Here’s something about me you might not know: I am protective of my people.
By my people, I mean those I am connected to including my family, my friends, my clients — in short, people like you.
And when one of my people is threatened, I get a little crazy.
It’s this crazy that I have been dealing with the last couple of weeks.
When someone threatens me and mine with tons of moving steel in the form of a car and turns our car into a smashed tin can, I get a little crazy. (This actually happened back the end of September. Read more here.)
Not only crazy, I get worried, fearful, anxious, angry, jumpy, nervous and very mistrustful.
When the unexpected happens in a bad kind of way, we all get our crazy going.
It’s a natural human reaction and a reaction that can be hard to understand, hard to get a hold of.
My chiropractor told me that part of the natural reaction in the face of trauma is to literally let go of your body — to let your awareness flow from your body so that you are no longer consciously aware of your feelings, especially the painful ones.
I am living testimony to the truth of this.
Several weeks ago, I came to the awareness that something wasn’t right.
I could not feel any connection to my body and very little to the thoughts in my mind.
Everything got really hard to do, I could barely concentrate on any one thing at a time, much less a day full of seemingly simple tasks like getting dressed, taking a shower, brushing my teeth — though the eating part was fully functioning!!
I was dealing with crazy.
Somewhere in the fog, I decided that the best thing for me to do was find where I felt safe and go from there.
I literally let go of everything including phone calls, email, writing, contacting others.
If I could not easily figure out a way to do whatever, I let it go.
This was not easy for me.
I want to be reliable and highly productive.
I want to excel at what I do and anything less than my stilted view of perfection is failure.
But I did not feel safe and I did not feel all there/here.
I felt that until I could find safety, I wasn’t going to be doing much anyway.
And the only place that felt safe is the one where I was not forcing myself to do what didn’t feel right to do.
I spent several days just watching TV and going to doctors’ appointments.
I spent several more days just letting go.
Then I spent a couple more days realizing some more how much I wasn’t fully present.
I thought that I had already done this when the car accident first happened.
But apparently not enough because here I was again, letting go, looking for safety, looking for me.
Now I am feeling a little more here. I feel a little better at keeping myself present.
There is a part of me that is the same ole’ me.
But there is another part of me that realizes the old me is doing new things and that a new part of me is emerging and doing some of the same old in a new way.
Like a recurring theme, I am realizing just how much my expectations can trip me up and how much my old stories are begging to be let go if I will.
I feel safety in letting go of anything I tell myself about what this is all about.
I am not finished with the journey, I can only see one step at a time, and I feel that I will follow the road where it leads.
I write this because I think that we all encounter traumatic events where we get crazy from the threat to our people and to ourselves.
It’s hard because there is so much commotion inside and out.
It’s hard because some of our protective mechanisms after a while just get in the way of getting past the crazy.
So if you find yourself facing your crazy, my best advice is to answer this question for yourself: Where’s safety?
Then move to safety and go from there.
Our sense of safe helps tone the crazy and allows you to bring you back in.
When you feel safe, you begin to connect yourself to your inner power and the place you can begin to let go.
My second bit is a reminder: sometimes getting past crazy is a full-time job.
Allow yourself time.
Allow yourself some confusion.
Allow yourself room for the fog to clear.
That’s all I got right now.
Deal with Crazy by Finding Safety: A lot of my writing comes from what and how I am aware of my inner landscape and my personal work. You can find more articles like this here: For Body, Mind, Heart & Soul.
