Where Did Normal Go? by Dr. Deb Hirschhorn

Dr. Deb

Where Did Normal Go?

By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.

OK, the yom tovim are over, and we can get back to normal. Whew…

Except that normal seems to have disappeared.

Is it gone forever?

In March of 2020 we knew there was a Martian invasion. OK, it wasn’t Martian; I’m trying to be apolitical, here.

And we were shut in for an entire year, experiencing our aloneness, our fears, and the sorrow of death. Then things looked better. We thought they were better.

They weren’t.

Families became divided: To Vax or Not To Vax.

Without the advantage of time to see what would really happen, we could only guess. And believe. That is, believe one way or the other.

I would have liked to go to Israel again. My grandson, whose bar mitzvah I went to a year ago, just turned the big 14, and his younger brother is going to be bar mitzvah next August. Will I be able to go without that annoying bidud in a one-window basement apartment with no mirpeset?

Who knows?

One extremely good thing is that I made no lunch commitments for Simchas Torah and doggedly stayed until the very end of davening. I got tremendous joy reading Yehoshua, 1-18, which I never had before. There were always small children that needed to be fed earlier than that. Wow! We were going into the Promised Land.

But I heard from the Promised Land this morning, and now my three-year old granddaughter is in bidud because a classmate’s parent has COVID. C’mon, how frequently do babies spread this?

My eight-year-old granddaughter was just getting over her frustration of six – yes, six – weeks in bidud because her 12-year-old brother’s classmate’s father had gotten the dreaded illness. Of course, not a single child in the class had any symptoms. But the disease – or at least the positive tests for it – swept through my son’s family, one person at a time. My son, who’d been vaxxed, got sick, and I was more concerned about him than I’d been about myself because his respiratory pipes are sensitive to such things.

But, as the sukkahs disappeared from the front lawns last week, I thought, at least I could get back to normal anyway. So motzei Shabbos, I came home with the full intention of catching up on articles for TJH and posts for my blog (I seldom “repurpose” - something inside drives me to write fresh content every time). I opened my computer the next day and faced the shock of two deaths of people I knew well.

What’s going on here?

And I couldn’t make a normal shiva call either; one was in Eretz Yisroel and the other wanted phone calls only. I asked my son to make the call in-person for me to the one in his neighborhood, and that’s when I learned he was babysitting his quarantined three-year-old while my daughter-in-law works.

My daughter-in-law, who, eight or ten months ago was championing the vax, admitted today, “I don’t know what’s going on,” when I asked her why they don’t judge who should be shut out of circulation on the basis of antibodies. She told me the government doesn’t do that at all and if you want an antibody test, it’s 250 shekel. Hmm.

Since I just had Covid, some medical people are telling me that I’m immune for life and others are saying quite the opposite.

So I give up on trying to figure any of it out. We just have to wait it out to see.

Plunging into my work is always fun, and I wanted to communicate with some people in my Facebook group with whom I’m sharing the non-pathologizing view of emotional challenges.

Only to discover that Facebook went offline. Whoa. Goliath topples. At least for a while.

So, I was pleased that the class

I’d signed up for that will take about six months to complete was just going to start. It’s on Internal Family Systems. Yes, I’ve been using it all year, but that was from books. Now, I want to experience it.

At least that would feel normal.

It did not.

The class is composed of 48 therapists and coaches who, like me, have been practicing IFS for a long time but wanted the feedback and the supervision of more experienced people.

Well, I was in for a surprise.

The class was experiential as well as didactic. I’d known that already. What I did not know was what it felt like to be on the “other side” of the therapy room. We broke up into groups of three students and a trainer to each experience that very thing.

I now have a far greater appreciation of the nervous state clients can be in just to have their guts exposed.

But the thing that really struck me took place in the demos done in front of the entire group. There, trainers shared the worries of their protector parts and rescued their exiles with the help of the master trainer. Some shed a few tears. All were genuine.

And it became clear to me that every one of us has parts that some-

times hijack us away from the calm and wise state of Self that we strive for. I knew this before, but now I know it in my bones. It’s a different knowing.

The master trainer has been doing IFS for 30 years and initially trained with Dr. Schwartz, the founder. Yet, she, too, acknowledged parts that may have carried roles of anxiety or anger. She, too, shared how she has dealt with situations in which the parts take over.

You know, this is very comforting, actually.

True, we’d love to be “there” already – complete, always wise, go-

ing with the flow, making good decisions, in charge of our emotions. But none of us actually is, or can be. All we can do is keep striving for it and be pleased at our progress.

So how is it comforting, then?

Simple. If no one is “there” – which means “normal” – then no one is “sick,” either. We’re all on the same journey. That’s why not a single one of us is exempt from Yom Kippur or daily efforts at teshuva, for that matter. Tishrei may be over, but we didn’t get “there” yet.

So the answer to my initial question is that we never had normal to begin with. There have been times when there are lulls and then there are times when the changes happen too fast for us to adjust. But we remain the same (as Koheles reminds us) – not normal, but that’s OK. It gives us something to work on. It gives us a dose of humility.

And it helps us accept the total lack of normal in the world around us.

We’re all on the same journey.

Dr. Deb Hirschhorn is a Marriage and Family Therapist. If you want help with your marriage, begin by signing up to watch her Masterclass at https://drdeb. com/myw-masterclass.