Some Personal Insight

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!
Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!
Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

When we have experienced any type of disaster especially one that is unexpected and it creates physically, mentally or emotionally the sense of being wiped out, the impact can be the same as when Dorothy got blown to Oz. Imagine being dropped into a situation not of your own making where everything and everyone you knew was altered in someway, and the routine of your life was now a tight rope to be walked instead of the safety net you knew. We never realize until something like this happens just how the ordinary things in our lives function as compass points to help us stay the course. When they are no longer accessible we can feel lost in a strange place with no idea about what direction to take and no faith in our ability to deal with what has happened.
I suppose in a way divorce can be considered a type of natural upset these days if not a disaster, but going back to prior comments on relevance I must confess mine felt like it took on disasterous poportions. The details are not necessary, suffice it to say I had no warning of the degree of my ex-husband's deception and no opportunity to decide when would be best to deal with the fallout. I took an emotional and mental blow that took a toll on my health as well and just like Dorothy and her companions becoming more and more anxious regarding what they might encounter in the dark forest; my thinking also began to escalate on its own; imagining the extremes in my situation and making my anxiety all the worse. This kind of mental leaping is not uncommon especially when someone has experienced a big loss that impacts them across many areas of functioning.

Loss of perspective in addition to no faith in one's ability to direct efforts at recovery seemed to be the over riding concerns for myself at the time. Glinda begins to intervene with Dorothy by asking her, "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" The answer to that self defining question is what gets Dorothy started down the yellow brick road. By asking a similarly defining question, "What would you like to do in regard to this situation," I realized that by making a choice or exploring options for choices I mattered in the process and that I wasn't going to be buffeted by the situation unless of course that is what I wanted. The initial questions asked at the time also gave me a sense that I could impact the direction of my life in regard to them and that I could protect my daughter from a lot of the emotional fallout. These question and answer type sessions early in my work with the therapist helped to slow down my racing thinking by getting me to focus on answers and not imagined possibilities. It kept me in the present where I could exercise my energy effectively and made me feel competent again to reclaim some of what I had lost in terms of myself esteem and a more accurate picture of who I was.

Like Dorothy who was able to see her heart's desire and then exercise her ability to get home, I was able to see accurately, with the help of my thearpist, that finding and enacting my own answers was the shortest route to get back to the me I recognized as my personal home.