When You Hit Bottom

 Life is going along fine, maybe even wonderfully, when suddenly an unexpected tragedy rams into you, knocking you off your perch. You fall, and keep falling. Your head spins, as the life you knew slips through your fingers. You try to grab it, but there’s only air. You experience a flood of bad emotions. You can’t think. You can’t cry. It’s just one long, loud, internal scream.

And then comes the abrupt crash at the end. Of course, you don’t hear a thud, but the force of the blow shakes your inner core. It hammers your soul. It’s quietly painful and painfully quiet at the same time. You have hit bottom.

If you have never experienced this, I want you to continue reading to better understand when a friend or family member goes through this. If this has happened to you, then it will be a reminder of just how far you have come since then. And if you are at the bottom, read this slowly and understand that I know how it feels, and the words are true, to the best of my ability to express them.

We tend to judge the people who have hit bottom based on our perceived notions of how they got there. If it was bad decisions, we say “they deserved it”. If it was of “no fault of their own”, we find it tragic. But how we feel about them is of no interest to the person at the bottom. They all hurt just as desperately. The place is the same for all people. Rich, poor, educated, uneducated… The torment doesn’t discriminate. And regardless of the circumstances, all bottom dwellers will find some reason to blame themselves for their predicament. Even when it’s not your fault, you will savagely beat yourself up repeatedly at the bottom.

And this tendency to judge people because they deserved it? In the BOOK, when the MAN encountered someone at the bottom, he was not concerned about how they got there but totally focused on offering them a way out.

Now there are actually three good things about hitting bottom:

1.    You can’t fall any further. That plunge was traumatic and frightening, but you are on solid ground now. You have reached an endpoint.

2.    There is no confusion about which direction to go. There are no choices. There are no options. There is only one way out – straight up.

3.    It’s eerily quiet at the bottom. There are few distractions. If you want to hear the voice of the CREATOR, there is no interference or distractions.  

When you hit bottom, you land face first. This means initially, you lie there staring at the ground. You are focused on the ground and how you ended up there. You focus on the past. You are obsessed with the specific details that brought you there. You rewind the hell over and over. It’s like playing the same horror movie repeatedly, and you are the star of the show.

Therefore, step one in the recovery is to roll over and stare at the sky. That represents the future. And that’s where you are headed. But it’s still a struggle because you continue to think irrationally. You can’t trust your thoughts at the bottom because you keep telling yourself lies, such as:

-       There is no way out of this mess                                 

-       It’s always going to be this bad

-       I’m always going to feel this torment

-       My useful, relevant life has ended

And these are utter, complete lies. They seem ludicrous now to those who have ever been at the bottom of the pit, but they were so believable and destructive then.

In the pit, you can’t see the future. You can only see your failure – or your circumstance. It’s challenging to look forward even a year into the future when you are obsessed with just making it through the day. But there will be a future. It may be much different than the past, but it will be your future, which you can control. Dwelling on your past mistakes or misfortunes while trying to recover is like driving a car forward by looking in the rear-view mirror. You can’t go very fast or very straight. You have to rip the mirror off your car.

At the bottom, it is also easy to think that because the CREATOR threw you in the pit, he will just as suddenly lift you out. It may seem logical, but this is a false hope. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. You must lift yourself up.

To climb out the pit, one must scratch and claw your way back - learning to celebrate small victories against sturdy resistance. The weight on the lifting machine has been set to the max, and now you must become strong enough to move it.

And move it, you will. Through the process, you gain the strength, the guts, the determination, the fortitude, and the skills to flourish in your next challenge in life. Life at the bottom is brutal, but can be empowering if you let it.