One of the things that made me a great Life Coach was that I was deeply empathic, meaning that I could feel others’ emotions (especially pain) quite intensely. This served me well in coaching but also has a downside too. You see, when there is a lot of pain in the world, I feel it. The emotion floods me and I have a hard time functioning. So between the trauma of evacuating our home on short notice, the tragic effects of COVID worldwide and watching my beloved city burn down this last week, it’s honestly taken all my energy just to get through my days.
Those first weeks of April were rough. I vacillated between denial and anger over the COVID situation and took it mostly out on my poor husband by trying to control him since everything else in my world felt out of my control. Thankfully, he’s become quite familiar with this tendency of mine and kindly points out what I’m doing and why it won’t solve the problem that I’m actually upset about even if it does briefly make me feel better. :)
The denial piece surprised me a bit, as I tend to be quite rational about things. I think as the number of unknowns grew and grew and my perfectly laid plans disintegrated there became a point when it just became too much and my last ditch response was to cling to denial instead of accepting that this was really happening.
After denial came the anger. I was furious about how much COVID had impacted my family’s life & was destroying the lives of thousands other who had situations more tenuous than mine. Anger isn’t an emotion I’m comfortable sitting with usually but for some reason it felt great to channel all my anger at COVID for a few weeks. I was solidly in glass half-full, no silver lining, life sucks mentality. I remember one day my husband said, “What can I do to help you feel better?†and I responded harshly “I don’t want to feel betterâ€. And the truth was, I didn’t. I liked my anger, because it gave me something to focus on and meant I didn’t have to accept the reality of what was happening. But then my therapist called me on it during a session in late April. She helped me see that while I needed to process my anger, it wasn’t really serving me anymore and it was time to move on. I told her I’d think about it… :)
Gradually the anger gave way to a new phase featuring hopelessness and despair. As I moved toward acceptance, I need to mourn the loss of our pre-COVID world. Because as we all know, things will never be the same as they were in 2019. Our world will fundamentally change because of this, just like it did after 9/11. Surprisingly, this stage felt very similar to how I remember feeling at the height of my depression back in 2007. Kind of like my life had peaked and would never be that good again. Thankfully, that phase didn’t last long (maybe a week, tops). It was rough though.
I began to move toward acceptance in mid-May. It manifested as an energetic shift in my being. It didn’t feel like I was wearing a heavy blanket all the time anymore. I saw sparks of possibility in life again. And I began to focus more on the present moment than the future. I’m still not all the way to acceptance yet, but I know I am resilient and will come out the other side of this. I’ve seen over time that the moments in life when I feel crappiest and am **SURE** nothing good will come out of a situation are the times that yield the most transformational changes in my life. Fingers crossed that this will be one of those.
