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In last week’s blog I wrote about my childhood discovery that sharing wounding can be one of the ways people become close to each other. I became attached to this particular aspect of self-disclosure and honed it into a fine art during the first part of my life. The basis of many of my friendships became, “here’s my suffering; where’s yours?” I naturally attracted people interested in suffering, many of whom were happy to share their own with me. And predictably, the amount and variety of suffering in my life steadily increased. A man carrying a hammer is constantly looking for nails.

Then during my 20’s I made a sudden course reversal, a 180 degree turn. Instead of wearing my wounded heart on my sleeve, offering it to anyone who would listen as a way to connect to them and form friendships, I “lowered the blast door” and started carrying my stuff in a more compartmentalized, and less visible, way. I made a conscious effort to focus on positive things and to seek out enjoyable experiences and the people attached to them.

As mentioned last week, that’s not the end of the story. Eventually that blast door had to be pried opened, a crack, and I had to go back to look at the original source of some of that wounding, stuff that goes back to childhood and in some cases to infancy. I did that (primarily through psychotherapy) in a slow, contained process that took a couple years. I engaged that work because I sensed that while the blast door was protecting me on some level, it was also preventing me from getting close on another. It was keeping me from sharing myself more deeply with people I wanted to be intimate with.

Eventually, I started to balance out, to find a middle way between “I’m wounded, please help me” and “no thanks, I can take care of myself.” And finding and holding that middle way has become a critical practice, not only for my own personal life, but also in finding my way and keeping my balance in Touch Practice with other people.

My evolving relationship with “the animal of my wounded self” could be understood in five stages. Let’s call the wounded self “the dog” by analogy:

1. In adolescence, I let my wounded self (“the dog”) run all over the neighborhood and do whatever it wanted to do. It became everyone else’s problem; everyone else was taking care of it and worrying about it. When people became annoyed with my dog shitting on their lawn, I’d simply move on to the next neighbor. There are lots of lawns, what’s the problem?

2. Next, after the famous grad school party incident, I decided to lock the dog down in a small cage and put him in a dark, soundproof room. I tried to forget about the dog, ignore him, starve him to death. But magically, this dog does not die no matter how hard you try to forget about it. It’s there, even if it’s hidden out of sight. So the dog survived that period on his own, while I developed relationships with my neighbors which didn’t involve the dog.

3. Later, (in therapy) I began to visit the dog, cautiously, preferably when no one else was around. I started to get to know him a bit, would occasionally let him out of the cage for a moment, fed him occasionally, but maintained very tight control of him. I did not let him out in public. I was not fond of him, but we developed a cautious, respectful relationship.

4. Subsequently, I began to take the dog for walks on a leash, began to let the neighbors see him, but was careful to keep him off of their property and to clean up after him. It’s MY dog, after all; I’m responsible for him Still, other people enjoyed brief visits with him and would even play with him occasionally.

5. Eventually, the dog became well trained, and now is off the leash. He’s integrated into the other aspects of my life; all my friends have played with him at least once. He’s well behaved; he stays out of people’s laps. He’ll engage people in a friendly way without getting completely overbearing or slobbering over them. He understands his place within the community, understands that I’m his master. If he needs taking care of, it’s my responsibility to do that.

Wounding is a part of life; we are all wounded. If you want to, you can spend every moment of every day until you die dealing with and talking about your wounding, your shame, your pain, and you’ll find plenty of material to work with. The more you focus on it, the more material you’ll have.  Eckhart Tolle calls this the “Pain Body.” It’s that part of us that loves pain, that feeds on pain. Pain and drama can make us feel so alive! It’s like an animal. Feed it daily, and it’ll get bigger and bigger.

Or, we can take an opposite approach: completely deny and repress wounding, and focus only on the happy stuff, in a naive approach that says, “me? Why worry. Be happy. Which way to the next party?” That works for some people, usually for a finite period of time, but it doesn’t permit much depth of engagement with this life. It’s a kind of happiness that is “skin deep.”

The middle way, for me, says, “I am wounded, but I am not JUST wounded.” And, “I am strong and powerful, but I am not JUST strong and powerful.” I am wounded and strong and powerful. I’m not going to get stuck in “oh help me, I’m so wounded.” And neither am I going to get stuck in, “I will do this all by myself and don’t need anyone’s help.” Those two points are the extremes of a continuum; life is lived in between.

The process of connecting with pain, shame, and old hurts can be a passage to freedom or it can be an endless loop, like a racetrack, where we are constantly running without ever actually going anywhere. Being wounded–if we take it on as an identity,  a “technique” for having friendships, or the stuff we automatically talk about when we go out to dinner–can be just another a bad habit, like paying your bills late or picking your nose.  The remedy for grinding out our pains and sorrows over and over again is the same as the remedy for nose picking: just stop it. It’s that simple. It’s as simple as stopping any other bad habit.

Engaging and resolving wounding mindfully within the big space of responsible, empowered adulthood is another matter. When we bring assets from the adult to deficits in the child, powerful things result. Consider a gratitude practice, for example. People look at me suspiciously when I suggest a gratitude practice in response to an awareness of wounding, because they think that I’m encouraging them to use denial or repression to suppress awareness of wounding. I’m not! I’m encouraging them to identify assets from the adult, “what is going well, what do I have to be thankful for.” Identifying assets is critical; we draw strength from what is going well in order to address the things that are troubling us.

A gratitude practice doesn’t deny wounding; it simply uses a surplus in one bank account to offset a deficit in the other. Focusing on what is going well in life does not in any way deny wounding; on the contrary, it gives us a strong, positive field in which to engage wounding. Positive thinking is not the same as denial. I can understand the confusion, but it’s a fundamental misunderstanding that in order to engage some darkness from childhood, we have to block out all rays of sun we are currently experiencing. That’s not depth; that’s blindness. Taking a look at what’s been hidden in the dark isn’t made easier by making the room darker. Light can actually be very useful.

One of the challenges in Touch Practice is to sit with the whole person. That means constantly balancing awareness, in both partners, of the physical, the emotional, the energetic, and other dynamic balances such as pain/pleasure, fun/seriousness, attraction/aversion and work/rest. It is easy to get stuck in one particular thing if it’s powerful or attractive in some way. People can get absorbed in their experience of erotic energy, or absorbed in an emotion, or absorbed in projection onto the other person. So the grounding markers of “where’s my breath right now” or “where are my feet” or “what does the contact with the ground feel like” become critical ways of asking, “so what else is happening?” Enlarging the field of awareness is part of the work, so that we see the whole rather than these little pieces.

And the Pain Body, as Tolle calls it, is one of those little pieces where we can get stuck. Just as there are people who come to Touch Practice whose habitual, patterned reaction is to fall head-first towards erotic energy and attach there until I wake them up by saying “breathe!”, there are others who will fall straight into the pain body (in particular, towards crying) and spend the entire hour there unless I nudge them with “so what else is happening?”

Focusing on pain can be transformative, or it can simply be a bad habit. Which is it? That’s not for me to decide. I don’t presume to know another person’s interior world; each of us has to make our own determination: Have I come back to this pain because this is my important work for today, or have I come back here by habit, because it’s comfortable, familiar, safer and more predictable than moving forward with life?

How long should we spend with the wounded self? My answer: “take as much time as you need. And not a single minute more than that. Not one.”

This is my truth, for me, from my experience (and you can decide your own:) engaging inner pain in a larger, spacious field, a field that includes a gratitude practice, service, kindness, and other spiritually supportive and balancing disciplines, can be vital work that moves us forward in life. But chewing on the same pain repeatedly because it feels familiar, gives us something to talk about, causes people to run to our rescue and makes us feel fully alive? That’s just a bad habit. Just stop.

The good news is we can change bad habits in about 21 days. If you’re stuck, you might just find your way home by the time the holidays roll around.

Have thoughts you’d like to share?

Touch Practice is a sacred practice for me, and part of that is keeping confidences sacred. While a name and e-mail address are required to post a comment, feel free to use just your first name, or a pseudonym if you wish. Your e-mail address will never be seen by or shared with anyone. It is used to prevent spam and inappropriate comments from appearing in the blog. I’d really like to hear from you!