Say What?!!!

As I have worked with clients recently, I have been observing my approach. The method I use would not be categorized as “touchy feely,” yet it is caring and healing when embraced and utilized as it was intended.  It is not a about handing over tissues and saying “Oh you poor thing” or “that must have been terrible.” The vernacular calls for you finding the benefit in things that you have previously labeled as wrong or painful or embarrassing or hurtful. It also looks for the drawbacks in all the events and behaviors you once might have put in the unicorn and rainbows category. It is confronting and liberating. Difficult and strident also come to mind. 

I love it. Except when I do not, which is usually when I have determined that I am stuck and seek another facilitator to drag me from the muck and mire.  I have a level of expectation and excitement because I know from history that on the other side of that chasm lies balance and a new sense of peace. In my mind I will tell the facilitator what the issue(s) are, we will glide through the process that I know so well and believe works and, ta-dah I will be done and free. A new me without breaking a sweat or a nail or any major body part. I stand on the precipice wearing my smug smile as a badge of honor and I step off.

In my mind it will be a soft drifting down toward enlightenment and then I realize that I have yet again hooked myself up to a giant bungee cord and am hurtling through my subconscious and the landing is not looking good. I begin to back pedal, obfuscate, argue, disagree and deny any knowledge of that which I know to be true. With both hands out in front, I attempt to shove this reality I have requested out of my way and scurry back to my hidey-hole of existence.  That one sided story I have created is looking very inviting and the yawning maw of ending that reality to create something new (and better) seems a very bad idea.

This is when the facilitator begins to assist me past the point of no return. A pleasant hand on my back or elbow assist it is not. It is a litany of my unwillingness, inability to see or understand  often combined with more colorful phrases to call me out.  It can sound mean and uncaring and arrogant, and it most certainly is in your face. I know that the person doing that is not doing it to me, but rather for me so that I can get out of the fractured fantasy in which I have resided. The places I can find to hide are far greater than I ever imagined, but they stick with me to get me to the other side.

I replayed what I must sound like sometimes when I am working with someone.  It can sound unrelenting, but it is because I am not willing to let them quit before they get there. Also, I do not want them to be alone with their thoughts because what I realized during this analysis is that what a facilitator sounds like to me is my subconscious. 

The things we say to ourselves all day, every day are usually not the kindest.  It is all the voices of authority outside us that we have embraced as our own.

                “That was stupid.”

                “Why did you do that or say that or behave like that?”

                “I can’t (fill in the blank)”

                “I don’t deserve (fill in the blank)”

                “They don’t like me/understand me.”

                “They hate me.”

We are awful. Silently screaming at no one but ourselves. Judging every move or perceived procrastination. Finding fault where there is none.

Yet when we hear it from the outside, we become incensed and take umbrage. If we stopped to simply listen to what was being said and owned it as something we have done at some point in our life imagine the freedom. And that is an act of kindness.