Just a little over two months ago, my marriage of 13 years came to a sudden and unexpected end. Before I knew it I was packing my bag and driving to my brother’s place, where I would crash on his couch. In our personal and professional lives, we often have to deal with changes that we did not want and could not have predicted. Here are the core strategies that are helping me get through it. I share them with the hope that they’ll be helpful to you in your own transitions.
declair a Self-Care emergency
From the moment I knew my marriage was going through a crisis, I knew that I was in a sink or swim situation, and that swimming would mean prioritizing self-care. In our day-to-day lives, self care can seem like something we can put on the back burner. We have promises to keep and other roles to fulfill and we believe (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly), that something else takes precedence over making it to that yoga class. But during times of momentous change, we cannot afford that. My self-care practices include eating well, getting exercise, being in nature, float therapy, and Thai Yoga massage. Create your own menu of self-care activities and treat them like the emergency that they are.
create A Judgment Free Zone
During tumultuous change, we are often in uncharted territory, trying to get our bearings in a new environment that is very disorienting. We are going to make mistakes. Our patterned and unhelpful responses to stress are sometimes going to get the better of us. If we turn around and judge ourselves, we are only adding insult to injury. Ironically, our judgements often reinforce some of our bad habits, because we need relief then not only from the stressful change we are going through, but from the internal atmosphere of self-criticism. That can create a vicious cycle. Creating a judgment free zone where I just refuse to beat myself up for anything has really helped me. Though I adopted this strategy as a response to a crisis, I’m telling you now, I’m never leaving the Judgment Free Zone again. It’s too nice here to leave!
Only Connect
“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”
-E.M. Forester
When tragedy strikes, it’s natural that in the immediate aftermath, it seems like “nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.” It seems unique, special to us, and especially bad. That happened to me anyway. Yet as I told people my story, I found that many other people in my life have suffered similarly in their own divorces and other endings in their lives. It turns out that by getting a divorce I’m joining a club that in our country eventually includes 1 in 4 adults, and that claims close to half of marriages. The people in that club have a lot of wisdom and counsel to offer. But more than that, there is a look in their eyes that says “I’ve been there. That creates a special sense of solace. If we’re able to trade the feeling of specialness and self-absorption for the fellowship that comes from connecting with others with similar struggles, we’ll find we benefit from the exchange.
Create a Playlist of the Heart
Just as leaders need to engage body, heart, and mind when they are trying to intentionally create change, so we need to engage our bodies, hearts, and minds in responding to unwanted change. Keeping the heart open, amidst all of the fear, anger, and sorrow that we feel, helps our entire system to adjust to the new reality. In my case, this has meant creating a Spotify playlist of sad love songs, and I have also recruited my friends to add songs to it. When they mistakenly add songs that they think will cheer me up, I remove those songs. That’s not what this playlist is for. This playlist is for helping me to stay connected to the natural, organic feelings of grief that are my body’s way of letting go, so that over time I will be open to the new possibilities of the world I have been thrust into. You’ll have your own way of doing it, but find out how you can have, as the kids call it, “all the feels.”
Conclusion
In the broadest sense, trauma is any experience that is “too much, too fast”. Unwanted changes are almost all in that category. Partly that’s just the nature of things, but it’s also because people in our culture just don’t have the skills needed to initiate change for other people in a way that doesn’t traumatize them. Honestly, we are just not that good at this. As we learn to cope effectively with the traumatic changes in our lives, we make space for what psychologists call the post-traumatic growth that allows us to make even the most unwelcome change into opportunities for transformation and personal development. The strategies I’ve offered are my ways of coping with unwelcome change. What are yours?