You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.
C.S. Lewis
I know “what ifs” aren’t healthy or helpful. I know they keep me stuck in painful spaces. But I’m human and I deal with them by the minute, hour and day. They range from the deep past to the recent, they focus on changing the outcome of what I did and didn’t do. But, I’m well aware I can’t change what I’ve done, well aware I can’t change the consequences or take away the pain I feel, the pain I caused others. It’s easy to look at a situation in hindsight, to dissect it and understand how and where things started to take a turn for the worse, and no matter how much I look at it, no matter how many places I identify where I could’ve made better or different choices, the fact remains that I didn’t and now I’m here.
What I can do, is use each of those moments to change future behaviors and avoid making the same mistakes twice or three times or more. I have replayed the last 8-9 months over and over, identifying points where things started getting bad or worse and how I responded. I see how grief and loss were piling up on me beginning with a series of fatal avalanche accidents in late January and early February involving a number of former students and some acquaintances, and a couple friends. I did my usual grief process, a few hours of public sadness, some drinking, some toasts and moved on, but I didn’t. One accident in particular hit particularly close to home, partly because it was close to home, partly because I had some connection to nearly all involved in both the accident and the recovery mission, and partly because it is the script from my primary nightmare. As I replay February and March, I see myself slowly slipping from 2-4 beers a day and maybe a bender a couple times a month, to getting drunk nightly, mostly by myself as I was on the road teaching. Drinking to numb, drinking to not feel, drinking myself to sleep.
So I’ve talked about a bunch of this stuff, but one of the processes in my therapy is not so much about changing or removing the trauma, it’s about reprogramming how my brain responds to it, identifying triggers so I can avoid the fight, flight or freeze response that has been my default in so many cases, to keep my brain out of the hyper aware state that leads to irrational decisions and actions.
So I keep replaying things, I keep running thru the what ifs, because I have a need to understand the triggers, I have a need to learn new responses and changed behaviors. If I hope to have any chance to repair the damage I’ve done, I have to show that I’ve changed my core behaviors, that I’ve learned new ways to manage this pain, that I can and will deal with future crisis in a healthy and productive manner. I have spent my life reacting, I am learning to take a deep breath, to assess the threat (real or imagined) and then respond appropriately.
I believe the end of this story hasn’t been written yet, and I have control over how my side gets written, and hopefully by rewriting it well, others will give me the chance to change how things end with them as well.
