OK friends, here’s my latest brainwave.
A series about writing what scares us.
I openly grant us (myself included) permission to do the thing so often suggested, but rarely done - to say, or actually to write what we’re afraid to write. I invite you to write what scares you. For you. So you can look at it.
I’ll show you mine. If you want to show me your writing, send it over. Or just do it for you.
I’ll go first…
I LOVE my work as a writer and a psychologist and I hear I’ve helped change lives and relationships over the last two decades.
Yeah. OK. Thank you I’ll take it.
But there is some stuff to unpack…
I do believe that I help many patients to open their inner eyes, to see other perspectives, consider useful behaviour changes, observe generational patterns of dysfunction in their daily lives.
That being said, I am floored constantly by the tenacity of our human dysfunction, the embedded patterns of meanness and abuse, the widespread lack of empathy, the rigidity of our defensiveness as humans. I can tell you, the change don’t come easy!
I’m shocked by how many times we repeat cycles of criticism, arguing and distancing, even when we know the cycle has a terrible outcome every time. Even when it beyond bores us. Even when people pay me to help them work it all out, so often they don’t make the changes. Even if I say it a hundred times, in a hundred different ways.
I’m not only surprised by this in my patients, but at times, in myself too. The more things change the more some stay the same. The work of therapy is the greatest work one day and yet, the next day it feels like an utterly thankless waste of time because same old habits.
If you’ve been in therapy or you still are, please don’t take these words personally or think I’m saying it’s all pointless. I am saying the opposite of that. Therapy is for many of us, the only path out of our inner pain.
Remember, I’m writing what scares me today. And what scares me is how some days, despite all the work, after all the searching and undeniable growth, our patterns are forever. Our fault lines are etched into our depths, tattooed on our souls, and they do not wash out. The actual work is living with that truth, then working out how to do better despite the things we cannot change.
The deepest work is to resist falling into the same holes moment by moment, despite their thrall. It’s training ourselves not to knee jerk straight back into dysfunctional aggressive or defensive manoeuvres under intense pressure, not only in the easy moments. It’s teaching ourselves to work around old hard-wired stuff inside, installing new programming, when you can’t take the old stuff out.
My fear is when despite all the insights, we don’t change. It’s too hard. We don’t care enough. It’s easier not to. Change is too scary. I can’t make anyone do it and it’s hard to keep watching the cycle.
That’s what I’m scared to say, and scared to write.
But there. I wrote it.
There’s more.
I’m worried that we’re too primed to fall back into our animal natures, resume lizard mode, regardless of the hurt passed on by generation after generation of lizard brains.
The fear is real. To me, it’s why greed and murder and abuse and war happen, why more and more people are dissolving into drugs to escape. Because even when we know what to do to be less lizard, we don’t do it. We are scared of the real world with good reason. Don’t go for a run in nature ladies, the monsters are real.
The world teaches some of us that to be real can be life-threatening, better to keep your head down. In family violence a lizard brain rules over a group of those with less muscle bulk and it’s lizard rules or pay the price.
If we grow up in a tyrannical lizard house, (thanks to the brilliant Trent Dalton for the metaphor) it’s no wonder we stop being real to the point of forgetting what our real even is. We spend our life ducking and weaving, surviving.
Here’s something someone wrote to me for their ‘write what you’re scared of’ exercise:
I deaden myself.
I go dead to move amongst unshowered men and their infantile rage for the teat.
It’s not a gothic kind of dead, I wish it was because that’s got glam and pity.
I go dead in an irritating, cheery, jingly way that smells like plastic and screams insincere like a two dollar store.
But it’s all I’ve got.
My real would obliterate the world and I all I get is to die alone.
I know. Wow.
It’s not just the fear nobody will like us if we say how we really feel, it’s the fear that it endangers us. It’s the fear that we won’t be able to handle the consequences.
It’s fear of the seismic events we might set in train at our depths, the devastation they might cause to our status quo. It can make real not feel worth it on the layers we can see. It’s only worth it at the depths of soul, and who cares about that, because nobody can see that. Right? Right?
What are you scared to write to yourself? What are you scared to say? What seismic events loom and threaten if you dared to write it, dared to say it?
Are they certain quakes, or just fear? Maybe there’s a way to find out safely brave heart. I’m here and I’m ready.
Love to you,