What are we willing to become aware of . . .

“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” - Carl Jung

Most of us learned at a young age to avoid internal discomfort (sadness, loneliness, unworthiness, etc.) because we grew up in a family that wouldn’t allow us to express such discomfort. And so we constricted and shifted our awareness in ways that made sure we couldn’t see the extent of our emotional pain.

Our internal protector parts learned to limit our awareness so we won’t feel the emotional pain inside. Today, this shows up as us keeping busy, intellectualizing, distracting ourselves, focusing on everything but what is happening inside of us. 

Our protector parts achieve their goal of keeping us safe by contracting our awareness: we lose the ability to experience our sadness, grief, loss, loneliness, inadequacy, and so on. To these internal protector parts it’s a win, but to the rest of our inner system it’s a loss. 

Our parts carrying painful feelings and memories are locked away out of sight, and all of our other parts are vastly limited in what they’re allowed to do and be. Our world becomes small because our inner system requires it. Acting/moving/being outside the restricted boundaries set up by the protector parts will cause their master plan to come crashing down. 

At some point we realize the bargain we’ve made: we lost our ability to feel the pain but we’ve also lost our ability to experience real joy, deep connection, a sense of inner peace, flow, and meaning. 

So we look for the silver bullet—that thing that will help us experience all the joy, connection, peace, etc. without ever touching the pain and sadness. Some things work for a little while, other things don’t work at all. But none of them do the trick . . . because there is no silver bullet.

We can only get out the way we came in. As we learned how to constrict our awareness as kids, adolescents, and young adults, we can learn how to slow down, widen our awareness, and get curious about this entire range of experience we’ve shut off for so long.

It’s not easy (this is why we need guides/coaches/therapists), but it gets easier. As our inner system learns to be with discomfort again, it also learns how to reconnect with the raw, stunning beauty of this one, precious life. A virtuous cycle grows where the more emotional discomfort you open up to, the more all of life opens up to you.