2. What the f*ck is healing? : stressLess-life
What the f*ck is healing?
What the f*ck is healing?
Somehow this word “healing” has entered the mouth of every self-help tik toker, Hinge profile, and social circle where curious minds meet to understand themselves. Our little rectangles are filled with talking heads blabbering on with phrases like: “Until I did the healing” or “We have to heal within to be whole”. Needless to say no one ever pulled us aside and told us where we find this “Healing” or what the fuck it is exactly?
Is healing an actual place one gets to in one's lifetime? Healedville USA? Is it between Cleveland and Columbus? Off in the American midwest where the rural hobbits reside - they already have horses and buggies there, just need a wizard and an epic sound track.
Unfortunately, no healing is not somewhere you go; and it is also not an accomplishment you check off like a college degree. There is no use in linear thinking when it comes to the world of healing - sorry type A people. Maybe I am being a tad dramatic, but what is important to understand is this: healing is a way of life.
Healing is an active state, a vacillating way of being. More specifically for our purposes today, healing is the process of consciously cutting off the branch that has been holding you up for years, knowing full well you're about to land on the branch below. And yes, that probably means crushing your nuts. Put that image in your head and keep it there. It will make sense later.
Enter The Trauma Tree.
At this point you may be asking yourself, “What the fuck is with the branch metaphor?”
Let me explain, at some point in our lives, we ran up this tree to get away from something. Something that hurt, something that overwhelmed us, something that made us feel alone.
Whatever it was, we needed distance from it, and the Trauma Tree offered us exactly that. So we climbed, safe up in the Trauma Tree sitting on our branch, swinging our legs as the danger below is presently gone. For the first time in a while we feel safe.
The problem is that while we are sitting safely in the Trauma Tree, life keeps moving below us. People fall in love, people laugh, people carry groceries, people make mistakes. Life continues without us, and eventually something begins to ache inside.
We miss the messy business of living. We miss food shared with friends, we miss adventure, we miss intimacy. We miss the feeling of being fully alive.
But we can't go back down, and we know it. The thing that terrified us enough to climb up the tree is still somewhere below us, so we stay.
Life in the Trauma Tree
Because we can't live on the ground, we learn to live in the sky. We live in our heads, feelings, ideas, theories, memories—these become our entertainment, our purpose, and eventually our identity.
We disappear down rabbit holes of thought because anything is better than sitting alone on a branch wondering why life seems to be happening somewhere else.
We know we're in the Trauma Tree, so naturally we try to understand how we got here. After all, the content we see on the rectangle tells us that we need to look in the mirror to heal. Maybe this is what we’re supposed to do? We analyze, dissect, and connect dots. We piece together a story of our lives and convince ourselves that if we can just understand the story well enough, maybe then we'll finally be okay.
For a while this works, or at least it feels like it works as understanding does bring relief and is necessary in the world of healing. We comb through our past looking for moments of pain, insecurity, rejection, abandonment. We read books about how our childhood fucked us up. We learn attachment styles, identify triggers, uncover wounds - and every discovery feels important. The more we learn, the more we feel. The more we feel, the more convinced we become that we are healing. After all, something this intense must be the meaningful thing that is going to make us feel okay. Right? …….Right?
Eventually a question begins to haunt us: If all this understanding is healing, then why are we still miserable? We know our wounds, we know where they came from, and can explain that trauma in exquisite detail. So why do we still feel stuck? Why are we not happy?
Enter the Intellectual Trauma Tree
The cruel joke psychoanalysis plays is that many of us climb out of one Trauma Tree and straight into another. Only this time the branches are made of insight, therapy, and diagnosis. We become experts on ourselves, painfully self-aware and self-absorbed in our traumatic analysis. We can explain every defense mechanism, every attachment wound, every dysfunctional pattern. We can spend hours discussing our inner child, our shadow, our trauma responses. And yet we remain exactly where we are, still in the tree, still miserable.
Firmly seated on our branch, we have analyzed ourselves into paralysis. We are no longer detached only from the world below; we have become detached from ourselves. Everything becomes an object of observation. Every emotion becomes a case study. Every relationship becomes data.
Meanwhile life keeps happening below, people are falling in love, people are dancing badly, people are making mistakes, people are getting rejected, embarrassed, heartbroken, and imperfectly alive. And we're still up here writing footnotes about our suffering.
A thought creeps into the deep recesses of our brain. It pops up and we can’t help but hear it echo around the meat between our ears: “Is so much of what is called healing just mental masturbation?”.
We can’t unhear this and just like real masturbation, it feels productive without producing much actual fulfillment or lasting sense of happiness. If anything it starts to make us feel worse, it’s a substitute like Diet Coke, fake butt cheeks, like watching travel videos instead of buying a plane ticket.
We see now the tree did save us, the psychoanalysis did teach us, but staying here is now killing us. The strategy that once protected and informed us has outlived the circumstances that created it. In our pain we have mistaken understanding life as living life.
All medicine is poison, the thing that kills you is the dose.
Enter the first attempt to get down from the Trauma Tree
At this point you might be thinking: "Okay, I get it. The Trauma Tree sucks. Why don't I just climb down?"
Fair question, we look below us, the ground is there somewhere we think. The problem is that we've lived up here so long that many of the lower branches have died away. The easy path back doesn't exist anymore. We can't simply reverse the journey and the consequences of time. There is no staircase, no elevator, no therapeutic zipline waiting to carry us gently back into life and to the taste of real coke, butts made by barbells, and a vacation with the people we love. Only branches, and the large gaps between them.
This is where many people become trapped, as they don’t believe there is a way out. In a final despair we believe maybe this is where I am supposed to be in life? In this melancholy they wrap themselves further in childhood wounds, triggers, diagnoses, and endless self-examination.
They believe they are martyrs of self-awareness, poets of their own pain, as the suffering has been stitched into the very fascia of their being. Tragic. Complex. Deep. The wet blanket of the Intellectual Trauma Tree is our only escape.
Enter what the Trauma Tree actually is
Sitting defeated in the Trauma Tree, we lost something. We can’t quite figure out what it is we are missing, but something is gone from our chests and to get out of the Trauma Tree we need to find it again. We’ve tried to do it ourselves for years now, and are tired of combing over the same wounds. We ask God, The Universe, or Kanye West to show us what we lost - we admit we can’t do this anymore. We are ready to listen.
As our prayer sinks into the muted forest, an answer returns to us.
The Trauma Tree was never the problem, fear was. The tree is simply the architecture fear built. We climbed it because life hurt, we stayed because life was uncertain, we decorated it because leaving became terrifying to face.
Simply put, we have lost our courage to live. Our goal in life was to not get hurt, and to realize that goal we ran to the Trauma Tree and the subsequent Intellectual Trauma Tree. We didn’t live life, we feared life. Yes it is that simple, in the words of psychoanalyst Ichiro Kishimi, “The World is simple, and life is too”.
Enter having the courage to heal
This is where most conversations about healing go sideways. People think healing means becoming confident, fearless, perfectly self-loving human beings - it doesn't. There is no mystical turtle at the bottom of the ocean holding ancient scrolls of how to heal and finally awaken your 3rd eye.
To start our way down the Trauma Tree we first must find the courage to accept ourselves as wholly incomplete, fractured, likely to fuck something up humans; and not busy ourselves with positive affirmations to cover up our blemishes.
If you are an anxious person, and to fix this you say “I am brave”, tell me how you feel five minutes later. You’re probably still fucking anxious, because you are trying to hide from the uncomfortable truth that you struggle with anxiety. You don’t like that about yourself, and that's okay. Similarly, who suffers more: the guy who admits he’s gay or the guy who prays the gay away? You do the math.
Healing requires the courage to have delusional levels of self-acceptance, because this courage is what allows us to leave the Trauma Tree. We have hidden from ourselves and the fears we carry for so long, that we have forgotten how to be the clever little monkeys we are.
Healing begins when we stop trying to become a better person and find the courage to be an imperfect one.
Enter cutting the first branch
There is an ancient story that priests are told to say prayers with the Bible on their heart, so when their heart breaks, the words will fall in. I don’t know the last time you were heart broken or had a death in the family, but if you don’t understand that please look into an anti-psycotic medicine.
Likewise the phoenix has to burn itself alive in order to be reborn - what do these stories mean? Death actually means life. To regain the courage to accept ourselves, climb down the Trauma Tree, we must also endure a similar pain as the Phoenix and the Priest. However in this version of torture, we must crush our nuts. Yes, your nuts need to be punished, or at least “healed” and sometimes the difference is blurry.
The branch you're sitting on in the Trauma Tree feels safe, and that's why you have to cut it. The healing begins when you finally put the saw against the very thing that has protected you for years. With every stroke, you get closer to losing the identity that kept you safe. Closer to uncertainty. Closer to embarrassment. Closer to rejection. Fuck I hear the branch cracking. Closer to life.
SNAP!
Newton gets proven right once again. Your nuts get crushed. Congratulations. Healing has begun.
Enter touching grass again
Writhing in ear ringing nauseating pain we look around, wiping the tears from our eyes we notice we can actually see the forest floor again. Does it all make sense now? Because crushing your nuts was never the point, the point was getting lower in the tree and closer to life.
For one person crushing their nuts might mean apologizing with all one's heart. For another it might mean leaving a relationship. For another it might mean finding what's left of their nuts and asking someone out. Speaking honestly. Risking failure. Admitting they were wrong. The tasks of life we were avoiding in fear.
Every branch you cut costs you something, usually your ego. Good, that's the price of admission.
However, each branch we cut off brings us closer to the present. The pain eventually subsides, and we see the momentum we are gaining. A brevity washes over us, love songs move us again, and the sides of our weathered cheeks crack a smile for no reason.
Eventually your feet touch the ground, not because you've solved yourself. Not because you've finally understood every wound. Not because you've completed Healing™ and received a certificate. Your feet touch the ground because you got tired of studying life and decided to participate in it again.
You fall in love.
You embarrass yourself.
You get rejected.
You dance badly.
You apologize.
You fail.
You forgive.
You grieve.
You live.
And one day life will scare the hell out of you again. You will find yourself halfway up another Trauma Tree and that's okay, remember we decided to accept we are imperfect long ago. But this time you'll know something you didn't know before.
The way down.
submitted by /u/Strange_Ad_58
[link] [comments]
Related links
I want to know the mind and emotions of a man towa. I want to understand what he is thinking and feeling at any given time. I want to know what makes him happy and what makes him sad. I want to know what he fears and what motivates him. I want to know his hopes and dreams. I want to know everything about him.
Addiction Is Messy, But These Things Help Me Stay Clean
5 Ways to Use Movement (Not Exercise) to Support Your Mental Health
My Second Mother: When Someone Steps Up Like Family Never Did
just sitting silently
How to Release the Fear That Holds You Back and Keeps You Small
What Happiness Means and How I’m Boosting My Day-to-Day Joy
why am i always in one-sided relationships
Psychological behaviour of husband with his wife who failed in love before marriage
What makes you dislike yourself?
When You’re Ready for Change: You Need to Believe in Your Future Self
4 Anxiety-Calming Techniques I Wish I Used When I Freaked Out on a Plane
What type of doctors experience the most stress?
Why is it significant to overcome stress?
How I Stopped Chasing Men Who Hurt Me and Found Healthy Love : #stressless
Stay Comfortable
I have irrational thoughts that she’s better than me
Skills That You Can Learn From (A2) Trying Harder Isn\\\'t Always The Answer:stressLess-life.
How do we know what we want in our lives?
5 Simple Yet Essential Self Care Tips That Can Change Your Life
#2 . How do I stop putting my worth based on how men see me? : stressLess-life
Self love challenge - looking for a group to join!
People-Pleasers Are Liars: 3 Things We Gain When We’re Honest Instead
How to Deal With Low Moods: A 4-Step Plan to Help You Feel Better
One words to define love story Hater
does depression affect sperm quality
What is the difference between stress and emotions? The WHO has defined them as two different life skills and I am not able to make a difference.
What are some signs that show a lack of confidence in a person's speech or behavior?
Is it good to live hubby without love or marry to BF?
growing up as the only black member of a white family movie
separation anxiety mother symptoms
why self-love and self-care is important
I am very sad every day. I have decided not to live. What should I do?
why am i losing interest in things i used to love
never waste your feelings on someone who doesn't value your emotions meaning in hindi
I am very sad every day. I have decided not to live. What should I do?
Why is it significant to overcome stress?
Can-I-reduce-my-stress?
https://stressless-2021.blogspot.com/2022/06/reduce-my-stress.html
Getting Out Of A Slump
Me Exercising/dancing to Unbelievable by EMF. Not too great, but started doing this at 57 yrs......truly my inner child is coming out to play!:stressLess-life
Abandonment Issues
Increasing and practicing self worth and self love:stressLess-life
(A2) LIFE AND LOVE???:stressLess-life
Neon Genesis Evangelion and validating ones own existence:stressLess-life
Calmed myself down with loving energy.:stressLess-life
"Why do you forgive everyone but yourself?”:stressLess-life
How to accept belly fat?:stressLess-life
admiring myself all 2022 ??:stressLess-life
Self love feels so lonely:stressLess-life
Increasing and practicing self worth and self love:stressLess-life
(A2) LIFE AND LOVE???:stressLess-life
Neon Genesis Evangelion and validating ones own existence:stressLess-life
Calmed myself down with loving energy.:stressLess-life
"Why do you forgive everyone but yourself?”:stressLess-life
How to accept belly fat?:stressLess-life
admiring myself all 2022 ??:stressLess-life
Self love feels so lonely:stressLess-life
😄
" Forget the past; look forward to the future, for the best things are yet to come. ..... "
What the f*ck is healing?
Somehow this word “healing” has entered the mouth of every self-help tik toker, Hinge profile, and social circle where curious minds meet to understand themselves. Our little rectangles are filled with talking heads blabbering on with phrases like: “Until I did the healing” or “We have to heal within to be whole”. Needless to say no one ever pulled us aside and told us where we find this “Healing” or what the fuck it is exactly?
Is healing an actual place one gets to in one's lifetime? Healedville USA? Is it between Cleveland and Columbus? Off in the American midwest where the rural hobbits reside - they already have horses and buggies there, just need a wizard and an epic sound track.
Unfortunately, no healing is not somewhere you go; and it is also not an accomplishment you check off like a college degree. There is no use in linear thinking when it comes to the world of healing - sorry type A people. Maybe I am being a tad dramatic, but what is important to understand is this: healing is a way of life.
Healing is an active state, a vacillating way of being. More specifically for our purposes today, healing is the process of consciously cutting off the branch that has been holding you up for years, knowing full well you're about to land on the branch below. And yes, that probably means crushing your nuts. Put that image in your head and keep it there. It will make sense later.
Enter The Trauma Tree.
At this point you may be asking yourself, “What the fuck is with the branch metaphor?”
Let me explain, at some point in our lives, we ran up this tree to get away from something. Something that hurt, something that overwhelmed us, something that made us feel alone.
Whatever it was, we needed distance from it, and the Trauma Tree offered us exactly that. So we climbed, safe up in the Trauma Tree sitting on our branch, swinging our legs as the danger below is presently gone. For the first time in a while we feel safe.
The problem is that while we are sitting safely in the Trauma Tree, life keeps moving below us. People fall in love, people laugh, people carry groceries, people make mistakes. Life continues without us, and eventually something begins to ache inside.
We miss the messy business of living. We miss food shared with friends, we miss adventure, we miss intimacy. We miss the feeling of being fully alive.
But we can't go back down, and we know it. The thing that terrified us enough to climb up the tree is still somewhere below us, so we stay.
Life in the Trauma Tree
Because we can't live on the ground, we learn to live in the sky. We live in our heads, feelings, ideas, theories, memories—these become our entertainment, our purpose, and eventually our identity.
We disappear down rabbit holes of thought because anything is better than sitting alone on a branch wondering why life seems to be happening somewhere else.
We know we're in the Trauma Tree, so naturally we try to understand how we got here. After all, the content we see on the rectangle tells us that we need to look in the mirror to heal. Maybe this is what we’re supposed to do? We analyze, dissect, and connect dots. We piece together a story of our lives and convince ourselves that if we can just understand the story well enough, maybe then we'll finally be okay.
For a while this works, or at least it feels like it works as understanding does bring relief and is necessary in the world of healing. We comb through our past looking for moments of pain, insecurity, rejection, abandonment. We read books about how our childhood fucked us up. We learn attachment styles, identify triggers, uncover wounds - and every discovery feels important. The more we learn, the more we feel. The more we feel, the more convinced we become that we are healing. After all, something this intense must be the meaningful thing that is going to make us feel okay. Right? …….Right?
Eventually a question begins to haunt us: If all this understanding is healing, then why are we still miserable? We know our wounds, we know where they came from, and can explain that trauma in exquisite detail. So why do we still feel stuck? Why are we not happy?
Enter the Intellectual Trauma Tree
The cruel joke psychoanalysis plays is that many of us climb out of one Trauma Tree and straight into another. Only this time the branches are made of insight, therapy, and diagnosis. We become experts on ourselves, painfully self-aware and self-absorbed in our traumatic analysis. We can explain every defense mechanism, every attachment wound, every dysfunctional pattern. We can spend hours discussing our inner child, our shadow, our trauma responses. And yet we remain exactly where we are, still in the tree, still miserable.
Firmly seated on our branch, we have analyzed ourselves into paralysis. We are no longer detached only from the world below; we have become detached from ourselves. Everything becomes an object of observation. Every emotion becomes a case study. Every relationship becomes data.
Meanwhile life keeps happening below, people are falling in love, people are dancing badly, people are making mistakes, people are getting rejected, embarrassed, heartbroken, and imperfectly alive. And we're still up here writing footnotes about our suffering.
A thought creeps into the deep recesses of our brain. It pops up and we can’t help but hear it echo around the meat between our ears: “Is so much of what is called healing just mental masturbation?”.
We can’t unhear this and just like real masturbation, it feels productive without producing much actual fulfillment or lasting sense of happiness. If anything it starts to make us feel worse, it’s a substitute like Diet Coke, fake butt cheeks, like watching travel videos instead of buying a plane ticket.
We see now the tree did save us, the psychoanalysis did teach us, but staying here is now killing us. The strategy that once protected and informed us has outlived the circumstances that created it. In our pain we have mistaken understanding life as living life.
All medicine is poison, the thing that kills you is the dose.
Enter the first attempt to get down from the Trauma Tree
At this point you might be thinking: "Okay, I get it. The Trauma Tree sucks. Why don't I just climb down?"
Fair question, we look below us, the ground is there somewhere we think. The problem is that we've lived up here so long that many of the lower branches have died away. The easy path back doesn't exist anymore. We can't simply reverse the journey and the consequences of time. There is no staircase, no elevator, no therapeutic zipline waiting to carry us gently back into life and to the taste of real coke, butts made by barbells, and a vacation with the people we love. Only branches, and the large gaps between them.
This is where many people become trapped, as they don’t believe there is a way out. In a final despair we believe maybe this is where I am supposed to be in life? In this melancholy they wrap themselves further in childhood wounds, triggers, diagnoses, and endless self-examination.
They believe they are martyrs of self-awareness, poets of their own pain, as the suffering has been stitched into the very fascia of their being. Tragic. Complex. Deep. The wet blanket of the Intellectual Trauma Tree is our only escape.
Enter what the Trauma Tree actually is
Sitting defeated in the Trauma Tree, we lost something. We can’t quite figure out what it is we are missing, but something is gone from our chests and to get out of the Trauma Tree we need to find it again. We’ve tried to do it ourselves for years now, and are tired of combing over the same wounds. We ask God, The Universe, or Kanye West to show us what we lost - we admit we can’t do this anymore. We are ready to listen.
As our prayer sinks into the muted forest, an answer returns to us.
The Trauma Tree was never the problem, fear was. The tree is simply the architecture fear built. We climbed it because life hurt, we stayed because life was uncertain, we decorated it because leaving became terrifying to face.
Simply put, we have lost our courage to live. Our goal in life was to not get hurt, and to realize that goal we ran to the Trauma Tree and the subsequent Intellectual Trauma Tree. We didn’t live life, we feared life. Yes it is that simple, in the words of psychoanalyst Ichiro Kishimi, “The World is simple, and life is too”.
Enter having the courage to heal
This is where most conversations about healing go sideways. People think healing means becoming confident, fearless, perfectly self-loving human beings - it doesn't. There is no mystical turtle at the bottom of the ocean holding ancient scrolls of how to heal and finally awaken your 3rd eye.
To start our way down the Trauma Tree we first must find the courage to accept ourselves as wholly incomplete, fractured, likely to fuck something up humans; and not busy ourselves with positive affirmations to cover up our blemishes.
If you are an anxious person, and to fix this you say “I am brave”, tell me how you feel five minutes later. You’re probably still fucking anxious, because you are trying to hide from the uncomfortable truth that you struggle with anxiety. You don’t like that about yourself, and that's okay. Similarly, who suffers more: the guy who admits he’s gay or the guy who prays the gay away? You do the math.
Healing requires the courage to have delusional levels of self-acceptance, because this courage is what allows us to leave the Trauma Tree. We have hidden from ourselves and the fears we carry for so long, that we have forgotten how to be the clever little monkeys we are.
Healing begins when we stop trying to become a better person and find the courage to be an imperfect one.
Enter cutting the first branch
There is an ancient story that priests are told to say prayers with the Bible on their heart, so when their heart breaks, the words will fall in. I don’t know the last time you were heart broken or had a death in the family, but if you don’t understand that please look into an anti-psycotic medicine.
Likewise the phoenix has to burn itself alive in order to be reborn - what do these stories mean? Death actually means life. To regain the courage to accept ourselves, climb down the Trauma Tree, we must also endure a similar pain as the Phoenix and the Priest. However in this version of torture, we must crush our nuts. Yes, your nuts need to be punished, or at least “healed” and sometimes the difference is blurry.
The branch you're sitting on in the Trauma Tree feels safe, and that's why you have to cut it. The healing begins when you finally put the saw against the very thing that has protected you for years. With every stroke, you get closer to losing the identity that kept you safe. Closer to uncertainty. Closer to embarrassment. Closer to rejection. Fuck I hear the branch cracking. Closer to life.
SNAP!
Newton gets proven right once again. Your nuts get crushed. Congratulations. Healing has begun.
Enter touching grass again
Writhing in ear ringing nauseating pain we look around, wiping the tears from our eyes we notice we can actually see the forest floor again. Does it all make sense now? Because crushing your nuts was never the point, the point was getting lower in the tree and closer to life.
For one person crushing their nuts might mean apologizing with all one's heart. For another it might mean leaving a relationship. For another it might mean finding what's left of their nuts and asking someone out. Speaking honestly. Risking failure. Admitting they were wrong. The tasks of life we were avoiding in fear.
Every branch you cut costs you something, usually your ego. Good, that's the price of admission.
However, each branch we cut off brings us closer to the present. The pain eventually subsides, and we see the momentum we are gaining. A brevity washes over us, love songs move us again, and the sides of our weathered cheeks crack a smile for no reason.
Eventually your feet touch the ground, not because you've solved yourself. Not because you've finally understood every wound. Not because you've completed Healing™ and received a certificate. Your feet touch the ground because you got tired of studying life and decided to participate in it again.
You fall in love.
You embarrass yourself.
You get rejected.
You dance badly.
You apologize.
You fail.
You forgive.
You grieve.
You live.
And one day life will scare the hell out of you again. You will find yourself halfway up another Trauma Tree and that's okay, remember we decided to accept we are imperfect long ago. But this time you'll know something you didn't know before.
The way down.
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/y9a44ozybd6h1.jpeg){kind=link}
Post a Comment