After a Fraudulent Affair, Feel Your Feet

What do you get when you cross a ‘digital day-off’ with a massive side order of Online Fraud? This is no joke, it happened to me last weekend. At 9am last Sunday I switched my phone off and declared it a digital-free day.

What I got was a massive dose of how far I’ve come with responding to unexpected crappy happenings. It’s official, I’m changing – yipee! 

The day started brilliantly. Despite weather reports of gale force winds here in central Italy, the skies promised warm brilliant sunshine. My husband and I set off to meet our friends at one of our favourite restaurants. It’s kind of special to me to go out for lunch on a Saturday, it’s often a work, study or rehearsal day. This Saturday was going to be different.

Lunch was super yummy and our friends were in love with our choice. We ordered plates of fresh home-made pasta with just-picked porcini (mushrooms) and another platter of the most delicate ricotta-filled ravioli and a tomato-based sugo. Delish! The second plates and desserts had us all chatting about when we could all lunch at that spot together again, it was that good.

My digital detox lasted until 5.15pm. I know, it wasn’t a whole day but it was better than other attempts. But OMG. Throw an entire bucket of cold pasta with fish sauce all over me, and the shock might have been similar. 75 automated messages from my bank showing that my credit card had been cloned and used all over the world.

Here’s where things got a little more interesting. In the past, when something happened outside of my immediate control, my responses went like this:

1. Freeze
2. Hot face that turns beet-red
3. Tears. Lots of hot, angry self-blaming, punishing tears
4. Anger and more tears
5. Blaming and shaming – looking for someone else to point the finger at then flipping that finger-pointing back at me.
6. Go to bed, wake up every hour, on the hour, thinking over and over about what has already happened that I can’t change.
7. Repeat for at least 7 days.

In short, this was my standard way of living this kind of event up until about 3 years ago. If you flick your eyes back up to this list above, you’ll notice there’s nothing proactive about blocking the credit card. Yep, head-in-sand is where I used to stay for quite a bit and my voice would fail me as in I could not speak about even something like a credit card cloning without falling to pieces.

What was different this day? Was the pasta really magic? Were those mushrooms, those kinda mushrooms? No, but…

Thanks to some digging into my own reactions and responses and some great coaching from ‘Schema Therapy Online’ founder, Christine Askew and Nervous System Expert, Irene Lyon over the last 3 years, my responses have started to change. It’s taken some work but this little event kinda hit me in the face with how much has changed for me.

Positives from this fraudulent affair

It can be really frustrating doing work on self and not knowing if anything real is different or even changing. This was one of those times that showed me that things are changing. Here’s what I actually did, without overthinking anything (what a relief!):

1. Searched my bank for their online fraud number to block the card (ooh, action!)
2. Held my breath (old stress-response habit) then smelt coffee
3. Called and blocked the card
4. Felt my feet on the ground and smelt coffee
5. Copied and pasted all the messages into one document
6. Let my face fall while watching some easy tv with my husband
7. Baked apples in the oven (still full from lunch)
8. Went to sleep and woke up once – felt where my spine contacted the mattress and went back to sleep.

Lots of much-needed active steps, my voice fully in action on the phone and notice no crying or red-face heating up? I do not miss that!

Getting Active In Simple Ways

Smelling coffee, feeling feet and face fall might read a little cryptically right now, keep going though, and feel your feet on the ground as you continue reading. These next 3 activities could be called ‘grounding’ but I prefer prompts to come back into your body. Check these out, you might like to play with them even if nothing stressful is going on in your world – and reinforce a good physical habit for when sh*t goes down:

1. Smell the Coffee

Well I don’t really smell coffee but this action has my breathing working efficiently and brings me back into my body. I mean, I haven’t really left my body, but I can retreat into my head and my thoughts whirl then no action happens. I’ve gone into a survival response called ‘freeze’. It does what it says on the packet, I’m kinda left immobilised and stuck in my head. 

Back to smelling coffee, take something you love the aroma of and breathe it in. If you can’t get something (for me it’s coffee), imagine that yummy aroma. Breathe that in a few times. Then pause and wait until you sense your breath doing itself, until it’s no longer a conscious act. This took me about 10 seconds right now, sometimes it takes me longer. Try this out for yourself now. 

2. Feel Your Feet

This seems so ridiculously simple. Right now, feel your feet. Pay attention to feeling what they contact. My feet are in socks right now. I’m a little on the less-than-tall side so I’m sitting with the balls of my feet in contact with our wooden floor. I feel my heels are a little elevated and they’re a little cool, almost tingling as I write this. I feel my toes and now my heels. Just sense the contact they make. Oh and keep breathing 😉  

This simple act helps bring me back into right now. A great place to be, so great it could be a new holiday destination.

Give this a go now. Takes about 4 seconds. I’ll wait right here. 

3. Face Fall

About a gazillion years ago, at my first singing lesson, I heard the phrase ‘release your jaw’. It meant nothing to me at the time and I had no idea how to do it. I didn’t know I was even ‘holding’ my jaw.

Another attempt to get me to let the tension seep out of my face was made a decade later when I was studying ‘Vocal Balance’ (still studying!) telling me to ‘let your bottom jaw drop, like you’re watching tv’. That made a little more sense but there was very little release happening.

Since then, I’ve coined my own instruction and it starts with my eyes.

Sitting, I let my eyes go slack, my forehead follows with slight relaxation and then, I let my my bottom jaw just kinda hang.

No stretching or forcing, just as it happens. I do this throughout the day too. It’s a new habit I want to cultivate . I let my whole face fall. 

While you’re here, give it a go. I’m happy to wait, it takes about 9 seconds.

How was it? What else ‘releases’ as you do this? Oh go on, do it a few times, fall in love with your face falling. It can affect your breathing too. Let your breathing maybe even slo a little, as a by-product, not a ‘I-am-relaxing-my-breath-now-dammit!’. That can cause more tension and we’re going for efficiency, right?

Better Feeling, Connecting Better

What strikes me through this different outcome to my digital day off is that I’m experiencing this kind of shock/trauma entirely differently. 

Three years ago, I would not have slept for days, I would have cried on the phone to each real person I spoke with and I would have walked ghost-like through all other parts of my life. And I didn’t know that that was not working for me.

Instead, since Saturday I’ve physically felt different reactions in my body, I’ve felt disconnection try to happen as an old habit. I felt that urge to rationalise and overthink, like an online identity thief, almost undetected, but the practise of simply feeling my feet kicks in almost automatically now. I have simple things to do when I sense I’m whirling those thoughts and getting stuck in my head. 

I’m growing a new habit. It’s taking time also to even recognise that I’m feeling something physically, to sit in that feeling and then sense my feet on the ground, and smell coffee.

Going for better feeling instead of feeling better is the thing that’s helping me to form this new habit.

Four Police and A Happy Ending

As I write this, I’ve learned there are 4 different ‘police’ that could be concerned with this fraud and they have all done that point-your-index-finger-on-both-hands-and-cross-your-arms, sending me in 4 different directions thing. I physically went to speak with each of them. The result? I have an official appointment tomorrow to formally report the online card-cloning. 

Smell Coffee, Feel Your feet, Face fall

Even as I type that subtitle above, I automatically let my face fall – I feel my shoulders sink back and down to their natural anatomical position. I let out another sigh, as it wants to be let out. Oh and it’s not that detectable either, so you can do this in public 😉

Back into my day. Time for some humming and digging into a new jazz tune I’m studying. My voice is fully available to me and I will play with it a lot today. 

What’s your go-to response when sh*t happens? If it’s not something that’s doing you good, what would you like it to be? 

I am fascinated by how us humans evolve or not and how we go about installing habits that help. Talk to me, I’m listening!

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