It started at 4 am. My eldest daughter, Lyla, stumbled into our dark room and whimpered “mom, dad, I’m sorry. I tried to get it in the toilet, but I couldn’t make it and I puked all over the bathroom floor.” We were obviously not mad at her—I’m still impressed she didn’t get any in her hair—but also not thrilled to start our day like that.
A little bit of background: we were three hours from home at a friend’s cabin. Our friends are selling the place so we were all up there for one last hurrah and consequently to help them move a bunch of stuff across the street into their pole-barn. The bathroom had already been scrubbed, because yes, they’re the type of people who scrub a bathroom clean before selling it.
“Mom, dad, I’m sorry.” I got up to check the bathroom while my wife checked my daughter for remnants of dinner. I managed to find some bleach and paper towel that hadn’t yet been packed away. Fast-forward past the painful details of that clean-up. Lyla and I went to the couch for the rest of the night. She puked again every 25 minutes for the next four hours.
I am still holding onto myself physically and emotionally at this point. I’ve been told I do really well with throw-up—it’s a special kind of skill I guess.
After finishing up a few odd tasks and saying goodbye to the cabin, we piled into our shuttle-bus of a van to head home.
That’s when the real nightmare started.
Within the hour, the rest of my children started dropping like drunk college kids in a limbo-line. Four of them took turns expelling the contents of their stomachs. My warrior-wife held down her own long enough to hold another grocery bag to their chins.
It’s amazing how quickly my mind goes from “this is awful” to “I am awful.” From “I hate this” to “I hate myself.”
As I tried to remove myself from my body, I am brought back by the shrill demand for Goldfish from a precious child who will surely return them as orange mash only a few minutes later. Or the compulsive gag of another who was dry heaving for the fifth time while strapped to a car seat, I was brought back and forced to feel the things I didn’t want to feel. To feel the soreness in my muscles from moving furniture the day before—a soreness I only feel because of the sedentary nature of my average week. To feel the tiredness in my eyes from squinting down the highway for the last two hours. To feel the rub of my shoe against my heel that is planted firmly in order to keep the gas pedal where it belongs. To feel the weight of my self-doubt and condemnation.
Many of us carry around toxic ideas of ourselves, of our loved ones, or of the world. Whether we know it or not, we find ways to keep that voice quieted as much as possible because it hurts to feel inadequate, unlovable, defective, and rejected. If you’re like me, you probably have a whole set of tricks and strategies to manage all of the voices. Maybe you have gotten pretty good at it. But I bet you start to lose control again when life takes a turn that you weren’t prepared for. For me, when stress piles up, my walls start to crumble and the toxic sludge that they were holding back starts to flow in.
So often I try to escape and run from the messages that tell me I am not enough. This time, I was brought back into the moment. Into the place. Brought back to face and confront the voices. But this is not my first faceoff. I’ve worked on these parts of myself before. I’ve labored to dig up the roots of these feelings and replace the lies about myself with what I really believe to be true. This time I am able to remember that my worth is not dependent or conditional.
Where do your thoughts go when you’re thrown into a stressful situation? Toxic thoughts create a self-reinforcing dynamic. When you try to operate from a place of self-loathing, you are very ineffective in changing anything about your circumstance. So it gets worse. Then you feel even worse about yourself. And so on. Breaking out of the cycle requires certain tools. The kind of tools that we necessarily would have had to develop before becoming trapped.
What do you do when your self-talk turns dangerous and hateful? Where ever you are at on this journey, thanks for being on it. We need people like you who are willing to do the hard work of healing our shadowlands.
Until next time, be blessed.
Sam
Image Sources: Tangled
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