Part of really knowing someone, be it a partner, friend, family member, or oneself, is to know their weaknesses, their wounds. I don’t mean just any negativity, but rather those tender spots that they themselves judge so harshly that their repertoire of response is limited to just one thing. They react in one particular way that shuts down any further connection. The wound may be about anything, some bit of painful history, their weight, their intelligence, their ears, anything. It may be real or imagined, warranted or unwarranted. The point is, at this particular time, this person has an encrusted, negative perception that they still identify with some core idea of themselves.

To love that person, treat those wounds with the same care and attention as any bruise or broken bone.

1. Be aware of the wound. Many people are private about their physical wounds, nearly all are private about their emotional ones. Knowing exactly “where it hurts” emotionally is not so easy. Sometimes we are told outright, but more often these wounds are not only hidden from us, but the wounded one may be a little fuzzy on them as well, so often we discover them only by bumping into them. This can make them difficult to recognize, especially if part of the reaction of being bumped into is anger, and our loved one seems more hurtful than hurt. Very often I’ve seen these wounds in a marriage hiding in plain sight, very much out in the open, but not seen for what they are, and the source of much conflict.

2. Avoid reinjuring the wound. Once the wound is known, and our loved one knows it is known, greater care is needed to avoid more harm. Perturbing the wound now can only seem deliberate and will rapidly deplete good will. Be rather part of the wounds protection. Endeavor that your loved one should know that you will do what you can to keep the wound from being retraumatized.

3. Attend the wound. Avoiding reinjury does not mean avoiding the wound. If the wound is to heal and not just be a sore spot for the whole life, it usually requires care and attention. This is obvious with physical wounds that require a change of dressing, a splint, some medicine maybe. For emotional wounds it is more along the lines of compassion combined with honesty. Delicate business, and timing is often everything, but once the wound is known, if it is never again spoken of, you join the voice which says that healing is hopeless.

Be Aware. Avoid Reinjury. Help with Healing.

You can make yourself eat peas, but can you make yourself like them?

I was reminded the other day of how often we expect ourselves or others to be or feel something that’s not actually under our control. And one of the ways this happens is confusing our ability to control our actions with our helplessness in the moment to control our feelings. Whether it’s about peas, a house, or a person, because we can control our actions, and because our feelings can vary from time to time, we mistakenly think that how we feel about something in any given moment is our responsibility and should be under our control.

Say I like working out. But one day I wake up and I don’t feel like doing it. The tendency of the mind is to make life more complicated by not liking the fact that I’m not liking. I had a good workout yesterday. I generally like it. So I should like it today. Something’s wrong. The mind starts making up stuff–meanings. Oh, this means I’m this or that, I’m lazy, I guess I’m just not as into it as I thought…

Letting it be, acknowledging that in this moment, this or that happens to be what I feel, does not mean I don’t go work out. That’s a separate issue, or at least it can be. And deciding whether or not to work out will actually be less encumbered by letting the feeling be whatever it is moment to moment.

With working out, the whole process — waking up, wanting or not wanting to do it, reacting to that fact, and deciding to go do it or not –may not be a big deal. It may take only seconds and I may have learned tricks of sliding through it unconscious and seemingly unscathed. If I put on my running clothes before I get my first cup of coffee… 

But when I wake up one morning and hate my job, or my marriage or my life, the same mechanism is probably at work and the consequences of not being conscious or equanimous with what you have control over and what you don’t are a much bigger deal. If we miss the simple, tiny truths of what we feel moment to moment either by ignoring them, or by judging them and thinking they should be something else, it’s harder to know the deeper truths, the more profound desires about work and love and life.

With peas or working out or anything else, our past experience will tend to some balance of liking or not liking. That balance is effected, however slightly, by each additional experience. The balance can thus change over time, either by happenstance or deliberately. But confronted with a plate of peas or a workout in any given moment, I cannot command my reaction, my liking. I may not like my reaction. But it’s what’s happening. It may be frivolous or it may be profound, but it’s my life manifesting itself, and I would do well to pay attention.

What do we use as a guide when all our choices seem to have a pretty big downside?

Sometimes it’s like that. We’ve gotten ourselves in some pickle, or life has provided a pickle, from which there seems no escape without pain, pain for us or pain for others. Mostly, we spin our wheels searching for that elusive pain free path, the one that magically solves the issue in some way that leaves everybody smiling. When no such path appears, we then usually avoid the problem if possible, in the hope that somehow it might solve itself, or just go away.

Our “choice,” if choice it can be called, often ends up being a sort of default, an unconscious resignation of doing this or that, as if acting without actually choosing absolves us of responsibility for any negative consequences. We act as if, often literally saying, “well, I really didn’t have a choice.” This reflects feeling the consequences of our actions, but wanting to avoid the responsibility. Some try the inverse, claiming full responsibility, but shielding themselves from any feelings.

What’s so difficult, but ultimately most rewarding, is both deliberately choosing and facing/feeling the full consequences of that choice. To both choose and to feel will expose our intentions, so attempting both will call up and challenge our ethics. Being clear about our own moral code and trying our best to live by it is the best way to find a path among the thorns.

It may sound odd to say, since embracing and facilitating change is what counseling is all about, but I find I’m still inspired and a little bit in awe of it when a person makes a profound change.

I was having a final ending session with someone this week and I was struck by the fact that this person was different than the one I’d met some months before. To be honest I couldn’t say what part, if any, her counseling sessions played. What I do know is that it was her change, she was responsible. She worked very hard and successfully developed a response of curiosity to herself and her emotions that previously shut things down.

What’s most inspiring, I think, is not just seeing the relief from some unpleasant habit, but seeing a person’s rock hard assumption that “this is just the way things are” dissolve in a new and more fluid understanding. It is movement towards actually living more moment to moment, when we see the reality of just how fluid things really are, how change is actually the one true constant. But to our normal, walking around, worldly selves, that prospect is frankly so terrifying, we’d rather believe in the permanency of our personalities and all the troubles that brings than face the implications of the truth of change.

When conditions are right, though, and we see past that apparent solidity, wow. Human beings are so cool.