” which refers to the capacity to be with all of your sensory experiences, including uncomfortable emotions.

    2. Mindset

    Bringing an attitude of curiosity and care to your inner emotional world will help you start to connect with your emotions. Investigate and challenge any internalized myths/beliefs that emotions (i.e. tears) are weakness. Understand that your emotions are not who you are—they are energy, sensation, and experiences all humans are hardwired to have. They do not define you.

     3. Self-reflection

    Learning to pause and go inward to investigate your emotions is essential to see what type of emotion(s) you’re experiencing.

    Ask yourself: What am I feeling? Can I stay with it long enough to see if there’s something underneath? See if you can name what you might be feeling. It’s okay to guess if you’re not sure. (“Is this sadness? Fear? Anger?”)

    If you feel a negative emotion, like shame, question the truth of the thoughts that accompany it to help get underneath to the core emotion. For example, if the thought is “I suck at everything,” you might ask yourself, “Is that true?” Then ask, “Where did I learn that I’m not good enough?”

    Write down the messages you were taught and from whom. You might be able to see that you learned this from somewhere.

    Remember, just because it feels real, doesn’t mean it’s true. It is most likely one of those skewed, negative, unhealthy emotions that came with painful learning in childhood or from negative or traumatic experiences in your life.

    Recognizing our use of instrumental emotions is important to check ourselves. If you are using emotional expression to get another person to respond in a certain way, choose to be truer in your emotions. Investigate what it is you really want and speak directly with the person in your life about what you really feel and what you need.

    The practice of mindfully witnessing and reflecting on my emotions allowed me to know myself, understand my feelings and needs, and ultimately see that I am not my emotions. They are important information, but they do not stay stuck and they do not define me. This felt incredibly helpful and freeing.

    4. Express your emotions

    Journal/write/paint/create to begin to connect with and express your inner feelings in some way.

     5. Self-compassion

    Sometimes staying with our emotions is hard. Sometimes we close off or shut down from our emotions, which, particularly in cases of trauma, can be adaptive. Bringing an attitude of care and friendliness to our difficult emotions is essential.

    Not knowing what we’re feeling, or feeling something other than happy, needs to be held without judgment.

    As we work to learn the language of our emotions and relate to ourselves with understanding, it helps to approach our experiences with kindness, patience, and compassion. We are all feeling beings, and we all suffer at times in our lives. Reminding ourselves of this is paramount to healing and being better at feeling.

    You will find that practicing these steps will transform your experience of feeling. Over time, you will come to see that many emotions, when they arise and are not judged, dissolve naturally without activating stories of the mind or creating drama or painful narratives.

    When we investigate the stronger emotions that have deeper meaning for us and relate to issues of importance, we can close in on them with curiosity and openness, able to identify their inherent messages and heed their call to connect with our inner most needs and desires. We can connect with our true self.

    Getting better at feeling completely transformed my life. Thinking back to the times when I couldn’t bear to be with any of my feelings, drowning myself in anything I could to not feel, it’s like I was a completely different person. Eons away from my true self.

    Of course, I was still me. The difference is, I learned that my emotions are an importance source of intelligence in life. I learned how to read the messages of my emotions and to use them to connect with myself, which ultimately led me to pursue my dreams and my purpose. Which I realized is to help others do the same.

  • My Pain Was a Gift and a Catalyst for Growth

    My Pain Was a Gift and a Catalyst for Growth

    “Sometimes pain is the teacher we require, a hidden gift of healing and hope.” ~Janet Jackson

    I was becoming more and more confused as to what my feelings were toward my husband. Longing for that personal adult male connection, I started to feel trapped in my marriage. However, I still had a very strong sense of our family unit and my commitment to it.

    I wasn’t going to do anything to jeopardize the family, even if it meant sacrificing my personal happiness. I made a conscious decision that my life was enough. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough.

    However, within a few months, I knew in my heart that my husband and I were further apart emotionally than even I could accept or ignore any longer. I had to address it, but I had to do it carefully. I wanted to make sure my husband understood that I still loved him; we just needed to work on some things. I believed it would make both of us happier.

    I found time one night after dinner. We had just finished cleaning up the kitchen and were standing by the counter. The mood was relaxed and we had some privacy; the girls were busy working on their homework upstairs. It seemed as good a time as any.

    I took a deep breath and blurted out, “I think we are not as close as married people should be.”

    My husband looked at me funny, first a little quizzically as if he didn’t understand what he had just heard. Then his face relaxed and a look of release washed over it. His response shocked me to my core.

    “I agree,” he said with relief. “I haven’t loved you for a long time. I was just pretending.”

    “What? What did you just say?!?” I stammered, feeling as if I couldn’t catch my breath.

    His words were suffocating. I stood there, motionless, as a torrent of emotions raged inside of me. I looked into the eyes of the person I thought I knew completely, that I had trusted without question. A cold, damp feeling of dread came over me. He was the person I thought loved me unconditionally, the one that I had built my life with.

    What did he just say?

    Now, I wasn’t expecting flowers and chocolates. But I wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting his response to be more along the lines of “I agree. I feel it too. What can we do about it?”

    I was astonished. I was numb. I cried. I pleaded for some explanation. He had none. He said he would have gone on pretending forever, but since I dared to bring it up, he was able to finally be honest. We briefly tried marriage counseling, but his mind was made up. He didn’t love me. He was sorry. He felt guilty for the pain he was causing the girls and me, but he didn’t love me.

    We were divorced within the year. Everyone marveled at how civil we were. How well I was handling everything. I went into survival mode during the divorce proceedings.

    I had to protect my children emotionally. All of my strength went into doing that. I had to stay calm. I knew they were watching me. I tried not to argue. I tried to act normally. Really, I tried.

    I also had to financially protect myself and my children. There were so many things to think about. How could I stay in the house with the kids? They were in high school by then and I didn’t want to uproot them. How could I pay for college? We were just getting by with two salaries and one house. How could I make this work? We eventually figured the financial part out. In comparison, that turned out to be the easy part.

    He moved out, we got divorced, and then I fell apart.

    This experience exposed some very deep wounds within me. Wounds I had that for many years had been scabbed over. Deep, thick scabs that protected me and allowed me to pretend they weren’t there. Now, without warning, they had been ripped wide open.

    Wounds are funny things. We all have them. We respond from them, sometimes consciously, but many times not. They affect our thoughts and behaviors even when we’re not aware of it. If we look close enough we can even see others’ wounds in their actions.

    Some wounds can lie dormant for many years and only return to taunt us when we are faced with the very thing that wounded us. And the funniest thing of all is that wounds don’t heal on their own, regardless of how much we pretend they are not there. We have to heal them ourselves.

    My personal wounds had to do with self-love and my relationships with others. And they were deep, deeper than I had ever realized. When they resurfaced, I was surprised not only by their presence but by their intensity. There had been signs through the years, but they were easy enough to ignore.

    My wounds might surprise you. I believe most people consider me to be a smart, attractive, capable woman with many accomplishments in my life. “Capable” as a nice way to say assertive or a take-charge kind of woman.

    But there is also another side to me, a side that has deep-rooted feelings of not being “good enough” or not being “worth the effort”. My thoughts would go something like “I’m pretty, just not pretty enough. I’m thin, just not thin enough.” I’m smart, but intelligence wasn’t something celebrated in a girl growing up during the sixties and seventies. We were told to make sure we weren’t smarter than our future husbands, because men didn’t find smart women attractive, and God forbid of all things, don’t be capable.

    But the traits not celebrated were the ones I clung to. I believed they were all I had to offer. I was the smart and capable one. My intellect and the sheer force of my will allowed me to succeed in most endeavors. I became goal-oriented and proved my worth by accomplishing my goals. I never allowed myself to fail, because success was expected, it was the only thing that I believed validated me.

    That, however, didn’t translate into healthy personal relationships. I didn’t find value in myself as a whole person, so in turn, I never believed that the whole of me could be embraced, cherished, and loved. I was the only the “smart” and “capable” one.

    Why couldn’t I love myself? Why didn’t I feel I was worth the effort? Why didn’t I see the whole person and celebrate my strengths, laugh at my weaknesses, and cherish the little girl in me that was just doing the best she could?

    Eight years ago, I didn’t know. Today, after having lived through deep pain and more personal self-reflection and inner work than I care to admit, I believe I have some understanding of the larger journey.

    Pain was my catalyst. Deep, aching pain that stopped me in my tracks and made me choose between exiting this lifetime (yes, I considered it) and seeking deeper answers to heal the ball of hurt I had become. I chose to seek deeper answers and that was the beginning of my spiritual journey.

    Over the years I have learned to open my heart to myself and look at my experiences with a wider lens. I see my divorce and subsequent pain and depression as a gift that transformed my life and me along with it.

    I’ve traveled back into my childhood and identified the core trauma that I experienced that shaped the personality (the smart, capable, one) and the embedded belief (I had to succeed to have value) from the essence of who I am. That took a lot of work because the personality traits and beliefs we create are so intertwined into who we think we are that it is difficult to separate them, as they have been ‘us’ for our whole lives.

    In our defense, much of the ‘less than’ beliefs we hold are a result of the negative, punitive language that is deeply embedded in our religious and spiritual constructs. Many of us have come from a traditional religious belief system of ‘original sin and karma that we need forgiveness for’ and move to a spiritual belief system of ‘we need to learn our lessons and repeating our lessons until we finally get them.’

    What if there is nothing to learn and no penance to do? What if everything in life is an experience for us to feel emotion and live from that deep space? That every emotion is an opportunity for us to expand our awareness and embrace the magnificence of who we are.

    Deep emotions shake us out of our complacent lives and spur us into action.

    In the experience is the emotion and in the emotion is the gift.

    Keep digging because the real you is in there.

  • Honor Your Progress and the Path That Led You Here

    Honor Your Progress and the Path That Led You Here

    “In time and with water, everything changes.” ~Leonardo da Vinci

    This is a story about our past and progress. It’s about holding on and letting go, moving forward by moving inward, and time. And like any good story, it’s a love story in the end. I’m talking about the kind of love that eases suffering and restores peace. The love we show ourselves through patience and unconditional acceptance.

    It begins with a box in the back of my hall closet, tucked neatly beneath the snorkeling equipment and board games we always forget about. I’ve moved that box from Texas to Tennessee and back again, to California and Arizona.

    I last opened the box eleven or twelve years ago. I lived in Memphis then in a bright but lonely third-story apartment. There was a thunderstorm that day, and something about the dark afternoon and Clueless playing in the background made me nostalgic.

    I spent hours poring over old family photos and so many trinkets I’d forgotten about. An old nametag from my college dorm, programs from past performances, marching band gloves, complete with cut-out fingers. All proof that I was here.

    I’d unearthed a time capsule of cherished keepsakes mixed with hastily stored pictures of people I used to know. Good memories and bad ones greeted me, both softened and warmed with time.

    I pulled out a caricature of me and my high school boyfriend and braced myself for a punch in the stomach I always felt seeing his face. I’d vowed to wipe him from my memory. “I’ll never be that person again,” I’d promised. And here was evidence that we happened. That, too, had softened.

    It’s a bittersweet mix of pleasure and pain to revisit the past. Compartmentalization and sentimentality, like why would I want to remember this, but also why would I ever want to forget? Our lives are made of days we long to linger in along with those we’d like run from, burning the bridge and the whole city behind us if we must. Both tell the story of us.

    I’m happy to remember what I want to remember. Graduations and award ceremonies, laughing on the swings outside my apartment, sleepovers with the friends I’d grow into an adult with. I want to acknowledge the things I’m proud of, that clearly speak of my strengths.

    I’ve spent many wishes on extracting the other times from my story…the lows and illnesses, ridiculous relationships and naiveté. CTRL+X, like it never happened. Paste in something prettier.

    Opening that box and feeling my heart open just a little wider made me wonder if my past deserves more respect than that. And so much more love. I was out there trying my best and living. Even when I didn’t know where to turn or understand what I was looking at, I managed to find my way through.

    It’s interesting, too, that as much as I wanted to leave behind many aspects of my past, I’d found something worth holding on to in it. Did I know that one day I might see things differently? Maybe. Or maybe I was just as idealistic then as I am now, listening to love songs and hoping the box would keep the good times alive.

    I’ve considered taking the box out and showing it to my kids, but something’s always stopped me. Part of me wants them to hold a little slice of their family legacy, and another wants to leave it alone. Best not disrupt the balance I’ve found. I’ve grown up and moved on, but the fear about what I might unleash opening up the past remains.

    So, I suppose this is a story about trusting in our progress, too.

    I’ve made more peace than I give myself credit for. The hang-ups I thought I’d never get over and the heartbreaks I thought would haunt me forever, shoved down dark and deep, don’t hurt me in the same way. I’m not afraid of the same things anymore. It’s true, I have new fears now. But now, I also trust that they’ll change. My whole relationship with fear is different. I’m not perfect at it, but I’m a lot less judgmental of my fears and their origins.

    This is also the story about the wisdom and peace we seek. And it’s about life, legacy, and forward momentum.

    We want to move forward and grow stronger, braver, and wiser. We’re all caught in that pull between holding on and letting go.

    We can act like moving forward means bottling it all up or leaving it all behind, as if that will make us faster. Sure, we’ll outgrow things. Space will ask for clearing. We’ll bury hatchets, set dreams free, and so on. Parts of us will be reborn many times over. None of this moves us very far into that peace and wisdom we desire if done in anger, rejection, or shame, though.

    Pain becomes wisdom and life becomes legacy through respect for the path that led us here and gratitude for our progress, in whatever form it takes. And transformation happens through our daily decisions. Making amends, apologizing, setting boundaries, or just taking better care of ourselves eases suffering and brings us closer to peace when made from a place of caring.

    It’s not instantaneous, of course. And it’s okay to keep a “box.” We need a place to put those things that we don’t know what to do with or make sense of. But we also owe ourselves the honesty about what happens inside that box.

    The box isn’t magic, and hiding things doesn’t make them disappear. Yet here’s the paradox of it all: time has healing properties. It eases the intensity of old wounds through perspective. Over time, we make sense of our past and reach a new understanding of how it all fits together. The path we’ve traveled often looks clearer through the rearview mirror.

    We don’t move forward by packing everything away and never looking back. Part of the growing process is taking that box out and sorting through it. Letting some things go with compassion and holding some closer to our heart, then breathing a sigh of sweet release as the box grows lighter.

    Above all else, then, this is a story about suffering and compassion. (In the end, it’s always a love story.)

    Whether we’re holding on or letting go, love is the path through. Love may be tender, but it’s so strong. Love gives us resilience. Grit. With love comes acceptance and patience. Love breeds openness.

    Love reminds us of why we’re trying in the first place.

    It speaks to us of our courage.

    Love makes us willing to look at the parts that hurt with kindness.

    Sometimes we need to see the ugly parts to find the beauty again. Sometimes confusion is the first sign of clarity. It’s our willingness to be present with whatever arises that gives us the strength to keep going.

    Dear Traveler, we all have a box of one kind or another. What’s the story that yours tells? What form has your progress taken?

    It’s eleven years later, and I’m still learning how to be more intentional about the holding on and easier about the letting go. I’m learning that I don’t need to rush so much, and I sure don’t need to try so hard to escape where I’ve been.

    I’m seeing for myself that it’s okay to let go of shame. It’s okay to hold on to the positives, too. (Even in the painful times.)

    I’m learning how to nurture the small moments of joy and appreciate the everyday things that tell my story.

    As for the pain, I’m learning to meet that with love. Fear, too. When I’m ready to face it, I face it with as open a heart as I can manage. If it burns, I ease up. When I’m not ready, I give myself permission to set it aside for a while, this time closer to the light. I promise it I’ll be back when I’m a little older and wiser.

  • When People Want to Help but Just Make Things Worse

    When People Want to Help but Just Make Things Worse

    When I was fourteen years old, my family spent a week of vacation in the northwoods of Minnesota. We rode horses, sailed on the lake, sang songs around a campfire, and all the other things most teenagers tell their parents is lame. Even if they are having fun.

    After this week of boring, according to me, my family loaded up into our van and began what should have been a five-hour drive home.

    Except it wasn’t five hours.

    Thirty minutes into the drive we were in a head-on car collision. Triaged and transported to different hospitals around the area, it wasn’t until a few hours later—when my question, “What happened to my dad?” was met with silence from nurses, physicians, and my extended family who found me in the ER—that I knew he didn’t make it out. Not alive, at least.

    Two weeks later, I started high school.

    While I would have liked everything that had suddenly made my life “not normal” to fly under the radar, that was easier said than done. I was walking with crutches. I had crunching, paper bandages around my neck from the seat belt, and the whole story had been on the front page of the newspaper.

    What I was going through was my business, and yet I became surrounded by people offering this and bringing me that and giving me hugs when I just wanted to get back to normal.

    A few weeks later, my uncle showed up at our house and wanted to take us apple picking, something my dad had taken us to do at the local orchard every year.

    This time, when my uncle said apple orchard, he meant the Mecca of all apple orchards near Pepin, Wisconsin.

    As instructed by my mom, I pulled open the door to the garage and loaded into the car, suddenly finding myself sitting behind the driver’s seat. The exact same spot I was sitting during our crash. And not only was I sitting in the driver’s seat for the first time since the crash, I was sitting behind someone who, from behind, looked just like my dad, and who was trying to help by taking me to the apple orchard just like my dad.

    My heart was pounding. I focused on the seat back pocket in front of me, tried my best to breathe and sit facing forward while not looking any longer at the driver and his seat in front of me.

    The longer we drove, the angrier I became.

    My uncle was trying to help, but this, this was not helpful.

    I was tense the entire ride, wrought with worry the car might explode in front of me again, and when we returned home a few hours later, I shot out of the car, slammed the door behind me, muttered, “Thank you,” ran to my room, closed the door, and burst into tears.

    Going to the apple orchard with Dad was our business. Not my uncle’s. Driving that car was Dad’s job, not his.

    While he thought he was doing something so helpful to keep my dad’s memory alive, his one time trip to the Mecca of apple orchards, for me, was the opposite of helpful.

    That’s the thing about any business that’s important to you.

    Whether it’s someone you’ve lost or something you’ve loved and now lost, when things are special to you and other people see those things causing you hardship, they want to help.

    It’s a natural human reaction to want to help. But when you’re the one who’s receiving the help, there are so many times when something that was meant to be helpful turns out the be… the opposite of helpful.

    The truth is just because someone meant well with their actions that does not mean you have to feel good about their actions.

    In fact, most of the time, if someone does something that does make you feel good, it’s because they’ve taken the time to know you really, really well (like asking you if you prefer a compliment during a team meeting or a thank you card in your mailbox), or it’s just luck.

    And all the times when someone means well but it doesn’t feel well are so very normal.

    That’s okay.

    Instead of feeling bitter and angry about what someone did, whatever their intentions, and instead of becoming disillusioned about whether you can do anything to help someone else, it’s important to know the one thing you can know for certain in any interaction: you. Your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and expectations.

    So the next time someone is trying to help with something that is your business. Try this:

    1. Take a time out.

    We tend to use this as a tool for disciplining kids, but honestly, it works just as well, if not better, on ourselves as adults. And it’s not about giving yourself a time out from something you want to be part of. What you do is notice when you are feeling a growing sense of anger, frustration, overwhelm, and use your words to say something like, “I’m going to need some time to think this through. Let’s pick up this conversation at another time.”

    And then take the time away from the situation.

    2. Remind yourself of the intentions in the room.

    Why are you doing what you are doing?

    Why do you think they are doing what they are doing?

    Most of the time, people are doing something because they think it is a good thing or a helpful thing or something that will make the situation better. So, know that the people who are wanting to help are doing so because they care. There is something in it for them to help you and they want to help you.

    Even if the way they are helping now is the opposite of helpful, you can use this reminder about their intention as a key to making the situation helpful for you again.

    3. Speak out. Ask. Use your words.

    You have a person that wants to help you. So use your words. Tell them what would be helpful (or if you don’t know, tell them what is not helpful, and why).

    Say something like, “When you came to take me to the apple orchard, I felt like you were replacing my dad. I already feel worried that I am going to forget him, and I felt even more scared when we did something that made it feel like we were trying to replace him.”

    Notice the “When _______ happened, I felt ________.”

    This is intentional language.

    When you speak this way, you keep the focus on the goal: helping you to feel better, because you have identified a specific situation when that did not happen.

    Then say, “To make this feel better to me, I would need ________.” And say what you would need.

    Is it any apology? Is it that you want them to talk about things more? Do you not want to talk about it more? Do you want to do something you’ve never done before instead?

    It’s your business. So make it your call. And help them help you by showing why unhelpful things are unhelpful and suggesting what would have made the unhelpful things… well, helpful. Because at the root of every relationship is love.

    So, even during times when things aren’t as good, it’s important to separate the actions other people do to help with the intention that’s behind it all: love for you.

  • It’s a Myth That We Can Just “Get Over” Pain and Loss

    It’s a Myth That We Can Just “Get Over” Pain and Loss

    “There is some kind of a sweet innocence in being human—in not having to be just happy or just sad—in the nature of being able to be both broken and whole, at the same time.” ~C. JoyBell C.

    “I just feel like it’s never ending… like I should be more over it by now,” my friend says, her eyes looking down at her mug of tea. She lost a loved one three years ago in tragic circumstances.

    Her words make me sad, and there are layers to my sadness: I’m sad for her loss, her grief, for the difficulty she faces daily as she continues her life without this person. Also, I’m saddened by her belief about her suffering; that it’s somehow not okay or normal to still be so sad.

    This is not a woman in ruins. She has a good life. A job she loves, a beautiful home, and family. She’s a wonderful mother to her children. But she is deeply sad. She carries this sadness around with her everywhere she goes—on the train to work, on the sofa while she watches Netflix, out to dinner.

    Her sadness is heavy, yet she carries it with a grace that belies its weight. It’s not ruining her. Yet it’s there, like a psychological shadow, even in her happier moments.

    This conversation made me think more broadly about our societal beliefs about loss, our attitudes toward sadness, and the inherent problems these give birth to.

    My grandmother died over six years ago now. She died horribly and quickly from a brain tumor. From the time of her diagnosis to her death, there were only three weeks.

    Her death didn’t feel real for a long time, and initially I didn’t grieve as I expected I would.

    Months afterward, it started to sink in. As it did, the sadness came. It didn’t consume my every waking thought and feeling, but it was there beside me, wanting me to turn toward it. For a long time, I found this very hard to do.

    My cultural conditioning that sadness was ‘bad’ added a toxic layer on top of the raw experience of sadness and made me feel somehow ‘wrong’ each time I felt sad.

    A Kind of Healing-Perfectionism

    “Get over it.”

    These words suffuse the space around us, deeply ingrained in the cultural lexicon of healing. “I’m over it,” we say to ourselves. We assure others that they will do the same. Worst of all, we hold the belief that we should be over it by a certain time.

    We believe that this is the hallmark of a perfectly recovered loss/trauma/sadness—the gold standard of “I am perfectly okay now.”

    Is anyone ever perfectly okay? Is this really what we’re aiming for?

    Is there anyone who doesn’t walk around with the roots of sadness grounded in their being, even as their happiness exists above these depths? I don’t know of these people.

    What I do know is that the greatest lie we’ve been sold about success and happiness is that these things exist in our lack of sadness or pain.

    The notion of “getting over” a loss speaks more to an ideal than a reality. Like many ideals, it’s alluring, but the closer you move to it, the more you see the danger. It gets in the way of our understanding about loss and grief, and it congests the fullness of our hearts.

    It disconnects us from our emotional truth and gives credence to an expectation about the course of grief that we cannot live up to. When this happens, there is one predictable outcome: We add judgment to our suffering and turn a natural process into a pathological problem, something to be ‘fixed.’

    Certainly, when it comes to dealing with loss, there are times when a normal emotional response can turn into a condition in need of intervention—if our initial sadness fails to abate with the passage of time, and we continue to be obsessed with our grief and unable to function in our everyday lives.

    In such cases, therapy and possibly medication are required. Yet, within the boundaries of what can be considered a healthy reaction to loss, there is a great range.

    What does a normal, healthy response to loss look like? How should it feel? How long is it okay to still experience sadness? When should we get over it? Should we ever? Says who? Why? What does “getting over it” even mean?

    When we think about the need to get over a loss, what we’re referring to is arriving at a psychological destination of being untouchable, unshakable. Reaching a point where we are largely unaffected, even by the fondest memory, or the most difficult one, of that which we have lost.

    It’s a kind of healing-perfectionism that needs to be named for what it is. Such ideals around suffering cause further and unnecessary pain and obstruct the very heart of what it means to be human. When we use the language of “getting over” loss, we are reinforcing the belief that sadness is something that must be overcome.

    Co-existing with Our Sadness

    We are conditioned to move toward things that feel good and to retract from those that feel bad. Primally speaking, it’s about survival. Sadness is one such ‘bad’ feeling; we recoil from it. Yet this retraction isn’t so much based on the inherent quality of the emotion as much as our insidious belief that sadness is, per se, bad.

    Of course, sadness isn’t a pleasurable experience—psychologically speaking, it’s classed as a “negative” emotion. However, we are not simple beings, and the primal drives we have are not so simple either; as such, it is often necessary to go against our basic instincts—to move away from pleasure (as in the case of addiction) and to move toward pain (as in healing).

    In healing from loss, ignoring and resisting our sadness will only send it deeper into our psyche and our bodies. One thing we know for certain is that when we fail to acknowledge our feelings, they continue to affect us anyway—influencing our thoughts, our emotions, and our decision-making beneath the level of our conscious awareness.

    One of the biggest problems with the idea of getting over loss is the implication, and subsequent expectation, that there is a life span to our sadness. A progressively tapering timeline where, after a certain point, the volume of our grief has reached a finite baseline—zero.

    Depending on our unique losses and our personality, the acceptable lifespan might be one year, two years, three years, four. But at some point, as time marches on, we’ll turn to our sadness and ask it why it’s still sitting with us.

    We’ll start to tell ourselves that it’s “been too long.” Yet, try as we might, we cannot force or sadness to leave, so we’ll do the only thing we can: turn our minds away from the sadness that lingers on in our bodies. We’ll disconnect.

    We Can’t ‘Fix’ Our Sadness, and We Don’t Have To

    Whilst Elizabeth Kubler-Ross may have delineated the stages of dealing with death (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance), these were originally meant for those who were themselves dying, not for those who were dealing with the death or loss of another.

    An unfortunate consequence of applying the concept of linear stages of grief to our human experience of loss is, again, the expectation of a finite ending; we go through the stages and we reach The End.

    The less convenient truth is that grief is non-linear; there is no one pattern it’s obliged to follow.

    Yet this concept of a finite resolution speaks to our society in a broader sense. Humans are exceptionally good at finding solutions. If there’s a problem, we solve it. If something’s broken, we fix it.

    This way of thinking is part of what makes us great; without it, we wouldn’t have the technological advances we have. But the problem arises when we apply this mode of thinking to our human suffering.

    Our bodies can be fixed; we can give someone a leg when they’ve lost one, sew a deep cut, stop an infection with antibiotics. But what of our sadness in the face of loss? How are we to ‘fix’ that?

    When we’re sad, we are not broken. We are suffering, and this is different. Sadness is a normal response to the experience of loss. Yet in a culture obsessed with fixing what’s broken, the idea of “getting over it” starts to infiltrate the rawness of our experience and dilutes the edifying, tragic beauty of living with loss.

    Making Space for Our Sadness

    It also speaks to our discomfort with ambiguity and paradox, especially in the realm of our emotions. We cling to our separate boxes; we seek the clear delineation of “I’m over it” versus “I’m still suffering.” Such thresholds don’t exist in life, nor in love.

    But rather, two opposing, seemingly contradictory emotions coexist; I am both okay and I am suffering. We must give ourselves permission to be the complex and contradictory beings that we are if we want to be fully human.

    Healing is not a line, but a wave. It’s organic, meandering. It doesn’t always move in one direction with one energy. But the most important thing is that it moves—if we allow it to.

    When we have lost, we must learn to live side by side with our sadness. Attempting to shut it out will shut everything out. There is only one highway where emotions in the body make their way into the awareness of the mind; joy, sadness, frustration, peace—they all travel along this same road.

    There are no alternate routes. Which is why when we judge our sadness and push it away, we inevitably push away our joy also. Rather than wasting our energy on the hopeless eradication of sadness, we must make a home for it. A place where it is welcome to live.

    We, in the West, are not so hot at embodying the truth that our sadness has a right of its own; we can’t really control it, any more than we control our joy. Certainly, we can’t structure our life around it, but we can make a space in our life for it to coexist.

    Its resting place is in the same sweet spot as our deep joy and gratitude. Sometimes I say to myself, “My sadness is a person too.” This is how I think of it. And in this thought, a respect for it arises.

    Side by Side, Sadness and Love

    Our belief in the notion of getting over our sadness also robs us of one of the most beautiful opportunities of healing—experiencing love by the act of remembrance.

    The thing that keeps our sadness close is remembering the love we hold but cannot give to someone we’ve lost. Memories are how we relive a person. They’re a way that we honor the existence of another. They’re also how we re-live a part of ourselves and bring meaning to our life.

    In our remembrance, we suffer. We feel sadness. And there is such poignant beauty in this; it’s an edifying kind of pain because it’s born from the depths of our love. To never feel sad, then, would be a kind of forgetting.

    The last thing we want to do when we’ve lost someone we love is to forget them. And yet, when we buy into the belief that healing means a lack of sadness or pain, we avoid the memories of the people we’ve lost, and in our avoidance, we disconnect from our love. Because to feel this love is also to feel the pain of it.

    Where does the love we hold for someone who is no longer with us go? It lives in us. But to breathe life into it, we have to let it live in our hearts right next to the pain that love and remembrance bring.

    When we do this, we soften. There is a release. We expand. We connect, both to ourselves and also to others.

    Compassion can only exist between equals; when I know my suffering and let it speak to me, I can see and speak to yours.

    You don’t need to overcome your sadness. That is not the measure of your healing.

    The measure of healing lies in the relationship between you and your sadness. You don’t have to make friends with it, but you do have to learn how to allow it to live in you, to respect its right to be there even as you respect your wish that it wasn’t.

    This is no small feat. It is the most courageous and bold thing you will ever do, to live in that dichotomy. To inhabit that space.

    Let this be the measure of your healing.

  • 3 Practices That Help Ease the Pain of Being Highly Empathetic

    3 Practices That Help Ease the Pain of Being Highly Empathetic

    “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” ~Walt Whitman

    Empathy is the ability to put yourself in another’s experience and understand with depth the gravity of their situation. In general, I believe the world needs more empathy.

    But I’ve learned over the course of my twenty-nine years that sometimes being a highly empathetic person is incredibly painful. And sometimes too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

    Hearing stories of the pain that people experience can be extra painful when your mind tries to carry their pain around with you. Empathy is healthy when it’s useful and helps a wounded person feel understood and validated and release their pain. But it’s unhealthy when you carry it with you as if it is your own.

    Feeling sorrow for someone who is suffering is part of our humanity and connection to each other. Carrying the sorrow as if it belongs to you ends up feeling traumatizing and can cause you to disconnect from others.

    I’ve always struggled with holding on to the pain of others. From the stories of suffering I hear on the news to the people I run across in my everyday life, I’ve found it difficult not to get lost in their pain and end up holding on to it. When that problem hit even closer to home, I reached a breaking point that ended up teaching me how to stop it.

    My sister is a nurse who was working on a trauma unit floor the day she was assaulted by a patient. Seeing the bruises covering her face and her eyes swollen shut was a gut wrenching experience. For months after that my mind turned over and over again how she must have felt.

    I’d see the surprise and fear on her face in my mind’s eye. I’d feel the terror and the pain. And the overwhelming relief when he was finally off of her. Followed by the sense of humiliation and vulnerability at being alone on the floor.

    She was wounded. My overly empathetic brain created me as the second wounded one.

    I am a highly sensitive woman who struggles with both ADHD and Anxiety. These three challenges come together into the perfect storm to torture me with too much empathy sometimes.

    High sensitivity makes me more attuned to others. ADHD makes it extra difficult to control my runaway thoughts. Anxiety creates a sense of ongoing vulnerability that keeps the wound open. This perfect storm has required a strong internal set of resources to combat it. In the traumatic aftermath of my sister’s assault, I finally found the recipe for that resource.

    These three things have helped me reduce the internal wounding of being too empathetic.

    Mindful Attention to Words without Pictures

    I was on the phone with my mom as she was processing what happened to my sister, and I noticed that the most painful part of it all was the movie reel playing in my head as my mind interpreted her story in pictures.

    I couldn’t bear the emotional onslaught that I could feel coming and somewhat intuitively picked up on a mindfulness tool that I now swear by. As she continued, I made a conscious effort to hear only her words. To only focus on her words.

    When my mind started to create the overwhelming pictures, I would return my focus to the sound of the words themselves. I tried to hear the words and only understand them to the extent of their definition—devoid of the extra meaning and emotional context I had been attaching to them.

    Even though this practice was difficult to do, I was able to leave that conversation without feeling re-wounded. And that was a first.

    A Mindful Mantra

    It wasn’t just the conversations and specific triggers that created the wounded feeling. My anxious ADHD brain would recreate the story on its own. It would play that movie of what my sister experienced start to finish. In those moments, there were no words to attend to. There was only me and my sometimes-torturous brain.

    It was out of that experience that I developed what I’ll call my mindful mantra. It starts with the recognition that my thoughts have run away from me. When I see that, I imagine that it was all playing out on a picture book that I can see myself firmly shut. I even imagine the sound of a book being forcefully shut.

    Then the mantra. Every time I catch myself in this place I use the same mantra, and over time it has become helpful in its own right. This could be anything, but for me, my mantra goes like this:

    “Nothing good goes down this path.”

    It serves as a reminder that there is nothing useful to me or to the wounded person (in this case my sister) in fixating on their painful (now past) experience. It’s also a subtle reminder that choosing to stop the internal battle isn’t hurtful to the person who’s been wounded.

    With that, I find that I can practice the next skill before re-engaging myself in something else.

    A New Visual for Letting Go

    Sometimes the mind tries to hold on as if it’s not quite ready to let go. My ADHD mind has extra trouble with this. It’s in those moments that I practice this mindful visual exercise. I sometimes need to practice it several times before my brain is ready to transition on to something more helpful.

    But like any mindfulness practice, I find that the more I bring my mind back to the exercise, the better it gets at using the exercise for letting go.

    I see my thoughts (or sometimes the book in which I closed them up) floating down a river. I grew up in an area with a ton of amazing waterfalls that debut in this visual exercise. I visualize a powerful, tall waterfall like the ones I grew up with and I see my thoughts fall over the edge.

    Then I stand and watch them flow on the river beneath until they are completely out of my sight.

    After this, I’ve found that it can be helpful to engage myself in another activity to help my brain transition. Sometimes that looks like a good movie or a walk with my husband. Other times, it’s a hobby or project I’m interested in that helps grab my attention.

    If the movie reel starts to play again, I send it back over the waterfall.

    With these strategies, I’ve been able to finally find some peace with my mind. Even though they are challenging strategies that sometimes take practice, I’ve found them to be well worth the effort.

  • Pain, Suffering, Joy, Love—Meditation Helps Me Experience It All

    Pain, Suffering, Joy, Love—Meditation Helps Me Experience It All

    “I know, things are getting tougher when I can’t get the top off the bottom of the barrel.” ~Jesse Michaels

    No one thought I was going to live to see twenty. Including me. In fact, I vividly remember telling my father that it would be miraculous if I saw twenty-five. It wasn’t emotional. It was simply a statement of fact. And yet here I am—mid-thirties, wife, daughter, one on the way, house, job, sense of purpose. What happened?

    I was one of those kids with questions. Big questions. “What does it all mean?” questions. I used to wonder what the point of all of this was. As young as seven and eight I remember lying in bed at night trying to understand the nature of the world. I would examine my family, my friends, my fears, my aspirations, looking for the thread that would unravel the existential knot.

    I loved to learn, and I was frequently drawn to the sciences in a way that I now see as continuing to look for answers to the big questions. When my friends were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, they gave the common answers—policeman, fireman, professional athlete, etc. I think someone said “Batman” (it might have been me…).

    When it came to me, I would usually say, “paleontologist or astronomer.” (I later amended this to astrophysicist, but I hadn’t heard of it yet, and further, didn’t have the math skills.) It was clear to me that this world had a rhyme and a reason, and I wanted desperately to understand it. And then, at twelve, I discovered the answer.

    I became a drug addict and an alcoholic. It was beautiful. It did not give me any answers; it simply took away the questions. It shrunk my life to the “one-pointed mind” that I would rediscover later in another context.

    Addiction is an all-consuming activity. I compounded this problem by developing a number of co-occurring mental health problems—rage, depression, anxiety. A continuous cocktail of hopelessness and loss.

    This spiral was only arrested at the nick of time by the intervention of a loving family and a supportive community dedicated to service to those struggling with addiction.

    In the decade and a half since, I’ve watched many friends die, go to jail, disappear, and I have often wondered what the difference between them and me is.

    I have heard the “some have to die so others can live” theory and the “they just weren’t ready” platitude. I have heard the “at least they’re not struggling anymore” and the “God must have needed them” explanations. I reject these utterly.

    While these statements offer some degree of emotional and psychological comfort, I can’t imagine the reality of what they seem to imply: Some of us are “chosen” and some of us are not.

    I think about a friend of ours who died Christmas Eve morning from an overdose. I couldn’t conceive of going to his grief-stricken family and saying, “Bummer about your son, guess he wasn’t chosen.” I’m sure that would’ve helped lift their Christmas spirits every year.

    I have been to seventeen funerals in the past few years, all for people under thirty and most under twenty-five. Each time I have asked myself the same question: Why them and not me?

    I don’t pretend to have an answer. Furthermore, I don’t think there is an ANSWER (capital letters intentional). When I discovered my spiritual and meditative practice I was strongly drawn to the fact that these practices openly admitted they had no answers, only a means to investigate the questions.

    Meditation doesn’t give me any answers. It doesn’t allow me to sidestep grief or pain or rage. It doesn’t make good times better or bad times suck less. It doesn’t offer me a way to disassociate from my very real human experience. Although, for the record, I have tried to use meditation to do all of these things.

    So what difference does it make to me?

    The meditation practices that I employ bring me face to face with the pain and hurt and fear and rage. The pain of losing my friends; the hurt that no one could help them, not even me; the fear that I very well could fall victim to the same delusions; the rage at the utter injustice of why beautiful, talented men and women at the beginning of their lives are lost to us.

    In not trying to avoid the pain, I get to experience it and learn from it.

    I have repeated the negative and destructive patterns of my life not because of lack of will or lack of desire to change, but merely because I didn’t see them. I’ve looked away from my pain and my trauma, and so it’s had no choice but to reemerge over and over again.

    Sitting “on the cushion” has given me a stable and safe place from which to step into the sea of suffering, find the part of me that needs comfort and compassion, and try to bring it into the light.

    My practice has shown me that the answers we look for are whatever we want them to be. Meaning is not an inherent quality. Things happen, and we, as human beings, assign them meaning. Sometimes the meaning is that we “live for them” (the people who have past). Sometimes we “make it matter.”

    I once asked out a girl in one of my graduate school classes because I had just helped bury a seventeen-year-old kid who I realized would never get to ask a girl out again. So what the hell? I asked her, thinking maybe Danny would give me an assist from wherever he was. She still said no. I swear I could hear him laughing at me.

    Sometimes we use things to reinforce the negative story that we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world we live in. We create our own victimization and tell ourselves it’s not our fault. The world is terrible. I did this forever, reinforcing the story of my own victimhood until it almost killed me.

    Meditation helps me examine all of these storylines. It helps me embrace the things that make my life better and discard (almost always with assistance) the things that are detrimental to myself, that cause pain to those around me.

    It offers me the opportunity to “turn the volume down” on the rage and anxiety and depression. It brings me back within the bounds of experiencing these without them becoming the monsters they used to be.

    It also helps me accept reality as it is. Nothing is supposed to be happening. It’s just what is happening. Embrace it or fight it, it makes no difference. It will, has, and does happen exactly as it’s happening. I only need to adjust to conditions as they are, not how I would wish them to be, to be truly content. Meditation helps me see things closer to how they really are.

    I write this having attended a funeral last week for a twenty-three-year-old man who was my student and my friend. I am selfishly grateful in a strange way that his death was accidental and not related to any substance abuse. I’m not sure if that matters, but it feels different.

    I loved and will continue to love Josh. He was amazingly talented. I met him when he was fifteen and couldn’t play a note. By the end of our time together (I was a music teacher then) he could play four instruments well and a few poorly (harmonica is tough). He had interned at a local music festival during high school and eventually parlayed that into a full-time gig at one of our local venues. I am so proud of him.

    His service was packed. Friends, family—he touched so many lives. The greatest gift that my practice afforded me is that I was there. Really there. I cried. I laughed. I hugged people. I snuck one of my medallions into his casket when no one was looking. I thought he’d like that, both the medallion and the sneaking. (We share a bit of an anti-authority streak.)

    I didn’t run—from his death, from my feelings, or from the people around me. I hugged his dad and told him how much I adored his son and how grateful I was to have helped him along his journey. I stood with my friends and offered a shoulder when they needed it and received one when I did.

    I am so deeply moved to have been able to be there, without a buffer, to help send off my friend. I can be uncomfortable and be okay with being uncomfortable. Pain and sorrow are my teachers. So are joy and love. Meditation brings me to the place where I can experience all of it. I wouldn’t trade this life for anything.

  • My Favorite Tip to Ease the Pain of Grief

    My Favorite Tip to Ease the Pain of Grief

    “It’s also helpful to realize that this very body that we have, that’s sitting right here right now…with its aches and its pleasures…is exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive.” ~Pema Chodron

    Many people like to think of grief as an emotional experience. It’s something that dominates your internal, emotional space, and that’s it.

    But it doesn’t take long when you’re in the thick of grief to experience grief that isn’t emotional at all.

    You feel heavy. Like there’s a giant weight on your shoulders.

    You feel like your legs are weak and shaking from trying to stand after the ground has been pulled out from underneath you.

    It’s hard to breathe because it feels like the wind has been knocked out of you.

    You feel heartbroken. Like there is literally a hole punched in your chest. Your grief is as much physical as it is emotional.

    Each of the times you experience intense emotional grief you have also been a human being, in your body, experiencing what’s going on.

    When I started to recognize my own body as part of my grieving, I discovered my favorite way to ease the pain from grief for myself and for people around me.

    You see, when I was fourteen I started high school two weeks after my dad died.

    As I walked into that school building, everyone knew what happened, but at the same time I felt like I had no allies. No one that understood. That knew my dad, or that knew where I was coming from.

    The first couple months I just tried to get by.

    I did the motions.

    Didn’t ask too many questions.

    Nodded and shook my head at the appropriate times, making sure each day I came back with the worksheets filled out and ready to turn in.

    I was like a machine.

    My school counselor checked in with me each week to see how things were going. I saw her in homeroom every Tuesday.

    “How’s it going, Kirsten?” she’d ask.

    “It’s so hard,” I repeated again and again.

    So when she sat me down in her office after the first term, she braced herself for the worst. She’d gathered all the paperwork and people she needed to begin a full blown intervention. And then she looked at my grades.

    “Kirsten! What are you talking about?”

    “What do you mean?”

    “You have excellent grades. What do you mean ‘school is hard’?”

    “That’s just it. It’s one thing to fill out a worksheet everyday (this is what I now call “showing signs of life”), it’s another thing to actually do this school thing. I barely feel like I get settled in one class before the bell rings for the next one. I can’t switch my mind from thinking about geometry to immediately conjugate Spanish verbs. My world runs in slow motion, and this place doesn’t slow down.”

    “What can I do to help you?” she asked.

    “I don’t know.”

    Because I didn’t know.

    That’s totally normal not to know.

    Later that week, I found out from my mom that all my teachers had met about how they could help me, and they offered me an extra set of textbooks to keep at home so I didn’t have to carry around heavy books all day.

    “Why would I want that?” I told Mom. I didn’t want any special treatment.

    “Just try it, Kirsten,” my mom encouraged.

    So because she’s my mom, I listened.

    And it was the BEST. THING. EVER.

    On the physical level, it literally lightened the weight on my shoulders. It reinforced the true reality that just showing up to class was more than enough.

    It meant that just being there was all I needed to do, and the rest of the stuff—the logistics—were already taken care of.

    So when you know you’re going to have an emotionally intense day, what’s one thing you could do to lighten your load?

    Maybe it’s setting a timer when you’re cooking so you don’t have to remember how many minutes the pasta has been on the stove. Lighten your mental load so you have space to be with your thoughts.

    Maybe it’s resetting expectations your family has of you, being honest with them about what you are not available to do so you can use that open space for yourself.

    Whatever it is, think about the little things that cause you stress and use those as a source of inspiration for what actions will help.

    The other key part of the textbooks gesture is that it was a gesture that recreated trust.

    You see, in that one small gesture of giving me an extra set of textbooks, my teachers showed me they trusted me.

    They trusted me with these expensive things and they trusted that I would take their gift with respect.

    All the while, I didn’t know if I could trust myself.

    What was even left of me?

    It felt like I was all grief and no me.

    When someone, a whole group of someones who I respected, said with their action, “We trust you,” it was the first time in a long time I was extended a gentle invitation to trust my community again.

    I didn’t have to feel up for every social event or trust the whole world yet, but I could trust my teachers.

    Suddenly, I had a whole group of undercover allies.

    None of the other students knew I had been given “special treatment.” And each day I walked from class to class to class, I knew there was at least one person in the room I could trust.

    That one action was more powerful than any amount of words my teachers said to me over the entire year.

    Here’s what I want you to take away, even if you can’t resolve the pain from a feeling: Try to alleviate some of the physical burden. By doing so, you are creating space for you to heal that would never have occurred if you focus only on words, wondering “What do I say? How can I talk about grief?”

    Pay attention, listen to your body.

    Even if you can’t take away the emotions right now, what can you do to relieve the physical burden?

    How can you relax the gripping around your heart?

    What can you do to release the physical tension in your muscles?

    It might not take away everything, but just a little something can make a world of difference.

  • When You Feel Tired of Hoping and Trying, Remember…

    When You Feel Tired of Hoping and Trying, Remember…

    “What happens when people open their hearts? They get better.” ~Haruki Murakami

    What do you do when just can’t do it anymore? When the pain is too much? The discouragement is too much? The hoping and trying are too much?

    It’s not that you haven’t tried. You’ve been brave. You’ve been persistent. You’ve been soldiering on through hurt that other people don’t understand.

    It’s that you’re feeling broken from the trying.

    That’s how I felt when my husband died of stomach cancer. There were two healing realizations that changed not only the path that I was on, but how I felt. I think they can help you too.

    In the ten months between my husband’s diagnosis and his death, I was driven by desperation.

    I only slept five hours a night. The rest of the time I was caring for him. Or researching his condition. Or worrying about him.

    Don could only eat a few bites of food at a time, and he was often too nauseated to want to eat at all. As I watched him waste away, I cooked as many as five fresh meals a day, trying to create something that would persuade him to eat.

    Meanwhile, I lost thirty pounds.

    My path was unsustainable.

    I knew it, but I didn’t care. Deep down, I didn’t want to go on without him.

    At the end, I spent more than a month at his side in the hospital, day and night. I left my job and children to care for him. He was my whole world.

    Then he died.

    In that small, dark place, I had to decide if I would die too.

    Realization #1: It’s not about you.

    Choosing to live didn’t come all at once, any more than feeling lost and broken had. The first step was realizing “It’s not about you.”

    It may seem like that realization wouldn’t be helpful for someone who wasn’t even eating or sleeping. And how are you supposed to live your life if it isn’t about you, anyway?

    But the truth is, I was neglecting myself because I was so focused on my own pain. Shifting my focus eased my suffering.

    I didn’t make the shift for philosophical reasons, though. I made the shift because I saw how much my pain was hurting my children.

    My teenage daughter went out for pie on a special occasion with her friends. She brought her piece home untouched for me because she said I needed the calories.

    On another occasion, she brought home a Styrofoam box containing the entire restaurant meal from her anniversary date with her boyfriend, for the same reason.

    When my heart started breaking from these small but mighty sacrifices, I realized how much heart I really had left.

    I had thought my capacity to love, to hurt, to care had been exceeded. But it hadn’t.

    Most of us have the instinct to shut down in response to pain. To pull back inside, as though cutting ourselves off from the rest of humanity could heal our broken parts. The truth is just the opposite.

    Love heals.

    Finding the Love that Heals

    Viktor Frankl lost his entire family in the Holocaust. During his own imprisonment in multiple concentration camps, Frankl became fascinated with the differences in how people responded to the atrocities they experienced.

    Everything about the camps was designed to dehumanize the prisoners. To tear them down, and to strip away their courage, hope, and identity. Most of the time it worked.

    Many people gave up. Frankl described camp mates who died not just from starvation and illness, but from grief and discouragement.

    Sometimes the shift was subtle–a spiritual and emotional wasting away that the body could not survive. Sometimes it was more dramatic. Prisoners walked into an electric fence or the path of a guard’s rifle.

    And sometimes, in order to physically survive, prisoners let part of their spirit die as the experience transformed them into someone cold and uncaring.

    But there were exceptions.

    There were people who became more kind, noble, and beautiful through the experience. The difference, Frankl concluded, was that these people were living for something bigger than themselves.

    They were sustained by love of family, faith in God, or commitment to science or art. According to Frankl, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how.’”

    Healing comes from having a reason to hold your heart open to pain. Because when you do, you automatically hold it open to joy as well.

    What do you love more than yourself?

    When You Don’t Feel Like Loving

    Maybe you don’t know right now what you love enough to motivate you.

    Maybe the problem is that you lost someone or something you really loved.

    Or maybe you feel exhausted from the way you’ve been going about loving.

    I get it.

    Not the specifics of your story, but I get what it’s like to be disconnected from every feeling except pain. To feel sucked dry from the giving. To be disillusioned and discouraged and so tired that the thought of loving any more is impossible.

    And you know what? That’s okay. It’s okay to be with those feelings. To take time for yourself, even if all you can bring yourself to do is binge watch Netflix.

    But the truth? When you’re ready, choosing love will do more to help you than almost anything else.

    Love prompts us to do hard things.

    It’s love that fuels parents who stay awake night after night with a colicky baby. It’s love that helps hurt friends to reconcile. It’s love that makes those relationships that have spanned the years precious, not despite but because of all the ups and downs along the way.

    And it’s love that can give us the courage to walk away when the situation calls for it.

    Love prompts us to make those sacrifices that in the moment don’t seem beautiful at all, but in retrospect become the most significant choices of our lives.

    It’s love that fills us, when we feel our most empty.

    So be brave. Let yourself love. Love an animal. Love the houseplant on your kitchen table and the nature you encounter on a quiet walk. Love the contributions you can make toward the greater good. And love the people around you.

    Love Grows

    I started back at my job a few weeks after Don died. It was tough. We had taught at the same college, working out of the same building, for a decade. Memories were everywhere. And because I teach psychology, there were many discussion topics that were triggering for me.

    I did it because my kids needed me to pull it together. For them.

    But as I did I it, I realized I was also doing it for me. The classroom became my happy place. I felt better when I got out of my head and focused on my students.

    My own pain was still there, of course. I cried in class more than once that first term. When I did, my students cried with me. They thanked me for being brave and open, and they offered me the same love and encouragement I had been trying to give them.

    That’s because love grows. That’s the magic of it. Even when you think you don’t have much to offer, it becomes enough, and to spare. When it is freely offered, love expands within us and around us with the giving.

    So how do you get to that point when you are feeling too worn out to give?

    Realization #2: Sometimes it has to be about you.

    When you get real about doing the impossible, about trying when you don’t know how to try anymore, you have to accept that it’s going to take all of you.

    It’s going to take you showing up fully. Owning your own power. Being unapologetically yourself.

    It’s going to take you making yourself the hero of your own story.

    So what have you been holding back?

    Is it love?

    What it Looks Like to Love Yourself

    When I was at my lowest point, my kids pointed out the ways I wasn’t taking care of myself. And because I didn’t want them to follow my example, I listened.

    I finally got medical treatment for a back problem that had been bothering me for years. I started buying myself little things that I enjoyed. I planned activities that weren’t really necessary, but that I wanted to do.

    In my world, trying had meant chronically neglecting myself so that I could put just a little more time, energy, or money into someone else.

    It’s no wonder I felt like I couldn’t keep going. I was right.

    Step one was nurturing myself with the same tangible attention I would give to someone else who I loved.

    But loving yourself means a lot more than a new haircut and a bubble bath.

    What it Feels Like to Love Yourself

    Loving yourself means showing up in your own life.

    It means giving yourself the best you have to offer and trusting that it is enough.

    It means being willing to try something new. And to keep trying.

    It means believing that you can create something beautiful even when all you’re feeling is pain.

    It means respecting your own boundaries.

    Loving yourself means being willing to do the hard things that will help you in the end.

    It means when you start to feel sorry for yourself, you stop. And you reconsider how to connect the dots between the events in your life. Because you get to determine the meaning of it all, and to decide how you want to move forward.

    And it means that when it’s time, you let go of the dreams that used to fuel you and dare to believe in new ones.

    Choosing Life

    When your spirit has been crushed, when you have no more words for the pain and no more heart for giving, remember:

    Love heals our broken places.

    Loving others. Loving yourself. It’s the same flow that heals everything it connects to.

    Those wounds hidden carefully away inside? They are the ones that don’t heal.

    The wounds bravely opened sting, yes. There is pain, but it is healing pain. Sadness felt and released opens space for joy.

    Gently offer love like sunshine, and feel your spirit grow toward the warmth.

  • Why I’m Grateful for Accidents, Pain, and Loss

    Why I’m Grateful for Accidents, Pain, and Loss

    “If you have nothing to be grateful for, check your pulse.” ~Unknown

    I couldn’t feel my legs.

    There wasn’t any pain, just this odd “sameness” of non-sensation.

    My body was frozen as I turned my eyes downward to scan down my nineteen-year-old body. Below my knees, my legs were splayed out in a very peculiar way. I was halfway underneath my car, pinned down to the dirt and gravel of the road by the back right tire.

    The tire had caught my long, curly hair and the puffy left sleeve of my new white peasant blouse, miraculously missing my face.

    Blessing Number 1:

    In the distance, I could hear my two best friends shouting for help; as passengers, they were fast asleep when I fell asleep driving, hitting a tree and rolling the car. Thankfully, they escaped unscathed.

    Blessing Number 2:

    My vehicle was lifted off my broken body, and I was carefully hoisted into the ambulance. Without warning, pain seared through me like nothing I’d ever experienced. I remember worrying about my parents and how upset they would be that I’d crashed the car.

    The blur of the ER swirled around me, and I was quickly positioned on an ice-cold steel table.

    I could hear the ripping sound of my clothes as they were cut off my body. I was aware enough to be embarrassed when they got to my underwear. With no time for pain medication, the doctors yanked my left leg straight. Both of my femurs were badly broken and had to immediately be put in traction.

    When it came time for leg number two, the attending doctor told me it was okay to scream, so I did—loudly.

    I can still see my mother standing in the doorway of the ER. I will never forget the look of fear and horror on her beautiful face. Not wanting her to suffer, I looked up and said, “Mommy, I’m okay.”

    It’s been nearly four decades since my accident, and my eyes still well up as I share this part of my story. Not because of what transpired over the next extremely difficult year, but for the pain it caused my parents. It seems that while I woke up physically under the car, I had also woken up in spirit.

    Blessing Number 3:

    Before the accident that was to define my life, I was a carefree, hippie-type, artsy teen. Nothing bothered me; I went with the flow, was basically happy, and, like all teenagers, believed I was invincible. Traction, a body cast, a blood clot in my lungs, and a wheelchair would teach me that nothing was further from the truth.

    The details of the next twelve months don’t really matter, although they certainly did at the time. All I know is that facing my mortality at such a young age was the greatest gift of my life. Everything that I had taken for granted was gone—I lost everything during that time, from walking to finishing college to using the bathroom and everything in-between.

    Blessings Number 4, 5, 6… infinite:

    Over the course of the next year, I graduated from traction to a full body cast, into a wheelchair, onto crutches with a leg brace that wrapped around my hip, and eventually to a cane. Just before my twentieth birthday, I was set free, finally able to walk on my own again.

    Walking is something almost all of us completely take for granted, but not me, and never again. With each literal “step” back into life, I became more and more grateful. It wasn’t just the joy of advancing from a bedpan to a toilet, but to live in a place that had a toilet. To live in a country where insurance paid my staggering medical bills. To live!

    I was grateful to have a family that stayed by my side, day in and out over the course of that year, through multiple surgeries and life-threatening situations. A mother that drove the hour back and forth daily for the three-plus months that the hospital was my home. A father and brother who pressed their hands into my ribcage for an entire night to alleviate the pain of a blood clot that had traveled the distance from my right calf to my right lung.

    I was grateful for my older sister, who brought her toddler every week to sit on my stomach while my two legs were in traction. I was grateful to experience life in a wheelchair, being looked at with pity and wanting to scream, “I’m going to walk again!” to total strangers. Grateful for two legs that were still the same length. Grateful to be alive, and so much wiser than my peers.

    As soon as I could walk, I returned to college, finished my art degree, and went out into the world. At twenty-seven, I fell madly in love with a crazy comedian, who became my husband and the father of my children.

    During our thirteen years together, we traveled the corners of the earth, living a life of love and laughter. Until we didn’t. The loss of my marriage is another story, but I will say this: It was as dramatic and painful as breaking both of my legs and not walking for a year.

    There was no money; I lost my home and was forced into bankruptcy.

    The word “accident” is defined as “an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury,” or “an event that happens by chance or that is without apparent or deliberate cause.”

    Losing everything was completely unexpected, extremely unfortunate, and most definitely damaging.

    While the signs leading up to the demise of my marriage had been there all along, I had spent years pushing them down to a place where they couldn’t hurt me—at least not then. But I was much wiser this round: I knew that, in order to survive, I had better look for the blessings.

    Being broke meant my two sons and I staying home, making cardboard box forts and lots of brownies, which was actually my preference!

    The animals we rescued, that my ex-husband never wanted, were to love us for the next fifteen-plus years.

    Losing my marriage revealed who my friends really were.

    Having no money pushed me into single, working-mom mode, earning me a badge of courage that I proudly still wear today.

    My boys learned too: Losing our home made all of us appreciate our tiny rented condo and everything we shared in that beautiful, intimate space. Thousands of art projects, play dates, and burnt Eggo waffles later, my children and I became closer than I ever could have imagined.

    To navigate and process my pain, I became a “seeker,” which led me to incredible teachers, a lifelong meditation practice, becoming an author, lots of art, and a master’s degree in art therapy.

    Over time, I understood the true meaning of forgiveness and self-love, which fully opened my heart and my life. I understood that compassion was the answer to almost everything, and embarked on a path of helping others overcome hardship. This has become the most gratifying part of my life.

    I learned the beauty and blessings of the present moment, and how to stay there. I learned that loving someone with all of my heart did not mean sacrificing my own dreams.

    In the end, losing everything led directly to me finding myself.

    Both accidents taught me this: It’s easy to find things to be grateful for when life is wonderful. The key is finding things to be grateful about during and in challenge, so we feel good more of the time.

    Here’s how I did it: I learned to look at just about every situation and ask this question: “What’s good about that?”

    This was no easy feat, and I’m not at all saying that when life gets hard or tragedy strikes, we should immediately be expected to feel grateful. I certainly didn’t. Gratitude is a path and practice, and finding blessings-in-disguise can take years, even a lifetime.

    I believe that genuine gratitude is simply about finding good things in less time, whatever that is for you, and however you need to get there.

    Knowing all I know now, am I grateful enough to say I am glad it all happened? My accidents made me who I am, and I’m not sure how I would have gotten here without the hardship. So, in that sense, I can honestly say that I wouldn’t change a thing.

    I am most thankful for my abiding trust in the knowledge that looking for what’s good in hardship is a transformative way to live, and it both humbles and amazes me. The present moment is all we have, so we may as well find peace in it.

    I have absolute faith that by looking at all areas of life—emotional, social, physical, spiritual, familial, and vocational—and asking, “What’s good about that?” I will always have something to be grateful for, even if it’s simply using the bathroom again.

  • How I Climbed Out of the Valley of Loss and Healed

    How I Climbed Out of the Valley of Loss and Healed

    “In our lives, change is unavoidable, loss is unavoidable. In the adaptability and ease with which we experience change lies our happiness and freedom.” ~Buddha

    The universe was conspiring against me, I was sure of it. By the time I was thirty-six, I had lost everything in life that I had set out to accomplish—my marriage, my pregnancies, my two dogs, and eventually my house. The perfect family model I was so desperate to create was completely lost.

    Living alone and in fear of the future, I worried about what may or may not come, because everything I had tried up until that point had failed.

    I began doubting myself, as I wasn’t sure if all of my effort was worth it anymore. Anxiety and sadness gripped my heart and I drank to escape, because I really wasn’t up to the task of figuring out how to love myself in spite of my failed expectations.

    Then the universe added insult to injury: I found out my dad had metastatic colon cancer, and it was a total devastating surprise. I don’t know how it could have been, since as a nurse I could already see his sunken eyes, pale and ashen lips and skin, and the lack of energy in his step.

    Everything about him was telling me that he was dying, but when you love someone, it’s easy to see what you want to see.

    Selfishly, I needed to see my dad as the healthy, solid dad I knew. The dad I could rely on for advice and his pick-me-ups of “good job, kiddo.” But most importantly, I needed him to stay the man who helped me when things in my life were most dire.

    The thing is, it was not a white knight on a horse, it was my dad who loved and rescued me. It was he in his black Toyota pickup driving over 800 miles from Seattle to San Francisco to rescue me from my abusive marriage. He literally helped to pick me up off the floor after my husband had thrown me to the ground and tried to suffocate me.

    It was my dad who collected me and what little remained of my belongings, and without any questions or “I told you so’s,” packed me up and drove me back home to heal. And it was my dad who helped me hire a lawyer to file for divorce.

    When I learned that my dependable dad was dying, my mind tried to race against the symbolism of the metastatic invasion into my life that I refused to accept. I was losing again.

    How was I going to survive all of this loss? Would I have anything left or would I harden into a shell of a hollow woman?

    Despite attempts to plead and bargain with the universe, my dad died on a Friday. Friday June 21st. It was summer solstice and a day that not even the longest day of the year could light up. It was my darkest hour.

    At 10:00pm exactly, my dad took his last breath. It wasn’t until the undertaker came to pick him up and placed his lifeless body in their white plastic bag and I heard the sound of the zipper closing him in, that I turned in a childlike panic to face my mom and cry to her in half-truth, half questioning, “I’ll never see my dad again.”

    She looked at me blankly as the tidal wave of panic took over and I was drowning in pain.

    Many people run from the pain when they lose someone they love. They drown out the sound and fury of the feelings by numbing themselves in a variety of ways. I could have easily called my life quits and elected to stay living in the pain of loss, but instead something greater than me began to appear in my life. A spiritual side took over in a true form of resuscitative life support.

    I started to ask myself the bigger picture questions, “What else can I be doing?” “What else does life have in store for me?” “Why am I going through all of this?”

    Over the following months, I developed new hobbies and outlets for my self-care such as writing, meditation, and simply being quiet.

    I told myself it was okay to live in each moment and take life as it was presented to me.

    But the most importantly, I felt I was being spiritually guided through my dreams and my intuition, to my own inner wisdom showing me how to heal and activate my spiritual strength through my loss.

    “You can lose other people without losing yourself.”   

    “You can have loss without being lost.”

    Living beyond grief and loss is an evolution through a set of choices beginning with TRUST.  Trust the process. Trust yourself in the process. Trust that you can heal and flourish again in time.

    If you’re grieving right now…

    1. Know that time is your friend.

    We all learn to let go in our own way, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. Sometimes in parts, sometimes all at once. And then all over again. It is a process, and a process worth trusting.

    Choose to be patient with yourself. Give yourself permission to grieve and permission for the times you want to bounce out of it and watch TV.

    It can take months or years to absorb a major loss and to accept that life has changed. In whatever way it has changed, be kind to yourself by taking further pressure off, and don’t purposefully make any more major changes.

    Don’t worry about pleasing everyone else, completing everything on your to-do list, or keeping up with everyone around you. Sometimes it may take all your energy just to get through the day, and that’s okay. Sometimes that’s enough.

    2. Accept yourself and where you are from moment to moment.

    Grief isn’t always linear or convenient. Allow yourself to be sad, to be calm, to laugh, and to return back to being sad again. Lose all attachment to anything happening in a specific way. I remember being at work dealing with sick patients and having to leave the room because the tears and sadness would suddenly take over. It happens—let it.

    While it takes effort to begin to live in the present again and not dwell on the past, remember who you are in each moment—a beautiful soul dealing with transitory feelings—and know that is enough.

    3. Let the tears flow.

    If there is one thing I do well, it’s cry. Do you allow sobbing wails and tears? Allow the feelings of grief to arise and to pass. Emotional expression through grieving is normal and tears are a part of that process.   There is no reason to be embarrassed or try to suppress your tears. Crying is a normal human response to emotion and has a number of health benefits, including pain relief and self-soothing effects.

    Every time you allow an aspect of your pain to be felt and released, you are healing.

    A successful spiritual practice and one that gave me great freedom was to know, regardless of what loss I experienced in life, I can love myself through it all. Remember, you are not your pain and are worthy of love at all times.

    Though I walked through the valley of the shadow of loss, I will not live there. And you don’t have to either.

  • Even in the Hospital, He Found Joy in the Now

    Even in the Hospital, He Found Joy in the Now

    “Don’t let the sadness of your past and the fear of your future ruin the happiness of your present.” ~Unknown

    Back in the day when I was a stay-at-home mom, “mindfulness” wasn’t even a word in my vocabulary. The only mindfulness I was aware of was my own mind-fullness just trying to navigate a busy, full schedule with three children. It wasn’t until later in life that mindfulness was brought to my attention through the examples my oldest son Sean exhibited.

    Sean was my mindfulness teacher. He showed me how to be in the sweet spot of the now. He had an ability to hold a singular focus on what was happening right in front of him. There wasn’t any moment other than the one he was in, which made mindfulness look effortless.

    Mindfulness became a necessary skill especially because in the first year of Sean’s life, he developed an unexpected seizure disorder. As soon as the seizures began, we were on a life-long medical treadmill of doctor’s visits, prescriptions, surgeries, and therapies.

    Professionals wanted a recalling of the past as they asked a myriad of questions about family history, Sean’s developmental milestones, seizure activity, and responses to various medications tried. Noting past events took up a lot of room in my head, which made it hard to keep my mind focused on the present. Often I was busy corralling my thoughts from the detour they had taken into the past territory of “what used to be.”

    In those early days of seeking medical opinions, doctors gave optimistic reassurances about Sean’s future. Over time, as the seizures continued the prognosis grew more grim. I never wanted to think about Sean’s future for long, as down-the-road possibilities only caused apprehension and heartache. The what-if scenario’s easily swept me away from the present into feeling overwhelmed.

    I needed to practice mindfulness to cultivate calmness. Whenever I was present to the “what is” at any given moment, I could breathe more easily. I didn’t fret, re-hash, or ruminate over what had happened nor fear what could happen.

    Later in Sean’s life, his balance became more precarious. Despite wearing a helmet to protect his head, the helmet failed on many occasions to keep his face totally protected. If he lost his equilibrium or fell due to having a seizure, often a subsequent trip to the local emergency room occurred.

    One particular time after Sean had fallen, the ER visit was particularly challenging. Sean had received a nasty laceration just barely above his eye. It was a jagged, mean-looking, gaping wide-open cut. Sean’s eye had already swollen shut. The doctor explained how the sutures had to be intricately stitched in the inner and outer layers of skin.

    “Sean, you are the bravest boy in the whole wide world” was what I would always tell him. It was true. He suffered in a way that I know most people will never experience in their lifetime. I found as the years progressed, it became harder and harder for me to witness his suffering, to stay present during medical procedures.

    I talked and sang to Sean to distract him from what was happening, to reassure and comfort him. However, I knew I was losing my bearings. My thoughts were already in the instant replay of the traumatic scene we were in, in technicolor, on one endless loop. I couldn’t stop my thoughts from fixating on the suffering Sean was enduring.

    Sean looked as if he went a few rounds in the boxing ring. I knew this had to hurt and attempted to hold an ice bag on his face to minimize further swelling. I internally shuddered as I watched the wound being cleaned, the pain numbing injections and the sutures being threaded over and over in such a tender area on his face as I tried to hold him still.

    All these painful scenes got filed into an already extensive compilation of memories.

    Once the doctor finished, while we waited for discharge orders, Sean showed me a different way to live with his example of mindfulness on full display. This ER trip was where I learned that instead of re-immersing myself in the upsetting experiences of what had happened, I could stay present.

    I could find something to appreciate right in front of me, and allow myself to enjoy it fully, without revisiting painful experiences from the past and worrying about what might happen in the future.

    I moved a phone over to Sean’s lap and told him we would call Catherine, his sister. Ever since Sean was a little boy, he loved to make phone calls or ‘talk’ on the phone. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist, but you could see his glee whenever he was on the phone.

    I held the phone to his ear as he put his hand over mine to cradle it. As he talked to Catherine, he stretched back comfortably in the bed, tilted his head to the side, intently listening.

    It was stunning to watch how, in a matter of minutes Sean, understandably upset, was now beaming a big smile. He was totally there, in that moment, so totally tickled to be on the phone with Catherine.

    What he just went through receded into the past almost as if forgotten. He was not re-living in his mind the awfulness of the fall, how horrible of a cut he had nor the pain he had endured. No, not at all. Sean was on the phone, that’s all there was right then, and he was happy.

    Our positions reversed, with Sean, the calming presence, and I reassured by him. He showed me how freeing it was to release the past. To let go of the suffering, be right there in the now. How truly it’s a grace to have mindful moments like that and stay in the awareness of the moment.

    Sean showed me more than once how trouble-free life could be if one is mindful. No past considerations or future possibilities. When I was mindful, I saw Sean just as he was.

    I did not settle into thinking of the past when once upon a time, Sean was a normally developing, beautiful baby. Nor did I focus on the skills he lost along the way or how fragile he had become. Or abide in the fear and apprehension of what would happen next.

    Being mindful kept my thoughts in the present moment, which allowed me to more fully appreciate and enjoy the limited time I had with my son. It was only from there that I could sustain my immense gratitude for the gift of Sean’s presence in my life just as he was. His lessons on mindfulness are indelibly written in my thoughts and heart.

  • My Life with an Alcoholic Parent (and 6 Addiction Myths)

    My Life with an Alcoholic Parent (and 6 Addiction Myths)

    “Be the person who breaks the cycle. If you were judged, choose understanding. If you were rejected, choose acceptance. If you were shamed, choose compassion. Be the person you needed when you were hurting, not the person who hurt you. Vow to be better than what broke you—to heal instead of becoming bitter so you can act from your heart, not your pain.” ~Lori Deschene

    Take a moment to look around where you are right now. Look at the people surrounding you, whether you’re in your office, a waiting room, or the line at the post office.

    Statistically, one out of every eight American adults in your space is suffering with a substance abuse disorder.

    This person could be your next-door neighbor, your family doctor, your teacher, or a co-worker.

    Out of more than 15 million people struggling, less than 8% reportedly have received treatment, according to the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

    Television shows and movies often lead us to believe that the people who suffer from addiction are the homeless, jobless people on the street who beg for money to feed their habit.

    In some circumstances, this unfortunately is true, but I’ve learned that addiction can also be found in the people around you in your day-to-day life. Addiction doesn’t care which zip code you live in or what skin color you have. It doesn’t matter how much money you have in your bank account or what kind of position you hold within a company.

    I was around five or six years old when I first recognized that my dad had a problem. I didn’t know what the word “addiction” meant; however, I knew his actions made me feel that our family was different than others.

    It would be summertime and I would see neighbors sitting outside laughing together and barbecuing, and being that it was starting to get late in the day, my dad had already drank a few too many and would be inside for the night.

    The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates that a quarter of children in the U.S. grow up in households where there is substance abuse.

    Growing up with a parent who has an addiction isn’t easy. You see them transform into a different person before your eyes. Within hours. You wonder why they choose to spend time with the addiction instead of with you.

    You can cry, scream, and slam your bedroom door to try to make a point of how much it hurts you, but it never seems to be enough. And it doesn’t mean this person doesn’t love or care about you, although it can make you feel that way.

    At a young age, I remember experiencing the ups and downs of a parent with an addiction. Each day would be different than the last. Some days he would joke and laugh, and others, we would do anything to avoid him because we knew he’d take out on us the weight of whatever he had been carrying that day.

    My dad was considered a “functioning alcoholic.” I don’t recall him ever missing one day of work, even when he had the flu or after spraining his ankle.

    By trade, he was a carpenter and scaffolder, and to this day, he is the hardest working man I’ve ever known. He’d wake up before the sun to get to work so he could provide for us. He went above and beyond to care, love, and protect us, but after a certain time of day, we knew that would all come to an end.

    The classic picture of an alcoholic is someone who drinks too much and whose life is falling apart because of it. But that’s not always reality.

    A functioning alcoholic might not act the way you would expect them to act. They might be responsible and productive. They could even be a high achiever and in a position of power. In fact, their success might lead people to overlook their drinking.

    Alcohol and drugs steal away the person you love. They rob you of time you should be spending with them. They turn them into someone else—a person who says and does hurtful things. And in turn, you might say hurtful things back. Not because you want to, but because you simply don’t know what else to do. You begin thinking of what you can do to turn this person around. What will make them stop?

    I grew up with a parent who had an addiction to numbing his feelings.

    There were times when he would open up briefly about the hardships he had experienced growing up and how hurt and angry they made him feel. Rather than forgiving those who’d caused him pain, to free himself of what he kept bottled up inside, he would drink to relieve it.

    It hurts to see someone you love hurting. It hurts to not know what to do to help them.

    My dad never admitted to having a problem. Not once. Not even when we poured the cans of beer we’d found down the sink and he became excessively angry.

    Admitting to having a problem is the first step, and the next would be to make a change. And it wasn’t something he believed he could do.

    Sometimes it feels easier to stay the same than do what’s needed to rid yourself of the addiction. You feel ‘safe’ where you are, and you can easily justify maintaining the status quo. My dad had a job, a family, a nice home. In his mind, why would he need to change? That wasn’t what rock bottom looks like. So everything must have been fine how it was.

    I recently heard a story by Kirk Franklin:

    “Two twin boys were raised by an alcoholic father. One grew up to be an alcoholic and when asked what happened he said, ‘I watched my father.’ The other grew up and never drank in his life. When he asked what happened he said, ‘I watched my father.’ Two boys, same dad, two different perspectives. Your perspective in life will determine your destination.”

    I was a young girl when I realized that I had two choices when it came to my dad’s addiction: to forgive or to hold onto the hurt, as I saw him do. I saw what it looked like to hold on to anger and resentment, so I decided that no matter what my dad might say or do, I would show forgiveness. 

    This wasn’t easy because at the end of the day, you just want that person to stop, but I chose to focus on the dad I had when he wasn’t under the influence of alcohol. The dad who would shoot hoops with me in the backyard, who would fill the oil up in my car without asking if I needed it, who would keep letters I wrote to him in the pocket of his jeans years after I had given them to him.

    I’ve learned that it is our decision to create the life we want to live and the mindset we want to have. I could have held on to the hurtful things my dad said or how he refused to get help. But I believe we have the power to overcome any circumstance by focusing on what lifts us up rather than what pulls us down.

    “I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.” ~Carl Jung

    Today I am choosing to share my story with you as a way to honor my dad, who kept himself in a cage for his entire life. Was it out of fear of judgment or discomfort? I’m not sure. But I do know for the last twenty-nine years, I’ve been conditioned to do the same.

    The stigma related to addiction causes us to feel shame. And I have felt shame for having a parent who had this disease. We keep our stories inside because we are afraid of how people will view us or our loved one. But in reality, it’s sharing that sets us free—free to make a difference in the life of someone else who is struggling.

    Today is the day I open the door to my own cage, after nearly thirty years, to set myself free and break the cycle. I hope that my story will connect with someone who needs it—a person who, like me, has buried their past deep inside and pushes forward, not realizing the power and strength found in release.

    I also hope to shed some light on what it’s like to struggle with addiction, based on my observations of my father, because I believe we’re better able to help the people we love when we let go of these common myths:

    Addicts can stop if they want to.

    Research shows that long-term substance use alters brain chemistry. These changes can cause intense cravings, impulse control issues, and the compulsion to continue to use. Due to these chemical changes, it is very difficult for a true addict to quit solely by willpower and determination.

    Addiction only affects those who are weak, uneducated, or have low morals.

    Addiction does not discriminate. It affects people of all ages, ethnicities, cultures, religions, communities, and socioeconomic statuses. Addiction is not a result of low morals, though often addicts behave in ways that violate their personal beliefs and values. Addiction is an equal opportunity disease.

    Addiction is a disease, so there is nothing you can do about it.

    If your doctor told you that you had cancer, would you not begin the necessary treatment and make the necessary lifestyle changes? Addiction isn’t much different if you believe in the research that suggests that addiction is a disease of the brain.

    Just because you have the disease of addiction doesn’t mean you throw in the towel. Research shows that the brain damage resulting from substance use can sometimes be reversed through abstinence, therapy, and other forms of treatment.

    Addicts who relapse are hopeless.

    Addiction is a chronic disorder. Addicts are most prone to relapse in the first few months of being clean and sober. A relapse does not constitute failure.Processing the events surrounding a relapse can be healthy and aid in preventing future relapses.

    Alcohol and drug use cause addiction.

    There are several factors that contribute to a person becoming addicted. While alcohol and drugs may trigger a substance use problem for some, there are those who can drink alcohol and experiment with drug use and never become addicted. Factors that contribute include environment, emotional health, mental health, and genetic predisposition.

    Addicts should be excused from negative behaviors.

    Some may believe since addiction is a disease, addicts should not be held accountable for their actions. This is not true. An addict may not be responsible for their disease, but they are responsible for their choices and their recovery.

    —

    It’s easy to judge and criticize what we don’t understand. You don’t have to walk a mile in an addict’s shoes to understand addiction and addictive behaviors. You just have to educate yourself and want to help so you can break the cycle of pain. And remember: whether you’re an addict or you love one, there’s nothing to be ashamed of, and you are not alone.

  • What to Do When Someone You Love is Struggling

    What to Do When Someone You Love is Struggling

    “Sometimes the easiest way to solve a problem is to stop participating in the problem.” ~ Jonathan Mead

    I don’t think I’m alone in having someone in my life whom I wish I could change. Someone I see struggling, who ignores or resents any lifesavers I send their way. I can clearly see how this person contributes to their own struggles, but they remain totally unaware of it. Sometimes, I want to shake some sense into this person; I think, “If only they would get their life together…”

    For many of us, this person is a relative: a sister, brother, parent, or child. For others, it’s a close friend or coworker. A lot of times, it’s someone we want in our lives, even if it’s painful to keep them there. No matter who it is, it certainly isn’t easy to see someone you care about struggle.

    Being in the presence of another’s pain used to provoke a deeply emotional response from me. And I know others feel the same. Sympathy and the desire to help someone in distress are naturally instinctual responses.

    According to Darwin, humans and animals alike take comfort in one another’s company, protecting one another and defending each other against threats.

    I get that. It makes total sense to me. I would have gone to the ends of the earth to see the people I care about happy. I did just about anything to try and change them; I read books and articles, reaching out for experts’ advice on how I could get them to see the light. In fact, I became one of those “experts” myself, and if I’m honest with myself, it’s because I was looking for a way to help the ones I love.

    You see, I didn’t just have one person in my life who was struggling. At one point, it seemed like the majority of my family members were having a tough time. That led me to feel desperate and helpless, unable to live my own life while sensing their pain.

    I always hung on to the hope that the people in my life would somehow change. That something I had overlooked would prove to be the magic bullet to help them live a good and fulfilling life.

    I kept buying more books, reading more articles, and encouraging them to go to therapy, whether they wanted to or not. I reasoned, pleaded, led interventions. Dreamed of my ideal relationships with them, imagined them happy and full of life. Yearned for their smiles and enthusiasm for life. Believed that I couldn’t be happy until they were.

    I made it my life mission to change others, becoming a therapist to help make changes in other people’s lives, fixing what was broken.

    Well, as you can imagine, that never worked. When you have people in your life whom it hurts to love, the only logical solution seems like trying to help them change. But I had to learn the long and hard way, by running into dead ends and facing many disappointments, that you can’t make other people change. You can’t make other people happy. And you can’t rescue another person.

    The only person you can change is yourself. So that’s what I did. I learned to manage my anxiety around other people’s discomfort. I decided that other people’s struggles and journeys were just that: their struggles and journeys. I stopped trying to be helpful and instead decided that I had a right to be happy.

    It’s so important to understand that you can’t make somebody change. You can inspire them to change. You can educate them toward change. You can support them in their change. But you can’t force them to change just so that you can feel more comfortable around them.

    Maybe that sounds like giving up. Maybe that even sounds a bit uncaring. However, I didn’t stop trying to be helpful to those struggling because I stopped loving them. I stopped because I saw it was not only not working, it was also contributing to their problems.

    When I made efforts to take on other people’s problems I would do too much. I relieved them for a moment of their pain; however, I wasn’t providing them with the space they needed to solve their own issues. If I kept jumping in to help them, they would keep relying on me, instead of themselves, which wouldn’t allow them to better deal with life’s many difficulties on their own.

    After years of doing the same things over and over again, with very little result, I decided it was time to change my approach. I was doing the very thing I wanted to see other people stop doing: I was contributing to my own problems. And it was time to stop doing that. It was time to be happy, not only for me, but for those that I cared about. It was time to be less helpful.

    Our efforts to be helpful might be based on good intentions, but those good intentions don’t always yield good results.

    By committing to learning what real help is, I came to understand that if I could manage my anxiety about other people’s problems and invest my time thinking about real solutions, I could change my responses and do something that was legitimately helpful.

    As the first step in this process, I began to define my true beliefs, values, and ideas about helping others.

    I’ve learned that in crisis situations, it’s best for me to calm myself down and respond as wisely as possible—when it’s needed and, of course, when it’s welcomed. The ability to manage my emotions in the highly anxious and emotional presence of another, especially a loved one in pain, is a lifelong mission of mine, because I truly believe it’s what will be helpful.

    If we can all manage ourselves in the face of other people’s problems, we can truly be present and accountable.

    On my journey to find out what it means to be truly helpful, I’ve found some tools I keep in my back pocket when the going gets tough.

    First, stay in touch.

    This isn’t easy to do in the presence of someone who’s very anxious and upset. Some people naturally create distance when anxiety is high. Thinking that you can’t help, or that the situation is too large, can lead you to run in the other direction.

    I try to stay in contact with people I care about, even if their problems are too big for me to solve or aren’t solvable at all, like having an illness. Staying in touch helps me manage myself around the big stuff I can’t solve, and learn to accept people as they are.

    Second, see the person past the problem.

    When I was walking around with a hammer, I was basically seeing everyone in my life as a nail. There was more to them than the issues they were facing, but I wasn’t relating to them as whole people. Now I look for other people’s strengths, and their ability to solve their own issues. People are more resilient than we tend to think.

    Third, respect others’ boundaries and ability to solve their own problems.

    Many people are vulnerable when they face life’s stressors, and some people look to others to solve their problems for them. These days, I try to respect other people enough to let them come up with their own answers.

    Determining how much to say or not say in each situation we face is not an exact science. I respect others’ boundaries by supporting their autonomy, being there for them but staying out of the way when my opinion isn’t needed. I make sure that any ideas for possible solutions come from them. I offer useful information without telling anyone what to do.

    Fourth, know your own limitations.

    It was humbling for me to find out how little control I have over the way others decide to live their lives. I changed my thought process from thinking I knew what’s best for my loved ones, to defining what I really could and couldn’t do; then my responses became clearer.

    I was able to be more open and honest about the reality of my own life and how available I could be for others. I learned the hard way that, most of the time, my limits of time and energy were reached before other people’s needs were met.

    Fifth, become more objective.

    Boy, is it hard to think objectively when it comes to our important relationships. In intense emotional situations, it’s easy to get pulled into it all and feel pressured to do something instead of taking a step back and seeing the bigger picture.

    With each situation I face, I work on getting more objective about it, reflecting on how I can remain calm and not feel the need to solve anything immediately.

    Remaining objective is about seeing the difference between reality and what you feel. So, for example, instead of thinking you need to break your best friend’s unhealthy relationship pattern because it hurts you to see her in the same painful situation over and over again, you might step back and recognize she’s making progress, even if it’s slow, and we all need to learn our own lessons in our own time.

    Sixth, work toward being open and honest.

    We all have a need to feel seen, heard, and understood. However, way too many people aren’t open and honest in their relationships. When we can be open about our vulnerabilities and share our own experiences, it can be healing and calming. We can let others know that we can relate to them. When we’re trying to solve and fix everything, we aren’t connecting with others at a deeper level. We’re acting as if we’re above them.

    —

    By making an effort to stop trying to be helpful, I saw many changes in my life. I no longer felt the pressure I once put on myself to be responsible for other people. I no longer made other people’s struggles about myself. And through all of that, I was able to foster better relationships with the people I care about—relationships based on reality, versus fantasies of who I wished they would be.

    What I describe here is my own personal experience. I share it as a way to get you thinking, but there’s no one-size-fits-all method for determining what real help is.

    The biggest lesson I learned in all of this is that I wasn’t helping anyone when I was swooping in trying to solve every problem without looking at the bigger picture. I understand now that when my “helping” is rooted in anxiety and an urge to smooth things over, it isn’t coming from a genuine place.

    I now know it’s okay to not have all of the answers; it’s okay to take my time to think things over; it’s okay to throw my hands up and say, “This situation really stinks right now, and it’s going to be hard for a while.”

    It’s okay for you to do all those things, too. Not every struggling person needs saving. Knowing that, and accepting it, might be the most helpful thing you can do.

  • I Thought It Was Love, But It Was Actually Abuse

    I Thought It Was Love, But It Was Actually Abuse

    “Alone doesn’t always mean lonely. Relationship doesn’t always mean happy. Being alone will never cause as much loneliness as being in the wrong relationship.” ~Unknown

    I don’t know if it’s the conditioning of Disney movies that makes every young girl dream of finding her Prince Charming, but that was my experience. My prince entered my life just like that, saving me from my boredom and taking me on a roller coaster of excitement. He assured me that our love was going to last forever, and the naivety of being sixteen made me believe him.

    It didn’t take long for his true colors to emerge; sadly, it took me longer to see them.

    I thought the control was over-protectiveness. I thought he cared when he told me what to wear, who I could associate with, and where I could go. The Neanderthal behavior must have touched something primitive in me, and I was overwhelmed with the urge to please.

    Quickly, I went from princess to property. He shouted at me, berated me, and mentally tortured me. And I thought I was being loved.

    To anyone who has never been in this situation, the words “run, Forest, run” might come to mind. However, we say this from an adult perspective, older and wiser. When you’ve been brainwashed since you were sixteen, it takes more than a quote from a movie to see sense.

    Everything became an argument. Every argument taught me to walk on eggshells. If I didn’t conform, he would ignore me. If I refused to listen, he would isolate me. If I cried, he would scream at me. If I had no emotion, he would play the victim.

    I thought I could make him better. I thought he would receive the love from me that he was lacking elsewhere and that this would make him change.

    I thought wrong.

    Nearly fifteen years later, I am the one who holds a lifetime worth of memories that I can’t forget, and I’ve had to recondition myself into believing that this is not my fault. No amount of “what ifs” can change a person’s innate morality. Mentally and emotionally healthy people do not try to make others feel unworthy of love and dress it up to be love.

    If you asked me to define love, I would tell you it is the ability to be unselfish. To be willing to put others first and sacrifice your needs and desires at times. More importantly, love needs to be reciprocated.

    But when I was with my ex, I felt as though I had to work hard to receive love. I needed to shut myself, my thoughts, and my feelings down and simply become a doormat, or else he’d emotionally abandon me.

    So, I tried that. I became a “yes” woman. I lost myself in the world of conformity, and it still wasn’t enough. He accused me of being unfeeling, emotionless, and devoid of passion. So, I changed again. I tried to become more like him. I would scream and shout to try and gain control, and then he called me manipulative and psychotic.

    I tried to combine the two. I tried to be religious. I tried to be a party-goer. I tried to be dominant. I tried to be submissive.

    Nothing worked.

    I cried, begged, and pleaded to be treated like a human. I asked for compassion but received cruelty. I asked for love and had to be satisfied with lust. I wanted hope but felt hopeless. Until I realized that I was asking for something that he was unable to give me.

    A narcissist is incapable of recognizing the needs of another. He/she cannot fathom that people have emotions, unless they are used as a method of control. They thrive on the idea that you believe in them and, rather than granting you equality, they manipulate you into believing that the scraps they throw you are the only ones you deserve.

    He told me countless times that he loved me, so why have I spent the last decade and a half repeatedly asking the same question, “Do you really love me?”

    If he loved me, how could he not understand my pain? How could he be okay with knowing I felt so low? How could he constantly betray me? Why couldn’t he make the same sacrifices as me? Why couldn’t he just be the person I first fell in love with?

    The answer to those questions is simple: The narcissist is a multi-faceted creature, a chameleon who adapts to your weaknesses and uses them to maintain a position of strength. Because of their personality disorder, they are lacking in the qualities that make you who you are.

    They are determined to keep you in a position of subordination because this feeds their need to feel superior, and when you fight to break out of that role, they leave.

    They show you good times to ensure that you feel indebted to them and to make you yearn for them once again. They make up and break up with you so often that you may find it hard to move on. If you do, you likely feel distrusting of people, making you an incomplete partner for a mentally and emotionally healthy human being.

    After a breakup, we often try to make ourselves whole by seeking another, the biggest mistake we could possibly make. Would you purchase an item with pieces missing?

    It’s a little crude to compare a human being to an object, but we cannot expect to ‘move on’ if we are seeking to replace the void left by a narcissist.

    Moving on shouldn’t mean jumping into a relationship with another human. It should mean taking responsibility for why we stayed in this unhealthy situation, recognizing what needs to be addressed and healed within ourselves, and moving on mentally from our trauma.

    My trauma originated from never knowing my father. I yearned for someone who would fulfill the role of a protector. At the beginning, my ex did. It didn’t matter how many times we argued, I knew that he would always fight in my corner, and that made me feel safe. Eventually, the cons outweighed the pros and I knew that I had to break free.

    Now that I’m on my own, I have days when I wake up and forget that I am no longer in this toxicity, I have days where I remember the good times, and I have days when I regret laying eyes on him. However, my days are no longer concerned with how I stand in relation to him.

    I wake up and wonder what I am going to do today. I actively pursue my dreams of being a writer, or I focus on other ways I can improve my life. I research my MARs (Masters by research) topic, I cook the food I like, I wear the clothes that I look good in. Small victories for some, milestones for a victim of narcissism.

    I pray, I meditate, I exercise, and I write. Most importantly, every day I heal. I take back a part of my life that I lost because I made the mistake of trusting the wrong person with my heart.

    I rebuild the relationships I lost when I gave in to his attempts to isolate me from my friends and family—because I didn’t want to argue and because I was ashamed that, for all my outward strength and intellect, I couldn’t find the courage to leave.

    I cut out the unhealthy influences from my life, and if I can’t, I distance myself from them. I refuse to regress to the lost teenage girl and instead, harness the energy of a strong, powerful, and determined woman. I refuse to conform to the idea that a woman is “past her sell by date” and reject the notions of commodifying humans.

    I also reconnect with who I am beyond my roles. I’m more than someone’s mother, daughter, niece, and grandchild. I am a writer. I am a creator. I am a dreamer.

    There is a difference between being alone and lonely. Sometimes we need to be alone to truly rediscover ourselves. The relationship between you and yourself is more important than any other.

  • How to Free Yourself from Your Spiritual Drama

    How to Free Yourself from Your Spiritual Drama

    “You have no friends. You have no enemies. You only have teachers.” ~Ancient Proverb

    My very wise aunt, a talented psychotherapist and one of my spiritual teachers, has told me many times that the people, places, and things that trigger us are just “props in our spiritual drama.”

    This phrase has stuck with me for years because it’s catchy and it rings so true to me. If we are struggling, it’s not a matter of the external force, it’s about what it provokes in us.

    We don’t heal by trying to change others. We heal through breaking cycles; through knowing and honoring ourselves by creating healthy boundaries, processing the past, and living presently to make different choices.

    We don’t grow by staying in the same circumstances and hoping they will be different, or by leaving one set of circumstances only to repeat the same patterns with new people and places. We grow by stepping out of our inner default programming and into discomfort, and by consciously shifting away from the patterns we know and choosing different environments and dynamics.

    The people, places, and things that come into our lives are there for our spiritual journey, learning, and evolution. We can use these ‘props’ for good, we can use them to stay stuck, or we can use them to spiral down. As adults, the choice is ours.

    The props in our spiritual drama are what trigger us the most. They may be people, situations, or even certain qualities we notice in strangers.  

    My most challenging relationship is with my father, and while I could get stuck in that hardship story, I believe that he was placed in that role to assist me in the lessons I needed to learn while growing up and into young adulthood.

    The guy that I just dated, who I fell hard and quick for, was a prop in my relationship practice and process in continuing to clearly define what I want in a partner and what healthy boundaries I need to set.

    When I feel pain in my heart and want to stand up for the child who is being yelled at by a stressed mother on the subway, it shows me my own emotional hurt and the ways I haven’t expressed my truth about how my young inner child was treated poorly.

    When I feel anger when confronted with economic inequality, inconsideration/lack of caring, and other injustices in this world, it teaches me that I am not doing enough to feel satisfied and proud of the ways in which I contribute positively to society.

    Anything that I have not made peace with, found forgiveness around, or worked out within me yet continues to be a prop that encourages my spiritual growth.

    As I’ve contemplated the props in my spiritual drama, I trust they are there to assist me on my path.

    Challenging people and situations can be very difficult to live with and through, but I believe they serve an important purpose. If we are conscious and choose to move toward growth, freedom, and love, we can take this adversity and turn it into empowerment so we are more capable of being our best selves.

    Two main points have stuck out to me as I try to evolve through my spiritual drama.

    1. Situations repeat themselves until we learn the lessons.

    The lesson is ours to be learned, so if we don’t learn it the first or the tenth time, the pattern will continue in a vicious cycle until we finally get the message and choose a different way.

    Sometimes if we examine where or by whom we are triggered, the lesson is clear right away. Other times we need some guidance because we recognize something doesn’t feel right, yet we can’t get out of our own way enough to see it clearly.

    Friends, mentors, and family members we have healthy relationships with can be great at helping us understand our cycles and patterns so we can break free. Other times, we need to go within.

    When confronted with a low point, we have the opportunity to acknowledge what isn’t working and figure out in what direction our gut wisdom is guiding us.

    Personally, I had a habit of choosing men who were very passionate about their career or a serious hobby, and they would prioritize this passion over me, which led me to feeling hurt and uncared about.

    When I held up the mirror to examine myself deeply, I was able to see that as long as I wasn’t prioritizing myself and showing up to fully love for myself, I would attract partners who would partially reject me in the same way.

    A second layer of this was that I was subconsciously living vicariously through my partners’ aliveness and passion because I was missing that in my own life. Once I developed my own passions and started doing work I love, the need to feel this joy vicariously faded away and I started desiring partners who are more balanced and can have multiple priorities.

    The change may be uncomfortable, but usually quite rewarding in the end. And the discomfort we feel moving into the unknown is better than the despair we feel when repeating the same pattern over and over and staying miserable in the ‘known.’

    2. Our triggers can help us discover unmet needs, and meet them.

    Oftentimes we feel triggered by certain people, qualities, or situations because they represent ways we feel consciously or subconsciously uncared for, attacked, neglected, and rejected.

    For example, let’s say your boss gives you some constructive feedback regarding your work, and you feel like it’s a personal attack or a criticism instead of feedback intended to support you to help you succeed.

    In this scenario, instead of feeling attacked or rejected by your boss, you could ask yourself why you’re feeling such intense emotion. Is it because you’re hypercritical of yourself? Or do you feel shamed for not getting praise or approval because that’s a pattern you were taught growing up? In this instance, the trigger might teach you that you need your own approval.

    The more we can meet our own needs and lovingly re-parent ourselves, the more these triggers will fall away. So the inquiry becomes the key to moving through this spiritual drama.

    We need to ask why to understand our triggers more deeply, shift the immediate emotional response to curiosity, and eventually release the trigger by clearing past baggage and learning the lesson to show up for ourselves differently.

    Whenever, I’m feeling particularly triggered by a person or behavior, I take a few minutes to sit quietly, go within, and ask myself what it’s about and what I need to do to take care of myself.

    Maybe my inner child needs some reassurance that she is safe and loved.

    Maybe my body needs some relaxation because my nervous system is over-stimulated or stressed.

    Maybe I need to play, dance, and move energy through my body because I’ve been too much in do/go/on mode.

    Once I take care of my own needs, I’m not focused on the other, the prop, the trigger anymore. I am peaceful and present.

    This realization has served as a helpful reminder as I’ve moved through my life and felt the range of emotions that have come up. It’s never all about the other person; on some level, it’s about me. It serves me well to keep the focus on myself, what’s going on for me when the triggers come up, and what I can learn and process so that those triggers no longer live inside my body, mind, and soul.

    As we own and clear what is within us, the props in our spiritual drama fall away and we become lighter and can live more peacefully.

    May this serve you and may you be free.