When I started writing this portion of the newsletter a few hours ago, inspiration struck. I found myself making connections between models of change, and all sorts of fancy lingo crept into the rough draft. I felt like I was back in grad school, having lightbulb moment after lightbulb moment. Sharing it with you as I pieced it together in my head was Plan A.
What I was typing was creative and bold, and the more I typed, the more I realized that it was too much. It was too much jargon, too ambitious of a concept to march out in just a few paragraphs in a newsletter. It belongs in the workbook.
Plan A was just too much. For now.
But Plan B is where we are, aren’t we? We probably didn’t expect to be working to cope with a post-estrangement life, with a shakeup of the family system so severe that we no longer even know how to host Christmas dinners.
Except there was no estrangement Plan B. I didn’t have one. I didn’t foresee ever needing to figure out how to navigate a life such as this. And I can’t read minds, but I bet you didn’t have a Plan B either.
What I can tell you is that the change model I found myself attempting to create did boil down to one salient point:
You neither expected nor implemented this change, but now that it’s occurred, regret and denial are not relevant to adaptation. Your motivation and your ability to recognize yourself as a priority, for perhaps the first time in your adult life, is.
Plan B is to accept dominion over your life. Grief books describe the death of a child as being “out of order.” That is, in that instance, we don’t expect that a young person, our child, would pass away before elderly members of the family. In estrangement, it’s the departure that’s out of order. The plan was always for the child to grow up, be independent, and create their own life. Yes, it’s an oversimplification given that estrangement can affect vastly different concentric circles of change in a family system. Nevertheless, we are not being honest with ourselves if we deny that an independent, post-child life was always ahead of us.
You have permission to figure out your plan B.
