Healing: The Right to Be.
What do you hear in the silence of your soul? I ask, because a significant part of the journey I am now on involves learning to listen to myself at a much deeper level than ever before.
So much of my life up until now has been spent in avoidance, which has looked a lot like caring so much for other people. Yes, I have truly cared (sometimes too much) but if I’m honest, which I’m trying to be, I can realize that part of my ‘caring’ has been a way to avoid listening to what my soul has been screaming at me for so long.
Trying to tell me that something has been missing in the core of me.
Once I realized that I needed to dedicate myself to this journey, I scaled back a lot of things in my life. I wrote the ‘Sabbatical’ post, telling you what was happening to me, and why I was going to be stopping or decreasing the frequency of my posts.
I told coaching clients that I could not support them at the current time, and I have deliberately distanced myself from some people who incite me to care in ways that are sometimes painful for me.
And after removing a lot of distractions, I’m getting down the task at hand, which is listening to the screaming in my soul.
Which sounds a lot easier than it really is, because most of the time, our soul just speaks in emotions that don’t have a lot of explanation behind them. We simply feel things, but don’t necessarily have a great understanding of why, and so we struggle to tease out the meaning.
After all, sadness is an indication of loss, but is that of purpose, of significance, of connection? Anger is the same – it is a secondary emotion that rarely explains itself.
So in all of my listening and writing over the past couple of weeks, I’ve begun to create a shape, or a form, as an explanation for what my soul has been trying to tell me, and it’s been a startling realization to understand that what is missing is something very profound, and considerably problematic.
Because the part I’m missing is “The Right to Be”.
I know that sounds crazy, but please bear with me while I try to explain it. As I’ve made no secret of, I grew up in a home where there was a lot of chaos, and a significant lack of emotional support.
One of the downsides of that type of a home life is that you never have a safe platform to explore who you are, and people can come out of those types of upbringings feeling like the problems were some fault of theirs.
That probably makes no sense unless you’ve been there, but I’ve spoken to so many people who came from a dysfunctional or broken home, who at some point in their childhood created the understanding that the problems were somehow related to who they were.
Maybe if they got better grades, their parents wouldn’t fight so much, or if they were just a better son or daughter, their emotionally unavailable parent would love them more.
So you grow up believing that you are the cause of a lot of the problems in the world, and that you need to become somebody else in order to make that right.
And you lose the right to just be the person who you really were born to be.
Which for me manifests as a constant sense that I can’t live my life for myself, that I always have to be serving someone else. In practice, I struggle to charge for what I do, because I have this deep underlying sense that I should be serving them for free to make up for who I am.
If I find myself with free time, I wrestle with the concept that it’s ok to just do something for myself. Even now, as I write this in the privacy of my office at home, there’s a desire to phrase the words just the right way, so that I might touch the heart of someone who reads this, and help them feel less pain, more peace, and a greater sense of joy.
Because doing something just for me is wrong.
Which sounds very noble, but it’s really incredibly destructive. A child who for whatever reason (and there are many) never gets the emotional and psychological freedom to find out the truths of who they are can live a life that rings hollow, never fully finding a sense of completeness or peace.
It’s like no matter what you do, or who you become in your attempt to right the scales of your life, you’re never going to find that sense of authenticity, or emotional congruency, until you find the answers to your own questions, and become the person who is right for you.
Which means you have to accept that you have a right to become that person, that despite the opinions of others or yourself…. you simply have a Right to Be.
Which can feel incredibly wrong, selfish and terrifying.
But I’m trying to find a sense of peace through this journey, and to do so, I realize that I have to have a right to be me, and to find the sense of who that really is. Not bound by Dogma, or of the opinions of others.
Not even bound by this incessant desire to care so hard that I might balance the scales in opposition to my supposed inadequacies.
But to discover the person who I really am, in the absence of everything and everyone else.
Which for me is such a hard thing to do. I stare with jealousy at those who have a confident congruency in their soul, and I struggle to not care too much for those who are so very important to me.
Withdrawing from the world to walk alone for a while is my way of trying to find the person inside of me, without falling prey to the weaknesses of the thoughts and feelings I carry within.
So I ask you patience while I seem to be gone for a while, because I’m trying to find the right to Be, and the right Me.
The pathway I am walking is a lonely one, but the journey is more necessary that you can possibly imagine.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings