Between The Devil & The Dow Jones Industrial Average

I guess when I really tuned into this process, I started seeing how I'd let everything control me. And I do mean everything. In my professional life, I am a stock and bond broker. As you might imagine the past 16 months have been a little rocky. I never thought of my profession as one that had care taking attributes, but a year and a half of clients sick with what has happened in the market has taught me better.

When the market decline started, I would wake at the crack of dawn to find out what the market futures were indicating. Then I would hold my breath until the market opened to see what was going to happen. All day long I was a prisoner to some mysterious number over which I had no control. The stress and anxiety were so heavy, I couldn't sleep, I didn't want to eat. And Sunday felt like a portal to hell...what kind of mass craziness was Monday going to bring?

My training and education taught me that my job was to be the calm in the storm. Put on a brave face as you face the day and distraught clients.

Mercifully, somewhere in the middle of all of this craziness I came to begin to know Al-Anon. The practice of identifying what I can control and what I can't, was easier to identify when I used the market as my "qualifier" as opposed to identifying my habits with family and most specifically with my husband. It's fairly obvious to the rest of the world, I'm sure, that I personally hold a miniscule amount of influence over the market. But in my darkest days of despair over Wall Street, I must have thought that if I worried enough about what was happening that it might be pennence enough for either the market to change, or for my clients to feel better about their losses. Because really, knowing that I fretted over their personal situation can really make up for their losses, right?

By really embracing the fact that I had no control over those external forces, I slowly began to thaw out from my place of sheer terror, to a place where I could begin to use logic and reason to start making some necessary moves. I am so grateful to have been able to step outside of my personal life to learn a tough lesson. Hopefully now I will be better positioned to apply this understanding to my family.