Because Giving Up Isn’t An Option

Written by: Melanie Groves; Metamorphosis Healing

Overwhelm. I close my eyes and I allow that feeling to wash over me. It’s not hard to come up with a distant time in my life or even recently when a moment of heightened emotions laced with feelings of helplessness has created that feeling of overwhelm in my body. You know the feeling. The emotional $#*!storm that washes over you, like the wave you didn’t see coming at the beach that knocks you over and knocks the wind out of you. And then when you try and stand up, sputtering, it nails you again. Yup, that’s how I feel overwhelm.

Like many times before, this week’s blog topic lines up perfectly with the overwhelm storm that washed through my home this week and sent adults and kiddos alike head over heels in the waves of holy moly, except I really want to say something other than moly.

We had another seizure this week. I say “we”, because even though it’s my son who suffers the physical manifestation of the seizures, we all get rocked by them.

We’ve just recently procured a super high CBD oil. One that doubles the previous dose we had for him for seizure control. We had such high hopes. Like every new therapy, we were convinced of its efficacy. I even Huna healed that bottle of amber liquid. Oh yes, I went there. And while we had a couple of blips last month with the fun circus that comes with weaning off one strain and onto a new one, we really wanted to get to that stable new normal through this new product. Ideally no seizures at all. That is the ultimate goal. That goal, my friends, is the reason I discovered and now practice Huna energy healing. That goal is the reason I fell into and now practice EFT tapping. And yep, you guessed it, is the reason that I also am looking to be certified in NLP by the end of summer. Learning new things empowers me. Empowers our whole family. Gives us new ways to cope and ride the waves of overwhelm when they hit.

A seizure hits. Here’s how it rolls. Son stands up, pupils huge, face pale and hyperventilating. 8-year-old kid brother runs for the towel in case the seizure ends in vomiting. Husband clears a safe place to lay him down “in case”, and me and the kid get into the boxing ring with that seizure. We’ve stopped some seizures dead in their tracks. We have. It involves unwavering eye contact. It involves physical touch. My hand placed on his heart and his hand on mine, and me coaching him to tune into my calm heart. It involves deep breathing to relax the body. Lately, because I came across tapping, it involves tapping the meridian points to relax the body enough, and distract it enough to cut the hyper-reaction of the amygdala and decrease the stress hormones flowing. This week I go into that mode, we all do, like robots. The seizure hits. We power through the seizure with our assigned roles. We’ve gotten quite good at playing our roles and then getting up after the post-seizure sleep as though it was all a well-rehearsed and planned safety moment and we go back to life as usual. The thing is, on the outside looking in and even as I describe it, there is a surgical precision to which we all play our parts in this recurring scenario.  The seizure came, we couldn’t stop this one and then the “sleep off” happens for my son. My husband carries him to bed, covers him with a blanket and we cocoon him with pillows.

It sucks. And it’s overwhelming. The rest of us return to our interrupted dinner. I’ve lost my appetite. Overwhelm hitting us each in our own way. Thankfully, it’s as though we each take turns reeling from the after-effects. Here’s the gist of our reactions:

• Kid perspective: Once he wakes up, “Why do I have these? My life is not fair. I hate this ‘gift’ God gave me. I wish God would take it back.”
• Younger brother perspective: “I hate it when he has seizures. It sucks. Will I ever get them?” Sometimes his sleep right after his older brother has a seizure is fraught with screaming nightmares on how he has to save his brother. He’s 8. He’s the younger brother. Too much on his little shoulders.
• Dad perspective: Frustrated, seething. “It’s bullbleep. When does it end? How can I protect him?”
• My perspective: Frig! (Except I don’t say Frig), I totally forgot that we had just used an NLP technique of anchoring on him. I let him down. I didn’t trigger the calming point before jumping into the tapping. I am angry, I am tired, I am once again feeling “less than” as a parent, as a healing practitioner. Which, as I write, having a few days buffer between us and the seizure, I can thankfully say and realize is an absolute BS thought but I can also assure you that in that post-seizure moment those are the very intense feelings that whir around. The demons that surface to make me question my value.

So how do we as a family navigate the overwhelm that comes with this? We talk. We talk about it a lot as a family. We express our emotions. We allow all the emotions. Without judgement. We allow them to be there because stuffing them down makes the next overwhelm worse. We scream into pillows. We beat up those pillows with as much force as our fists can muster. We now tap on it. We do energy healings on it. We write feelings down on paper and burn them. Whatever we are inspired to do to validate and then let it go, we do.

Should I have seen it coming this week? Maybe. I wasn’t in flow. Vacation week meant my morning routine was off. I didn’t meditate and yes, in the moment, I forgot the new NLP technique of anchoring that we had just 2 days earlier practiced. The lack of meditating wasn’t the reason for the seizure of course, but the intensity of the overwhelm that came up was. I was less anchored, less grounded, and therefore less able to raise my head above the tumultuous tempest of the seizure and feelings. I admittedly went to bed wallowing a bit, begrudging the I don’t know which number seizure that was. I was so grateful for bed and for the sleep that I knew would help restore and re-balance my off-kilter spirit. You can be sure that I meditated before drifting off to sleep.

Beautifully, with the rising sun of the new day, so came the new perspective. Or the less altered and less overwhelmed perspective. My sons both woke up like nothing had happened as did my husband. Full of hugs and kisses. As I sipped my coffee, the first message I got was from a client who was so appreciative of the changes seen in their child after a healing they had just received. Validation.

Giving up is not an option. So we learn together. We fumble in the dark together. We hold hands. We cry and we laugh and we talk it through. We do use Huna energy healing to clear the stuck emotions. We now also use EFT Tapping. Well half of us do. And we respect those choices and free will we each have on what we feel comfortable with and what resonates with us for our healing. Each learning, each milestone of stopping seizures or them being more spaced apart or them hitting and us finding a new trick to get us through is a reason for us to celebrate. It is also like an extra life preserver that we hang on to dearly when the overwhelm hits and helps us cushion the blow and keep us safe as we hold hands and ride this wave of life.

Breathe in, and breathe out. We got this.