The law of equal inequalities.
I know that sounds like an oxymoron. It probably is. But it’s also a law that I have to explain to people time and time again in my work as a coach, because we as a species are incredibly good at dismissing our own trauma out of some desperate need to avoid feeling like we are favoring ourselves.
Instead of accepting our own pain, and processing it, we look around for somebody who has a more difficult situation and we utter those fateful words.
“I can’t complain”.
And we do ourselves a disservice, minimizing the trauma that we feel and ignoring all those emotions that we deem as unnecessary, or unworthy.
Instead of experiencing them, and learning from them, we thrust them down into that place in our soul wherein lies all of the unmet dreams and unrequited feelings, and we pray that they will “stay in their place”. We ignore them, we suppress them and in return we fall victim to them.
Because we minimized ourselves and accepted both our suffering and our supposedly pious response as “righteous”.
Feelings don’t stay where we stuff them. Sure, we can try to push them down with platitudes and restrain them with ritual, but eventually in some way, in some place, those feelings will have their day.
Usually at the most inopportune moment, and expressed in a way that elevates no one, the pain of the trauma that you tried to ignore will come back and it will bite you again and again.
Because that’s what it is, trauma. Just because somebody had it worse doesn’t mean you didn’t get hit, weren’t wounded and don’t need to heal.
It just means that you are trying to avoid feeling that pain so you find a way to minimize it in the hopes that you can lie yourself out of those feelings. Here’s a newsflash, that never works.
The only way that I know to truly heal from trauma is to clean out the wound, and then try to provide the necessary love and care to ourselves as we slowly suture our hearts and minds back together.
But it will never happen until you have the courage to accept that what happened to you was traumatic, and show yourself enough love and compassion to allow yourself to space to feel.
I’m not saying it’s easy, because it certainly isn’t. In my own life and in the lives of people I’ve helped, I have seen the absolutely heart-wrenching outcomes of trying to suppress emotions that needed to come to the surface, and it’s never pretty. Sometimes it can take years or decades to finally reach a point where that pain is fully experienced, tears are shed and a heart finally begins to mend.
And in the meantime, years or decades of joy and peace are lost.
Today, I invite you to accept the reality of things that have been done to you, and stop minimizing your trauma by comparing it with that of somebody else. If you had been stabbed, and somebody else had been shot, you would still need to be treated and healed in order to continue living.
Emotionally it’s the same, it’s just often a slower, more painful and much longer process.
But if you don’t start now, it will haunt you for the rest of forever.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings