• Cut yourself a break and don’t expect as much from yourself as you normally do.
Physical
Here are ideas for caring for your physical being:• Pamper yourself.
• Do soothing, relaxing activities regularly.
• Move your body in ways that feel good to you.
• Get enough sleep; nothing can deteriorate you faster than lack of sleep. Ask your physician for help if this becomes a problem.
• Undertake some exercise daily, both to care for yourself and as a release valve for the stress created by the trauma.
• Get a massage to calm and soothe yourself.
• Eat a healthy diet by avoiding junk food, alcohol and caffeine.
Spiritual
Paying attention to the spiritual part of your being provides a peace many say they can’t find elsewhere. Here are some ways to care for your spiritual being:• Develop meditation and other spiritual exercises that nurture your mind and soul.
• Read books or writings that provide wisdom and comfort to help guide you through the decisions ahead.
• Listen to music that comforts your mind and soul.
• Watch movies that show how others have faced difficult circumstances.
• Consider adding spiritual practices or activities with other people for the benefit that “fellowship” can build into your life.
Good Self-Care Can Help You Continue to Care for Your Children and Continue Your Job
When betrayal trauma depletes our energy and scrambles our focus, caring for others or going to work every morning can feel impossible. Prioritizing good self-care in all three areas not only protects our overall health and well-being, but also it can enable us to continue the other roles we play in life.
Self-Check: Take some time right now and write out a self-care plan for yourself. Be sure to include what you will do to care for yourself emotionally, physically and spiritually. Share this plan with your therapist or the person to whom you’ve turned for support. What things are you already doing for yourself? What things might be difficult but important for you to do for yourself? Remember, you are worth it!
Chapter 7
From Crisis to Stability
Marsha shares a journal entry she wrote as her marriage came to an end. It captures much of what partners feel and experience when betrayal shatters their lives:My eyes are open and I’m instantly aware of the raw pain that has replaced the long-time joy in my marriage. I glance at the clock: 6:00 A.M. Somehow three hours slip by as I shower, dress and prepare for my day.
Finally ready to go, I reach into my coat pocket and…no keys. Oh, no! Not again. I am reminded that no matter how hard I try I can’t keep order in my life with the increased stress, emotional pain and distractions that rule my nights and days. As I move from room to room, pulling out drawer after drawer, I begin to worry. I don’t want to waste another good day, I mutter. Could I possibly have left them in the keyhole on the outside of the front door again?
I unlock and open the door. No keys. Maybe the car door? Out I trudge, beginning to become annoyed with my constantly slumbering memory. Not there, either. What if someone took them from the front door so they can break in at night? I analyze my thought and realize I sound like a paranoid woman.
The next three hours I spend looking for my keys. During those three hours, I discover that somehow my cell phone is missing, too. I dial it, hoping to follow its ring. But there’s no ring to follow. Back out to the car, back in the house, back up the stairs. Just what I need: another bumper-car-in-the-fog-day.
I finally give up and call a friend who has a backup key. She’s sweet and sympathetic and offers to come over as soon as she’s ready. Moments after hanging up the phone, my eyes spot my terry cloth robe. I plunge my hand into a pocket. “My keys!” I shout, actually feeling joy for a moment. Hurriedly, I call my friend back.
Somewhere between opening my eyes this morning and losing time to my inability to stay organized, my enthusiasm for the day has vanished and I feel exhausted. But finally, around noon, I manage to get myself into a coat, gather my things and leave. Safely in the car, I head to town. There’s still lots of sunshine and I’m hopeful that it will be good medicine.
Hungry and needing to be around people, I pull into a fast-food restaurant. Just as I join the end of the line to order, I accidentally dump the contents of my purse and a strange assortment of “stuff” splatters over a square yard of the floor. As I bend down to begin collecting my things, aware of many noontime eyes upon me, my sheaf of marriage separation papers drops from my other arm and scatters across the tile. The man in front of me—one of my “angels” for that particular day—turns and with a gentle smile says, “Let me help you.”
“I’m going through a personal crisis, and it’s beginning to show,” I mumble awkwardly. He looks up and smiles softly, continuing to collect the oddities I’ve spread across the floor. He picks up my name tag and hands it to me. “That’s my name,” I blurt out, realizing after the fact how ridiculous it sounded. Again, he smiles. As we finish, I thank him and he turns to place his order.
After lunch I head to my favorite bakery, hoping they still have some apple cinnamon chip scones. Ah, they do. As I give the young cashier $1.75, a man dressed in a cyclist’s gear comes in, holds up a prescription pill bottle and asks, “Do you know this person?” My eyes lock on the translucent brown bottle and my name highlighted in yellow jumps out at me. I reach up and almost snatch the bottle from his hand, once again saying, “Oh, thank you.” Lord, I pray silently. I’m a mess! Please help me and take care of me.
I go next door to the drug store for a couple of things I need. Somehow, several minutes pass as I wander up and down every aisle in a daze. Again I’m shrouded in feelings that I know accompany shock; I realize I am dissociating. I feel cut off and disconnected from my body and from reality, as if I’m groping through a dense jungle in a white-out fog. I find myself in the greeting card aisle and suddenly the same emotions I felt following my father’s death swamp me with heavy waves. As the tears flow down my cheeks unbidden and unchecked, I read cards with beautiful, heartrending expressions of farewell to someone you love. I pick them up, read them, put them back. And I wonder why I’m doing this to myself.
Finally, after another hour has passed, I pay and leave, carry my bags to the car, turn and walk into a coffee shop. Reaching in my purse for my wallet, I discover it’s not there. I check my pockets. No wallet. Oh, no, not again, I think in disbelief. I’m trying so hard to remain present and be extra careful, but I can’t seem to control my brain that’s bent on wandering through the years of my broken marriage.
I hurry back into the drug store to ask the cashier, “Excuse me, did I leave my wallet here a minute ago?” “No,” she says through a thick accent, “but I found one outside,” and hands my wallet to me. Another one of my angels for the day! Emotionally spent and troubled by my condition, I give up, get in the car and drive home. I feel completely drained. I’m also aware that I’m blanketed in a deep, dark depression.
As I unlock the house door, heavy, heaving sobs begin to wring yet more emotion from my weary mind and body. I go into the bathroom; I can’t stop wailing. The reflection in the mirror is almost pitiful and I’m grateful my soon-to-be former husband isn’t privy to my pain. He needs to know only that I’m strong and capable, I remind myself, even as I hear the anguished moans gush out of my body.
The remainder of the day is spent heating a frozen dinner and eating at my computer.
Tomorrow I will go back to the Y and exercise, I tell myself, hoping to get some kind of order back in my life.
Finally, this pain-filled day is over and I’m grateful I survived it. And grateful, too, for the grieving process at work within me. I know it has to happen if I am to heal. As I reach into the closet for tomorrow’s clothes, I am pulled toward my husband’s jacket. I take it from the hanger and press the collar to my face, breathing in the scent of him. Oh, God, I love that ma
n.
Please deliver me from these feelings and this anguish, I pray.
I’m sure you know the feelings Marsha expresses in her journal entry only too well. How then, do we get from here to hope and healing?
On her “Stages of Surviving and Recovering From Trauma” chart, Tana Slay, Ph.D., describes the second stage of trauma as surviving.1 Dr. Slay says that in the surviving stage, which follows the crisis stage on her chart, we consistently feel safe, we’re doing no self-harm, we’re clean and sober, we demonstrate good coping skills and self-care.
That’s a lot to ask on the heels of a crisis. For most of us, the surviving stage doesn’t come quickly or painlessly. Yet even in the pain, experience has produced valuable tools that will help any of us if we learn to use them for our benefits. We can create boundaries between ourselves and the trauma by using self-soothing techniques, changing cognitive distortions and negative self-talk to healthy self-talk, learning to ground ourselves if we begin to dissociate and using self-care activities to take responsibility for meeting our own needs.
The Paralyzing Power of Fear and Grief
As we discussed in the last chapter, we need to create boundaries to block the triggers related to our spouses and their addictions in order to heal. In addition, we must learn to give ourselves breaks from our triggering fears and the grieving process going on inside of us. Without breaks, both our fears and our grief have the power to paralyze us and make life unmanageable.
Because our minds spin in endless circles with our seemingly unsolvable problems—sort of like merry-go-rounds piled high with the baggage of broken lives and pain—we must find ways to interrupt that negative process. This takes on greater importance when we understand why: It’s because that mental circular motion, called rumination, reinforces its grip on us with each revolution . Unless we challenge ourselves to “take a recess” as needed, we’ll find it harder and harder to interrupt the spiraling cycle.
The Power of Fear
Marsha says:I ache when I listen to women share from their mental merry-go-rounds, because I so clearly remember my pain and fear as my marriage fell apart. Sleep became nearly impossible during the weeks I spent on circular thinking’s endless revolutions. One day after I had healed, life presented me the perfect picture of how futile it is for us to get stuck in those cycles. It happened when, somehow, a large squirrel got trapped in my living room in the Pacific Northwest.
The poor little guy raced around the large room in a frenzied panic, leaping from one piece of furniture to another. He ended up focused on a small, circular table covered with a floor-length tablecloth that sat in front of a large, plate-glass window. He set up a perpetual pattern of running at the table, flying through the air, touching down on the table then leaping against the window in a frantic effort to get outside. He hit the window with such a thud that it threw him back to the floor, where he lay stunned momentarily, then he got up and began his routine all over again, repeating his own version of circular thinking.
In his frenzied fury, the squirrel failed to recognize that we had opened the French doors creating an escape to his freedom. After more than an hour of wild-eyed hysterical antics that were painful to observe—his little heart beating fast and hard against his chest—he finally allowed me to direct him through the doors. But even then, he didn’t find his way outdoors. Rather, he bounded up the steep stairs that led to the third floor of the old home I lived in. He leaped two steps at a time as he blindly tried to save himself.
In my opinion, that squirrel’s activities gave a perfect picture of the futility of fear’s panic and our repetitious circular thinking. We need every tool and technique that is available to us to avoid our own wild-eyed merry-go-rounds. Hopefully, you’ll find those we present here helpful.
The Power of Grief
Sharon, the mother of six, found herself in a dangerous position when grief’s power left her crumpled in a heap. Sharon and her husband both wanted many children and together they planned for six and built what appeared to be a solid life filled with love, many friends and community activities. She seemed to have it all, just as she’d dreamed.
Then one day Sharon’s husband made a careless mistake: He forgot to cover his tracks. From that one error his house of cards came toppling down and with it, Sharon’s world. She learned a truth she couldn’t fathom: the wonderful father of her children, the man she loved and adored, made frequent visits to prostitutes, strip parlors and much more. Suddenly, everything was gone, including the financial stability she thought was theirs.
Having six children ages one to fourteen, Sharon and her husband separated and her husband moved out of the house. Sharon couldn’t force herself out of bed; she couldn’t care for her family and she couldn’t stop crying. She was blessed with loving, supportive friends who took turns getting her up and into the shower every morning and helped care for her family, but it was a long time before hope dawned in her life again. In the interim, Sharon needed to learn how to take breaks from her intense feelings by creating boundaries between herself and her trauma.
Creating Boundaries Between Yourself and Trauma’s Fear and Grief
Bearing the full impact of our pain twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, takes a terrible toll on our minds and bodies, as we have learned in chapter 5. Not only do we need breaks, but we also must take them if we have to work at a job, care for family members or protect our health.
Learning to Self-Soothe and Renew for Greater Self-Control and Peace
Bessel van der Kolk explains what happens to our ability to self-soothe when we experience trauma:As they mature, human beings continue to rely on feedback from their bodies to signal whether a particular stimulus is dangerous or agreeable. Even as we vastly expand our repertoire of soothing activities, we rely on being able to establish physical (sensate) homeostasis to give us our sense of flow or of being grounded. For traumatized people who develop PTSD, however, this capacity to sooth oneself is compromised. Instead, they tend to rely on actions such as fight or flight or pathological self-soothing (for example, mutilation, binging, starving or turning to alcohol and drugs) to regulate their internal balance.2
Most of us recognize that our ability to self-soothe has been compromised by the trauma, but what can we do about it? We can learn to take breaks by using self-soothing techniques to calm and comfort ourselves in the face of our pain and difficulties.
Self-soothing can serve many purposes in our lives, whether or not we’re dealing with trauma. Under ordinary life circumstances, the practice of self-soothing helps us cope when things don’t go our way, helps us relax when we feel fried and frazzled from daily stress, helps us relax our way to sleep at night and produces better health in the long run because our bodies and minds receive mini-breaks in the form of soothing, focusing time outs.
For those of us who face the pain and trauma that sexual betrayal produces, learning to practice self-soothing techniques proves essential. By using them, you will quickly gain access to a long list of benefits if you make this technique a part of your days—and your nights, if need be. By learning to use self-soothing techniques, we create a space between our trauma and ourselves: a buffer of sorts, a protective layer of calm between our inner world and the grinding friction of our fear, anxiety and pain.
Self-soothing techniques give you ways to:• calm anxiety,
• handle fear,
• take time out from anger,
• comfort yourself,
• find compassion for yourself in the midst of what you’re feeling,
• create a buffer between you and the trauma,
• care for yourself the way you care for others,
• stay present when you face emotions that cause dissociation,
• replenish and restore yourself emotionally so you can give to others,
• gain the ability to connect with yourself to understand what you’re feeling.
By learning and using self-soothing techniques, we intention
ally “let go” for a little while. Letting go is an antidote to the tensing, tightening constriction that trauma places on our minds and our bodies. According to mindfulness teacher Shinzen Young, resistance amplifies and expands suffering. “Loosening” the tightness, however, can help difficult emotions (or other sensations) pass through us more easily. So think of self-soothing techniques as a way you can let go and allow your muscles to lengthen and relax while allowing some of trauma’s toxins to melt away.
Mental and Physical “Loosening Techniques”
One powerful, truly wonderful self-soothing resource for “loosening” and dealing with stress, if you have access to a computer, is available twenty-four hours a day without cost from the Mayo Clinic Web site. We encourage you to check it out at http://mayoclinic.com/health/meditation/MM00623. With a beautiful, single lit candle, soothing piano music and a calming woman’s voice, it guides you through a short, breath-focused relaxation break. As you use this video, you will feel your body and mind letting go of the anxiety and the tension you’re carrying. Best of all, you can use this resource as many times a day as you need to in order to manage negative emotions that threaten to keep you feeling powerless over your fear and pain.
There are many other ways to relieve your tensions, calm and soothe yourself:• Bubble baths
• Getting a massage
• Taking a nap
• Practicing Yoga, Tai chi, Qi Gong or meditation
• Playing calming music while visualizing a peaceful nature scene
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