That’s the thing about humans and life…We like to put events/people/ideas in a nice little package that is supposed to sum up the whole complexity of a specific disorder/illness/trauma/life/personality/person.
It’s what makes healing or transformation as we like to name it so difficult to predict. We’re living in a time where technology makes it so easy to share information that the information gets easily misconstrued, trivialized, or generalized. This makes it even harder to define what we are terming 'healed' for example.
Trauma resolution is not a linear progress; LIFE IS NOT A LINEAR PROCESS. Personality is not a linear process. The complexity of humans and their intersection with Neurodivergence, trauma, mental illness, inequality, dis-ease, life or loss, is not wrapped up in a tidy box - nor necessarily healed after a set amount of time has elapsed.
For example when someone seem to ‘get over’ it quickly, ( and what are we terming 'get over?') this is not because they are the one’s who are tackling it better; doing more work, or ‘behaving’ well; and likewise someone who seems to take longer shouldn’t be viewed as it’s opposite - There are a million and one factors which come into play…
Witnessing, recognition, and compassion are not things we hold for another in one moment and dismiss in the next, because there seems to be two different stories playing themselves out; Two incongruence’s in whats presented in a personality. Life’s circumstances and energies are sometimes compelled to play themselves out in a given chapter or lifetime - it’s not our fault. I knew when I was five my life would be extraordinary, but I never once thought it would mean such intensity of suffering, and in that such unquantifiable loss. It doesn’t make us weak, damaged, failing, or incompetent, if we get it ‘wrong’ or we seem imperfect. It just means we are struggling in that moment. No-one is ‘less than.’ Remembering at any given moment it could happen to us, is what makes us human, and how we handle it is not always how we think, or hope. I’m humbled in that thought.
What I know to be true in my heart is life is so much more than this set of rules and guidelines, called ‘functioning’ which we agree to from birth to death. It’s an endless web of knowledge, felt experience, essence, simplicity and love. What I also know is our humanness applies to even the most ‘spiritual’ of us. We have vocations, schools, parents, friends, relationships, social paradigms, conversations, loves, dislikes, pain, suffering and joy, and what makes us sanely human and profoundly spiritual, is understanding the path is much more than seeking some grand version of love, where we meet our soul and true essence, its also about learning to meet humanity in our struggle, in our differences - coming together not turning away.
What i’ve learned about myself and the humans I work with is there is nothing simple about our lives, and pretending that we can pull some magic trick out of a hat and life will magically be transformed is a myth.
Does that mean we’re doomed to be on a path of getting nowhere for the rest of our lives? NO. Each day we find more relief as we start to understand what helps and what hinders; Each day we learn to orient better in the world so events and experiences don’t turn our life upside down; Each day we learn to say yes when we want or need to and no when we want and need to- and we don’t feel guilty for it; Each day we learn new healthier responses, and feel more hope, connection and presence.
Each day if we are really getting it we learn not one of us responds, thinks, feels, emotes the same and we finally get that ‘Boxes’ don’t really exist.
