When I think about uncertainty, I can’t help but recall the time in my life when there was only uncertainty and at the same time I felt the least capable of being in charge of my life. Living between my small town home in TX, psych wards, and the little farm in the south valley of Albuquerque my dad lived and worked on, I lived day to day, and sometimes minute to minute.
I was having a complete mental breakdown after flunking out of fashion school.
It started with panic attacks, although at the time I didn’t know that’s what they were. Then the night I told my mom I got kicked out of school, the compulsions started. After several hours of trying to support me, my friends called 911 and soon I was on the way to my first stay on a psych ward and first prescriptions for psych meds.
Over the next 2 years my psyche completely broke down. Me and my family and close friends went through hell and I almost didn’t survive, on a number of occasions. I don’t remember much from the days I spent hospitalized, back and forth between mom and mike and dad, and from time to glorious time, my friends. It’s mostly just glimpses, floods of intense emotion and a heaviness that feels like I swallowed a bowling ball.
I remember what it was like going to the hospital. The fear and anxiety building the whole drive. I remember the humiliating intake process and being filled with overwhelming shame and disgust, none of which made my current nervous system status any better. The entire first day was often one immersed in a depth of self hatred I find difficult to describe to this day. I have never felt more alone, more rejected, more worthless - and notably, more deserving of it all.
Paranoia was a close frenemy at the time - but also one of my oldest. You don’t grow up with 4 traumatized siblings and not develop at least some propensity for paranoia, at least not if you’re me. The paranoia stemmed from the deep and overwhelming fear that had been suffocating me for as much of my life as I could recall. When you lose trust in everyone and everything, especially yourself, there is nothing left but uncertainty and fear.
I nearly jumped off a sky bridge at a Dallas mall. I had a psychotic break driving home from Dallas one day that resulted in a state trooper chasing me, on foot, down the side of the highway and tackling me rather than, as he later told me, shooting me. Then there was the worst of my Ambien reactions, when during the middle of the night I took every pill I had (probably 10-15 different meds at the time), drove myself to the ER and lost consciousness in the parking garage. There were other occasions, too.
When faced with overwhelming uncertainty, the key is connection. I am certain of almost nothing but one thing I am 100% certain of is that were it not for my friends and family, I would have died. I probably wouldn’t have made it the first year.
When I lost connection to everything, including my friends and family, they all kept me going - literally.
We cannot survive - we cannot face uncertainty without meaningful connection. And don’t get me wrong, I fought my family every step of the way. I knew they were trying to protect me so my resistance was mostly towards my loss of autonomy, my condition and the fact I had no idea why any of it was happening. It was clear to me they were desperately trying to keep me alive and even if I resented them for what that meant, I was always profoundly grateful I had people who desperately tried to keep me alive.
It doesn’t seem like one could hold gratefulness and resentment at the same time but I sure did. I didn’t understand at the time but so much of what I was going through was a combination of primarily living in a state of trauma induced dysregulation and shut down, the growing awareness in me that life is paradox all the way up and all the way down, and the reason that almost nothing I was taught to be real and true in the world always felt untrue to me was because it WAS untrue for me.
One of the biggest keys to my healing has been in coming to understand, through therapy, psychology and neuroscience, that the ways I survived my childhood and the effects from the experiences I had did not mean that I was bad or that something (more like everything) was wrong with me - and in fact, were normal human reactions to an environment in which I did not feel safe emotionally, mentally, or spiritually or my authenticity understood or accepted. (Physical safety only became precarious by means of my siblings in fairly typical gen x/elder millennial fashion sibling warfare.)
Through better understanding the complexity and context of my life experiences and conditions I was able to see things objectively and accept the ways I adapted to my conditions and did my best to stay safe in the face of profound uncertainty, pain, and fear. As I fostered safe relationships with people, I also became aware of the healing relationship I was developing with plants and slowly I began to feel more confident in being in charge of my life.
Building trust can be so much more difficult and slow going than breaking trust but it is one of the most fundamental skills needed for healing and connection.
Plants and the process of caring for them, offers an abundance of opportunities for building trust, resilience, and clarity. When combined with coaching this process has the potential to help you grow to heights beyond your wildest dreams. All it takes is to make a choice.