October 10, 2024
What is your role in your suffering? This sentence used to trigger me a lot.
It would bring up defensive parts of myself up who would point at my various past traumas and systemic oppression and use those experiences to not recognize my own role in my healing.
Don't hear what I am not saying-
I am not saying, your traumas don’t matter and there are not systemic things that are and have impacted you. Systemic oppression impacts our every atom and our every experience. Personal and collective trauma incite fear within us, damage our physiology, and wreck our nervous systems. I will write a seperate blog post about systemic oppression and its impacts.
However, what I am saying is, there is space to process the trauma and systems AND focus on how you also have a role in your suffering.
Processing how you self sabatoge allows you to be an active participant in your own life.
In order to make changes in our lives, we need to notice our own blind spots. It is just like driving, if we ignore our blindspots, they don't go away, we just will cause a lot of pain.
Existential therapy offers the following themes as important themes to understanding who we are, and how we can create lives that are meaningful:
Meaning and Purpose: Discussing what gives life meaning and how to find personal purpose.
Freedom and Responsibility: Examining the balance between freedom of choice and the responsibility that comes with it.
Isolation and Connection: Exploring feelings of isolation versus the need for connection with others.
Death and Mortality: Confronting the reality of death and how it influences life choices and priorities.
Authenticity: Encouraging individuals to live authentically and align their actions with their true values.
Anxiety: Understanding existential anxiety and how it can lead to personal growth or avoidance.
Existential Crisis: Navigating periods of doubt or confusion about life's purpose or direction.
Personal Values: Clarifying personal values and beliefs that guide life choices.
These are are deeply uncomfortable topics, and not topics you can process in one therapy session or one conversations, instead, they are topic that we will continue to reflect on throughout our lives in order to make meaning and make choices that will lead to getting out of stuckness, and getting into our lives.
When we think about times where we have made big changes, we can often notice that prior to that big change, there was likely a catalyst. A period of feeling stuck, maybe there was a traumatic incident that happened, maybe we did not know how our family would react to who we are, etc., however, something within us knew that we needed to make a change. And we mustered enough courage to listen to that voice of reason within us.
A golden token of wisdom I gained from my supervisor recently is “ One day the scales will tip and you will do something that will give you a different outcome, because the discomfort of your current life will outweigh the fear that comes with making a change.” This brings in the nuance that these things take time, but we cannot only rely on time, we also have to rely on courage and action. Action keeps us living our lives, not being resentful participants in it.
The discomfort of your current life often feels safer than the fear of change, but true growth lies in embracing the unknown.
We cannot wait for fear to “go away” to make a change. It is about learning to hold yourself through fear so that you can “do the hard thing”.
Rather than, “how do I get rid of fear so that I can do hard things”
The premise becomes, “how can I support myself when im scared, but still do the hard thing to create the life I want to live”
And then, you hold yourself through hard things by:
listening to what parts of you need
regulating your nervous system
making accommodations for yourself
exploring existential underpinnings
practicing DBT skills (mindfulness)
and the list goes on :)
Book a session and we can find a tailored plan for you. A bit of shameless plug ( 🤭 its that gen-z in me)
But the idea that we need to just wait for fear to go away can keep us stuck in unhelpful patterns and feeling stuck in our lives.
What would it do for you to notice your own role in your suffering? What might you gain from not being defensive towards the topic?
Tara تارا
