broken – Page 7 – Out of the Chrysalis

Caution…Work In Progress

Published on July 7, 2013 by Kimberly Novak5 Comments

work in progress Lately, my time is spent with a tool in my hand, sometimes it’s a hammer, other’s it’s a paint brush, today it was a two-wheeled dolly to haul damaged, rotted out wood from a front walk to a pile in the back yard. I have been working very hard to make my new home mine. Erasing memories that live within the walls, floors, and even the front walk. In the midst of all of the pounding, scraping, sweeping, sawing, and washing I have realized that moving on from divorce or loss requires more construction than I thought.

However, I’ve also concluded that these memories I’m ferociously trying to remove, I’ve never actually seen! They are images that I believed have happened in this home, scenes that I have created in my mind. So I’m working as hard as I can to make changes, that other than being cosmetic, I really won’t notice, or will I? The mind can play many tricks on us and recently mine is doing some very fuzzy thinking. My hope was that with each new renovation I would be able to feel some sort of release happening in my mind, heart and soul. Sometimes I even envisioned the memories being lifted from the area I was working on and floating off into the horizon.

This journey has brought many difficult changes my way, and every once in a while I get a little reminder of something I forgot to change. Like being called by your previous married name in the grocery store because you didn’t change your rewards card information. Then looking blankly into the eyes of the poor unaware cashier, seeing her puzzled look and just saying, yes that’s me. Yes that’s me?

This little reminder was a kick in the behind for this one. Why on earth did I slink down and hide in who I was in my marriage? Instead I should have stood tall (as tall as you can when your height challenged) pushed my shoulders back and said ” I’m sorry I need to update my information, I have been made new”. What was I missing? I was missing just one drop of courage, strength, and confidence to announce to that cashier, and the world, who I am. If that wasn’t enough I had run into an old mom from my kids preschool days and she so happily addressed me as Mrs. and asked how we all were. I stood there like a deer in the headlights trying to think of a quick escape. Maybe I could just drop what was in my hands and run out of the store and she wont’ notice? Maybe I could play it off like I didn’t recognize her? No, instead I politely told her things have changed and she glanced down at my ring finger, said I”m sorry and it was nice to see me then walked away.

With both of these occurrences is when I discerned that I am currently still under construction. I’m my eyes I am the new me, with my new-old last name, but to some I still may be the married woman who I was for so long. This is something that I need to work on, I need to be able to find the courage to stand up for who I am now. But I’m going to need help. This is going to sound a little silly but between the old me and the new me I feel like I can really take shape as to who I am supposed to me. There were some really good moments with the married me and lessons I have learned, if I can apply them to the new me, let them mold together, then quite possibly the two of us can do something spectacular.

one drop

This will require patience and perseverance, there will be days when I really don’t want the old me to put in her two cents, and the new me is going to have to keep a very open mind, but if we give it all we’ve got, it will only take one drop…..of courage….. belief….strength…and confidence to fully become who I am meant to be. Let the construction begin!

Divorce and loss can take a lot out of us, but I truly belive if we put the old with the new we can become complete again.

Have you been able to merge the old with the new? Please share..

Kimberly

Courageous Butterfly

Related Blogs/Links

One Drop, Plumb

A No-Brainer Going Back To My Maiden Name, Since My Divorce

Stay The Course, Welcome To My Walk

don’t panic

Published on March 17, 2013 by Kimberly Novak6 Comments

dream-butterfly The caterpillar has just realized that she is trapped in her cocoon until she is ready and strong enough to fly on her own. What do you think is going through her mind? I’d like to think she is calm, relaxed, and reflecting on what her future will be like once she is transformed. Perhaps she closes her eyes and in a calm voice whispers to herself, “don’t panic”.

They are only two little words, 8 letters in total but when I speak them or hear them there is no calm in my voice. Recently after a Chinese dinner I opened a fortune cookie. I’m usually very excited to see what lies ahead, but this time when I read those two little words my pulse began to race. All I could think of was why? Why should I not panic? What do I have coming that I will want to or need to panic, and how long to these Chinese fortunes last?

Life is full of bumps along the road and hills to climb and panicking through them will only make it harder to survive. I thought about the past few years and wondered if there were any situations where I did panic, and I was able to think of a few. When I look back on them now I can see that being in a panic mode did not really help me to resolve anything. Then I looked even further back into my marriage, to an incident that if I would have processed it correctly, I would have seen what was happening then, instead of six years later.

When we panic we over-anticipate things which can make it look to us like we are over reacting. That is what happened to me. Instead of calmly looking at the situation one piece of evidence at a time and focusing on the facts and what I was seeing, I panicked. I went into a OMG mode and I missed clues, over looked facts, and ultimately that led me blindly into the false explanation that I would soon accept as truth. Those emotions can cause you to look at things irrationally and at times you may even become fearful and hysterical. I had immediately imagined the worst but because I was in that rushed surge of emotions, I convinced myself that I was wrong. The emotions that panicking brought out of me were crazy, therefore I discounted it all. Since then I have learned to trust my gut feelings and I know now that if I want to really hear them and feel them I have to go through difficult situations in a calm manner.

I can’t go back and change that moment but I can certainly learn from it. I can let that moment go and make sure that in the future I pause before reacting. Storms come and go in our lives just like in the weather. At times we get a warning and other times they just drop out of the sky. It is important that we have our emergency response system working properly. At the first sign of trouble, or when the first dark cloud rolls in….pause….take a deep breath and whisper “don’t panic”, I’ve got this. Then try to focus on the facts and what you need to do in order to grow, change, or move forward out of the storm. Learn what ever life lessons are coming from it, accept any changes, and take pride in knowing that you have survived it. As the storm passes, spread your wings and soar! z_p18-The-butterfly

I do not even want to imagine how many dizzy butterflies there would be if every caterpillar went into a OMG panic mode when they emerged from their cocoon. Don’t be a dizzy butterfly….take a deep breath….close your eyes…..and whisper “don’t panic”.

Have you panicked and it altered your reasoning? Please share in the comments.

Kimberly

Courageous Butterfly

3/17/13

Emotional Memory

Published on January 11, 2013 by Kimberly Novak7 Comments

Brain-conceptual-image-puzzle Anyone who has spent time on a fitness program knows that the muscles of our body are equipped with muscle memory. Meaning that when we work out our muscles grow accustomed to different types of movement, thus turning it into an unconscious learning process for the body. What would happen if we apply that to our emotions?

In my last post I talked about PTSD after divorce and this topic goes right along with it. Recently I have suffered from effects of both PTSD and what I believe is emotional memory. It has taken me by complete surprise. I was even reluctant to publish the post thinking that it wasn’t really relevant to those suffering a divorce, but I was quickly put to ease when I started researching it. I’m glad I decided to talk about it because it is a real problem and there are many of us suffering from it. With support and the ability to share our stories, we can all learn how to get past this current emotional state.

At this point on my journey I was convinced that I was past all of that. I had dealt with what I thought were all of my emotions during my divorce and for the first year afterwards. Like I said in the previous post, I had forgiven and moved on. I am finding out now that the journey of healing is a longer road than I thought. I have reached a pretty high mountain and it was no where on my radar screen, it just appeared.

Take a second and pretend you are a little kid again and have just entered an amusement park….I bet right now you are feeling excited and happy and it feels just the same as it did all those years ago. That is emotional memory. We don’t think about it when it is something that makes us happy, we just accept the feeling because it is a good one. It affects us in a totally different way when it is an emotion that caused us pain or sadness.

I was recently in a brief relationship with someone and just before it ended I could sense that something was a little off. My intuition, which I finally am in tune with, was telling me that something was different. When we had the conversation and ended things I felt exactly the same as I did when I received the email telling me my marriage was over. I was overcome with emotions that I should not have been feeling because they were left over from the divorce. It made no sense to me because you could not even compare the pain of my divorce to this current event. However, since both situations ended in a loss, that was the trigger. Even though they had very different outcomes the same emotional memory response was felt. When this happened I started out being very angry with myself. I was upset because I was spending more time with these emotions that I had already dealt with two years ago. I was feeling very frustrated with the fact that maybe I’m crying now because I was too strong when I should have been weak, and really taken the time to face those feelings. I quickly realized that is not the case. No matter how much time I took dealing with those emotions as they were happening, my brain was busy storing them up. It took this event to bring them back to the front of my memory, thus filling me with the exact emotional response. emotional memory

I will admit that all of this has been pretty scary. I’m now faced with the fact that anything in life may produce these memory responses, and that they can happen at any time. The hardest part will be allowing myself to live life and experience situations where some of these feelings may resurface. I was under the impression that only the divorce itself could produce those emotions, and that since the divorce was over, I should never feel like that again….I was wrong.

I know now that my journey of healing is still very much in progress and I am thankful for the recent relationship. Not only because it brought joy and happiness back into my life, but also because it took losing it to know that I still have a lot of work to do! It is a blessing to me that I had enough courage to put myself back out there. I am also grateful that it has happened now rather than ten years down the road. Because right now I am still in battle mode and I will use the strength that I gained from having survived the divorce to learn how to handle this new stage of the healing and transformation process.. When it comes up again, which it will, I will be ready and know how to respond. I’m slowly getting past the anger of it all and realizing that only I can choose how I handle this. I am the only one living it, therefore I am the only one who can move me past it. In a recent conversation with someone who means the world to me, I was reminded of an old song that speaks volumes for how I am currently feeling. In the voice styling of Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes: the road is long and there are mountains in our way, but we could climb a step every day….love lift us up where we belong! I like to replace the word love with they’ll, because as I climb each step of any painful mountain, they’ll bring me closer to being fully healed.

I’ve begun keeping a dream journal to help me see what other subconscious emotions may be brewing inside this little brain of mine. Talking it out with close friends and my counselor has also been beneficial. I think it’s a little early for me to offer any concrete advice but I would like to suggest that if you are going through this, do not try to suppress it. Let it out! It will be very hard to feel all of the painful emotions again but it is the only way to heal through it. If we keep suppressing them our emotional memory responses will never learn how to properly process them so that when they are brought out they are less painful each time.

I had several comments on the post relating to PTSD and I hope that there are other’s who will share their stories relating to that topic as well as this one. Your comments and advice are welcome below!

Kimberly

Courageous Butterfly

1/11/13

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