There was once a movie made titled A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I’m going to tell you about my Three Curious Experiences on the Way to Growth.
I can’t say that all people will have experiences like mine, and I’m certain enough that quite a few people will relate. In this season which is when my first of thoise experiences happened, I present to you my story. The title can be reminiscent of The 12 Days of Christmas, as I lay out my three past ghosts.
The first experience is what drove me to healing, and I do mean drove me. On Christmas Day, on an accident scene, and relayed in another post, I had a meltdown. It was really like a meltdown, because I certainly came undone. So much so I had no real idea of anything, let alone what had happened to me. I could use any number of visuals:
It wasn’t two decades
It was almost six.
or the very literal meltdown in the partial image in the header:
Uninhabitable desolation
As far as the eye sees. Former nuclear reactor. Uninhabitale desolation is what I felt like.
The point is clear. The difference was I had no idea what was going on, and really, what had gone on for almost six decades and how far reaching those consequences were.
That was what I was like on the 26th of December. I came home from that call (after stopping at yet another call for a corpse), and I spent the next two days in bed. Still in uniform. I cried, and slept. I fin ally had to get out of bed, and get something in my, and decided on coffee. Being bereft of energy and motivation I decided it was easier to walk into town. Still in uniform, after three days after a week of being on duty that ended on Christmas Day, 2011. This was a very personal experience. For now I’ll say that the rest is another story, but it started me on the path to healing, which officially started October 19, 2013.
On Tax Day weekend of 2019, I had another meltdown. I had been on the healing path for almost six years. On that day, my then partner, who figures heavily in my story and healing between meltdown and now, told me I had to move out,, rightfully so, after living together for the several years. The immediate effects? Primary relationship gone. Place of living (home) gone. Vehicle I had access to gone. And in the next month, my job gone. My Krav Maga class, gone. Stepmother gone. Friend from high school gone. That was my April and May of 2019.
There was a big difference between the the two meltdowns. The experience in 2011 was a personal one. My nervous system was the bundle of wires catching fire. My Chernobyl. I was uninhabitable, radioactive. Nothing growing there. The 2019 experience was my circumstances melting down. You know what I was doing on April 16 after being asked to move out? I was looking for a place to live between crying bouts. By June of that year, I had obtained a vehicle, I got a new job, place to live. The Krav class after January 2020? Not happening. People dying? There is only one thing to do about that - Grieve.
Which I did for the rest of the year. If you read the headline to the tune of 12 Days of Christmas, kudos. My seasonal touch here. Frankly I had no idea, and as things worked out, I was living alone, had to completely rebuild my life as all I had were books really, so I have since then been adding to my possessions. A bed. A table, silverware, and the other things one needs to have a single guy household. And while I was doing this household building. I discovered opened a jar of grief, the one that I used to store my grief in for almost 60 years. Oof.
In my healing during the previous five plus years, I didn’t pay much attention to grief. I look back and wonder if I missed the signals. Or, perhaps in things like changing jobs, Or I could do more to acknowledge the emotional aspect of that. Let’s look at that. Since 2011 I haven’t been laid off or “let go” from a job. Since then every job change was to better my situation, and one, when I left the equine center, it was a tough choice. I loved the work there. I liked being with the horses, the smells of leather, horse, and the great outdoors. I was trusted, for good reason. I was a godsend to them. Just tell me what needing being done, and I did it. Cleaned up afterwards and put the tools away. Cleaned something else while I was at it. The job I went to was not only an immediate 11.1% hourly wage hike (how’s that for ROI on money spent healing!?), there was a 401 tossed in, and, I wasn’t spending $55/day on gas and wear and tear on my vehicle. That’s about $1100 month. The equine center couldn’t touch competing with that. Despite how painful it was, I made that choice. I have no regrets, but did I feel those feelings fully? Feel that sadness of leaving?
One thing that helped is reading was reading The Grief Recovery Handbook by James and Friedman. It has a lot of great exercises to help one see possibilities that one could explore in examining all of life’s losses, and I discovered that my 2019 was just that. I loved doing the timeline of my life from the loss perspective. ALERT: don’t do one if you are still in the state of trauma. The odds are high it could re-traumatize you. That is something to discuss with your provider as to when that could be done. In my program at Raise Your Resilience™ (RYR) we begin to investigate this a couple months in, and keep an eye on it throughout. Yet, we never focus on the wounding events of the past.
I liked that timeline, as one of the assessments we use at RYR is the old Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, which includes a lot of experiences we normally don’t consider at traumatizing. No stress, no trauma, so that part isn’t true, and the second take we might see events where grieving would have been beneficial. Like when I moved from Milwaukee to Arlington Heights, IL. My parents did nothing to help with that transition emotionally. I basically went from creeks and trees to cornfield and flat suburbia.
Most of all, I liked the Grief Recovery Completion Letter. So much so, I’m turning those letters into either parts of the same book, or two separate ones.
I’m sharing this now as Christmas Day is the (2o24-2011 =13) 13th anniversary of my meltdown, and my life today is very different. I am aware that “traumaversaries” as I call them, begin to have an effect a couple days before, and sometimes a few after. For a few years around the tail end of January I braced, waiting for the other shoe to fall, as it was near a traumaversary. This year I’m still working on ideas for next years Solstice season ritual. I know this time of year can be hard on people, and I’m here to say it can be better. If you want to talk about it, let me know.