“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)
Writing about this idea was taken from Cheryl Strayed’s List of Writing Prompts. The original prompt was to write about a time when I learned the hard way, but I changed it to what I learned the hard way. While the story surrounding these lessons is wildly interesting and incredible, it’s long, and writing it in a blog post will not do it justice. Plus, I don’t have the writing skills necessary to properly tell that story.
However, the lessons I learned then are potentially some of the most influential I will ever learn in my entire life and I’m going to share some of them here.
This is the post I needed seven years ago. If I knew these lessons, or if I was able to learn them the easy way, then I probably would have saved myself a bunch of suffering.
I’m hoping someone can learn at least one of these lessons the easy way (reading this post) rather than the hard way (through immense suffering). Trust me, it’s much better to learn things the easy way but I also know that the human-animal can only learn some things the hard way.
Finding Words Sets Us Free.
A few years ago I got tangled up with some bad people. During that time I saw myself and others do hideous things. I was manipulated by a sociopath because I wasn’t paying enough attention to see what was right in front of me. I didn’t have a way of conceptualizing what I was doing or what I witnessed because I didn’t have a language for it. On top of that, I was tortured which made everything much harder to articulate.
While that experience was one of the toughest in my life, I never felt more relief than when I was able to find the words or phrases, to explain what happened to me. I felt like a shattered version of myself and over the following years, everything I explored had the undertones of finding the bits and pieces that could help me process the trauma. Every time I heard, read, or learned something that could help me understand what happened, I felt a little more whole.
Finding the language to capture the experience sets us free from reliving the trauma and starts the healing process. I didn’t know this for years, but I felt it in my body. I never felt more relief than when I was able to find the words or phrases, to explain what happened to me. I supposed this was one of the ideas that I had to learn the hard way.
Turning our experiences into language orders the chaos of our minds, which helps us understand where we are. Our minds occupy territory in space and time, so when we transform the experience to speech we turn a little bit of the unknown into the familiar.
When we experience trauma, the parts of our brain that process speech shut off and we are no longer able to turn our experiences into speech. Speech is so powerful from a mythological perspective. But the loss of speech, in this case, comes with the inability to process experience into speech and also prevents us from putting the experience in the past.
Practicing my ability to articulate my thoughts through writing via blogging and journaling has given me a greater body of knowledge and language to draw from, which aids in the healing process. Honestly, in my experience, it’s been essential in my healing process.
Understanding, internalizing, and having a vocabulary for ideas like malevolence, betrayal, archetypes, willful blindness, responsibility, sacrifice, suffering, striving, struggle, logos, animus, anima, envy, narcissism, neuroticism, the shadow, circumambulation, atonement, and so many others has been life-changing.
My speculations that this idea was true were verified when I read about many PTSD patients recovering after finding the words to describe their trauma in the fantastic book The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessell van der Kolk, which I highly recommend.