Member-only story
I’ll just jump right into this one.
I’ve been in an emotionally taxing situation in one of my personal relationships. I’ve had all the feelings — anger, sadness, hurt, guilt, and even shame. It’s been a bit of a bugger, I can tell you. I may love witnessing and helping others work through their junk, but that doesn’t mean I actually enjoy working through mine all the time. Sometimes, I’d rather crawl in a hole with a live cobra. I would also love to claim that I don’t have junk to work through anymore, that I’m somehow more evolved than that, but I would be handing you a stinking pile of BS. So, I’ll keep it to the truth instead: sometimes I hate doing the emotional heavy lifting that healing requires.
Still, I recognize that doing the work around my emotions, staying present in relationships, and walking through the tricky, mucky, muddy spaces, is important. One of my core beliefs as a human being and as a professional healer and coach is this:
We reclaim bits of our Selves and integrate our experiences of Life when we do the work.
That doesn’t mean I’m pretty about it, and it doesn’t mean that I don’t fall back into old, maladaptive coping skills when I’m doing the dirty work. I do. For instance, in the midst of this situation, I found myself trying to have a party with my favorite maladaptive coping skill family. Let’s call them the ButIt’sTrue Clan: Justification, Rationalization, and Blaming. Every time I got too close to information that hurt, particularly if it brought up guilt or shame, I found myself rationalizing my position and justifying my feelings. When I bumped into feelings of anger or pain, I dove into blaming. I abandoned my Self by jumping into bed with the ButIt’sTrueClan. Here’s the corresponding core belief:
We abandon Self by invalidating and denying our ownership of our thoughts, feelings and behaviors — Our Experience.
Here’s what I mean: Every time we move away from the immediacy of our experience (the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors happening in the present moment) by EXPLAINING ourselves, whether silently in our own mind or out loud to another person, we lose some of the power of Self’s truth in the moment. The present truth. When we justify, rationalize, or blame, we walk away from Self and give some or all of the responsibility for whatever is going on to another person or event or even to a past…
