Stormy Weather

It's been an interesting week, particularly the last few days before the weekend. Somehow I got caught into a tailspin and was a mental and emotional mess. I felt like I had no defenses, like my skin was raw and every little thing, every word and every new bit of information, felt like a tiny arrow piercing me, causing me literal pain. My head was spinning and unable to process just simple normal day-to-day stuff. I felt totally overwhelmed and over stimulated, and was at a loss for what the heck was going on. The hardest part was that it all seemed so familiar, like emotions that I hadn’t felt for years, that I had believed dealt with and done. It was as if all the growth I had made in the past several years had disappeared like the mist of a dream, and I suddenly woke up as a teenager again.

I am finally pulling myself out of it but, PHEW, what a ride. Every time something like this happens I have to remind myself of a few things. That feeling bad, lost, overwhelmed, etc, is not bad, that it does not mean there is anything wrong with me, and that it is not a failure. It's easy for me to get caught in self-judgment when I go straight from feeling so strong and empowered to feeling like I'm hitting rock bottom with no self-worth. Of course neither am I at rock bottom nor am I worthless, and what helped me turn these feelings around was dropping into my center, my heart, where I knew these things to be false. The feelings were still there, spinning around me, but there was a peacefulness at the center -- again, the eye of the storm.

On my way to work I was asking Artemis about it and her response was something along the lines of "It's a storm. It can't be anything but a storm. Nothing you do can change that. Best thing to do is hunker down and wait it out."

That is exactly what I learned from having panic attacks for so many years. When a wave of panic began to wash over me, I learned to just sort of surrender and let go. "You know what this is, it's not going to hurt you, and it will be over soon." As much as I may have felt the impulse to fight it, or to find a way to fix it and make it better, nothing I did could change it. It was not a logical thing, so thinking was not going to save me. Best to just hunker down and wait it out. Keep telling myself that while the feelings are valid, as all feelings are, they are not true. They, not being based in reality, are irrational, and like a friend recently told me, "There's no talking to Crazy."

Like a storm whose chaos may not make any sense, these periods of bad feelings are cleansing times. In order to flush things out there is going to be a lot of dirt and grime coming to the surface, which makes it usually look and feel worse than it is because all you can see is the muck and the mud. But once the storm passes, there is a quiet and peacefulness, and everything is cleaner than it was before.

And though it may feel like a step backwards, with the added feeling of, "Why is this coming up again? I've already dealt with this," there is always forward movement. One of my favorite images for this is Martha Beck's concept of 'emotional shrapnel.' Our emotional wounds don't just hit and affect us in one area of our lives. They are scattered throughout, some deeper than others. The biggest ones are most likely closer to the skin, so that's the major healing that takes place initially, but other smaller shards dig deeper to a point that we don’t even know they are there until, with time and growth, they work their way to the surface. It is not that you’ve gone backwards, regressing to the point where this was a major issue in your life, but rather that enough healing has taken place to force these miniature versions of the original pain to the exterior where they become apparent. It is a healthy sign because there is no longer room for them inside of you any longer. They really are being pushed out to be cleansed and washed away.

The other image that arises for me is that life is not a circle, going round and round and round over the same ground, but it is a spiral, ever ascending. Though you are still going around and around, each circuit is a bit higher than the last so that, even if you encounter some of the issues from the past, each time it is from a different, raised perspective.

So as my mind continues to clear, and I begin to see and feel my authentic self return, I am seeing the puzzle pieces of events and actions that have allowed this latest bit of shrapnel to rise and be released.

But that will have to wait for a future post...