When you are in the middle of a story, it isn’t a story at all, but only a dark confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs, or swept over the rapids and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.
– Margaret Atwood, in Alias Grace (Chapter 33)
I’ve realized lately that one thing I love about books and movies is that ability to see how the different parts influence and absorb, how things resolve. In life, we don’t often get to see that. It can be so easy to feel and to believe that we’re not moving toward anything but merely running on a wheel or plodding daily through events with no progress.
In trauma or crisis, it feels like there is no movement. If we’re clear enough to think about how things could be better, the distance between the here of the situation and the there of the goal might as well be the distance between Earth and Mars. Still, there comes a day when things have changed enough that we can hardly believe it. In AA, the focus is on one day at a time. After a lot of days, you can usually see a whole lot of changes that were nearly imperceptible as they were happening. Picture a long steady climb up a mountain, when you can’t see your ascent until you’ve gone a long way and come around a bend
What could I say to encourage someone else, to say “You can do this! It’s hard, and I can’t reach back with my hands and pull you from where you are to where I am but begin! It will be worth it!” Whatever your journey, whether it’s an unhealthy or abusive relationship (or pattern of relationships), alcohol or drug abuse, loss and grief, a divorce… what makes it possible to move forward rather than numbing out?
I suggest that you start with compassion. I can picture the attentive expression on the face of a woman counselor, the way she would pause as I spilled some secret or described something I regretted. She would ask me if I had a best friend and how would I advise that friend in similar circumstances. It always came down to compassion which had to begin as compassion for self.
Other sources at the time carried a similar message. That idea that we can bully and browbeat ourselves with mental self-flagellation is a colossal error. Call it a maladaptation, call it a lie of Satan, call it anything you like, it doesn’t work! The more I tried out the idea that being kind to myself really was the first part of The Golden Rule, the braver I felt and the more I could effectively practice changes.
So, begin with compassion and be sure that includes yourself. Think of the best encouragement you would have for your best friend and try it out in your life. Do that for a couple of weeks, and see if you don’t have more clarity and more energy. See the changes start to happen.
Rather Curious 