I’ll never forget the first time I looked at the moon through a telescope. I was in my early 30s, and after having looked at the moon regularly for three decades, it was like I was seeing it for the first time. The vague spots my eyes could see on their own were now cliffs and craters and rocks and ridges, and I could so clearly imagine myself up there on a dirt bike, having the time of my life. It was awesome. Telescopes rule.
But the thing about telescopes (and microscopes, and binoculars), is that you can’t see shit out of them until you get them aimed and focused properly. Before you do that, they’re actually worse than your naked eyes; everything is just a blur and you have no idea what you’re looking at.
Self-healing and personal growth are exactly like that. Until you know what you’re aiming at, and focus yourself properly, you’re not going to get anywhere by “trying to improve”. You might even get worse, because there’s nothing quite like failing, for someone who struggles not to feel like a failure….
A common mistake, when people get motivated to heal and make positive changes in their lives, is that, full of hope and the short-term boost of knowing they’re finally doing SOMETHING, they get TOO optimistic, TOO big-picture, TOO hopeful, TOO complicated. It’s like when you go grocery shopping hungry (or high…), and you intend to get just three things: bread, milk, and eggs. Somehow, $250 later, you leave the store with bags full of a ridiculous combination of “what you need”, “what was on sale”, and “random shit you picked up for no reason at all except, mmmmm….”. And you get home and, DAMMIT, you forgot the bread! And eggs!
This is what generally happens to me, when I sit down to do a “Who I Really Am” exercise. Or a “Values Clarification” or “Goal Setting” or “Where I Want to Be in Five Years”, or similar type of exercise. I start with the soberly self-aware knowledge that I’ve got some key things I want to work on. And half an hour later I have COVERED my notebook with scribbles, and arrows pointing between everything, and enough plans to not only “Get My Shit Together”, but to become a “Black Belt, Magic Wielding, Enlightened Life Ninja”, with 3 languages under my belt, $2 million in the bank, and a nice little cottage-farm somewhere, where I train for my 7th triathlon in my own private gym. In the mountains. On an island.
Then I put this Awesome Life Changing Notebook somewhere, and never look at it again.
Then, a few years later when I’m depressed and “ready to change”, and wondering what to do with my life, I do it all over again. Rinse, and repeat.
This has accomplished one thing — I’ve gotten older. That’s about it. But I’m still not an enlightened, magic-wielding ninja. D’oh.
So, Step 1 is to Focus. Our focusing knobs (to riff on the telescope metaphor a bit more), are the following four questions. And remember, DON’T JUST READ THIS. Get out your notebook, and actually write stuff down. This is going to take you about half an hour. Maybe a little longer.
Exercise #1: Focusing
Q.1) What are you seeking? (Hehe, this reminds me of Monty Python’s Holy Grail movie….’What is your Quest?”) But seriously, why are you doing this exercise in the first place? What are you hoping to get out of it? What do you most immediately want to change, fix, make better, deal with better? How would you like to feel about yourself?
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Q. 2) What have you tried so far? Given the “Quest” you outlined in Question #1, what have you already tried?
NOTE: Broadly speaking, there are two categories of “things you’ve tried”. One is “things you’ve tried” to actually improve the situation or fix the problem, gain the skill, etc. The second is “things you’ve tried” to just stop feeling shitty about things. BOTH of these categories belong here, so whether you’ve taken concrete steps to improve things (e.g., I went to therapy), or whether you’ve practiced Shit Avoidance Strategies (e.g., I got drunk a lot), write these things down.
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Q. 3) How have your strategies worked so far? If you compare yourself now, to some point in the past (6 weeks ago? 6 months maybe?), are things getting better? Worse? Both, in different ways?
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Q. 4) What has it cost you? What toll have these strategies taken on how you feel about yourself? How have they affected your health? Relationships? Work? What have you sacrificed, missed out on, or lost?
NOTE: This part might be hard. It will likely feel shitty. After all, avoiding this awareness is why we practice Shit Avoidance Strategies in the first place. In therapy sessions, this is often where clients tear up, look down, and take a lot of long silences, or maybe get angry and feel like “this is stupid”. We all like to believe that “things are getting better” and “I’m JUST ABOUT to change, like, it’s right around the corner…”, and other lies like that. So, take this one slowly. Give yourself some time. Be honest, brutally honest. Cry if you need to. Remember that shitty diaper — it stinks, but you’ve gotta change it, or it’s going to get worse.
So, what has it cost you?
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Okay, you’re done Exercise #1.
I just want to say, sincerely, well done. I know it can be hard to go through an exercise like that. There’s a good chance right now that you’re feeling some tough things, or having some pretty self-judging thoughts. For me personally, I had a lot of shame come up when I did this, and I have some very well-rehearsed awful things I say to myself, about myself.
So when you can, please do what you can to remind yourself, those critical thoughts about yourself, those judgements about You as some essentially, fundamentally bad person, are not true. Even if you’ve done some pretty bad shit, and the consequences of your actions have been pretty bad for yourself or others, this doesn’t mean you are a Bad Person or some kind of “loser” or something. I really, genuinely mean that. And the evidence is, here you are, facing yourself, facing your shit, and taking a step in a better direction. Fundamentally Shitty, Hopelessly Terrible people don’t do that. Caring, courageous, willing-to-change people do. And that’s you, right now.
The strategies we employ to keep ourselves from feeling shitty are there for a damn good reason. When you started practicing these strategies, you needed to. They were probably the best tools you had. When you struggle in your adult life, you almost certainly had the foundation of that struggle laid for you by difficult experiences in childhood. And at that point, you didn’t have a lot of tools to deal with things. So, you coped. And thank God for that! Those coping strategies got you this far in life. They were extremely useful. They kept you going; they allowed you to be a survivor. And here you are.
But at this point in life, those coping strategies have outlived their usefulness. And it’s time to let them go. Not to regret them or hate yourself for them, but in a sense, even to thank them. If you hadn’t “coped”, who knows what would’ve happened, right?
I know, for myself, I slid into addiction when I was a teenager. I kept it up for quite a long time. And sure, I regret that, obviously. But I’ve also come to respect that getting stoned, getting drunk, and such, kept me going, in a sense. It kept me alive. And that’s no small accomplishment.