Sit in the Water: What a Broken Bridge Taught Me About Feeling Your Feelings

By Barbara Hettinger, LAC — Arizona Family Institute

There's a bridge in Budapest called the Széchenyi. The Chain Bridge. Stone and iron, suspended over the Danube, with lion statues standing guard on either end. It was finished in 1849, and for almost a hundred years, it carried people back and forth between Buda and Pest. Before that bridge, you couldn't really get across. Not reliably.  (see my video on this topic)

Then came 1945.

The Nazis were retreating. The Russians were closing in. And on their way out, the Germans blew every bridge across the Danube. They needed to slow the Allies down. So they detonated the bridges and left them sitting in the water.

If you look at photos of the Chain Bridge after the explosion, it's devastating. The cables snapped. The deck collapsed into the river. The lions are still there at the ends, keeping watch over the wreckage.

And I have to tell you — it's still beautiful. Broken, submerged, tragic. And beautiful.

I've thought about that bridge a lot in my work. Because I sit with people whose lives have been exploded. Sometimes by something someone else did. Sometimes by grief. Sometimes by a moment they didn't see coming. And they come into my office and the question underneath everything they're saying is: How do I get back across? How do I rebuild what's in the water?

Here's what I've learned. And honestly, it's what the bridge taught me.

You sit in the water first.

I know. That's not what any of us want to hear. When our lives come apart, the impulse is to act — to fix, to reassure, to move, to schedule, to talk over the top of the ache. To do almost anything except feel what's actually there. But you can't rebuild a bridge while you're still trying to pretend it didn't fall.

So I'll say to a client, sometimes very quietly, Can we just sit with this for a minute? And often there's a long pause. Sometimes tears. Sometimes just a long exhale that tells me the body has been holding something the mind wasn't ready to name yet.

That's the work. That pause. That's where rebuilding actually begins.

Our feelings aren't obstacles to getting our lives back. They're the information we need. When we let ourselves feel sadness, or fear, or anger, or grief — really feel it, without rushing to explain it or solve it — something shifts. The emotion gets easier to understand. Easier to release. It stops running the show from underground.

The Chain Bridge was rebuilt. Took about four years. I've walked across it many times. It's stunning. You'd never know, walking across it now, what it had been through — except that the people of Budapest know. The city knows. That bridge carries its history in its beauty.

And I think that's true for us too.

You are going to have seasons where life feels like it's in the water. More than one, probably. That's not a sign that something is wrong with you. That's part of being a human being in a world that sometimes explodes underneath us. The question isn't whether you'll ever need to rebuild. The question is whether you'll give yourself the time to do it well.

So if you're in the water right now — if something has come apart and you can't see how you're going to get across — please hear me:

You don't have to have a plan today.

You don't have to be okay yet.

Sit in the water. Feel what's there. Let the feelings do what feelings do when we finally stop running from them.

The bridge comes later. And when it does, it will be beautiful.