How do we recover from a gut punch?
You know— something that happens to us unexpectedly, that seriously and negatively impacts our stability, maybe even our safety?
Because there are all kinds of gut punches that are gonna hit us in the course of our recovery.
We have to have some strategy for dealing with gut punches that isn’t based on denial— but which also isn’t “just forget about recovery.”
That is to say: we need to find a way to continue working our trauma or addiction recovery, even if we get hit with a gut punch.
First thing’s first: when we get hit with a gut punch, we need to acknowledge we’ve been hit.
We need to acknowledge exactly how much it hurts.
We need to give ourselves permission to be impacted, to take a step back, and admit that the thing that just happened— the gut punch— maybe knocked the wind out of us for a moment.
Many of our difficulties coping stem from us not wanting to admit we’ve been hurt.
Many of us grew up conditioned to hide our pain. To never let anyone see that what they did affected us at all, let alone hurt us.
Here’s the thing, though: we can’t realistically cope with or process pain that we’re not acknowledging.
We can deny we’re hurt and pretend we’re fine, or we can realistically try to manage the pain— but we can’t do both at the same time.
There’s actually nothing “weak” or “wrong” about admitting we’ve been impacted by a gut punch.
The world might mock us for copping to our pain or vulnerability— but the world’s mockery isn’t actually something we need care all that much about. What we DO need to care about is coping with and processing this pain, so we can get back on track.
Certain gut punches may seem to us to be so impactful that there IS no coping with them— they knock the wind out of us so throughly that we actually believe, in the moment, that the punch might actually kill us.
There are definitely moments when we cannot imagine going on after being hit with certain gut punches.
When that happens, it’s real important we not make permanent decisions based on moments of intense pain.
The truth is, when we get hit with a gut punch, we don’t know how debilitating it’s going to be in the long term.
We know how much pain we’re in right now, and we know what other gut punches in the past have done to us— but we don’t know how long it’s going to take us to get back on our feet, how long it’s going to take us to get back our wind back, after THIS gut punch.
As with all things in trauma recovery, what we want to is to bring it all back to this moment. This one, right here.
(This is really hard, by the way, when we’re reeling and hurting from a gut punch.)
We don’t need to deny or disown the pain.
We don’t need to shame ourselves for hurting or staggering or being vulnerable to this pain or this attack.
And we don’t need to throw our trauma or addiction recovery out the window because we’ve been hit with a gut punch that hurts.
The pain is real.
But our recovery is more important than the pain of any gut punch.
And the tools we’ve developed to work our recovery— self talk, mental focus, and body and breathing use— are going to be absolutely essential to coping with, processing, and recovering from the pain of this gut punch.
Gut punches hurt. There’s no need to deny this.
There’s also no need to sacrifice our recovery because something awful and unexpected happened.
Breathe; blink; focus.
Use Your Damn Skills 