Living Life Untangled

There are many things that can tangle us up in life. For many of us, it’s the way we grew up. For others, it is some specific event we remember vividly that still haunts us in our dreams. It can even be a pervasive feeling of anxiety or depression that feels like it’s always been with us. No matter the origins, it still makes us confused and tongue-tied, unable to find the words to explain how we feel and why we feel the way we do. It becomes a knot in our chest, a ball in our stomachs, that we have learned to push down and ignore in order to keep going. But when it’s quiet and we are not so busy, it creeps up into our conscious thoughts and won’t seem to go away…

So often, the way we needed to cope in a moment of crisis ends up becoming our default mode. The default mode for handling situations gets encoded in our brains and though this does not serve us anymore, we haven’t figured out other ways to deal with life stressors. Furthermore, we believe negative things about ourselves based on these events. These beliefs only solidify our default modes until the spiral becomes a web of tangles difficult to heal from, at least without help.

The truth is we all need help at times to process some of the things we have been avoiding. When the circumstances are too overwhelming to sift through alone, it is time to reach out. Proven scientific methods can aid in this process of delicately untangling our stories until we have a cohesive narrative that we understand for ourselves and can verbalize to others. We no longer have to live with fragments of ourselves we are afraid to encounter in the quiet moments but can process the past, focus on the present, and look forward to the future… and live life untangled.