Coping When S**t Goes Wrong

And it will. Sometimes spectacularly. In both our business and personal lives, shit sometimes stinks. Bad. Like, make you want to retch bad. Maybe your business is failing, it can’t find funding or you have personnel issues that make you want to jump off a cliff or stab people.

Maybe your kids are teenagers (gasp!) and an evil zombie has eaten your sweet child, or you are going through a gut-wrenching divorce, or have lost a parent or life partner.

Whatever it is, it stinks. Totally and completely.

Ideally, we can pick ourselves up, get help from those around us, do what needs to be done and see how in the long run, this will make us better individuals who are more compassionate and wise.

And, then, what happens when you just can’t.

You can’t get out of bed. You can’t stop crying. Or drinking. Or being unkind to the people you love. Or any number of other behaviors that we KNOW are not helpful, and yet there we are, day after day in the same stuck place.

Be kind to yourself.

You are human. Full of complex emotional and biochemical reactions to your environment and the shit that is going down hard. You are grieving for whatever the loss is. Loss of innocence, money, companionship, love, easy lifestyle, people, pets, businesses, homes, etc. The list is endless, and they are all losses to be grieved, and we must all process in our own ways. When the griefs stack up one after another, as happened with me a few years back, sometimes you have days or weeks or months of deep grief and depression. It’s ok.

It will not last forever.

You are a confident, competent and capable person, just not right now. Be kind to yourself. Give yourself time. And as you feel up to it; first, get help from a good therapist, councilor or coach. If the first one (or five) you talk to don’t suit you, keep looking. Ideally, you want someone that will help get you back on your feet and be available for crucial check-ins when life’s shit ramps up again (because it will), and not someone who will have you in their chair every week for 15 years. You need someone who can equip you with tools and wrap you with kindness and compassion.

Second, on the days you feel up to it, connect with your community, especially other women. If you don’t have that community, find somewhere to start volunteering, or a faith organization and build your community. It can be two women, but it matters to be loved, heard and seen for more that the owner of a steaming pile of shit.

Third, eat food that makes you truly happy, take nourishing walks and spend time recharging your soul in nature. Or anything else that makes you smile, even just a little bit.

Life will come back. It may look differently than it did before, but that’s ok. That is how we grow and go on to help other people who are going through their own shit sundae. This is how we become wise, wonderful women.

You are not alone.

You are loved.

You will get through this….