Part 6: Don't You Want to Get Well?

Wearing the clock of invisibility

Our reality is not to live and strive to be happy, but to be out there, and not be ridiculed, abused, and hurt. We do not live life to find happiness, but we live it to avoid getting hurt, to avoid losing more than we have already lost. It literally felt like we were at the mercy of the next kid; teacher and even our very own family. It always felt like walking on a shifting landscape, there was no safety at home, no safety at school either. Dissociating from reality was always the best solution. Always felt safe departing from the body, evading, from a painful existence and reality, or at least how we had come to perceive it.

We put so much effort into hiding, into being visible, that’s why we are drained. It takes effort to make yourself unnoticed, to camouflage, be a chameleon, become one with your environment out of fear, so no one will see you, and no one will see your flaws. Gain a little bit of power from the abuser by being invisible, while at the same time battling your need, your want, your desire to be seen, touched, accepted, and loved for who you are. At this point you don’t even know who it is you are, because you have constantly been changing who you are in order to fit in or be normal, but really it's in order to hide. Darkness, and being unnoticed feels better than the light and being seen.

Light can be freeing and liberating, but at the same time, it will expose whatever issues you are struggling with. It takes energy to live, so sometimes we rather stay put, in a comfort zone for 38+ years. A comfort zone is a great place to be, but nothing really grows there. We will not allow our legs to “grow” walk out of our situation. Change is frightening, being healthy is frightening. It puts us in the room amongst other healthy people, and that can be quite scary too, so we resign ourselves to our current states because of what it will cost and take from us to change and be healthy; we become comfortable in our dysfunctions.

Jesus meets this man and asks him an interesting question, “Don’t you want to get well?”

I believe this to be a rhetorical question, because the answer can be found in the question itself. “Don’t you want to get well?’’ By this Jesus meant that it was within this man’s reach to get well. He had the power and the capacity within himself to make himself well. The power was inside him all along, all he had to do was to dig down within himself and discover the wells that were within him, the water he was looking for was within his inner well.

Again, we always carry the power of change within ourselves, and as long we remain unaware of our inner power to change the course of our instinctual responses to life, we will continue being imprisoned and remain trapped in this neurotic reality we have constructed.

His answers kind of give us an insight into the ambition (if any) of his thinking. The man responds, “Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool.” The profundity of this statement alone is quite striking.

First of all, we can identify confusion between needs and wants. We have established previously that we are born with needs, but sometimes we do not know how to meet them. For several reasons, we may not have been empowered to believe that we can meet our own needs. Over time, our mind would have learned to distrust itself. It may be that we have not learned to trust our minds enough to make decisions appropriate for reality.

Our self-efficacy could be low or non-existent, but the point is we have needs, and when we do not meet those needs it slowly plagues us on the inside, even for 38 years. Maybe as a child, my need for self-validation was not met, and now I am stuck with approval addiction.

However, the bigger issue here is our tendency to confuse a need with a want. A need is not a want in the sense that, a need is detrimental to our survival, but a want is not. The man needed to get in the pool, but he wanted someone to help him do it. He kept himself out of a healing by waiting for what he wanted instead of addressing what he needed. Most of our behaviours are defined that way. Sometimes we might venture looking for sex, believing we want and need sex while what we should really be addressing is our need for attachment. What we really want is to resolve and get into the pool to get healing from our attachment dysfunctions in a healthier way.

Second, he replies "I have no one to help me." This illustrates the issues of the Locus of control; The ability and the power within which we exert a measure of control over our own lives. The Locus of control can be internal or external. When it is internal, we believe that what happens to us is within our realm of control. When it is external it means that we believe external forces define what happened to us whether positively or negatively. It is basically living with a self-defeating attitude and waiting for happenstance to define the course of our lives. It is essentially deemed our reality to be a construct outside of ourselves and into others.

People with low self-esteem usually have an external locus of control. They dread to look inwardly because they fear it is not good enough, and they are afraid of what they would find as Nietzsche said, "If you stare into the abyss, the abyss will look back." It is because they do not look inwardly, because their thinking is distorted outwardly, and that causes them to reproduce destructive behavior because their psyche is turned inwardly, going through life without any form of introspection and reflection. They repeat this closed loop which is really a noose choking them to death.

Furthermore, they rely extremely on external factors for their salvation and growth, but real growth only happens when we realize that no one is coming to help us, no one is coming to help us live the life we want. We are always one decision away from living that life, a decision that will stir us to do the things that we need to do to help us live our lives. When we are sort of left to fend for ourselves, we learn to take control over our own lives and stop waiting for a solution outside of ourselves. Truly, the treasures we are looking for in others are buried within ourselves.

Again, I do want to point that having an internal Locus of control is not necessarily proof of high self-esteem either. This is because we do not come into this world with the ability to see things from others’ perspective, and because we don’t, we tend to blame ourselves for everything that happens to us, and that has a profound impact on our self-esteem as well. If as a child I am abused, and I believe the abuse is my fault and that I deserved it, then immediately I will start believing that I am a bad child.

The key to healthy self-esteem is thus to learn to put boundaries. To learn to determine and be accountable to my actions, and not project my actions unto others, nor accept the responsibilities of others’ actions unto me. It is about finding balance. We cannot afford to pendulate from one end of a spectrum to the other. Living in extremes always hurts us.

Thirdly what we are is an expression of history; of the past stories that have happened to us and the stories, we have been telling ourselves. Stories and narratives make us who we are. Stories and narratives hurt us. Again, the story being narrated here is that, “It is not my fault, but the others if I am not making any progress”. Reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre famous quote “Hell is the others”.

Our narratives hurt us, but our narratives can also heal us. We can break free from the noose of what is keeping us captive by confronting our own narrative. Confronting our role in the stories we have been telling ourselves. Role-playing, pretense, self-deception can hinder our ability to correctly apprehend reality, and the thinking in our minds can only be as clear as our ability to maintain a cognitive link to reality, that nothing will be superior to the facts of reality.

Also, self-esteem is a reputation we have acquired within ourselves, but this reputation is determined by the stories and narratives we have been telling ourselves over the years, and we cannot go higher than the stories and narratives we have been telling ourselves. Thus, reconstructing our personal stories and narratives will help bring healing.

But before Jesus gets him through the healing, notice one thing he does not do, he does not ask him why are you what you are? Yes of course some might say it is because he is omniscient, but here is what I believe; sometimes it is our ‘’why’’ that is keeping us stuck. We may have been traumatized, abused in all sorts of ways, and it has made us who we are today, the monsters we have become, but sometimes it is dwelling on the past that is keeping us stuck from laying hold of the present, and ultimately the future, our destiny, and the fullness of who we are. Our narratives can really keep us stuck.

Finally, Jesus says, “Rise up and take up your bed and walk”. I believe low self-esteem is self-inflicted blindness and paralysis of the mind. It is to lay by the pool of our lives, paralyzed unable to enjoy and bear the reality of life with all its pleasures and pain. It is being unable to walk with the feet of our minds due to lack of awareness and consciousness. Maybe because of the narrative we have told ourselves, that we cannot walk, we cannot think, or that our thinking is useless, we therefore cannot break free of our circumstances. This can only be resolved by raising consciousness.

I believe that consciousness is key for survival and for healthy self-esteem. It is important to be conscious of reality as it is. It is important to be conscious of who we are, and conscious of all the lies that we have been telling ourselves that are hurting us. So, Jesus raises the man’s consciousness by asking the man to rise, hence raising the consciousness, that the ability to walk was always within him. Just as your ability to walk beyond the limitations, the paralysis, the infirmities you have inflicted on your mind is within you. Rise and walk, climb beyond what has been deemed impossible.

Everything in the way we are wired (our reflexes, B.S, brain, fight-flight, or freeze responses) is geared toward one direction: self-preservation. Therefore in the name of the preservation of the self, we distort our thinking and allow entropy to set in, acting as a force of inertia maintaining us into a dysfunctional state. It is not possible to remain in a less than ideal state with an appropriate estimate and perception of reality, the way we think and perceive reality has to be distorted. Entropy has settled into my love life, nothing has grown there of late. My thinking in that area has not been appropriate to reality.

It was geared to preserve "me". I had a choice between reality and myself, and subconsciously I chose me. I chose to perceive relationships as a threat to my existence. Stop trying to preserve yourself, you are too concerned with the sorrows and regrets of yesterday, and anxieties of tomorrow. We have to be mindful in the now. Now is really all we have, and it is all we need. While we are waiting life is passing, do something, anything, keep moving for life is in motion. As long as you are moving forward, every step counts, every step becomes part of the journey, so rise and walk, keep moving…

‘’Take your bed and carry it.’’ The bed was the element that enabled the man’s dysfunctions. He would lay on it by the pool, not laying hold of his destiny, but laying on it, comforting himself in his dysfunctions amongst other sick people. The bed had been carrying him and his dysfunctions. He felt comfortable when he was on it. Jesus asks him to carry what had been carrying him. What carried your dysfunctions? Was it sex? Approval? Addiction? What gave you a false sense of feeling at ease, while robbing you of the fullness of who you are, of your destiny? You must carry that.

"The doctor is effective only when he himself is afflicted. Only the wounded physician heals, but he does so to the extent he has healed himself." - Carl Jung.

You cannot help people whose perspectives you do not understand. You have to be kin to them. So Jesus says to Peter, "When you have turned back, strengthen your brethren." In other words, you need to go through what you are about to undergo to help others. You cannot help people that are struggling if you have never struggled yourself. We tend to judge others' weaknesses we do not have. The greatest sign of your recovery is your ability to help people overcome what you have been through.

The greatest sign of recovery is the ability to carry what had been carrying us. It is the ability to hold what had been holding us, as a way to express its powerlessness over us, but also to transform others’ lives through our own. This is a reflection of who you used to be, and an acceptance of where you are coming from. When people saw the man with the mat, and they recognized him, they also noticed that something had changed. They noticed that he was carrying the mat instead of the mat carrying him. So, carry your past, because although you are reaching for destiny, destiny cannot be achieved through discarding our entire history. What we are is an expression of history. We can start building who we are on the foundations of who we used to be.

Fight, flight, or freeze are some of our responses to trauma. The issue with freezing (playing possum, thanatosis, tonic immobility, more on this later) is that we might keep being frozen even after the fact, hence being immobilized, crippled, and paralyzed by what we have been through, by our past.

“The mind forgets but the body remembers..." - Sigmund Freud.

All visceral and traumatic, PTSD reaction, cortisol secretion, is the body being hyper-vigilant because it does not want to be hurt again, or it is bracing for impact. The body has not realized that the danger it was exposed to has passed, and the key to healing is to teach your body to be mindful in the present, so it will realize it is safe and any healing in the present will ripple in the past. The past does not matter when we learn how to be present; every moment becomes new and creative. “His mercies are NEW with each rising of the sun." Sometimes we only must heal our present issues and proceed, because healing ripples forward and backward. #mindfulness for the win.