Survive - Abandoned & Rejected: Alone

TO SURVIVE Rejection and Abandonment - Alone The Situation & The Questions I’m in my late forties; I have no job, no work, no income. I’m alone (my father used to say that this was the saddest word in the English language). My wife suddenly left me for another man, after 21 years of marriage, and our two children live with her/them. I can’t find a partner and have no girlfriends – is there something wrong with me? Am I attractive to women? I have had numerous meetings, and have sent my CV to a number of supposedly interested work or contract prospects, but I receive no replies after months and months of waiting – why is the market not interested in me? Will I ever find work? What must I do, where should I go to try and bump into or socialise with women so that I may possibly one day meet someone? Should I take the step of getting involved with “forced” dating via the Internet or clubs etc.? Am I approaching the wrong market to find work? Do I need to move to another town, Johannesburg, move to another country, I’m sure I could find work in London? I know what I really want to do in life, or at least I’m pretty certain that I do, but – I can’t go ahead and just do this because: • • •

I need to be here/around for the sake of my daughters, they need my support and presence. I need to earn some income first to establish a sound financial base and make sure all my basic expenses are covered. I need to be settled and comfortable and not have any issues, which will happen when I start earning a steady income, before women will find me attractive, that’s why I can’t find someone, I’m sending out the wrong signals.

I don’t really enjoy the type of work that I’ve been doing for the past who knows how many years but, it’s what I know best and it will be the quickest and easiest way for me to find work again and earn that income that I so desperately need. I have to remain positive all the time and be confident – there is a “master plan” out there for me and if I’m patient something will just come along at the right time. But, I’m lonely and depressed and very worried about the lack of income and every cent that I spend worries me because it’s eating into my savings. And, this situation has been going on for months and months now and I see no change and I don’t see an end to it. I have no purpose in life, I have no reason to get out of bed in the morning, I have nothing to look forward to in the day, I have no love in my life, I’m struggling to find a reason for my continued existence – what is the point of living?

DIRECTION INTRODUCTION The questions and situations described above require a whole host of answers. Everyone’s situation, however, is different whether from the point of view of the difficulties which face us or as a result of our upbringing; beliefs, community, environment, desires etc. So it is neither possible nor suitable to take one, or any, of the situations that I have faced and to either try to provide the “answer,” which certainly won’t be relevant to everyone else, or to try and map out the set of steps that I followed which helped me find some direction. So what I will be doing is to discuss these situations and difficulties at a slightly higher, principle level, although not too high so that they lose their relevance to you and your situation. Rest assured, the situation and questions that I posed at the beginning are very real; I faced every single one of them and I suspect that I face a greater difficulty in not slipping down too much into the details of my own troubles rather than in ensuring that I do not make light of your troubles through generalisations. Any discussion of how a human being, and the human mind, should deal with personal conflict and trauma is a difficult one and has many dangers. Countless books have been written by countless people far more qualified than I to speak on the subject.

I am not attempting to preach as if a psychologist or an expert in the field of the human mind. I am merely recounting the experiences that I have suffered, and the ways and means that I was able to use to help me get through them; endure my sufferings, come out the other side into the light, and to progress forward into a wonderful and beautiful world, filled with some incredible and amazing people – and to be at peace within this world, and with myself. It will be necessary for me to use my own situation from time to time in order to better explain the solution or direction that is available to you. So where do we start? STEP 1 This is quite difficult. I do have a pretty good idea of where we should start but in many cases this will not be what you want to hear, and it will also not be helpful to you in your current state. We live in a physical and materialistic world. This to the vast

majority of us is the reality in which we exist and operate. When trouble strikes, and it has struck hard right now, we can only see and think about, and we need, this physical and material reality to be “fixed.” So for me to make the statement that it is your state of mind, or your mind, that needs to be “fixed” first is less than useless to you. This subject can only be considered, and thus discussed in all it many twists, turns and guises, once the initial period of “healing” has occurred, and discuss it I will in great detail in a later part of this course.

Similar to the business environment where all too many people are looking to make a “quick buck” by doing the minimum amount of work, when faced with great difficulties and trauma people look for the quickest possible solution. The purpose of my course is to provide people with the direction which will enable them to take a holistic view of themselves and Life, to see and understand what has gone before, accept this, change what requires to be changed, and to recognise the good in themselves and build on this – all of this takes time!! Although help will be provided to assist in overcoming immediate, insurmountable, emotional hurdles, I do not aim to provide quick fixes. It is my experience that this leads to shallow relationships and a revisit of the same path in Life which led to the initial traumatic experience that we are currently facing. A last comment, for now, and an example, on the question of the mind and its importance to start the holistic healing process. Let’s consider the scenario where your entire body is full of aches and pains; you have “the flu,” headache, sinuses are blocked, runny nose, sore throat, all your joints ache, you have diarrhoea, stomach cramps, no energy and, and, and….. So where on earth would one start to fix all this lot? You could really start anywhere you liked but without one very important piece in place, pretty much all efforts targeted at any of these ills will have little to no effect. It is quite important to believe that one day you will actually get better and that the host of pills and medicines that your doctor has prescribed for you will do their work and will succeed in making you better. Or, if like me, you are the type that prefers not to take anti-biotics and the variety of other drugs that are prescribed, and you would rather get through it on your own by staying warm, staying in bed, getting more sleep, building up your resistance again etc. then in both cases, strange as it may seem, even though you will be sitting back and doing nothing, you still have to believe that either the pills or your own remedy will work. We’ve all heard of the placebo effect, and I’m sure have heard many examples of how this has worked for

people. The same really applies to the real drugs that are prescribed, and your own remedy. The power of the mind is enormous and not given due credit by most of us; it is possible to believe that the prescribed drugs will not make you better, or you’re your own remedy won’t work – and they won’t. In other words, the area of the body that needs to be “fixed” first, and most importantly, is the mind, in the example above and with respect to the trauma that we face in our life. But, as stated before, that is not terribly helpful when we have a real life, physical and/or material situation in the forefront of our minds which is causing us immense distress; the mind can only think of this one thing at the moment and the possibility of putting these thoughts aside so as to think at a deeper and broader level does not exist. So let us deal with this single mindedness and distress. Consider the following poem:

I have stumbled through the wastelands of Destruction, Spiralled downwards into the bottomless pit of Depression, Drunk long and hard from the oceans of Despair. The armies of Desolation, ever vigilant, they never sleep. Happiness an unattainable goal and beyond conceiving. But Hope, what is the bridge to this at least. Time, is she my enemy or my friend. Wherefrom the Healing. Maybe then …… but now ?! This was written by a person in an acute state of distress. If any of you would like the precise details of my state of mind at the time that I wrote this poem I am more than willing to share this with you. I will not describe it here for two reasons: firstly, it is your troubles that are of importance now, not mine, and listening to me describe mine would both annoy you and switch your mind off. Secondly, it is not possible to describe the depths of despair that I was in at the time; weeks and weeks of sleepless nights with my mind unable to think of anything else. It is because I have been there and I know what you are going through that I can say:

When faced with a trauma of this magnitude in your life, there are only three things that can help you get through it: 1. Family; 2. Friends; and 3. Time. It is not possible to even consider the future, your mind cannot see beyond the obstacle that is blocking its path at the moment. You cannot see how you will ever be able to rid your mind of these thoughts. How will you get through it, how long will it

take – you have no idea. You don’t know which way to turn; you simply want those thoughts to disappear. There are actually quite a number of options available to you to try and overcome this situation, some of these are in my view extremely negative one’s, but admittedly they come to mind quite easily and are often taken by many people because let’s face it, you couldn’t be in a more negative frame of mind at the moment. Some of the more obvious one’s are: •

• •

You can deaden your mind through either alcohol or drugs. The worst period of the day to get through is obviously the nighttime when you are alone. It was often suggested to me that I take sleeping tablets to help me sleep. You can hit the town and lead a life of “wine, women and song” like nothing you ever did whilst you were a bachelor in your younger years. Since the trauma is so great it is quite likely that you will consider ending your life.

Other options, the more positive one’s, are far harder to accept and to put into action. It is another quirk of this life that we lead that the good things are harder to do; it’s far easier to be bad. These negative solutions are of the quick fix type that I mentioned earlier. Let me provide an example: say your spouse has just dumped you after being together for 25 years. This was sudden, you had no idea, it came to you out of the blue. Naturally you are devastated, your self-confidence has been rocked, there’s something wrong with you. What are you going to do now, you’re on your own and you’re no longer a youngster. You could now hit the clubs and pubs with the sole purpose of finding a partner. To be simplistic let’s say that there are only two types of partner that you will find: one that will sleep with you either immediately or fairly soon – and that’s pretty much all there is to the relationship. The second being the one that, although you may well have slept together fairly soon, you strike up a relationship with and possibly even marry. Naturally it may take a number of the second type of relationships before you marry again, or not. There’s one major factor missing in this example that I’ve just posed – nowhere has there been any mention of analysis of both the situation that existed when your spouse dumped you after 25 years, and self analysis. This may sound a bit scary to some, or even a bit off i.e. it sound like we’re talking about the possibility of a couch session with a psychiatrist. Not necessarily exactly like that but something along those lines definitely needs to happen. I remember only too well one of my good friends trying to give me this message in the early days right after I’d fallen off the cliff. What he said was something like: “you’ll feel better, or it will be better, once

you’ve given it some thought because you’re also to blame for the break up, both sides cause a marriage to break up.” Now when you’ve just been dumped for another man totally out of the blue after being with a woman for 25 years this is not what you want to hear. It took me a long, long time to realise what my friend was actually trying to tell me – I had to analyse what type of person I had been at the time that I was dumped, and therefore what my contribution was to my spouse being unhappy with me and our marriage, and being willing to dump me without even considering the possibility of making it work. Getting back to the example, if we don’t do this type of analysis then there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for our next relationship, and our next one to fail in exactly the same way. We have taken the easy, quick fix solution and moved very quickly into another relationship, in which I’m sure you are very happy. But, how certain are you that this one will be a long term relationship, or for good, what have you done or changed to ensure that you will not make the same mistakes again. Your family and friends are there for you. Some of them may be distant, in another country but every single little piece of communication from them helps. You will be amazed at how many friends you do have, people who you considered distant are now showing incredibly true friendship. The friend who tells you that you can phone him any time of the night or early morning and he will meet you anywhere with a flask of coffee for you to have a chat. The friend overseas who sends e-mail messages and sms messages every day. The family who make sure they’re there for you, they offer advice, they help with the daily chores that need to be done because you are incapable of even thinking about them let alone doing them. The friends who gather to meet you and have a drink with you. All of these examples have a golden thread through them – all of these people know that you need to talk. Every single one of them is on your side, they listen to your story, shake their heads in amazement at your plight, offer condolences, ask you what you’re going to do now, and some of them will offer some form of advice. They know that your self-confidence is non-existent and they will try and help you build it up. Many of these family and friends have either been through a similar traumatic experience in life or know someone who has. They will give you names and phone numbers of people who can help you. If your personal experience is an extremely difficult one then you do need to seek professional help, a person who will listen to you, someone that you can talk to at length about everything, someone who will not be judging you because they know your past and all the people in your life, and someone who knows exactly what state of mind you’re in and knows when to offer what advice to assist you through your days, weeks and months ahead. It is through the tremendous assistance that you receive from a professional, and here I am talking about a psychologist (I have it on good authority that the only

difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist is that the former may prescribe drugs to you, the latter not), that the analysis of your traumatic experience and yourself will take place. It is not guaranteed that through the advice and support of family and friends that you will necessarily do this analysis, and then the danger exists that you might one day have to endure a repeat to some degree or another. Another benefit, which might seem a bit wacky to my male counterparts; below I have described very briefly some of the aspects of the professional help that I had. At every single session, without exception, I cried my eyes out. This is a benefit which again may not occur with family and friends.

A family member suggested to me that I go and see a psychologist. I had visions of a session lying on a couch. I felt embarrassed, my friends will now know that I’m no longer capable of supporting myself and I need help. Because I was like a feather in the wind at the time and ready to accept any advice that was given me, I went. My first session I hated – dingy little room, no couch thankfully but just two chairs and a desk in the room, he was very unfriendly, not one word of compassion, I didn’t even like the way he looked. I agreed to go again. I went many, many times. He is the greatest listener I have ever met. He had the knack of saying just one sentence at the end of my almost hour long dialogue, without a single interruption, which was an “ahaa” experience for me every time. I understood what was happening, my situation, myself, I regained my confidence ………. and much more. It is the combination of everything that I have said above which will provide you with the direction to take the first steps to recovery. At this stage you can be regarded in exactly the same light as a shark attack victim. The first and most crucial aspect to be dealt with is to treat the victim for shock. Many, if not most, victims that die from non-fatal shark attacks do so as a result of shock. At this stage of your situation you face the same danger, not necessarily to the extreme that you might die, although unfortunately and unnecessarily some do, but more from the aspect of the need to treat the victim, you, for shock and to get you past this stage. Go out and meet and talk to and listen to all the family and friends and professional help that is offered to you. This takes time plus the more you talk about it, and the more similar stories that are told to you by just about everyone that you meet, and have no doubt, they will tell you them, and the more well-meaning, although at times possibly not that appropriate from a timing point of view, advice that is offered to you, the softer and more understandable becomes the pain – and you get through the shock of it all. Remember the advice that is given to you even if you think it to be inappropriate at the time. It probably is, and has probably been offered by some well-meaning soul who genuinely wishes to help you, and their advice is good, but not during the shock phase that you are in.

To each his own, and if you find some of the activities that I earlier branded as being negative useful to you in the form of distractions which will help you get through this shock period, particularly the quiet times, the night times, then so be it. But, these are just that – distractions – and they will not provide any healing or understanding, but merely supply a cover up, a black spot on the core of your being. It is crucial that these be regarded as only gap fillers around the other activities that I have mentioned.

Do not think, once you have made it through the initial shock period, that you are cured or that you are “over it.” You are NOT, you have merely survived the attack, and now starts the much more lengthy process of healing!!!! STEP 2 In the first section of this course I spoke about getting through the shock of it all and how your family, friends and time are all that you have, apart from the distractions that are out there, to get you through it. Many friends will gather and come to your aid, even if only to lend and ear or to offer a few words of support, friends that you didn’t even know were your friends.

I will never forget the day – I play hockey with a bunch of friends who have played together for nearly 10 years now, a closed team. My “shark attack” happened shortly before the end of the season and our team’s end-of-season supper evening with wives and children where we take over half the restaurant. I was a broken man at the time and obviously did not have anyone with me at the supper. For at least 85% of the evening my team, my friends, did not sit at the tables with their wives and children, and did not order food from the menu. They stood around me, put some bar stools in the middle and ordered a few pizzas, and many beers, and spent the evening around me. I will never forget. The reason that I have shared this story with you is to prepare you for what will happen pretty soon into step 2. You have now survived the shock of your own particular “attack” and you’re ready to move on. In exactly the same way that all your friends could see that you were broken and in shock and they gathered around you to come to your rescue – equally quickly they will see that you are over the shock, that you are ready to stand on your own two feet and to face life again, and equally quickly they will fade back to their normal, probably quite distant, positions as friends in your life (which in Cape Town means that you will very seldom hear from them let alone see them). If you thought that step 1 was difficult then prepare yourself, because step 2 is far more difficult for at least two major reasons. The life-savers who hauled you out of

the water, made sure that you were alive, made sure that you survived the shock of the attack and will continue to live have now gone back to their posts to sit and wait for the next victim who needs their help. You are on your own now (naturally there will probably be one or two family members and maybe the odd friend around for some time still, but I think you understand my point). Having overcome the shock, your mind is no longer frozen in one place and on one thought, it is now free and roaming and thinking.