Throughout my life I’ve been told that I am the exception, the fringe element, the unconventional one. Why? Because I’ve always insisted on working on my stuff. Working on my stuff means exploring territories that many people don’t know about, don’t care about or would rather avoid.
Instead of bumbling through my life’s more perplexing chapters, I invested a lot of time on trying to puzzle them out, tease out the meaning, parse the lesson – and then commit to the change. Oftentimes, my explorations lead me to outcomes that I didn’t particularly like. But, this is why life is not smooth and easy – we’re here to learn important things with peaceful breaks in between the lessons.
The real challenge is to figure out how to have a more even balance of hard lessons to restorative time off.
Here is an example of an actual process I developed. I did it because I was tired of the pain and was ready to commit to the solution. It went something like this:
A person who is very, very dear to me called me up one evening and we were having a pleasant conversation. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, he said something that I took as a terribly hurtful statement. It hurt so much that I had to hang up the phone. I laid down on the couch in the fetal position thinking that the pain I was feeling would be the same if my skin was being peeled off. I was shocked, hurt, self-pitying … and …
Wait – self-pitying. There was the door. I stopped my mental processes and allowed myself to just feel. Instead of trying to argue the pain away, deny it or numb it, I felt it with all my heart … and suddenly, there it was: underneath the searing burn was a part of me I didn’t even know existed. And that me was enjoying the pain.
In the same moment I felt shock, fear and a deep recognition.
The Lesson In Progress
What was going on? In a moment that I can only describe as a deep, dimensional perception I got the lesson. And the lesson was this:
I was attracting pain in many forms to myself because I liked it. I liked it because if someone hurt me, then I could blame them for it – and I would get to be their innocent victim. Why would I want that? Because in this life the favorite game of all mankind is called “Shift the Blame.” We all do it. We all fly our flag of righteousness in the faces of the bad guys. The strategy is to be the first one to shift the blame so we can be innocent, blameless, one of the ‘good guys.’
At the moment of recognition, the pain disappeared. I collected myself, thought about what happened, and later called my friend and told him the story. He was thankful that I called. He couldn’t figure out why I suddenly started acting strangely. He never intended his remarks the way that I received them. And he wondered why I suddenly had to hang up.
If I had not gone through this process and then called him to try and explain what had happened, I would have continued to believe that he was an untrustworthy person who might lash out at me for no reason … and that my best defense would be to stay away from him. What self-sabotage! The reward for working on my stuff – even when it’s really painful – was that I didn’t lose a friend. I forgave myself, set the experience in the front of my life’s toolkit, and grew.
More than One Way to Learn a Lesson
But there is another kind of pay-off to working on your stuff.
First, you must believe that there is value in the work. But if you’re already working on your stuff, you already believe in the value. The example above pertains to lessons suddenly appearing in your path. Next, we’re going to look at a lesson as a process.
A long time ago I had a job in an industry that I enjoyed. I enjoyed my job, too, until after a few years when it became apparent that it was time to go. I decided that my boss must have an apparently undiagnosed personality disorder, and I could have easily used that judgment to shift the blame to him, but I decided that he really wasn’t the bad guy. His outbursts were difficult to take, for sure. Be that as it may, I had to leave. Urgently. Every day I stayed at that job seemed to claim a little bit of my soul. The problem was, there were no jobs available for me at the time.
I felt that I had to end the psychic pain of going to work every day, even if it meant that I would be replacing that job with nothing (which was not an option, but it shows the level of my desperation to leave). As I would run the probable exit scenario through my mind, it always included the boss and I yelling at each other and hurting each other with our words. I did not want to leave like that, but I felt trapped and thought that my only way of easing my pain was to blame him for my bad luck of being out of a job with no prospects.
Whenever I would get caught in that spider web of fear and blame, I’d stop – I’d remind myself that he had nothing to do with my painful daydreams, and I’d forgive myself for diminishing the options that might be available to me. And I also acknowledged that he had hired me and continued to pay me. This exercise went on for two years.
Then, one fine day, out of the blue, a friend called. She asked me if I’d like to work for her as a technical assistant. She’d pay me more than I was earning at my current job and I’d only have to work for her on an occasional basis. The rest of my time was to be dedicated to building my own business.
I went to work the next day, and with love and gratitude in my heart, I gave my notice. The boss and I had a long, quiet, introspective talk. I left for my new job with an unexpected sense of relief, happiness and freedom that I never anticipated.
Whenever I get tied up in my blame game, I remember the totally unexpected feelings of balance and joy that I felt as I left a job I thought I was trapped in. That is my touchstone, my reminder, my safe place to rest.
Working on your stuff. It’s worth the effort. Be open to the unexpected rewards. Implement what you learned when the going gets tough. Rewards might not always be immediate, but when they arrive, there’s no mistaking them. This is the real road less traveled, and the only one worth taking.
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Deb, I agree with Jessica. Isn’t it interesting that the things we rail against are the very things we have invited in? Fascinating. Thank you for helping me take another look at my stuff.
Thank you, Jessica. No one is exempt from the path, but we CAN sit down an refuse to progress. But why? No one is exempt, no one gets a free pass, and there’s no statute of limitations on learning.
Thank you so much for such an introspective and valuable post. It’s very courageous for you to describe your own experiences, however hurtful, and the great lessons you learned. Good lessons for others in similar situations now.
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