Emotional Eddies: How I Got Unstuck
When I moved to the southwest, this gorgeous drought riddled landscape, something I noticed right away was people’s obsession with water – swimming holes, creeks, rivers – and the various ways to measure them. Flow, snowpack, and precipitation are commonly discussed at excruciating length. What’s the Verde running today? Remains a common greeting.
I soon fell in with a group of people who call themselves river runners, many of whom lead people down the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, the rest have day jobs and stash away time and money to get back on white water a week or two out of the year.
My first river trip I got to go on was a guide training trip. I was not a guide in training, but a reporter so I had the much easier job of observing and doing lots of dishes.
I remember one afternoon standing on a rock letting my damp clothes dry in the sun after a particularly wet morning crashing through a roller coaster of rapids. I was watching a young guide at the bottom of a rapid. She’d miraculously made it through Crystal Rapid – a harrowing feat for most experienced guides –rightside up with a guide mentor at the back of the boat. As they high fived, everyone else rowed into our lunch spot. But she soon realized she had inadvertently got her boat caught in a whirlpool. No matter how hard she rowed – and the unlucky thing was pushing and pulling with all her might, tears springing from her eyes – she just kept spinning in place.
I stood mouth agape perplexed by the phenomenon. That’s when I heard mumblings of a word I hadn’t heard before – eddy. “She got herself caught in an eddy.” “Damn, eddies,” people around me were saying, as if she’d just stepped in dog shit.
The guide standing next to me explained that an eddy was a spot in the river immediately downstream of a rock, where the water seeks to backfill the lower pressure area behind the obstacle creating a pocket of upstream current – or a mini whirlpool.
This whole scene played out in my mind yesterday when it was pointed out to me by my beloved therapist that I was stuck in an emotional eddy.
You see, over the last five months I’ve been learning how to walk again. On Easter Sunday I stepped on a sheet of ice, lost my balance, and felt a pop. That pop was my leg breaking.
Two plates, seven screws, a frighteningly early osteoporosis diagnosis, and countless hours of physical therapy later and I am finally, blessedly walking without a limp (most of the time) pain free.
Physically I worked my way back to healed, but my bone mass is still at osteoporosis levels, so emotionally I was still spinning. Since I got my bone scan results I had been feeling broken, fragile and weak. I literally imagined my bones were hollow like a bird’s.
So yesterday when my therapist asked how strong I felt, I told her I was feeling a bit stronger. I was able to walk around the neighborhood without a limp, to stay on my feet without my ankle ballooning. But she hadn’t meant physically.
It was at that moment she put down her tea and decided to let me in on her process. She told me y’know sometimes we as therapists want you to arrive at the conclusion yourself, and sometimes we’re just going to let you know explicitly what our hope is for you.
She said, this is one of those times where I’m going to let you in on what I’m thinking. “Saying you are strong has nothing to do with your physical body or your feeling of wholeness. It has nothing to do with your bone scan or whether you walk with crutches for the rest of your life or run a marathon every year. It’s about the way you show up, or rise above it, Laurel. You are putting so much intention and fight into healing. That is your strength.”
In other words, the pain I sometimes experience is more about the hurricane of stories I step into and tell myself over and over. I suffer because of how I view myself – weak, hollow, broken. And I can choose to step out of it and believe I AM strong.
Back to the young river guide stuck in the eddy. She eventually found her breath, calmed down, and listened to her mentor guide her out. I still don’t quite understand how. I think it has something to do with angle and speed. All I know is she had to still something inside herself first, then skillfully manage her way out of the spin.
