#414 – How can you be present when fear and pain sicken you?

When fear and pain are so heavy that you can hardly breathe, it's easy to do one of two things:

• go full-throttle into fixing mode
• go somewhere else (via Netflix, social media, food...)

Please, do none!––I had to remind myself yesterday at dinner.

When the steaming paella was already on the table, our son said he wasn't hungry. Sensing something off in his voice, I asked him to come sit with us.

Even though he tried to appear his cheerful self, he couldn't hide his angst. He'd googled himself and what he'd found destroyed him. The mugshot, the assumptions the media made, the lies. It was a reckoning: the worst wasn't being in orange in a jail cell. The worst was right ahead.

I know he's the one needing to do the work, but I struggle: how can I support him without fixing things for him (which, by the way, I can't)?

I've never been too much of an "evader" using food or TV as escape routes.

My "drug of choice" has always been the "fixing," the "solutionizing." Here, let me help you (and I actually do it for you).

But, if that's always a mistake, now it'd be catastrophically dangerous. He has to do it. He has to find his way. This is not my "cross to bear." And since I don't have the same level of skin in the game as he has, I must say and do nothing.

That's what's hard and the only way.

I have to accept this reckoning as a fact of our life, even if it now seems earth-shattering. And I have to stay grounded in the day-by-day, without catastrophizing or wanting things to move faster.

How did you learn to not succumb to (or escape) the sickening fear and pain?

Love,

Carolina