What about ongoing stressors?

I have been getting better for the last couple of years with the help of this site and Curable, but recently I’ve had a major setback. My husband has been self-employed for most of our married life and it was always a feast or famine situation for us. But two years ago a local technical college called him and wanted him to come adjunct teach, promising him that they were working on hiring him full time. Because of this my husband had let the business kind of fade away (he didn’t really have time for it anyway because he was teaching a full load of classes even though he was just an adjunct). So back in October he was told, that not only would the school be unable to hire him full time, but that they had to cut his teaching hours drastically because he didn’t have a bachelors. Well, since we’ve let the business go by the wayside, this is going to be a major financial hardship for us. He has been looking for another job since then, but has had no luck. So now we are coming up on the semester where they cut his hours and we have no new customers for the business and my husband has not been able to find a job anywhere else.

I’m battling anger at myself for not doing more with a career because maybe if I had we wouldn’t be in as bad a financial bind. I was a theater major in college and of course then could not find a job in my field once I was out. So I have worked a series of clerical jobs ever since, also taking an 8 year break to stay home with our son. I currently only work part-time because of my health and I’m also angry at myself because I don’t feel I could handle a full-time job yet.

I’m also battling anger for not being able to get a grip on my emotions about all that is going on. I’ve meditated and written and brain trained and self-soothed till I’m sick of it. I know I’m trying too hard, but I can’t seem to stop.

I’m terrified! We are three years from paying off our house and now I’m afraid we could lose it. I worry that we’ll never be able to retire (we’re both 50) because we’ve never been able to save enough. This job with the school would have been our saving grace because not only does it have a 401K, but it also has a pension. This spiral is going faster and faster and I can’t seem to stop it.

If you have any tips, please share.

 

We cherish a vision of our post-TMS life where we absorb, process and correctly file away our stressors the very same way we put away our groceries - as if they no longer have the power to start the hamster wheel going in our brain. Hahaha! Nope. You're doing your best to work through a very, very challenging situation, and it sounds like you're tackling it with all the tools in your toolbox. Nice work! All I might add is that the anticipation of how wrong things could go (losing the house, for instance) is really adding fuel to the stress fire. Don't pre-grieve events that have yet to happen and in fact may not happen at all (easy for me to say, I do this all the time). Meditate on what IS, right now, and give the universe its chance to guide your path in a direction you might not have even considered yet. And especially don't be angry with yourself. You know, in your heart, you're doing your best. Tell that other voice to f--- off. You'll get through this, and it's going to be okay.

 

what is the setback? You don't mention any TMS which is actually GOOD! It means you are focused on the real issues instead of any symptomology. I know you don't want to hear this BUT the fact that you are on point means you're in the lucky percentile that is aware instead of sweeping it under the TMS carpet.

Good. Get pissed.... or at least let it manifest itself on paper, to a friend, break some plates, chop some wood...don't battle..let it out!!

We used to get a grip on our emotions. It was PAIN. Remember, it was our own personalized over-evolved coping mechanism. Feel that chite...let it out in some way or another...as much as you can.

I dodged quite a bit of money and career to be able to be around my sons more when they were kids. They are adults now and I wouldn't change a thing. They are confident, balanced and spiritually healthy because they didn't get dumped on the 'system'. You will never regret doing that and your son will excel and beat his peers at everything due to the confidence that being loved instills in him.

Now.. that IS a TMS farm, but generally I found staying aware that the 5 year old in me didn't really want to play nurse maid, resented their mom for abandoning them, and I really would have liked being a rock star or a professional skateboarder or some other selfish endeavour....as long as I kept that idea floating, I stayed pain free and relatively sane.

Ultimately I don't own anything. We are all Renters. My Home is a bunch of wire and wood and rock on a piece of land that has been here for 3.5 billion years and will eventually be burned up in another 3 billion years or so when the sun runs out of fuel and expands to eat the whole inner solar system. We are all just passing through.

Are you afraid of being 'homeless'? I always write down all of my fears to the full extent of their possibility and then review them for humors sake...reductio ab adsurdum I think it's called? It's a good check on our silly materialistic illusory thinking and let's it out of the squirrel cage so it stops rolling around.

This was the most honest post I have read in a long time

 

Unfortunately the set back IS pain in all the old TMS places and no matter what I do I can't get it to calm down.