Change Is Messy, Uncomfortable, And Sometimes Traumatic
Some of the best things that ever happened to me came out of some of the worst
Some of the best things that ever happened to me started off by looking like catastrophes. My autistic son’s school aid — the only one we’d been able to keep for more than 6 months at a time — announced she wasn’t coming back the next year. The woman who had been my mentor — and the leader of my entire emotional support community — revealed herself to be an unstable narcissist and I had to walk away. Both of these things turned out not just OK, but spectacularly well — much better than I ever could have dreamed of if I had chosen a positive outcome for myself.
We often have the idea that positive change will take place in a way that feels good. It will clear away the clouds and pour down sunshine and the thing that needed to be healed or fixed will manifest in a golden halo of joy. The problem is, that’s not how life actually works. Just ask a butterfly. In order for a caterpillar to be transformed, it first has to be destroyed in its present form in a process that is both violent and unpleasant.
Inside the cocoon the caterpillar changes into a pupa. In a process called histolysis, the caterpillar digests itself from the inside out, causing its body to die. During this partial death, some of the caterpillar’s old tissues are salvaged to form new. This remnant of cells are called the histoblasts and are used to create a new body. Using its digestive juices, the caterpillar turns his old larval body into food which he uses to rebuild its new body.
This is why so few people actually undertake personal growth or significant change or even take a hard look at themselves. It’s difficult work and it’s not for the faint of heart. Much easier to remain complacent even if it means accepting a life that doesn’t really work for them. Change is a struggle, and it often takes you into a more difficult place before it brings you into an easier, better one. As a life coach, I have prospective clients back out on a regular basis, because although they want to have a better life, they aren’t always ready to do what it takes to get there. That’s OK. I really only want to work with those who are ready to make the commitment to something better and are willing to put in the effort. The others can come back another time when they are ready... or not.
We think that healing or moving forward in some way will look like meditating peacefully, when in truth, it will look like unpacking trauma, taking radical responsibility for yourself, setting new boundaries, and having challenging conversations. It will take extensive excavation of your bullshit and the stories that you tell yourself about why things are the way they are. Only after digesting yourself from the inside out like a caterpillar will you be able to create something new and turn the disgusting pile of goo that used to be your life into something beautiful with wings.
The loss of the school aid forced us to take our son out of the public school he’d been in for 5 years, an arts-based charter school that we loved, but that in truth wasn’t really a perfect fit, and find something that worked better. He started going to a learning center that was specifically for kids on the spectrum and started getting some of the educational support that he hadn’t had before, despite their best intentions in the public school. For the first time, he made real friends and was in a place where he was completely accepted and at ease.
The public school had always been kind to him, and he never faced bullying or anything negative there, but it still wasn’t really meeting all of his needs. The new school was a much better fit, and it was a huge blessing that we were forced to seriously consider it and to think in a different way about what we imagined his school experience should be. We had made assumptions about the learning center that were incorrect and so we hadn’t even really considered it in the past until we had to. Thank goodness the aid quit or we probably never would have.
The woman who introduced me to life coaching and set me on the path to finding my way to real healing was herself kind of a fraud and a hypocrite, but initially, I didn’t know that. Despite that, Janice helped me a lot before the ways that she was assisting me to grow finally did come back to bite her in the ass. I eventually got to the place where I knew and trusted myself well enough to be able to see a lot of her flaws that I had been previously blind to. After an incident that completely shocked me, I abruptly cut all connection with her, someone I had trusted with the most personal and intimate parts of my life. Ultimately, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me, but at the time it was pretty traumatic. I felt completely blindsided and betrayed, and instead of being a part of a supportive community, I was suddenly on my own.
After I finally realized how manipulative Janice was, it was like being a baby bird who has been pushed out of the nest. The good thing was that I discovered that I actually could fly. I spent a couple of days being hurt and really just sort of devastated because when I left her, I also left behind my entire community as well. The rug had been ripped out from under that part of my life, but what I realized after a few days of mourning was that it also left me with a clean slate on which I could create whatever I wanted to. That was a place of power and freedom that I had never experienced before.
I found someone else to assist me in my personal growth journey, someone who had also been manipulated by Janice who could really understand. She helped me get through that tough time and learn how to make my own way without leaning on a teacher (a coach isn’t supposed to be a teacher anyway). I had given too much of my power away to Janice and so I learned the hard way not to do that again.
I also went from someone who was lost and searching, unsure about how to cope with a lot of the things that were happening in my life, including how to raise an autistic child with a lot of challenging behaviors, to someone who was confident and on her way towards creating the kind of life that she wanted to be living. Things weren’t perfect, but at least I was firmly in the driver’s seat of my life for the first time.
That was definitely one of the best things that ever happened to me after I got through the disruption and sadness of feeling betrayed and excommunicated from my community. It was horrible at the time, but it led me to a place of much greater belief in my self. I stopped looking outside myself for answers and got better at finding them within with the help of the woman who helped me pick up the pieces of all of this. She went from being my new coach — one who actually coaches as you are supposed to by facilitating my best thinking and not by telling me what to do — to being one of my very best friends.
Through this process, I realized that I actually wanted to be a life coach as well, and I took a lot of what had happened to me with Janice as a lesson in how I did not want to be with my own clients. After I completed my training, my former coach and now friend and I shared an office for many years. If all had gone well with Janice, I never would have met her, and I never would have never learned to believe in myself in the way that I do now because I would have kept going along in a hierarchical and co-dependent relationship with Janice.
These are only two examples, but I’ve actually had this happen to me time and again, where something that initially looked like a terrible thing turned out to actually be for my benefit. Maybe not ever catastrophe has a silver lining but as I’ve gotten more in the habit of asking myself, “What is this for?” I can always find some opportunity in any circumstance, and that gives me some measure of control.
I’m well aware that the road to wholeness and greater peace is not going to be an easy or even a gentle one. Old structures have to get ripped down and old ways of thinking have to be deconstructed in order to make room for something new. This can be ugly and even traumatic at times, but it does seem to be the way of things, so I accept it, both in my own life and on a larger scale. Understanding that this is quite often the process helps me to survive the difficult parts and to begin looking for the new possibilities that very well may arise out of the rubble.
