The Role of Debriefing in Helping You Cross the Transition Bridge

Photo by Aleksandr Barsukov on Unsplash Click to Learn More About the Transition Bridge

Twelve Years Ago . . . 

Shell shock.

Our family sat in shell shock in the apartment. We didn’t know what had just happened. Our lives had been turned upside down in only a matter of days. Actually, it felt like it had only been a matter of hours.

We hadn’t slept in days. Everyone was weary—weary physically, weary emotionally.

We tried to process on our own, my spouse and me, our kids and us.

Just a few weeks ago, life had seemed normal. The kids were in school. My husband was working at the office. I was teaching at the community center. 

Today, we were in a different country, with a different language, with a different culture, and different foods. We looked around the apartment. The decorations, the furniture— nothing belonged to us. We didn’t know anyone around.

We had just left our life.

There was no one—no one to hear our story. We needed someone outside of our family of five to listen, to hear, to help us process, and to care about our story.

We felt alone. The transition bridge was lonely and scary, and we had no one to walk across with us.

Rather, we stuffed our emotions. We tried to forget our experiences. We did our best to shelve the memories.

I guessed we would process our story one day soon. That day never came.

Seven Years Later . . . 

Seven years later—another transition. Different circumstances, similar feelings—shock, overwhelm, loneliness, anger, sadness, disappointment . . . 

The list of emotions seemed to be never-ending. They were all over the place, on all sides of the spectrum.

“I’ve got to find someone to process with, someone to hear my story. If not, I’m going to explode,” I told my spouse.

We all needed to tell our story, every single one of us. We needed to process as individuals, since we had each lived the experience differently. We also needed to process together as a family. 

Once again, we had just crossed the transition bridge, and we couldn’t walk this journey alone anymore. It wasn’t healthy. 

Our suitcases were full—our emotional suitcases—mine, my husband’s, and those of each of my children. 

What had not been processed from our transition seven years ago had been stuffed into our bags. We had been hauling things from country to country, and they had become heavy and burdensome.

It was time to unpack them, and it was time to process this new transition. There was no more space in our luggage. The zipper was already breaking! 

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Sitting down with the debriefer, I could already feel relief. 

“At last, someone to help me dust the Saharan sand off my suitcase, unpack it, and take this load off!” I thought. “I’ve been carrying this story for years.”

Little by little, over the course of three days, a few hours each day, our debriefer led us gently and wisely as we walked through our family’s narrative. We tried to start with the situation at hand, the things that had happened most recently. However, like a tangled, messy ball of yarn, the knots were tied tight, connecting all the different threads of our story. Everything was connected. Our current situation, our current transition was clearly linked to the past one.

Yep, that unprocessed transition bridge we had crossed alone seven years ago.

The stories, the experiences, the losses, the grief had accumulated. Our debriefer took our hands and guided us back across the bridge of transitions, helping us slowly unpack the buildup. 

It was clear to all of us that we could not move forward in a healthy way without walking all the way back, all the way back across the unprocessed transition bridges. 

We needed to take the time to linger, to look, to listen, to sit with the pain, to acknowledge the doubts, to recognize the fears, to discover the lessons learned. 

I looked at my children, my spouse, our marriage, our family. I wondered where we would have been if we had found someone to debrief us after that first transition.

I imagined that we would have been in a much healthier place. Perhaps if our suitcases had not been so full for all those years, maybe we wouldn’t have been so tired all the time, so angry, so disappointed. I wish that we had debriefed it sooner and more often.

One thing I knew for sure, one lesson I had learned . . . I would never walk across the transition bridge alone again. I would find someone to tell my story to, someone to talk to, someone to listen to what I was going through or what I had just been through.

Photo by kyler trautner on Unsplash

Today . . . 

I sat with the woman. A screen separated us, an ocean loomed between us. Yet, there she was. There I was, in that space, in that moment.

“I feel stuck. I don’t know what just happened.”

Oh yes, I remembered those words, those feelings, those experiences.

Shell shock. 

“I understand. I’ve been there before,” I told her. “Let’s take it one step at a time and begin to untangle the messy ball of yarn you hold in your hands. I call that messy ball of yarn ‘life.’”

She slowly began to talk, began to open up. Just like our family, she had suddenly needed to leave the land she had called home for many years, needed to quickly pack up her bags. Not just her bags, but also those of her husband and her two sons.

An unexpected and unwanted change, their entire life had turned upside down.

“I don’t know where I am, or who I am anymore.”

“It’s ok. You’re ok. How you feel is completely understandable,” I reassured her. “Let’s begin to walk back over the transition bridge together. We can retrace your steps, see where you’ve been, and process it. Before you know it, the weeds in your heart and mind will clear, and you will begin to see the path forward. You won’t be alone. I’ll walk with you every step of the way.”

Guest author, Marci Renée, along with her French husband and four boys, is a global nomad who has traveled to more than 30 countries and has lived in the United States, France, Morocco, and Spain. She loves to travel, speak foreign languages, experience different cultures, eat ethnic foods, meet people from faraway lands, and of course, write and tell stories. She is a published author of children's picture books, memoirs, short stories, and poetry.

You can find Marci and her books on her website.

"The Cultural Story-Weaver," at www.culturalstoryweaver.com