How Did I Get Here?: Navigating the unexpected turns in love and life. Barbara Angelis De

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СКАЧАТЬ giving something a name, we create a sense of separation from ourselves and whatever it is we are experiencing. I am not going crazy because I am experiencing mood swings—my body is going through PMS. I am not a bad parent because my child is screaming and refusing to cooperate—he is going through the “terrible twos.” I do not have a bad attitude because I dread going into work each day—I am unhappy with the cutthroat atmosphere at my place of business, and need to make a change. Identifying the experience contains it. Knowing the name makes it somehow more manageable. We become more tolerant and less anxious because we know what it is we are dealing with.

      Recently I was scheduled on a very early flight out of town and ordered a cab to pick me up at four-thirty the next morning to take me to the airport. When the driver, Henry, arrived, I thanked him for getting up before dawn so I could catch my plane. “Oh, I’m not starting my shift,” he explained. “This is the end of it. I like to work in the middle of the night.” I asked him why, and over the next twenty minutes, he told me the following:

      In the late 1960s, Henry had spent two years in heavy combat on the front lines of the war in Vietnam. He had seen every kind of horror imaginable and lost many of his buddies. Finally he was sent home. “I was a mess,” he confessed. “My girlfriend had waited for me, but when we were reunited, I couldn’t feel any emotion. Everything made me jumpy, and the smallest noise, like someone scraping their chair across the floor when they got up or the clatter of dishes in the sink, threw me into horrible anxiety attacks. Worst of all, I couldn’t sleep—I would lie awake for hours at night, sweating and hyperventilating. I thought I had gone off the deep end.”

      It took several years before Henry found some professional help and could give a name to his demon—post-traumatic stress disorder. “You can’t imagine what a relief it was to be able to call what I was going through ‘something,’” he told me. “It didn’t really take away my symptoms, but at least I knew what they were, and they didn’t freak me out so much. Anyway, that’s why I work nights—I still have trouble sleeping in the dark, so this job works out perfectly.”

      I felt very emotional listening to Henry, proud of him for persevering in trying to make some sense of what had happened to him in Vietnam, but sad for so many other veterans who didn’t get the help they needed to name their inner monsters as the first step in taming them. One thing Henry said really stuck with me: “When I was in ’Nam, I thought I was going through the worst thing anyone could in life. But coming home was even harder. At least over there I knew who the enemy was. I knew what I was supposed to do. But to be back here and feel crazy and frightened and angry all the time, and not know why or what to do about it—that was like an enemy I couldn’t ever see or find, but one that never went away.” When the doctors helped Henry name his inner enemy, he could finally begin to find some peace.

       2. Naming can calm our irrational fears and dispel the illusion that we are going through something unusual or uncharted.

      If naming what we are going through is helpful and affirming in good times, then it is all the more crucial in challenging or confusing times. Imagine, for example, how terrified we would be if the phases in life were not named and explained to us. One day we would notice hair beginning to grow in strange places on our bodies, and we would think we were going through some bizarre transmutation instead of entering puberty. A woman would notice her belly growing bigger and bigger, and would be terrified that she was terminally ill rather than pregnant. My poor grandmother thought she was bleeding to death until her experience was given a name.

      This is the second power that naming has—it identifies our experience as something people have gone through before us, and by doing so, it dispels our sense of isolation, connecting us, tangibly or intangibly, with others. “I am not the only one this has ever happened to,” we think with a sigh of relief. “I am not alone.” And somehow, in an undefined but unquestionable way, this makes whatever it is we are facing more bearable.

       3. Naming allows us to arrive more fully in our reality.

      Whether a reality is pleasant or unpleasant, exciting or frightening, once we name it, we claim it as ours. It is as if we are pointing our finger at a spot on a map and declaring, “I am ‘here.’” Even if “here” isn’t a place we want to be, even if we are unhappy to find ourselves at this particular “here,” still, we feel a comfort and security in giving it a name, rather than having no idea where we are. Naming it makes it more of a known quantity rather than an unknown, and therefore locates us in time and space. The anxiety of wondering where we are is replaced by a certainty that clears our minds and in some mysterious way calms our hearts.

      I remember reading an interview with an American soldier who had been captured and held as a prisoner of war in the Middle East some years ago. When the reporter asked him about the conditions of his captivity, the soldier explained that the hardest part had not been being beaten or kept in a tiny cell with very little food and water, or even feeling afraid that he would never see his wife and children again. The most terrible moments, he confessed, were when he first woke up in a completely dark room and had no idea where he was, how he’d gotten there or what was going to happen to him. He’d been knocked unconscious during a skirmish with the enemy, who had then transported him to a prison while he was still unaware that he’d been captured. For what seemed like several days, they left him alone in the dark pit. Reality of any identifiable sort had vanished, and he felt as if he had gone crazy. When his captors finally revealed themselves and moved him to a cell, he felt a strange sense of relief, as if his sanity came flooding back. At least now he could name what was happening: “I am a prisoner. I have been captured by the enemy. I am in some secret camp. I am in a filthy cell. I have two guards who take turns watching me.” As terrible as these realities were, they were his. According to this brave soldier, those realities became his link to sanity and psychological survival.

      Here is the point I have been making:

       To go through powerful times of questioning and challenge, and leave our process unnamed or, worse, mislabeled, is to condemn ourselves to feeling frightened, disoriented and as if we are somehow doing something wrong. We must give our times of transformation and rebirth their rightful names.

      Every individual existence is brought into rhythm by a pendulum to which the heart gives type and name. There is a time for expanding and a time for contraction. One provokes the other and the other calls for the return of the first. Never are we nearer the Light than when the darkness is deepest —Swami Vivekananda

      It is easy to see where you are when it is light out. It is easy to discern your location when there are signs posted identifying it. But what happens when we come to places on our path that we don’t recognize, or have experiences that we haven’t heard described? What do we do when we, like the brave soldier, find ourselves frightened and disoriented and totally in the dark? How do we know where we are? What name do we give to something or someplace we don’t understand?

      For most of us, the name we choose is crisis:

      “My boyfriend just broke up with me, and I’m in an emotional crisis.”

      “I just quit my job, and I’m in a career crisis.”

      “Our daughter has started hanging out with the wrong crowd and taking drugs, and we’re going through a family crisis.”

      “I was just diagnosed with diabetes, and I’m going through a health crisis.”

      “Crisis” is often the word we use to describe unwelcome experiences or situations that we wish were not happening. After all, when asked СКАЧАТЬ