Emotional and Relational Help for Overwhelm

Recently I’ve been struggling with conditions of extreme overwhelm. What happens to me when hit by too many things at once is that I tend to shut down, lose focus, and lose my ability to concentrate. I am easily distracted, and become easily attracted to behaviors that don’t assist me in facing the daunting situations looming ahead of or around me. While I know the usual advice of breaking things down, making them manageable, and just getting started, sometimes it seems like there is more going on than just procrastination and too much to do.

In part, I see the shut down that can occur during overwhelm as a necessary survival instinct. Sometimes when faced with too much, the body needs retreat—the mind needs a little escape to rest and come back refreshed to face all those necessary items on the “to do” list. Developing healthy retreats in the face of overwhelm can be restorative, and I have to confront any disparaging voices that shame me for taking a much needed breather—or for stepping back to get a better view of my situation. Sometimes it isn’t as productive to just forge ahead and make myself plunge in.

Another part of me realizes that overwhelm often occurs alongside feelings of loneliness. I almost never feel overwhelmed when I am working with others to accomplish something. I feel it much less when I know someone cares about what I am doing, and is there to lend a hand if things are too difficult. Finding others to work with, to share chores, has always been preferable to going it alone. This isn’t always possible, but honestly, I sometimes just don’t ask, thinking I have to do everything.

A deeper aspect of healing overwhelm also needs to be considered. From childhood, I suffer from feelings of abandonment and loss. My mother, married to an alcoholic, was often overwhelmed and preoccupied by my father’s drinking. I was often left to cope with feelings and life functions alone. When overwhelm hits me in my adult life, I find myself re-experiencing that sense of neglect. Too often, it is all up to me, again. It’s hard to find help, and sometimes I feel that all the help I need is just too much—that my needs are just too large! And then the stories begin to spin in my mind—“I don’t deserve help.” “No one REALLY cares about me.” “I’m just not enough to deal with my life.”

These are all lies I am telling myself--lies that for some reason surface in the middle of distress, complicating the overwhelm and driving me toward an overall (and usually temporary) shut down.

I’ve often wondered where the “stories” come from. Why the lies seem so compelling and real, and why I sometimes still believe them. Somewhere, at sometime, the stories must have been useful to me. They must have helped me get through something. I’m guessing that my childhood mind thought that if I was to blame for the loneliness and neglect, and if I whipped myself hard enough with criticism and blame, I could CHANGE.

The first time I read Pema Chodron’s words: A desire to change is fundamentally an act of aggression against yourself—I remember feeling such a shock. It was as if my crutch was kicked out from my armpit, and I was standing on a sore, but functioning and atrophied leg. Since that time, I think about the desire to change and improve—to be better, to drive myself, to succeed…

The thing is, the whipping and criticism never helped me change. It made me want to run and hide. It still does, in those more intense moments of overwhelm—right now being one of them. I’ve just moved, I’ve just re-started my counseling practice, I’m getting caught up with new laws and requirements, my partner and I just started co-habiting with his part-time 12-year old Chinese adopted daughter—so there’s a lot going on. And there are so many opportunities for me to slip into self-criticism. (I’m not outdoors enough. I haven’t worked in the new garden nearly enough yet. I haven’t been exercising as often as I should. His daughter hates me. There is that pile of books to read. There are those counseling tapes to listen to. There’s the new book to start writing, and the research for that—and oh yes, a new blog!) None of this helps me get even a millimeter closer to what I want for my life.

So here’s what is helping:

• Staring out the window at the Starlings pecking at the lawn--noticing their awareness of the immediate world helps me become aware of the immediate world.

• Deep and frequent breaths. Sighing. (A friend told me she moans out loud, if possible, and it’s very relieving).

• When I can’t focus enough to meditate, I use a game called “The Wild Divine,” which is a biofeedback program turned into a computer game. It’s a bit too “new-age” for me, but I sort of like it anyway, and it’s effective and mildly entertaining.

• Long hot baths with Epsom salts.

• Gently becoming aware of unkind things I am saying to myself, and stopping them. Not bluntly, but with a sort of surprised, “oh, you again.” Then showing them the door.

• Showing compassion and attention to the inner child who was left to fend for herself so much—having a caring dialogue with her. It’s corny, but it works. Sometimes I write down the dialogue.

• Writing about the overwhelm helps—going to a coffee shop, finding a cozy seat, getting a comfort drink, and writing my heart out. It curbs the loneliness and takes me out of myself, if I can’t find a friend.

• Learning the art of asking for help without expecting that anyone will really be able to.

• Graciously accepting and appreciating all that does come my way, and knowing that—hey, I’ve made it through this far. I’m forgetting to look, sometimes, at all that I have—all the wonders in my life—the fact that I can even do the sort of work that I do, that I have a wonderful and supportive partner, and we live in a beautiful place. There’s always something to appreciate. Once, years ago, in the middle of a grinding and brittle depression, I suddenly became aware of how extraordinary the sky was on a given day—how the clouds were spinning and unusually gorgeous. Sometimes under intense pressure, beauty can break through and into us in unusual ways—with more poignancy and intensity than we experience in our ordinary moods. So I look for and appreciate those break-through times when the stress or emotion is extreme. I call these “emotional portals”.

• Finding or arranging something to look forward to, some event down the line that will lift me out for awhile. Sometimes I just need to know that this pile of work I have to do isn’t my whole life.

• My last ditch effort, when I just have to get through some chore (that doesn’t require concentration), is to find someway to distract myself from the tedium of it. Say I have to clean the kitchen or organize the closet—I’ll put on a compelling taped story to listen to that keeps my mind off the unpleasantness of the task—or I’ll make a phone date with a friend and we’ll work together. This isn’t very “Zen” of me, but hey, it gets the job done.