Healing is a forward journey

At some stages of the healing journey, particularly the early stages, it can be really helpful to find a sense of community among others who share the same struggles as you. It can be validating to hear that others experience things that are similar to your experiences, and it can be a great thing to have encouragement from people who really understand how even the ordinary things can be that much harder when you’re working around a diagnosis.

But it is to our own benefit to remember that the survivor community is only the first stop on our healing journey. It is not the end point, and there does come a point at which it stops being a help to us in any way.

The survivor community is a stagnant place – and as a member of that community, you will never really be challenged to choose healing over stagnation. You might get a few small challenges along the way if you exhibit some extreme of defeatist thinking, but very rarely will anyone even try to push you to look at yourself honestly, or ask you the really hard questions about your behaviors or your beliefs, or whether what you’re doing really supports your stated intention of healing.

And the reason this happens so rarely is, that the community will leap to the defense of anyone who is thus challenged, responding with outrage to the suggestion that anything a survivor does might be wrong or bad, or that a survivor’s responses might be skewed by their own trauma-created perceptions and therefore not accurate to the situation at hand.

In the survivor community, it is the person who issues the challenge who ends up being wrong. It doesn’t matter how appropriate or necessary or correct the challenge is – the community will band together against anyone who dares to suggest that anything another survivor does is anything less than perfectly acceptable.

The survivor community will actively defend your right to be sick with its last dying breath, and they will defend your right to be sick with equal fervor, whether you’ve been “working on healing” for a month or for a decade. They will defend a survivor’s right to be unchallenged in whatever sick thing they’re doing, to a degree that is sickening – but then, it is actually reasonable to expect a sick response from a sick community. The thing is, to not forget that the people in the survivor community are sick, and many of them have every intention of staying that way.

So what if you’re one of the rare few who actually hopes to move beyond being a card-carrying member of the dysfunctional brigade?

Then you’re going to have to think for yourself, and you’re going to have to find the necessary drive and incentive within yourself.

Your “friends” won’t be able to help you – they’re much more likely to want to keep you right there where they are, and it can feel like disloyalty to even think of outgrowing them.

But if they were really friends, wouldn’t they support you even if you were further along than they? Wouldn’t they respect you for accomplishing what they also hope to accomplish? Wouldn’t they want you to succeed, and then take encouragement from your progress and your success, as evidence that they can do it too?

Do you ever ask yourself why so few survivors offer this kind of leadership to each other?

Your friends may very well not support you or encourage you. But that doesn’t make you wrong for wanting more for yourself than they want, for themselves or for you. Regardless of what your “friends” are doing, it should not stand in the way of your own journey away from sickness and toward health.

And the “community leaders” won’t be able to help your healing either, because in case you haven’t noticed, they aren’t doing much healing themselves. We can’t look to them to show us where we can go or how to get there, because they’re not going anywhere.

The survivor community offers a cocooning protection for those who are just learning to recognize their dissociation, or just getting to know their dissociative systems – and in the earliest stages of healing, we really can benefit from the safety and nurturing of that cocoon – but a caterpillar who stays in the cocoon too long will smother and die in there.

We have to be ready and willing to leave our cocoon behind too, or we too will smother and die.

It may mean leaving behind the “friends” and “leaders” who have no real desire to accomplish what you’re striving for, and who won’t support you in doing it because it only highlights the fact that they’re not doing it.

It may feel selfish and disloyal, and you may be accused of being these things and more and worse in the process.

But despite this, you need to think for yourself and listen to yourself, ahead of anyone else, and you need to do what’s right for your healing even if nobody else is doing it.

Part of being healthier is understanding and respecting your own needs and finding ways to meet them even when that means not doing what other people are doing, or not doing what other people want you to do – and even when you care about the people who are telling you to do something different. Compromise should never mean self-abandonment for either side – and if your friends really care about you, then your health should be just as important to them as it is to you.

So when you begin to feel a need to move away from sickness and sick people and sick behaviors and people telling each other how okay it is to be sick – or if you ever heal enough to feel that need – don’t squash it out of a misguided sense of loyalty to, or an over-developed identity in, the survivor community.

If you’ve progressed far enough to feel like you’re ready to move on, then the community has offered you everything it has to give. Get out while the getting’s good! And take anyone who will come with you – but don’t let anyone hold you back.

Healing is a forward journey – so keep on moving.

Take Me To Your Leader

Last week, I wrote a post that I thought was going to be about one thing, but which adamantly insisted on being about something else altogether.

Not that the need for sources of real inspiration in the survivor community is not an important topic – it’s really important. So often we are left taking “inspiration” from rotten sources – people who really aren’t doing anything to resolve their own dysfunction, people who say they’re working at healing but aren’t really accomplishing anything in their healing – and yet, they set themselves up as “leaders of the community” anyway.

There is no true inspiration to be found there – what are those people doing that any of us would really want to emulate? But with nothing to compare them to, we tend not to question the “leadership” we end up with, even though they’re not really leading us anywhere.

Healing doesn’t have to be the slow-moving (or no-moving) process it so frequently appears to be when we look at these non-leaders, these people who sit in the same place “working on” the same problems for five or ten or twenty years without making an inch of real progress. Doesn’t anyone ever wonder why, with all that work and all that time, they never actually get better?? Or are we all just assuming that they’re actually doing the best they can, and the nothing they’re getting for all their purported effort is really all there is?

Well, it’s not all there is. It’s not all we can hope for. It’s not the best that can be done. And the boundaries and limits of the healing journey should not defined by people who aren’t actually traveling anywhere. Although we all have to face and overcome our own limitations and roadblocks in healing, we should not take on someone else’s limitations, to define and limit what is possible for us.

When we’re finally ready to really work at healing – to give it the consistent energy and focus and attention it needs – to put our healing first, instead of ranking it behind absolutely everything else in our lives – to leave the safety of denial and the security of being sick – or IF we’re ever ready to do all that – then healing and progress and change will happen.

If we’re really working at our healing, then we absolutely will not be in the same place and talking about the same things five or ten years down the line. The healthy changes, the steps made toward a safer, more stable, more peaceful life, a life that is more ours than our lives have ever been before – will be so dramatic and so obvious that nobody will be able to miss them – because even if ninety percent of the work is done in our internal worlds, between and among and by our internal selves, where nobody can see it – the results of that work will be clearly reflected in every aspect of our external life.

But it’s an unfortunate truth that we can’t look to the so-called “leadership” of the survivor community to help us get there, because ironically, every one of these people, whether they’ve been there for one year or twenty, are still full-fledged, card-carrying members of the dysfunctional brigade – and where will we get, by following where they lead? No further than they’ve gone themselves.

These people can talk the talk well. They know all the “therapeutic” explanations and suggestions for every problem – and well they should, since they’ve spent so much time in therapy themselves. They’re quick to share what they know with everyone, and to rely on their words to be so impressive to others that we become almost dazzled by how much they know, by how much they talk, and we never really examine what they do.

And they have to hope we never do look past their words, because there’s nothing there. A leader should lead by example and action as well as by words – but our so-called leaders are not exemplifying successful healing, or even healing that makes progress. To the observer, the “healing journies” of our so-called leaders are like a soap opera – take a year or two off from watching, and when you come back, the same people are still be dealing with the same problems. If the people who set themselves up as leaders of our community can’t make a step of progress themselves, then how can they lead anyone else? And why are we looking up to them in the first place?

Our community leaders are also wonderful at making the newly diagnosed feel more comfortable with being where they are – and well they should be. They are experts in finding ways to be comfortable with where they are themselves, with rationalizing and justifying where they are, so that it not only becomes tolerable, but almost desireable – and this is something they pass on freely to the masses.

But a good leader should not make you feel good about being where you are – certainly not in terms of healing – because the whole point of healing is change, and if you feel good enough with where you are, then where’s the incentive to change anything?

A good leader should make you slightly uncomfortable with where you are, because they are modeling and exemplifying where you want to be. And if you aren’t there yet, then how good do you want to feel about that?

A real leader should be someone who is living the goals you have for yourself – not someone whose own life is no better or healthier than yours is. You already know how to be where you are – you don’t need someone to lead you there, and you certainly don’t need a leader who exemplifies nothing more encouraging than stagnation.

Of course, it’s not in their own interest for these putative community leaders to encourage you to change or heal or progress – because if you do it when they still haven’t, it makes them look bad. But that’s their problem – and it’s up to you whether or not you take it on to become your problem too.

That being said, we owe it to ourselves to take a good hard look at who we’re looking up to in the survivor community, and why.

What are they exemplifying to you?
What are they modeling for you?
What do they represent to you?
What have they accomplished, in their healing or in their lives, that you hope to accomplish yourself?
What goals do you feel encouraged to work toward by the leaders you look up to?
Are your leaders really showing you that you can do more or be more or heal more than you thought possible?
And if they aren’t doing any of these things, then why are you looking up to them in the first place?

Looking for Inspiration

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?