Tag: wisdom
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I Didn’t Know How to Let Love In… Until Now
“You open your heart knowing there’s a chance it may be broken one day and in opening your heart, you experience a love and joy that you never dreamed possible.” ~Bob Marley
A few months ago I was visited by my mother in a dream; my deceased mother who took her own life thirty years ago.
In my dream, I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom thinking about my teenage daughter, who is around the same age I was when my mother died. I felt like my daughter was in distress, and I wanted to help her.
As I sat and pondered, I looked up and saw a blanket coming toward me. I knew it was my mother trying to comfort me, but I could not see her. I only felt her. I was confused and uncomfortable with her presence and why she was there.
She then became visible in her ethereal form, beautiful and healthy as I once remembered her long ago. A victim of mental illness, she had fought her own demons for years before making the decision to end her life.
Her exit from this world shaped the path of mine. I had not dreamt of her in many, many years.
From an early age I was her confidante. She shared her fears with me, as well as her insecurities and her deep depression. I took on the role as her caretaker and emotional support. She was desperate to be loved, and I was desperate to help her feel it. I felt I had to. If I didn’t, I might lose her.
She opened her arms to hug me in my dream, and I instinctively pulled away. This was not our relationship, and I didn’t trust it. It was not her job to comfort me. I was the one who comforted her. It didn’t feel safe.
She waited in silence with her arms wide open as I resisted. I was curious, but cautious. I slowly leaned in and felt her embrace… and then, I let go.
I let her hug me. I released my fear, leaned in even closer, and let my body go limp as I wept in her arms.
I have never experienced anything like it. A feeling of complete surrender and letting go into the care of someone else where I did not have to be strong. I did not have to fix anything. I did not have to make anything okay. I let myself be embraced by a love so powerful and comforting… just for me.
When I woke up, I felt an enormous wave of peace and contentment. Scribbling down insights and details at 4am so I wouldn’t forget.
I spent the next day enamored with the aha moments that followed. I saw the patterns that began early on that I couldn’t quite grasp. The fear of attachment and commitment. The danger I felt getting close to people. How giving love was a survival tactic to get my basic needs met and how receiving love felt dangerous and unknown.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to fully experience being loved by others, I didn’t know how. I saw the push and pull in my relationships. I wanted to get close to people, but it felt risky. The closer they would become the more I would internally retreat in protection.
I had a strong desire to be connected to others, but the resistance that came with it was fierce. So much fear.
I married in my mid-twenties feeling I had a strong connection with my husband and I would comfortably ask for what I needed. Yet the more attached I became, the more my anxiety around loss intensified.
I feared arguments would lead to the end of the relationship. I was convinced that if I didn’t shape myself to meet his expectations I would no longer be welcome in his life. I felt the pressure to assess his needs while ignoring my own, which eventually led to long-term resentment and the disconnect of our relationship.
Instead of telling my husband, I withdrew enough to deem the relationship no longer working. I was too scared to ask for what I wanted, assuming rejection and defeat. My biggest fear was that he would leave. Instead of waiting for the inevitable end, I chose to leave him before he left me, which led to another debilitating fear—that I would hurt him.
I always felt I had to be tough, the one who took the hits. Because my childhood experiences with an emotionally unavailable parent positioned me as the caregiver, I believed that was my role in relationships. I did not think I had earned the right to support my own emotional needs.
And due to the fact that I’d failed to save my mother when she was in the most pain, an unwarranted, yet longstanding guilt created a fear of hurting others. I would rather put their needs over my own and “suck it up” so they didn’t have to experience what I had become an expert at—enduring pain.
After spending significant amounts of time with myself, comforting the wounds of loss from my twenty-plus year relationship, and getting to know who I was independently, I began to nurture my vulnerable heart. I realized my lack of love and compassion for myself was keeping me in a cycle of dysfunctional and unhealthy attachments.
As my heart strengthened and healed, I was introduced to new friendships with those who were willing to be open and vulnerable, and slowly began to do the same.
I noticed the more comfortable I became in my own skin, the easier it became to expose my true self. Yet, this didn’t elevate my trust in relationships, their intentions, or how long they would last. I continued to keep those I loved at arms length in fear that they could be gone at any time.
Although I practiced trust, and even teach ways to move through fear in my career as a psychotherapist, it did not make trusting relationships any easier for me. I trusted myself and my own decisions, but when it came to interpersonal relationships I continued to fear connection and loss of love.
As I began to allow in healthier connections, my real challenges began to unravel. I wanted more intimate relationships equally as much as I feared them.
I started to notice how quickly I wanted to bail if things felt uncomfortable. I felt the inner sirens blare in alert when any kind of threat or disagreement began to brew.
My desire to run is almost instantaneous, like a reflex. I keep my shield up as I find the quickest way off the battlefield to protect my heart. It is a true challenge to not react based on fears that I developed long ago, despite the fact that my life is completely different, as am I.
This self-awareness combined with a consistent practice to respect my fears, has allowed me to make the changes I know are necessary. I now choose to change my patterns by doing the opposite of what I normally do. If I want to run, I stay put. If I want to shut down my emotions, I give myself the space to feel them so they move through me and dissipate.
If I want to pick a fight because I’m scared and want out, I practice sitting with it, or even better, I calmly verbalize my needs. I practice the pause to make sure I am not sabotaging something that is “normal” and will pass with space and calming of my internal wiring. I allow myself time to listen to what my fear is saying to me and question if it is real or imagined.
I’m learning to say how I feel out loud instead of hiding my irrational thoughts. The more I express them and work through them, the more I am realizing they’re just the way I’ve protected myself, but I don’t need them anymore. They are outdated, but still need the comfort of being heard and not dismissed.
The more I’ve changed my response to allowing love in, the more loving relationships and friendships I attract. With people who talk through difficulties and don’t threaten to leave. People who know my tears are normal and don’t criticize my skittish reactions to life. People who somehow inspire me to believe that maybe I really am enough.
I believe my mother’s message to me in my dream was really rather simple. My fears have been under the guise that love can be taken away, but my mother’s embrace showed me that love does not die. It changes forms. That each experience in my life has been a lesson of love, whether an opportunity to feel more love for myself or compassionate love toward others, knowing their own fears of loss of love are the same.
Every time one door has closed in my life, another has opened. Each person who has showered me with love and left has made space for more love to come in. And this is true for all of us.
Most of us are carrying around insecurities in relationships due to our experiences growing up. We’re scared of being hurt or rejected, and it’s tempting to close down—to shut love out so it can’t be taken away. But we need to trust that opening our hearts is worth the risk, and that even if someone leaves us, we can fill the hole in our heart with our own self-love and compassion.
The night after my dream, my independent, headstrong adolescent daughter asked me to lie down with her at bedtime. This is a rarity, as she has grown to not need me in her self-sufficient ways. I melted with the chance to put my arm around her as she released tears of pent up stress and fears of change. I recognized her sadness; I have felt the same.
My dream had come full circle. I am the mother I always wanted; the unconditional love and support I craved. And I am here to teach my daughter that she, too, is not alone and love will never leave her.
Although I know my own work of self-love and acceptance will continue, I see now the rewards of opening my heart won’t cease. To let love in we must practice not shutting it out. In the end, it’s all we really want, and we can have it, if we open up to it.
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How Empaths Can Stop Sacrificing Their Needs for Other People
“Sometimes you don’t realize you’re actually drowning when you’re trying to be everyone else’s anchor.” ~Unknown
Have you ever felt trapped?
No, actually, have you ever felt absolutely paralyzed? Like you’re fearful of making any choices at all? It feels like any step you take could end in utter catastrophe.
Five years ago, that was me.
I was living in a small, run-down house in Peru, in a city that I didn’t want to be in, far away from family and friends, and I was in a relationship that wasn’t working.
At the time I worried that any decision I made would determine not only my fate, but also my ex-partner’s fate, and that of our housemates, who happened to be family members.
My monkey mind was telling me that if I left, it would mean everyone would have to go back to their respective cities and it would be the end of the house, a business, and the world (they did and it wasn’t).
As an empath, I lived on the assumption that it was important for me to make sure everyone else was okay. I let myself get trapped in a thick forest of stories about other people’s emotions and well-being.
It was torture, and ultimately, at the end of the day, I was wrong. There was no way I could know the future. I needed to do what I believed was best for me. My obsessive man-management was not my job to take on. On some level, I was simply trying to be the hero.
My intentions, for the most part, came from the right place. But I had taken on a role that wasn’t mine in the first place, and truthfully the perceived burden made me frustrated, resentful, and all in all, a less enjoyable person to be around.
If you are an empath and you’ve found yourself stuck in a situation where you are sacrificing your needs and mental health for other people, then it’s time to stop doing so. When you are free from the weight of trying to save others from potential pain and discomfort you will have the energy to be present for them.
Here are five ways that you can stop sacrificing your needs for other people.
1. Recognize that you don’t know what’s going on in their head.
A lot of the time when we try to help others, we paint detailed images in our mind about the past, present, and future. This may include what they’re thinking, what they once thought, what they’re feeling, how they once felt, how they acted in the past, and how they will act in the future. The problem with all of these mental images is, we can never truly know!
I thought, for example, that if I left the situation, my roommate was going to be mad at me. When I finally left so did he, and in reality he was very happy to move on. My imaginary story about how he would act was completely off the mark.
2. See where it’s making you secretly resent people.
Try and notice when you are starting to resent people because of your obsession with helping them. If you feel agitated, frustrated, or annoyed by the burden of managing their feelings and needs, this is usually a clear indication that you, as an empath, need to take a step back.
When we build these ideas and storylines about the way things are, they inevitably clash with reality. Why? Because the map is not the territory.
If we can be mature enough to drop our attachment to stories about ourselves and others, then our frustrations over how a situation is playing out can be seen for what they are—just ideas.
My feeling of being trapped was entirely self-imposed, but when I was smack bang in the middle of it, the story was that it was everyone else’s fault—as if they were reaching inside my mind and making me prioritize (what I perceived to be) their best interests over my own.
3. In the case of an emergency, put on your own safety mask first.
You can’t help anyone if you can’t help yourself. When you notice that your health is starting to suffer as a result of your attempt to help other people, you need to take some guilt-free time for yourself. When your batteries are recharged, then maybe you can try and lend a helping hand again, but until then, focus on self-care. You have a limited amount of energy; use it wisely.
4. Realize that it’s not your job.
Empathetic people tend to look around at the difficulties in the world and think, “If I don’t help them, who will?” I know I’ve done this, time and time again.
We do this because we project our feelings onto someone else’s situation, making it seem worse than it is. We think, “If I were in their shoes, I’d feel…” But they’re not us, and we can’t possibly know what they feel and what they need unless they tell us. And even then, we’re not responsible for managing their feelings or meeting their needs.
It’s hard to realize, but it’s not your job to save the world, and oftentimes people don’t actually need saving.
I thought that my leaving the relationship would ruin everyone’s life, but truthfully I was only fearful that it would ruin mine. My ideas about the world made me see everyone else as vulnerable, but they were going to be just fine.
5. Trust other people to solve their own problems.
At times throughout my life, I have had an unnecessary need to control situations. When I was in a fearful mind-state, this habit tended to amplify.
We don’t realize that we can control a lot less than we think, and that’s okay. You can never control what another person does, or thinks, or how their life ends up. To do so will only make you tired, and them frustrated. Give them some space to breathe and let them take the wheel. Trust that they can handle themselves. Things will work themselves out.
Since I left that situation I’ve learned that it’s not my job to be the hero. Most of my attempts at controlling other people, and trying to make sure they don’t suffer, have stemmed from my fears. People tend to be stronger than we think, and our mental projections about the world are always less reliable than we take them to be.
Remember, in the case of an emergency, put your own safety mask on first.
Have you ever felt that as an empath your mental health has suffered?
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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.
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How to Move Forward When You’re Out of Work and Feeling Lost
“My attitude has always been, if you fall flat on your face, at least you’re moving forward. All you have to do is get back up and try again.” ~Richard Branson
Let’s face it, losing a job sucks! Over the last couple of months, I have been chatting with friends who have recently been affected by organizational changes resulting in being out of work involuntarily. This is a situation all too familiar to millions of people, frequently through no fault of their own. Often it’s a result of an economic downturn, restructuring, acquisitions, and cost savings.
A couple of years ago, while I was on a business trip, I found out my role would be coming to an end. It wasn’t completely unexpected, and I was actually relieved. However, as an expat it was overwhelming.
Would I have to move back to my home country? Would I have to leave the place where I’d started to build a life? What about my volunteer commitments? This and so much more spun around my head.
Thank goodness for re-runs of How I Met Your Mother. Upon finding out the news, I spent hours obsessed with the saga of Ted and Robin while indulging in cookies and ice cream. After a few days, (and before my jeans got too tight), I picked myself up and started moving forward. I was reminded of some valuable lessons along the way.
Feel the feels.
Likely you will experience a range of feelings. Allow yourself to sit in it. You may find yourself grieving. This is natural; after all, something that was a significant part of your life has come to an end.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross made famous the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Recognizing these stages can help with the coping process.
Breathe. Do yoga. Meditate. Write in a journal. Create a vision board. This will help ground and center you and soon enough, you will start having clarity about how to move forward.
Your tribe will always be your tribe.
Connect with friends and family. Let people know what’s going on. Your tribe will rally and embrace you no matter where in the world they are—or you are. They will love you, encourage you, help you, and still think you’re great, even when you don’t. They will drag you out of the house, drink a cup of tea with you over a video call, and make sure you get to that yoga class. As tough as it is, talking about it helps.
Ask for help.
As a fairly independent person, I find asking for help uncomfortable. In the spirit of “be comfortable with being uncomfortable,” I reached out to my network and asked for help.
One particular situation will always stick with me: I called someone I’d met at an event and told him the news. He asked me to call him back the following week so he could think about suitable connections. Sure enough, the next week, he was ready with a list of ten people that would be valuable to connect with. This blew my mind. He spent time in the following weeks crafting up personalized emails and making introductions. This was a reminder of the human spirit. People want to help—ask!
Create a routine.
Not having to wake up and be somewhere messed with my routine. Having a routine can help anchor us, while providing structure, building good habits, and creating efficiency.
I found it helpful to design a new routine.
I woke up at the same time every morning, did an hour of physical activity, meditated, and created a to-do list for the day.
I found a neighborhood coffee shop that became my “office.” When I was not out meeting someone, I would go to the coffee shop and work on applications, networking requests, learning modules, goals, and volunteer projects.
I ended my “work day” around the same time daily and would have an evening activity lined up. This helped me have structure, kept my mind engaged, and ensured I was making connections.
Set goals.
When a job loss hits, it is easy to feel as though your purpose has been lost too. A way to counter this is to set goals and reflect.
Setting goals helps provide clarity and gives focus, motivation, and accountabilities. Examples of goals could be setting up a meeting or two per week, fixing up your CV, applying to two jobs weekly, or getting involved in volunteer work.
Goals give you something to work toward, and at the end of the week you can take stock of what you’ve completed and feel a sense of accomplishment. Taking the time to reflect allows you to see your progress and be grateful for the support you have received, and it also gives you something to build on.
Create a personal board of directors (PBOD).
This was a concept introduced to me a few years ago by one of the members of my own PBOD. They’re a trusted group of people who you can turn to for advice, who will share helpful resources and offer different viewpoints.
As Lisa Barrington explains in her article, Everyone Needs A Personal Board Of Directors, “Your PBOD exists to act as a sounding board, to advise you and to provide you with feedback on your life decisions, opportunities, and challenges. They provide you with unfiltered feedback that you can’t necessarily get from colleagues or friends.”
Companies are careful to select their board of directors, and you should be too. Some roles you may want to consider are: an accountability partner, someone who will ask the tough questions, one of your biggest fans, a connector, and a mentor.
Your PBOD does not have to meet all together. You just have to stay connected to all of them regularly. I speak with at least one member of my PBOD weekly. It helps keep me on track and provides pushes me to think differently.
Play.
This can be a time filled with high highs and low lows. Take time to play. Laughter and play release endorphins in the brain. As stated on NPR’s podcast All Things Considered, adults play for many important reasons: building community, keeping the mind sharp, and keeping close the ones you love.
Explore the city you’re in—check out all of the free things you can do. Spend time outside. Go on a vacation for a few days. It can help you gain perspective and reconnect you to what’s important.
According to Dr. Stuart Brown, Founder of National Institute for Play, “What you begin to see when there’s major play deprivation in an otherwise competent adult is that they’re not much fun to be around.” Put yourself out there. Talk to strangers. Say yes. Have adventures.
Celebrate.
Yes, this sounds counterintuitive. You’re walking into the unknown, what’s there to celebrate?
It’s not every day you get to put life on pause and recalibrate. Be grateful for the downtime. Think of this time as a gift. Be thankful for the experiences the job gave you. Celebrate the success and the struggles. Embrace the lessons—you will take these with you as you move forward. Be thankful for the relationships you formed and the people who helped you and will help you.
While this period in life may sting, remember, it’s temporary.
Take this opportunity to hit the pause button, reflect on what’s important, renew and build your network, and set new goals.
Trust the process—this journey will add a richness to your life, give you empathy, and will build your resilience. The turbulence might shake you, but space is being created for new opportunities, and chances are it will work out better than you thought. Keep moving forward and enjoy all that this time will bring.
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How I Found Hope and Inspiration After Years of Quiet Desperation
“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” ~Henry David Thoreau
How many years do we live with a sense of quiet desperation, faking the connection we have with ourselves? Why do we deny ourselves authentic living and exchange our time for mindless living?
Over the years, life silently and slowly eroded my identity away. By the time my son was twelve years old, I’d completely lost touch with reality. I was always busy trying to be everyone’s hero and creating this perfect little world around me. While juggling the responsibilities of being a wife and mother, I’d lost my individuality.
Life had brought me to unchartered territory, a place I had never been before. I could no longer silence the cries of my quiet desperation, the yearning to break free from what everyone wanted me to be.
The weight of being a perfect mother—having laundry done and feeding my family home cooked meals daily—seemed more than impossible. The goal of being an amazing wife was like climbing Mount Everest; I had no energy left when it came to my husband. Because I’d excelled in my career, they thought I could handle more, so they’d doubled my workload.
I was suffering. The despair was a disease I learned to live with every day, but this day was different. The pain of my confusion and mental starvation was agonizing.
I found myself on my knees having a mental breakdown.
I can still feel the tenderness of my hands after I spent almost two hours pounding my kitchen floor, screaming at the top of my lungs, “I can’t do this anymore!” I was shaking uncontrollably from the anger I could no longer suppress. It was a long and painful journey down to the bottom of my soul.
My tears seemed never-ending. I could barely breathe as my emotions began smothering the little air I could take in. I felt like I was drowning, being suffocated at my own will..
My mind wandered to thoughts of suicide. My brain fantasized about not having to make decisions, meet deadlines, or deal with the uncertainty of life. I pondered if I could really take my life as an answer to my silent depression.
I could not calm myself down. I could barely even open my eyes enough to see my hands beginning to swell from the pain of hitting the floor. I felt my husband physically lift my body off the floor, but my soul remained lying there.
The decades of living in quiet desperation had surfaced.
I was a shell of a woman whose soul had left her years ago. I had abandoned all my internal needs—time alone, boundaries at work, and space to reconnect with my writing.
My exhaustion had left me paralyzed. My eyes were dark and my heart was empty of any spirit or ambition. The beautiful glow I once possessed seemed non-existent. The only things visible were fatigue and hopelessness.
My husband cradled me in his arms, gently stroking my hair while telling me, “It’s going to be okay.” I didn’t believe him. Instead, I worried about the time I was wasting crying when I could have been checking things off my to-do list.
In that moment, as I wept like a child in my husband’s arms, I realized the root of my suffering.
There was no major catastrophe in our home or tragic event. I was simply tired of holding it all together and figuring it all out, every day. I was living life in constant “ready” mode, like a soldier in war.
I had to be ready for tomorrow, prepare for next week, and be on guard for next month. As a responsible mother and wife, I was always trying to get ahead of the schedule by meal prepping, doing laundry for the following week, paying bills early, and preparing for any hiccup that might come up.
I was serious all the time. I remember my boss describing me as intense, which bothered me at the time, but now I understand. I saw every action as proof of my success or failure; each gauged whether I was excelling or being lazy.
I never took the time to feel the present moment because I was so worried about the next one. I never truly connected to what was going on within me because the future always mattered more than the present.
I spent decades “preparing.” To-do-lists, goals, and deadlines spun a web around me until I was fully cocooned, unable to breathe.
On this particular day, the air had run out and I was gasping for a few more breaths. I had two choices: ask for help or die trying. Either way, something had to give.
I could no longer live this way, in a hamster wheel of predictability and repetition. I was a robot on autopilot doing the mundane tasks that filled up time slots on a weekly planner. There was no connection within me, just a hodgepodge of work, errands, a few holidays, and parenting.
After this breakdown, I spent life in a fog, unable to answer my own questions. I was sick inside and had been silently bleeding for years. I needed to heal. I made the decision to take the time I needed for my own recovery. The first step in returning to my soul was to put myself first.
As I plunged into the depth of my inner self, many things became clear. The carefully spun web of my former life began to shed, and I began exploring new ways of living.
These five things saved me, healed me, and put me back on a path to authentic and balanced living.
Just stop.
Stop everything. The running, rushing, hustling, and moving. Just stop it all. Time will not stand still until you make a choice to break the routine.
I never took the time to be in the moment because I was always rushing to the next destination and looking to check off the next box on my to-do list. I was running in an eternal mental marathon with no real winner. I was trading the beauty of life for mundane tasks without ever stopping to smell the roses.
I had to stop the mindless living at all cost. This was the first step in reclaiming my power. It was the first call to action that I demanded of myself. If I did not practice controlling what I did with my time, I would never be able to rescue my soul.
Cultivate passion.
My soul constantly yearns to be in harmony with my mind and heart. These three facets of my identity are vital, crucial to my well-being. When they are uncoordinated, exhaustion easily seeps in along with negative thinking and fear. I become an easy target, not anchored or stable.
My weapon against uncertainty is my passion for writing. When I don’t cultivate that which makes my soul sing, I die a little each day.
We all have something we do that causes us to lose all sense of time. You cannot ignore this innate ability or talent. It’s simply part of you. Take the time to find it, reconnect with it, and cultivate a relationship with it. It’s your eternal escape. It’s your ace in your back pocket, the answer to most of your confusion. You will find many of your answers when you connect and unite your soul, mind, and heart together.
Rest your soul.
Let’s face it, there will be very demanding days where you are juggling many things. The flow of life can get complicated at times, but in order to regain your center, you must take time for your soul to rest and recharge, without any guilt. You wouldn’t run your car twenty-four hours a day thinking it can do more by staying powered on. Everything and everyone needs downtime.
I used to wrestle with the idea of downtime and often confused it with laziness. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Resting is the most efficient way to keep your spirit aligned. Don’t try to be a hero and neglect your own needs as a human being. Oddly enough, the better care you take care of yourself, the better you are to others.
Seek connection, not perfection.
My need for perfection was insatiable. I used to label it as my Type A personality, my overachiever tendency, or the fact that I simply wanted the best of everything.
This way of thinking often led me to isolation, anxiety, and a heighted sense of depression. However, in my vulnerable state of lying on my kitchen floor having a breakdown, I didn’t have the strength to hold the wall up anymore. The wall that separated me from having true friendships and connections had to come down. It just wasn’t worth the effort of trying to make everything look perfect when it really wasn’t.
I didn’t need perfection to gain happiness; I needed the connection and the closeness that only real relationships bring. So I exchanged the pursuit of perfectness for the ability to be vulnerable with others. It was finally okay for me to say, “I am a hot mess, and I don’t have a clue how to put myself back together.”
Allow inspiration to emerge.
Denying the fact that I was living under a cloak of desperation led me to a higher realization about life. Sometimes in the lowest points of our lives, when all seems to be falling apart, life is actually falling into place.
When the walls are caving in, the air is getting scarce, and you can feel the weight of suffocation, something happens. Your pain transforms, your agony evolves into something bigger, and you realize that a new you is about to emerge.
My desperation was the pathway for me to rediscover my inspiration. The dark valley I found myself in led me to higher grounds. I don’t push away the struggles or hide from hard times. Instead, I remain patient, allowing the pain to bring forth a new chapter in my life. Sometimes you need to take a few steps back in order to take giant leaps forward.
Today, I live from a connected heart space, one that is fully aware and conscious of the energy I hold within me.
Today, I seek to stay centered. It is here I feel most alive and the happiest.
Today, I can thank the years of desperation I lived, for I am now on the path to living the best version of myself.
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How I Started Enjoying My Alone Time Instead of Feeling Lonely
“The only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going inside ourselves.” ~Bessel A. van der Kolk
Learning to be alone as an adult has been a struggle for me. It’s taken quite a while for me to adjust to spending periods of time by myself. It may sound strange to those who know me because I am most definitely an introvert and need my quiet time. However, my time alone was never quite as satisfying as I’d hoped it would be.
Often my solitude dissolved into sadness, and I didn’t have a particular reason why. My alone time wasn’t productive, and it just made me feel out of sorts. It was frustrating because I knew I needed time to myself, but I couldn’t stand to be alone.
Once I began to get curious about the sadness and apathy I’d feel when I was alone, things started to shift.
One day, I noticed that a particular script would begin to play in my mind over and over again. No matter what time of day or the length of alone time, I could begin to hear it play. It said, “You are alone. You are always going to be alone. No one could truly love you. You are unworthy of love.” This tape has played for so long I am unsure if it will ever fully go away.
In the past too much alone time would leave me depressed or even suicidal, and it’s no wonder why. Hearing such awful things on a loop for an extended period of time would wear on anyone.
I spent long periods where I was afraid to spend time alone because I knew I’d end up in a rough spot. I did all I could to avoid it. I’d go to bed early, keep my schedule full, spend all my time with my roommate, and more.
Spend enough time trying, and you’ll soon learn that avoiding solitude is very difficult as a single adult. I knew that, at some point, I had to stop avoiding and figure out what was going on.
At first, all I did was notice these thoughts happening. I found that this script was common in my life. This same tape would play when I made silly mistakes at work or a friend didn’t get back to me right away. Maybe it wasn’t just about being alone after all. Maybe this was something deeper.
So I stayed curious about this dialogue in my head. I kept thinking through it when I could. I talked to my therapist and my mentor about it too. Eventually I had a realization that this script and my time alone were a reflection of all the down time I had as a child.
Growing up, I didn’t see my friends outside of school very often, and I didn’t spend a lot of time with my family. Instead, I spent a lot of time alone.
When I first thought it through, I just figured I was a normal kid who got bored a lot. Thinking further, however, I realized those moments alone went well beyond typical boredom. What I wanted most during those times alone was attention and love. I wanted to feel valued and appreciated, but I didn’t.
I didn’t have the connections with others that I truly wanted or needed at the time. I spent long periods of time being pretty sad and feeling deeply lonely. I felt unloved and unworthy of being loved. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It’s exactly how I feel when I am alone as an adult. It’s that damn script again telling me I’m alone in the world.
This realization was huge for me because, though my life as an adult is drastically different than my life as a child, I recognize that I’m still healing from past trauma and neglect. Something in me still connected being alone with being lonely. My inner child was still suffering, and it made itself known through this terrible dialogue playing on loop.
I am in a different place as an adult. I have made choices to surround myself with a community of loving people who support and care for me. I’m not actually alone anymore. Somehow making this connection felt empowering.
That was then, I thought. This is now. I decided it was time to take my power back and resist the script. Next time I had the chance for some alone time, I was determined to move through it differently. I wanted to teach my inner child that not all solitude is lonely.
So the time came again where I was alone and the familiar sadness began to well up, but I was prepared. I knew it was coming and I had a plan.
I had calming music playing in the background and some of my favorite activities ready for me. My journal was out for writing, my canvas was out for painting, my machine was set up for sewing, and I had a book out too. And you know what? The tape in my head didn’t seem so loud. I could still hear it, but it didn’t paralyze me or send me to bed early. I enjoyed being alone.
I share this all in hopes of encouraging anyone else who might struggle too. There were a few key things that helped me move through this experience.
First, I stopped avoiding and fighting my feelings. Avoidance keeps us stuck in the same patterns. It’s important to get curious about our thought patterns and our feelings.
Asking questions like, “I wonder what perpetuates that thought?” and “Does this emotion happen at certain times?” can help things begin to shift. If it may help, I encourage you to sit down with a mentor or a therapist and talk it out.
Getting really honest about the answers to those questions requires that we sit with the discomfort for a bit and connect in to our inner selves. It’s uncomfortable, but so very worth it. Ultimately, this can help us nurture ourselves. Once we know what we need, we can begin to nourish the parts of ourselves that desperately need it.
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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.
