An issue that often goes unnoticed in the process of healing, is the loss of the many selves that we’ve built up along the way.
Being legitimate victims of life’s circumstances, if we identify as such, still comes with certain benefits.
For example, the excuses you can give yourself for your many failures serve to dampen the pain of failure itself. If you’re not absolved of your failures by your trauma, then you’re just a run of the mill loser (so sayeth the voice in your head).
There is a comfort in misery. There is safety in victimhood.
In no way am I telling you to let it go – it’s supported you as a survival method until now, and only you can decide that it no longer serves you. But it’s all you know, and when it leaves, you lose part of yourself.
Your world views, no matter how fucked up and warped by the shit you’ve been through, are still the only way you know the world.
To adopt a supposedly better way is to be reborn again; for all intents and purposes, an ego death.
The old you is lost, and who knows what this new, supposedly better self will look like? You can only experience it once you’re there, and so there’s an inherent leap of faith.
I have written in the past about death as a value that should be considered head-on. But I believe that it’s not just final death that we’re best contemplating, but the many mini-deaths that we encounter along the way in our journey of personal growth.
