The Stories we tell
Mid-April I got the call. “He is in jail,” my 85 year old uncle told me. Relief washed through my body in a palpable way. I had no idea how much I had been holding onto this constant dull level of fear/lack of safety until it was gone. My 50 year old cousin had violated a protective order back in January, had been in front of a judge for pre-trial conferences, and let out on bond until his trial. Then he picked up a new charge for resisting arrest in a different county and the his bond was revoked at his next pre-trial conference. He was immediately incarcerated, and would be there for at least 30 days.
The next 30 days were intense as I tried to help my uncle navigate conversations with attorneys, file a notice to start the eviction process for his son, and apply for a protective order. I also arranged for a dumpster to clear out the TRASH that was piled up in my cousin’s room, arranged for someone to come in, strip the room, bleach the walls, install new flooring and paint the walls to make it livable again. We filled a 30 cubic yard dumpster and a 10 x 10 storage unit.
It would have been tough enough to make these decisions on my own behalf, let alone trying to make life altering decisions for someone else. Always wondering if I was guiding him in the right direction, wondering if I had missed something that could backfire on him, or wondering if we had just poked the bear only to have it come back to hurt us.
I went to sleep thinking about it, I woke up thinking about it, and I thought about it on my drive to and from work. It was in these moments that my brain would kick into overdrive creating some hellish stories. When it comes to dress rehearsing tragedy, I am a PROFESSIONAL. It was like my default setting in my brain was to think of the worst possible scenario, let it play out, get the anxiety bio-chemical cocktail pumping, all in hopes that I could be prepared for anything else that might happen. It was consuming me and I knew it.
After all, for the past year I have been studying trauma and adversity, and how they impact our stress response system. I learned from Dr. Perry about the different brain states of arousal ranging from calm to terror, and how each of those states can impact brain function. So I was well aware that I was living in a constant brain state of arousal somewhere in the alarm/fear state. I also knew this meant I was not in my best thinking state of mind.
I know myself well. I know I am a fixer. I hate to see people I care about in pain and all too often I slide from caring to over-caring. Healthy caring for others should feel good. Over-caring for others is draining. I was teaching a Resilience Advantage™ class online, and we were going over the module on care vs. overcare, and that was when I realized I had slid deep into the valley of over-caring the past 30-45 days. I had become so accustomed to solving the problems of my aunt and uncle, that I had lost sight of my own healthy balance.
This awareness brought me to an epiphany. I realized that while my brain might really love to TELL stories, I also have the ability to WRITE stories. I had become so engrossed with story telling in my head, that I had forgotten to focus on writing the story I would prefer to experience. It is such a subtle shift, but a powerful one.
So the next time I caught myself dress rehearsing for tragedy, I shifted my thoughts to what I would rather have instead. I used tools to create a state of coherence within my body, and from that coherent state, I allowed myself to map out and plan out, a HAPPY story. In so doing, I flooded my body with biochemicals that matched the happy story versus the chemical cocktails that matched the stressful ones.
Then the next epiphany came. Not only can I write my story, but I can also allow for others to write their own stories. I don’t have to write their story for them. In other words, I don’t have to fix the problems of everyone else around me. I just need to focus on the story I choose to create in relationship with them. In other words, I just need to focus on how I choose to show up in that relationship, and to what degree will I keep a healthy boundary and balance in that relationship. When they are not with me, they are free to write their story any way they wish.
In this case, I knew my cousin would not be in jail forever. I also knew when he got out he would be a desperate man, a man without a job, without any money, and without a place to live. About two weeks before he was supposed to be released I was trying to figure out ways to ease the transition and prevent him from causing more pain or emotion upheaval with his parents. I made phone calls to shelters, and even looked a bit for cheap apartments online. Then I caught myself…I was trying to write his story for him.
His story is not my story to write. It was not up to me to help him figure out what to do with his life. That was an eye opening moment for me.
The more I focused on writing my own story, and less on writing his or my uncle’s stories, the easier it was for me to flow into compassion and forgiveness. From this new place of being I could think about some actions steps to take that were compassionate, not because I was trying to control an outcome, but because it is simply who I choose to be.
As a family we agreed to park his truck where he can easily access it. His dad agreed to give him some money to help him with initial food and housing expenses, and to give him the chance to find a job. Again, we did so not because we were trying to write his story, but because it is how we chose to write ours.
While my story is far from over, my cousin’s story is no longer intertwined with mine. I can look myself in the mirror and be happy with who I am, and that is all that matters. At the end of the day I have come to realize it is far more powerful to be a story writer, than a story teller.