How healing from the inside changed how I see things outside…for the better.
Plus 5 Characteristics of True Healing
Back in my day…
I mean, when I was your age…
Let me put this another way…when I used to walk to school uphill both ways…in the snow…
All kidding aside, when I was in the throes of emotional pain I was compulsively driven to escape it. I was on the go, go, go all the time, doing whatever I could to feel a sense of getting closer to the end goal, whatever that end goal was. For me, I never really knew what I was trying to get to. All I knew was to keep going.
Now that I look back on it all, I see that I wasn’t trying to get anywhere other than away from here, hence the opening lyric to my song, Road Trip.
“Didn’t know where we wanted to go, just had enough of here.”
Anyhow, I still am driven in many ways, but the emphasis now is on what drives me or more specifically, what direction I’m driving towards.
Am I driving away from it or through it?
Check out this bird metaphor to see where I’m heading with all this.
Did you know that some sea birds will fly into the eye of a storm in order to survive it? According to scienceabc.com/nature and researchers at mit.edu, by placing GPS units on these birds they could see that some of them would fly into the eye of a hurricane or typhoon if the storm was heading out to sea, as opposed to heading towards landfall. Kind of makes sense to me - they jump into the eye of the storm that is heading out to sea so that they don’t collide with anything on the land.
Not all the birds are rewarded by what appears to be a courageous choice though. Some get severely injured (or worse) from the high winds, but there are many who do in fact survive the extreme conditions by flying directly into them until the danger subsides.
Healing from the inside for me means to head into the eye of the storm. The storm I'm referring to was an event from the past, and heading into its eye means to sit still long enough to feel its power, appreciate its energy, acknowledge its impact on me, and then bid it farewell. I sometimes repeat that process. In other words, it's not a one-way street where I did something once and now I'm all better and done with it. Sometimes it's more of a round-a-bout and I have to repeat certain actions on a daily basis in order to move forward.
I wrote about the specifics on how I did this in my book, "Hollow: how a young man turned childhood trauma into music.
Not all of it is positive though. For example, heading into the eye of the storm is terrifying. I understand why so many don't even bother trying. Plus, it comes at a cost. My world view and view of my life in general shattered and collapsed. I had created a false sense of self that many people liked. Unfortunately, that is not who I am and living that type of double life fed the anxiety I am now free of, or free from.
Moving forward now, I am seeing signs in my own life that indicate that I am on the healing spectrum. I am part of the solution now instead of being part of the problem. For example, I now care about you and your well being more than I used to. I now see that we are more alike than we are different. I now want to be useful to the common good of us all.
Here are my 5 Characteristics of True Healing:
1) APPEARANCE: I used to be hyper-aware of my appearance and my surroundings; today I’m comfortable in my own skin.
2) THOUGHTS: I used to be hyper-aware of what I thought you thought about me; today I realize that your opinion of me is none of my business and I let thoughts pass on by.
3) LOW-to-ZERO ANXIETY: I used to be hyper-aware of my anxiety from the minute I woke up in the morning until I went to sleep at night; today anxiety didn’t even cross my mind until I thought about it consciously after being awake for an hour or so.
4) CONVERSATIONS: I used to be hyper-aware of how uncomfortable talking to others was; last night at a party I welcomed conversation and found it easy to talk to others (other people did most of the talking anyway!). I also started up a conversation with someone who was sitting by himself scrolling on his phone and felt that I provided him a sense of comfort.
5) OWNERSHIP: I used to be hyper-aware of how many people I thought were causing my problems; today I am able to say "it's not them," and I am more able to identify how my own reactions have the potential to become "storms."
True healing isn’t easy and requires revisiting difficult emotions and a willingness to feel uncomfortable and awkward sometimes, to say the least. But through that process, I discovered a useful oxymoron; by not caring so much about what other people might be doing or thinking, I am able to care more about other people on a more sincere level.
Caring about others allows me to connect, and the dis-connection is where this whole business of trauma and anxiety stemmed from to begin with.
Now I pass this energy along to you and wonder if you will use it to restore a bond, re-establish a connection, or rekindle a wounded relationship. Seems to me that the connections are what get us through the storms.
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