The Walking Wounded: Hurting versus Dealing and Healing

Brilliant. Beautiful. Accomplished. Sophisticated. Talented. Funny! This describes several friends who I adore to no end. And they depress the hell out of me.

From afar, they seem to have just about everything one could want out of life. Loving partners. Close families. Good friends. Gorgeous, gifted children (apparently all children born after 1990 are gifted). Advanced educations. Manhattan apartments in cool neighborhoods. And yet, they are some of the must agitated, unhappy, nervous, woeful people I’ve ever met.

What could these amazing individuals have to complain about, I wonder. If you talk to them, plenty: they have expensive elite preschool to choose between, job offers to consider, and my personal favorite: boxes needing to be emptied. Literally: boxes of crap cluttering up their fabulous albeit unlarge Manhattan apartments. And figuratively: psychological baggage, mental boxes filled with all sorts of stuff – memories, fears, beliefs, emotions, rationalizations, reasons, excuses, justifications – from the past that they can’t or won’t let go of. Weighing them down in the present, making today feel heavy, arduous, difficult, suffocating, scary. Which they drag and dump into their vision of the future, making tomorrow seem daunting, distant, filled with portents of doom and disaster. (You’ve seen shows like “Hoarders” featuring the poor souls drowning in a sea of their own detritus. My friends don’t quite fall into that group, though the dynamic is similar: clutter = the physical manifestation of unresolved emotional junk we are unable or unwilling to release.)

How does all this angst and anguish show up in their lives? They walk around in a state of woe and weariness and overwhelm. They are busy running, striving, struggling, doing - yet nothing ever seems to get done. Some have migraines; take anxiety medications. Some feel stuck in their marriage. Some stress about their money, their parents, their kids, their kid’s $13,000 nursery school education. They obsess over pollution, political unrest, the economy, earthquakes in distant lands – you name it. Real or imagined, near or far, they’ll find something to fret about.

I call these amazing but troubled people, bubbling with potential and yet unrealized joy, the “walking wounded.” They’re out there, everywhere, coast to coast - you may know several dozen yourself, at home or at work. It concerns me when I read statistics from myriad studies stating that up to 80% of the medical conditions from which Americans suffer (and require serious medical treatment) come from 100% preventable sources. Seems today the choices we make and habits we develop, such as smoking, lack of exercise, poor diet, too much stress, not enough rest – rather than the things Mother Nature doled out, like infectious disease or congenital disorders – are killing us. In other words, we make ourselves sick.

I see this dynamic play out dramatically in my aforementioned friends. It’s distressing to see how their stress stresses them out! Especially when the stress in their life is mostly, dare I say entirely, self-generated.

Yes, we have oil spills, earthquakes, tsunamis and nuclear meltdown across the Pacific; political instability all across North Africa and the Mid-East; partisan back-biting and political Ping-Pong at home, as well as a prolonged and recalcitrant recession. But before you dismiss my peeps and other like them as neurotic, self-absorbed, spoiled Woody Allen-esque whiners who don’t realize or appreciate how good they have it, please consider the following: each of us has our own set of “issues”, wounds/scars from childhood we carry into adulthood, that we hold near and dear to our heart. (You yourself may not be fully aware of your own set, and how it may negatively impact your health, how it may be eroding your quality of life, aging you before your time, driving your friends and family to distraction, and generally making you feel miserable.) From the meta view, the negative and largely avoidable impact of these conditions makes us sick, tired, fat, lethargic and complacent; it erodes our cultural/economic dynamism and ability to innovate, diminishes our levels engagement and willingness to participate in life, while jacking up the price of health care for everyone. More conditions require more testing and treatment, taxing our already overextended and ever-inflating medical, insurance, Medicare/Medicaid and other costs. So, in the end, everyone pays. Dearly.

When I get together with my gorgeous, amazing friends, we talk about life - our hopes, dreams, fears, loves, plans, triumphs, challenges. The world we live in. What’s remarkable, though, is how often the conversation circles back to the same-old same-old: we’re stuck, we’re not happy, we don’t know what we want / we know what we want but can’t seem to get it / we have what we thought we wanted but aren’t sure we want it after all. Followed by the laundry list of what’s getting between us and our happiness: too much or not enough work; a lack of time, energy or money; the perils of having or not having romantic partner; the demands of having kids or wondering “what if” when you don’t; needy aging parents; these extra10 lbs., etc. It’s always some external obstacle(s) keeping us from clearing the clutter, creating space for the good stuff, inviting it in. Or so we think … However, upon closer inspection, it soon becomes evident that the external explanations and “whys” turn out to be physical expressions of the internal emotional wounds we refuse – yes, actively refuse - to allow to heal.

“Hah?” you ask. Don’t we spend good money and seek to identify and work out our “issues” through therapy, meditation, medication, seminars, books, hobbies, retreats, yoga, all that jazz?

On the surface, yes. But deep down, most of us identify with and define ourselves through our painful experiences. “You create the world, then worry about it.”** We cling to all those terrible things done to us by life and others, and all those terrible things done by us as a result. “My past, c’est moi.” We actually coddle our hurts, examine them, nurture them, protect them, keep them alive by breathing new life into them with our attention, our efforts to understand them, and our repeated reliving of them. Consciously or inadvertently, we poke and prod at them. “Oh, yes – that hurts, doesn’t it.” But we enjoy the pain, familiar and oddly comforting. We use them to define us: They are our wounds, our story, our childhood, our experiences, our memories, our life. Why we feel the way we feel, think the way we think, value the things we value, hurt the way we hurt. You see, they explain our pain, give reasons for our problems, justify our difficulties. They are what make us special, what make us the person we think we are.

Except that, we use them to remain “less than.” Reinforcing who we say we are, and why we are the way we are, keeps us from becoming the person we’d truly like to be. “The total is open and available, but you will not take it. You are attached to the little person you think yourself to be.”**

Our “story” permits us to play the victim of, rather than the hero in, our life. Instead of healing, either by leaving our wounds be, or protecting them from further hurt so that time and nature can heal, we poke at them, pick at them, rip off the scab so they bleed anew. I recently read in an article* that this obsessive rumination, this reopening of wounds has a name: perseverating. “To repeat or prolong an action, thought, or utterance after the stimulus that prompted it has ceased.” We’ve all done it … It allows us to remain shackled to the past, haunted by mental ghosts. “Hurts so good, this pain of mine. It’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. It’s who I am and why I am the way I am. And don’t anyone try to tell me otherwise, or, heaven forbid, take it from me.” So we keep running in a hamster wheel of repetition, exhausting, getting nowhere.

Having these gaping wounds leaves us open to repeated injury not only by oneself, but by those around us. When friends, family, significant others, bosses, co-workers, the guy at the deli or even complete strangers approach, intentionally or inadvertently, press up our sensitive “buttons” or “triggers” as they’re also called, we feel that original pain all over again, as if for the first time. (We may even unconsciously leave them open and unattended to they’ll do just that.) Ouch. And we tend to react in a similar fashion. We age-regress a 5-year-old child (or 15-year-old adolescent) all over again. And nothing changes.

My fabulous friends are masters of perseveration. (Actually, I’m not so bad myself.) Our sensitivity leaves us open and vulnerable to further pain, inflicted by self or others. Comfort in the familiar, I guess. The devil you know.

However, every now and again, one of my remarkable friends (and amazing coaching clients) will, for some inexplicable reason, spontaneously hit some metaphorical bottom, and decide that enough is enough. That living in pain / destructive patterns is no longer an option. That they’re through reliving this same crap story over and over again. That it’s time to move on, heal. And they choose to step off the hamster wheel. They edit the script, change the dramatic arc and write a new, fresh ending. One in which they are in control, they call the shots, they determine the outcome.

These people somehow come to realize that they “are the infinite focused in a body;” they begin to “think of neither the past nor the future, just be”** in the present, and respond accordingly. How they inspire and astound me, these people, who just decide one day to step off the hamster wheel. My challenge as a friend and/or coach is nudge them in this direction; to help them see that other possibilities indeed exist; to champion their decision to make changes; and to support them as they envision and draft a better life story. Most importantly, I help them redraw the central character, define his/her hopes and dreams, and allow the hero/heroine to move beyond and grow from tragic flaws …

Fact is, everyone can allow the wounds of the past to heal; everyone can be the hero in a new story they script. The remaining scar (if any) serves as a badge of courage, the triumph of overcoming, a reminder of what was but no longer is. I thought that perhaps there was some magic bullet, a switch that, once flipped, compels people to allow their wounds to heal. To find a way to expedite the process, eliminating the need to “hit rock bottom.” To circumvent much of one’s sturm und drang, stamp out perseverating forever, and craft a better story with a happy ending. But, alas, my highly enlightened therapist friend Diana tells me that the process “differs from person to person. People comes to their own realization in their own time.”

Any ideas or insights? If so, please share!!!

*Martha Beck, “Dear Me” - O Magazine, April 2011

**I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj