Dr. Liz shares her recent experience in Asheville, North Carolina where she unexpectedly found herself amidst a hurricane, far from the familiar preparedness of Florida. Despite the unexpected power and water outages, the camaraderie and creativity of being with her daughter and her friends highlighted the importance of community.

Listen in as she also shares how a gratitude practice can foster a sense of small moments of joy and happiness, even in emergency situations, offering a practical tool to navigate life’s hurdles with a positive mindset.

If you would like to donate to help those in need in Western North Carolina including Asheville and the surrounding areas, these are two reputable organizations:

https://www.belovedasheville.com

Venmo:  @Ashevillepovertyinitiative (12 Baskets Café Asheville Initiative)

The bar who fed everyone free food Venmo to:  @Tamy-Kuper

 

About Dr. Liz

Winner of numerous awards including Top 100 Moms in Business, Dr. Liz provides psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, and hypnosis to people wanting a fast, easy way to transform all around the world. She has a PhD in Clinical Psychology, is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) and has special certification in Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy. Specialty areas include Anxiety, Insomnia, and Deeper Emotional Healing.

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Do you have Chronic Insomnia? Find out more about Dr. Liz’s Better Sleep Program at https://bit.ly/sleepbetterfeelbetter

Search episodes at the Podcast Page http://bit.ly/HM-podcast

Help yourself with Hypnosis Downloads by Dr. Liz! http://bit.ly/HypnosisMP3Downloads

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A problem shared is a problem halved. In person and online hypnosis and CBT for healing and transformation. Schedule your free consultation at https://www.drlizhypnosis.com.

Listened to in over 140 countries, Hypnotize Me is the podcast about hypnosis, transformation, and healing. Certified hypnotherapist and Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Dr. Liz Bonet, discusses hypnosis and interviews professionals doing transformational work

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Transcript

Hey everyone, dr Liz here. This is an update episode and I thought I would throw some tips in here about gratitude, like how to do a gratitude list. I get asked that quite a bit. Actually, people want to do gratitude but they don’t know how to get started, or they get bored, or they do it for like a week or two and then stop, or they do it for like a week or two and then stop. And there’s lots of research about how good it is for you actually, how it helps you access joy, gratefulness, happiness, see the good things around you, and that’s sometimes really hard to do, depending on what’s going on for you and where you are in the world and what’s happening.

So that’s going to be part of it, because I was in Asheville, North Carolina in the US, when the hurricane hit it. My oldest daughter lives there and I flew in Thursday night to visit her for five days or so and we lost power 6 am Friday morning. I was worried about turbulence on the airplane, on the flight people. I had no idea I was flying into a hurricane zone. I don’t think any of them actually knew how hard it was going to hit them.

It is very different than Florida. Okay, Asheville’s in the mountains. Floridians move there to get away from hurricanes. I mean, seriously, it has so many Floridians there because they love the mountains and the nature. It’s this beautiful little town, about 100,000 people, with lots of arts, and I think it has the most yoga studios per square foot in the entire world. There’s lots of, like you know, sort of hippie dippy kind of stuff in Asheville and it’s a very accepting community, very unique. Nobody knew that this was going to hit.

As I said, it’s very different than Florida because we actually start preparing when the hurricane season starts, which is like June or something like that, or May. We start buying extra canned food and putting it in our pantries or our laundry rooms or wherever we can fit it in case a hurricane hits. We often have the big five-gallon jug sitting empty that we can fill up in case a hurricane hits. We have generators, we stockpile batteries, every household has a flashlight guaranteed in case a hurricane hits.

And then also Florida, the state itself has the infrastructure to get things up and running actually pretty quickly after a hurricane hits. The longest I’ve been without power is about two weeks. That was Hurricane Wilma. I was pregnant with my second Like 30, I think I was 35, 36 weeks pregnant, very pregnant, and it was very hot. The hurricane hit. That was not fun, but we almost always have water restored within a day or two. I don’t think I even remember being without water more than 24 hours, so you fill everything up, just in case. There are often boil water notices that you have to do once you get power back, but we have the infrastructure to restore that water pretty quickly. We’re also built differently than Asheville.

The water here, even though it floods significantly, it eventually just sinks. Okay, it dissipates, it sinks into the ground, into the aquifer, and it goes away. That sinks into the ground, into the aquifer, and it goes away. That is not the case in the mountains. That doesn’t happen. So the water remains, the floods remain. Now, with Asheville, part of the problem is that the roads that the repair workers have to take to restore the water lines are blocked, so tons of trees fell down, massive flooding. They can’t actually get to the stations to repair them so that the population can have water. So there I am in Asheville. We have water for about 24 hours and then the water goes away.

And I’m there with four Gen Z’s Okay, four kids in their 20s, early 20s. The oldest one is 26. The other ones are like 23, 23, 22. I’m trying to remember how old Jacob was. I think he’s like about the same 23, something like that and my daughter and her boyfriend live in a one-bedroom apartment. It’s a really cute, I love it and she works at an art gallery that rents space in a Fancy Hotel, the Omni Grov Inn Hotel. I’m not saying the name right here, people, but that’s where it is, but it’s up even higher than her apartment is sort of up on the hill, and her boyfriend works at a hotel that’s more of like a regular hotel.

And the hurricane hits and we don’t have power and then we lose water and we have no signal, no, no internet, no way to reach anybody to know what’s going on. So it’s okay, a day or two we’re like all right, what are we gonna do here?

One friend, her best friend in Asheville, had to evacuate their apartment. They brought two cats with them and so we go to check on their apartment and it is a second story apartment. The stairs are washed away, the water line is up to about the middle of a window. It’s completely flooded, completely filled with mud. They can’t access their car because they couldn’t get out of their complex because a tree fell while the evacuation was going on. So my daughter’s boyfriend actually went and picked them up and the two cats, and so that’s completely destroyed completely.

So they’re staying with us. Thank god for the cats because they were super cute, super cute. They kept us all entertained.

And then another friend, his girlfriend, was in like Chicago for a work trip or something and so he was alone and he just knocked randomly on the door. I think it was Saturday that he knocked. No, it was Friday. Friday that he knocked, because he left on Sunday and he spent the night there two nights. So Friday he knocked and he’s like I was alone, I don’t know what’s going on. I was hoping somebody was here. We’re like oh my God, come in, come in, come in. So he was super funny. His apartment was okay. It had some gas. It has a gas stove instead of electric.

So we took a lot of the perishables over there eggs, and some stuff and cooked it all up so that we had some food to eat, and collected a lot of his non-perishables, like he had a lot of canned beans for some reason. So we took all of those back to Mia’s apartment as well as him. We were all staying there, so the friend with the cats actually prefers to sleep on the floor, thank god. Okay, I’m on one end of an l-shaped couch, jacob’s on the other end of the l-shaped couch, okay, so we’re two of us on the couch, one on the floor, then me and her boyfriend in the bed. There is a lot of us in a one-bedroom apartment trying to navigate and get information.

So while we’re checking on the other apartments, we realized that we can catch a little bit of signal in one of the grocery store parking lots. Now the stores are all closed, gas stations closed, banks closed, nothing’s running, nothing. But for some reason this one little parking lot was a hotspot and you could get some messages in and out and make some calls. So we did that. We called family, let them know we were okay. Not all our phones were working, but like two of our phones were working. So we just used those two phones to call everyone and text and let them know.

And then, finally, we got the information from Mia’s dad actually, who’s a structural engineer. I don’t know if he, like, found the database or something, but he knows all about. You know roads, infrastructure, all kinds of stuff, buildings, of course. So he found out that they were not going to restore water for two to three weeks.

At the same time, we found out that the hotel location that Mia and her best friend work at was going to be closed for two weeks. Now, this is a super luxury hotel, and so at that point we were like, oh my god, like they have inside information, probably, that we don’t have. S

So at that point I was like, mia, we’ve got to make an evacuation plan here. Like you can’t stay here without drinkable water, and the drinkable water is running out. So we had some that we had run from the sink before the water got cut off. We had some water bottles that we had, but I was like it’s not going to last us period. Even if you were just here with your boyfriend, that would be really difficult. There’s no way it’s going to last you two to three weeks. So we’ve got to make a plan for getting out of here.

Now the one friend, Jacob, had a brother in Charlotte, so he’s like, okay, I’m going to head out there and hoping that he could make it because he only had a third a tank of gas and that would not take him all the way to Charlotte, but he was hoping it would take him far enough so that he could be able to call his brother and then his brother could pick him up if he did get stranded. He did end up getting some gas, luckily, but even two hours out of Asheville the gas were out. They didn’t have any gas. When we left we found a gas station that had gas about three hours out and we had enough to get there. So Mia’s boyfriend had half a tank and I had a about three quarters of a tank. I had a rental car. Thank god I don’t always get a rental car when I visit Mia because she has a car, you know, and we can use that.

But we had some plans to go visit another city and things like that, and so I’d gone ahead and gotten a rental car. I was like, all right, we can make it, I’m gonna follow you. What we plan to do is go to Mia’s uncle who lives in Raleigh. Raleigh is in North Carolina, it’s east of Asheville and normally it takes about four hours to get there. It took us six and a half. Okay, normally it only takes about two hours to get to Charlotte. It took Jacob five hours the day before, like Sunday morning. He did make it but, um, at that point I was like you’ve got to go, like you can’t stay here. So either I’m going to drive you back to Florida with my rental car or her uncle said, hey, yeah, they can stay here, it’s not a problem, she can stay here as long as she needs to, because he has a house in Raleigh and you know his kids are launched. They’re about about Mia’s age. One is living there, the other one has her own place and so he’s like no problem, they can stay as long as they need to.

And they were way more comfortable with that plan being a little bit closer to their apartment because her boyfriend, his work, his hotel was up and running, they were rationing water. They did have power. For some reason they had power, so he would take our devices and charge them at night we slept because he works the night shift, so he would charge them and then we could use them some during the day.

So I felt lucky to have some resources there, that he worked in a place that had power, just a stroke of luck. The other three kids did not. Theirs were closed. They also had some bottled water, so he obviously couldn’t take all their bottled water, but he could bring us a bottle or two to keep us going. We’re like great.

We flushed the toilet with water we had run in the bathtub and then, when that ran out, we used pool water. That’s what everybody was doing using pool water to flush the toilet with water we had run in the bathtub and then, when that ran out, we used pool water. That’s what everybody was doing using pool water to flush the toilets. And we’re obviously not flushing pee, we’re just trying to keep it down to twice a day for bowel movements. That’s it. That’s how we survived.

But his hotel wanted him to stay and work. They just had a batch of first responders that were going to stay there and he’s like look, no, I’ve got to help. Take everybody over to Raleigh. I’m going to come back in five days or a week or so and see where things are at. That was our plan. We made it to Raleigh, we headed out, we loaded up all the animals and the kids and headed out to Raleigh.

Pretty much everyone had a good sense of humor around me which really helped. Okay, we had tons of books that really helped. I travel with this like teeny sewing kit sometimes and I had that and some the quilters out there will know what this is some like. I had some EPP little things I was working on making little hexagons, patches and stuff, and so I had that to entertain myself. I had a Kindle at night that I would only use at night so that we had a flashlight quote unquote at night. We were using candles at night to see anything until we fell asleep. We had tons of art supplies. We would take a walk, we would draw, so that kept us entertained. The cats kept us entertained. Watching the mice kept us entertained.

The community that she lives in one person would pull up their car and turn the radio on for the updates that the sheriff started giving, like twice a day or something. So we eventually started to get some updates that way. So entertaining ourselves was not really the problem. It was more like keeping the anxiety down, because these are young adults that are living paycheck to paycheck pretty much. You know they’re working jobs like Mia’s job, I think pays her $15 an hour. It’s low, she needs that paycheck, and so that was the other thing of like oh my gosh, she’s going to be out of work for two weeks. Luckily, I can help her out. So I’m at a place in my life where I can do that, but lots of people don’t have that there. They don’t have parents that can help them out.

So the anxiety level was rising and again when I got the news that there’s not going to be water, I was like we got to go. You can live without power for a really long time. You can’t live without drinking water. I was like we have to make a plan to get out of here, which is what we did. We went over to Raleigh. I returned the rental car there, I flew home from Raleigh and back to my own home. This is the update from Asheville.

Trauma

Okay, it was um, what am I going to say? For me, it was trauma with a small t. For some of of them it was trauma with a big T because the one friend, their apartment is destroyed, everything in it is destroyed, their car destroyed. They also have parents that could help them out, but if they didn’t, it’s like I don’t know what they would do. They’d be living in a shelter right now or with friends. So that’s trauma with a big T. Like what do I do? My job is not running, I have no place to live unless it’s a friend’s place and I have no vehicle to get around like that’s trauma with a big T.

I was crying on the airplane. I didn’t cry pretty much the whole time, but finally, I think, when I was out of a position of responsibility, I started, started crying on the airplane. I asked a friend to pick me up from the airport instead of taking an Uber, because she’s, like, safe to cry with, and so she was happy to do that and I just cried. I’m still crying randomly. It’s just for the destruction to go through. It is really hard to see it.

Like the details come back to you in odd ways too, with there’s this one road we would take to get to the grocery store parking lot to pick up some signal for our phones, and there’s a tree that had fallen and so only one of like two lanes was open, so we just go around it. Well, the next day, another tree had fallen and caved in an entire car, like caved it in. I don’t know what happened to the people. I hope they were okay, but it was like, oh my god. Okay, we’ve got to be really careful here with where we’re driving around trees, because the trees are still falling, they’re unstable, there’s still landslides happening, there’s no lights working.

Citizens, people who’ve always dreamed of directing traffic probably right Like two guys are out directing traffic Again in Florida. We know when the lights are out, you treat it like a four-way stop. They weren’t doing that in Aasheville, and so there was car accidents happening. There was constant sirens of police and emergency vehicles going on almost 24-7. So that was really difficult too to constantly hear the sirens and to get out of the way. You had to be very careful. Driving to get out of the way is details like that that come back to you as well.

(Please see this post about Trauma Release.)

Gratitude

All right, let’s talk about gratitude here at the end.

I think I originally did a gratitude list as part of my recovery program and then stopped for years and then started doing it again during the pandemic, but this time I had a gratitude buddy. So one of my friends we decided to send it to each other once a day, and that really has helped me keep it going completely. We have done it now for 4 years I think. We’ve tried various methods, but what we settled on and what’s worked the best for us is we each have our own gratitude notebooks, so we just chose a little notebook. That that’s where we’re going to put our gratitude every day. And we shoot for three, so minimum of three and we often use stickers.

Okay, like, I know, it sounds sounds funny. I know it sounds funny, but stickers for some reason makes it a little more fun. I think she started doing it originally and then I was like, oh yeah, I’ll add some stickers because I love seeing her stickers. And even um, she’s not, she doesn’t live by me, but she visited one time and I gave her these little dog stickers and they’re so cute so they’ll show up in her gratitude list. Right after that. You know, I was like, oh my god, I love the dog stickers and she’s like you gave them to me. I’m like I know, because they’re fun to see! I knew I would see them in your gratitude journal. So stickers for some reason makes it more doable and more fun.

Sometimes I will do doodles because I like to work on my drawing and art and so sometimes I’ll do some little doodle art in there and before I send it off. Our stickers tend to be seasonal, so fall stickers in the fall and holiday stickers during the holidays, that type of thing, but somehow it keeps us doing it.

So we write it out, we take a picture and we text the picture to each other. That’s how we do it. When we’re on vacation, we’re traveling, we normally just send a text instead of taking an extra notebook along with us when we’re traveling, but when we’re home, that’s how we do it, we just send the picture and send it off.

Now I don’t know if there is some research that when you send gratitude to somebody else about them, that it also increases their happiness. So sometimes I will do that when one of my friends shows up, which is pretty frequently, so I don’t do it all the time but let’s say Crystal, who picked me up from the airport and I was so grateful for that and of course that went on my gratefulness list. So that day I sent her the picture like so grateful for you, with a little message.

And sometimes I feel silly doing that, but I just remind myself like, nope, it helps their happiness and mine as well, and it feels good. It feels good to tell someone how grateful you are for them. It feels good to them too. It feels good for you to hear it, right, like we all like to be appreciated. So that’s what I tell myself when I get like. So that’s what I tell myself when I get a little self-conscious about it.

Now, it’s best to be very specific. If you’ve listened to the podcast, you know I talk about this from time to time. It’s best to be specific. When you’re doing gratitude, you will run out of generalities very, very quickly. The other rule is that you don’t repeat, so you can’t put I’m grateful for my kids every day. Okay, that’s a no. This gets boring anyway. Like who wants to read that every single day? Of course you’re grateful for your kids or your pets, but when you start to get specific, then that’s very sustainable. Meaning. I’m grateful that Eva and I laughed together today.

I’m grateful my daughter didn’t get annoyed with me until the very end of the hurricane.

I was stopping too much to use the bathroom on the way to Raleigh. By the way, yeah, I’m a woman in her 50s, I gotta stop to use the bathroom. So she got a little annoyed with me. She prefers her dad’s car trips, I think, where they literally go like seven hours without stopping. He’s like all right, girls, use the bathroom load up. Let’s go. Versus me like every hour and a half or so I need to use the bathroom, it seems like, even when I limit liquids. So I tried to limit my liquids so I wouldn’t annoy her, but still had to use the bathroom twice in a seven hour trip. That’s not too bad.

So anyway, grateful for her, grateful for the cats that were there during the hurricane that kept us a little entertained, grateful for her friends, grateful for her boyfriend’s work that had a few bottles of water that they would let him take home, all kinds of stuff.

After you go through that, a toilet flushing is big. You like watch it go down. You’re like, oh, my god, what a relief. You know Grateful for running water here at home.

So that’s what I recommend. . . try to find a friend and you may find that your friendship deepens because you will know more about what’s going on in your lives through your gratefulness list.

And sometimes my friend and I will call each other, like when something big happens and shows up on the gratefulness list, it’s like what? So I’ll call her, see what’s going on with it, or something I don’t understand. It’s like what was this? I don’t understand. So we’ll either text a little extra or call, but it’s really helped to deepen our friendship substantially.

I would say so choose someone you trust Absolutely. You have to have a certain level there to share things that are private, like that vulnerable, and also know that it’s going to help your friendship. So those are some of my tips for gratitude. Thank you for listening. It helps me to just talk out what happened in Asheville.

I know people are in dire circumstances all over the world and when a hurricane hits like that, it’s a reminder of that for me. Like some people are living like this for months, some people have been in war zones for years and this is what it’s like for them on a daily basis. And yet still we survive, still we’re resilient, still we find moments of happiness. It’s miraculous that anyone stays alive. I sometimes think that I don’t know if that’s a species, but I think sometimes we’re miraculous. It’s miraculous that anyone stays alive. I sometimes think that I don’t know if that’s a motherhood kind of thought or not, but it’s like it’s a miracle that anyone stays alive. Really, we’re so vulnerable in the bodies.

You have my thoughts and prayers to anyone who’s going through a disaster zone right now and suffering Truly. I truly, truly feel for you. I also hope, when you’re listening to this, that you are safe and healthy. Peace.

Transcribed by https://podium.page