A couple of months ago, I started noticing myself slipping into a low place emotionally. Depression ebbs and flows–I know that, but sometimes it takes me off guard. Even though I have several tools to deal with depression, I temporarily “forgot” them. When I prayed for help, the answer God gave me was, “You have tools, use them.” I began applying some of the tools I had temporarily set aside and began feeling a big boost in mood. This article shares a few of these tools.
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Writing down your thoughts can help get them out of their vague uncertainness in the brain and into more manageable words and feelings. This process is an important key to getting leverage over your emotional health.
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Grief is a heavy emotion. It shrouds everything with a bit of a darker hue. Even happy things don’t feel the same intensity of joy. One of the most difficult parts of grief is the illusion that it may last forever. There are tender and sweet parts of grief that I would never give up. And there is a secret I learned to getting through it.
This is a significant week for me. It is the anniversary of my mother’s passing; 7 years ago we lost her to Ovarian cancer. She was the emotional center of our home; mother of 6 children and married to my dad for over 30 years. Her mother thought she looked like a vulnerable little robin bird with it’s legs all curled up when she was a newborn and named her Robyn. Throughout her life she loved birds and even chose the name “flight” as her camp name as a young adult. This analogy of flight became significant for me in my process of grief.
She suffered with cancer for 4 years. Even when it was her time to go, it’s hard to ever be ready to say good-bye. I was living in China, and sobbed all 18 hours of the flight home to Colorado. I remember trying to write her a final letter, or say a final good-bye. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t quite get my mind around it. How could I sum up on a piece of paper what my mother meant to me? I gave up.
We were all surrounding her bedside as she took her last breath. She had been in pain, and now she was free of her earthly bonds and strains. We imagined her reunion with her parents, and her mother in particular who she had lost when she was only 14.
Those tender realities softened, but didn’t eliminate the difficulty of watching her lie lifeless on the bed, and be wheeled out of our home. The finality of the gurney wheels and the car door closing made my heart ache.
The day of the funeral, I felt numb. I greeted people and felt so genuinely loved and supported. It all felt surreal; I didn’t really know how to process not having a mother.
In the days that followed I felt adrift. I’d think, “I need to call mom and ask her….oh.” I’d stop myself and remember there was no mom to call.
When my mother was alive, I would save up little things I wanted to tell her and write them on post-it notes around the house. I found myself still writing them. But, instead of calling they just accumulated. Little situations, daily tasks and exchanges with others–totally un-related to my mom felt heavier and harder. I was irritated more easily with others.
My mother was the one I depended on to remind me who I really was and give me a hit of courage when I needed it. I watched her as my model of how to mother, how to do hard things, how to think about the world, how to be a woman. All of that was gone. I felt anchorless. Where would I find my confidence and mentoring?
I had my mother’s picture in my hallway. Sometimes I felt like she was watching me. I became hyper aware of all my imperfections and became self-conscious. It was a dark time. I cried myself to sleep many nights. The emotions would well up at strange times—like a song on the radio, or when I saw her picture in the hallway. There were bittersweet moments too–like standing on the Great Wall of China where she’d wanted to stand with her grandchildren, without her.
I felt that who I was had changed. I felt like without knowing about this sentinel event in my life it would be hard for someone to fully understand me. My identity was different.
Sometimes our grief is obvious if we have lost someone we love. Other times our grief is less obvious if it is grief over a job loss, a spouse who changes, a divorce, a child who is struggling, poor health or the life we thought we would live.
The fog of grief has many sweet parts too–it is an indication of how significantly the person or thing you are grieving has influenced your life. I believe that is part of grief’s role–to help us focus in on the imprint left behind. Fully letting ourselves mourn the loss of something allows us to eventually let it go.
Letting it go often means letting a piece of ourselves go too, and replacing it with something deeper and more profound that we gain through the experience. Each person’s grief journey is different and the circumstances surrounding loss often inform our grief process differently.
I remember for a long time the feelings of grief were so raw it was difficult to own them sometimes. I felt an affinity to anyone who had lost a parent—knowing they “knew.” My cousins had lost their mother to Ovarian Cancer about 5 years before. One day, in a tender exchange my cousin Marie Jackson shared this with me:
“You’ll never stop missing your mother, but the pain becomes less acute over time. One day you will be able to sit on your moms grave and eat popsicles and tell stories.”
I remember thinking about that over and over. It planted in me a small hope that I could endure this pain—knowing it wouldn’t last at this intensity forever. My mind began to think on a poem my Aunt Natalie had read at my mother’s grave-side service.
My Aunt Natalie lost both her parents, three siblings and a sister-in-law and many other loved ones. She knew loss. The poem she sharedwas elegant in it’s appropriateness.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers
By Emily Dickinson“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.
It is a feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen. I love that analogy of hope as a bird. It’s perched in it’s nest, but has wings—which promise flight. Those wings promise greater vistas and new experiences, even if they aren’t available now.
Over time I began to feel hope. Not all the time. But little moments of it—like little pockets of light in the darkness. I would notice how beautiful life was in glimpses. I had a moment of joy watching my baby smile, my husband would make me laugh, or I would be enraptured by the all-consuming glory of a new blossom. These moments helped me realize the contrast between happiness and how I was seeing life most of the time.
It was almost as through I saw life through a filtered lens of grief most of the time. These moments of hope, reminded me that life would not always look this way. Hope “sang the tune without the words and never stopped at all.” It just kept gently reminding me of happiness and peace.
Little by little I began to feel hope more often. At times I’d sink back to a deep and painful place. That was important. I needed to be there. Feeling pain acknowledged and gave voice to my loss.
However, I still needed the hope that I wouldn’t always be there. Grief and healing are messy. There isn’t a neat step-wise process you complete and “heal” from. You don’t “get over” a loss. But, in my experience over time the pain becomes less acute and the shroud of darkness over everything begins to lift with time. The emotional and mental brain space the loss occupies becomes smaller and smaller over time and other things are allowed to take it’s place.
People who have never experienced the same type of loss can sometimes have a difficult time relating to the person who is grieving. What To Say To Someone Who Is Grieving. My aunt gave me some beautiful advice after my mom passed away. She said, “Carve out space and help people help you grieve.” I found that sometimes I had to ask a friend to listen when I needed it, or I needed to cry to my husband or my sister sometimes. Raw emotion would catch me at moments I wasn’t expecting like a song on the radio, or seeing her handwriting on a recipe.
Often I would long for her when I was lonely or struggling. I needed her encouragement. No one quite replaces your mother. She is the one person that doesn’t expect reciprocity. There is something so comforting about that. My mother had lost her mother when she was only 14.
She always told us growing up that there were “compensatory blessings” that the Lord provides to help us compensate for the lack of other things. I believed her, but wondered how that would play out. There were certainly plenty of lonely moments that didn’t feel very compensated!
Over time I did see lovely divine interventions and compensatory blessings. It never fully alleviated the ache of missing her or the absence of her in my children’s or my lives, but they did help. And, I found that I became a different person through the experience–someone stronger, but also more reliant on God and connected to others in a way I hadn’t been before.
As I began to see my life could be beautiful–even though it was different than I’d planned or would choose, it gave me more hope. Grief and hope wove a beautiful tapestry together and still has it’s ends unfinished.
Grief is a clean emotion—it’s cathartic and healing. We absolutely need to let ourselves feel it fully in order to let it go. However if we stay in it beyond what we really need, it can turn from grief to self-pity.
No one on the outside could ever determine when someone is in grief and someone is in self-pity. It is something only the person can know on the inside. It is a tricky tightrope to walk between the two. I know for me I knew I had crossed over into self-pity when I sometimes felt like a victim. Instead of feeling just sad about the loss, I began to resent others who didn’t understand or assumed they wouldn’t. Sometimes I expected others to feel sorry for me. It wasn’t a place I hung out in often, but I certainly learned the difference between grief and self-pity.
Self-pity is not a clean emotion, it is an indulgent emotion. I often felt worse after indulging in self-pity. I love the way CS Lewis describes this space. In “A Grief Observed,” a book he wrote after his wife died he says, “I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it–that disgusts me.”
Allowing our selves to feel the full weight of grief is cathartic, it helps us process it and eventually let it go. Conversely continuing to indulge in the “sticky-sweet pleasure” of our self-pity keeps us stuck. It is when we cross this line between the two that we keep our feathers held down. Hope can begin to wither and resentment and anger can take root.
After my aunt read Emily Dickenson’s poem at the graveside on the day of my mother’s funeral, my Dad had each of his children stand in a semi-circle. He told us as a symbol of letting our mother go, he had bird for each of us to release. One by one we each held a trembling white bird and let it fly into the air. Meanwhile the song “Amazing Grace” was playing.
As I let my bird fly free, it’s wings took it higher and higher until I could hardly make it out in the great expanse of the sky. I feel grief is a little like that. When it is close, it looms large and causes us to tremble. As hope lifts us little by little, our grief becomes smaller until it is only a piece of us–not all consuming.
It has been 7 years since my mother’s passing. Last summer, we flew our children to Colorado and my husband and I took our four daughters to my mother’s grave. We sat around and told stories about my mom and ate treats as we talked. A lot of healing has occurred in the intervening years. I still miss my mother terribly, but my grief has lessened. As my cousin had promised, the rawness of the pain and longing is not as acute. The more life moves forward and I feel more hope that there is so much beauty to be had in my future.
It’s joyful to talk about my mother. I want my children to know her. With time, some of the holes she left have been filled by compensatory blessings—stronger dependence on God, a deeper connection with my husband, a new and richer interdependence with my sisters, finding wonderful mentors in friends and women in my community, and more courage to listen to my own heart. The little bird of hope continues to sing the song and never stops at all.
What are you grieving?
1. Grief is clean pain—it’s important to allow yourself to fully feel the loss.
2. The human spirit is resilliant—it wants to feel hope. As we notice and embrace our small hopeful moments they will grow and lift us to higher planes of happiness.
3. Remember you can feel grief and hope at the same time.
I like it when people respect me and admire me. Most of us do. We spend a lot of our time in social situations managing the way others feel and think about us. If you really believed that it was okay for people to be wrong about you, how would that change your behavior? This idea has radically changed my life, improving my relationships and allowing me to focus on what really matters.
When one of my daughters was a toddler she had some health issues and cried almost constantly. A lot of the day was spent in tantrums and tears. We felt so badly for her. We read lots of parenting books, tried lots of things and worked hard to find her the medical care she needed.
However, caring for a child who was so emotionally volatile was exhausting. It was also humiliating to bring her out in public because I felt so judged.
I remember the looks on people’s faces as they watched me with her in a store or when we were at church. They stared. They lifted their eyebrows. They rolled their eyes. They walked away. They pretended to ignore me, but their faces told a different story.
Sometimes people made comments like, “Wow, she’s loud,” or “She’s a handful.” It wasn’t uncommon to receive unsolicited parenting advice, “Have you tried just ignoring it?” or “She really needs some consequences and boundaries.” Sometimes people we knew a bit better would say things like, “I used to think you just couldn’t handle your daughter, but now that we have a tough one I feel bad for judging you.”
We aren’t perfect parents, but we were trying earnestly and had tried A LOT of things. I believe most people were just observing what they saw. Because I felt awkward about the way my daughter was acting and I worried people would judge me, their comments felt a lot like judgement.
Occasionally some good soul would say something like, “I’ve totally been there.” One time my daughter had a tantrum in the entry way of a large building. She was large enough that it was difficult to lift her up and take her out. I remember a woman who stopped and said, “You’re doing great.” I loved that human being! I had some wonderful friends and family who were supportive and loving during this difficult period. I am still so grateful for this.
One day though, I confided in a friend how discouraged I was feeling about how my daughter acted in public. She said, “There is nothing wrong with your daughter—there is only something wrong with you!” I don’t think she meant to hurt my feelings, but it hit at the core of what I worried people were thinking. “Because your child is acting so difficult, there is something wrong with you!” I found myself not wanting to go out with my daughter in public.
Every time my daughter had a meltdown, I not only had the very real emotional, mental, and physical work of helping her, I also felt like I had to defend myself, my daughter’s situation, my actions and my parenting. I didn’t want to be judged. Though MANY people were loving and compassionate, it was hard for most people to understand. I felt a lot of resentment that I was misunderstood.
I could see resentment was eating me away. It was eroding my relationships, my happiness and enjoyment socially. So I made a decision: it was okay if people judged me. Of course people didn’t understand! How could they unless they had been through something similar? People judge. There isn’t much we can do about it. It’s part of being human.
I decided to believe in myself. I knew I was doing my best, and it was okay if people thought I was a “bad mom.” It was so freeing!
Once I let go of trying to prevent other people’s judgement, my life changed. I remember going to Michael’s with my daughter screaming the whole time and being able to genuinely return smiles for the rude looks I got. I remember just being able to listen to people’s comments of sympathy or concern and keep an open mind without feeling defensive when friends shared ideas about how to help her.
With so much mental and emotional space cleared up from worrying about being judged and trying to defend myself, I was able to use the space to be more creative and have more energy to help my daughter and get in a healthier place myself. Also, because I was less defensive I was able to actually accept some of the good ideas people offered. Some were helpful, others weren’t. But I was able to think of them as offerings of love instead of darts of judgment.
I learned a powerful lesson through this experience. The things that I notice in others are often reflections of how I feel about myself. When I feel confident that I’m doing my best, I was able to be okay with other’s judgement of me because I didn’t believe it. I realized they could think whatever they wanted and I could still sincerely know I was doing my best. This was a tremendous relief.
Who do you try to please?
Stop trying to convince them you are right or good, and start believing in yourself enough to let them be wrong about you.
Hard is normal. It’s what each of us experience it many times in life;overwhelm, discouragement, losing a job, divorce, financial trouble, stress, moving, loss, depression, anxiety, disappointment, children with struggles, health challenges, and so many more. How we deal with hard determines our experience. I was bequeathed a legacy of bravery from my mother and grandmothers. I always pictured bravery like I saw it in super heroes or in movies. But through their legacy, I’ve discovered that bravery is something much different. It is the ability to find peace in difficulty and grace under pressure.
Some of my great-grandmothers helped to settle the American West. They took their families to the unknown and made a beautiful life over and over again as they moved.
One of my grandmothers writes of moving over 7 times within a short period. When she finally settled in her new home in Salt Lake City, she set to work creating beauty. She planted tulips and writes of her delight at being on one place long enough to watch them bloom. Before they had fully flowered, she received news that she would be moving again. At first, she threw herself on the bed, and sobbed. With tremendous grace, a few days later she left her tulips behind and set her nose to her new home.
That new home was a dug-out in the desert of St. George. Not only were there no tulips, there wasn’t much of anything at all besides dust storms and floods. If it was anything like most dugouts, when it rained the ceiling dripped and the floor was a mud bath. Early settlers of the same place wrote that St. George seemed void of any civilization.
She was cooking dinner one night when a Native American of the area came to try to evict her from her dug- out. After 7 moves, she wasn’t about to give up another home without a struggle! She took her frying pan and knocked him out cold. She stayed in her dug-out home. She created beauty where she was and helped to make that desert area bloom.
Like my grandmother, I am blessed with a life of frequent moving though admittedly there is no covered wagon and I’m not taming of the wild west. My husband and I felt brave starting out in the Foreign Service where we knew we would live in many countries around the world. Our eyes were big with the idealism of traveling, raising broad-minded children who were citizens of the world and serving others.
As we started out, we enjoyed many wonderful parts of our lifestyle; my husband loved his job and felt he was able to contribute in a meaningful way, and it allowed me to be home with our children. We were able to offer a wonderful education for our children, meet amazing people, learn new languages, discover history and culture and serve others.
However, our children struggled with the constant moving.
At first, the signs seemed minimal and we didn’t worry too much. But over time their issues became more pronounced and began to affect their functioning. A couple of my daughters developed significant anxiety.
They didn’t adjust like I saw other children do. It seemed like once we finally got them settled in a new place, it was time to move and their anxiety flared again. It was painful to watch and exhausting to manage.
We sought medical care, counseling, and read a lot on the topic. However, our lifestyle made getting them the care they needed more challenging. Moving frequently made it hard to find continuity of care with one provider. Often, I found myself trying to use complicated medical terms in other languages to communicate with doctors in whatever country we were in. Despite a long list of interventions, my girls continued to struggle.
Eventually my sense of adventure began to wane and stress and exhaustion began to wax. I was getting worn down trying to manage everything; I began to feel resentful about moving frequently and the stress it caused our children. I didn’t want them to suffer. And, I didn’t want to have to keep trying to manage their issues with so few resources. I felt slighted without access to the medical resources I was accustomed to. I was easily frustrated with people around me who didn’t seem to understand how hard it was.
The harder things got, the more resentful I became and the more I blamed our frequent moves and living abroad for my children’s suffering, and making my life miserable. Theoretically, I threw myself on the bed and sobbed over my tulips many times. This was not the life we had dreamed of. This was not fun. This was hard. We thought we would be educating our children’s minds in foreign lands and instead we were wracking our own brains to try to figure out how to help them function. My husband and I often blamed ourselves when our girls had issues. Guilt is not an emotion that brings forth the best in us. It certainly didn’t for me. I became negative and discouraged.
We began looking for alternative careers or grasping for any solutions we could find. We moved state-side to Hawaii for a while, hoping we would find some stability and better medical care. We used to joke, “Everything will be better in Hawaii.” It WAS an amazing place to live, but I was surprised to discover that my girls continued to struggle even there—in the midst of American medical care, stability, familiar culture and language. It became evident that their issues were bigger than just our lifestyle. Frankly I was surprised. I had spent a lot of time blaming our moves and foreign living for their problems.
After three years, my husband received a new assignment to work in Taiwan. One of my daughters in particular was really suffering at that time—even with an amazing team of doctors behind her. I was stewing a bit about another change for our children and how they would respond. I was gearing up for the worst possible scenario for her in our new place. I was also praying that God would help guide me in how to help my children.
Around this time, I discovered some amazing tools that began to completely change the way I thought and saw things. I felt like my brain was being turned literally inside out. I had always known that thoughts were powerful in how we feel, but these tools of how to actually change my thoughts were transformational.
I realized that for years, I had created a story about our life. It went something like this, “This lifestyle is causing my children and me suffering.” That thought caused me tremendous resentment and frustration. Those feelings caused me to stay stuck and to feel sorry for my children and myself. The result was miserable for all of us.
One day as I was listening to Jody Moore, a life coach, talk to someone with a similar situation to mine. This idea distilled on my mind. “What if there is a different title to my story? What if this is the PERFECT lifestyle for your children? What could be more beneficial to children with anxiety than the opportunity to frequently face hard and new situations? They get to practice under the watchful guidance of loving parents. This is the perfect chance for them to gain confidence to overcome anxiety.”
Suddenly my whole perspective shifted. It was an idea I had never even considered. The idea brought excitement and relief. And, I felt God confirming that this was a better way to think about our life.
I decided to experiment and try this new thought with our move to Taiwan. I embraced the idea that “hard is good” for my kids. Essentially, I “set my nose” to our new home and tried to leave behind my tulips—my idea that some other situation would be my ideal life. I tried to envision our new life as the PERFECT life for my children.
Indeed, as we moved, my children encountered challenges and anxiety as I had anticipated. For example, I remember one day my daughter came home and told me she was being bullied because she was one of the only white girls in her class. My heart hurt for her. My brain’s first reaction was to doubt our decision and blame myself. I thought, “This lifestyle is causing them so much suffering.” But I stopped myself and tried to re-direct my brain to a healthier thought. “This lifestyle is exactly what my children need to become confident and brave.” I noticed that when I armed myself with this thought, I started to feel thankful and creative instead of guilty and resentful. This allowed me to be so much more loving, compassionate and creative in helping her. I was able to say, “That sounds really hard. What do you think we could do about it?”
As she began to feel my confidence in her—not just my compassion, she began to rise to the challenge of dealing with the issue. It didn’t resolve immediately. But small exchange by exchange she did deal with it. She was able to make good friends as well as stand up for herself. By the end of the year, she was a thriving student beloved by her peers. I was fascinated at the difference in her response when empowered.
Just when I thought we were on an up-swing, they would struggle again. One of my daughters felt so anxious she wasn’t able to go to school. We tried a number of things with the school and eventually we had to withdraw her. At times, I worried I was just trying to convince myself this was a good idea and that I might be really hurting my children further. But I theoretically got out my frying pan and crushed the thoughts that continued to bubble up. “Even if this lifestyle is causing them suffering,” I reminded myself “there is suffering anywhere. The best thing I can offer my children is love and a healthy mom. I can’t be healthy if I’m trapped in misery myself.”
My daughter began a homeschool program and really thrived with it! She had a wonderful year and learned more about American History than I ever did! She was able to enjoy learning instruments she wouldn’t have otherwise and she and I developed an amazing bond last year. I had to remind myself—she has her own path. This is the perfect life for her. And, with a healthier brain, I’ve been able to set up better care for her. We found counseling that she can do from home through skype. It’s been a huge blessing—better than any of the counseling we did face to face. Sometimes our ways through things look different than we expect.
As our girls sensed our confidence in them, our daughters began to slowly rise to their challenges in a new way. Of course, their problems didn’t disappear, but I was delighted at how brave were and continue to be. As they confront their challenges, they have gained confidence and they are thriving. Life has become fun, and our lives are happy a lot of the time.
This experience has meant learning bravery in a whole new way. It’s not the bravery of doing something painful or fighting through misery as I had previously thought—instead it is the bravery of letting go of old ways of thinking and embracing new ones. In letting go of my anguish, there has been more space for compassion and creativity.
I certainly still have my throw-myself-on-the-bed-and-cry moments. I think feeling the spectrum of emotions is essential to happiness. There are times that living a more stable lifestyle sounds very attractive. But I’ve also come to see that there are pros and cons wherever you live. There is suffering and happiness everywhere.
I have learned that letting go—leaving behind the tulips or the ideal I thought I wanted, and committing to what I have now has been transformative. It requires a lot of courage to let the old go and it requires continually knocking out self-doubt with the frying pan to embrace the new, but it has brought peace and beauty to our lives. This is the kind of bravery my grandmothers have written on my bones. This kind of bravery is written on yours too…it is the inheritance we receive as humans.
What is something difficult you face?
1. Allow yourself a cry-on-the-bed moment to mourn the loss of what you had hoped for.
2. Accept that the difficulty probably won’t go away. So decide, who do I want to be despite this difficult thing? Set your nose to it.
3. Knock out the negative self-talk with the frying pan.
As the stresses and struggles of life accumulated I found that they began to eclipse the joy and happiness I had always enjoyed. I lived for a long time in a fog of disillusionment, discouragement and disconnection with people I loved. This is my story about depression and the process of finally finding light again. My journey is personal and in some ways vulnerable, but I lived in darkness for so long I want to share hope that there is a way to feel happiness again; hang on. This is my story. At the end I give some helpful steps that set me on a course for healing.
As a young child, my mom used to call me her “sunny-delight.” I grew up as an all-American girl in the suburbs of Chicago; my mom took me puddle jumping after it rained, and my Dad taught me to ride a two-wheeler without training
wheels. My family had a gaggle of girls and a boy at the end that my mom used to call the cherry on top. We used to sit on the stairs and brush and style each other’s hair and exchange notes in little “mail boxes” on each other’s bedroom doors. This was also a time when I began to recognize what God’s love felt like, and developed a deep conviction of his care and involvement in our lives.
My teen and college years in Colorado and Utah were also filled with sunshine and hope. My mother used to tell me I was like her little hummel on the fireplace: pockets spread wide and filling them with new experiences. I ran cross country, traveled to Africa to teach hygiene to children, sang in a Pentacostal gospel choir, and graduated with a degree in Fitness and Wellness Management from BYU.
As a young professional, my eyes were wide with idealism. I helped create a wellness clinic for a sports medicine doctor, worked in the NICU of Primary
Children’s Hospital and ran the statewide wellness program for the American Heart Association. Best of all, I fell in love and married a bow tie wearing diplomat. Life was perfect.
Sometimes even the sun goes dark. The recent eclipse in the United States was a fascinating example of this. A warm sunny day changed to a dark cold one in just a matter of minutes as the moon eclipsed the sun. It’s light never never actually changed, but it was covered up and no one could feel the light and warmth it characteristically gave off.
Over time, despite the abun
dant blessings in our life—the sunshine in my life began to be eclipsed. We moved frequently for work and graduate school. The frequent moving and isolation from family took a toll. I began to feel less bright and happy, and more tired and irritable. Problems seemed bigger and answers seemed more significant and weighty. I cried a lot.
Sometimes I would create “harry problems”, as my husband called them, that had no good solution and then I’d analyze and over analyze and swirl myself downward into misery. No matter what solution I found—nothing felt right. I had a difficult time making simple decisions like what to do with my free time. I ruminated on conversations with friends and worried about things I’d said or didn’t say. All of this mental drama weighed me down.
It was confusing. I had wonderful days too, and every time I thought about my life it seemed so amazing; nothing seemed wrong per-se. Of course I had stresses, but it didn’t seem like more than anyone else had. I tried harder to count my blessings, and focus on the positive. I kept telling myself I SHOULD be happy. I need to try harder.
I remember calling my mother one day and pouring out my heartache; I was sitting on a park bench in Boston sobbing. She gently mentioned she thought I might have some depression. She had suffered from depression, and she must have recognized it in me. She was a hero to me. In a time when depression was hardly well known and certainly not widely understood or normalized, she discovered and identified that she was not coping well. She sought treatment with medication and counseling, and was able to largely heal through these and through the atonement.
As the realization began to settle in that I might have “depression,” I resisted it. My brain found plenty of evidence to show how I had lots of happy days, I was fine, and how I had lots of normal excuses to account for how I was doing. However as I began to look at who I had become and how I felt and interacted compared to who I had been and how I had felt and interacted most of my life, it became clear that something was not healthy.
Recognizing that I was at a vulnerable place, my mother took a plane to Boston and spent a week with me. I will forever be thankful to her for that tremendous gift of her love and nurturing through a critical juncture in my life. The first thing she did was have me take a depression and anxiety evaluation. She explained that this would help me determine if I was indeed depressed or anxious or both—and how severe. While it might not be a perfect measurement, it would give me a decent idea if I should pursue treatment and help in that direction. My scores were severe in both depression and anxiety.
I was shocked. I didn’t feel like the embodiment of what I had pictured someone with severe depression like. Accepting this label took a lot of humility, but it was also freeing to know that there was a reason for my feelings and behavior beyond my own character flaws! Knowing there was a diagnosis also gave me hope that there could be treatment. My mother’s example was a huge inspiration to me.
My mother suggested I begin some medication–even temporarily that might help me get to a place I could think more clearly and change some of my patterns. I wasn’t anxious to put things in my body that I didn’t absolutely need. I thought counseling would be a better first step. I had 5-6 visits with one therapist and found that I was more of a mess after going, and there didn’t seem to be much help or hope on the horizon working with him. I tried two other therapists thinking maybe it was just not the right personality match, but ended up feeling a bit disenchanted with counseling in general.
I began reading a book called, The Feeling Good Handbook by David Burns. David Burns was a pioneer in the field of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a highly successful therapist and a professor at Stanford. He wrote the first lay handbook for patients about how to begin to recognize some of our unhealthy thinking patterns—and learn how to untwist them. I was fascinated as I read with some of the distorted filters and inaccurate thinking patterns I recognized in myself. Becoming aware of my own distorted thinking was helpful. I seemed to get to a better coping spot but I certainly wasn’t thriving. I wasn’t really sure what else to do. So, I just kept limping along emotionally the best I knew how. All this time, I don’t think most people around me knew anything was wrong. To people not close to me, I looked like the essence of happiness.
Soon we found that we were expecting our first daughter. We were thrilled! We prepared a place for her and welcomed her with great excitement. I had always looked forward to motherhood, but I often found myself stressed about doing things “right.” I worried about nipple confusion, sleep training, and tummy time. I tried to read all the books and exhausted myself trying to be the “perfect mom.”
My baby did not sleep well and I was exhausted. After 9 months of sleep deprivation and with hormones ebbing and flowing, I slipped into a deeper depression. I remember stomping to the baby’s room, angry she was up again. I would feed her, only to be awakened again a few hours later. I was a zombie during the day. My brain kept telling me I should be happy. But I felt numb, and miserable. I remember watching friends with their babies. They seemed to find joy in their little movements and progress. I felt like day and night were one long exercise in endurance. I continued to slog through every day and night—what else could I do? Slowly the sunshine and happiness I had experienced much of my life was largely darkened.
I was a ball of negativity. I frequently complained about all the “hard” things in my life whenever I was with my husband or friends or family. I’m sure I was miserable to be with. Frankly I didn’t even enjoy being with myself. I remember my husband coming home from work and saying he wished we could enjoy having fun together in the evenings instead of debriefing on all the hard things and slogging through the tasks of life. I knew he was right. I wanted to have fun as a family too–honestly I didn’t know how. l remember one night we made a desperate attempt to “enjoy” family time. We sat in the family room and rolled a ball around with the baby. It felt so awkward.
My threshold for frustration or aberration was very low. I was frustrated with anything that made my life even a little harder—having to change an extra diaper, hitting traffic, picking my husband up from work. I didn’t feel like myself, and I knew it. I knew I probably still had some depression, but a also assumed most new mothers felt this way.
Life kept happening. Over the next 10 years, we moved many times—sometimes internationally. While this was exciting, it was challenging to be away from family and adjust to new cultures. See Mental Gardening. We had 4 daughters; each of which was such a blessing. However, with hormone fluctuations, lack of sleep and some colicky babies I ended up with some post-partum depression after each of them. Some of my children struggled with anxiety and other health issues. See All Things Brave and Beautiful: Finding Peace in Difficulty. My mother struggled with Ovarian Cancer and passed away. See Hope Is The Thing: Getting Through Grief. My Dad remarried and we got a new step-family. we were glad my Dad could have a new companion, but it took time to adjust to a new “normal.” Meanwhile there was dinner, diapers, kid’s homework, church responsibilities, exercising
and additionally, the stresses of living internationally—bleaching all our produce, foreign languages and culture, living far from family, and constant change. Many of these things were wonderful but most were challenging too. During this time I ebbed and flowed in my emotional health, was never really healthy.
As the stress piled up, I got lower and lower emotionally. My burdens felt too heavy– I began to feel like a victim of life. There were good moments, there were good days. However, those became much fewer and farther between. In the midst of my pain, I blamed my circumstances, I blamed the people around me, I blamed myself. The blame began to sabotage my relationships, my self-respect, and snuffed out any last sparks of joy I felt. Slowly I felt the last rays of sun in my life go dark. For me it was just about a total eclipse.
One of the worst parts was that in the midst of my emotional heaviness, it was much more difficult to feel God’s love. I couldn’t feel the spirit directing me very well, and without the nourishing help of God, I often felt particularly alone and in darkness.
As my life went dark, I felt trapped. I felt like I would always feel this way. It felt hopeless. I felt like nothing I did really helped much. Everything felt heavy and hardI felt numb. I felt resentful and angry a lot of the time. I endured because I had to, but didn’t feel much joy. And, to add insult to injury I was discouraged because I wasn’t showing up as the mother, wife, friend, daughter and sister I wanted to be. That added more layers of sadness and depression.
Even simple tasks felt overwhelming. Opening the curtains in the morning felt too hard. I remember taking my kids to ride bicycles in the back yard felt so monumental. We lived in an apartment building, and getting in and out of the elevator and going through 2 sets of glass doors felt too hard. I would dread and avoid anything that might be hard or add more load to my already heavy one. Decisions were difficult. I couldn’t think clearly. My head was clouded with worry about what others thought. I replayed conversations over and over in my mind worrying about what I should have said or not said.
Night after night my husband listened to the awfulness of the day and all the hard things. He was a saint. Looking back, I realize I wanted someone to understand how much pain I felt and how heavy it was to carry. He listened and validated and tried to help. But even he had his limits. I remember him gently saying one night—I’d love to talk about something besides just how hard everything is sometimes. I constantly felt resentful that no one seemed to understand. It was beginning to affect every aspect of my life—my health, my sleep, my marriage, my mothering, my friendships, my extended family relationships and my day to day functioning. Even with all this, I think most people just thought I was sort of a negative person. I don’t think most people outside my close circle of friends and family would have known the suffering I was experiencing every day. I knew I needed to do something.
Finally, out of desperation I tried the only thing I knew to do—I called a therapist again. This time I found an amazing therapist. For almost a year I talked to her every week and word vomited everything that was “hard” and that made me feel anxious and discouraged. She listened, and helped me identify the things causing the most pain. She empathized and helped me extract so many emotions that had been shoved inside for such a long time. Verbalizing and recognizing my pain allowed me to externalize them…to get them to a place that I could look at them, evaluate them, and even let go, change or mourn them instead of being controlled by them. This was essential. I couldn’t deal with them when they were inside floating around under my consciousness.
As I began to unload all of this darkness I been shrouded with—I began to feel lighter. I began to have more space in my life for light. The more darkness I extracted, the more space there was available for light. It was almost as if I needed a space to place all my pain. This therapist was that place for me.
After several months, my therapist recommended that I begin taking medication for depression. She said she felt it would help me get to a healthier place where I could begin to feel and think differently. I resisted at first. I was feeling a bit better after getting out so much pain. I thought I could heal without meds.
One day, I was talking to my friend. She had experienced depression and anxiety and was telling me about someone she knew who was depressed but refused to take meds. She said something that resonated so deeply with me at the time that I will never forget. She said, “It is really irresponsible to herself and everyone around her NOT to take meds.” I had never thought of it that way before. I decided I wanted to try medication. My therapist reminded me it could be a temporary thing—and that often people who get on meds make progress more quickly.
A few weeks on meds and I was amazed. I started feeling brighter and happier. I noticed I didn’t snap at my children quite as quickly. I wasn’t quite as irritated by things. I remember being able to sit on the couch and not feel stressed that I should get up and do something “productive.” I also started feeling the spirit again. I remember thinking, “This is the old me!” I had thought the old me–the one who had filled her pockets with every experience and loved the wind blowing on my face riding my banana seat bike was gone. I wasn’t really gone. I had just been so weighed down and sad that that I could not feel or be who I had always been.
(Medication is not the only means of healing and is not the correct route for everyone with depression. For me it was a critical element of my healing for a time. Looking back I regret waiting 10 years to finally try it.)
I felt like the sun peeked out again from behind the moon and shed a little light in my soul. Hope felt so glorious—maybe I wouldn’t have to feel depressed forever!
As the sunshine began to filter in slowly, I was able to see a little more clearly. I didn’t feel quite so wound up inside and decisions didn’t seem to be so painful. I wasn’t as irritated and I didn’t see things in such a negative light. As I saw things differently, I felt happier and more calm and I showed up more positive and more loving to the people around me. Small successes built on each other and while I often fell back in the ditch, I was able to pick myself up and keep going.
I had been doing therapy for about a year and felt a lot better. I had gotten out lots of the darkness, and there was room for more light. However, I felt I still had a long way to go in changing the way I thought and felt and acted to stay in a better place. I remember one day asking my counselor, “I feel like I’ve gotten a lot of the junk out, now what? What do a I do with it? How do I change the way I think so that I don’t keep putting more junk in? How I can stay emotionally healthy?” I was ready and excited to move forward. I was stunned when she said, “Well, I don’t know. I’ve used all the tools I have to offer—I don’t really have anything else to offer you.” I was so disappointed.
Therapy had certainly served an important purpose for me. It helped me identify and verbalize all the junk that caused me pain, but hadn’t really helped me know what to do with it all. Many studies actually show that patients who do extended therapy can get worse simply by ruminating over and over on their difficulties when therapists don’t have the skills or the courage to help clients move beyond them after they have sufficiently processed them.
I wasn’t sure where to turn next. I was feeling good-enough to function and frankly I was exhausted from a year of emotional heavy lifting. For the next few years, I coasted emotionally. I didn’t do much digging or healing—I just ambled along and tried to enjoy the better state of being. On my meds, and with some of the junk out, I established some better patterns with my children and my husband—even with friends and extended family. I enjoyed things more and could laugh and joke and find joy in life. I began to put my own self-respect back together. Since I felt less overwhelmed, I was able to exercise, eat healthier, enjoy better friendships and contribute in my church responsibilities. Perhaps best of all was my ability to feel God’s spirit and power in my life returned. The divine flow helped guide and craft my healing.
I tried a few times to get off meds, thinking I was doing better. But every time my dose was decreased, the depression returned full force. This told me that I hadn’t really addressed the cause of my depression yet. In fact, I could feel my meds becoming slowly less effective. My doctor gradually increased the meds, but I noticed side effects at the higher dosages. I gained weight. I felt numb and not compassionate sometimes. Some of my old patterns of unhealthy thinking even started to emerge.
I remember one significant moment during this time. I was out shopping and was chatting on my cell with someone. I was sharing all the hard things about a particular situation. As I was going on and on, the spirit brought a very specific phrase to my mind. “Choose happiness.” I was confused. Who wouldn’t choose happiness? If I could feel happy, I would—of course. So, why would we need to choose it. After all, it wasn’t like there was a pallet of emotions around me and I purposely selected “frustrated,” or “overwhelmed.” Or did I?
At the same time, the spirit brought my evening conversations with my husband to mind. Whenever I told him about the day, I focused on all the negative things that had happened. I told him how hard the kids were or how frustrating the traffic was or how awkward a conversation was with someone that day. There were plenty of wonderful things that happened too, but because the negative things bothered me, those were what I tended to share. The spirit gently suggested that I try focusing on the positive things that had happened during the day—and only sharing those. Choosing happy. It took a lot of courage and self-restraint at first to share the happy and omit the negative. However, I began to notice that I saw my life differently when I described and focused on the positive.
I began to feel stirrings that there was more healing to be done; more changes I needed to make.
Along my journey I came across a talk entitled, “Christ Centered Healing From Depression,” given by Carrie Wrigley. She is a therapist who spoke at an Education Week at BYU regarding healing from Depression and Low Self Worth.
I confess at first, I was a bit skeptical. While I have deep faith, I had suffered with depression for over 10 years, and I knew first hand that praying more and serving more and painting on a smile didn’t do much to lift the shroud of darkness that covered me.
However, I also knew that God was ultimately the source of light and healing. I recognized that God had sent many tender mercies to me in form of friends, books, ideas and help. I suppose I thought that WAS the way he healed us. However, there was part of me that believed his healing could do more. I just wasn’t sure how to access his healing power.
Carrie Wrigley discusses research surrounding the effectiveness of many therapeutic methods, use of medication and her experience as a practitioner seeing patients and not seeing many change long-term and how to compelled her to search for how to really help her patients heal and change.
As she searched and studied, she discovered how to help patients access the atonement in their healing. The atonement makes us into a new creature. She explained that one way God helps us become a new creature is by changing the way we think. Our thoughts create how we feel, how we feel drives how we act and how we act creates the result in our lives. So one of the ways God helps form us into who he wants us to be is by helping us change the way we think, and the way we see things. I was fascinated by this idea. I began praying that God would help me learn how to change my thinking.
One day as I was on Face Book I came across an ad that said, “What if you could feel happy most of the time and overwhelmed sometimes instead of the other way around?” I was intrigued. I clicked on the link and discovered a life coach named, Jody Moore. I began listening to her podcasts and finding my mind was challenged and opened in new ways
Over the course of the next year, I began to learn how to re-set my mind to think differently—and much more healthfully. I enrolled in a life coaching program. I learned several tools and did a lot of personal emotional work that did a complete emotional makeover on my brain. I learned how to identify the thoughts that were driving my depression and change them. I learned how to recognize and process difficult emotions instead of acting out on them, or suppressing them. I learned that I spent a lot of effort avoiding emotions by eating, shopping, listening to audiobooks or watching Netflix. I began to feel a positive momentum building. I was feeling better, my relationships were totally different and more positive. I was able to hand overwhelm and difficulty better. I could be more of who I wanted to be.
God guided me through an amazing process has helped and continues to help me become a “new creature.” I have changed so much inside I am unrecognizable to myself. The spirit began to help put new thoughts in my mind. I think and interact in a whole new way. I am an up-leveled version of myself—even better than the original “old me.” I feel joy! My life feels full of light.
As my brain has changed, I have been able to work off my meds slowly. This has been an important indication that finally the source of my depression is being addressed. I don’t dwell on conversations, I don’t take forever to make decisions, I don’t feel constantly overwhelmed and wallow in self-pity. I don’t constantly worry about being “productive.” My relationships are deepening, my brain fog has cleared, and I feel like I show up more often like the kind of person I want to be. Instead of having a head full of overwhelm and stress, it is full of more compassion, desire to help others and mostly full of joy!
One of the things I discovered was how essential darkness is. God made the light and the dark. There is darkness almost 50 percent of the time on earth. Without darkness, it would be difficult to sleep, it would get hot, there would be no natural separation of days, and it would be tempting to keep working, or playing instead of taking a break. We wouldn’t appreciate the light. We must have both to understand the other.
I realized the same was true for my emotions. God created opposition in all things; we are meant to experience difficult emotions a large portion of the time. The tension of opposites is what gives joy and happiness it’s meaning and it’s value.
Knowing darkness or difficult emotions are important made me less afraid of them. Knowing how to process them and how to move past them has given me confidence that I don’t have to be controlled by difficult emotion. Now I can accept them and let them go more often. This allows me to let go of them instead of storing the emotion and being controlled by them. I know there is more light ahead.
Having lived in darkness for so many years and not knowing how to climb out, I feel deep compassion for people who live in the dark night of the soul—even partial darkness. I know it is painful and heavy. I heard someone say once that each of us bears the mark of the pain we’ve felt. It becomes like a secret code that binds us to others who bear the same mark. I am so deeply grateful for all of the people who have helped to uncover my light and I want to share the joy of light with anyone who may be suffering. That is part of the reason I am writing this blog.
Over the years, many people have asked me where to even start when they feel depressed. Each person’s journey is unique. I would never begin to think that I could tell someone else how to heal or recover from their own individual difficulties. I have listed the steps that have helped me in my journey; I hope they will be helpful to others in some way. There is so much happiness where light is–and it’s possible. If you are in a dark place, hang on. There is light ahead.
1. Trust yourself
If you notice that you don’t feel yourself, believe yourself. Don’t just keep pushing through. Slow down and observe yourself. Just because you have good days doesn’t mean you aren’t depressed or anxious.
2. Take a Depression/Anxiety Test
If you have become someone you don’t recognize, and don’t like, consider taking a depression scale test. This can give you an idea if it’s something you need to address, and how severe you may be. Here is a Depression Test that could serve as a good starting point.
3. Dump the dark (Counseling and medication may be helpful tools to consider)
An important part of healing is getting the dark out in a place you can see it, address it and change it if needed. Shedding light on things often takes away the power of difficult things. Counseling is an excellent way to do this as therapists can help to draw out pain points.
Sometimes meds can be helpful in getting you to a place that you can see more clearly and function better. It’s sometimes difficult to change patterns of thinking and acting when they are deeply ingrained and the feelings causing the behavior are so raw and difficult. They are not the right course of action for everyone however. Remember meds can be temporary.
Both counseling and medication can be particularly helpful in high moderate to severe depression. More mild depression may be able to be addressed differently. Methods such as journaling or talking with a confidant can be helpful in unloading pain as well.
4. Choose to Let in the Light
Once the brain knows the pathways that lead to depression, it’s easy to fall back into old patterns. It requires a deliberate decision to “choose happy.” The minute we allow ourselves to take even a step into the quicksand of self pity and wo, we get sucked down. Sometimes we unknowingly feel that there are benefits to feeling depressed or anxious and it’s hard to fully heal when we still “want” in some ways to feel this way. It may sound strange, as no one would “choose” to feel this way, but sometimes making a list of advantages and disadvantages of depression or anxiety can help us discover our own resistance. This was helpful for me.
5. Get Help Changing Your Brain
Once you are in a stable emotional place, it is time to begin a brain remodel. If we continue thinking and acting the way we always have, it is likely we will relapse into depression or anxiety again. There are many ways to learn to think differently.
Life Coaching is one fantastic source of this type of brain work. A therapist who does Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or Dialectical Behavioral Therapy can also be helpful. Sometimes hospitals or colleges offer groups that discuss important principles. Bibliotherapy can be highly effective as well. No matter how you choose, the change will come from actually observing yourself, writing down what you observe and making changes to your thoughts.
A great book to get started with is, The Feeling Good Handbook by David Burns
One of my favorite podcasts that has helped me make these types of changes is:
The Life Coach School, Brooke Castillo
6. Share Your Light
Sharing your new found tools and hope is often the ray of hope someone else needs to know they won’t be in a dark place forever. As we reach out to share and help our own light grows.
Most of us feel broken in some way–we feel unworthy or unappealing or less lovable because we less than our own ideal in some way. For some it is being overweight, or not having the financial means to have the home or clothes they’d love. For some it might be feeling like they just can’t stay on top of their home, they yell at their children, they can’t perform to the extent they’d like at work, or are doubting their faith. More substantial struggles like losing someone we love, divorce, infertility, abuse, trauma, or having a significant health challenge can all be things that can cause us to question our own wholeness. Ironically it is our brokenness that allows us to come to true wholeness. God loves broken things–it is what allows him to heal us.
I saw my husband’s elbow brush the edge of my favorite Talavera plate hanging on our bedroom wall, but it crashed to the floor before a warning escaped my throat. The bright ceramic colors were strewn across the floor—some large, others tiny fragments. There were too many pieces—it seemed impossible to put back together. The plate was gone. My husband felt terrible. We scooped it up and the pile of shards sat on my desk for several days. I kept looking at it. I considered tossing it. I noticed the empty plate holder; the room seemed a little duller without it. And the days went on. One day, I pulled out the ceramic glue and tried to piece back together some of the larger pieces but there were cracks and chipped fragments. I left it for a while to think about if I even wanted it anymore, it just wasn’t the same.
There is something about us that doesn’t like broken things, we resist them. Things that are broken seem less useful, unworthy and less appealing. Why is that? Breaking is a powerful metaphor. People break, relationships break. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. When we feel broken, the natural response is to ignore it, to fix it, or to hide it.
When my mother called me to tell me she had been diagnosed with stage four Ovarian Cancer, her first words to me were, “We’re not cancer people.” She refused to be broken. She underwent surgery, chemo, remission, lots of natural healing methods and chemo again. In the in-between she undulated between gut wrenching sickness, longing to live to finish raising her family.
Of course, she did what any of us would do—fight to stay alive. With her characteristic optimism and quest for knowledge, she was constantly on the lookout for new healing protocols. We loved her for it, and cheered her on. Her work and discipline was inspiring, I believe trying new things gave her hope too. She would often tell us her tremendous hope that a particular method would be successful.
We rode the waves of hope and disappointment as she tried various methods. While I unfairly depended on her for her reassurance, there was always an underlying anxiety. I was never quite sure how she really felt or what would happen “if” the new idea or protocol didn’t pan out.
As her health declined, her search for healing became all consuming. This was understandable and certainly what any of us might be inclined to do. It took most of the day each day to scan the internet for new alternative healing methods, to make all fresh foods and do a variety of protocols with exercise, heat etc. It was a time of grasping at anything to try to get more time.
We wanted her around for more time–but I confess that selfishly at times I longed for her to stop trying to get more time, and admit she might not have much time left. I wished she would use the little time she had left to focus more on spending time with me and with her family and friends. That was the time we knew we DID have. I remember changing our flight plans to be with her at Thanksgiving right after her diagnosis and she insisted we not come—saying “This is a marathon, not a sprint.” When I tried to record some of her stories about her life, she resisted. It felt to her like admitting defeat. This was absolutely understandable, and I would probably do the same thing in her shoes. However it was interesting to be on the opposite side. As much as we wanted her to keep trying things to keep living, sometimes resisting the cancer meant separating herself from spending time with her loved ones and writing down her experiences.
There were times she did accept her cancer and let us be part of her world. A few of my favorite were when she took us wig shopping with her and we all tried on ridiculous wigs and giggled at how silly we looked. One time she got wigs for every member of our family and we all did a photo shoot together. She let me come with her to get a hair cut when she knew her hair was about to fall out, and let me cry with her as she had to cut off the hair cut she had recently grown out. She let me make her mashed up sweet potatoes to help her nausea during chemo–there was something sweet about getting to serve my mother who had always served me. Another thing I loved was to hear her insights from the amazing things she was learning. She read a stack of cancer books taller than she was. She was overflowing with interesting perspectives on faith, healing, nutrition, health and so many other things.
Certainly learning how to deal with a terminal illness was a learning experience for all of us. Perhaps the most difficult was when she wouldn’t tell us what was happening with her health. I believe she did this to protect us–so that we would not feel the depth of worry and heartbreak she had to feel. I love her for this. However, ironically the more it was unspoken, the more anxiety I felt. When I would call on a bad day, she usually wouldn’t answer the phone. It was often several days of silence until she’d come to a better place and then she’d tell me how low she was and how much better she was now. In the interum I worried, and wondered what was happening. I hated not being able to love her and listen to her when she felt most broken. She seemed to only be able to be broken in hindsight—it was too vulnerable to be broken in the moment. Having never been through this but having watched her, I can imagine there were days she simply couldn’t talk. She felt too sick or was too emotionally low to share. This was a new and terrifying journey. She was doing the best she could and the best she knew how. Still, I wonder how it could have been sometimes if I could have accompanied her more on the difficult paths of her journey–particularly in the earlier phases of her cancer.
She did break. Not all at once, but slowly.
The summer before she passed away, she had a paradigm shift. She had asked a fellow cancer survivor for her book list on cancer cures at a yoga class one day. Her friend refused; she lovingly put her arm around my mother and spoke words that echoed through her heart. “You are in a frantic frenzy. You need to stand still and let God.”
My mother did. She had a profound realization of her anxiety or resistance against being broken. With tremendous courage, she made a deliberate decision to stop “fixing” and stop “hiding.” She stopped scanning the internet for solutions. She stopped following every undulation of her blood tests. She accepted that she was sick but decided to stop panicking about healing and instead feel peace in the time she had left. She did do a few things to keep up her health, but it did not consume her. As she relaxed and accepted her “brokenness,” she began to feel tremendous personal peace. She knew Christ was the ultimate healer.
Peace began to permeate our family as well. Her own peace was contagious. Knowing she was at peace, allowed me and my siblings to relax and connect with her in a new and deeper way. When we visited she cleared the calendar and chatted, laughed, shared, and sat. She had tea parties with my daughters in the backyard, she ate more chocolate, and we laughed while we watched “I Love Lucy” re-runs together. She called all of her children more often and took all of us and her grandchildren on a family history tour of St. George, UT that summer. She wove into our stories our grandparents’ stories. She even compiled all our family recipes for each of us–a way of acknowledging she may not be here to give them to us in the future. These actions were so different than a year or two before. These are some of my most cherished memories of her. After this paradigm shift, she seemed willing to share more of her difficult times as well. This allowed us to be part of her journey. Though it was difficult sometimes to hear of her struggles, there was much less anxiety and so much love as we got to accompany her.
Just a few months later, the cancer returned and spread throughout her body. This time she surrendered; she knew she was broken. This time it was not “fixable.” But interestingly she continued to feel hope. It was not hope in a new protocol, a new diet, or vitamin. It was a deeper hope—a hope in Christ. As she deliberately chose to set aside the anxiety and stop resisting, God was able to heal her spirit. I distinctly remember a phone conversation we had in which I asked her if she thought it was her time to die. She said she thought it may be. She told me that while she wanted to stay and be part of my life and each of my sibling’s lives, she felt at peace that it was her time and that she was at peace with God.
I was living in China at the time, and I received an emergency call one Saturday morning that she may only have a few days to live. I frantically boarded a plane and sobbed all the way to Colorado hoping to be able to hug her one last time and tell her I loved her. I was privileged to get to hold her hand and be with her the last few days before she passed away. She was in tremendous pain. She didn’t try to resist it–she accepted it. It was almost as if she had to labor to get out of this world, just as mother’s labor to bring children into the world.
One day my Aunt Nanny and I laid by her and asked her how she was feeling. Her response was, “I am feeling great peace.” In her willingness to let her body break, God could finally heal her heart and give her true hope. Her acceptance gave us all the peace and courage we would need to deal with her passing.
When she did finally pass away, we all knelt around her bed and watched her as her breathing slowed and finally stopped. It was a sacred and beautiful experience largely because she had accepted her own brokenness. Having her gone, meant that I felt “broken”. For a long time I felt that it defined me in some ways, to have lost my mother. I have had to learn how to be “broken” and beautiful in my own way. See Hope is The Thing: Getting Through Grief. After all, God loves broken things. It is what allows him to heal us.
Brokenness isn’t something to fear, we are all broken in some way. We have broken hearts, broken dreams, broken bodies, these are the raw material of hope. When we resist our brokenness…try to hide it, fight against it, and try to prove we are not broken–it gives our brokenness power over us. God loves broken things. As we surrender our brokenness to him and accept our brokenness ourselves, He gives us hope and peace through his grace. He mends us. Sometimes the mending looks different than we expected. But it is always more beautiful than we anticipated. Our brokenness is a gift.
I think I will keep my cracked Talavera plate. It reminds me that brokenness is beautiful—it’s what spurs us to change and grow. It is what allows God to heal us. The new wholeness is stronger and more powerful than it was in the first place, because now there is a story of pain and picking up the pieces and creating something new…something even stronger and even more beautiful.
When have you felt broken?
What if you owned your brokenness instead of resisting it? Have you allowed others to see it? Have you asked others for help? If you could rebuild, what would you do?
I love this new song by Calee Reed called “Broken and Beautiful.” It expresses a similar idea.
The people we love become part of us, and losing them means losing part of your identity. Trying to adjust to life after loss means we often feel unsteady almost like a chair without a leg…we know we’re missing something and it’s hard to function correctly. It’s normal to feel this way, and important to recognize what role the person played in our lives. Often loss makes that poignantly clear. Grieving is essential. However, learning how to function and re-calibrate after grieving is crucial to finding hope and healing after loss. This is part of my story of re-calibrating after losing my mother.
I was living in Beijing, China when I received a phone call on a Saturday morning from my sister. “Mom isn’t doing well—the hospice nurse thinks she only has a few days left.” I hung up the phone. My mother had been battling cancer for 4 years. I knew she wasn’t doing well, but I hadn’t realized the end would come so quickly. I was panicked I wouldn’t make it back before she slipped away. I boarded a plane that morning and sobbed all 24 hours to Denver. Bless my sweet seat companions. Every time I had a layover, I called. She’s still here. I didn’t relax until I had her cheek to mine and I was squeezing her hand.
It was a bit of a shock to see her so gaunt and wasted and in a hospice bed in the middle of the living room. The last time I had seen her, she and I had gone for a walk around the trails in our neighborhood. Now just breathing was laborious for her. Each night for the next 6 days I wondered if it would be her last. I was lucky enough to get to minister to her—to rub her feet, to read her biblical text, to lay next to her, to laugh with her. I tried to soak in every minute and detail of her presence up until the moment she took her last breath. For more on losing my mom see God Loves Broken Things: Accepting our Brokenness.
I did not anticipate the emptiness and longing I would feel as I watched my mother lie lifeless on the bed or be wheeled out of our home. The day of the funeral, I was numb. People were so wonderful and so supportive, but it all seemed like a bit of a blur. It seemed surreal that I was at my own mother’s funeral, shaking hands of people we loved, laying a flower on her casket. And then it was time to leave. Her earthly remains disappeared.
I knew she was gone, but I still needed her. By default, I still kept going to the space she occupied for me emotionally and would find her gone. I felt adrift and off-balance. Some days I’d pick up the phone to call my mom…..and remember she wasn’t there. I had always written little ideas or funny things I wanted to share with mom on post-it notes around the house to tell her next time I talked to her. I found myself still writing them for a while. But then I stopped.
My mother was my emotional calibrator. When I needed encouragement or to laugh about something humiliating, I could almost hear her voice as she’d quote Anne of Green Gable, “Girl you do beat all.” When I went home, I would re-charge my emotional and personal history battery. It helped me remember who I was and how I wanted to be. But now I just slowly lost battery and wasn’t sure where to recharge.
Where should I look to find a model of the woman I wanted to be? The mother I hoped to become? She was gone. I watched other women her age, but not having access to their thoughts and personal doings, I felt at a loss.
I knew I still needed anchoring and mothering. But I didn’t know where to find it. I felt like the little bird in the PD Eastman children’s book, “Are you my mother?” At times I looked for her in others. I sometimes tried to find her in my husband, my sisters, my dad, my friends. They were all amazing, and sometimes they did fill her space in my soul for a moment. I read her journals, I read books I knew she had read and loved. I made her recipes. Other times I looked for her in my memories or in her legacy. What would she do if she were here. Sometimes looking for her helped, but other times it made the empty space she had occupied feel larger and hollower.
I felt my new identity was wrapped up in her passing. I felt disconnected from people who didn’t know about it. Little things un-related to my mom felt heavier and harder. I was irritated more easily with my family and others. They were not my mother. And I felt resentful they weren’t. Of course it wasn’t their fault, or even mine—it was part of the grieving process.
It was a dark time. I cried myself to sleep many nights. The emotions would well up at strange times—like a song on the radio, or her handwriting sprawled on top of a recipe I was making that said “delicious.”
I remember sometimes the feelings were so raw it was difficult to own them. I was a busy mom with a new baby, two older children with their own needs, I was preparing for an international move and trying to carry on with normal life responsibilities. Life kept going, but the construct of life I had always depended on wasn’t there. I had to keep going but with more heaviness. Sometimes I would shove the difficult feelings down when I couldn’t process them. I wanted to process my grief. I wanted to own it. But part of me didn’t know how.
Significant days like Mother’s Day, the day of her passing, and her birthday were the hardest. I remember sometimes being sick of the pain and wanting it to stop. And, then other times not ever wanting to feel “over it,” as it seemed like that would diminish the significance of the loss. I wanted to find my mother, but I didn’t know how. For more on grief see Hope Is the Thing: Getting Through Grief.
I Found My Mother in Me
In this longing and looking for my mother, and often not finding her, I discovered something. She was not the only source of love and strength and peace. I realized I am stronger and braver than I thought. But I had to walk farther than I’d ever walked before to know it. In the midst of an international move to Mexico I found my mother—in me. I remembered the grit she showed as she re-landscaped our front yard one summer, or walked herself into another chemo treatment. But I had to summon the courage to try. I found the courage and strength to walk by children to school past drug deals and guards with machine guns. I found the courage to take my children to doctors in a foreign language and how to do white-knuckled Mexico City driving.
I Found My Mother in God.
I found that He is closer and more merciful than I knew. But I had to reach out and remove the obstructions of pride and laziness preventing me from feeling his love. I had my 3rd daughter just a few months after my mother’s passing. I needed my mother. I wanted her there. The spirit helped replace the longing and acute pain with peace. When I needed a confidant I began falling to my knees to pray to my father who loves me perfectly. Isn’t that really our journey here anyway—to learn to fall to our knees?
I Found My Mother in Others.
I found that they are more loving and vulnerable than I expected. But I have to let them come close to my heart and I have to change my expectations. No one will ever fill that entire role. But people can fill tiny bits of her. When we arrived to Mexico City, we had no furniture. My husband and I were ordering furniture for our home for the first time since we were married. I scoured design websites and looked for deals. I was so excited when it finally came—I wanted someone to be excited with me. I called my neighbor downstairs and she came up to celebrate with me. It was just a little space she held, but it was enough.
The absence of my mother, left a hollow part of me. I still miss her fiercely. I will never fully replace her, but in trying to fill that space, I have found so many mothers… a closer relationship to God, deeper friendships, courage, and so much personal growth.
Mourning is something each of us do many times in our lives—not just when we lose someone we love, but when we lose a job, lose part of our health, move or a friendship changes etc. It’s important to grieve and recognize the absence. Often it is that noticing that gives us a deeper appreciation for what we’ve lost. After those feelings have become less acute, it can be so healing to begin noticing the amazing compensatory blessings God places in our paths to help fill those spaces. He does fill them.
What loss have you experienced?
1. Consider writing down how life has changed because of that loss, what is missing with that person or that thing gone? It can be so healing to recognize what a significant contribution that person had. Often it’s hard to fully realize without losing something.
2. Can you see any way it has been filled in different ways? If you aren’t sure, become curious and begin looking. You may find some compensatory blessings.
Most people belief stress is a villain. After all, it can increase your risk of a heart attack, it can decrease your effectiveness in a meeting or difficult conversation, and it can reduce our enjoyment of things. However, new research suggests that it is not stress it’s self that is the villain, but how we think about stress that causes the problem. In fact, in many cases stress could actually be beneficial.
A few weeks ago, I had to teach a group of about 50 women. Normally I really enjoy teaching, but it had been a busy week, and I had struggled with how to present the material. As the time got closer, my heart began to pound, sweat collected on my palms and forehead, and my mind started racing. If felt stressed!
Biologically a lot happens to the body when we feel stress. The brain (the hypothalamus) sounds the alarm system! It says, “Help, there’s emotional danger—gather the troops!” The body releases the hormones of cortisol, adrenaline and oxytocin. When cortisol increases the blood glucose levels it stops non-essential emergency processes like digestion, growth, and the immune response. Adrenaline is also released; it increases the heart rate, blood pressure and energy. Our bodies are incredible the way they are able to instantly gear up to meet a threat.
These responses won’t hurt us if they only occur occasionally, but if they are felt ongoing they create a host of problems. This is why for years health professionals have told us that stress is bad for us. However, recent research has put that theory into question.
Kelly McGonigal, a Stanford Professor and Health Psychologist, reveals some fascinating new research about stress in recent study that tracked over 30,000 Americans for 8 years. The study tracked the amount of stress they had, their belief about stress and how many of them died. For people who had a lot of stress, the study showed that there was a 43% increased risk of dying. Think about it…if you’re stressed, your risk goes up by almost half! BUT that was only true for people who believed that stress was bad for their health. Those who didn’t believe stress was harmful for their health had no higher risk of dying!
So, put simply you decrease your risk of death from stress by 43% just by changing your thought about stress. Did you catch that? That is powerful. You can reduce your body’s risk of dying from stress by changing a sentence in your brain! Wow.
In her book “The Upside of Stress,” Kelly McGonigal explains why this change in our perception about stress can be so powerful. One of the hormones released during stress is called Oxytocin. This hormone has several stress reducing properties. First it reduces cortisol–which we mentioned earlier stops digestion, immune response and growth. Oxytocin also relaxes your blood vessels which lowers your blood pressure and it can decrease physical pain due to it’s anti-inflammatory properties.
Isn’t it incredible how the body compensates for its own self-causing damage? When people believe that stress is NOT harmful, more oxytocin is released.
In a study done at Harvard, study participants were taught several benefits of stress. Then, the patients were purposely stressed while under observation. When patients thought about their stress positively, their heart still beat fast, but their blood vessels stayed open. Kelly McGonigal explains that this biological profile looks like what our bodies do when they feel joy or courage. She says, “When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage.”
When we stress out about stress, it IS bad for our health. However, when we choose to make friends with stress, it actually doesn’t harm us. The best way to make friends with stress, is just by changing our thoughts about it.
If you need more convincing, here’s one way McGonigal says stress can actually HELP us. Again we can thank the hormone oxytocin. In addition to the other physical responses it creates, it also has emotional benefits. Oxytocin increases your trust, empathy and your desire to connect with others. McGonigal states, “When you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience.” Connection is one of the most significant determinants of happiness. Stress actually gives us a biological nudge to connect.
Another study that tracked 1000 adults in the US, showed an increased 30% risk of death for each stressful event that occurred. BUT it also showed that those who spent time serving friends, neighbors and people in their community had 0% increased chance of death from their stressful events. Our biology is literally changed when we reach out under pressure.
This week as I stood in front the group of women, I confessed that I was feeling really nervous. Immediately I received kind looks of affirmation and smiles. Their smiles gave me the courage to calm my nerves enough to present the way I had hoped.
Stress is only harmful if we believe it is. I love Kelly Gonigal’s summation of stress, “Stress gives us access to our hearts. The compassionate heart finds joy and meaning in connecting with others.”
What are you stressed about right now?
Here’s a TED talk by Kelly McGonigal discussing this idea more in depth. How to Make Stress Your Friend.
Undefined expectations for ourselves and the roles we operate in always lead to disappointment. There is a simple solution for increasing success and satisfaction; defining exactly what it means to be a “good mom,” or a “good person,” or a good wife” etc. allows us to know what we’re shooting for.
When Dorthy set off along the yellow brick road in her sparkling red shoes and eyes wide with hope, she didn’t know much about Oz. She just knew it was where she wanted to go because she had heard the Wizard of Oz could help. When she arrived, it was disappointing to find he was just a man behind a curtain. It’s easy to put up false Oz’s for ourselves without even realizing it.
About 2 months after we moved into our new neighborhood in Taiwan, rumblings and mumblings started about Halloween. We live in an old military neighborhood on a mountain overlooking the city of Taipei. Because Halloween isn’t a “thing” in Asia—those who do know about it are curious. Over the years our neighborhood has drawn crowds from all over the city. Many are local Taiwanese who want an American cultural experience.
My neighbors told me, “Halloween is a BIG deal here.” “No matter how much candy you have, “you’ll run out.” “Everyone in the neighborhood decorates. You should have seen what the people who lived in your house before you did! Everyone really goes over the top.”
I was new and trying to fit in, so I started scheming and ordering on Amazon. Our family decided to do a Wizard of Oz theme. We all dressed up as different characters and we built a set with the Emerald City and Dorthy’s house with the legs of the wicked witch underneath. My husband figured out how to broadcast the Wizard of Oz movies on the outside wall of the house. It was pretty awesome. I thought I had rocked the “Go Big!”
The day of Halloween arrived and I thought it was strange that none of the neighbors had many decorations up. But, I figured they must be last minute people like I was. Around 5 I started setting things up. Still no neighbors setting up…eventually I saw a neighbor set out a table with a cloth and a pumpkin and I saw another neighbor hang an orange pennant banner that said happy Halloween. One neighbor had a few skeletons sitting around, and another had hung out some lights, but nothing too big yet.
By the time the masses started coming around we were the only spectacle around. The kids loved it and we had a ball, but I had to laugh at myself. Apparently my idea of “a BIG deal” was slightly different than theirs!
Definitions are so crucial. I could have saved myself a lot of headache (and money) if I would have simply asked a few more questions to define exactly what “BIG deal” meant to most people. Apparently to them it meant dressing up as an adult and sitting outside with several bags of candy and a cute Halloween tablecloth.
I find that defining things—even if it’s just for myself can reduce tons of headache and extra work. Steven Covey says, “Disappointment is the gap between expectation and reality.” If our expectation isn’t even realistic, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment.
One area that seems to have a big expectation-reality gap is our roles as mothers. I know it is for me at, at times. I think most of us have amorphous sort of ideas about these pieced together from what we saw our mothers do, what we think others are doing or things we’ve read in parenting books. My old definition of a good mom was a conglomerate of the compassion of Mother Theresa, the influence of Oprah, a home like Martha Stewart and hair like Jennifer Anniston. I often measured my success by how my children acted and performed. It’s no wonder I often felt like I was falling short. My expectations were completely unrealistic!
If we take time to actually DEFINE what a reasonable mother would do—it gives us a more attainable goal and cuts out the disappointment gap between expectation and reality. There are many ways to do this. One is to look around and find someone who has accomplished what you want to do or be as a mother. Ask them how they define success and how they got there. Another way to be more realistic about role definitions is to take your big vision goal and break it into smaller step-ladder goals. Make sure the first step is something you know you can do! Define success as the first goal, then move to the second one when you are consistent at being or doing the first. Success helps build momentum a lot faster than failure.
In addition to unrealistic ideals, sometimes we set ourselves up for disappointment by including things in our definitions that we can’t control. For example, we might include the choices our children make, or we might include the way our children treat us as part of our measurement tool for being a good mother. What our children do cannot be an accurate measure of success, because it is something we cannot control. (Clearly we may want to change what we’re doing if our children aren’t responding the way we hoped, but it’s important to consider children may not respond no matter what we do.) Our definitions of success must include only things that WE can control.
One of the great creators of discouragement is generalities. Words like “always,” “never,” and “everybody.” While we know intellectually that no one is perfect, we often expect it of ourselves. We assume that others are able to someone achieve perfection. Our subconscious definitions of success often include things like “never yell,” and “always take time to listen,” “everybody else takes their kids on amazing vacations during the summer,” “always make a healthy dinner.” While these are excellent ideas to strive for they make it hard to live up to success. Getting specific and thinking through what we actually can and should do can help. “I will try to make a healthy home cooked dinner 2 times a week.” Or “When I want to yell, I’m going to snap the rubber band on my wrist.”
Define success in a very specific way. Here’s my new definition of a “good mom:
Love my children. Teach them things I feel are important. Model being a happy and healthy woman most of the time.
The Emerald City wasn’t all that Dorthy had dreamed it up to be; it was something she had built up in her mind as THE ultimate destination and the solution to all problems. When she actually saw the man behind the curtain it was a bit disappointing, but it turned out it was even better! Define what you expect of yourself. Make sure it’s realistic, specific and only YOU control it.
What is your current definition of a good mom?
Get a piece of paper and define what it means to be a “good mom” Is your definition realistic, specific? Are you completely in control of the outcome or are others involved?
This works well for other roles too–define what it means to be a “good wife” a “good employee” a “good person” a “good daughter-in-law.” etc.