Spinning into a meltdown can be turned into something huge and ruin your entire day or days.
I am currently selling my home, cars, furniture, and other things. My husband and I are preparing to go to New Zealand, and so much has to be done. With a garage sale, furniture and stuff were easy to get rid of, and almost everything was gone. We got rid of one of the cars and are now selling the house. Remodeling and fixing the house was a lot of work, but selling was frustrating!
This initial feeling of fear, uncertainty, or frustration isn’t necessarily a problem … it’s just a feeling. It’s an initial twitch in our hearts. The real difficulty comes not from this initial twitch or punch at heart…
It comes from what happens afterward: we go into a Defense Mechanism of spinning one of our usual self-talk. My narrative is that I probably did something wrong, so it’s my fault it happened!” It becomes a great deal. Then adverse events occur; remember Murphy’s law “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
Fear, frustration, and anger continue growing, and now it feels like a tornado category five. We might have other things to cope with this feeling —yelling, shutting down, hiding, comforting ourselves with food or web browsing, shopping, or going into a depressive funk mode. I definitely go on shutting down and web browsing.
So how can I stop the meltdown?
The first step in the process is to recognize the feeling and ask why I feel this way. The trick is to catch this feeling when it is still at the beginning because if I let it spin, it can grow uncontrollably, and I’ll not stop.
Felling fear, anger, or frustration is OK.
We can give ourselves some space to feel fear and uncertainty, frustration, or whatever the feeling might be. We can take a few breaths. Give ourselves some compassion. And then let go and move on to the rest of our day.
I am a trained social worker and have the tools to help me in this process. Not easy for me either because I am at the center of the tornado. It took me a lot of practice to recognize the signs of frustration, anger, or fear: when the heartbeat increase, when the thoughts become difficult, and the head is spinning, or the pain is in the neck. So I can pause and notice the feeling as a sensation in the body. Breathe for a few moments. Be present with the sensation without getting caught up in the self-talk that adds fuel to the fire.
The important step is to stop the self-talk because it is unhelpful (it only makes things worse), then turn off the self-talk and feel the sensation in the body. Let yourself feel this emotion as a sensation. From here, you can give yourself some compassion, some love. Take care of yourself as you feel this uncertainty, fear, and frustration.
I can’t wait to sell the house!
