When It All Feels Too Much

Hold It All At Once

Hello ♡,

I wanted to share with you some therapy interventions I use when it all feels like too much. Whether that is too much in the larger world, in your own life, or for many it may be both right now.

Photo by Jack Lucas Smith on Unsplash

I, maybe like you, stared at the number of deaths in the recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria from the bizarre distance of a news links. Sitting in my own home, safe, and getting ready to go to pick up my son from soccer, I read and re-read the death toll. It took my breath away.

I hear many people talking about how our nervous systems are not made to live on a global scale, but are made to live local - with all the joys and hardships of a community we can reach with our body. It certainly feels that way, doesn’t it?

And it felt so strange to go to soccer and everything be fine here, when nothing is fine there, and nothing is fine in so many ways and in so many lives. This is a reality that is always true in the world, but at times it feels like an exclamation mark gets added to the sentence of the unfairness of suffering in the world.

I sat down, closed my computer, and felt the overwhelming sense of how do I comprehend reading of thousands of lives lost and going to soccer practice?

I remembered something simple and grounding: the both/and idea I use in my therapy work and my own life.

We are tempted as humans to categorize, divide, separate, and ultimately shut down because we can’t hold it all together (or so we think).

This is good. This is bad. She is bad. He is good. They are bad. They are good. Happy. Sad. All. Nothing.

It is a normal tendency, and one that can also get escalated when someone is struggling with anxiety or depression. It is also very normal and kids as they grow and develop. For many people it may be the way they were raised, not ever getting the chance to learn the freedom in allowing complexity, nuance, differences, and unanswered questions to co-exist.

But, it can be exhausting to oscillate back and forth between good/bad, all/nothing, should I be upset or can I be ok? We often shut down our empathy and develop a way of living that is like tunnel vision because no one mentioned to us it can all coexist - and that there is actually relief in that.

The relief is in part that you take yourself out of the role of the decider and/or fixer, and come back into alignment with your smallness. Smallness does not mean inactive, it just means perspective. Smallness for me incorporates my faith and reliance on God. It simply means you may not be able to solve this, but you can learn how to hold it all at once, and engage in the world and your life from there.

A Both/And Approach:

When it all feels too much, hold it all at once, don’t look away, hold onto what is good and lovely and small right in front of you.

Remind yourself that hardship and OKness coexist right now, and it is ok that they do (the suffering is still unjust and unfair, but you are learning to engage and not shut down).

You can feel great grief and happiness at the same time.

You can mourn with other people and celebrate something beautiful in your life at the same time.

You can care for the larger world and focus on the smallness of your own world (in fact it is your responsibility to focus on your little world, that is not selfish).

It helps to get small, notice what is right around you and breathe (this is not denial, this is allowing it all to co-exist).

It helps to practice naming what you are happy about in your own little world (remember feeling “guilty” about good things serves no one, and helps no one).

You can do one small thing to unite the urgency of the need with your action (this may be a donation to boots on the ground organizations, or if that is not possible right now, sharing with others the organization to spread the word - engaging both helps your neighbor and relieves the desire to help in you).

Finally, I will leave you with this picture of a Both/And approach from Charlie Mackesy:

“When big things feel out of control…focus on what you love right under your nose.”

with you,

Monica

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Officially Official

I have officially signed a book contract with my publisher! It feels Officially Official, you know what I mean? Here is me signing below!

(And here is a funny video my family always laughs about to use as an illustration when something is official official “this is my hair wet wet.” (click and turn sound on) A little comedic relief, mental health break, and what I have actually been thinking now that its all official. )