SoCS: Therapeutic Hindsight on Being Alone

JoAnna

Jun 3

This week's prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is "left alone." Use it any way you'd like. Have fun!

There are times when I don't mind being left alone as long as I have the dog, cat, and birds singing outside. For a while, that is. Sometimes I wonder, being an introvert with sensitive and empathic traits, how long it would take me to feel lonely without human companionship. When David goes out of town, I'm okay for a couple days at least.

But after my first marriage ended in 2002, I felt lonely - even with two kids and two dogs in the house with me. This loneliness came from feeling rejected by my husband of twenty years. Feeling unwanted made me vulnerable enough to fall into the rebound from hell. That was twenty years ago. Isn't it weird how some memories can be so vivid - like they happened last week? Or last year?

It was shortly after the year long rebound from hell ended, when I was still dealing with some of mental and stress induced physical symptoms from that sick relationship, that I overheard a friend at church talking to some people about a party she was having. Though we had been good friends, she never talked to me about the party. If this happened today, I might go to her and say, nonchalantly, "So I hear your having a party...." I don't know, but if I wanted to go, I like to think I would mention it and give her the opportunity.... But I did not do that twenty years ago.

What I did do was schedule my first ever hypnotherapy session for the afternoon of my friend's party to work on those mental and physical symptoms, to work on ME. It was a good session. I think I might have cried during it. Two things that came up were my love for water and for dogs who had always been there with their unconditional love. After that, I swam more at the beach and pool and embraced walking the dogs. I kept working on me.

The week after the party, a close friend mentioned to me that she was sorry I wasn't able to make the party. I clearly remember my flat response, "I wasn't invited." My friend looked surprised and didn't know what to say. I remember feeling sad and rejected. After that, the friend who had the party announced all her big parties at church and said everyone was welcome. But that's not what's important here.

Yesterday, as I happened to drive by the house where my friend had the party, (she doesn't live there anymore) I remembered feeling rejected and unwanted by the lack of invitation twenty years ago. Then it hit me: Maybe I was being protected. I was pretty sure there was a guy at that party who had flirted with me a few weeks earlier. I might have wanted to date him, but I didn't get the opportunity. He later got back with his wife. What I'm getting at is that maybe my guardian angels were protecting me, knowing I needed to work on me and to Trust the Timing. That's what I'm going to believe, because everything eventually worked out for the best.

It is a gift to be able to go back and reframe things from our past in a more positive light or at least gain some new insight. It's like therapeutic hindsight. I'm thankful that my first marriage ended. Even though that ending was very painful, it eventually made room for something better.

The something better is my husband and first love David who found me again when the timing was perfect.

On Memorial Day, David went with me to the vegan potluck at the sanctuary where I volunteer. I forgot to take pictures of all the food but did remember to show the remnants of cooler corn cooked to perfection by pouring a large pot of boiling water over a full cooler of corn then leaving it closed for about 15 minutes.