The Power of Distractions

Has your marriage or relationship ended abruptly? Have you recently lost someone? PTSD? Trauma? Narcissist discard or simply abandoned when you were in a marriage or relationship? Then what you need is to be distracted. 

There are plenty of videos and blogs about how to temporarily distract yourself for a few seconds or minutes if you feel panicked or anxious. It works. What they don't tell you is that longer distractions also work wonders!

Distractions will help you heal. 

So what do you do? Distract yourself or let yourself be distracted! 

Call in help from friends, colleagues, family - let them distract you and temporarily relieve your mind of what happened to you. Maybe now is the time to reconnect with old friends as well?

A distraction is not an escape. Your memories, trauma and experiences will come with you wherever you go. They won't suddenly go away! You should do do anything that temporarily switches your thoughts to other things than your trauma. Do something, just doing things really helps. Anything to keep you from sitting still by yourself and letting your mind wander.

I adopted a cat, this is Max (19). Great
distraction and good company!

The objective here is to give your mind other things to think about rather than the past. You need to focus on the present, not the past and not the future. The present is where you need to live while you slowly heal and will naturally slowly start thinking about the future. You need to heal yourself in the present before you can move on to your future. 

The best thing you can do for yourself is get off that sofa and go do something. Anything practical you do with other people works best. 
Examples:

• Go for a short trip with friends or family
• Go and visit family, friends and relatives
• Do an activity with someone - baking, cooking, walking, crafts, a drive
• Help someone in your local community
• Get  a pet
• Join a walking group
• Volunteer - but only for short term things for example helping out at a soup kitchen on and ad-hoc basis

My ex took me on a trip to Portugal. It was great
being completely distracted for a week! Silves, 2019.

If you are recovering from trauma you will have limits as to how much you can do and for how long. You will get tired easily. You should not commit to something long term, just short activities here and there.

Enlist the help of your friends and family and get them to take you with them on trips. Get your friends to take you out even if it's just for dinner (but stay off that alcohol). Go for a car ride somewhere nice. 

To the extent you can, get other people to keep you active. Don't rely on yourself to organise activities for yourself, you likely won't have enough energy. 

Back in my native Norway visiting my parents.
Hankø, 2019

When you do something it focuses your mind on the present and stops your mind from wandering or ruminating on what has happened to you. Sitting idle by yourself will just lead to a never-ending spiral of bad thoughts, reliving the trauma, feeling sorry for yourself, and feeling down. Whatever you are struggling with, it won't magically go away it will always be in the background. But when you are in the middle of this a distraction will provide temporary relief and you will be thinking about what you are doing right now and your mind will push everything bad to the background. The idea is to redirect your attention to the task at hand.

Should you occupy yourself with more work? 

Throwing yourself into work may seem tempting but it will be an attempt to escape not a distraction. It will likely exhaust you more and not help you heal. With more work you are just pushing your healing in front of you, postponing it. You need to focus on self-care and work is not self-care. Distractions where you do things you like, for yourself and with people who care about you - that is proper self-care. Also: your workplace won't be served by having someone "broken" around, and it won't be good for your career to try and work so much while you are still healing. Coast at work while you heal.

Should you get a new partner?
Is that a good distraction? No. you need to heal first. Getting a new partner while you are still healing is a recipe for disaster. Even casually hooking up is, I would argue, not what you need. Heal first, get to a stage where you are happy again in your life and with yourself then venture into meeting someone. 

I tried my hand at baking. 
Clearly I am not an
artistic baker.
It worked as a distraction
though!

What did I do? 
I was the subject of a very traumatic experience - you can read my story here. 

When I first started to try and pick up all the pieces, I made a list of all the things I always wanted to do but never got round to. Activities that would distract me for a while. I tried baking, signed up for some cooking lessons over Zoom, went on walks and drives. We just went for a drive in my local area, I rolled down the window and looked out enjoyed the fresh air and just thought about what I was seeing. For a while, I was distracted. My first ex-husband (I get through them) took me for a wonderful surprise trip to Portugal for a week. Why did that work well? Because for a week I had something to do. I had direction, purpose, I was active. I wasn't just sitting on the sofa feeling sorry and spaced out. I had someone with me. We went for car trips, cooked a barbeque, lounged by the pool, watched some TV. I went for walks by myself, one day ending up having a late lunch at a lovely hotel while sitting outside watching the sunset. I was simply distracted and did not have the time or the opportunity to sit and think about what had happened to me.

Silves, Portugal. 2019.

For a while the dark clouds lifted and gave me a boost to distract myself more. I went for lunch with a good friend, invited my ex over for dinner from time to time, and started working my way down the list of things I wanted to do for myself. You should also make a list - even if it takes 3 years before you get to the bottom of it! Good luck with your healing.