A few months into my first pregnancy, I woke up in a mood. I quickly identified it as a hormone-induced mood. Wow, here it was. I felt totally out of control of my emotions. I was irritated and no amount of rationalizing in my head or trying to distract myself could change it. I was stuck. I felt not like myself and didn’t want anyone to realize that I had become that “crazy pregnant lady.” I so didn’t want to be her, but there I was feeling crazy and out of sorts. What was I going to do?
I did my best to stamp the hormones down and to hide their affects. I fought myself all day long, hoping that they would go away. I hated the experience. I hated myself and how I felt and how I was being that day. I nearly snapped my husband’s head off that night. It was miserable.
I talked with my coach the next day when I was feeling more decidedly like myself. Yet, I was majorly disappointed with myself and what I had experienced the previous day. I was beating myself up pretty good.
Knowing that hormonal days were bound to show up again and knowing that I had not enjoyed the experience the day before, my coach and I worked on different perspectives or approaches I could try. We brainstormed some possibilities: I could cancel all appointments on those days, in essence calling in sick. I could continue to do my best to mask it. I could keep it together for others and just let my husband experience the wrath. As we were generating ideas, I didn’t immediately see a “feel good” path.
Then, I saw something! I could actually surrender to the hormones. I could let the hormones win, choose not to fight them. Fighting them wasn’t fun. It did not serve me to be in a battle all day long. What if I just gave up at the beginning of the day and said, “Okay hormones you win!”? I got excited about this. “What would that look like?,” my coach asked. It would look like me freely admitting to others that I saw or spoke with on “those” days that I was having a hormonal day. It was letting others know that I wasn’t sure how I’d react to things that day. It might look like cancelling some things because I just wasn’t in the emotional place to enjoy them. But, it was doing this without feeling guilty or wrong about it. It was bringing some humor to the experience. It was saying “Uncle” to my own chemical makeup.
My coach asked me how I could remember on my next hormonal day that I wanted to surrender. I made a little white flag and I carried it around in my purse. It was my reminder to surrender and it came in handy on more occasions than those hormonal days. I know, yet often forget, that focusing on what we don’t want gets us more of what we don’t want. That when I get so anxiously engaged in wishing that something wasn’t the way that it is, that all I get is evidence that yes, this is the way that it is. It was helpful to surrender on hormonal days. It was helpful to surrender when I needed to buy bigger pants. It was helpful to surrender when people made (clearly) annoying comments to me. A need to surrender may show up in a different area for you. I had to learn that I was not in control of all that was happening. Yet, I could be in control of how I responded.
This is not to say that this idea of surrendering allowed me to completely rid myself of any moments of annoyance, disappointment, or resistance about my shifting hormones. There certainly were still plenty of those! And, I know, the times that I was able to surrender were transformative.
When has it been transformative for you to surrender? (to the situation, to your feelings) Or where do you see it might benefit you to surrender?
