Almost 10 years ago to the day, I was thinking about the stature of David. More precisely, Michelangelo Buonarroti’s answer to a question of how he sculpted David. “I didn’t, he was already there. I just chipped away everything that wasn’t David,” the artist famously said. The imagery of chipping away the parts that didn’t represent the self was a central theme to the book UnFuck Yourself, a book that started the journey for me. The quote from Michelangelo put words to a feeling I had about myself and my life. There was a part of me buried under all the noise. Could I chip away and free that part?
What followed was a frenetic pursuit of learning and self understanding over years. Too many twists and turns to describe a clear path. I’d come from a childhood of neglect and abuse and bore the weight through a version of complex trauma, I came to learn over the years. So much analysis of my situation, therapy sessions and an endless array of self help audiobooks took place. Through fits and starts, I healed greatly but arrived at a plateau.
There was a moment in time when I had enough inner distance from my emotions and thoughts to finally see the pattern. From the shadows emerged the truth that all my healing to that point allowed me to see it only from the perspective of being the victim. It had taken me quite far from where I started, but now my victimhood was becoming a shield from accountability.
My day job is almost entirely built around locating the root cause of problems. Like a weed in the yard, most problems keep coming back if only dealt with on the surface. To remove the weed means pulling out the root. Problems are similar. If a fuse blows on a machine over and over, only to be replaced with a new fuse, that fuse will keep needing replacement. Better to figure out why it fails and fix that. That’s the nature of problem solving.
Knowing my professional abilities made sense here, I began to use the improvement tools from work on myself. What I didn’t immediately recognize is that this was the first step toward challenging the self. The ego. It meant pointing the finger at my own behavior and recognizing that I was deeply responsible for the prison I’d built for myself with fear, self loathing and shame.
I’d love to think that I did this through inner strength, but it was simply the next point in my spiritual development. At the time, I had gone from casual Catholic to deeply connected Child of God. That transformation demands surrender. Being a victim, I could not align with the actual mechanics of surrender to God. I needed to make the decision to avoid the inertia of my past hurts and instead follow the path toward self understanding, forgiveness and healing. I needed to see and understand how I was keeping myself locked in my own emotional prison, able to blame everyone else for my needs not being met. I needed to stop finding blame in others.
My wife an I celebrated 35 years of marriage this past July. A few years back, we’d separated and things seemed hopeless. We each couldn’t meet the other’s needs and that felt like it took so much energy from both of us. We both were hurt, tired of the friction, and trying desperately to meet the other’s needs. The shift to looking at patterns led me to recognize that I wasn’t being the husband and friend she could feel free to be vulnerable around. My inner world was tumultuous and she’d sometimes walk into it innocently only to have some small issue blow up. The reverse would happen too, of course. We were two people whose inner selves were so afraid of one another. I began a process of confronting my own ego, something I attend to consistently to this day.
“I choose you. In a hundred different ways everyday. I made the choice to stay. I could hit the open road and run my life away, but I choose you, everyday” is the lyric from a Steeldrivers song. That song, played as my wife and I laid in a hammock overlooking the Gulf. For me, the song I Choose You put to music the inner difference I felt from confronting my own behavior in our marriage. What I really needed for myself, and found at that moment, was the self love and self confidence to express our marriage as a willing choice I make. That my inner life is rich and alive, but it’s much better with my best friend and love of my life in it. My wife witnessed a side of me that had been missing for decades. She told me so.
That moment could not have occurred if I kept allowing my feelings to go unchallenged. Everyone is different, and my wife and I are no exception. We live our lives at different frequencies. The act of understanding myself and changing those behaviors that kept me in unstable patterns gave me a gift I couldn’t see without the work. We still disagree, but now with more humor or understanding. The raw issues that each of us carried, we worked to soften those edges. My understanding of love, skewed from childhood, has evolved deeply. Beyond what I ever could have imagined 10 years ago.
I tell this story because I see so many others stuck in patterns despite a breathtaking amount of self healing work. I go back to surrender. That word has deep connotations from so many trauma survivors. But it’s necessary to surrender the safety of victimhood to move forward from the cycle. The others in your life may need this too, but spouses heal together at this level. You cannot bring them to take on the ego, but watching the results of someone making amends for behavior and seeing changes, tends to improve the resilience of the relationship. I cannot tell you how to do any of this, I can just tell you how to start. Accept that challenging yourself is the next step. Once you understand the extent of how you have been a victim of they system, someone else, whatever do not stop. Ask what you did to create or support the situation or pattern you don’t like. Pull the thread. Be truthful with yourself. Do the work to love yourself and hold yourself accountable for how you interact with the world. It might just change everything for you, too.
-30-