So many of us suffer with some form of mental illness or emotional disturbances. So many of us tend to suffer needlessly for prolonged periods with these issues. It’s rare that we seek help for these issues before having them get so wildly out of control that they interfere with our lives and our relationships. We think that if “we can make it just one more day” it will get better on it’s own. Without intervention, or active self work, this is rarely the case.
We all know or have known someone, someone we care about, who lives in a state of perpetual suffering. We listen to them, we sit with them as they agonize over why they cannot make certain aspects of their lives work. We offer them advice when we can see a solution for them but they rarely seem to take action, or try to create any real change in their life, regardless of how effective the advice we give them may be.
To the observer the solution can seem so simple, but often times when you are lost in the quagmire of your own suffering it’s not only hard to see a way out, but it’s hard to believe that anything can be done to change what you are experiencing. You may try to adopt a new, healthier perspective, but it just seems like it never really takes hold. We lose ground fighting back against our suffering and we feel like we are failing. This process doesn’t seem to encourage us to try our best to change these things, or to try to fish ourselves out of the muck. When we cannot pull ourselves out of it, as easily as the advice we’ve been given implied it would be, we tend to feel disempowered, or like we have failed ourselves and those we love.
The path to recovery is difficult and filled with terrors. Most of the time, in order to free ourselves from our suffering, we have to face things that are uncomfortable about ourselves, and our lives. We have to take ownership in where we are at. Though many things have happened to us to encourage our present state of mind or being, we have chosen to hold hands with those events, and we have agreed with them and their ability to hold us down.
In order to escape our suffering we have to take ownership in what we have done to accent the situations that have brought us to this position. When we take ownership in this way, we can realize our own power to control the trajectory of our lives and our experiences, and we can become inspired to use that same sense of power to reverse the damage that we have allowed into our lives. For many, these truths are hard to face.
In our culture we sell this idea that there is a pill for every ill. There is a magic bullet that that can defeat the beast of our suffering. Understandably, this is a very attractive proposal. In our lives we have so little time to devote to our self care, checking in on our emotional well being, and doing what we need to do to manage ourselves and master our minds so we can spend more time living our best lives.
We package this idea that if you take the right pills, drink more water, get enough exercise that all our demons would just disappear and we can just get back to doing what we have determined to be more important than seeing to our well being. While many of these things do help to relieve the pressure we are under, our demons are still alive and well, nestled in to our psyche, and acting themselves out in our close personal relationships. So what can we do to free ourselves from these destructive patterns?
A very wise person once said to me that many of the things in our lives that plague us are the result of avoidance. It took me a long time to process this idea and digest it, but now that I understand it I try to prevent myself from being avoidant. When we are avoidant we are refusing to face certain truths about ourselves or our lives. By not acknowledging these things we continue to allow them to be present in our lives. The idea that if we ignore something long enough it will just go away doesn’t serve anyone. Either these things are events or people that are actively in play in our lives, but more often than not they are parts of our psyche acting out unhealthy patterns that we learned in our development.
These patterns are consistently deteriorating our relationships with people in our lives, causing us to feel progressively more alienated from those who would normally be there for us. These patterns are showing up as defense mechanisms causing us to create counter phobic defenses to people we would love to have be an important part of our lives. These patterns make it hard for us to show up at work and do our jobs as best we can. These patterns prevent us from getting up off the couch, stop watching a 93 hour Netflix marathon, go for a run and drop that 40 pounds that we’ve been complaining about. These patterns keep us living in our inadequacies and over compensating to the point of mental and physical exhaustion. So how can we move past this and get ourselves back to a life that gives us the qualities that we deserve?
We need to be determined that the suffering that we are living in is too much and unnecessary. We need to commit to ourselves and our quality of life and understand that we and we alone are responsible for the circumstances we are living in. We need to hold ourselves accountable for the actions in our lives and not deliver excuses for our antisocial behaviors and begin healing the important relationships in our lives. We need to create effective boundaries for those who treat us with disrespect or anything less than we deserve to be treated.
In short, we need to take personal responsibility for the events in our lives, and see clearly where we have had a hand in creating these circumstances that are not adequately suiting us. Through actively empowering ourselves by recognizing our strengths and building our character we can develop a stronger sense of self to help us to feel like we can take our lives back. We did not come here to suffer, we came here to remember the lessons of forgiveness and of love. I think we could all do better to start learning these lessons by establishing them with ourselves and then with those who are around us.
Artwork by: Christopher Foulkes c-knox@live.com
Nightwing Healing Arts 