Finding Our Way Back to Ourselves

Recovery, Reconnection, and the Return of the Self

Welcome to the June newsletter of The Wellbeing Equation. June brings together PTSD Awareness Month and Men’s Mental Health Month, two observances that both point toward forms of suffering other people may not immediately recognize.

This is why I find myself thinking about what happens when we go through painful, stressful, or overwhelming experiences before we have had time to understand what we have been through.

In some ways, when we begin to suffer and cannot yet explain what is going on within us, we are brought back into contact with one of the earliest conditions of being human. Before we can understand ourselves, we first need some way of feeling comforted and safe in our body. The search is not only to figure out what is happening to us. It is also to find some way of helping our body feel safe enough to stay with what is happening inside us, before we can better understand it and perhaps put words to our experience.

When we are suffering or not feeling well, our body can at times be the first part of us to know. The first sign may be that we feel less at ease with ourselves, and a bit less comfortable in our own skin.

We may feel unusually tired, have a harder time sleeping, or notice headaches or body aches when too much stress has accumulated. At other times, we might become more easily agitated than we would like. We might also become jumpy or overly cautious. It can be easy to dismiss these reactions as having a bad day or a particularly difficult week. But they often suggest that our body is still carrying too much stress, stress we may not fully understand or have had enough time to process.

We may pay too little attention to our discomfort, or try to explain the discomfort away. In my case, I can tell myself I’m too busy: Bronce, you have a lot on your plate today and a lot of people to help. Before I know it, I can move through my day without giving myself enough time and space to pay close attention to how I actually feel in my body.

When I do slow down, I sometimes find that my body is still carrying some of the stress, even when the stressful situation has passed. I may not immediately understand why I continue to feel stressed, only that my body does not feel as calm or comfortable as I would like. In these moments, I try to help my body slow down so I can feel calm and centered again. Once I feel more settled, I can often understand myself a little better and have a clearer sense of what I need to help myself.

Though stress can affect many different parts of our lives, I find one particular aspect especially important: how stress can change our relationship to ourselves. When stress continues, we may not only respond differently to the situations around us. We may also become more critical of ourselves for how we end up responding. The difficult part is that, after a while, the stress can start to feel like just another part of us.

We may feel ashamed or embarrassed by our irritability, or humbled by not being able to live our lives the way we would like. Over time, this can make it harder to feel connected to ourselves and to enjoy who we are when we are more at ease with ourselves.

And while I help people explore and contend with the stress of everyday living, I’ve also wrestled with this in my own life. I know, in a more personal way than I would like, the painful experience of losing contact with parts of myself when I have been dealing with too much stress at once.

It began, as it did for many of us, during the pandemic. I remember being in my house, inside the strange bubble so many of us found ourselves living in, away from extended family, ordinary routines, and the daily habits that helped life feel familiar. No gym. No office. No seeing my patients face to face. How was I going to help the people I cared about without the old-fashioned, face-to-face human contact that sits at the heart of so many warm, caring relationships?

So there I was, beginning telehealth of all things. More and more people just kept calling to see me, while my cat TomTom sat on the couch and I on my recumbent bike. And somewhere in the middle of this strange new life, I remember having the thought: you aren’t going to be able to see everyone. Maybe you should write a book. But you don’t know how to write a book. It’s okay you can learn. That is how it all started.

And I was right. I couldn’t see everyone. So I began getting up in the early morning hours to write and work out, while still trying to keep up with the rest of my life. The words poured out of me as more and more people called.

Soon, I had to begin turning people away, and I kept writing with even more urgency, out of a desire to help and also out of my own mounting guilt. Where I came from, you did not turn people away when they came knocking at your door, suffering in spirit and in need of a little relief and kindness to help with their healing.

In the dead of winter, after ten months of the pandemic, I was seeing patients early in the morning and into the evening without getting outside in the sun. My anxiety and stress were still mounting, so I decided to begin hiking on my lunch break. It meant extending my break by an hour, seeing fewer people, and making less income. But it also meant less stress and a way to ease my nervous system in the middle of the day.

By the time the book was finished, it had ballooned to somewhere around two hundred and forty thousand words. I eventually found an editing company in New York, and the person I spoke with told me that I had three books’ worth of material and would need to cut it down.

Then came the cost of editing a manuscript that large, and after that another unfamiliar phrase: author platform. I remember thinking, what is an author platform? Then came the book proposal. What is a book proposal? Then came the question of finding an agent. You need a book agent to write a book? And how does a person even get one of those?

Over time, the book became its own kind of second job, while I was still making my living as a full-time therapist. I kept writing in the morning, working during the day, hiking in the afternoon when I could, and in my “free time” trying to build the author platform everyone kept telling me was all important. I stopped working out in the morning so I could write more, and my anxiety and irritability kept mounting. Eventually, I went back into therapy because I didn’t like how irritable I had become.

After two years of trying to figure out the agent process, and after seventy-five query letter rejections, I finally signed with an agent. Not long after that, my father had a heart attack, later broke his hip, and I found myself helping him look for an assisted living place. Then the book proposal was finally submitted, with no guarantee of a contract.

Over time, I could feel the emotional and physical cost of all of this building. It was not that my work as a therapist or my work on the book had stopped feeling meaningful. In many ways, helping others had become even more meaningful and personal than ever.

But I was no longer experiencing myself in the ways I had worked so hard to become: calmer, more centered, more self-assured, and kinder. I had given up parts of my morning routine. I had once again become a younger version of myself, less confident and more irritable than I wanted to be.

My life had become its own kind of repetition: my book, my patients, my father, and the hikes I could still manage in between, all while trying to show up with less stress for the people who come to see me. Somewhere in all of that, I missed the part of me who could go on vacation and simply enjoy my time off. No checking emails. No feeling the need to keep up with the people engaging with me online. No feeling constantly connected to the process of getting my book published. The stress I had been dealing with for so long made it harder to enjoy myself, even when I finally had a break and time away.

My body had been under too much stress for too long. I needed to take seriously how much that stress had worn me down, not only physically, but in my ability to stay connected to the parts of myself that I enjoy.

The harder question, then, is how we can begin finding our way back to the parts of ourselves that help us enjoy our lives again, even in the midst of what have become, for many of us, ordinary, difficult, and stressful lives.

For me, I still need a break from the stress I have been under, and another chance to go on vacation to see if I can actually enjoy myself this time. But I have also been trying to look back at the situations that helped create the problem in the first place and reverse engineer them a bit. I have moved back to exercising at six in the morning instead of writing for hours before work. I am trying to be online a little less and respond a little less quickly, my apologies. And I have gone back to spending a half hour or so reading an actual paperback or hardcover book, the old-fashioned way, for sheer pleasure.

I have become too focused on getting to an outcome, and not focused enough on putting time and energy into enjoying myself in the process. Over the weekend, I went out to celebrate my book proposal being sent to a few publishing houses. The book is not published yet, and there is still no guarantee of a contract.

I went to a new restaurant, ordered one of my favorite meals for the first time in years, and had a glass of red wine with dinner for the first time in four or five years. I also left my phone at home so I would not be distracted. When I got home, there was a message from my brother letting me know my father was back in the ICU with kidney and heart problems.

The timing was hard to miss: after waiting this long to celebrate anything related to the book, I was glad I had gone out, but it was hard to enjoy the rest of the evening, and I felt a little guilty for leaving my phone at home.

But after six years of writing, building an author platform, trying to make my way through the publishing process, and contending with the ongoing stress of my father’s health, what I failed to realize is that I had been waiting for a contract, or even the published book itself, before I celebrated the milestones I had already accomplished. But there may always be another worry around the corner, waiting for me when I get home. This made me think I need to carve out more moments where I stand a chance of enjoying myself, even with everything I have going on in my life.

Maybe, then, the important question is not how we escape the stress of modern life altogether. Maybe the question is how we learn to notice when stress has made it harder to stay connected to the parts of ourselves we enjoy, and what it takes for those parts of ourselves to return.

With this in mind, here are a few practices that may help us respond to our stress so we can come back to ourselves in ways we prefer.

1. Regulate Your Body Before You Reflect.

When we feel irritable, anxious, or overwhelmed and do not know why, we can ask whether we need to help our body slow down before we push ourselves to make sense of what is happening. When our physiology remains activated, it becomes harder to self-reflect and think clearly. This might mean moving our body, getting outside, meditating, or stepping away from the screen long enough to let our nervous system slow down a bit. The point is that we do not have to resolve everything at once. Once we are less activated, it often becomes easier to think about and better understand why we feel the way we do.

2. Bring Back One Thing That Gives Back to You.

When we are stressed and overly busy, we can give up the very things that help us feel less stressed. Maybe it is morning exercise, reading before bed for pleasure, getting outside on a lunch break, or taking time to talk with friends and loved ones. If you have had to give up something that used to give back to you in a healthy way, pick one of your favorites and put it back in a realistic way. Reintroduce it slowly and pay attention to whether you begin to feel less stressed while doing it. Sometimes taking one small step can help us feel a little more like ourselves again and give us back some sense of control.

3. Choose Enjoyment on Purpose.

When we have been contending with too much stress for too long, enjoyment can become something we keep postponing. We tell ourselves we will enjoy ourselves later, once the outcome has been reached or once we feel less stressed. But sometimes we have to put time and effort into enjoying ourselves before our nervous system has had enough time to recover. Start with something simple: something you used to enjoy, or something new you have wanted to try. Do not worry about getting it right. Try it, and then notice whether it helps you feel a little more connected to yourself in a way you actually enjoy.

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In Closing,

Perhaps the difficulty is not simply that too much stress leaves us worn down, but that we can become accustomed to continuing under stressful conditions, even when we are doing ourselves harm. What often begins with the feeling that we are merely doing what has to be done can, over time, make it harder to stay connected to the parts of ourselves we enjoy.

👇 Comment below: Where in your life have you been continuing under conditions that may have quietly cost you more than you’ve been willing to admit?

With care,

Bronce

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