19 - Foggy Days

TRANSCRIPT

I’ve spent this entire week thinking about how to follow up last week’s podcast. If you remember, last week we talked about the difference that can be made when you go through an emotional healing journey. And the next thought that came to mind was what does that journey look like.

I’ve said in the past that emotional healing is how we get to emotional health, and that that journey or that process is unique to each individual. What I mean by that is we each do things differently. My emotional healing journey is different from your emotional healing journey. There are similarities. There are things that are universal, but we are each unique individuals and therefore our actual journey, our actual process, is unique to ourselves. You can learn from what I’ve gone through. I can learn from what you’ve gone through, but the specific steps that I took may not be the right steps for you, because we are different people. With that in mind, I was trying really hard to figure out how to describe the journey...what metaphor, what analogy, could I find for the journey. And I have one that I think is perfect.----more----

Thanks for joining us today on the Lessons from Life podcast. I’m Mary Young, and we are talking about what it looks like while you are actually going through your healing journey or your emotional healing process.

And what does it really look like?

Confusion...Uncertainty...Apprehension...Nervousness...all that. And when I look for a simple metaphor or a simple allegory, fog is the word that comes to mind.

Have you ever driven in fog, or been out on the lake or the ocean and been enveloped by a fog bank, or maybe gone walking on a foggy day? It changes how everything looks. In fact it may hide everything so you can’t even see anything. Sometimes you can see a little bit of the way.  Sometimes you can see a lot, because it’s just a light fog which makes everything hazy, and makes it look not quite the same as you’re used to seeing it.

But sometimes, it’s like this morning when I was out. Fog hid everything that was more than a 10th of a mile in front of me.  If I tried to look ahead, I couldn’t see anything except the road ending in a bank of fog. That’s what it feels like sometimes when you’re on that healing journey.

As I was thinking about that, I remembered a time when I was 21 – I was a senior in college. My friend and I had gone to another town to watch the movie on Golden Pond because it wasn’t showing in our small Indiana town. This was in northwestern Indiana, maybe 10 miles south of Lake Michigan, and it was winter time.  You get foggy roads in the wintertime when you’re close to Lake Michigan. We went to the 730 showing of the movie, so it got out about nine, and we headed back to our college town. It’s normally a 45 minute - maybe an hour - drive. We got home at midnight, because the fog had settled in and it was dense. And when I say dense, I mean cut it with a knife dense. We’re on this back road - it’s a state road but it’s a back road - to go back to our town. We are maybe 10 miles south of the lake so we have all that lake fog, and I couldn’t see the road I was driving on. In fact Colleen and I both had our windows rolled down, and while I was focusing on keeping the car going straight, she was looking out her window to make sure that I was in the right lane. She was looking for the stripe on the side of the road, and I still remember when she stopped and said “Mary I am seeing double yellow stripes on my side of the car,” which meant I was totally in the wrong lane. So I eased back over to her side of the road until she told me that she could see a white stripe. And no sooner was I fully in the correct lane, then we came up to an intersection and I saw headlights coming towards us. So if we had not made that lane correction, we could very possibly have been in an accident.

There’s a lot of parallels there to emotional healing:

• not being able to see where you are
• not sure where you’re going
• not sure where the road is
• suddenly realizing you’re not in the right position on the road
• making a lane change
• narrowly avoiding a collision.

All of this is a really, really good metaphor or allegory for emotional healing.

So let’s look at that a little bit deeper.

When I first saw my therapist back in 1998, I had never been through therapy before. I had a degree in counseling; I had done some internships when I was in college, but it had been 20 years at least since I had graduated college. Maybe 25, and I had never actually worked in the counseling field, so my experience with therapy was very limited.

I had done a couple counseling sessions in college, but again it had been 25 years ago probably. And I remember telling a friend of mine “I can’t go to therapy that means I’m crazy.” And she’s like: “you know better than that.”

So I started seeing Tricia. I had no idea how to talk about this stuff, because I had never talked about it. I had no idea what I needed to work on, because I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

It was all foggy, and I had a choice.  I could stop and go home; say I’m not coming back, or I could keep going.

We always have a choice.

In going back to the driving in fog allegory, or the traveling through fog bank allegory, you have a lot of different choices.

Choice number one is I could just stop. When Colleen and I were driving home from that movie, I could’ve just stopped and said: “hey I can’t see where I’m going we’re just gonna stop.”

There’s a couple different problems with that, not the least of which is I’ll never get anywhere if I’m not moving.  If you’re just standing still, you are not making any progress. You are just standing there.  And sometimes that’s the right move - don’t get me wrong. But not when you’re on a foggy road, because there may be other cars on the road, and if you’re just sitting there, there could be a collision.

Standing still was not an option for me on my healing journey. I had to keep moving, even if I was moving at the speed of a snail. Even if I felt like I was crawling on hands and knees over broken glass, I had to keep going forward. The only way to get out of a fog bank is to go through it. So choice one: you could stop.

You could stop your car in the middle of the road in the fog because you can’t see.  And that’s a dangerous choice because you’re not gonna make any progress, and you might wind up in a collision.

Choice number two: I can change my direction. I could turn around and go back where it wasn’t foggy. I have a hard time choosing to retrace my steps in a healing journey.  I don’t want to go back. I want to go forward. I want to heal. So I did not choose to go back. I chose to go forward.

You can go really slowly, and put your flashers on to make it easier for other cars to see you. That’s what I felt like I did. There were days in that 45 minute therapy session where we spent 30 to 40 minutes talking about all kinds of other stuff, and I would bring up the hard stuff in the last five minutes. You don’t make a lot of progress that way, but you do make progress.

Go as slowly as you need to go, but don’t stop. Stopping is not progressing. Stopping is not moving forward. Here’s the thing -- fog will lift eventually. It always does. And when it does, you’ll be amazed at how far you’ve come when you look back, as long as you don’t stop. So yes, the healing journey can be a very foggy, very disorienting journey.

But it’s worth the trip.

It’s worth the time and the effort that you put into it, and you just have to keep moving. Even if you move slowly. Even if it takes you forever be able to share with your therapist about the stuff that really, really matters, you’ll get there. And that fog will lift, and you’ll be able to see the road ahead of you again, instead of it just being some giant cloud bank. That’s how it’s been for me. I’m confident it will be that way for you as well.

Thanks so much for listening. Go make it a great week