P2YL | 4. Ways to find comfort: Distraction
When the unthinkable happens, it feels as though, suddenly and without warning, the ship you’ve been sailing on safely for so long has sunk, leaving you clinging to the wreckage in a choppy, grey sea.
Still painfully alive, but with open wounds and in deep shock. Greyness above you, greyness below. And bitterly, bitterly, bone-clenchingly cold.
At this stage you need the metaphorical equivalent of respite. You need to find comfort and a way to let the wounds begin their natural healing process, because yes, be comforted that the silent, hidden work of healing will begin whether or not you do anything conscious about it. But there are things you can do to help the process.
For now, the best thing is not too much violent action and lashing out. Save your energy. Just hold on. Then gradually, gradually, inch yourself into a lifeboat, and rest.
When my own personal unthinkable misery happened many years ago I kept diaries into which I poured all that rage and despair. For years I could not bear to read them, but now they give me vital clues on how to survive the trauma so at some stage you emerge from it and can regroup your forces.
1. Find activities that soothe and distract
What to do with those endless hours when your mind continues to churn over its misery like a rat caught in a maze?
I recommend distraction as a powerful balm.
I am no good at craft and early on in my life wrote it off as boring, but, going through my own miserable time, I bought a beginner’s simple cross-stitch kit from an art shop and was surprised at how it absorbed and soothed my jangling nerves. There is something mesmerising and hypnotic about the rhythm and repetition of the stitches. The feeling of wool and cotton slipping through the fingers, the handling of soft fabrics, soothes and strokes the skin. As the body is soothed, so the mind relaxes. My hands stopped trembling.
Working with needle and thread was a traditional female craft and as I sat doing my tapestry in the evening, I felt slightly comforted in the knowledge that generations of women had done the same, sewing into stitches and seams their misery and frustration at the hands of men and life. They had gone before me, gone through it, and come out the other side. Their pain was in the past. Perhaps, if they could do it, so could I? Perhaps one day my pain would be history too?
People are wired so differently. I recently asked around for other people’s ideas of soothing activities that helped them melt away the hardest times in their lives.
I found an interesting division between what helped women and what helped men but in the end it doesn’t matter, there is plenty of overlap between us as humans.
You can often guess instinctively what might work for you as a self-soother and in keeping an open mind, you discover new possibilities of finding calm.
Activities which others found helpful include:
- o Jam and marmalade-making.
- o Gardening.
- o Cycling, then a bit more cycling, then even more cycling.
- o Watching or listening to really good comedy.
- o Colouring or any form of art.
- o Crosswords, cryptic or otherwise.
- o Absorbing myself in nature by going out for a walk and stopping to examine a leaf, a flower, a tree in detail.
- o Walking as fast as I can up a steep hill to be rewarded at the top by a spectacular view.
- o Putting together an intricate jigsaw puzzle of something beautiful so I can see it forming in front of me, piece by piece.
I am so grateful that there are so many ways of finding respite from painful feelings. Even if they are not magical solutions, they give us relief, help us regather our strength, and cope.
🤔 Are there any soothing activities you can recommend? 🤔
I'd love to hear them if so because I think the more tools in our armoury, the better.
