20 - Not Every Day is Foggy

TRANSCRIPT

Hi everybody, and thanks again for joining me on Lessons from Life. I’m Mary Young.

If you remember, last week we talked about how the emotional healing journey might be confusing, maybe even nerve-wracking. I compared it to driving in fog, and that’s probably nobody’s favorite travel experience. I don’t want to scare you away from the healing journey by describing it as a foggy drive, but one of the reasons I like that analogy is because even when you’re on a foggy drive it’s not always foggy.----more----

Fog comes in many forms. It can be a light haze. It can be so dense that you can’t see your nose in front of your face, but even if it’s dense fog it’s not permanent. The sun comes out and burns the fog away, or as you’re progressing, you move away from the low ground to the higher ground and the fog lifts accordingly.

It’s the same way when you’re healing. You can be in the middle of a craptastic fog bank - and that could be literal or metaphorical - but the sun is going to shine again. one of the reasons I picked the picture for today’s podcast is that even though it’s a foggy picture, you can see the sun rays slanting through if you look at it very closely.

And here’s the thing to remember -- not every day is foggy. It’s easy to forget that when you’re in the middle of some hard days or some hard memories, but they won’t last forever. I shared last week about the flashbacks and panic attacks that I had, and there are not enough words to describe how hard they were to experience. But they were not 24/7/365. They were interspersed with days of stability, and as I healed, those days of stability lasted longer. And I had more emotional energy, more coping techniques, more resources for dealing with the flashbacks and the panic attacks when they came.

The challenge for me in this podcast is being open and honest, authentic, vulnerable, and at the same time not scaring you away.  I want you to go on that healing journey. The healing journey is the best gift you can give yourself for emotional healing for emotional health, but I want you to go into it with your eyes open.

It is a lifetime journey. It is not something that you can waltz through in three months and say: okay we’re good now. If you know people who have done that, then they have chosen to short-circuit themselves. They have chosen to stop the healing process. Let me I’ll tell you how I know this. It was January 1999 when I walked into Tricia’s office. So next month will be 20 years. last night December 1, 2018, almost 20 years after walking into Tricia’s office...twenty years after being on a healing journey and watching the fog lift and having more sunny days than foggy days. And last night at 10 o’clock at night, I was curled up in a fetal position on my bed, holding onto my dogs and crying my eyes out because I was in the middle of a full-blown panic attack, and Ativan wasn’t touching it. I can give you reasons for why that panic attack happened, but that’s not the point. The point is it happened. 20 years on the healing journey, and I still get panic attacks.

The difference is they’re not debilitating. I took an Ativan. I let myself cry. I snuggled with my dogs. I tried to relax. I tried to let myself fall asleep. I was not being successful, so I got up and grabbed my laptop, and reached out to an online support group that I have, and was able to share with them that I was having a panic attack. I think I know what caused it, but in the meantime I just had to get it out of my brain, and I needed somebody to hear me. Within 20 minutes somebody had responded on the Facebook page, and once I knew I was heard then I could quiet my brain down. But at 10 o’clock/1030 last night, I was using every coping mechanism that I’ve learned over my healing journey.

Grounding myself...I felt like a very tiny little kid, so I spoke out loud and reminded myself that I’m 57 years old almost 58. I reminded myself that I was in my bedroom, in my bed, with my dogs, that the year was 2018, that there was nothing out there that was trying to get me. There was no monster in the house. I let myself cry:  I screamed into my pillow because I didn’t want to scare the dogs. I reached out for help when my own coping techniques or mechanisms weren’t doing the job.

I did not reach out to my therapist - it is totally inappropriate to text your therapist at 1030 at night on a Saturday. There was a time earlier in my healing journey where I would not have been aware of that, and if I did know I would not have cared. but I am healed enough that I was able to say you know what, I can tell her about this when I see her on Monday, and I know that I’ll be okay. I just need to get myself to where I can go to sleep.

That’s what the healing journey can do for you. Even when the fog comes, you just slow down, use proper driving techniques, and you keep going. That’s why I like the metaphor of driving in fog, because here’s the other thing... if you have been on a healing journey; if you have been trying to change your mindset; tried losing weight; tried changing habits; tried starting an exercise program... I’ll guarantee you that at some point you didn’t succeed. At some point, you fell off the wagon.

And if you are like most human beings, when you did that, you started yelling at yourself: I knew I couldn’t do this! I knew sooner or later something would come up. I knew something was going to happen. Last night, I could have sat there curled up in a ball and called myself names. I could have lain there in a fetal position and yelled at myself for having a panic attack, when the fact is that it was my body and my brain telling me that I was currently overwhelmed, and they didn’t know how to handle the overwhelming issue.

When you are driving and you come across fog, or when you are out driving in rain and the rain goes from being a little mist to maybe a drizzle to pouring down so hard that you have to put the wipers on super-speed, do you blame yourself for the weather? Oh my God it’s foggy - I am such a terrible person because it’s foggy! Oh shit, it’s raining! What did I do to make it rain so hard? NO. We don’t do that, because we know the weather is outside of us. We don’t control the weather. We can’t control the weather.

Your brain, your heart, your emotions, want to heal. Nobody wants to walk around not healed, but we sabotage ourselves during the healing process by blaming ourselves for the fact that we need to heal. It is not my fault that the jerk in the basement liked little girls. That is not my fault. And yes, I want to heal from that. I have healed from that. But first I had to stop blaming myself for his weakness. There are too many examples for that because we all do it.

We blame ourselves because something happened, and it’s not our fault. Especially, and let me say this out loud, slowly and clearly...

• if somebody hurt you when you were a child -- physical abuse, mental abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse --  that was not your fault.
• If somebody raped you, that was not your fault.
• If somebody beat you, that was not your fault.

It is so important to stop blaming yourself. I had to stop blaming myself. We all do it, and we all need to stop. I don’t blame myself when I drive into a fog bank. I don’t blame myself when the heavens open up and the rain pelts the car so hard that I have to slow down. All I do is slow down, and I make sure that I’m taking proper driving precautions. But I don’t kick myself and go oh my gosh it’s raining. I’m such a terrible person! Oh my gosh it’s foggy. I am such a terrible person!

NO! 

NO! 

NO!

What happened to you when you were a child has nothing to do with you. It has to do with the predator that attacked you. And healing from that predation is going to go on the rest of your life, because of things that we learned; things that we were taught, ways that we were taught to behave that are not healthy coping mechanisms. But that doesn’t make you bad. It doesn’t make me bad. It doesn’t make me a failure as a human being, because for a large part of my life I did not know how to deal with authority. That doesn’t make me a failure as a human being. It means I had something I needed to learn. I am not a failure as a human being because for a large part of my life, I did not live up to my potential. The more emotionally healthy I get, the more I find myself living up to my potential.

As you travel on this healing journey, pay attention to the victories. Sometimes you may not even notice them because they’re so small. So start a notebook -- call it Proof of Healing, and every time you find yourself behaving differently than you used to, write it down.

• Proof of Healing: I started a podcast.
• Proof of Healing: I applied for a promotion at work.
• Proof of Healing: I did not reach out to my therapist at 1030 on a Saturday night while I was having a panic attack, because I have past experience that tells me I can get through that, and I can reach out to her on Monday when I have an appointment scheduled with her.
• Proof of Healing: my credit card bills are going down instead of up.

Find those victories. Even if they look really tiny to you, find them. Recognize them. Celebrate them, because what happens is you will build on those. I think you’ll be surprised when you start writing them down, how many little victories there are.

I used to celebrate if I would have stability for two days. That was a big whoo hoo! for me. Then I had stability for a week --oh my gosh 5 to 7 days where I felt stable instead of crazy! It’s been years, literally years that I have been stable and that’s why the panic last night did not derail me.

Because I know, because my experience has shown, that I’ll have panic attacks. Yes I need to recognize what I’m feeling; I need to examine what I’m feeling. What was it that had me so scared and why, what was so overwhelming? And then I can go on.

Total honesty...it was not like that 20 years ago. If you remember, 20 years ago panic attacks could have me hiding in the closet.  But that was 20 years ago, at the beginning of the healing journey.  I’ve made progress.

You will make progress. Recognize that progress. Celebrate that progress. It builds on itself and you will find that it is not always foggy. The fog will lift, and you will have sunny days. That’s the way it’s been for me, so I know that’s the way it can be for you.

Thanks again for listening today. We’ll see you next time. Until then go make it a great week.