“they say that time heals all things,
they say you can always forget;
but the smiles and the tears across the years
they twist my heart strings yet!”

– George Orwell

 

I’ve been getting a lot of lessons lately about how time heals all wounds. People tell me it takes time, things will get better in time and I will look back on this and laugh in the future.

That said, according to other people (and the quote above), the hurt never really goes away.

I know my hurt and pain from my divorce has not gone away yet but I do feel back to normal on most days. But that is not what I wanted to write about.

I want to write about short term time because I’ve come to realize that even just ten minutes can be enough to make me feel better and it is knowing that fact that gets me through some fairly emotionally painful situations.

The first person to introduce this concept to me was my divorce coach. I had just found out that my soon-to-be ex husband had filed for divorce without telling me and then he refused to find somewhere else to stay. I’m not saying I didn’t play a part in this but at that time I was in shock. Almost anything could trigger me and put me into a state of anxiety or depression in those early days of divorce. Every other day, I was packing an overnight bag so I could go and stay with a friend so I didn’t have to be in the same space as my soon-to-be ex. As I walked away from my life and my kids (whom I’d never been away from before), I would get very emotional and I basically stayed in that state full time with reoccurring spikes on an hourly basis.

Anytime I started to explain my situation to anyone, like my divorce coach, I would relive the pain and start crying so my coach taught me a trick so I could calm myself in order to function. This trick was called tapping or EFT and there is a lot of theory behind it and how it works,  but all I know is that it stopped me from thinking the thought that was making me cry and injected five to ten minutes of time into my life. After tapping for as little as five minutes I was always more calm. In a lot of situations I was laughing at myself as people wondered what the heck I was doing.

As time went along, I started learning new techniques and strategies, such as meditation (which I still struggle with), stopping what I’m doing and starting something else, writing and just being in the moment and letting the emotion flow through me. All four of these techniques involve time and I’ve noticed over the past two years that I always feel better after having taken some form of time.

What I’ve also noticed is that it is this recognition of how time saves me that makes my days easier to get through.  This has been a hard lesson for me to learn as I’m a type A personality and I’ve always tried to use my time efficiently and in the past, sitting on the coach and staring at the wall was not what I considered efficient.

Now, instead of getting bogged down in emotional pain and fighting my way through it so I can be efficient, I let time do the work. If I’m having a bad moment, I use one of my strategies to inject time.

If I’m in conflict with someone,  such as sitting through a mediation session with my ex-husband, and we are stuck, I will get up and take a five to ten minute break.

If I’m in conflict with someone and it is turning into a back and forth argument over email. I stop myself from replying for a day.

If I’m just generally sad, I will cry for twenty minutes or for however long it takes until I feel like doing something else. Surprisingly (or not surprisingly actually), after twenty minutes of crying, I always feel like doing something else.

If I’m angry, I sit down and write an email to the person I’m angry with, and then I send it to MYSELF.

I tell myself what I now know to be true. I may be sad, angry and feeling like things are hopeless, but I know in two days and maybe even just one, I will not even be able to remember that emotion because I will be feeling good again.