I am not a big fan of change. I want everything I do, everywhere I go, the people I know and my relationships with them, to remain in a fixed and unchanging state so I always know what to expect.
However, I am also committed to progress and healing – and if there’s one thing that both those processes require, it’s change.
The conflict between my desire for a predictable world and my commitment to healing is one that has required constant attention over the years, because it seems like, at every step, there is a chance for this conflict to trip me up or slow me down – a chance that my own resistance to change might be the thing that prevents my own healing.
And ironically, I think this becomes more true the more we progress.
When we first begin the healing journey, most of us enter therapy in various stages of finally admitting that something needs to change. As little as we might want to admit it, and as hard as it is to make the changes that really need to be made – we are at least nominally acknowledging the fact that change is necessary.
And these changes have elements that can feel good, even while they also bring their fair share of confusion and difficulty. They can make us feel like we are finally taking action on a problem that we have put off for too long, like we’re finally doing something. We are finding ourselves, we are gaining a sense of community with others like us, we are making connections – even the difficult times are opportunities to discover that we are not alone or “weird” or isolated in negative uniqueness.
The discovery of community can be emotionally addictive, especially since most of us have gone our whole lives up to this point without ever feeling like we’re on the inside, like we’re part of the group instead of trapped on its fringes.
So many of us have spent decades feeling unacceptably weird, unforgiveably different, undeserving, worthless, hated – and to finally find a community where people understand our struggles and accept us anyway, is like balm to our aching souls.
We can finally have a space for honesty, places to tell the truth of what we see and what we feel and how things really are, instead of having to hide everything behind smiling faces and facades of functionality.
However, I think there are a lot of people who get so caught up in finally feeling like part of the group, that they forget that this community was supposed to be only a waystation on their journey.
If our sense of self, our identity, our friends, the things we’ve done that make us feel good about ourselves, the things we do that are important to us, become inextricably entwined with our diagnosis, with being sick – then it is entirely possible to lose our incentive to work toward getting well, because “healing” becomes synonomous with loss.
The desire to hold on to this good thing they’ve found can sidetrack people from their healing, and cause them instead to take up permanent residence as a perpetual patient, eternally “working to get better” but never actually getting anywhere.
So many of us want to reach out to other survivors and offer them encouragement and support and hope – but the truth that many of us miss here is that, before we can really serve as a living example to anyone else, we have to actually accomplish something ourselves.
Support along the way is a great thing to share – but if we let the giving and receiving of that support become an end in and of itself, instead of a step that lifts us closer to where we really want to go, then we are missing the point – and cheating ourselves – and by example, cheating everyone who is newer to the journey than we are and is looking to us to see where they might hope to be when they’ve been at the process as long as we have.
So after you’ve been part of the survivor community for five years, ten years, twenty years – if you’re still doing the same thing you were doing five or ten or twenty years ago, it might be time to re-evaluate and ask yourself what you’re still doing there – because proof that you can be in therapy for twenty years without getting much of anywhere is really not all that inspiring.
Our own successful healing and peaceful lives are the most inspiring thing we can offer to other survivors.
What are you modeling to newcomers at this point in your healing journey?
Are you showing them that they can get where they hope to go?
Are you living the kind of life that could inspire or encourage anyone else’s healing?
And if not – then why not?
