Thursday, April 19, 2012

Step By Step




Time just slip slides away. 

You are trying to recover from a loss or a trauma and time seems to slip slide all over the place.  I feel this is when life needs to slow down a bit and be experienced in smaller increments.  Thinking about the future as one huge pulsing package of pain that will always feel bad is just too much and makes it too hard to go on.

Instead, try breaking it down.  Your days can be a series of steps that you set and you follow.  In other words, you set the pace of what you feel you can handle.  As in Step One: I will get out of bed today.  Step two: I will put my feet on the floor and make myself walk away from the bed.  Step Three:  I will eat nutritious food for breakfast instead of pizza or a cookie.  I felt like that a lot after my husband died and I had to constantly talk to myself about what to do next.

I find that breaking time down into small increments works when you are stressed to the max or trying to work through a particularly sad time in your life.  If you set it up right for yourself you can psyche yourself up to bear 10 minutes, then a half hour and sometimes an hour. 

And with each passing block of time, you realize that you got through it, you were temporarily able to think about something else and maybe, possibly, you can do it again, and then you can go about doing it.  Suddenly you find you have almost gotten through one day.

I remember trying to learn to accept my loss.  Your mind plays tricks on you and the passage of time doesn't seem quite right.  There were always those moments -- when you first wake up, when you are on the telephone, when you are working -- that you forget for a few minutes exactly what your reality is.  But-t-t-t-t then it comes back and knocks you in the tummy.

There's a hole in your life and there's no getting around it.  Ignoring it only makes your situation worse.  You can tamp it down as much as you want but it's still there.  Sitting in the back of your memory like a bomb tick tick ticking away, waiting to explode.  It's so much better when you take it, grab it and own it.  Why not  embrace it and absorb it and move right through it?  You can do it!  Put one foot in front of the other and keep going; keep moving forward.

Now congratulate yourself!