Important Questions for Growth/Healing

I've recently learned that trying too hard is worse than not trying at all.  When I try too hard, I fail, bruising an already battered self-esteem, sometimes losing ground.  It is sort of like pulling a muscle.  You have to heal before you can train again.  Conversely, when I don't try at all, no progress is made.  The tricky part is figuring out the right pace between not-doing and overdoing.  An important key to the right pace is honesty.  We need to question ourselves to make sure we are starting from a place of truth so we can make progress.  There are two sides to that: lies and truths.  Sometimes the lie is simply a denial of a truth, but sometimes it is much more.  If you have PTSD, it usually is much more.

We spin our wheels because we don't admit we are in a muddy hole.  We keep spinning our wheels because of the lie.  The truth is that because we are in a muddy hole, we're going to have to do more than just press on the gas pedal to get out.

I've found two questions that are helping me towards healthier, organic, non-forced growth and healing.  They are:

1. What lies am I telling myself?
2. What truths am I not seeing?

The Lies:  I wrote about the first question back in September, when a daily reading from Mark Nepo's Book of Awakening suggested that we look at the lies we tell ourselves.  The big ones of these are things like "Everything is fine" when everything ISN'T fine or "Everyone is against me, so I must constantly defend myself" when that is just PTSD trying to protect from a situation long past.  Sometimes the lies are simple denial of a truth, like the first one.  Sometimes they are more complex things, like the second one, triggered by PTSD.  The lies can either be denial of a truth or making up a story we like better than an unlovely part of ourselves.

The Truths: The truths are things like less-than-noble motivations for doing things, fears, or situations we can't deal with.  Recently, I found myself carping about a friend.  While some of what I was saying had validity, it was also sort of petty.  When I asked myself why I was doing that, I realized that it was because I'm jealous of the position she holds, a position that used to be mine.  The truth was I had PTSD-triggered reactions to a situation I didn't even know was there.  That lead to a very fruitful examination of my relationship with this person and helped me to be kinder.  If I had started with "what is the lie?", I would have gotten nowhere because there WAS some truth to what I was saying but it wasn't the REASON I was saying it.  So the truths are often about motivation, an important thing for PTSD'ers to monitor.


By approaching the problem from BOTH sides, we can make more progress.   I don't know if this will make any sense to anyone else, but it sure is helping me.