There’s Nothing Easy About Realizing You’re the One Who’s Been Holding You Back

So knock it off already!

I saw a meme today that struck a nerve.

Part of the reason it struck a nerve was because of the badly malformed grammar in the thing. I’m laughing as I write this, but I just looked at it again and it’s still bugging me. How do these things go viral when they’re not even written in standard English?!?

There were enough issues in the original that I decided to clean it up, grab a new image, and make it my own. Here goes:

Grammar aside, the theme is dead on. The nerve it struck was this: I realize this is exactly where I am right now.

Maybe some of you are as well.

As I said in my video last week, I decided to start going to therapy again. I’ve spent much of the past year dredging stuff up so I can finally address it, and I knew it was time to take the next step.

To be honest, I don’t really like my therapist, but I appreciate him. He’s a gruff old bird who isn’t going to let me dominate him with my eloquence or my gift for excuse-making. My previous attempts at therapy failed because I felt like I was the one in charge of the sessions, when what I needed was someone to call me out and keep focused on doing the work.

Paying someone to let you talk for an hour doesn’t get you anywhere but on the fast track to an empty bank account. Digging into your discomfort to identify and face whatever it is that’s been weighing you down is the only way to really start peeling back the emotional scabs to get to the shrapnel that keeps your wounds from healing.

As Jordan Peterson is fond of saying, “Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.”

What fog?

The fog that hides is the refusal to notice—to attend to—emotions and motivational states as they arise, and the refusal to communicate them both to yourself and to the people who are close to you. A bad mood signifies something. A state of anxiety or sadness signifies something, and not likely something that will please you to discover. The most probable outcome of successfully articulating an emotion that has accrued without expression over time is tears—an admission of vulnerability and pain (which are also feelings that people do not like to allow, particularly when they are feeling distrustful and angry). Who wants to dig down into the depths of pain and grief and guilt until the tears emerge? And voluntary refusal to take notice of our emotional states is not the only impediment to dealing with them. If your wife or husband (or whomever else you are tangled up with, unhappily, at the moment) says something that comes too close to the painful truth, for example, then a sharp and insulting remark will often shut them up—and is therefore very likely to be offered. This is partly a test: does the person being insulted care enough about you and your suffering to dig past a few obstacles and unearth the bitter truth? It is also partly, and more obviously, defensive: if you can chase someone away from something you yourself do not want to discover, that makes your life easier in the present. Sadly, it is also very disappointing if that defense succeeds, and is typically accompanied by a sense of abandonment, loneliness, and self-betrayal. You must nonetheless still live among other people, and they with you. And you have desires, wants, and needs, however unstated and unclear. And you are still motivated to pursue them, not least because it is impossible to live without desire, want, and need.

Peterson, Jordan B.. Beyond Order (pp. 101-102). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

One of the tough things about finally confronting all the unaddressed debris in your psyche — the kind that festers and manifests in ways destructive to both yourself and the people around you — is the need to sort out the difficult things that have happened to you that you can't control, and distinguish it from how you've chosen to deal with that stuff, which you CAN control.

Many of us think in terms of, "I can't help it, this is just how I am."

But do we really not have a say in the matter?

Most of us who took a decent amount of childhood damage developed coping mechanisms that sought to numb or avoid the pain of a constant anxiety or fear (or insert your trauma reaction here) of seemingly mysterious origin without ever really admitting that something caused those reactions. Something that needs to be addressed, along with the damage our chosen coping mechanisms themselves have done.

Seeking comfort, numbness, or escape to balance out chronic anxiety and fear works for a while, but not forever. If whiskey blessedly soothed my 25-year-old brain, it now makes my 45-year-old heart beat too fast, causes me indigestion, raises my blood pressure, ruins my sleep, and has added not a few pounds that sap my energy, make me hate the way I look, and even endanger my life. The social avoidance strategies that have kept me out of uncomfortable situations that ramped up my anxiety have also made me less present to my family than they needed, and left an unequal burden on my wife, who has been left to pick up the slack.

The bill always comes due.

Depending on what you’ve done to manage, the costs can be filed under physical health, mental health, and also relationship health. If you’re like me, there are debts to be paid in all three.

Discipline doesn't make room for the prolific excuses generated by those who suffer from an endless onslaught of irrational fears. I suspect it’s why I’ve always harbored a secret resentment for discipline, taking shelter in the needy randomness and chaos of my moods. But I've reached a point where I recognize I'm going to run out of road if I don't take the next exit. No more procrastinating. No more seeing if I can just make it a little further on this empty tank. Maybe I don’t even get credit for my changing priorities; perhaps my finely-attuned fear mechanism just found a more pressing set of threats: poor health, broken relationships, and the looming possibility of premature death. I think all of these are the more urgently to be avoided than whatever it is I need to face to finally get my shit together and start living like I want to stick around.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I've realized in a way that transcends clichés and platitudes that when you’re in a situation like this, despite the urgency you feel to change, you need to be patient with yourself. If you're in deep and you realize you've got to gut the House of Cope you’ve been living in, it's not too late. But it also took a long time to get from whoever you were when you were small to where you are now. Brick by brick, you built that twisted castle. It's going to take time to tear them down so you can climb out into the fresh air.

Patience isn’t a free pass though. This applies to me as well: you can’t just sit there congratulating yourself on figuring out that you need to do something. You’ve got to move, or you’ll backslide. Your destructive habits are well-honed and extremely comfortable - that’s what they were designed to be. Remember instead that every step you take, no matter how small, is one you weren't taking before. Each one moves you a little further in the right direction, and those course corrections add up.

If we commit to the work, I believe that bit by bit, we'll find ourselves in a better place.

There’s nothing easy about realizing you’re the one who’s been holding you back, but there’s absolutely something freeing about it. If you’re the problem, you’re in the perfect position to solve it.

Nobody else can do it but you.