‘Lifeshocks are profoundly lifeenhancing, if we learn how to suck the marrow out of them’
Difficult events – bereavement, illness, relationship breakdown – are an inevitable part of life. The important thing is to learn how to embrace them, writes author Sophie Sabbage
My darling father died in March this year at the age of 84. His illness and ultimate death were a very challenging, ongoing, heart-cracking experience that lasted nearly two years. Yet, I can write that sentence without shedding a tear. I can keep my distance. But when I recall the specific moment two paramedics carried him, ashen grey with an oxygen mask on his face, into his care-home bedroom on a stretcher, after a traumatic day in a hospital ward where he didn’t want to die, I weep with the same sorrow I felt at the time. This was what I call a “lifeshock”. It was poignant and precise. I had driven through the snow to get to dad after a night disturbed by remorse about leaving him in hospital just 24 hours earlier. I was waiting in his room when he arrived.
The specificity of these moments is important. You know those times when you are telling a story from your past and, as you relate a particular part of it, the emotions you felt at the time rise again – sometimes with surprising force? This is because those feelings – and the thoughts that create them – are locked in the memory of a lifeshock moment, even if you didn’t register it at the time.
Just hearing the word “lifeshock”, many of us may think, “Oh yes, I’ve had some of those alright!” Simply defined, they are unexpected – often but not always unwanted – moments in time that surprise us, blindside us, slap us in the face. “You have a five per cent chance of getting pregnant.” Hearing a paramedic say, “Code Blue, Code Blue” on his radio as the ambulance transported my 18-monthold daughter to A&E after an accident. Seeing my dad using his left hand to eat because his dominant right hand had been semi-paralysed after an operation. “You have incurable lung cancer, Mrs Sabbage.” By definition they are shocking.
These lifeshock moments are more particular than ‘life challenges’ – infertility, parenting, ageing, bereavement, cancer. Each one has a personal relevance. What strikes me hardest does so because there is something sitting inside me that needs my attention. If we are in the same situation, it will be different to what strikes you. This does not mean we are to blame for what happens to us. It simply means that each lifeshock has a personal relevance because it challenges our conditioning, our behavioural patterns and the belief systems that limit our potential.
When lifeshocks strike, we interpret them almost instantly. We draw false conclusions about ourselves, other people and the situation, which then determine what we feel and how we behave. But the lifeshocks will continue to confront our perceptions until we see things as they really are.
I believed that not being a mother made me a failure as a woman, which it didn’t. The “five per cent chance” lifeshock helped me lay that belief down and I can’t help wondering if finding true peace with being childless made my body more receptive to the daughter who then came. When she did, I decided I had to be a perfect parent, which I’m not and will never be, as the ambulance trip soon hammered home.
In my dad’s last months, having encouraged him to have that last operation, I had blamed myself for some of his distress. He often came to me for advice because of how I have been responding to cancer since my terminal diagnosis nearly four years ago. Of course, it was not my fault. Nor was it my job to save him. But taking responsibility for other people’s suffering is an old pattern of mine that still rears its head once in a while.
As for my own “incurable cancer” lifeshock? It challenged every part of me that had left my dreams on dusty shelves. And it unleashed the most creative, expressive, life-drenched years I have ever experienced – brutal as some days have been.
You see, by definition, lifeshocks are also about LIFE. They are profoundly life-enhancing, if we learn how to suck the marrow out of them. We can either see life as something to contend with or as having something to teach us about ourselves, whatever happens. That may sound cheesy, even annoying, because we are not taught how to do this. How do we change our belief systems? How do we milk our worst moments for all they have to offer? How do we become more ourselves instead of less ourselves when the s**t seems to hit the fan? And how do we find our true path when lifeshocks appear to derail us?
I have been teaching people how for a quarter of a century. My mentor for 16 years, Dr K Bradford Brown, devised a simple and systematic way of doing so. A direct student of some of the great minds of the 20th century, including the Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl, he wanted to make tools that tend to be reserved for psychologists and academics available to anyone who seeks to grow. I am certain that I’m still alive, against considerable odds, because of them. And in some ways, writing a book about these practices was long overdue.
Lifeshocks do not need to derail you. They can become a GPS system, revealing your mental road blocks and guiding you back to a more authentic, fulfilling and loving life.
Frankl said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” Lifeshocks provide such stimulus over and over again. And this is how we can meet them. We cannot control the curve balls that come our way, but we can choose how to relate to them. We can learn to enter the space between stimulus and response before we call it “unfair” and “terrible” or call ourselves “losers”, “outsiders” and “worthless”. It is the space where we can align ourselves with life as it is instead of life as we think it should be, and in so doing avoid the unnecessary suffering that comes when we fight reality.
This was the space in which I chose not to see cancer as an enemy to fight, but as an illness to treat and an experience to learn from. It is the space I entered when dad looked up from his stretcher, his eyes wet with tears, and said, “Sophie, you are here.”
That was the lifeshock I opened to instead of closing. I had been strongly resisting losing him up to that point. In an instant, my remorse was replaced by relief and a soft clarity that while I could not save or spare him, I could love him. I could pour my heart into his during his final hours.
As the nurse made him comfortable, the grey pallor of his cheeks darkened but his fear lifted and all the tension in his body melted away. He died a few hours later, as I felt his rigid fingers relax between my hands.
● Sophie Sabbage is the author of Lifeshocks – And How to Love Them, published by Coronet at £17.99. Out now. To learn more about her work, go to sophie sabbage.com
We cannot control the curve balls that come our way, but we can choose how to relate to them