I almost lost my mind in the supermarket this week. I’ll explain…

 

For those of you who’ve been following, we’ve had a lot of churn in our homeschool teacher situation. Suffice it to say, for the past year I’ve been interviewing teachers and have had to deal with some turnover. It hasn’t been easy. Our teacher is both our kid’s education and our childcare, so that person is incredibly important in how our lives are managed. In the past year and a half, we’ve had three different teachers, after having had our last nanny-teacher for 8 years. Between reviewing resumes, interviews, background checks and signing contracts, the process of finding a person to do this work with us is taxing, to say the least.

Last week was busy but good. Perry and I had a church leadership seminar that started Friday night and went through Saturday. I had been looking forward to it because it gave us one night away from home together, kind of a mini retreat! We came home, hosted a sleepover for one of the kids, and got everyone to church on Sunday morning.

At 1150 am, a text from our teacher came through to both me and my husband. I didn’t see it, but he did when he checked his phone at the end of service.  He took my hand, said we had an emergency, handed off the kids to someone at church, and took me into an empty room. The text said that our new teacher (who had been working for us for ONE WEEK), was unable to continue working because of an situation she was in. I was floored. We prayed together for our teacher and for help to get through the new upset in our life. We decided to go out into the congregation, ask for prayers from whomever we talked to, and talk to the kids about it when we got home.

As far as I was concerned, this was a disaster. Putting aside whatever awful thing our teacher was dealing with (which must have been horrible), what were we going to do for school? My eldest daughter was supposed to start her second semester of her program the next day. Both of us were working and we suddenly had no childcare for the foreseeabIe future. I felt like the ground just shifted under me.

 

 

We had to get a few things at the store to make dinner, so I ran into the Kroger on the way home. As I raced through the bakery section to get to the produce, I had the strangest experience. As I walked past the croissants and doughnuts and cookies, I envisioned myself ripping open all the packages and shoving doughnut after doughnut into my mouth. Y’all. I don’t even like store doughnuts – they taste like chemicals to me. I knew even as these crazy thoughts flew through my mind what was happening: I wanted to buffer.

What’s buffering?

Buffering is when you try to make a cushion between you and an uncomfortable thought. It’s a distraction, something that gets you away from focusing on the thing that is bothering you. It’s the reason people overeat, drown themselves in social media, drink too much, use drugs, binge watch TV or shop for things they don’t need. Buffering is an incredibly common coping mechanism for dealing with the hard things in our lives. So when I was in the middle of a sea of highly processed simple carbs, my mind decided that eating all of it was an excellent way to get away from the overwhelming feeling of fear I was feeling about our homeschool situation blowing up. The bad news? Buffering doesn’t work, at least not in the long run. The bad feeling still has to be dealt with, or it’s coming back, plus you have gained weight or have a hangover or you have debt you don’t want. The good news – I didn’t crack up in the store.

 

Good job, Mom!

 

We got through the day and got a (really wonderful!) temporary solution in place. A friend from church who was a school teacher offered to step in for the semester to help us out. God to the rescue! About 8 hours after the crisis began, we had a way to keep homeschooling, at least for the semester. But, even with that miraculous resolution, I woke up a couple of days later with terrible anxiety. I felt so much fear about the tenuous position we’re in depending on someone else to help us school our kids. Questions were flying around my mind and I just wanted to bury myself under the covers and not get up. I prayed, I tried to meditate, but I wasn’t feeling a lot better. You see, I’ve spent many years thinking very negatively. It’s only been in the past few years that I’ve been actively learning to manage my thoughts. For the most part, it’s been very helpful, learning to recognize the thoughts and turn them into thoughts that are more helpful and constructive. But after listening to coaching podcasts, I knew there was more work to be done. While I’m much quicker at working on changing the thoughts that cause me to feel badly, what I haven’t done is learn to sit with painful emotions. Why bother if I can change my thoughts? Because sometimes, it’s not that simple. Learning to feel the emotion and allow it to be present is what needs to come before trying to change the thoughts that bring the hard feelings. Running from the emotion and being afraid to feel it, rushing to change it before allowing it to be almost guarantees that it will come back.

I’d been resisting taking the time to feel difficult emotions and discomfort for a few weeks since I learned that I needed to do it. Taking time to sit with discomfort – it was on my list, but it seemed to keep falling off. I kept telling myself that I didn’t have time for all that, it would take too long, I needed to just get over it and keep it moving. Sound familiar?

 

Hmmm….

 

Fortunately, I had a coaching session at 7 am, so I had to get up. When I got on the call, I asked the coach to help me with feeling the fear. She walked me through identifying the sensation in my body as I thought the fearful thoughts. She had me put descriptive words to the feeling in my body, and then I sat there for a few moments feeling what the fear felt like. After about one minute, she asked me to decide if I felt the same, worse or better. And even in that little bit of time, I felt better. Not done completely, but better. It was as if the resistance I had to feeling the painful feeling just made it more frightening and bigger than it was. Did I really need to get over it and move on? Was it true that I didn’t have time to feel my feelings? Apparently not.

 

Life brings challenges. There are lots of things that we face that are hard, and we aren’t going to feel good all the time, even when we manage our minds well. Buffering doesn’t work and running from our feeling also doesn’t work. The way forward is through – through the emotions, through the thoughts, through the discomfort. It’s a practice, but even one good experience with it lets me know that I can do it again. And maybe I won’t want to binge eat doughnuts next time something hard happens!

 

Do you have a way that you buffer? What keeps you from feeling the uncomfortable feelings? Please share in the comments below!