The world is a hard place. It seems especially so these days.
Last month, I turned 46. I was determined to make my 40s a strong decade, but, so far, it has been more of a survival decade. It must be the case that each person goes through phases like this sooner or later. I had a pretty easy life in all the decades prior, so I guess my time was due.
I can only hope I’m laying the foundation for the next 4 decades, especially because I keep hearing that the lowest year for happiness is 47. I haven’t even hit the bottom yet!
But if every day is a little bit of a fight to find some goodness, here is what I’ve found works:
Evening walks with a friend, especially in horribly hot So Cal summers
Any time you can get to a beach and lay eyes on water
Any time you can be in weather in the 70s
Bookstores
Handmade/artisinal ice cream or custard
Visitors – family, old friends, colleagues. We take them all
Reading that beautiful book your friend worked on for over a decade!
Attending a Creative Writing class at your new church with friends.
Attempting to join the prayer ministry at your new church.
Writing with your new Montblanc calligraphy pen, your husband found you on Facebook Marketplace after years of giving up calligraphy.
Noticing that you are lonely in some common adult ways, but you are cared for by a circle of people who feel like your people, even if they don’t make up one group.
Staying on top of your health and lowering your A1C and cholesterol despite doctors telling you it wouldn’t be possible.
Getting asked to preach at new places.
New doors you didn’t plan for that answer some prayers.
Yesterday, my therapist let me know that I had been seeing her for two years. It was time to reevaluate what was needed as we moved ahead. My gigantic insurance reimbursement spreadsheet shows that we met weekly for 9 months and have been meeting every other week since then, for a total of 24.
20 years ago, when I was a newlywed beginning my career, I was referred to a therapist who saw me for the duration of my pregnancy with Emma. We worked on some key things that helped me adjust to adulthood with a better awareness of myself and my emotions. That was a great foundation for my adult life.
But then I entered a different season: the second half of life.
When the Old Tools Stop Working
Around age 40, the familiar strategies that once worked for me became ineffective. Changes in my work, home, and lifestyle intensified by the pandemic made it clear that I needed new approaches.
Unprocessed trauma surprised me and seeking help turned out to be a complex journey, not a quick fix.
2022: The First Attempts
Still COVID-cautious in this part of the country, I found an in-network licensed social worker to meet on Zoom. She taught me how to do box breathing for anxiety, but also told me to “just talk” to family members if things were stressful. It was like I had a piece of the puzzle (breath work) but not the other piece (actual strategies for my situations).
I don’t think she’s ever lived in a home with neurodivergent people, much less trapped during a pandemic in the same four walls together.
I asked Jeff to find a couples therapist with me to work on the new dynamics around raising teenagers. I didn’t care that this licensed marriage and family therapist wasn’t in-network. I just found the nearest Asian American available right away, hoping that would cover any cross-cultural nuances. We met with her for 18 months, nearly every week.
If I were to describe these 18 months, it would be like every member of our family was drowning. One domino would go down and the others would follow. It became clear that perhaps trauma was making each of our lives harder. We never got past showing up every week in survival mode to learn any strategies or repair anything.
2023: The Breaking Point
During that time, I started meeting with a new personal therapist. She worked with me on Zoom, asking me what I was feeling and where I felt it in my body. I felt no emotion in my body. I could name simple emotions like sadness, frustration, and stress.
I told her it felt like we were pummeled by relentless hardships with no time to catch our breaths. If one more giant wave hit, I felt I would go under.
Shortly after, I hit my lowest point when I was blindsided by a decision that did not work out in my favor. At the time, we were waiting for a favorable decision that would give us a new season and alleviate many of the stressors in our lives.
One day, desperate for relief, I took a walk, but was barely able to move. Despite regular exercise, I felt 80 years old. I stopped and lay down under a shady tree, staring at the sky. Despair caused my muscles and joints to move like old machinery, barely able to turn on.
Photo by Tom Fisk
Late 2023: A Realization
After 18 months with the same couples therapist, we left to find a neurodiverse couples specialist. Looking back, it seems odd we stayed as long as we did despite the cost and minimal progress, but we clung to any support we could find while the issues accumulated. We felt surprised that we had worked with so many people in crisis, but could not find the right kind of help for our own collapse.
If only my plan had worked 6 years before when I asked if we could do couples therapy while things were going well, to work off the habits of the PhD we had pushed through. The only problem was our insurance approved 8 sessions with a therapist WHO FELL ASLEEP during the sessions.
When my personal therapist moved, I reevaluated. I realized traditional talk therapy was not working for me.
I talk for a living. I do conflict resolution much of the time. I manage high-level situations. Jeff and I were not the type of people who have no self-reflection or people skills, and then get the opportunity to finally tend to it in therapy. I realized the disconnect was happening in my body.
During the pandemic, I read a book that focused on healing the body from experiences of racial trauma and violence. In the process, it introduced me to the concept of somatic (body) therapy. At the same time, the algorithms guided me, populating my social media feed with information about why some people don’t heal with talk therapy alone.
This sounded like me. I decided to Google “somatic therapists” and found one. She called me and I jumped in. She is the therapist I have been meeting with for 2 years. I am thankful for the way she integrates all kinds of therapies into trauma-informed care.
2024 Learning to Feel Again
In our very first few meetings, she validated my experiences and said most of her patients were experiencing a flood of post-COVID anxieties or trauma, especially those who had parented in difficult situations. She diagnosed me with chronic PTSD, and over time, we began to find safety in my body, even as I continue to live amidst a number of unresolved issues day-to-day.
One day, I attended a training on Zoom to learn about a new ministry program. It was the first time I had been in an all-day online meeting in five months. My body got exhausted and I felt myself slightly shaking. I had to turn off my camera and lie in bed. I realized I was experiencing some sort of PTSD from working day and night on Zoom during a prolonged crisis.
I brought this insight to my therapist and recalled to her the distracting and disturbing noises in the house that I experienced when I would try to work in the office during our pandemic year. I noted chewing, slamming, crying, barking, laughing, doorbells, and my family rustling as they searched for food. She helped me understand why these noises were so distressing to me.
I was present to a camera, showing active listening to others elsewhere, while inwardly suppressing what I felt and worried about in my home.
I had no idea I had been affected this way.
I began to learn the language of healing a nervous system. Did you know that when you go into fight, flight, fawn, freeze, or flop as a trauma response, your nervous system is either getting activated into hyper-arousal (like the fight mode) or hypo-arousal (flop or exhaustion)? You either can’t calm down or you crash out.
As difficult situations continued to unfold, I went through over a year of terrible symptoms of hyper-arousal such as shaking uncontrollably from the time I woke up. I could only exert myself for a short period of time each day and then I would go into hypo-arousal of needing to lie down.
Couples Therapy Rounds 2 & 3
We tried an online neurodiverse couples therapist. Despite his gentle efforts, he was moving slowly and progress was minimal. Then he went on a leave of absence indefinitely due to a house remodel.
Exhausted by being let down, we stopped seeking couples therapy and continued with our individual therapists for a while.
Then, a church we had been quietly attending for a few months announced that they were going to give 150 couples 12 free sessions of marriage therapy. I signed us up. Jeff agreed. It gave us the boost we needed. My husband chose a therapist from their generous list of approved facilities. It was finally a fit. We continue to meet with her every other week, even as we have switched to out-of-pocket payment.
Thank God. It took three years, but I have two good therapists.
Healing in the Second Half of Life
I am learning, for the first time, to cry a little in the moment instead of becoming dysregulated months later, when things compound. I am learning how to feel a wider range of feelings than sad, frustrated, or stressed. I am teaching myself that I am safe right now, even if my brain is telling me I am not. I am learning that I can go for a walk or go to Trader Joe’s when I am getting flooded with a bodily sensation that feels traumatic. (A trick for teaching yourself that you are not trapped in a cycle like your brain may be telling you).
I am trying to teach my brain that just because a family member is having a bad day does not mean they hate me, don’t love me, or that I am going to wither up and die. I am learning not to be hypervigilant to control or manage others around me, but to manage myself and the sensations that come with moving through discomfort.
My body and brain demanded that I take care of myself this way when everything got to be too much. It has felt at times like I am dying on my way to a resurrection, but when I look back with my therapist at all that I have accomplished, I know that deep healing has begun to take root.
Many of us probably come from cultures and places that assume you only go to therapy if you have an out-of-the-ordinary type of problem. But since I have been working with people for over 25 years, I know the truth is that all humans have problems and need help navigating them. Everyone should go to therapy, and there should be no stigma for needing couples, individual, or family therapy. I work with parents every day who tell me about their grief, frustration, bodily overwhelm, dread, and confusion. We all need help.
I hope my story helps you stay on the road to healing in whatever way you need.
I left this story hanging in July, right before things began to take off. You may remember that all I had was a picture of a tunnel with some light at the end. Step by step, I hoped I might get out of the darkness and into the light.
A few weeks after I posted that story, everything changed.
Within two days, I had a 501(c)(3), a firstborn to launch, and I picked up a contract. I had to laugh, but I wanted to cry. I felt frustrated by everything happening simultaneously instead of bit by bit when I had ample time.
Thus began the project of building the plane in the air.
First, let me back up.
Shortly after I sensed that I needed to take steps toward the light, I met with a small team of friends who were praying for my next steps. At that point, it was clear to me that turning in resumes for jobs as a method of discernment was not working.
My heart knew what I needed to do. I just really wanted to find someone to pay me to do it.
The discernment team asked me if I felt ready to start my own ministry organization. With reluctant clarity, I said yes. I was hesitant because I still did not like the idea. I was clear because I had to admit the fruitlessness of the four months prior. The best I could do was to take one step at a time and see if there was confirmation down this road.
Slowly but surely, there was. It would be hard to recall all the steps in detail now. In short, I spent early 2024 consulting with a few churches, leading local prayer groups for parents, speaking at retreats, and gradually filling out paperwork for a non-profit in the cheapest way possible. (Because the nearly $1000 of upfront costs to start the ministry were $1000 I did not have at the time.)
Still, I felt unsure of precisely what I was building. Was it a prayer movement for the next generation? Was it a consulting ministry for healthy churches? (Why would churches pay me to help make them healthy?) Was it a ministry to families? Would I be speaking and teaching? As it turns out, it’s a little of all those things. I am trying to find all the appropriate words to describe this succinctly on a forthcoming website. That feels vulnerable too.
It seems obvious, but I had no idea that following Jesus’ call to ministry in a renewed sense of vulnerable dependence would require building every piece like I got a new Lego set with a step-by-step manual. In other words, none of the who, how, or what would come primarily from my strategic gifts, which I had relied on my whole career. Instead, it would be a process of following directions, even being willing to experiment with ministry ahead of knowing everything I wanted to do.
So many of the concerns I had been expressing in my prior senior ministry management role were obsolete when I considered created something new. The choice was mine to do ministry more organically and trust the Lord to provide.
I have a big vision for this little airplane called All Gen Movement. We are living in a time when one could easily say that God’s promises do not seem to be true for our kids, the Church, or the future. But I believe the Spirit has been doing a work of renewal before the crumbling even began. Like the twelve getting sent out with the bare minimum, I feel like I am on a journey to share Jesus’s healing ministry.
This healing is what we need.
Falling off a cliff with no one to catch me was painful. Getting scraped off the pavement was not much better.
But as these stories go, the longer the time passes, eventually, we get a broader perspective of why it had to be this way.
My work requires freedom to operate away from systems that do harm.
Outside the constraints of a management job.
I am used to being a loyal employee who tries to bring up concerns in the context of values.
Now, I am creating with the Creator.
Being an employee was much easier.
But right now, for me, this feels much more sacred.
And, yes, on most days, the whole process feels a bit insane too.
Photo taken after speaking at my last work conference, flying home into the unknown.
The last few years have been a plot twist for my family. If you had asked me to describe my life prior, I would have called it complex. Even so, within complexity, we had few curveballs until the recent season of life hurled a number of them.
When your prior structure and framework for your life becomes a rug pulled out from under you, first, you will experience disruption and disorientation. Then, there is an opportunity to go through a process of healing. The healing has to do with figuring out what is accurate and true. You must dig deeper to discover what was false or faulty about your previous operational mode.
My conclusion about such healing is this–it feels like dying.
In other words, there is a lengthy stage in the healing process where you shed the old and do not yet have the new. This process is a slow, pronounced kind of dying. It is hard to explain unless you have gone through it because it is a dying into health, putting to death things that you will not bring forward with you.
This phenomenon is well-documented. You can read Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward or St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul to think about this on a spiritual and soul level. Or, you can think about it on a medical and bodily level. If you have surgery and a serious recovery process, you may feel temporarily worse before you feel better. The passageway between what was and will be is both painful and inconvenient.
A Real-Life Metaphor
The latest life-inspired metaphor to help ponder this is an appliance flood in our home on December 2nd.
We had just finished a lovely Thanksgiving weekend with our college-age daughter home for her first break. It was the Monday after. She was back at school, my husband was on a plane for a work trip, and I was on my morning Zoom call when I stepped out of our home office to make tea. What greeted me was a washing machine failure from the load I had thrown in just before the call.
Initially, it looked like an inconvenient derailment of my Monday morning, but when I saw the extent of the nooks and crannies the water had flowed into, it became a disruption on a much larger scale. By that evening, insurance had sent a water remediation company to tear out our floors and cut into our walls. They removed any damp materials and left us with eight industrial fans blowing at a deafening frequency.
The beginning of the demolition
What began as a hopeful Monday morning for quiet work and a peaceful start to the extras of the holiday season turned upside down. I asked the contractor for his honest timeline estimate. He told me two months. Four weeks have passed, and his estimate seems accurate. We have made it through the worst. The contractors patched up our walls the day before Christmas, but our possessions and our dining table continue to sit in the garage. Rugs cover a pathway through the rooms so we do not have to stand on hard, cold concrete.
I am seeing in a new way from this unfortunate experience.
Quick Break, Slow Repair
Damage happens relatively quickly. (It took less than 1 hour for the water from one load of laundry to damage half of our first floor.) The demolition is less instantaneous but also relatively quick. I had no time to waste as I pulled every towel out of our linen closet and got to work in back-breaking labor, even pulling out the heavy washing machine that I have seen contractors struggle to move in a moment of Herculean strength. Then, without delay, insurance made sure to do damage control by tearing out every area of dampness and throwing it away.
The process gets slow once the damage is done and the demolition is complete. The rebuild does not begin or proceed with the same sense of urgency.
It would have increased the cost of the claim if the insurance were to act slowly, allowing the water to do more damage. But in rebuilding they take time to negotiate with the contractors over every nickel and dime. They make slow determinations between their other urgent jobs. Then, the estimator finds contractors that can do the work within the parameters of the insurance claim. Because it is the holiday season, the progress is even slower.
Living in Between
On the other end, you have us, the homeowners. We have to live in a state of disrepair. It looks bleak and requires a lot of patience and renegotiating what life looks like daily as you try to cook and live in a disrupted environment. If someone were to walk into my house on the day all those fans were blowing (as several neighbors did), they would say what a disaster (as they did). However, as awful as it looked, those were the first stages of the rebuild. We were preparing a dry foundation.
One of my least favorite days. Living in a state of mayhem as repairs were underway on Dec. 23.
It looked better with the floor in tact, but underneath, dampness was going to mold. The day the floors were left bare and the concrete exposed was the first step in creating something new.
In other words, when it most looked like a catastrophe, the rebuild was underway. Likewise, there are moments that most look like death, where healing is underway. I could see the rebuilding stage in a new way and understand my life in the last year or so.
Hope in Rebuilding
Rebuilding is disruptive but promising. If damage happened without your agency, it is not your chosen path. The only way out is rebuilding and in that stage you are about to experience a good thing.
Things will go wrong in the process. It will feel like chaos and disorient you again. (I have never heard of a rebuilding process for anything without setbacks, mistakes, or delays.) However, brick by brick, you are headed in the right direction.
It feels terrible when you cannot appreciate the progress. When things are incomplete, it can facilitate despair. But when you understand the small steps with gratitude and keep your eyes on the bigger picture (we are getting new floors, new paint, a new washer, new floorboards, etc.), you can persevere. You can have some hope.
If the rebuild process is causing you despair, I understand.
But, I want to offer a perspective I am learning: you deserve to be congratulated. You already made it through the damage and the demolition. You are on the road to something better, something new. Not every day will look like any amount of progress. And some days, nothing truly advances. But you have every right to have hope. This stage is not a teardown. It is a piece-by-piece renovation.
If you are like I was last year, in a season of despair and disorientation, you may not have the capacity to hope (yet). I just want you to know, I have hope for you. From where I stand now, I empathize with your pain, and also see the potential for a significant rebuild in your life–one that will give you what you need for the future rather than keep things as they were in the past.
A Quiet Rebuild
The same principle applies on a macro level. Individuals have been experiencing damage, demolition, and rebuilding, but so has our society. Rather than living in rubble, we can clear it away and build something new over time. The other side of collapse is the first stone being laid.
Christmas is the beginning of a renovation phase. Christ came to earth as a new beginning, the second Adam. The first man and woman acted in ways that brought about damage to every generation. Subsequent generations, like Noah’s, had to deal with the demolition that followed.
The incarnation is a quiet rebuild, a flutter in a young woman’s womb that became light and hope for the world. It looked like nothing, but it was quite something.
You may be engulfed by atrocious damage done to you and others. You may be watching the rubble pile up in the teardown, debilitated like I was a year ago. But if you know the Christmas story, you know the angels, shepherds, and magi were the early witnesses to humanity’s rebuilding.
It did not look like much when he was born among the animals to unimportant people in a tiny city. The threat of more rubble came in the form of edicts for infanticide and crossing borders seeking refuge.
Rebuilds are long and slow. What looks like wreckage today is a new beginning for our home and family.
I believe the same for you. Where you are is not where you will end up.
Damage comes with the loudest bang but is the shortest visitor.
The teardown may take a little while.
But the longest leg of the journey is the rebuilding. And building is good. Piece by piece, you will get there.
