Trauma Choices

Some mornings start with a rain storm of happiness.

You stand on the back porch with a huge grin on your face as the rain rifles through the blooms of the vitex trees, and you think to yourself: today, I can do anything.

So you take the kids for a run, circling the block as your gray shirt becomes polka dotted and your hair is streaked with the liquid cheerfulness falling from the sky and your sweat is washed away before it has a chance to sting your eyes, and you think to yourself: today is going to be a really good day.

And your mind jumps forward to coffee (round two) and breakfast and a day’s worth of good work waiting for you at home, but before you can think anything else…

…there is a dog running at you, and he has his teeth on your dog’s neck, and your dog is screaming, a horrible hoarse cry, and you are grabbing at the other dog, pushing at his jaws, clawing at his incisors, yelling frantically, and then, when he finally detaches, screaming at your own dog to run home! run home!

Some mornings start with happiness and within an hour, you are holding your shaking, rain-drenched dog in your shaking, rain-drenched arms as you both try not to cry even as you realize that you are still okay. There is saliva in your dog’s fur and there is sweat on your body, but you are still okay.

And the day is not done yet.

And it’s in that moment that you have a few choices, that we have a few choices.

We can tell ourselves: what happened was traumatic, therefore we are totally justified if we completely check out for rest of the day. We can choose to spend the next few hours stretched out on the couch with a book (or whatever your version of comfort is), while we replay over and over again what happened until it looms larger and larger in our vision and gains more and more importance.

Or we can tell ourselves: this is not a big deal. Everything is fine. Get to work. Have your great day. Embrace all the opportunity. Ignore it and move on! We can shove what happened to the back of our mind where it will niggle at us like an irritating eyelash hiding in our eye until it drives us to a seemingly unrelated explosion.

Or we can take a moment. We can acknowledge that what happened was legitimately scary (or hard or heart-breaking or whatever adjective best applies). We can give those feelings a little bit of space and room to breathe before we tell them that they aren’t going to run the show. And then, as our day progresses and we’re having moments when we feel a little fragile, a little off, we can remind ourselves: yes, that really happened, something scary really happened, but look—we are okay.

The dog is fine (he won’t let me out of his sight, but he’s fine). And I am fine. And the kids are fine. And the beautiful rainy morning that kicked off my euphoria was not wasted, but repurposed.

The rain was not a sign of all good things to come but a bit of nourishment before I got put through the wringer, food for my heart that would enable me to make positive choices about what to do with the hard moment that followed.

And I feel like you should know: yesterday, I picked option two. I told myself it wasn’t a big deal and I plowed through with my plans and told myself that I was still all the happy that I had been sixty minutes before (and then wondered why I wasn’t actually feeling that way). And that worked until the moment that Twinkle accidentally shattered the microwave turn table, and then suddenly the feelings that I had been helpfully belittling felt super big and overwhelming and my entire body began to feel like an overworked, overly anxious noodle until I worked through the fact that I wasn’t upset about a broken turn table but about the fact that my dog had nearly gotten seriously hurt that morning. And I love him, so that matters.

And once I gave those thoughts and feelings room to stand up and stretch and move around for a bit, they showed themselves out the door, and I got more done in the last three hours of the day than I had in the previous six—and more happily too.

Then, instead of looking back at my rainy morning start with regret and wondering where that joi de vivre had gone, I could remember it as a moment of grace to carry me through.

One day, I hope I’ll start taking option three more regularly. Just saying. It seems to be a little more balanced and a good bit more gracious and a lot more effective in the long term.

I kind of hope that you’ll start taking that one too. Because it’s not always a dog attack, sometimes it’s something far more serious.

But the choice is always there.