Powerless to Powerful: How to Stop Living in Fear and Start Living Your Life

By Kat Spencer

Powerless to Powerful: How to Stop Living in Fear and Start Living Your Life is a practical guide for those who are tired of letting fear, stress, anxiety, and/or depression run their life. For those who strive to feel more confident, secure, motivated, and even excited about life, their job, or their relationship. No matter what kind of stress you're under, this book can help guide you out of the darkness and start helping you live a passion-driven life with purpose. From healing past wounds to understanding and loving yourself better, this book can help fix what's broken and start rebuilding a strong foundation for the life you've only ever dreamed of living.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kat Spencer
• Release date: Jan 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201656454

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

The Day My Life Changed Forever

I had gone to an early morning meeting at the hospital and was just starting my work day when the school called me; my husband had taken the kids to school that day. I thought that they were just going to tell me that one of them wasn’t feeling well and needed to come home. I wasn’t prepared for what they said.

They told me that my husband had been acting erratically on the school grounds and that they had to call the police and he was taken to the ER.

My response was, He did what?!

None of what they said made any sense at all. My husband was a shy, soft spoken, sweet, caring, kind and respectful person. What they said was the opposite of this.

I rushed to the ER and found him in a room, completely incoherent. I do not feel it is my place to share more of his story so I will only share mine.

They discharged him without treatment, even though he had clearly had a mental breakdown from all of the stress he was under. His father and brother took him to his dad’s house with them and I went home alone.

I felt like my whole world had just imploded and somehow, I knew it wasn’t temporary. And I was right. For those of you who have experienced a loss like this, you will understand me when I compare it to the death of a loved one. Because it is.

The person I had known for half of my life was gone. And I knew he wasn’t coming back. My best friend, my person, my husband and the father of my children was gone. If that isn’t a death and a loss, I don’t know what is.

There are some people who will say it isn’t the same thing, and to them I say it is actually worse. Because they aren’t physically gone, so there is a constant reminder standing in front of you of who and what you lost. But they are mentally not the same person.

He is a completely different person than the man I met when I was eighteen. Trust me, that makes moving on and closure, pretty impossible. Time doesn’t ever really get a chance to heal that.

It has been almost seven years since that day I became a single mom overnight. He has never been the same, although for the most part he has been able to work and still be a great dad. But he no longer lives with us and we aren’t together.

Although medication does help him, he refuses to take it. We were able to get him on medication a few times in the beginning, but starting about year two, he has refused. I know that he will never know what he has put me through. And I don’t blame him for any of it. It can’t be easy, any of the things he has gone through. Life can definitely toss you some curve balls, can’t it?

At the time of his breakdown, I was completely buried with all of the devastations life can bring us. I had lost my mother-in-law, my husband, started a new job, had to figure out how to be a single mom with no partner to share in any of the responsibilities of life. We were out of money and our credit cards were maxed out. I had no idea how I was going to pay my bills now. And I had no idea how I was going to save my house.

My sweet and amazing grandmother gave me $1000 just in the nick of time so that I could pay my mortgage that month. After that, my entire focus was trying to get my, now mentally ill, husband some help.

For anyone out there who has dealt with mental illnesses, you know that that is pretty much an impossible task. But I had no choice. I had to try.

The weekend he broke had been my son’s sixth birthday and Mother’s day weekend. He missed our son’s birthday and I remember visiting him at the psych ward on Mother’s day and being envious of his vacation.

I literally felt anger seethe from me when I saw how carefree he seemed that day. But why wouldn’t he be? He wasn’t having to deal with any life stuff anymore. He had walked away from it. And, by the way, my new job was in the same building where he was staying. When I was at work, he was right above me. And I was visiting him on Mother’s Day.

It took me until now to realize how hard that must have been for him too. To deal with the loss of his mother, right after her birthday and then right before Mother’s Day. Talk about cruel. But I was dealing with my own pain just then. And one of the most poignant things I’ve learned on my journey is this: People can’t see beyond their most immediate