Wounded

Whenever I read my old blog posts, I realize the undertone is sadness prompted by reality failing to live up to my expectations. Even when I share past events with mental health professionals, I see that I shape my narrative as one of being perpetually wounded, hurt—the slings and arrows of life puncturing my self-worth. One week ago I embarked on working with a psychiatrist in Chicago who practices Transference Focused Psychotherapy (TFP). Our ultimate goal as client and clinician is to build up a certain fundamental resilience. As one therapist said, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering does not have to be.”

I talked to Frank last night about the idea of absolute truth. If I can radically accept, and experience, the idea that there is no way I, or any human individual, can know absolute truth, then I don’t have to be fixated on my perspective or let the perspective of someone else determine how I feel. There can then be a genuine letting go, flexibility, and a certain degree of playfulness like in the story about the blind men and the elephant. Each blind man was certain the elephant looked a certain way based on the part of the animal’s body he touched.

How do I really, in my heart, relinquish the worldviews I have about who I am in relation to others, knowing, in my mind, that holding onto my perspective may have served me in the past but no longer bends and bows with fluidity under time’s ever-changing current? My hypothesis is awareness of these worldviews sheds lights on the brittle nature of the deeply embedded concepts and, once uncovered, the paradigm shift can begin.