The Viable Alternative

Once upon a time, you were a little child, completely helpless and dependent on your parents or caretakers for life itself. They knew it, and equally as important, YOU knew it.

Because of this, seemingly little things such as a parent “disappearing” for even 30 seconds was taken as a threat to your very own life and potentially caused deep emotional trauma.

Added to this, you had a young, unformed, callow mind that lent to taking things personally that had absolutely NOTHING to do with you. Things such as a father abandoning the family, parents arguing, seeing your Mom cry, your Father drinking too much, your Dad never being around because he had to work three jobs to keep the lights on, a parent who was frustrated about something that had nothing to do with you taking his anger out on you, etc, etc, were all taken to mean that there was something wrong with you.

This tended to cause more feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness, self-loathing, anger, sorrow, self-pity, etc.

On top of all this, life has its disappointments, let-downs, and people who come along and say some not-so-nice things that wound you (i.e. hurt your feelings) and cause PAIN.

The thing is, these wounds don’t just magically disappear like we like to think they do. We’re also never taught how to heal these wounds, thus we wind up perpetually living in pain, whether we’re aware of it or not.

Doing this thing called life is stress and trauma inducing at some point or the other, so no matter how “perfect” your life seems to be or how “strong” you think you are, you are carrying an unhealed wound from some point in your life.

This pain has an adverse affect on our behaviour, our perceptions, our thinking in ways we don’t realize. It also blocks us from being our strongest selves and holds us back in ways we can’t even imagine.

So….how do we heal from this pain so we can fully free, uninhibited and able to express ourselves from a place of power rather than as a reaction to pain?

1) Acknowledge it

Yes folks, this first step is not brain surgery nor astrophsics. In order to deal with anything, you have to first acknowledge its existence. The flat tire that’s making your car drive all funny and making all this annoying noise cannot be fixed unless you first acknowledge that there’s a problem and that the flat tire is the cause. When you acknowledge that there’s a flat tire, you can then start the process of fixing it.

Same thing goes for a broken window or a broken anything. First acknowledging it’s broken gives you the awareness that makes it possible for you to fix it. I could’ve never started therapy unless at first admitted I had unaddressed pain.

If you look at any type of dysfunctional behaviour on your part, from drug or alcohol abuse, to workaholicism, to overeating, to over indulgence in any type of seemingly “harmless” activity (partying, working out, shopping, sleeping, dating), it points to some type of pain.

Also note that dysfunctional behaviour can be ANY type of behaviour that you do to avoid feeling the pain you already have or that comes from a place where you’re trying to compensate from some perceived inadequacy (i.e. becoming a millionaire because you feel it validates your feelings of unworthiness, being a “tough guy” because deep down inside you think you’re weak and haven’t been able to overcome this feeling).

Whatever the case may be, you first have to admit it exists before you do anything else.

2) You Have to Feel It to Heal It

As was quoted in the G.I. Joe cartoon in the 80s, “Knowing is half the battle.”

The KEY word in that quote is HALF. You can acknowledge something to till the cows come home, but things won’t improve until you actually DEAL with the damn problem.

I can confidently say that just about everyone in the planet is in one way or another avoiding feeling the pain that resides in them in one way or another. I’ve said this before in other blogs, but it bears repeating, people on an unconscious level avoid feeling their pain through all sorts of “distractions” that include alcohol, smoking, eating, thrill seeking, going from relationship to relationship, partying, working, sex, etc, etc.

WE ALL DO IT ON SOME LEVEL.

To deal with your pain you first have to eliminate the distractions. How can you deal with your pain (or anything for that matter) if you’re too busy running from it?

To stop running from your pain means to be willing to stand and FEEL the pain knowing it’s not going to kill you. When you’re willing to feel your pain, instead of having it jammed up in your body where it not only unconsciously controls your thoughts and behaviours, but also potentially causes disease by blocking the normal flow of your biological and chemical processes, you’re rather giving it a space for it to express itself so it can subside and allow you to heal.

So yes, “You have to feel it to heal it.”

3) Let It All Out

Most people get emotions ALL WRONG. One one end, like I said before, you have people who completely numb themselves to their emotions so they don’t have to feel them without realizing that just because they don’t feel their emotions doesn’t mean that they’re still not being controlled by them and causing bodily harm to the person.

On the other end, you have the overly emotional person who’s run by his emotions is such a way that his anger drives him to become an ax murderer or roll up to a shopping mall with a semi-automatic rifle and shoot into crowds of people.

Truly, all any emotion stuffed deep with our bodies, i.e. our subconscious minds, wants to do is express themselves, but it has to be done in a healthy way that comes from a place of strength and not from weakness.

It may mean that if you happen to touch upon a deep feeling of rage within you that comes from childhood, instead of going to beat your kids, you take control of how you let out your anger by going for a jog, going to the gym and hitting the heavy bag, putting your rage to the pen and journaling to express how you feel, doing some housecleaning, or whatever FEELS appropriate.

It means giving yourself the time to grieve over an event that saddened you in some way.

It may also mean that if you touch into some sorrow from your three year old self, giving this three yourself a voice by going into your room, crawling up into a ball, and yes, crying like you may put it like “a little bitch.”

You may shudder at doing that because it means you’re “weak.” But holding onto pain weakens you, LITERALLY, and letting go of pain actually allows you to become stronger version of yourself. Plus, when you proactively choose to let your empty your pain, you’re not coming from a place where you see yourself as a hopeless victim who can’t handle life’s circumstances, instead you’re coming from a place of strength because you’re letting go of what’s holding you back to become a stronger version of yourself.

That’s courage, not weakness.

4) Learn to Re-Parent Yourself

We can be angry at our parents forever for doing or not doing a,b,c or d to us that left some emotional pain within us or we can start the process of putting the past behind us by proactively learning to give to ourselves what we wanted but didn’t get from our parents.

This means learning to re-parent ourselves.

We do this by connecting to our wounds and addressing them by treating ourselves the way we felt we needed to be treated but weren’t, providing for ourselves what we felt we didn’t get as kids, talking to ourselves in ways that we wished our parents talked to us as kids, and all in all, being the parent to ourselves that we needed to have as kids to fulfill our emotional needs.

Learning to re-parent ourselves helps us get rid of the feelings of victimhood we had as a child from not getting what we felt we should’ve gotten. Addressing this pain also addresses the myriad of behaviours we engage in whose source most of the time stems from the relationships we had with our parents.

5) Forgive

I’ve said it in other blogs, and I’ll say it here, forgiving is not easy. I’m no expert in this myself, but it is a necessary part of the healing process

If the forgiving of others as a positive thing is news to you, I’ll enlighten you. Holding resentment towards someone who did you wrong in the past is like leaving your hand on a hot stove and expecting the other person to be burned by it.

Resentment only damages you, it doesn’t damage the person you’re holding it against for whatever they did to you.

What I find interesting is the many Christians who BLINDLY say they forgive a certain person for the wrong the person did to them because they’re called to do so by Christ, yet it’s clear they still have pain and resentment towards that person.

I think such people are missing the point. While forgiveness is an important component of the healing process, I believe that there’s a certain amount of healing that needs to take place within BEFORE you can fully forgive someone.

In my opinion, forgiveness is the last part of the healing process. Taking the steps to heal allows you to be able to forgive, and forgiving allows you to fully heal.

6) Let It Go

This is a corollary to the last point, because your pain may not have been inflicted on you by someone else, but rather through a situation like a failure, a tragedy or some disappointment.

In this case, you still will need to go through all the other previous steps mentioned except for the forgiving part, because there isn’t anyone to forgive. As such, instead of having to forgive anyone, in order to complete the healing process, you have to look to see how this painful situation made you stronger, how it helped you to grow, and what it taught you.

Of course though, this applies to you even if you had to forgive someone.

When you constantly banter off about how hurt you are by whatever happened to you, you remain a victim by insisting on holding onto the past, which in turn prevents you from healing. On the other hand, you transmute your pain into power by letting go which involves doing what I mentioned above.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps,

Ike Love