Lotty – it is soooooo hard to go through w/d and it is sooooooooo sooooooooo hard to have actual stressful things happen at the same time.
Heck, I’m freaked out about cleaning the house. How am I going to deal with an actual stressor?!
One thing I have found helpful is all the people who said over the years on pp that they had been through terrible things in their lives – like the deaths of children or the suicide of a sibling – and that w/d felt even worse.
IOW, this syndrome is such a vicious chemical torture, that you just have to keep saying to yourself that, even when you are dealing with a bona fide stressor, your feelings are still way, way, way out of proportion to the event.
You understand I’m not trying to minimize your stressors in any way, right? And, I’m very sorry to hear about your father’s death and your mother’s cancer. I’m just trying to point the way to some modicum of relief – which is to keep reminding yourself over and over that your feelings are not entirely accurate, real, or tied to what’s going on. They’re a chemical torture going on, distorting and inflating everything, making even hard things seem astronomically worse.
The relieving thing about this is that you*will* feel much better as you heal, even about the hard things in life. So, just keep telling yourself that over and over, too -- that you really will feel much, much better about these things in the future, even if you can't imagine that now.
