October 10, 2006 by jacquie.

Lately I’ve been exploring a mystery – one I’ve looked at before; sometimes it takes a while to unravel a mystery. The mystery is: why is 4PM such a thorny time for me? Almost every day at 4PM, I feel sad and I am likely to over-indulge in food or drink.  For a long time, I tried working on the symptoms, such as having a healthy snack ready so I don’t reach for the ice cream, or making a phone call to someone I love talking to so that I don’t feel sad. That does work for the moment, but when I forget to take care of myself, the 4 o’clock willies come right back.

First, let me say something about forgetting to take care of myself. I believe that  a healthy lifestyle means that I am taking care of myself, but I don’t want to have to be conscious about every nuance of it. In this case, I want taking care of myself to be so ingrained that I don’t have to think about it, I just live it. So this recurring 4 o’clock problem is the opposite of what I want because when I don’t think about it, it becomes a problem.

I want to warn you right now that I am not going to solve this problem while I am writing this article. Well, it would be fabulous if I did, and in the past, as I’ve written an article, I’ve discovered a solution as a result of my writing. I’m not getting my hopes up on this one—it might take two articles. What I’m sharing here is how I unravel a mystery about the 4PM witching hour.

First I tried an intellectual approach. I looked at it from the perspective of Chinese Medicine, a tool I’ve used for the past 25 years. Each of the 12 meridians governs the flow of energy in the body for two hours of every 24. At 4PM, the Bladder meridian starts to ebb and the Kidney meridian ramps up. So I asked myself, what do my feelings and symptoms have to do with the Bladder and Kidney meridian?  The emotion involved with these meridians is fear. Hmm. Sound familiar? Does it always come to that for me? It seems like it.

OK. It’s about fear – now to the investigation of emotions. What about fear? I know from past explorations that this mystery has to do with feeling disconnected from people. Since I work at home, and my contact with clients is usually in the morning, by afternoon I’ve spent a lot of time alone.  Maybe my tolerance for solitude peaks at 4 PM. That seems likely. Also, my interactions are usually about my reaching out to others, not about others reaching out to me. It could be that I’m longing for attention.

When I started thinking about what happens at 4PM, I poignantly remembered my girls telling me how hard it was for them after their dad and I divorced. They’d come home after school and no one was there. Dad was at work and I lived far away. Just imagining that makes me want to weep. And yes, that knowledge is part of this feeling.  This is something I’ve worked on in the past, especially the guilt I felt about my creation of this unpleasant scenario. My feeling has something to do with tuning into their sadness after school.

Aha! It’s an after school thing. My bodily sensations from this sadness are: my chest feels heavy and my eyes sting with what feels like a bucket of unshed tears. As I continued to peel away the layers of this mystery, I asked myself if the feeling is totally from grieving about lost time with my daughters and the answer was “no.” What else is there? I closed my eyes and let my mind drift back over my life and I soon landed on another aspect of this puzzle.

When I was in the fourth grade, my parents made a huge decision to pull up stakes and move from Texas  back to Ohio where both Mom and Dad had family. We lived with my dad’s brother and his wife for a year. I know that year had to be miserable for my mother, whose home was her kingdom. She lived in another woman’s house, and I suspect she felt like a servant doing all the cleaning and cooking. What My main memory from that time is sitting in front of the TV after school eating pretzels and drinking rootbeer—eating a lot of pretzels and root beer. Where was my mother? She must have been in the kitchen but I don’t remember her. I suspect she had checked out emotionally in order to deal with her own situation.  Where was this woman I’d spent so much time with? What happened to our connection? Was I filling an emptiness there in front of the TV eating and drinking and longing for connection? Surely that was one of the saddest years of my life and every day at 4PM I anesthetized myself.

What is the connection between my after school experience, and my daughters’ after  school experience, and my over-indulgence at 4PM most afternoons in Berkeley, California? The foundation of this fear is that I’ll always be alone and unconnected. This isn’t even a new thought. What is new is the depth of the emotion that runs through three generations of women.  Now that I know what it is, I can do something about it.

I realize that this a story in my life, or several stories. I don’t have to keep telling these stories over and over every day. When I get to 4Pm and the sadness starts to appear, I can recognize this as history. My life right now is far different; I have much to be happy about. I don’t have to keep those old emotions alive by mindlessly giving in to them as I reach for more pretzels and root beer. I can write a new story!

Weekly Challenge

Do you have a recurring feeling or circumstances that you haven’t examined? What would it take for you to unravel that mystery?

© 2006, Jacqueline Hale

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October 10, 2006 by jacquie.

Here is the list of books readers suggested in response to my request in the “What Book Would You Buy Her” article: 

Alcoholics Anonymous (commonly known as the Big Book)

Ask and It Is Given by Jerry & Ester Hicks

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch

Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers

Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin

The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz

The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

The Success Principles by Jack Canfield

Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom

When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron

You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay
        

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