No Pain No Gain
Last week, I was invited to speak to a 6th grade English class on the topic of struggle. The students had just finished reading a book called “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, which tells the story of a perceived-to-be utopian society built on the premise that emotions of any kind – love, pain, joy, sadness - do not exist. As the story progresses, however, the main character, a 12-year-old boy named Jonas, is assigned to a job that conjures up emotions he was raised to believe he did not have the capacity to feel. As Jonas’ emotional experiences deepen, he struggles to remain confined and constricted by a way of life that denies him his humanity.Jonas' fictional world is real life for too many people. Over the years I’ve heard countless stories from clients who have grown up in environments where feelings were never talked about or, if they were, met with criticism, ridicule, and perhaps worst of all, silence. Being shutdown emotionally is fodder for struggling with a host of issues that hinder people’s ability to connect with their own vulnerability, much less receive and nurture someone else’s. The fallout from emotional paralysis typically manifests as anxiety, depression, codependency, and/or any number of addictions. Numbing becomes preferable to feeling and escapisms function as pain relievers, albeit temporarily and, ultimately, ineffectively.The truth is there isn’t a foolproof cure for pain inflicted by someone else’s negligence. There are ways to heal from it, though, and that process begins with a decision to get help. I’ve found that sometimes the first step toward getting help is hearing someone say, “living under the pretense that feelings don’t exist or that the ones you have are wrong is not okay. By and large, we are all born with the ability to feel emotion. When that ability is thwarted, if not denied to the point of believing you never had it, survival instincts take over and you do what you need to do to stay emotionally invisible.” In my experience, those words act as a cannon ball breaking through faulty beliefs that have served as barriers to feeling any kind of emotional pulse. Helping clients understand how muting their feelings may well have been a necessary survival mechanism at one point in time and, now, how that same default holds them back from achieving success in different areas of their lives…that is my favorite work to do. The same way Jonas from “The Giver” discovered there was another, more authentic way to live, so can you.