Been re-reading “The Body Keeps The Score.” Had read it the first time when I was in the throes of my crash…learning from the first integrative doc I visited, what might’ve gotten me to that crash in the first place, & how I could pull myself out.
I say pull myself out bc I learned – from her, my doc, that healing was an active practice. There was no magic pill that was gonna “cure” me (I should’ve known by then, since 52 of them hadn’t to that point).
Likewise, despite what some of the drawings on social media show, no doc was going to be able to meet w me weekly & “untangle the messy ball of yarn in my brain” by sitting across from them & just purging out what was in my head.
And yet, while I had to come to the realization that healing was going to take active – work…the incredible thing was: work was what got me very much into the spot I was in.
The realization for me was – this was a different type of work I had to engage in, in order to heal. Though I was never averse to “work”…there was a specific type I was avoiding – & that was work on myself.
After the situation I wrote abt in the last post, abt Antonio Brown, I thought it was important to address this issue of “work”…bc the term can be misleading, depending on how we use it.
In my case, work was my addiction. It’s what I knew & was most familiar with. I went to the well, often. Working in sports, you have the excuse of being busy 7 days a wk, all hrs of the day/night, bc there are games, concerts, shows, etc. Events are constantly happening.
But when you love the work – it doesn’t feel like “work.” In fact, it feels like anything but. Again per the quote card here: it feels familiar…it gives you purpose…dopamine hits…makes you feel accomplished.
That all sounds good, right? It is, but it also can impede healing. And if we’re right w the hypothesis that we ALL, 5 out of 5 of us, need some form of healing, bc we ALL have faced challenging life events that have impacted our MH to some level, then one form of “work” which feels familiar & safe, can be a great avoidance tactic for another type of “work” we HAVE to do.
Think abt that w Antonio Brown, or me, or you, or anyone who goes to do something that gives them purpose, daily. Some of us love it, some of us like it, but most of us – it’s what we know abt ourselves: athlete, sports exec, accountant, lawyer, bookstore clerk, janitor. It’s all work…& it CAN feel like we’re accomplishing things, daily. BUT, it can also be an excuse to not do the interpersonal work we need to do, to heal. Theo calls it “sitting in our shit” & working out of it. Maybe that’s a little graphic for some. But if we use one form of work we’re familiar with, as an excuse to not do the uncomfortable interpersonal work – we can crash, hard. Make sure you differentiate between the different types of work ya gotta do.
