Mind Matters

Mind Matters:
Recovery and Healing

Wendy Jameson,
Success Coach

Life makes for such great stories. For example, on a rainy October evening in Lincoln, Nebraska, my mother drove over my grandmother with their Honda SUV. While that is in no way funny, I can’t help but think of the Christmas classic… you know… the one with grandma and the reindeer?

I bring up this sad event — yes, it was an accident and she survived with some broken bones — to illustrate how crazy and unexpected life can be. More than that, it’s important how we respond to these events, as our mental state is determined by how we process these events, good or bad. Like it or not, your long-term emotional health is based on the choices you make about how to talk to yourself about the events of your life.

My mother, of course, is an emotional wreck over this. While it was determined to be a complete fluke, a bizarre accident resulting from minute details falling into perfect sequence to allow it (such as Grandma falling in front of the car at just the right moment), she still feels the weight of total responsibility. She sees the results and cannot help thinking “if only” again and again. She is wracked with guilt, telling herself repeatedly “I should have…”

For her part, my grandmother encourages this “stinking thinking,” though she denies it outright. Nonetheless there are subtle ways to convey a hidden agenda, and buried deep within my grandma is old resentment resulting from her favorite daughter moving far away thirty-five years ago.

And so, the situation is uncomfortable for everyone. There’s clearly an elephant in the room between them, unresolved anger and feelings of abandonment, fear of being imperfect and a hungry guilt that feeds on vulnerability.

Each of these women has choices — as we all do — about how they will handle this accident and subsequent recovery period. At present, the feelings are too raw to heal much and move on. Much of the work right now is dedicated to recovery, bill-paying and rehabilitation.

If guilt is allowed to reign as the predominant emotion, little progress will ensue. But if encouragement is strongest, if they can talk about their feelings together, if they can overcome the physical and mental obstacles together… then they both have a real chance of healing and becoming whole again. That’s not an easy path for anyone, particularly for my elderly grandmother who considers quitting rehabilitation every day.

As with most things, it is one’s outlook, one’s hope, one’s belief in the possibility of a positive outcome that motivates progress toward recovery. And that, my friends, is a choice.