Take your time. It’s worth it.
For decades I was never fully aware of my internal emotional turmoil. I didn’t really process my emotions, I just avoided them, numbed myself with mindless sex or with tasks so complex that nothing but those tasks themselves could fit in my brain and would push any negative emotions away. My environment and my reactions to it pushed me in that direction. It was my way of surviving. Until surviving wasn’t exactly what I wanted.
I worked so hard for so long, but for what exactly? I was working on the wrong task chasing a reward I would never get through it. And this behavior broke me. I didn’t have to work on that irrelevant task to find the human connection I was looking for – I had to face myself to find the human connections, the friends and people I truly wanted to have in my life. I needed to work on me, on who I was and who I am, on processing all the years of pain I ignored and couldn’t put into words perhaps because the stroke I had when I was 16 made everything worse in my head… and at my lowest point I realized I couldn’t do it on my own…
It took me too long to realize this, but there are two kinds of barriers that I can perceive:
- The barriers of the self – a set of things I’d like to change about me that depend on no one else but me.
- The social barriers – a set of behaviors I have that I can see I’m failing to manage properly when attempting to connect with others.
And if you look deeply into these two, the word “barrier” can sometimes be equivalent to “wound”: the wounds of the self, and the social wounds (or interpersonal wounds). And it took me a long time to realize the latter ones existed and that I could not solve those on my own. I needed to find the right people to help me figure out these interpersonal wounds and break these old patterns with them.
I’m writing this blog post because I really wanted to highlight the fact that interpersonal wounds exist. That those can’t be dealt with alone. And that not even a therapist can help with these – you need to find real people out there, anywhere, who can change your world view if you can bring yourself to trust them.
In my previous blog post I also highlighted the existence of interpersonal wounds and I realized I wanted to write this blog post to add to that because I find it to be a very important topic that I rarely hear about.
Breaking these interpersonal barriers, or healing these interpersonal wounds, can be a very exhausting and time consuming process, and sometimes trying to go out there to meet people who can help you break the barrier or heal the wound backfire and make you feel worse, but even then there are lessons to be learned and experience to gather. Because what I feel is most important than healing the wound itself, which will eventually happen, is acclimating to the pain to not fear it and to face it head on, to talk about it when you truly need to. This takes time. A lot of time. But in the end it’s worth it. Because the next time you go through the same experience, you’ll know how to deal with it.
