How To Heal When The World Is On Fire

Reading by Tim Foley:

Chloe writes the following via email regarding my recent piece “Don’t Let The Empire Gaslight You Into Believing You Are Powerless”:

“What you said about what to do when you feel powerless really stuck with me…that externally you can always help wake up more people to the truth and internally you can heal. I guess I just have a question more with the latter. How do you heal in the midst of a world on fire? How do you feel safe and secure when you realize that the world is anything but those two things? That any form of comfort you feel is currently costing untold numbers of people’s blood and pain? How do you heal and feel safe when everything is just…grind…precarity and feeling on the edge of oblivion? Waking up to those realizations is terrifying…and it just feels like a full antitheis to being able to start your healing. Like things can only be safe when the monsters and the hell is defeated which won’t likely occur within the span of our lifetimes? It seems like thats something you’ve figured out and I’m curious how to start that.”

Dear Chloe,

I think first we need to be clear that healing and feeling secure are two different things. Healing isn’t about getting away from uncomfortable feelings, it’s about moving right into them and feeling them fully. After we have done our work and healing has occurred we tend to notice that we feel better, but the actual work of healing begins in discomfort. That’s where the rubber meets the road on this path.

Healing is when you find a part of yourself that has been acting out unconsciously over and over again throughout your life, by getting annoyed or upset or collapsing into helplessness, or by freezing up, freezing out, or freaking out. You start paying attention to how these unconscious behaviors play in yourself (either in your outward behavior or privately in your internal suffering), and you get real curious about how that is happening.

Healing is when you track that defense mechanism back to its first instance, the very first time you felt this feeling, usually in childhood, where you were small and vulnerable and you came up with this way of defending yourself in that moment and have stuck with it ever since. Our inner dysfunctions are generally just old strategies for dealing with perceived threats that we set in motion much earlier in our lives and then forgot about, which then went on to continue pulling the strings of our psychology from the depths of our subconscious long after they became maladaptive and unhelpful.

Healing is when you listen to that small part of you that has just been doing its very best to defend you all these years from the perceived threat that is no longer there because you are no longer a small child. You are an adult now, and you don’t face the same threats you faced (or more likely imagined you faced but didn’t understand) back when you were a kid. But a part of your brain has not caught up with that yet.

So you let that part of yourself talk to you, and you listen, and you love it, and you thank it for defending you all these years, but you let it know that you’re all good now. It can go. Compassion for your tiny self that didn’t know any better floods your system and in all that love, you forgive yourself for the first instance, and for all the instances after where you were punching at shadows that were no longer there.

In that flood of compassion, the mechanism dissolves. Sometimes the energy of it will literally up and leave, out your mouth in the form of a burp or a dry retch, or in a shudder or chattering of teeth, but other times it will simply melt into your whole self. You’ll just feel better, and you’ll know it’s gone because you won’t be able to find the feeling again if you attempt to return to it.

The thing about healing is that it leaves only an absence of something, so it doesn’t make a big deal about itself. You might not even notice that you’ve done anything much for a while. The more you do this though, the more the noise in your head dies down, and the real world begins to emerge.

You become less reactive and less likely to inadvertently cause drama in your world, and in yourself you become generally happier and lighter.

But you also see — and this goes back to the nub of your question — that in this new light the world becomes a much less scary place. You can see that the monsters who rule our world aren’t so much monsters as just little kids with far too much power unconsciously acting out their defense mechanisms. The suffering they cause is real and horrifying, but at the root of it, they are humans playing out a very human pattern. In this context, it’s comprehensible. You’ve found similar things in yourself, so it’s not an alien threat which defies understanding.

You also see how predictable people are when they are stuck in their reactive patterns. You can see that in our leaders. They are not surprising or inspired in any way at all; they are monotonously boring and beholden to the patterning of their psychological conditioning, and their behavior is predictable. Evil, yes, but also predictable.

Predictability is also a marker of the imperial core as a whole. You can see how incapable it is of changing tack, even when it no longer serves the empire to continue the pattern. The empire managers think they’re so slick, but they are stuck with repeating the same plays over and over. That’s a major weakness. They are telegraphing their next moves to us years in advance, and there’s nothing they can do about it.

The other thing that happens is that in this newfound clarity, you can interact with the world as it is. You are no longer expending energy fighting shadows of the past. Your healthy anger is re-ignited, ready to animate you into inspired action that responds to the present moment. You get your intuition back, unencumbered by neurosis and paranoia, so you can move more efficiently in the world. You get your healthy wants back, your “fuck yeah” and your “hell no”, and you can make good decisions quickly, and deftly course-correct if you need.

Imperial propaganda uses our fears, our tribal loyalties, our insecurities, and our learned helplessness to control us as efficiently as if they installed levers in our brain. If you dissolve those levers, you become a very dangerous entity to the machine. You become a free human being no longer acting in patterned and predictable ways, but moving with the needs of the moment. That is empowering.

So we definitely don’t need to wait until the bastards have been defeated and we’re feeling safe and secure in order to begin our healing journey. In fact, beginning the work of true healing makes us much more effective at fighting the empire, and the work begins right here in the big sloppy uncomfortable thick of it all. All it takes is the sincerity, vulnerability, humility, and courage to begin taking those first steps.

_________________

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