Hi! My name is Dean Henryson. I have recently finished a self-help book
entitled BE YOURSELF. I hold a masters degree in clinical social work
and a bachelor's degree in psychology. I have counseled individuals,
couples, families, and groups for years. My experience and personal
growth have help me write this book. I currently provide clinical social
work services to foster families at a private, non-profit agency. I have uploaded this portion of the book for people to download freely.
HEALING
Life becomes a greater struggle than it has to be when you are insensitive to your feelings. If you are not sensitive to your hurt, you will not be able to use that feeling as a guide to focus you in the direction you should be growing. When you are not growing in the right direction, your life fills with more negative stress, complicating any healing that needs to be done. If you are in a job you don't want, if you are in a marriage you are not supposed to be in, if you are doing things you are not supposed to be doing, life will be a greater struggle because you are not in your life. It is like trying to swim up a river that has a current too strong for you. The river has a strong current of stress that only can be dealt with positively if you know-like the salmon-that your home is upstream. You should not be swimming up a stream that your feelings do not direct you up. Regular life-stress becomes compounded with stress from things you shouldn't have accepted. You don't get the relief you should because you are not doing things which make you feel good. If you don't follow what you are supposed to be doing, nature will get angry at you and punish you by making things more difficult than things should be. This does not mean that you cannot grow from swimming up a "wrong" river; you may be growing simply to become more sensitive to your feelings. Don't complain; start becoming what you are supposed to become. Get back into your river.
A powerful force that gets us off track is having never dealt with the pain we experienced as a child. This pain can become so old and deep that we forget it is even there. When it gets superimposed on the present, as it does despite the best attempts of our defenses to contain it, it makes us more needy and sensitive to present pain. This confuses us, and we may think we are going crazy because we don't know where so much pain and anger comes from. We don't know how to deal with the feelings because we have not placed them where they belong. The feelings cannot leave us until we attach them to where they belong. We may be afraid to look at the old, deep hurt. It may seem as an endless, dark space where we may never find light. After all, it must contain something scary for us to have been running from it our whole lives. In fact, it is the single most scariest thing for us to face in our lifetime, but we must in order to be healthy. And we must face it over and over again.
What helps you walk through this scary, dark space is knowing that you are in the process of embracing and becoming yourself. This is the little candle you can hold onto in the dark. You can stop looking for yourself outside: in other relationships, places, and in excesses of money or material objects. You are already complete in this moment. Other external things may come as they come, but you no longer need them. You are on the journey to yourself.
Stop running from yourself. It no longer makes sense. You are not bad; you are not powerless; you are not worthless; you only feel so when you do not face yourself, preventing yourself from being. Think about that. You should feel bad, powerless, and worthless when you are not being yourself. That is where you should be. That is part of your healing process. Otherwise, it would be too easy and painless for everyone not to be himself. Humanity would stop existing. Why won't you take the next step into the darkness? It is through the darkness that you will find true light. Do you want someone else to take that step for you? That will never happen. The step is yours to take, so you must take it.
The darkness you hide from stands in your way. The old pain you hold on to is in the way of you being as loving, smart, and best as you can be. Negative feelings block positive feelings, such as love, joy, and contentment. This can make it difficult to forgive people for the terrible things they have done to us. We may fear that if we let go of the hurt, we will have good feelings towards the abusers. To feel good about them after what they have done is crazy, right? To feel good ourselves is crazy after what they have done to us, right? Yes, but to hold on to the hurt, further hurting ourselves, is even more crazy.
We have to forgive them. This does not mean we have to see them, love them, or forget what they did. It means we must feel the hurt they caused us, grow so that we can limit or stop that hurtful behavior, and release the hurt. The hurt was meant for the time it happened, not an entire lifetime. To hold on to it longer means we have not found a way to grow from it. Perhaps we do not want to make anything positive come from it. This means we give their abusive behavior control over our lives. Read the last two sentences again and find a connection between them in your life.
Do you want to justify your pain by keeping it alive, keeping yourself from becoming yourself? The only person you hurt is yourself. No one else really gives a damn, especially the people who hurt you. Accept that. There is power in that acceptance. If they could care, they would have respected the expression of your hurt long ago. (It may sound as if I'm repeating myself, but you are repeating your mistakes and you need to hear this at different levels and in different contexts.) Even if they did care, it would not change anything. You still have to love yourself and let go of the hurt all by yourself. If you need them to accept the hurt, you have not forgiven them for not caring when you needed. Give up hope of ever being cared for by them; it is your turn to care. Take courage. Justify your pain not by keeping it alive but by expressing it through verbal communication. Stop communicating your hurt nonverbally by destroying your life, showing them how horrible their actions affected you. They don't care. And what is worse is that you are not caring.
You may have carried your old pain for such a long time that you feel as if it is a part of yourself. By letting go of it, you may feel as if you are "killing" yourself. Forgiving the people who hurt you may feel as if you will cease to exist. This is obviously not true; you will exist, but you will be a different person. You will grow and exist as a more powerful, responsible, healthy person. Through not allowing your old feelings to continue living inside, you may feel as if you are not treating them importantly. Those feelings are an important part of yourself, but they are only the part of yourself that was in the moment in which they first came up. When you continue to hold on to them, you "kill" yourself. Your old feelings are a part of you that needs to be accepted and integrated for you to continue your flowing self-existence. Otherwise, because old feelings block the route, your present feelings don't have the access they need to yourself.
The extent you don't forgive people who hurt you is the extent you are, in some way, chained to them. You seek out these kinds of people in your intimate relationships, behave like them, or become them. When you don't forgive people, you limit your self-existence by using up time reenacting scenarios similar to how you had been hurt. For example, a woman molested as a child might get involved with a man who is only interested in using her as a sex object. These reenactments are done as attempts to obliquely work out old hurt instead of openly expressing yourself. They do not work, and they cause you to share a perverse similarity with your abusers: your abusers were reenacting their own scenarios to obliquely work out their hurt when they hurt you.
As you grow older while hording your pain, you may gain feelings of empathy and relation with the abusers because you will be similar to them: a person with lots of old hurt. These feelings of connection and empathy make it easier for you to feel justified to continue abuse within yourself and with your spouse and children. If you do not find a better way of relating to people than the abusive way your abusers related, you may no longer perceive your abusers as abusive. You may come to believe that the ways your abusers acted were the best ways to handle the situations. You will become what you had hated by not acknowledging your hurt. Why do you think your abusers acted as they did? They were abused and were not open to their hurt.
Allowing old pain to dictate what happens in your life is not being the self you were created to be. Being that self means allowing your feelings from experiences help you grow as yourself. If you do not deal with old pain directly, you will bring negative consequences from it into your life, again and again. You will waste most of your youth in the suppression of the growth you should have actualized long ago. Face the entirety of your pain now so that your kids will not be the tools you use to work through your old pain. Be truly different from the abusers who have used you in a failing attempt to work out their old hurt.
You also need to forgive yourself. You have not been perfect. So what? No one is, and the person who claims to be is someone no one wants around. We are human. We make mistakes because we are all in development, not because we are failures. What hurt have you caused yourself that you do not want to let go? Why don't you want to let it go? Your choice of holding on to it is getting in the way of your growth. This choice is in the way of yourself, and it will be the thing that you will have the most trouble forgiving yourself for in the future.
If you hold on to old pain in order to remain a victim, you are being victimized by yourself. Your anger from having been hurt becomes directed back at yourself so that you believe you are a bad person. Since you feel bad, you are afraid of being seen as the perpetrator, the bad guy, so you continue to choose to be a victim. This is an unhealthy, vicious cycle you need to break. Being a victim means you have no power to change. Be yourself, not a victim. If you feel like a victim, perpetrators will detect that and abuse you. Your life has more meaning in it than in being a victim. You were hurt during one time period by them, yet you continue to hurt yourself through staying a victim.
-In what ways are you swimming up the wrong river?
-What do you need to do to start doing what you are supposed to be doing?
-Have you dealt with all the pain you did not feel as a child?
-How do you know?
-Explain how your present problems and routes up the wrong river could be from old childhood pain (even if you do not believe they are).
-List everyone with whom you still feel hurt.
-What is the reason you are holding on to the pain?
-What positives are you getting from holding on to it?
-What negatives are you getting from holding on to it?
-What needs to happen for you to begin to integrate and release it?
-Why?
-What negatives would happen if you released it?
-What positives would happen if you released it?
-In what ways do you feel similar to your father? your mother? your siblings?
-Do you not like feeling that way?
-Explain.
-Have you held on to pain as they have done?
-Do you need to forgive yourself in any way (including for holding on to pain for a long time)?
-(Writing a letter to yourself about how you hurt yourself is a good way to express your hurt to yourself and release it.)
The book can be purchased at www.1stbooks.com. You can order or download the entire book today at this site, or you can order it at your nearest major bookstore sometime after February 19.
