Listening…Carefully

When someone says they had a rough time, please believe them. Also, don’t try to talk them out of it. I’ve had more people in my life try to tell me that I should not feel the way I do.

Whatever happened to them might not have been as scary as your own life, but for them, it was terrifying. How do I know? Well, I had a rough patch myself. I thought it was over, really. I’d married, moved away and left my family. I’d made my own way in the world, and then things just started backfiring.

I started asking myself what was wrong. It just didn’t make sense. I had everything in the world to be happy about, and yet, I wasn’t happy. As I said, it just didn’t make sense.

So started my own scary-at-first-and-then-healing journey toward a stable life. Now, I’m 70. I know I haven’t answered all my questions, but then I realized somewhere along the way, I didn’t have to.

Now, I get to them when I get to them.

It’s like you’ve got a cut. Yes, ouch, it hurts. It just happened. Not only was there the shock you had of the knife slicing deeply into your arm, or across your finger, with the first hurt. But now it hurts worse. Then, as the days pass, it’s going to ache, and it’s going to itch as it forms a scab as it heals. Maybe a week needs to pass before it’s healed or on its way to being healed. You bang it on the kitchen counter and are reminded all over again that it happened. The whole process just takes time.

Same thing with life lessons you learn. They aren’t all fun and games, and sometimes it takes you a while to realize anything is wrong in the first place.

Sometimes you’ve got somebody wise who helps you along. Sometimes you have to get into psychotherapy to understand some of it. I had a friend who has since passed, who helped me to understand that you heal what you are able to heal, you go about life as normal, everything is smelling good, and then something happens. You get triggered, and it’s like nothing was healed at all. My first inclination was to blame my therapist. Thayer set me straight. He said you do what you can, return to life, get adjusted to the new you, and the universe sends you a test to see just how well you did with the healing process. Somebody pushes your buttons.

Thayer said to me, "It is as if your higher self says, 'Ah, let’s see just how healed she is.” What do you do? He told me that I had more work to do. He told me the process was fine. Nothing was wrong. I was healed up to a point. I was stronger. I had been given tools by my therapist to cope. I used them, and now I need some more.

So, I went back into therapy and did some more investigating and healing. That had to have been over 30 years ago.

It’s difficult to even try to approach the things that hurt you a long time ago, or that still do. There’s all that imprinting that went on when you were a child. Well, you’re not a child anymore, and you can do as you please as an adult. That includes healing the wounds within.

Intellectually, you can say, “That was 30 years ago. I’ve grown up. There is no way I should still be bothered by those things.” There is all that should be going on in your head. Don’t should on yourself. We’re writers here, right? Writers are fearless. Writers investigate. Writers can make up worlds. Writers figure things out.

Thanks for reading.

🌺 Pauline Evanosky