When Crisis Has Changed Your Life
by James E. Miller Willowgreen

"I am ready to fall,
and my pain is ever with me.
My heart throbs,
my strength fails me.
And the light of my eyes,
even that has gone from me."
(from Psalm 38)

Sometimes life hurts us.
Sometimes it robs us of something, or someone, very dear.
Sometimes it causes us pain
a pain we did not choose and do not want.
Sometimes life severely restricts us.
When that happens, we feel out of control.
We may be tempted even to question the meaning of our lives, asking, "Why me?", "Why mine?", "Why this?", "Why now?".
A future we had taken for granted will not come to be.
Plans, carefully drawn up, will not lead where we expected.
We find ourselves face-to-face with life circumstances not of our liking.
Life choices not of our making.
A life, in short, we don't quite know how to live.
We wonder: how do we go on?
Where is the meaning?
And how do we re-design our lives when the future that is
before us is so different from the one we've foreseen?

What must happen first is quite clear, quite natural-- and perhaps quite overwhelming.
We must let out our feelings.
And we will have many of them.
There may be anger, even outrage-- that this unfairness has happened to us, and "ruined" our life.

There may be fear, even terror-- that we won't be able to cope, that we'll fall apart.

There may be sadness-- for something important to us has ended, something that gave us joy is gone.

There may be despair-- as we doubt if life will ever be as good as it once was.

There may be feelings of guilt-- for the role we played in what happened, or for the pain that what has hurt us hurts others as well.

Our feelings matter, whatever they are, for they arise from very deep within.

Whatever our feelings are, they are uniquely our own, for no one has been through exactly what we have been through.

So whatever we feel, it is ours to feel. And however we feel, it will help to give our feelings words, either spoken or written, sung or unsung, full-throated or whispered.
And we may need to do this, not once, but many times, for our feelings ebb and flow over the course of days, weeks, months.

What will not help is to bottle up our feelings, keeping them tightly sealed. Because eventually pressure will build, and our feelings will demand to be released, one way or another.
We may surprise ourselves with the strength of our feelings, but that is okay--and even good.

For the presence of strong feelings today is a good prediction that we'll have strong ones tomorrow as well.
Tomorrow, when we'll feel something very different, and more encouraging.

So this is our first fragile step: to release our feelings, so that eventually they will release us. As we do so, we will discover an inner strength beginning to grow inside us, giving us hope, leading us on.

Gradually, the initial shock wears off and it becomes a time for exploring. A time to learn more about what has happened to us, so that we'll know more about what to expect, about what we need to do, and not do.

If we are diligent in our search, we will uncover riches of information-- others who have persevered, and how they have done so; others who share our lot in life, and how we can be connected.

The more we explore, the more we will learn about the choices we have before us, for no matter what we're dealing with, there are choices.

We are free to choose what steps we will take today, and what steps we will put off until tomorrow. And even though we may have no control over what has happened to us, we do have certain control over how we respond to what has happened.

We may choose to go into hiding, from others, from ourselves-- or we may choose to be as open and as honest as we can be.

We may choose to give up, thinking "What's the use?"-- or we may choose to marshal all our resources in our drive to re-build our future.

We may choose to become embittered-- or we may learn to become more understanding, more accepting, and wiser.

We may choose to become locked in unceasing anger-- or we may release ourselves to give more freely with our love.

As we learn more about this crisis in our life, it will serve us well to remember what crisis actually means:

it is a turning point which challenges our ability to cope.
It is a time when forces collide, and the outcome is unknown.
It is that point when life will go one way or another, when it is ripe with possibility.

That point when our life will go one way or another. That point when our life is ripe with possibility.

This writing is an excerpt is from the Willowgreen videotape How Do I Go On? Re-designing Your Future After Crisis Has Changed Your Life by James E. Miller. Additional information is available here.

More Information about the videotape from which this passage came.