In order for personal growth to happen you have to face adversity, pain and suffering. That's what we tell ourselves every time something bad happens to us. And it's one of the biggest lies we choose to believe.
I do it, you do it, everybody does it, it's a normal defense mechanism that for some people helps with the healing process after emotional trauma. But it's still a lie and I insist of reminding myself of that for a few reasons.
First of all, emotional or psychological pain can be debilitating. For example, losing something important in your life can cause you to lose your job, it can adversely affect personal relationships with other people close to you and it can immensely impact your health (and not just mental health) in a negative way. What's so positive about your life spiraling out of control?
Of course, it doesn't happen to everybody in the same way. Some deal with it better than others. Some can move on after only a short period of time, while others linger for years, constantly asking themselves the eternal "what if...?".
At the end of the day, it's just a test. A test of how much can you take before giving up. But not a test of success, more likely a test of well you can handle failure.
After a flesh wound heals, it will leave a scar. Scar tissue on the skin is less flexible, less resistant to radiation and hair follicles will not grow back on it. It's the same way with emotional scars. Time can however help with fading them out and sometimes you're able to return back to being the same way you were before. However, what was gained in all of this? Nothing. You only lost time.
So why insist on the apparently pessimistic view? Because some people believe that the only way inner growth can be achieved is through pain and suffering, which is obviously not true. Take a look around. All the people you know have failed something and have been through some tough times. How many of them have succeeded? If pain is so necessary for success, the answer should be almost all of them. But it's not. The reality is most of them have only succeeded in surviving.
You can choose to grow and get stronger in any way you want without having been through difficult times. Bad things will happen, whether we want to or not. But the point is, we don't have to want them. We don't need to wait for them to come out of nowhere so we can change for the better. Because maybe something so bad will happen that you cannot come back from it, and what happens then? You're left in a place that you're too weak to get out from.
How to deal with it then is up to everybody, and we each go through our own process. What helps is to in fact keep a positive outlook on life, but not in the way of telling yourself that something which caused you pain is what contributes to your growth. What caused you pain contributed to your scar, nothing more. What contributes to your growth is your desire to become a better person, a more balanced person that can maybe avoid trauma or learn to better deal with it.
It sucks and it feels like the end of the world sometimes. But it's not, it has happened to others and it may happen to you again. Now a choice has to be made in your mind, and this is the hard and at the same time, easy part. It's easy because you can either accept it and move on, or you can sit in a dark place for the rest of your life. And it's difficult because we don't know how powerful our minds are when it comes to these things.
For example, some people who are given placebo medication that works for them, and are told that the pills they were taking are in fact sugar, and continue to take them still experience positive effects. They know it's just sugar, it shouldn't work, but it still does, because the choice has already been made.
You don't have to go through hell in order to get to heaven. But if you ever find yourself in hell, you can choose to get out and remind yourself that heaven still exists. Maybe you'll never get there, even if you try, but if you don't try, the possibility drops to zero.
No comments:
Post a Comment