Today, I got some news through a third party about someone that I know who is going through a rough patch in her life. I wanted to let this woman know that I am thinking about her when she reads this blog. This woman could be you at this very moment. You see when life has a way of happening, it is not specific about who it impacts or where you are in the world or what is going on in your own little world. There are bigger forces at work. It is my belief that just like you, she can read this and not respond to me. So let me help her and perhaps help or at least enlighten you also.
When we find ourselves in great need and everything around us is “broken”, where do you run and turn for help?
Who do you think of FIRST?
This answer will be different for each of you reading this. If you are married you might try to reach out to your spouse. If you are a college aged person, you might reach out to your parents. Who do you think of first?
When I am in a place where my life has fallen apart, and fallen down all around me, something from deep inside me takes over and I became a “vessel” of recovery. I do not reach out to anyone. I think that instinctual reaction comes from my years of being a dependent of a military officer. As a dependent, you are pulled up every three years and plopped down in a new country, a new school, and a new environment and you are the only person you can depend on. You just begin to draw on your past experiences and you assess the situation and the people around you who are in your life very, very quickly. But, I want to present this idea to you as one of your with options. I believe that you too possess this vessel deep inside your core and I think that you may not have tapped into it yet or to the extent that you could.
The very first thing to do is; to let the feelings wash over you and to release them.
If you are in devastation, feel that completely. You will eventually cry yourself out and release all that pent up emotion inside. Let that grief, anxiety, and fear flow out. This may take some time. There are no illusions here about how any one thing affects each of us, just some facts that agencies like the Red Cross and others collect and use to put strategies together. Each of us reacts differently and our recovery time (to get our wits about us) is different. So for us those figures and charts and time tables do not matter. What matters is what is right in front of us which is our personal crisis.
You might even be in survivor mode and that is OK. Take care of what is immediate.
When you get to the point that you cannot breathe out of your nose..and your anger begins to set in with that all too familiar rant of “why did this have to happen to me…” you are now ready to do some real work at regaining your footing and putting your life back together.
Here’s what I know, when life happens to us, we cannot always wait for “help” to come riding up in a Red Cross truck nor can we always depend on having a US Army helicopter drop us relief supplies to help us out.
Once we have “released” all of that tension we have literally made “space” inside our head in order to actually T-H-I-N-K. It is from this space that we can begin to our recovery and our rebuilding.
Are you following so far?
Next time we will explore what to do next.