The Viable Alternative

If you were to hit your leg against something and get a gash on it, you’d of course be in pain. The pain would cause you to walk funny, and it’d make you be guarded as to how you sit down, how you put on your clothes and how you move, because you wouldn’t want to aggravate it to trigger more pain.

Numbing the pain with painkiller so you won’t have to feel it would help you regain some of the mobility you had before the injury, but it won’t heal the gash and eventually, the painkiller will wear off and the pain will return.

You’d be extra careful as to how you moved until the gash healed and the pain was gone.

However, what if the wound never healed?

If the wound never healed, you’d sooner or later learn to live with the pain and it will eventually become a “normal” part of you. With the pain being a part of you, everything you do that is associated with the pain will be a part of you as well – the way you walk, move, sit, etc.

In addition, your “wounded behaviour” will become a habit and you’ll behave that way on an unconscious level.

So now, not only is your movement and your way of being in reaction to the continuous pain you feel, it’s wired into your brain such that you may not be aware any longer as to how you’re behaving, and that will not change until you’re able to heal the wound which will eliminate the associated pain.

Well folks this is how emotional pain works as well.

Just about everyone who’s alive on this planet has some sort of emotional pain. Somewhere along the line, someone said or did something to us, or something happened to us that caused us to feel sad, angry, disappointed, rejected, guilty, etc, etc. Because we didn’t know how to deal with the emotion properly by giving it a proper outlet, it remained trapped in our bodies where they cause ongoing pain.

We may not even remember the offending incident that caused the emotional pain, and we may not even be aware that there is any pain, but whether we’re aware of it or not, it is there and it effects our behaviour in many instances on a unconscious level.

Because we unconsciously feel pain, we gravitate towards ways to numb the pain by self-medicating through drug abuse, alcoholism, workaholicism, violence towards others, victimhood, martyr complex, jumping from relationship to relationship, thrill seeking, over thinking, over indulgence in sex, and anything else that helps us escape the pain.

These are all ways that wounds express themselves to get your attention so you can address them and give them a proper outlet, which will subsequently allow you to heal in the process. This proper outlet may be allowing yourself to cry, scream, yell, hit something, forgive, laugh, etc. The key is to let the emotion out in a healthy manner.

In the middle of this past May, I decided that it was time that I undergo therapy. For years I’ve always been that guy who prided himself on being extremely self-aware. I made it a point to be aware of how my ego behaved and thought so I can avoid any dysfunctional, antisocial or sociopathic behaviour and not live like the many zombies out there who are totally clueless as to how they treat themselves and others. I even engaged in journaling for over ten years to take note of any new insights and revelations I got about myself and my tendencies. As such, I didn’t think I needed any therapy because I felt that since I was already so self aware, I didn’t need anyone’s help to overcome my issues.

This all changed last year, in 2013, when through the difficult times I had gone through, I started to become more in touch with my emotions and how they affected the way I behaved and thought. I started to see on a whole other scale how my habitual behaviour and thinking was being unconsciously triggered by a whole ocean of emotions I was previously unaware of. I noticed how at one moment, I’d be calm, centered and grounded but if one of these emotions were triggered by an event, a thought, or something from the environment, I’d go into a tailspin where I so felt strongly compelled to think and act in ways I normally wouldn’t choose that I felt helpless to do anything about it.

I realized that these emotions were from wounds inflicted from my childhood that never got to heal. As a result of these wounds, among many other things, I would sabotage relationships with women, I put a wall of protection around myself, and I began to suspect that they may have been the reason why I always seemed to have problems making money.

I knew that becoming aware as to how and when these emotions were triggered so I didn’t fall prey to them was one thing, I had been already working on that, but actually learning how to release these trapped emotions so my wounds can heal was a whole other thing that I realized was absolutely necessary if I wanted to be whole and happy. I had absolutely no idea how to do this and decided it was time that I undergo therapy to show me how. I also knew that traditional therapy wouldn’t be enough, because it just involved talking and wasn’t adequate enough to help me release the emotions trapped in my body.

The Viable Alternative was Body Oriented Therapy, a process that integrates breathwork, bodywork, core emotional release, and verbal dialogue to move through old patterns and enhance the sense of self and feeling of aliveness in the present. To date, after going for almost four months, my body has begun to feel more relaxed and lighter, I’m more consistently inspired about my life, I feel I’ve found my purpose in life, and I feel more grounded. I also know that this is ONLY the beginning, that there’s much more to come and discover of myself.

All this from finally allowing myself to undergo the process of healing from my emotional wounds.

It’s funny, I have a friend who was involved with this woman for about a year and a half. We both knew her for years before they started dating, and when they both got together she discussed with me the dysfunctional relationships that she had been in up until then, including at least one that had been physically abusive, and how she decided to take a year or two off of dating so as to work on herself and break the cycle. I thought that was pretty cool and said to myself, “Great, someone who gets it.”

However, as the two of them progressed in their relationship, the stories I heard from my friend about her pointed to the extremely low self-esteem and low self-wroth that had caused her to get into her past relationships was STILL there and causing her to sabotage their current relationship. It then dawned on me that spending time away from dating or any other thing to avoid drama won’t make a damn difference in the world if you’re not healing from the wounds that caused you to be attracted to these situations in the first place (and the wounds subsequently caused by the situations you got into). If you don’t heal, which will most likely involve you getting some therapy to help you with the process, your wounds will continue to make choices for you as to who and what you attract and how you behave that WILL ULTIMATELY NOT SERVE YOUR BEST INTERESTS.

I know a woman who was sexually abused repeatedly as a child. The pain was so great that it lead her to alcoholism as an adult to numb her pain. It also led her to get into relationships with broken men where there wasn’t too much intimacy. She first decided to get help for her alcoholism through Alcoholics Anonymous, but as she kept on relapsing into alcohol abuse, her counselor wisely realized that there were deeper issues going on than alcoholism and got her to see a therapist that deals with trauma. As her and the therapist started to address the trauma she had from sexual abuse and she began the process of healing, she felt less and less of an urge to hit the bottle. By treating the wound, the “symptoms” began to dissipate.

If one of your parents weren’t around when growing up, or you’ve been in an abusive relationship, sexually abused, a product of divorce, teased as a child, on the receiving end of emotional abuse from one or both or your parents, and a myriad of other traumas that we go through as a result of living on this Earth that have affected you in one way or another, you’re wounded, and the wounds are running your life through your thoughts, choices and actions in ways you can’t even imagine. You’re not aware of it because it’s been a part of you for so long that you don’t even notice.

By healing, you get to start living proactively rather than in reaction because you’re now coming from a place of love rather than a place of fear, hate, anger or hurt that is derived from the pain. You’ll also be able to re-connect to those “lost” parts of you that were previously hidden by all the emotional wounds you were holding in your body, and thus be enabled to express the uniquely remarkable being your really are.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps.

Ike Love