MIND MOVES:Reacting to a big change in your life story
ALL OF us want to be happy. And very often we hold the naive belief that if we just live our lives a certain way, if we press the right button on a Monday morning, we will sail through the rest of the week on a crest of wellbeing and success.
The truth is, life doesn’t work this way. Life has a curious way of breaking our hearts. It is full of violent eruptions of things that seem to come at us from nowhere. An old wound is suddenly reopened; an illness throws everything out of whack; a colleague betrays us; we lose someone we love – moments when suddenly the path we have been on disappears from beneath our feet.
One of the great lessons of life is that, while one may have an ideal picture of how things should be, we have to accept sooner or later that, rather than things being the way they should be, they are usually the way they shouldn’t be. Unless we can accept this about our life, family, organisation and friends, we’re going to have a really hard time.
But it is also true that the moments when things go wrong are also the precise psychological points where we can grow. Even if that hurts, even if it means some of our most cherished illusions about ourselves end up shattered on the floor. Whatever wisdom we mine from the raw material of living comes from facing the episodes of chaos, growing through and being stretched by them.
Most of what we take for normality is a distraction, a fantasy, a form of forgetfulness on our part to try in every way we can to forget the terror of existence. When any kind of pain or distress intrudes, we are unprepared. We feel out of sync with what people around us have been telling us we should be feeling or not feeling, and with what we hold as an ideal for ourselves.
In the face of this inner confusion, we may attempt to defend and protect ourselves in a number of ways: we may try to deny what’s happening and run as fast as we can along the path of denial; we may turn against ourselves for feeling the way we do and take the low road to depression; or we may turn against the world we feel has let us down and refuse to play the game any more.
Each of these responses is an attempt to survive the inner turmoil that threatens to turn our lives upside down. Each of these responses is a way of trying to keep alive the stories we have been telling ourselves for years about who we are; a story that gives us a sense of identity, a sense of continuity. A story that may leave us feeling brittle, highly vulnerable and even anti-social, but something we can at least hold onto in the face of a highly erratic, unpredictable reality.
Rather than taking our experience to mean there is something wrong with us, what if we were to consider that our confusion and distress may be alerting us to something important that needs attention? Something that may be hard to talk about, something for which we may not have words, but something very real nonetheless. Something that challenges us to grow and step into a larger, more liberating story than the one we have long been telling ourselves.
At first we may feel acutely anxious and unsure how to react. It can take time to make sense of it all and figure out the next step to take. But when we cannot change how we feel, we can choose to relate to it with some degree of kindness. Compassion is perhaps the best place to start when our world gets turned upside down. It is the first step of any growth or recovery process. It enables us to stand firmly in the place we find ourselves; a place that may be painful, but the only ground we can stand on if we want to feel real.
Squaring up to whatever is happening does not mean becoming self-absorbed. Compassion is not something weak or self-indulgent. It steadies us as we ask the questions that need to be asked and listen to our deeper intuitions. It allows the feelings in our body to unfreeze, rather than congeal into resentment or despair. It empowers us to face something that may not be our fault but simply another indication of what a crazy, unpredictable thing life is.
Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong – The National Centre for Youth Mental Health (headstrong.ie)