The Land Of The Walking Wounded
When we don’t deal with our pain, it controls us
In the West, and in the US, in particular, we value action, accomplishment, and being in control. Although the self-help industry is huge, most people are not willing to really do the tough introspective work to actually face and heal their wounds. They dabble and spend money on seminars and books, many of which become the functional equivalent of having bought exercise equipment that you don’t actually use. As with health and fitness, doing something for a couple of days will not give you lasting results. But deep inner work takes courage, and it’s also actively discouraged in our culture, so it’s rare.
Our leaders are particularly likely to be among the walking wounded because in order to look confident, they really can’t afford to be introspective. In addition, our society is based in a dominance hierarchy, so we also routinely reward the ruthless with power. It’s a double whammy. As Gabor Mate said in this discussion with Russell Brand, “I was listening to your podcast with Jordon Peterson and he was essentially rationalizing the existence of hierarchies, but when I look at who actually forms the apex of who forms these hierarchies, it’s largely traumatized people.
Trump’s brain was formed in a family where he was demeaned and punished and attacked and humiliated by his father, so he believes he lives in a horrible world, so he acts out. His brother drank himself to death.
Obama was abandoned by his father, and then he idealized him in his book. His mother was a highly troubled individual. He suffered a lot, but he lacquered his suffering with this patina of rationality.
I see in Margaret Thatcher, a tremendously repressed person. These are the people that society rewards with power, which is the sign of a traumatized society.”
As I said in Why Are Men So Much More Emotional Than Women?, when you repress and disavow your emotions, as men are often taught to do in our culture, (although women can as well) your feelings will secretly run you from behind the scenes. You cannot actually escape them, so if rather than experiencing and managing them, you stuff them, those emotions will seep out of your unconscious and control your behaviors.
“Most men have been socialized to believe that having emotions is feminine and weak. Emotions are also considered to be irrational, and out of control. Rather than learning to feel their emotions and work with them, men are more likely to stuff and disclaim them — which ironically, quite often leads them to behave in irrational and out of control ways.
The only difficult emotion that has been traditionally socially sanctioned for men is anger, which often masks more vulnerable emotions such as fear, insecurity, guilt, or shame. Some men are so uncomfortable with their negative emotions that rather than face them, they construct elaborate intellectual-sounding frameworks to try to make sense of them.”
According to the work of psychologist Carl Jung, the Shadow is the counterpoint to the Ego, and it is the place where all aspects of the personality that have been rejected by the Ego reside outside the light of consciousness. These may be traits that you are embarrassed about in yourself or they may be things you have been shamed or punished for by others. Because the Shadow exists in the unconscious, unless one does the work to meet and integrate it into your psyche, these narratives get projected onto other people.
As a life coach, the only client I ever fired was another life coach who was completely unwilling or unable to engage with the ways that her wounds were standing in the way of her having the relationship that she wanted. We went round and round for months, with me trying all different avenues and techniques but it finally became clear that until she faced her Shadow and her wounds, there was nothing I could do for her. Even as a helping professional, she was not able to undertake the difficult process of actually facing her shit (a technical life coaching term).
Our culture is actively geared away from demonstrating vulnerability, even though the groundbreaking research of Dr. Brene Brown has revealed that it is not only the “secret sauce” of relationships but also that “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”
Dr. Brown’s work has done a lot to bring this conversation to the table in recent years, but a dominance-based social hierarchy like the one we live in doesn’t make taking that step easy. We are taught to always compare ourselves to those around us to see if we rank lower or higher in the pecking order. There are no peers. It’s all zero-sum. If you don’t win, you lose, and this also contributes to the unwillingness that most people have to truly take themselves on as far as their emotional and mental health are concerned.
A large segment of our society is massively insecure and massively wounded and traumatized. Rather than dealing with that, as well as their fears and shame, most people try to make themselves feel better by verifying that they are up the pecking order from those around them (keeping up with the Joneses). Consumer culture supports this, of course, because it is what keeps it humming. If you only had that car or that brand of shoes, you’d feel much better — but only for a very short time, and then you can go buy something else.
Because introspection and vulnerability are not culturally supported, many people stay constantly busy as a way to not have to face their difficult emotions. Over-busyness is not just a badge of honor that signifies your importance, it’s also a trauma-response that allows you to never have to slow down long enough to meet any uncomfortable emotions.
And because we have little cultural muscle for dealing with wounds and Shadow places, many people don’t have any other coping mechanisms, other than addictions — addictions to substances, but also addictions to anything that produces a temporary hit of dopamine, something that takes the edge off the pain for a few minutes. Rather than deal with our difficult emotions and hurts, we try to distract ourselves from them.
As a coach, I’ve done a lot of my own trauma work over the years. I understand from frontline experience that it is not necessarily easy or fun to do, but I also know that getting more emotionally healthy and meeting and welcoming my Shadow places has given me access to myself in a way that was not possible before. I’ve also seen first-hand the way that it has transformed my client’s lives when they are courageous enough to go there.
What looks like just normal life to many people is a vain attempt to paper over all the ways that they feel dysfunctional and inadequate. Rather than looking for ways to heal themselves, they try to work out their pain on everyone around them. It never actually accomplishes that, but it’s another temporary distraction from the discomfort. We live in the land of the walking wounded and until it’s considered culturally desirable to actually go and deal with ourselves, it will continue to be so.
© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.
