Are you willing to Know?
Look, I’m not going to sugarcoat this for you. You are wounded and healing and those are facts. You either know it or you don’t.
Everyone is wounded…have you looked at the history of humanity? Name me one single bloodline where violence, oppression, and abuse do not appear. We are wounded beings, I don’t really know why. There is prophecy that we sought the tree of knowledge, we just simply had to know the wholeness of our humanity, which sparked the shock and horror of our nakedness. I’m not the one to ask but it’s true we are all wounded.
We are all healing. Believe it or not, things get better, gradually over time. Take a look again at that bloodline. Sure there are exceptions. Early deaths or tragic endings, but there are also lots of beings who just simmered down throughout life and somehow, became softer and wiser for it. Healing is what happens. I don’t know why but it does. Just notice how the next paper cut heals just fine, assuming you give your body the conditions for healing to happen. Cleaning the site, avoiding re-injury, and going about your healthy diet will automate healing. Healing happens.
But how much healing, how well it heals, how much the scaring impacts your day to day functioning, all of this is about your willingness to know that you are wounded and healing in the first place.
As we heal, we unfold in a spiral of sorts from the pain point. This is very obvious when you take a look at the pattern of re-enactment. Re-enactment is when you experience a situation that somehow—it’s uncanny—resembles the original wounding experience…in some way, shape or form. A re-enactment can be known or unknown. It depends on your level of self-awareness, and if you are tellable.
Once, my husband and I (together 22 years) were caught in a confusing conflict. Confusion is a sign that you are up for a re-enactment, for the presence of mind does not recognize this experience as relevant to the NOW. As we danced the re-enactment, I had a sudden realization. It was something about the way I was behaving, and the way he was behaving, and who was watching, that I caught on to what was not our argument at all, but the argument of my own parents, taking place in my own childhood. Right as my hand was on the gate, about to depart in a huff of anger, I caught it and I said out loud…”this is a re-enactment!” My husband, to his credit, the man listens to me, he said, “what…?” Right there in that pause I knew he was tellable and I said it again, “this is a reenactment of my parents relationship right now, exactly like this.” And he said, “well, let’s no do that,” and the entire conflict ended on a dime. That is the power of being willing to KNOW, and being able to be told.
I know a lot about re-enactment because my entire being is a large saturated drop of my father’s. I take after both of them but it’s my father’s wild mood swings, unpredictable and intense expressiveness, pointy cheek bones, and cravings for relief substances that runs through me like a pattern. It craves its re-expression through me, though it has little to do with me at all. I’m simply a lot like my dad. I didn’t ask for that but the baton was passed to me to work with this wounding pattern and it’s ongoing transmutation. Ironically, my unrelenting need to know, to understand, to explore the patterns, is often misidentified as the bad habit of holding on, instead of what is truly everyone’s responsibility…cleaning up our patterns, honing in on the re-enactments we create, and breaking the cycle by naming what is happening and choosing a different reaction—this is the assignment for each of us. And it all ends in a letting go.
Sadly, we don’t all want to know it. In my work with clients, we use this litmus test before we share what we see with the people in our lives….are they tellable? A tellable person is ready to listen. They are willing to take accountability. And they are ready to know how they are wounding and healing. They seek feedback and are eager to get the information they need to continue the work on themselves.
This is not most people. Many people are not tellable. They aren’t ready to listen because they think they already understand. They are defensive and scared to admit they could be a little bit bad. It can be easy to judge the ‘untellables’ and to harbor resentment but it is very important to realize two things.
First, they are not tellable because they are scared. They are probably deeply impaled by the original wound (the notion that we are all born bad and need a perfect being outside of ourselves to love us in spite of ourselves). And they don’t know it! They don’t know it because they are scared to look within and see themselves. This lack of looking does turn out to be a problem as they can’t take personal responsibility for what doesn’t exist in their vision. But untellable people don’t know any of this. They really don’t know what they don’t know.
The other important realization here is to understand that how a person becomes tellable is a contract they make within themselves. When they suffer enough carrying on with this ‘knowledge’ of who they think they are, they will finally shudder and collapse into ignorance, for which they will be humbly granted access to the mysterious center within, where they may just find themselves willing to ask, and to seek. It’s a vulnerable thing, to be told. For you have to accept your ignorance and your position of equality, something the ego is resistant to do.
There’s one mantra that I use that gives me the keys to freedom whenever I find myself wondering if someone who is untellable will ever be tellable and that is this, “they will or they won’t.” If I can accept that, I’m free right next to them.
Will they ever do their own work? They will or they won’t.
Will they ever be willing to listen? They will or they won’t.
Will they ever feel regret or remorse for the pain they inflicted? They will or they won’t.
To truly be free we can’t hold other people’s pain for them. We can’t hold anything. We have to give others permission to be untellable and seek to find our own work. We aren’t in charge of anyone else’s journey inward. It’s not about us. You don’t need anyone to get it, get there, take the path, or work their way. Thinking that you do is highlighting an area of attachment that can be released by loving them a little harder.
But you, you are tellable. I know because you are still here and the concept of accountability and personal responsibility are in your toolkit today. Bless you for that. Now let’s take a look here at your work. You are wounded. By now you have a sense of the primary wounds you’re dealing with. You may know them as the Mother Wound or The Original Wound, or the Witch Wound. But you are on to it. You get that you have incurred some destructive programs to your consciousness mother board. And you are rooting these wounds to the light of day where they air out and heal to the wind.
You know when you slip into wounding, that another version of you, one that is skillful in adaptation and in closing the heart, is running the show of your life. It is in these moments when you are both your most untellable and your most easily shaken open. The work is difficult here for you have not yet developed the capacity to interrupt this pattern because you are just getting your first real look at it from the tellable point of view. This process feels defeating for some people who wonder, ‘I get it, so why do I keep doing it?’
Well, you don’t really get it. When you see all of it, the entire wound in its fullest expression, then you’ll get it in an instant and it’ll become changed instantly by this seeing. Its transformation blows through you like a cool breeze and you’re changed.
Early in my midlife crisis, I was watching a circus of parts from my inner world, parts I’d tracked and traced for some time, surface in a way that I couldn’t get my head around. It’s like I had been pulling on a thread and gently tracing back to the place where it spools when all of a sudden an invisible knot broke through and the whole blanket covered my awareness and took out all of the light. This emergence is how wounds heal, the fresh skin builds from behind and within, pushing the debris and the puss to the surface for drying. But damn. I did not expect it to go like that. Slow slow slow, a damn breaks, and a flood expressed. Midlife crisis activated.
Not everyone experiences this to the same degree but when you do you and your a therapist, you might start recalling a term you heard long ago, Spiritual Emergency. You see, even though the damn had broke, and a wildly expressed (innocent and irresponsible) inner child was running free, something else was online in a big way. The counter vortex. In Somatic Experiencing- the counter vortex is something that refers to the very vortex that is developed counter to the trauma vortex, a circulating mirror image of the painful process—in the form of its resiliency. Being traumatized is not a blessing, it’s an experience and you are a human who learns from every single thing you experience. This accumulated knowledge is the counter vortex. And for me, the results of this unleashing counter vortex of energy verified for me exactly what was happening. Yes I was wounded, yes (even) this is how it heals. Because of the magnitude of energy and the expression it took in my mind body, a spiritual emergency was a fitting description.
This is why healing gets a bad rap, because it is really challenging. And kind of scary. And it is sometimes true that it gets worse before better. Ultimately, when we are healing, we are letting go of things we believed were important about us. We are letting go of strongly held beliefs. When you no longer believe what you thought you believed, you feel like you are insane. But when you used to believe you were innately unworthy, inherently too difficult, or deeply broken, well, it’s worth going insane. At some points in the journey inward, the terrain is so steep you just have to fall deep into the underbelly where the light does not go. Just so you know, there’s magic down there, but you have to be willing to know.
In the magical, mystical, mysterious, ephemeral puddle of you, a meeting of sorts happens. Who you are is revealed—in great relief— you remember what you had merely forgotten. This remembering is what is known as an awakening, a true inner reckoning of the duality of nature and the oneness of everything. That is all that happens here. A fleeting moment of raw realization. Somehow, it cleanses everything.
When you (eventually) find your ‘self’ back at the surface, upgraded with new insights and important recognition, it is likely you too will find yourself in amazement at how the same trigger that would before have sent you reeling without a life raft, now is a little like a tease from the Universe who winks at you with pride for the work you’ve done to love it out of you. No longer triggered, just reminded to remember, that is what it’s like to heal the wound completely. Until then, you are wounded and healing. The only question is…are you willing to know it?