As I wrap up my therapeutic process, at least for now, I feel myself entering a new stage in my life and the above has been on my mind a bit. What I mean by falling is anything that lets you be hurt for a while. One could argue this is an essential aspect of the therapeutic process, of the mental health movement -- asking what is wrong with me?
If you can allow yourself to actually hear the answer, the consequences can reverberate across months and years. It's not easy, sitting with your hurt. As I've gone through this stage of my life, I've come to understand that there was some wisdom to how past generations viewed trauma and hurt.
Leave it well enough alone.
It sounds very ignorant to our 21st century ears, but there is sense to it, if you think about it. Disturbing buried monsters carries with it the very real possibility of being chased, engulfed in flames, or swallowed whole. Sometimes, you fall and you stay down.
Case in point, while some people manage to sit in their hurt a while and then get back up, many don't seem to want to. Many among us seem to hug to themselves this victim identity, this hurt child behavior, and just lie in their past forever.
These might be people who always play the victim in every single story. I'm all for speaking your truth and sharing your hurt and all that, but when you're the person things were done to in every single story of your life...? That's suspicious. In relationship lingo, that's a red flag, if you meet someone like that. I think we should beware this red flag in ourselves, also.
These might also be people who cleverly "admit" their guilt on occasion, but they'll typically cushion it by saying things like "yes, I wasn't the best partner, parent or friend, but considering my much bigger hurt and all that was done to me, it's not really my fault, is it?". This facade of ownership is used to trick us into siding with the speaker and sympathizing with their hurt without actually holding them accountable.
At some point, you gotta be held accountable. By yourself, chiefly. At some point, you gotta return from the forest.
That's the point of that story. Yes, the young member of the tribe leaves on a soul-searching, maturing quest into the woods, and comes back much changed. But comes back. Staying lost forever isn't growing up, maturing, or growing wise. It's just moving your caravan a little down the road.
When I started along this journey, I thought yes, everyone needs to sit in their hurt and acknowledge and ponder and pour over their trauma. Now, I think that can be very hard. Once you start thinking in terms of wounded animal, it's very tricky getting on your feet again and continuing the journey. It's very tricky resisting cynicism, cruelty, a victim mindset. Hell, sometimes it's hard just to stop yourself obsessing over some shit thing that happened in your past.
A while ago, I wrote about Abigail Shrier's book "Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up". Over the past weeks, a couple ideas from that book stayed with me:
- Talking obsessively about your emotions can be harmful. Asking yourself every single day how you feel and why you might be anxious could be what's making you anxious;
- "Shake it off" might not be such bad advice, after all. In her book, Shrier argues that it teaches kids resilience, that life will throw curve-balls at you, and that you need to believe that you can move past them, if you are to survive. I see some truth in that.
Where we are now, as a society, in the development of the mental health movement insists quite a bit on heading into the woods. Needless to say, Big Pharma has every interest in keeping you there. But a lot of this pop, social media bite-sized psychology world also encourages you to feel like a perennial victim.
Yes, leaving on the quest is a big part of the story.
So is eventually returning to the tribe. Changed, but returned. So much focus in our modern-world goes on "me", on self-care, self-love, self-compassion. So much that we risk forgetting that we can't flourish without tribe. There's a different kind of meaning, of satisfaction we get when we help others, when we do things for the people who matter to us, and we can't get that satisfaction, that fulfillment out of relationships with ourselves alone.
These are just some thoughts I've been mulling over. They may change. Everything else does. But they are where I am right now.
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I'd be firmly in the leave well enough alone camp. I've never found it helpful to dwell upon past hurts and injuries. I believe I'm strong because of rather in spite of my difficult upbringing.