04/03/2022
The joy and pain of oatmeal…
Life is not about right and wrong, it’s about finding a way to navigate and not judge.
It’s so easy to “see the way out” or “see the best path” for someone else but in order to really do that one has to have lived every moment the other has lived so they can truly understand “why” they are making the choices they are making, and that is impossible to do.
What’s in a persons past is what directs how they can heal, for in that story is what defines joy and pain to that person. What brings joy to one person can be excruciating to another based on their history.
For example, When I was young I was forced to sit at the table until all my food was gone. Well, oatmeal is not a particular favorite of mine so I didn’t want to eat all of it. After over an hour of sitting at the table with a bowl of oatmeal in front of me I got the, “take three bites and you can leave”. Anyone that has eaten cold rubbery oatmeal knows what that tastes and feels like 🤢. Well, I wanted to go play with my brothers so I took a bite and guess what happened…yep🤮, all over the table. Now can you guess how much trouble I was in?!?! Let’s just say, I didn’t get to go play.
Yep, oatmeal PTSD HAS JUST HAPPENED! 😫😩
Can you imagine the emotion seeing, smelling or tasting oatmeal brings to me to this day?
Now let’s look at someone else’s story….
Growing up, all would gather at the grandparents house around the table to have oatmeal before heading out to play with the horses🐴 and pot belly pigs. It was so exciting because we only made the trek to Nana & Pap’s ranch once a month and all the cousins came too!
Tan dah…Oatmeal euphoria has just been created. 🤩😍
See how wonderful this person would feel at even the mention of oatmeal?
Now let’s fast forward to today and someone says , “it’s so simple, the way to the happiest life is nothing more than a bowl of oatmeal to start the day”.
How do you think that’s gonna work for me? Not at all, and yet it really is quite easy to eat oatmeal every morning, isn’t it?
So, let’s say I tried it, every morning would be filled with anxiety, stress, and emotional exhaustion as I made it. Then I’d try to eat as much as I could as fast as I could but when I couldn’t finish it, I’d be overwhelmed by shame, guilt, self doubt, and depression that I couldn’t do it.
Pretty sure I wouldn’t be living my happiest life starting each day that way but eating oatmeal should really be that simple, so they weren’t wrong in their suggestion until you realize the emotion attached to it and that can only come from learning and understanding my past.
So, though we are all only trying to help each other as we give suggestion and directives may we learn that directing another and telling them “just do this” is minimizing and denying another of the whole of their story and seeing only the now, without embracing the then.
The only way to truly help yourself and another is with compassion and understanding that what works for us may not work for them and to not judge when they can’t do what we think they should.
And to the warrior fighting the shame & guilt of failure… please learn that complete forgiveness of self and others is in knowing that we are all doing the best we can with what we have in the emotional place we are in given our unique journeys. We are not meant to to live up to their expectations and we didn’t let them down intentionally, we emotionally couldn’t see the light at the end of our dark tunnel.
A happy healthy life is accomplished in learning to identify the emotional connections and how they affect you THEN releasing them forever!!!
