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The Rocking Chair Continues…
Well, here I am again, in what is quickly becoming my best thinking space, my rocking chair in my son’s nursery. With just the dim light from the star on the wall, the baby asleep in my arms and my reluctance to put him down in the crib, I have uninterrupted quiet time to just sit and enjoy and think.
Tonight I am thinking about paradoxes and how the theme of “life is full of Paradoxes” is so true in so many aspects. The word ‘paradox’ means “a seemingly contradictory statement that may nonetheless be true,” (American Heritage Dictionary). So basically, it is when the best route to take is the opposite of the one our instinct says we should take. For example, in the Disney Pixar movie “Cars” Doc Hudson teaches Lightning McQueen that in order to make that fast curve on the dirt track he actually needs to turn the wheels the opposite way from what he thinks he should do in order to keep the car from spinning out of control. How many times in our lives do we feel like it is spinning out of control? And paradoxically, if we turn the wheel the other way we are able to get back on the road?
The biggest example of this that comes up in my therapy work is the paradox of intimacy. It is the thing we all crave, but the instinct to protect ourselves flares up and sends us running the opposite direction from each other. How many times have you “liked” someone and ended up avoiding contact with them, or as a teenager, sent your friend to talk to him? Or with your spouse, how many times have you had an opportunity for a close moment that you just allow to pass by for fear of being rejected? The paradox to great relationships is that you have to risk being vulnerable to achieve that kind of intimacy. You have to walk TOWARD the risk instead of away from it. You have to pursue those opportunities for closeness regardless of whether you will be rejected or not. That is the part called “work” when we talk about relationships taking “work”. It is the part that takes effort to go the opposite way than what your instinct (reacting to fear) is telling you to do. To truly connect with others you have to take those risks. Does that mean you won’t ever get hurt? No, of course not. You will get hurt. That is part of life. But if you don’t take those risks you will never feel true intimacy with someone and that is probably the best thing there is in this life.
The next most common one I encounter in therapy as well as in my personal life is about the healing process. Again, the instinct (reacting to fear) is to stay away from what hurts you. Yes, it is a survival skill that probably worked well in the stone ages and occasionally works well today, but a lot of the time it really gets in the way. People avoid their pain like the plague, whether it is physical or emotional pain. Say you break your leg. That is a pretty severe injury that really hurts every time you move it. So you tend not to move it, but if you never move it again, it won’t heal properly and you won’t be able to use your leg, or if you do, it won’t be as good as it was before you broke it. The same goes for emotional pain. If you are hurt emotionally, your instinct says to avoid it however you can, whether it is through numbing yourself, or diverting your attention or trying to numb yourself through external measures like drugs or alcohol. All of these things allow you not to think about the hurt, but it doesn’t allow the hurt to heal and the hurt doesn’t go away. So paradoxically, the best route to health is to work through the pain. For the leg, that means physical rehabilitation and for anyone who has been through that they will tell you that it is very painful to go through rehab. For the emotional hurt, that means working through the pain, allowing it to come out and dealing with it. For both, we have professionals who are trained to help people deal with their pain. We realize that working through pain is incredibly difficult regardless of the kind of pain it is and that we all need a helping hand from time to time, a guide, a support, someone to help us along the way. Even there, there is a paradox. The instinct is just to handle it yourself and the paradox is that it is better to have someone help you through that tough time, be it physical or emotional. There is trust that your guide/helper/support person can handle whatever kind and amount of pain you have. Believe me, it is not always an easy job for the guide/helper/support person, but we wouldn’t be doing the jobs we are doing if we couldn’t handle the pain. Plus, the risk you take to do what you need to do to heal will be worth it in the end.
So when you get to those tough decisions in your life or life isn’t working out the way you want it to, look and see if you are headed in the right direction. It could be you are in the middle of a paradox!
Carol Agnew, MA, LMFT
Online Counselor
www.asktheinternettherapist.com/online_counselor_ag.asp
