Lori Jean Glass - #HealthyAdult: Pivot from Fantasy to Reality, Confusion to Clarity, Isolation to Connection

Here I sit, alone in this dark hotel room. Ive already taken the aspirinhow much, I dont know. The bottle of vodka is still in my hand, but Im already drunk. How can a person feel this much pain and be so disconnected all at once? I am not in my body, am I?

Life outside swirls around as it always has. Why am I in this town? Oh yes, the hair showLOral. Im really good at my job. Does that matter at all now?

Does anything matter? My sons, my boys! They need to know its not their fault. They need to know I love them. Someone needs to tell them.

The events of March 2, 1997, seemed to happen to me as in a trance. I moved from one step to the next until I was there, stomach full of pills, waiting to die. It wasnt until guilt hit my consciousness that I had the thought to call someone. And that was what I did.

My supervisors at work had no idea how bad things were. All they knew was that something was wrong with me. They didnt want to get rid of me, so they invited me to get some outside help.

At their request, I paid a therapist to tell her what I thought she wanted to hear. I wasnt in touch with my feelings when I went to see her, as many people arent. So I wasnt benefiting from the therapeutic process, as many people dont. But calling her from the hotel room that night, I felt there was no longer any point in hiding.

In those days, I didnt have access to Wi - Fi or texting. All I had was the number of an office landline. It was almost nine oclock at night in Chicago when I called, and seven oclock where my therapist was in California. She just happened to be back at the office to pick something up before heading out to dinner. Our paths crossed that night in a miraculous way. I dont know what would have happened had she not picked up the phone.

By the time we spoke, I was a total mess. I told her I couldnt go on. I dont know how to be a mom, I let out through shallow breath. I dont know how to be a wife. I dont know how to show up. I dont know what to do with the pain thats inside me.

I was drunk but coherent enough to ask her to pass along a message to my boys. I wanted them to know how much I loved them and that this wasnt about them. It was in that moment that my therapist saved my life with a single sentence. Without pause, she said, If you kill yourself, youll leave your boys with what your mother left you.

Despite the state I was in, I felt the full weight of what she was saying to me. I sat still for a moment, unable to think. Well, what do I do? I finally asked her.

Understanding the situation, she kept her words brief. Youre going to have to come back and start by not drinking, she said. Right now, you need to go make yourself throw up. I hadnt told her about the pills, but she knew I was drunk.

When she told me I needed to throw up, reality hit me once again. All I knew was that I needed to follow her instructions. I was fairly successful in throwing up the pills and plopped myself down on the bed. I felt horrible, but I was still alivealive enough to walk into my first support group the next day.

Now looking back, I know what was happening. My pain - body , a term Eckhart Tolle refers to in his book A New Earth , was getting activated. I describe the event as a pain - body attack. Tolle defines the pain - body this way:

It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain. It comes together with other energy forms from other instances, and so after some years you have a pain - body , an energy entity consisting of old emotion.

On the trip, I had called home to talk to my husband. He told me he was done with our marriage because of my actionsthe alcoholism, the impulsive shopping, the constant need for positive regard outside of my marriage, all of it. When I heard those words, I didnt know what to do. I felt completely devastated. My abandonment had been activated big time, and I literally felt like I couldnt breathe.

At the time, I was working and seemingly successful. My husband was building his real estate business, and everything seemed to be going well. Behind the scenes, however, I felt lost and alone. Even though I had a family, this old wound of abandonment that lived inside of me daily made me feel like I didnt belong. Our two small children were being raised by a nanny. Our marriage lacked intimacy, and I didnt know how to fix it.

My husband and I had both suffered a great deal of trauma in our early lives, but I never connected my past experiences to our current relational patterns. I couldnt connect the dots and see the ways the deep wounds remained present in our lives. I felt them every day, but I had no understanding of the weight they carried in every relational decision I made. There were no podcasts or internet sites helping anyone understand how to crawl out from underneath a heaping pile of shame. I paid a therapist to listen, but I could not speak.

Without real understanding of what was happening within me, I kept making the wrong choices. I was acting out in multiple ways, and I would use anything I could in an attempt to manage and tolerate my feelings. I couldnt feel anything but the painthe constant ache of unmet longing.