Controlling the Uncontrollable

“Let it go...the cold never bothered me anyway..”
— Elsa, Disney Princess

The East Coast of the United States where I live is bracing for a massive storm and I am bracing along with it. I am doing all that storm-related preparation we New Englanders are so good at: batteries, flashlights, full tank of gas, new shovels, extra water. I have the candles out. I cooked food ahead of time. I have a pile of books. I am charging all of my devices. I have my snowshoes ready.

And all of the storm prep was fine if it didn’t interfere with the other plans I had this week. I had a flight on Wednesday of this week for work and was optimistic (others might say in denial) that my flight would be fine. But I had it all worked out. The storm would end late Tuesday. And voila, I’d be headed to work. Look at me…in control of storm prep….AND still able to get to work. Maybe not leaping buildings in a single bound, but still.

Only, that’s not what is happening. And today was an object lesson in wanting to, and even trying to, control the uncontrollable. It’s an amazing thing to watch if you can get a little distance and maybe a smidge of compassion. I hurdled from one hope and one attempt to strongarm a solution to another. I joked with friends that it was all of Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief in one day, ending, finally with acceptance. This wasn’t the week I had planned but this is the week I was delivered.

Some of you have already learned this lesson about control because you are wise, or just better people than I am, but clearly, despite lots of practice, I have not. At around 2 pm today I was in serious knock-down-drag-out World Wide Wrestling Smackdown dressed, of course as the Illusion of Control trying to fight The Universe and in my delusional state, I even thought I was going to win.

Who won, you wonder? The Universe. Always does. On days like this I am reminded of learning to rock climb as a Girl Scout. You started struggling up the rock face feeling like you were so dangerously high up and really, when it got scary you could just put your feet back down on solid ground. It was there all the time.

When I finally put my feet back on the ground, I could see that it wasn’t the week I had planned, but it is a week to do with what I was given. And there really is something to the experience of acceptance. Of giving up the fight. Surrendering to what is. You can actually feel your breathing change. You can think again. You can look around and see possibility where before you could only see loss. The good news is that I have a week I didn’t plan and the whole adventure of the storm to practice.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015

Mindful Monday: Mindful Hellos

Hello. It’s one of the most common greetings. Most of us even know how to say it in at least one other language. Hello. It is the action of giving a sign of welcome or recognition. It is the action of placing our attention on someone. Or something. Today we are going to look at how we can bring more mindfulness to our day through being more mindful of our hellos.

Hellos are a beginning. A fresh start, or a re-start. A chance to see whatever or whomever you are greeting with fresh eyes and a warm heart. A chance to see something for the first time again. 

There are parts of the world where the sacred is intertwined with this intention of welcome and greeting. In Hindi there is a hello, Namaste, used in many parts of Asia and South Asia, meaning “I bow to the divine in you.” “I see the divine in you and I bow to it.”  And in the Southern Germanic Speaking world of Bavaria, Franconia, Schwabia, Switzerland and Austria they use the familiar greeting “Gruss Gott” ‘May God greet you’ and even our English goodbye is the shortened version of ‘God be with ye.’  The old German meaning of ‘greet’ was the same as the meaning for ‘bless’ and so in the same vein as Namaste a greeting was an aspirational and inspirational act. Most other hellos are versions of ‘good day’ and also bring intention to the interaction—a hope, a wish, a prayer. Bill Bryson states in his book Mother Tongue that "hello" comes from Old English hál béo þu ("Hale be thou", or "whole be thou") meaning a wish for good health. You see, no matter where you go in the world, hello is intended to renew you and connect you with health, wholeness, and the divine.

I had a teacher this summer on a course I took named Satish Kumar. And he was a man who infused his hellos with the divine. He looked at each person he said hello to with the joy that one usually exhibits when they greet a newborn baby or a golden retriever puppy. Pure joy radiated from his smile, from his eyes. It is such a different feeling to be on the other side of that hello. His hello was medicine.

Today, see if you can slow down and bring your attention—your heart, your mind, your spirit to your hellos.  See if your hello can be medicine to the people you meet. They can be loved ones, colleagues, co-workers, the barista at the coffee shop, the bus driver, the janitor, the other person walking toward you on the sidewalk. Today, instead of saying hello on autopilot, actually fly the plane. Slow down. Take a deep breath. Feel your feet on the ground. Smile. Say hello. Say hello with your whole being. With your whole heart. And then do the most radical act of all. Wait for the hello back. Make hello a conversation. Make hello a gift. And let it come back.

Yes. Wait for the other part of the interaction. Look at their eyes. Smile. Let the hello sink in. It’s a second or two difference but the impact is immense. Say hello. Wait for the hello back. Take it in. Let it nourish you. Namaste.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015

Box it up or let it flow: Titrating emotion

Yesterday in describing the impact of trauma I talked about how some people shut their emotions down—how they can go numb and not feel anything—and that often this happens automatically. And how being numb can interfere with healing and being becoming whole.

This ability and pattern of shutting things down, of being able to flip a switch and shift your state of being is also known as compartmentalization. You can have the ability to take how your feeling, or what you are thinking about and put it in a box and close the lid. The thing about these strategies, these protections, these coping skills is that they are rarely learned—more often, and especially through trauma, we grab on to the strategy that worked for us—or that our brains and systems naturally gravitated to.

If you overuse shutting down or going numb or putting everything that is hard for you in a box—what’s the down side? Well, mostly, you eventually are cut off from your emotions and this interferes with your ability to be connected to other people and to make good decisions. We actually need emotion to make decisions—we feel before we think, and if we are shut down, we are not using all available information.

But the ability to compartmentalize is also a strength and a capacity that helps us function when we feel overwhelmed. When we just don’t have the resources to manage. When it’s too much right now. When we have to get something else done.

The opposite of being shut down is being overwhelmed. Flooded with emotions. And this can be even more problematic than numb because for people who don’t naturally compartmentalize, it can be hard to know what to do when they get flooded with emotion. In my work I have noticed that when people who aren’t good at shutting down or compartmentalizing go through trauma they are more susceptible to drugs and alcohol because they use these substances to become numb and shift state. 

But the real issue of having a defense, a protection, a coping skill isn’t whether the skill is good or bad because they are all useful or not useful depending upon the situation. The issue is choice: it is whether you are choosing to be shut down or choosing to be open to emotion. This issue is whether your coping system is driving you or whether you are driving your coping system. It’s the capacity to both open yourself to emotions or put them away for a bit that will allow you to be at your best for whatever you are working with, whatever you need to do.

How do stretch from one to the other?

If you are trying to learn how to expand your ability to sit with emotions and not shut down:

1.     Learn to sit with your own emotions: You can practice sitting with emotions. A good way to do this is to practice mindfulness or meditation. Sit for one minute or five minutes and just pay attention to how you feel. Name the feelings if you can. Just expand your capacity to be with whatever comes up without having to shift it. Some people like to sit in quiet. Some people like to use meditation tapes. Experiment and find out what works for you. My previous post on mindfulness and mindfulness and trauma might be helpful. The good news for you is that no one will ever be able to take away your capacity to shut it down or box it up. You are already good at that. Your job is just to build your ability to sit with emotion.

2.     Experience emotions by watching others. You can watch movies with emotional content, or listen to other people talk. You can read memoirs or biographies of others. You don’t have to do anything special, or feel anything in particular—it’s a chance to pay attention to the feeling part of your understanding of people. Try to guess how they are feeling. If you are listening to another person you can try to guess and then ask them to check it out.

3.     Write it down. Take 10 minutes each day and write. Don’t edit or censor—just write about where you are—how you are feeling, what you are thinking? What is top of mind? You don’t need to interpret, or judge. Just write. You are merely stretching your awareness and feeling muscles.

If you are trying to learn how not to feel so flooded and how to compartmentalize so you can function better:

1.     Part of the issue is learning to get some distance between you and the emotion or the ‘problem.’ Some people find that concretely writing down the problem and putting it in a folder, or a box helps, with a plan of when you will get back to it.

2.     There is the illusion that talking to other people about it will help. For people who shut down, talking about it can help them be more connected to the feelings. But if you are already flooded with emotion, talking about it can make it worse. It is probably best if you can to let other people know you are having a hard time, but not get in to the specifics. If you can, save the conversation for therapy or another trusted conversation partner, but for now, just ask for support to move away from that topic or those thoughts.

3.     Distraction can be your best friend. Read something, do a crossword or Sudoku, watch TV, listen to a book on tape, clean out a cabinet. Anything that helps you shift gears and take your mind off it.

4.     Short mantras to coach yourself. Statements like: “I’ve got this” “I’m ok” “I’ll figure this out.” “This too shall pass” can be really helpful. Brainstorm a few more and write all of them on 3 X 5 card or post it notes to grab when you need them. Photograph the cards on your phone and you will always have them with you.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015

A Savage and Beautiful Country..

“...but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between...”
— Diane Ackerman

A savage and beautiful country. Yes. That is what it looks like and feels like once you begin to map and explore the terrain of yourself. Healing from trauma is a mighty steep and difficult climb. The weather can be treacherous. The way unclear. But the amazing views… And the experience of getting to know what it feels like to have your feet underneath you. To feel the sturdiness of your footfalls on even the most difficult terrain. To reclaim the landscape of yourself, for yourself.

And it is both: savage and beautiful. It is hard to hold them both. And often it is hard to see them both. Not unlike difficult mountain climbs, the work feels endless and the views are fleeting. It is why it is so important to watch the pace of healing. It is important to know when to take a break and go back down to a more comfortable altitude, or when to just take a break and look around wherever you are.

The problem with healing is that it’s hard to see the majestic nature of the climb when the challenges seem small. They aren’t small, but they can seem small. For example, one of the effects of repeated trauma is that you learn to shut off your emotions. You just shut them down. Well, you don’t so much as choose as your brain chooses for you. It is as if the smoke alarm keeps going off in your house. BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! What do you do? You unhook the wire so that awful loud sound stops. AHHHHHH. And this is what your brain learns to do with repeated trauma. It can’t stand the overload of emotion that trauma creates—fear, anger, sadness, terror. So, it shuts it down. This allows your brain to function and think again—it gives you the illusion of calm.

The problem is that this solution becomes habit. It’s like having a sore ankle. At first, just the ankle is stiff, but in order to protect your ankle, your whole lower leg becomes stiff and pretty soon its your whole leg. Our body creates a wider and wider buffer zone around our sore spots.  You get used to being shut down. To not having all your emotions. And you get used to feeling ‘in control’ of your emotions (which, admittedly, is easier when you can’t feel them.)

And then you mess up the plan. You start getting help for your trauma, you start therapy, you start sobriety, you start healing and you begin to have feelings again. You begin the climb up this mountain and the emotions rush in. And it feels savage.

When you are numb, the world feels organized. It’s not, but it feels that way. And when you start to get your feelings back it feels like there are gale force winds blowing through your entire life. When you are used to feeling in control, proud of your control—then any feeling at all can have you feeling off balance and out of control.

And there is some truth to the control thing: not that you are totally and completely losing it, but that your muscles for managing your emotions are actually flabby. They are out of shape. You haven’t used them because you have kept a rigid brace on your emotions for years and haven’t used your emotional muscles—haven’t flexed with them, and seen how they work. So when you start having feelings again you have to begin to build muscles again, and this can make you quite sore—it feels raw to go through this process.

But it’s not all savage. It’s not all terrible because the feelings, despite their messiness, feel real. You have glimpses, through the clouds of emotion, of yourself whole. You can sometimes feel more of yourself and feel more real than you have in years, or than you ever have. And you can sometimes wonder, which is worse, to feel all these feelings or to feel numb. What feels savage is that once you begin healing there are few days on the trail that feel comfortable. Either you feel all these messy feelings, but you feel real and whole—or you go numb, and feel in control, but exiled from this self you just glimpsed. And these are the poles you work from, ever gradually finding the middle ground. Helping your heart and brain to connect. Gradually bringing the emotions from the trauma and the story of the trauma and the new experience of healing all together in one place. That’s where you get the view.

And this is just the way it is in expeditions. It is just is. It is a long and arduous climb within a savage and beautiful country. But it is your country. And that’s something.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015