"What We Focus On We Become" Episode Sixty-Six

Welcome to Honor Your Truth

The “Is It True?” Series Episode Sixty-Six

“What we focus on we become”

Why is it that whenever I feel happy, I start to feel scared…..scared that something bad is going to happen and that it’s gonna happen soon….. coming straight down from the heavens to get me. I’m guilty and that’s just goofy, isn’t it? Thinking that any day now, I’m gonna find out that I have a disease now that I’m feeling good. God forbid I have to get on an airplane. I was feeling optimistic about my life, looking forward to each day with an eager hopefulness when I got on a plane to go on vacation. I had an anxiety attack so bad I demanded they let me out of the plane before it took off. This was many years ago when I was trapped in the equation that good = bad without being aware of the pattern and recognizing the insanity of it. Good cannot equal bad and still be good. It’s just not true. I can now observe it, step outside of the lunacy and wonder…..what the heck and why is it that I think this way? This response, specific to joy, was what I began to notice. It became familiar to me…..the inability to fully experience pleasure without the underlying dialogue that warns me not to get “too comfortable”….not to get "too used to it”. Fleeting moments were ok, but not contentment, not peace, nothing I could rest into….because one never knows…..

Everything could be going along just fine and then bam, we’re blind-sided. I remember gleefully jumping on the bed with my sisters and whacking my head really hard on the ceiling. Try it, it's quite a shock. We rarely receive adequate warning and even when we do, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee escape. Our parents might tell us it isn’t a good idea to jump on the bed, but we really don’t understand why until something bad happens. Stuff happens and there is often no preparation for it. I had a Planet of the Apes face for my 6th birthday because I swung under a loose bar while running on the playground and pulled it right into my mouth. I had no idea in the morning that I would look like that in the afternoon. It really hurt and Mrs. Bowl (yes, Mrs. Bowl) was mad because I wasn’t playing in the 6th grade area like I should have been, as if that could have prevented the freak accident. I still felt like it was somehow my fault.

I have a good memory. A song can bring me back to a tender kiss, the smell of rain on fall leaves can bring me back to the first time he walked out the door. Christmas reminds me of the many times he didn’t show up and New Years Eve reminds me why. I found out the truth that day, the awful truth. Do traumatic experiences teach us that it isn’t safe out there….that one needs always be on guard…on the look out lest we be caught by surprise when the “bad” stuff happens, as if that would change anything. Fear cannot prevent anything from happening. Do we think that it can? Something simple can trigger a memory and adrenalin will run through my body like the first time….panic. Post traumatic stress is real but are we bound to it forever. Being afraid and assuming the worst won’t change anything. Life is unpredictable. It is what it is and its all good, even when it seems it never could be.

I realized a while ago that it wasn’t very fun nor was it helpful to be worried all of the time…..to be wary of what is going to happen next. Focusing on and worrying about what’s going to happen will never stop what’s going to happen from happening. Period. I found that I had begun depriving myself of enjoying the present in an effort to avoid being disappointed, to skirt around anything painful. If I didn’t have anything, I couldn’t lose anything. I wanted to stop thinking so negatively. However, my brain still wanted to go there. It was a very bad habit. When I saw the movie, “The Secret”, I jst got mad at myself. I spent a while beating myself up for that too. I blamed myself for “causing” life…..the twists, the turns, the corners……the doors….opening….closing. It was cou...