MORNING REFLECTIONS
Ok, 3rd week of the 'Podcast'.
This week I share some thoughts about living with our mistakes, and how imposter syndrome affects me. I hope there is something in here of value that helps you.
(The link may not work, but you can watch/listen here.)
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings
Do you ever lie awake at night, unable to sleep because of the thoughts that run through your head? In my past, when this would happen, my brain would generally focus on the really dumb small things that I had done that day, like said something that on reflection wasn’t particularly intelligent or done something that made me look stupid.
I think a lot of us do this as children, because we’re still learning our way.
But I found as I get older that my brain doesn’t focus on those small and insignificant things. Maybe it’s because I’ve healed a lot of those insecurities that made those things painful, or maybe it’s just because the older I get, those small mistakes are dwarfed by other things… things that in the moment weren’t so embarrassing, but when compounded with time their magnitude changes.
And you come to see how they have affected your life, and in some cases still do.
I once heard the phrase that the pathway to wisdom is littered with mistakes, and I don’t know if I would consider myself wise at this point, but I’ve certainly put in the work of mistakes Yet as time has passed and the small things fall away, I find it harder and harder to do with the emotional fallout of some of the bigger mistakes of my life.
Because they didn’t just affect me, they affected my family and sometimes the people around me.
It’s very easy to look back on those mistakes and get lost in the nature/nurture argument, and trying to figure out whether these are a result of the circumstances of my environment, the nature of my personality, or some strange combination of the two. Yet I realize in doing that, I am really trying to find a point of blame, which doesn’t really help with anything.
Because what I’m really trying to do is live with the grief of lost opportunities, and the fear of making worse mistakes in the future.
In one of my previous pieces, I seem to remember writing that regret was a poison. Honestly after 600+ pieces of this work I can’t tell you all the things that I’ve written, but that one stands out. I guess at this point in my life I’m trying to learn to live with the poison of regret, while realizing that even that emotion compresses my soul, and makes it harder to do the things I need to do to change the outcome of some of those mistakes.
In trying to change, I am confronted with all the reasons that I made the mistakes in the first place.
And that can be really hard to live with. On the nights where sleep won’t come, or in the mornings where the world is quiet and I don’t have to rush out of the door to work, I find myself beset by sadness and a longing for things to be different. There are times when I can see the pathway that will lead me out of this place, but the very fears that prevented me from choosing differently back then assail me now, whispering a subtle toxin to my soul.
About how I will only make a mistake, screw things up, and feel even worse about myself when it has all gone wrong.
It’s very easy to get caught in that cycle of regret and fear. The longer I spend in those overwhelming emotions, the less confident I feel making the changes necessary to enable different future. I know that I cannot go back and change the past, but I’m trying to write a better ending to the story that I currently live, and I cling to the hope that a better ending than the one I currently envision will in some way help make all of the past worth it.
Because if all those mistakes were stepping stones to something great, I can live with that meaning. If not, then I have to learn to live with a very different emotional story than the one I would like to be.
I think it’s like one of those crazy Zen loops, where in order to make it easier to move forward in the future I have to forgive myself for the past, but the best way to forgive myself for the past is to move into a different future first. I think it’s far too easy to get caught into that way of thinking, lost in an eternal and internal pattern of frustration and fear.
Breaking that kind of a loop can be difficult.
I know it’s possible, I’ve done it before, but as I get older these kind of changes become harder. The baggage is greater, the outcome of the risks gets progressively larger, and yet in some ways so does the payoff if things work out.
Yet in order to move forwards, I have to find a belief in myself but is sometimes lacking.
Mistakes only lead to wisdom if you learn from them, and can overcome the frailties of human nature that got you there in the first place.
And sometimes that overcoming requires a degree of courage that is not easy to manifest.
But as the years pass, and the pain of regret grows, the pressure on me to rewrite the ending of the story becomes greater, and sometimes an abundance of fear, a cup of desperation and a small pinch of hope are all the ingredients you need to create a recipe for change.
And although change can be scary, if it works out, it can be all the healing that your soul needs.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings
A few nights ago, a cute little cat seemed to ‘adopt’ our family. It was cold outside, and my son had just gone to check on something with his car. He came back in laughing as he had had to fight to get through the door without a cat coming in.
Since we don’t own a cat, this was rather unexpected. Apparently the cat was very friendly, and seemed determined to come through the door with him.
Little did we know the journey we were about to begin.
We kept checking throughout the evening, and the cat seemed to mount a very determined assault on our porch. He was sitting there quite calmly, just staring up at the door. If we opened it a crack to see if he was out there, he would move hopefully towards the door.
If we didn’t have our wonderful four-year-old silver Labrador named Cocoa, we would have probably let the cat in just because it was below freezing, and he seemed to be trying to get out of the cold.
But there’s no way that our dog would’ve allowed that, and I didn’t feel like spending the rest of the evening cleaning up whatever mess the dog and the cat would make as they fought their way through the house.
As someone who’s had animals as pets for most of my life, I struggle seeing any animal suffer. I won’t go to an animal shelter, because I could honestly leave with every single animal there. The knowledge that a cat was outside in the cold made me uncomfortable, so I took him a plate of tuna for food, and a box with some towels both inside and over the top so that he would have somewhere warm to sleep.
I felt like I was at least doing something.
Over the next couple of days, this friendly cat would keep showing up. I realize that it was probably because I’ve given him some decent food, and we continued feeding him some chicken which he ate in a fairly calm manner. It didn’t seem like he was starving, and his overall condition led us to believe that he had a home somewhere where he was well taken care of.
But he kept coming back, and with the weather getting colder, both Holly and I were becoming anxious for his welfare.
We decided that we would give it a couple more days, and then take him to the animal shelter to see if he had been chipped. I was perfectly willing to continue with this plan of action, but Holly was struggling more and more each day with the idea that this sweet and affectionate cat was not being taken care of, and could be out there all alone.
So she took to the Internet, and started hunting.
It seems that our area has a lost and found pets page, and Holly, who is probably the greatest Internet researcher that I’ve ever met, decided to see if somebody had reported a cat like this missing. As well as unique markings on his face, he actually has some other unique features which make him fairly distinct and easily recognizable.
And after some hunting, it seemed that she had found a match.
Because back in July someone had posted a picture looking just like this little guy, and said that he had gone missing after July 4. There was nothing else mentioned, and so we just assumed that the cat had been found and then gone missing again, and he was just wandering type who liked to hit on kind people and get them to share food with him.
It’s not unknown in the cat world, and we are certainly the kind of people who are an easy target for an enterprising cat.
Holly reached out to see if the cat was still missing, and you can imagine our surprise when we got an excited reply from the cat’s owner. It seems that they hadn’t been able to get him into the house on July 4th and probably being scared by fireworks the cat, whose name turns out to be Mittens, had gone missing. He usually slept every night with their oldest child, but they hadn’t seen anything of him in five months.
To say they were surprised and elated is probably a huge understatement.
So Tuesday lunchtime we came home and found Mittens hanging outside of our house. We enticed him into our garage with even more food, and spend the afternoon with him. We placed a hot pad on the ground, turned it onto warm, put a couple of towels over it and just let him lay there while we fed him, petted him and gave him as much attention as we could give to make up for the last five months where he’s been running alone.
And waited until his family got there.
When is owner got out of the car, he was accompanied by a boy of around 8-9 years old. This was the young man who Mittens would sleep with every night, and to say that he was overjoyed to see his cat would also be an understatement. It was certainly a bittersweet moment, because in the few days that we had been adopted by this cat, we had come to care for him a lot.
But seeing the light that young boy’s face meant more to us than anything else.
I’m not sure what Mittens felt about being returned home, because he’d found a couple of suckers who were feeding him and providing him a hot pad to lay on while they stroked him and paid him every attention. I think after 5 months roaming without a home, he probably felt like he’d checked into a 5 star hotel, and he seemed determined to enjoy his stay as much as possible.
Later this evening we had some messages from his owner to let us know that Mittens was making himself at home, getting re-acquainted with his family, and was doing very well. His owner thanked us over and over, and it was great to know that this little cat, who had somehow talked his way into our hearts, was again living his best life, at home with his family.
After all the time he was on his own, he deserves all the love and attention they can give him.
But honestly, I kind of miss him already.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings
I’d love to tell you that the big changes in my life were the results of intention, planning and taken in calm moments of rational thought. However since I don’t lie to you, I can’t because that would be complete crap. When I look at the biggest changes in my life, they all came from situations that felt super uncomfortable.
Change starts when you’re not happy where you are.
My weight loss journey of losing 145 pounds in 18 months didn’t start with me sitting down calmly one day deciding that now is finally the time to lose weight. It came because I felt horrible when I was denied life insurance coverage, and I felt like I’d let my family down. I was in a difficult work situation, and frankly being significantly overweight was risky for both my health and my career.
So I radically changed how I was eating, and I’ve stuck with it for 6 ½ years.
Exiting that difficult work situation wasn’t exactly pretty either. I should have left long before I did, but it took things coming to a head in a really difficult meeting for me to realize that a change had to be made, and to be completely honest with you, it was my wife who made the decision that we both knew was the correct one to get me out of a situation that had the potential to kill me through stress and worry.
What looked like a brave and confident move was honestly anything but.
Even my decision to go skydiving was born out of a desire to become somebody different. I was emotionally stuck in a place where I just didn’t see a way forwards, and I figured that doing something that scared me half to death might be a way to get things moving again. It wasn’t hundred percent successful in that, but it did help me see that the fear controlling me wasn’t something that had to hold me back at all.
Sometimes we change out of desire; sometimes we change out of fear. Most often times it’s a combination of both.
I’m pretty confident if you look back in your life at some of the really big decisions, you’ll see that they were driven a mixture of emotions. I’ve had people tell me that they married their partner because they love them, but were also afraid of being alone. I’ve listened to people explain their career choice as a matter of reason and fear but also passion and want.
Only you know why you made the decisions that you did, but I’m guessing you also know a few things that you haven’t done that you wish you had.
Like I talked about in the previous post, over the last few months I’ve been trying to do things differently, and one of those is make changes not out of fear, but out of desire. It’s often said that on our deathbeds we will regret the things we didn’t do far more than the things that we did, and I truly believe the failing to change into the person that will make you happy is probably one of the deepest regrets that somebody ever has.
Please don’t let that be you.
I understand the change is scary. As someone who grew up in a fair amount of chaos, I’ll be honest and tell you that I hate change. I would love nothing more than to be able to live my life quietly, easily and changing as little as possible, but I also realize that the greatest growth times in my life have been the times right been pushed to the limit.
Sometimes the only way to find out who we really are is to walk that sharp edge without having a plan B.
In a few weeks we will start the new year, and people will make their resolutions like they always do. Sometimes people even keep them. Yet there’s no magical power around the first of the year, and there’s no sudden burst of insight, inspiration or willpower that happens when the clock strikes 12 in the calendar changes. You can make a change in your life anytime you want to.
And it’s better to do it when you want to, rather than when you need to.
If you are in the middle of a change right now and it’s scary, please know you have my admiration and my respect. If there is a change you know you need to make, but you haven’t been able to yet, please don’t be hard on yourself about it. Life can be difficult enough without you adding to your burdens with judgment and guilt.
Most of all, if you’re facing a change, may I suggest to you try to imagine what could happen if everything works out.
Because sometimes it does.
As I exited that difficult work situation I spoke of, my wonderful wife bought me a plaque that hangs on the wall in my office at home. She purchased it for Christmas that year, despite our agreement not to spend money on presents for each other because we didn’t know what the future held. It doesn’t have pretty pictures, it doesn’t have a beautiful font. It just has 12 words that have made so much of a difference to me.
“What if I fail? Oh but my darling, what if you fly?”
Not to get too corny, but she has been the wind beneath my wings for 26 years, and she inspires me every day to try to be better. Sometimes the changes that we make are out of fear, or out of desire, but sometimes they are made because of the greatest force in the universe.
Simply out of love.
Whatever change are considering, please try loving yourself as you go through it. Make time for yourself, celebrate yourself and be kind to yourself.
My wife Holly has a simple mantra. “Be kind, do good. Love is a verb”.
May you find love for yourself today and always, and may that love give you the strength to change in a way that will make you happy.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings
So here's the second episode of my 'podcast'? I'm still figuring this out, but I hope something in this 14 minute episode gives you some insight and understanding. This is all extemporaneous, so there are pauses and meanderings because that's how I think and teach. Again I'm still learning, so this is kind of rough, but I appreciate you putting up with me while I learn this by doing.
(The link may not work, but you can listen/watch here.)
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings
It sounds kind of funny doesn’t it – I mean if you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust? Of all the people in all of the world, the one person you should be able to count on to look after your best interests is the person looking back at you in the mirror. Yet I've worked with people who have a profound distrust for themselves, and honestly for some pretty good reasons.
Because until you’ve taken a good look at yourself, you actually might be your worst enemy.
But how can that be you ask? Well for many years I was in fact my own worst enemy. If you and I had sat down together, I would have regaled you with stories of all the things that were done wrong to me, how unfair it was, and how difficult it made my life. I would’ve probably added in about how dysfunctional my childhood was, and how the universe had set me up to fail.
If that doesn’t sound like me now, hopefully it isn’t.
But it’s been a long road to get from where I was to where I am now, and I realize that I am far from where I want to be. That change happened gradually over a period of many years, starting as I sat across from a therapist who taught me a lesson that I will never forget. It’s probably the only lesson I remember from him, but at the time he taught it to me, I really didn’t want to listen.
Because listening meant laying aside my story, and I had so much emotional energy invested in it, so much justification for my life, that I wasn’t willing to give it up.
So when he told me that my feelings were a symptom of the thoughts that were holding me back, I’ll be very honest and say I didn’t take that too kindly. I felt like he was asking me to give up all the justifications for where I was, and essentially take a sense of responsibility for all the mistakes that I had made. When you feel as badly about yourself as I did back then, the last thing you want is anything that will make you feel worse.
So I held fast to my feelings, and probably wasted several more years believing that everything I thought and felt was correct.
And in doing so I kept myself trapped. I wasn’t moving any closer to feeling happy; I wasn’t progressing in my career; I wasn’t even making any changes to me as a person. Yet I felt like I was perfectly justified in feeling the way I did, and I didn’t want to listen to anybody who would tell me otherwise. It took a long time for me to realize that by holding onto that story, I was actually hurting myself.
And when I couldn’t safely trust any of my feelings, I realize I had to go to work on myself.
It takes some pretty radical self honesty to stare into your own soul and see the truth of it. Most of us don’t have the knowledge or the understanding to do that, and it certainly took me time to learn it. I had to create a framework that allowed me to find ways to explain the patterns of behavior that I saw in myself, and I soon realized that the same systems can be applied to everybody else.
You know something is true when you see it working everywhere.
It’s been a long journey, coming to a point where I can trust myself to be my greatest strength. I can’t tell you the number of hours I’ve spent reading, studying, reflecting and meditating. I’ve lost count of the number of self-limiting beliefs that I’ve had to let go of, and the number of truths about myself and the universe that I’ve had to accept.
If that sounds difficult, then I didn’t describe it properly. It can be brutal.
But in the end, I finally found a point where I have the self that I can trust. The me who I know now is so different than the me I believed that I was. It doesn’t mean that I’m perfect right now, very far from it, but it means that I can trust myself to be honest in all of my decisions. That might mean accepting that I’m doing something out of fear, or it might mean recognizing that I have the strength to do what it is that I want to do.
Most of all, it means that in all things, I know why I’m doing it.
And I’m honest enough with myself to be okay with that. That has required me to let go of a lot of stories, or to reinterpret them in ways that strengthen me rather than make me feel good. I’m learning to live with the reality that where I am is where I am, and to work on letting go of the judgment against myself for that. On the start of this journey I blamed the world, in the middle of it I blamed myself, and at this point, I realize that things just are.
Judgment gets me nowhere; now I try to observe, reflect, decide and act.
In the end, whatever peace and happiness I find in my life will come not from an external source, but from making peace with and learning to trust myself.
Because once you have that, you realize just how little you need to get through everything else.
So the question is – do you trust yourself?
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings
You don’t have to do this you know – honestly you don’t. You can just keep on going the way of the world, being spoon fed your feelings and your philosophy through the constant drip of mindless media, recycled dogma and the occasional flash of inspiration that’s quickly smothered by the endless opinions of others. It’s the easiest way to waste your years.
And it leads to a life that never feels like your own.
But be warned, starting out on the journey of your own work is never easy. Chances are you considered beginning on this road because the life you were living just wasn’t getting it done for you. You probably had feelings of loneliness; not for the people around you, but for the company of yourself in a way that you could live with.
The moment you realize that your problems are within and not without, you have a choice to make.
But let me step back for a moment, and make sure we’re talking about the same thing. A dear friend recently shared with me that she had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned doing the work, and she’s at the point where she could really benefit from this in her own life.
I think it’s kind of a sad reflection on the culture we live in that this isn’t something we learn in our youngest years.
If I were to put it in a nutshell it goes something like this… ‘The Work’ is a process of turning your attention away from the things of the world, and going inward so that you can discover the truth of who you really are, and then living it.
Wow – that might win the greatest oversimplification in the history of mankind award.
Because let’s not have any illusions. This is the hardest thing you’ll ever do, and it can seriously change your life. There are times on my journey where I’ve had to swallow some pretty hard truths, and let go of a lot of things I was holding onto for the sake of my ego, not for my truth. It can change relationships, and change how people relate to you.
In case that all sounds horrible, which it can be, let me also tell you the upsides, because they are there and they are wonderful. Probably my favorite outcome is actually beginning to like myself. Over the last almost 5 years of writing this (which has been a huge part of my own journey) I have come to understand myself at a level that I never thought was possible.
In doing so, I've been able to forgive myself for many of the things that I have done. None of these have been heinous, rather the way that I have affected myself and my family for playing small, not using my voice, and for allowing other people to walk over me when I should have stood up for myself.
Once you know why you do things, you can start to deprogram the things about yourself that you don’t like.
But you’ll also start to become your own hero. When I see how far I have come from where I started, both emotionally and geographically, I can see the courage it took to make some of the choices that I did, and I derive a sense of safety from understanding that I do have a strength inside of me. Knowing that I can survive the struggles necessary to change my life helps me to face change with peace and calmness.
But by far the greatest outcome is knowing yourself at a level that allows you to live authentically.
That’s a term that gets thrown around a lot, so let me define it from my point of view. To live authentically means that you live true to your deepest feelings, regardless of your fears and your insecurities. It means working through the beliefs that hold you back, and discovering who you really are along the way.
There is an incredible strength in being honestly and truly yourself.
And the funniest thing is, you often come to find out that who you really are is not who you thought you were at all. Once you break through and let go all the nonsense in your head, you can truly start listening to your heart, and finding your way to your own sense of purpose and happiness. Because living someone else’s idea of what your life should be is never going to make you happy.
But like I wrote in my last post, growing can also be scary, but it’s only by doing the different things, the things that scare us, that we grow into the people who make us happy.
So I’m going to do something scary, and you might get to be a part of it. I’m putting together a 6-7 week workshop based around finding yourself, using a lot of the things I've discussed over the past 5 years in this work. I’m looking for a few people who might be interested in being a part of that. There won’t be any cost, other than putting up with whatever craziness flows out of me, but I’m hoping that it will be something of value to you.
If that sounds like something you might like to be a part of, then feel free to comment below and let me know.
It will be a small group to start, and I’m still working out how it will actually work, but if that sounds like fun, then maybe we can get to be a part of each other’s journeys.
Because the journey of growing into yourself really is worth it.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings
Everyone likes to preach about getting out of our comfort zones, but rarely do people tell us just how uncomfortable that can be. Over the last two and a half months I've been pushing myself to do things that I would not normally do, and let me tell you – it sucks.
I’ve been scared, wanted to run away, and found myself wanting to throw up after making a certain phone call or sending a certain text.
Or pressing the publish button to put my first ‘podcast’ out into the world like I did yesterday.
But over the last few months I’ve come to some pretty solid realizations that in order for my life to change, I have to be the one to change it. And sometimes making those changes is not only uncomfortable, but depending upon my limiting beliefs, it can actually feel immoral or unkind. Please understand that I’m not doing anything that I think could be considered overtly “wrong”…
It’s just that sometimes we are programmed to think that looking after ourselves is actually a form of taking from others.
So while some of the “different things” that I’ve been doing have made me feel uncomfortable because I of how I think it would be perceived by others, some of those different things have actually been difficult because of my own perception of the morality of the action I’ve been taking.
And I’m guessing if you’re the kind of person who reads this work, you’ve probably felt the same way at some time.
I’m pretty sure that there are some of you out there who struggle putting yourself first, because you’ve always been taught that others are more important. Even to do something that doesn’t hurt somebody else, but elevates your needs above theirs, can feel like an immoral act. So let me share with you a small revelation about life I had recently that has helped me to work through some of the thoughts I’ve been having while doing the “different things” that are making a change in my life.
When it comes to life, the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.
Please don’t misunderstand what I mean by that. I’m not saying that morality isn’t important, because it is. I’m not saying that whatever faith you may or may not have isn’t important, because if it’s giving you a sense of joy or purpose or peace then it has value in your life. But so many times we are operating within certain boundaries that we think we have to stay within in order to be a “good person”, when really there’s nothing wrong with looking out for ourselves.
My guess is that you are a good person already. Not because of how you are behaving, but because of the goodness in your heart. I have found that my writing is kind of a litmus test, and bad people don’t tend to read it.
So guess what, you’ve already passed
I’m pretty confident that if you and I sat down and had a conversation, before long we would figure out something that you could do for yourself that would make your life better but that you’ve been holding back on it because of the fear of what other people might think, or even worse, the fear of how you might feel. Maybe you’re just waiting for permission from somebody other than yourself, so that you can take the step forward that could change your life.
Well here’s your permission, and in addition, here’s a friendly word of advice. If you don’t do the different things to make your life different, it’s always going to stay the same.
So I get it if it’s scary, and I get it if it makes you want to throw up or scream. One of the different things that I did a few months ago made me so scared that I was crying, and could barely form words… But I did it. Pushing through that level of fear, and that level of uncomfortable has a powerful effect, because when you break through fear, it comes back as confidence.
And when you break through the lies in your head that are holding you down, you realize that the most authentic form of you is the one that can do the greatest good in the world.
Please do something for you today. If it’s something difficult or something scary, so much the better, but if that’s no where you’re at right now, just do something to celebrate yourself. Eat the cookie, drink the coffee, buy yourself a book or a blanket or a scarf or new pair of boots or whatever it’s going to be. Celebrate yourself, and get used to doing that because you are worth it.
Sometimes the hardest changes in life are the ones where we finally take our own happiness seriously, and then we live according to the changes that we need to make.
May you find confidence as you break through fear, and may you find joy and happiness as you do the things that will make your life better.
I truly believe that you are worth it.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings
Doing this makes me VERY uncomfortable…
which I guess is why I should do it. I’m not at a point where I’m ready to start a podcast quite yet, but I also wanted to add another option to serve you, so here is my very first attempt at what I’m calling a ‘pod-byte’. Facebook only lets you upload videos, not just audio, so this is just an image with the ‘pod-byte’ audio.
I didn’t have a script, this is totally extemporaneous. I initially intended it to be about 5 minutes, but it runs a little longer than that, which gives you an idea of how my mind works.
It’s a pretty rough product right now, because I need to up my audio editing game, but if I waited until it was perfect I’d never get anything done, so please bear with the glitches, and let me know what you think.
(The link may not work, but you can listen/watch here.)
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings
As someone who grew up in England, celebrating Thanksgiving never used a be a part of my life. When I moved to the United States, I was aware of what Thanksgiving was about, but I had never had a chance to participate.
It’s been close to 30 years since my first Thanksgiving, and while I enjoy the time spent with family, I have to confess that it’s not my favorite holiday, and it’s one that always leads me to be quite reflective.
Because I seem to have a gratitude problem.
And to be honest, that’s bugged me for quite a while. I can remember a Christmas probably in the early 80s when my sister and I were both given a Walkman for Christmas. (For those of you too young to know what that is, it’s basically a cassette tape player that was small enough to put on your belt and have music as you walked). Although I was grateful for what I had received, in truth I was somewhat upset because the one that my sister received was functionally better than mine.
At the time I was too young to realize that my reaction was a symptom of a much greater problem.
But as I started to get a little older, and a little more introspective, I came to realize that gratitude was not an emotion that came easily to me. So I went through a period of believing that I was an ungrateful person, and that I was not good because I felt that way. I wished that I could “feel” this deep sense of thankfulness that other people seemed to experience.
And, of course, I spent a lot of time judging myself harshly over it.
Fast-forward to a situation about 10-15 years ago where somebody did something for me that was truly, profoundly and wonderfully kind. Something that should have brought forth from me a strong sense of gratitude and thankfulness. Although I was grateful at the time, and although I did express that to the person who did something for me, I was forced to realize that the magnitude of their kindness to me was not reflected in the magnitude of my gratitude towards them.
And I felt really bad about that, and struggled to figure out why I was responding that way.
Through a lot of meditation, reading, introspection and time, I finally came to understand the answer, and in order to explain it, I’m going to start with a small story that started making the rounds a number of years ago in the online business space.
It’s the story of a young man who goes to a business guru and asks the guru to teach him how to be successful. So the guru has the young man meet him on the beach the next morning. The guru takes the young man by the hand and walks him out into the water until it is almost over his head, and then dunks the young man down into the water and holds him there until the young man nearly drowns.
Then the guru pulls him out of the water and tells him that when he wants to succeed as bad as he just wanted to breathe, he will be successful.
I realize that seems kind of a strange story, but here’s how I think it applies.
Sometimes people have enough of a wound in their soul that it overshadows all of their other emotions. For some people it manifests in their inability to be happy, for some in their inability to form meaningful relationships, and for some it can even be a strong difficulty towards feeling grateful, because the magnitude of the wound is so great that unless that wound is healed, nothing else really means anything.
Because for that young man on the beach, nothing other than air was going to solve his problem.
I realized that the psychological wound I was struggling with was so significant to me that unless somebody gave me a solution to that situation, anything else was going to seem small in comparison. It didn’t mean I wasn’t grateful, it’s just that my fear and pain over the situation that wound created made it so much harder to feel what should have been a commensurate amount of gratitude to the person who helped me.
When I finally realized this, it helped me release a lot of the shame and self judgment that I was carrying.
Please understand, I’m not saying gratitude isn’t important. The longer I study and the more I learn, the greater certainty I have that gratitude is one of the most powerful ways that we can change our lives. It’s just that sometimes people are hurting so much that trying to be grateful is supremely difficult, because the weight on their soul distorts how they feel about anything that doesn’t solve the problem that is causing them pain.
And although it sounds kind of funny, I am very grateful for that lesson, because it has helped me to understand so much about the behavior of others.
I recently had the chance to talk with the mother of a teenage boy who was acting in a way that was not appropriate for him or his future. She came to me in frustration because she couldn’t get through to him, and help him see that his behavior now was going to hurt him in a few years time.
I think it really helped her when I was able to explain that he was hurting so much now, that worrying about pain in the future was outside of his emotional capability right now. When she finally understood the magnitude of the pain he was feeling in the moment, all of his current actions made sense. He wasn’t “acting out”, he was just trying to change how he felt.
Because emotionally, all that young man wants to do right now is breathe, and trying to tell him to take actions in the future that don’t solve his pain right now is to disrespect and minimize how he actually feels. If it doesn’t help him solve his pain right now, he’s probably not going to take it to heart.
I’ll be honest with you and tell you that I still struggle with gratitude, because I’m still struggling with that same wound from many years ago. It affects me less in some ways, and more in others, but I’m trying harder to find the place within my soul to feel truly an profoundly grateful for the many wonderful people and circumstances that I do have in my life.
And I’m trying to judge myself less, and give myself more grace and understanding.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings
Yes, I’m talking to you. I apologize if I’m interrupting. But there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, and in the midst of all the crazy things in the world, sometimes I don’t feel like I have the time to say it.
Or sometimes it just doesn’t feel like it’s the right time, so I hold back from telling you what I’m thinking because maybe this sounds insane or maybe this sounds corny or foolishly naïve or whatever other adjective you want to apply to it.
To be honest though, I’m kind of past caring what people think.
Because caring what other people think has led me to not say the things I want to say, and it’s probably caused me not to help some people who maybe I could have helped. I have to live with that, and the weight of it is getting heavier day by day. So here’s my rather radical little secret that I want to share with you, so that you may all understand what I’m doing here.
I want to change the world.
Usually the people you hear of changing the world are either billionaires or superheroes. Since I haven’t been bitten by any radioactive spiders or been exposed to massive overdoses of gamma radiation, and since the last time I checked my bank account was closer to zero than it is to $1 billion, I have to choose a different way to make a difference, to enact my “master plan” of changing the world into the way I want it to be.
I have words, and I have you.
See I have this crazy dream. I’d like to see a world full of kindness, where people felt happy, peaceful and contented, because in my experience, happy people don’t start problems. Let’s face it, the universe has enough suffering and pain and stupidity built in. Just being human means that you’re guaranteed a birthright of problems and pain.
But when I look at the biggest problems in the world, most of them are created by people treating other people like objects, because they can’t live with how they feel about themselves in their quiet moments.
And I want to change that.
Yet in my experience, lasting change—the kind of change that actually sticks and makes a difference—doesn’t start with flashy gestures, and it doesn’t involve massive programs. If spending billions of dollars actually made a difference, we should be happy, and yet so many people are not.
I think we’ve been going about it all wrong.
I think the things that fundamentally change the human experience are organic, and they spread person-to-person, touching, enriching and ennobling life at an everyday level. Because when you wake up in the morning surrounded by a world of wonder and imagination, accepting yourself without criticism and without judgment, knowing that you’re trying your best…
Then you become the kind of person who helps others, which is exactly who I want you to be.
Because in a world full of heroes and villains, mayhem and monsters, what we actually need are people who can listen with kindness. I can tell you that on a dark day five years or so ago when I was struggling, feeling overwhelmed from all the pressure I was under, one act of kindness by one man sending me a text changed my entire day.
Kindness and compassion can heal more wounds than all the doctors in the world.
In my experience, the people who have the most kindness and the strongest compassion are those who have come through their own darkness, and in their own healing have found an understanding and a desire to help others. People who are hurting tend to focus on themselves, while people who are healing tend to reach out to others.
So I’m trying to heal the world, one person at a time, so that each person who is healed will radiate kindness and compassion to somebody else.
Yeah, I’m crazy enough to believe that a virus of kindness, happiness, peaceful hearts and loving compassion can do more than has ever been done before.
And my goal is to spread that kindness, that happiness, that peace and that compassion by helping you find your own peace, and then trusting in your goodness that you will share with others.
Right now all I have are these words and these pictures, but probably coming soon will be a microphone, maybe someday a video camera. Because I’m done playing small, and I’m past giving a damn what people think. These lives we have are so short, and the universe can be an unkind mistress, and you all deserve better than what you have been given.
My goal is to even up the score, and see what I can do to get us ahead.
Because in the end, the quality of your life comes down to how you feel about yourself, and how connected you are with others. I plan to help you with the first part, knowing that you’ll take care of the second.
So this is me, doing my best to help you, so that together we can change the world.
Maybe my dream is crazy, or maybe I’ve totally lost my mind.
Or maybe, just maybe, things get better for all of us.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings
When was the last time that you stopped and listened? Not just turned off the music, or put down the ever present cell phone, but actually made time, scheduled it even, so that you could just take a moment to listen to that voice inside of you.
You know, that one you’ve spent so much time and effort ignoring with endless scrolling, mindless game playing or even endless eating.
Yes, that voice.
The one that is coming from deep inside you, that only you can hear. The one that is trying to desperately tell you all the things you need to know, but that you are scared of listening to because it probably requires you to change how you are living your life. Those changes feel scary, monumental and overwhelming.
So we drown out that voice with the noise of everyday life.
Although the internet has made information more readily available, it’s also made entertainment vastly more accessible, which means if you are looking for a distraction, you can find one. Like most of you, I’m old enough to remember when life wasn’t so hectic, and I had time to think about the things I had experienced, instead of running to a website or an app to distract me from what I was feeling.
And more importantly, what my soul was whispering.
Because if the internet has done anything, I can tell you that it has made it easier for people to ignore the voice of their own inner wisdom, and substitute the opinions of others over that of themselves. Trying to live your life in competition with the curated and managed Instagram feed of an influencer is the fastest way to take from your life any sense of authenticity.
There is no worse thing you can do than live your life trying to match up to a image that does not reflect the intentions, beliefs and desires of your own heart.
But some of us struggle to listen to the whispering voice of our soul because it’s being drowned out by the sound of our fears. As someone who still struggles to stay out of ‘survival mode’, I know that I have to get really quiet and focus hard so that I can figure out what it is that my soul is really saying. The fears that have become so ingrained in my as a result of some of my life experiences make it hard to hear what my soul actually wants.
And even harder to make the changes when I do figure out what to do next.
I’ve been learning over the last year to hear my inner voice by allowing myself ‘free-time’ not only in meditation, but also in ‘play’. Sitting at my computer and letting myself click on Youtube videos that intrigue me, I’ve come to see how my soul wants to live a quieter life off grid, where my wife and I could have more time for each other, and also more time to write and focus on this work.
As someone who grew up in a city environment, that still seems very strange to me.
But listening to my soul has become the best way I know to find greater peace and happiness in my life. Over the last few years, it’s led me to do things that have scared me, inspired me, challenged me and in some cases confused me. Yet every time I've followed that inner voice, I’ve found my life immeasurably changed for the better.
It seems that deep down, my soul knows the actions I need to take, even when they run counter to so many things I ‘believed’.
To quote Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple… “And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become”.
But how are you going to follow the wisdom of your heart if you never spend any time listening to its whisperings, and seeing where they lead?
So today, I’d like to challenge you to spend just 5 minutes in quiet reflection, and see if you can hear your soul, and the message it’s sending. If you’re new to this, don’t worry too much about the message right now, just focus on sitting and listening. Learning to listen is very important, because only when you can hear clearly can you truly understand what your soul is trying to say.
And once you can hear it… you’re ready to start on another adventure.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings
“My childhood was fine… there was nothing wrong with it.” “I was loved.” “It had its moments, but overall it was a great childhood.” I’ve lost count of the number of times I've heard these types of statements, and have had to spend time trying to convince someone who is obviously hurting that they’ve had difficult things happen to them.
Note that I said difficult – not bad.
We have so many hang-ups around admitting that we’ve had trauma. Sure, if someone has had something truly heinous happen to them, we have no problems looking at that and saying they have experienced trauma. But when it comes to our own lives, we tend to have a problem with that admission. It took me a little while to figure it out, but I finally got to the bottom of it.
Because admitting we had trauma suggest that people were “bad”.
And let’s face it, unless something terrible happened, nobody really wants to label their parents as bad. And I’m going to tell you that in most cases, parents who were responsible for childhood trauma weren’t “bad” people (although some very definitely were/are, and we will talk about that in another post).
Chances are they were human, probably doing the best that they could, often under incredibly difficult circumstances and while trying to deal with the nightmare of their own trauma that wasn’t recognized.
I know it was that way for me.
If you had asked me about my childhood when I was in my 20s, I would have told you that it didn’t really affect me, and that I just chose to be who I was. The incredible lack of self-awareness of that comment honestly still makes me cringe. It wasn’t until my 30s that I began to fully understand that there were parts of my childhood that probably left some scars.
To be honest, it took me a lot longer than it should have done to recognize that, because I didn’t want to admit that I’d had trauma, because that meant that I was ‘scarred’ or ‘damaged’. But when I finally came round to the fact that there were some things in my head that I really needed to work on, I sadly took the easy way out. I chose to blame rather than dealing with it.
And if you had talked to me in my late 30s and early 40s, I would have happily told you how angry I was at some of the things that happened. I sadly had that victim complex down to an art form, and it cost me several years of personal growth.
But over time, I finally came to the realization that my parents were never malicious. Sure they had some issues, and there were things that could have been a lot better, but with all the knowledge that I have now, plus having done a lot of my own work, I can tell you that they were probably struggling after living through significantly worse childhoods than mine.
I’ve had to work through quite a bit of guilt over how I felt towards them. Sorry Mom and Dad.
Let no one tell you any different… Doing the work of self-awareness and self acceptance means understanding your flaws as well as, if not better than, everybody else’s, and that can truly suck sometimes.
So when I’m working with someone, and we’re starting to dig down into the roots of their trauma, there’s almost always this conversation that we have where they try to convince me that nothing happened, and that they had a wonderful childhood. Then we slowly and carefully start to pick apart the threads of the psychological blanket that they been holding onto for so long.
Which is when it starts to get painful.
Because most trauma is not what I call “overt” or “obvious” trauma, but it’s quieter, it’s more insidious and it scars us in ways we can’t even see. I decided to call it stealth trauma because that’s really what it’s like. It’s this thing that’s causing damage to you and you can’t even see it. Especially if it occurs while you’re growing up, because you have no sense of normal to evaluate it against.
In fact a lot of the time our response to those traumas is so much a part of us that we don’t even realize that it’s a problem. It’s just “who we are”.
So please do me a favor if we ever have a conversation. If I tell you that you’ve experienced trauma, please try listen with an open mind. I can pretty safely guarantee that almost everybody has had some kind of trauma. It might not be terrible, it might not be horrific, but it’s there, and unless you’re aware of it, it’s probably affecting you in ways you can’t even imagine.
It can be hard realization, but I’m here to tell you that admitting that you have trauma doesn’t make you broken, and it doesn’t make you shameful.
It just makes you human.
And when you can accept that, you’ll have begun your journey out of your own personal hell and into the light of a better and happier life.
May you come through your storm, and may you find your pathway to happier life.
Because you deserve it, you really, really do.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings
Here’s something I wish I had understood earlier in my life…. every day that you are not being authentic to yourself is day of your life that you don’t get back. I know that’s probably a hard thing to hear, but since we’re doing difficult truths, let’s go with another…. Every day you are not being authentic to yourself makes it just that little bit harder to make the changes necessary to be authentic.
Such is the interest rate of time.
Turning 52 recently seems to have been some kind of a threshold for me. I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching as I realize that I haven’t yet lived the life, and more importantly made the impact, that I feel like I want to make. While I’ve come further than the circumstances of my birth would have suggested, I still have this stirring in my soul to do more. A lot more.
And a large part of that is to live my life more authentically.
Which can mean different things to different people. For me, I think it means having harder conversations, as well as learning to find my voice in a way that respects the desire of my heart to be kind, while also letting the stronger side of me come out to play occasionally. I've realized that in striving to be ‘good’, I've actually sacrificed some of what it means to be me.
And that’s kind of a difficult balance to achieve.
I’ve been learning lately that I've been out of balance with myself in my attempt to serve, and I've been neglecting my own needs, let alone my own wants. When you combine growing up in a country where ambition and thinking you had something worth saying were considered distasteful, finding my voice through this writing has been an incredible blessing.
But I still struggle with the concept of who this work is leading me to become.
Yet all of this is framed against the backdrop understanding that the clock for me is ticking. Time has this funny way of luring you in with a ‘lower interest rate’… the idea that you’ve got years ahead of you. Then all of a sudden there’s a balloon payment when you realize that tomorrow is not promised, and even the rest of this day could be up for debate.
I’ve discovered that the longer you play with time, the more it charges you.
Which means that the longer you hold back finding your own voice, and your own pathway, you’re paying a greater interest rate in terms of pain and suffering. Please don’t misunderstand me, making the changes in your life to respect who you are, and to find your authentic voice, is not easy, and it’s not without bumps along the pathway.
It’s just that the sooner you get going on your work, the easier that journey is, and the greater the payoff is when you get there.
Because life doesn’t play far when it comes to the interest of time. You don’t get extra credit by sacrificing your voice on the altar of someone else’s feelings. You sure as hell don’t get a ‘get out of struggles free’ card by not living in a way that makes your heart sing. Every single day that I haven’t been 100% myself is a day I’ll live to regret if I don’t become who it is I want to be.
And like I've written before, regret is a poison you never want to taste if you can avoid it.
Some of you this week have reached out to explain how you feel lost, and can’t seem to find a sense of authenticity, much less an idea of who you really are. To those of you, I would implore you to begin the struggle of finding out who you are, and living in a way that makes you feel alive in your soul. If you’re not sure how to do that, give me a little time, because I’m working on something that I think might help you.
More on that soon.
But for now, may I ask you to respect yourself enough to do something kind for yourself today. It doesn’t have to be much, but every little investment you make for your soul will help to offset the interest that life, and the passing of time, are charging up against you.
Every day that you don’t live in alignment with who you really are has a cost.
And I’d like to help you avoid paying it if you can.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings
Who are you becoming?
I ask this because in every journey I’ve ever helped someone traverse, there’s a goal that they have. Yet in asking a lot of questions, I've found that most of the time people have a really good idea about what they don’t want, but they have more trouble defining what it is exactly that they do want.
So who are you becoming?
I’m guessing if you are reading this work, you’re probably on your own journey, even if you didn’t choose to start it. You’re probably clearer on the concept of what you are trying to leave behind, and kind of fuzzy on the details of where you want to end up. Which is ok, because just getting started is the most important part, but knowing where you want that next step to take you can save some painful detours along the way.
And yet, sometimes getting lost is the beginning of finding where you’re going to end up.
So maybe the best question to start you off with is ‘where are you now?’ Can you answer that clearly as it relates to how you feel about yourself, your relationships, your dreams and desires? My usual response to asking this of myself is ‘not where I want to be’, which sounds ok, but it’s actually a deflection. It lacks specificity, and in truth, I could give a much better answer.
But we like to avoid being specific, because sometimes getting detailed is painful.
So let me put it another way – if now never changed, and if things stood where they are for the rest of your life, would you be ok with that? Of course, you realize that nothing ever actually stays unchanged, because time is moving us forwards, but if your life, your relationships with others (and especially with yourself) never grew from where they are now, could you live with that?
Or would you face every day moving further and further into regret and sadness.
I’ll be very honest with you, and say that right now I’m moving into the period of the year where the very energy to change seems to be lacking. I hate winter, as both my body and my soul seem to crave nothing more than a blanket and a bed, and I find it harder to look towards the future with a sense of growth and optimism. Yet I realize that in the period where nature sleeps, I could be changing things for the better.
But I have to focus on what it is that I actually want that future to be.
And the definition of what I don’t want it to look like isn’t enough, because that locks me into a pathway where all I have to do is move a little to be not where I was, and then I can stop. I might not be as happy as I want to be, but I’m not as unhappy as I used to be.
Focusing on the negatives you want to avoid is a surefire trap to never achieving the positives that you actually desire.
And the truth is, today could be day one of a new creation for me, and for you, if we want it to be. Sure that might be difficult, and sometimes it requires more faith than I might seem to have right now, but if I put off that which I could start until tomorrow, I’m just pushing my eventual accomplishment just that further out.
And if I keep choosing tomorrow as my start date, eventually all those tomorrows will run out.
So today, I’m going to challenge you a little bit. You don’t have to share it with me (although you can message me with it if you want to), but I want you to get really specific on who it is you are becoming. Don’t just talk about who you don’t want to be, but get as detailed as you can on the person who your journey is leading you to becoming.
The more that description moves you, the more it will motivate you to become that person.
For now, I’ll share a little of mine. I’ve been writing this work for almost 5 years now, and in that time I've discovered a passion for helping people that astounds me as much as it thrills me. The person I want to become is the person who sits with you, and helps you find your own sense of peace, happiness and fulfillment. I’ve had some of the most incredible and amazing experiences doing this, and I hope to have many, many more.
I am creating the life for myself in which I am better able to serve you.
So I’ll ask you….. who are you becoming?
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings
How do you find your sense of worth? I ask this, because a good friend recently posted a question in response to one of my reflections that had been shared by mutual friend. The question that she asked was a simple one, but as often happens in life, the simplest questions can have rather complex answers. Yet the more I thought about it, I more I came realize that the answer wasn’t complex at all.
It’s just kind of a difficult one to swallow.
She was wondering how to get past her feelings of not being worth her own effort, or of someone else’s, and as soon as I read her question the answer came loud, and quick and strong. Forgive me if I use a little stronger language than normal as I answer this, but I’m going to do it as if I’m talking to her face-to-face, but also to you, one on one.
The answer is simple. You have to stop believing the bullshit that you are not.
And I get it, that doesn’t sound like much of an answer. If anything, it probably sounds kind of callous. Believe me when I tell you that I don’t mean it that way, but in order to get through all the programming that has taught you to believe this lie, sometimes it’s necessary for me to get really honest, and call it just how I see it.
The truth is you are worthy, but somewhere along the line, someone told you that you’re not.
And you believed them, probably because they held some kind of a position of authority over you. Maybe it was in a church or some organization, or maybe it was a parent or a family member. They probably didn’t use specific words, but the way they treated you left you made you feel like there was something wrong with you.
Then as so often happens, the voice that was used against you became the voice that you used against yourself.
You probably spent years living what you thought was the truth, holding back your voice, playing small, and doing the things that everybody else expected of you. They taught you to distrust your own instincts, to suppress your opinion under the weight of theirs, and to stay in the place which they had assigned to you. A place which served them, but did not serve not you.
The hard truth is that if you don’t feel worthy of your own effort, it’s because you don’t know yourself at all.
The only you that you know is the one they’ve created for you. And here’s the horrible secret, in order to keep you down, life layers so much pain over your own truth that getting there and finding it is so damn hard. You’ll have to face emotions that you have buried for so long, and you’ll have to face truths that you would do anything to hide.
It’s not for the faint of heart, but the journey of coming to know who you really are has a treasure at the end of it that has no price except that of radical honesty, and radical self-awareness.
Because once you truly come to understand who you are, you’ll start to understand why you deserve the very best that you have to give to yourself. You will come to see yourself very differently from the way that you do now.
Part of the respect that you’ll have for yourself will have been earned by the very fact that you took the journey and did the work. That you hung in there when you wanted to scream, when you wanted to throw up, when you had to let go of a thousand comforting lies in order to cling to one difficult but worthwhile truth.
The truth of who you were all along.
And here’s the kicker, the thing that will surprise you probably more than anything else. Once you have the tools to understand yourself, and you’ve taken that journey, you’ll start to see the truth of everybody else. Your whole damn world will change because once you know yourself, you’ll find that you can understand everybody else. You’ll see the truth of them, not the lies that you’ve been taught to believe.
Once you understand your worth, you’ll suddenly see the worth of everybody else.
And then everything changes. How you show up in the world changes, because you serve knowing the worth of the person you’re serving. You treat yourself differently, because you realize how very much you deserve the best you can give yourself. You’ll step out of the world of judgment, torment and shame and fear into a world full of wonder, imagination and beauty.
When you find yourself surrounded by people of incredible worth, you’ll see your worth reflected in them, and theirs in yours.
Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t mean things are easy. If anything it’s harder, because suddenly you understand why they don’t treat themselves the way that they should, and you’ll bite your tongue and hold back your tears because all you want to do is help them recognize their worth.
That’s where I am; that’s why I write this. I started this work to understand myself, and in doing so I came to understand and care for all of you.
Listen to me very carefully. Your worth is greater than that which you can understand right now. But hang in there, because I’m just getting started showing you all what you mean to me, and showing you the truth of yourselves.
The journey starts here, and I am here for you.
Now, and always.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings
I think I first saw you when I was 3-4 years old. I remember being so scared because I was sick and going to throw up, and my Dad was yelling at me for being a baby.
I can still remember what it felt to be there, feeling alone even though there was someone else in the room. So when you told me about how you were treated as a child and how that hurt you, I knew exactly how you felt that day.
Because I could see me in your experience, and I understood your pain.
Probably the next time I saw you I was around 7-8 years old. I remember so clearly how it felt to realize I was a child in a very big world. I had just closed to the front door on my way to school, and it felt like the whole world shifted into a different view, a sharper focus. So when you told me how lost you felt as a kid, and how you didn’t know how to handle that, I felt like I had known you forever.
I sensed every word that you said, and you seemed surprised that I could understand you so well. It was honestly pretty simple – the more I tapped into how I felt, the more you resonated.
And the greater my compassion for you became.
I know I saw you at 17, when my first serious girlfriend, the first real love of my life, broke up with me. I was such a mess, I cried for days, and I realize now that I felt shame for reacting the way that I did. So when you shared with me the heartbreak you were feeling, please believe me that I could feel all the pain and loneliness that you were going through, and all I wanted to do was hold you, and make it all go away.
I think I saw you there probably more than ever before.
I’m certain I noticed you when my wife surprised me with the news that we were pregnant. Someday I’ll share with you the funny (and honestly embarrassing) story of my reaction, but I want you to know that in that moment, I felt all the fear and uncertainty of being a parent, as well as an overwhelming, almost devastating sense of responsibility.
So when you shared with me your fears and frustrations as parent, I knew we were one and the same.
And I knew you on the day of that child’s birth, as the Doctors explained his heart problem, and how they had to open his chest and operate on his heart to save his life. The terror, the absolute and unthinkable fear that my child was going to die was something that I saw later on in you, as you explained to me the terrible loss and pain that you had experienced.
We were one in that moment, you and I. Different worlds, different lives, yet the same feelings, the same pain.
And when I held my wife as she cried over the passing of her wonderful father, and tried my best to helped her deal with the pain, I had no idea that I was seeing you, years later, as you explained to me the unfathomable experience of losing someone so close to you. I saw in her the same that I saw in you, and had some little concept of how to help you through your suffering.
In so many moments of my life, when I was looking at someone I cared about, it turns out I was seeing a reflection of you.
Because although we are different, we are more of the same than I think we ever understand. Although the recipe for my pain and suffering, or that of those whom I love, might have been different, the outcome of those ingredients produced the same emotions as the situations that you went through.
And if you look closely and carefully, in the pain of one person, you can see the suffering and heartache of another.
I’ve seen me in so many of you that sometimes my heart weeps for the things you have felt, are feeling, and will feel at a time in the future. If I could hold every single one of you, and try to take your pain, I would, because I know a little of how it feels to be you.
Because I have seen me in you, and you in me.
And so I cannot help but care for you.
Always.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings
