Love And Sorrow

Before I was old enough to resolve the judgmental, selfblaming beliefs that caused my pain, I had no concept of true peace. I found numbness to be normal and familiar. A seemingly painless place, numbness kept all my suffering away but it also prevented me from experiencing all feelings, including happiness. I’d heard it said that we don’t miss what we’ve never had, but peace and joy were so far removed from my consciousness that I didn’t have a clue that it was possible for me to experience those beautiful emotions.

When we don’t have the tools to face our pain, we numb out. There are many ways to do this: through psychological dissociation and activities such as eating disorders, drugs, alcohol,self-mutilation and thrillseeking; through excessive work, sex, exercise, shopping, gambling or hoarding; through anti-social behaviors like stealing, cheating, lying, fighting or abusing; or by becoming abused, accident-prone or repeatedly victimized.

For me, coming out of numbness was a slow and steady exploration of painful memories and feelings. At first, I had to get through my anger about having to face my past and accept that it just wasn’t going to go away on its own. Certain problems at that time brought me into therapy, but my original pain—the beliefs and emotions embedded into my unconscious—continuously brought me into relationships and situations that caused me to replay my early abuse. Then I needed to get through the additional anger and sadness I held about being mistreated, along with the shame and self-blame from thinking I was less than others because I had been mistreated.

Once the bulk of that work was done, I still had one last challenge—to allow myself to feel those foreign, uncomfortable feelings called peace and joy. As I released all of my self-blaming beliefs and emotions, peace and joy began to bubble forth. This new and strange sensation was uncomfortable at first but eventually became familiar and enjoyable

My small, daily choices changed. I began to move away from abusers and gravitate toward new friends with whom I shared easy-going experiences. I was in joy—enjoying myself. Islowly got used to that new feeling, but even more importantly, I began to identify myself as a happy person, a peaceful person. I began to choose peaceful situations over conflicted ones. Pain became a history that I learned to appreciate but with which I no longer identified.

Yes, I am who I am because I had those earlier experiences, but today I no longer feel like a person who had such a history. I look back at my life experiences with great appreciation—my difficult experiences were gifts, opportunities to change my identity from thinking I was horrible to knowing myself as unconditionally loving and innocent.

At one point, when I was studying the teachings of A Course in Miracles, I ran across a concept that teaches, ―In my defenselessness my safety lies.‖ 15 When we know our innocence, we no longer feel the need to defend. If we’ve made a mistake, we take responsibility for it rather than making excuses. If we didn’t make a mistake and have been unjustly or mistakenly accused, we know that the other person’s blaming words and actions say more about them than about us.

Because our defensiveness is connected to our belief in self-blame and because ―like energy attracts like energy,‖ we wind up creating what is commonly known as ―a selffulfilling prophecy.‖ When we take actions based on a fear belief, the decision we make carries that fear energy and that energy manifests or draws to itself the very thing of which we are afraid.

Life is much more complicated when we carry around self-blaming beliefs and much easier when we take the steps to correct these mistaken beliefs and uncover our innocence and our joy. Remember that, when we correct our mistaken beliefs, we no longer have to suffer the pain of defensiveness and our life moves forward with less conflict and more peace