Self-protection and healing
Last week, I went for a run with a friend.
About a quarter of a mile in, I tripped on a patch of uneven sidewalk, and there was a split-second moment when I knew I was going down and there was nothing I could do about it.
I can still hear the sound of my shoe catching the pavement, hitting the ground, and my phone skidding down the sidewalk (which came out surprisingly unscathed).
I quickly assessed the road rash on my hands, shoulder, and elbow. I felt a bruise forming on my hip. I told my friend, “I’m okay. But I’m hurt. I mean, it just hurts.”
After determining nothing was twisted or broken, I got up off the ground. I told my friend that I wanted to keep going. I continued my run, hands on fire. I even laughed at myself, the cartoon-quality drama of it all.
After the run, my friend helped me get cleaned up and bandaged. “You went down hard,” she said.
The next morning, when I felt my stiff neck and sore wrist, I had a better understanding of how my body braced itself for impact. I noticed how I fell more to the right than to the left: my right hand, right shoulder, and right hip got the worst of it.
Instinctively, I’d protected myself from landing flat on my face.
Because this is how my mind works, I started thinking about how we carry these reflexes—this form of subconscious self-protection— from childhood into adulthood. We’re wounded, and we tell ourselves that it wasn’t that bad, or that we’ve moved on, or that we’re okay. We keep going. But we rarely acknowledge how we braced ourselves for impact, the measures of self-protection subconsciously at work.
Self-protection works, until it doesn’t.
Self-protection stops working when it becomes a form of self-sabotage.
In a therapy session many years ago, after I’d left my job in television news, I broke out into an ugly cry. It was so sudden and out of nowhere, and I remember apologizing to the therapist for making a scene. I was so embarrassed.
And she kept saying, “No, this is good. This is good.”
I remember thinking, “How is this good?”
Today, I understand her point. In my grief, I was finally breaking free.
Recently, one of my readers, Roxanne, said it best when she said: “I feel like adding that being "real" (as though we can be otherwise!) is also necessary for healing wounds. It has seemed to me that many old hurts have just wanted to be acknowledged and, being satisfied, moseyed away.”
Healing is a process. Some hurts won’t ever go away, not completely. We don’t have to fix it, explain it, make it make sense, or justify it. We can simply tell ourselves, I’m okay. But it hurts. It just hurts.
This is how we elevate beyond moving on.