Some metaphors
Talking and yelling
Think about what it’s like to have something important to say, and the person who needs to hear it will not listen to you.
Say you’re in a long-term relationship with a person. It can be a romantic relationship, a marriage, or a friendship. Maybe a cousin, a colleague at work, a fellow student. Whatever. This person has a habit that is very obviously making them unhappy, and also frankly making other people unhappy. But this person doesn’t seem to notice it.
You feel like you’re good enough friends with the person that you can talk to them about it. So you tell the person what you’ve noticed, and they seem to listen … but they don’t change anything about their behavior. Or maybe they refuse to listen in the first place. Maybe they tell you to shut up because they don’t want to hear it. But it’s true and they need to hear it, and everyone around them is super annoyed by it. So you try again … but again you get shut down or ignored or yelled at.
It’s super frustrating, right? It makes you want to yell at them, scream at them, until they listen, because it’s driving you crazy and it’s making them and everyone around them unhappy.
If you have anxiety, your body is frustrated with you. Your body is trying to tell you things, and you refuse to listen. So your body talks a bit louder, but you tell your body to shut up because you don’t want to hear it. But your body knows how much you’re hurting yourself, so it talks louder, and louder, until it’s screaming at you.
The more you listen to your body, the less it will yell at you.
If it has a lot of yelling to do right now, you’ve spent far too much time in the past telling it to shut up. Now is the time to listen.
Follow the Yellow Brick Road
Sometimes when we are trying to make progress against mental illness, just trying to feel OK for once, we don’t know what to do. I’ve seen it compared to being in a dark place with no exit. Every step feels like it might be the wrong way to go. You’re just feeling your way forward, worried that everything you do might be the wrong thing, taking you back into your worst unhappiness rather than out into the light.
My best advice is that the road ahead is always visible, as long you’re unhappy or in pain. The road is the pain (or the pain is the road - take your pick). You move forward, moment by moment, guided by the feelings in your body. Alll the large and small pains, the prickles, tense feelings, muscle contractions, fears and sadnesses … all of it is the road. Just feel it. I’m here, present, feeling this pain, right now.
In your mind’s eye, see the pain, and step on it gently. Then wait for the next one, and do the same. Notice the pain, notice the feelings, one at a time. This is the way forward.
You are in pieces
“Why am I in so much pain?”
Imagine that your body has been literally cut into pieces. Your legs, your arms, your torso are lying in heaps on the ground. But somehow, magically, you don’t die. In fact, you can use your mind to keep moving the pieces of your body around, going about your life. But still, you’re in pieces. Imagine how much it would hurt to live in that condition.
In my view, by living a life full of anxiety, of denying that your feelings are important, you have done exactly that to yourself. Except that it’s your mind that’s in pieces, or (if you prefer) your psyche, or your soul. You have a lifelong habit of rejecting your own emotions. A little embarrassment comes up, and rather than simply feeling it, you push it away as hard as you can. Some anger, some fear: push them away, refuse to feel them. Your memory of what it felt like when your father died: that’s too painful, I don’t want that. Your childhood dream of the way your life should have been, compared to what you are actually doing with your life: far too painful to contemplate, best to push it away. You’re lonely and want to go on a date, or you want to reach out and make new friends, but you’re too scared to even let yourself seriously contemplate what steps you would have to take to make that happen. So many thoughts, ideas, feelings, sensations, emotions: you’re literally pushing them away from yourself. You’re defining your self as someone who doesn’t need or doesn’t want or can’t have those things. And so those feelings, wants, beliefs, desires, memories ... are not part of your self anymore. They’re separate, they’re rejected.
You’re in pieces. Huge parts of yourself are being lying in a pile on the floor, because you’ve rejected them. (They’re still there! You can’t get rid of them! You can only cut them off.)
That hurts. It hurts a lot to even look and see how many pieces you’re in. It’s painful to contemplate your own pain and how you got to this place.
The healing process hurts at lot, too, at first. You’re doing a kind of surgery, a re-attachment of parts of yourself – and there’s no anesthetic for this procedure! But once you allow the pieces to grow back together, you will start to feel better.
When you feel your painful emotions, let them be. More than that, let them be a part of you. Love them. Embrace them. Tell them you’re sorry for having pushed them away for so long.
Your body wants you to heal. It will do most of the work. Your job is to allow it to happen.
Feel your feelings. Go into them, over and over. By doing so, you let yourself grow back together.