Emotional Archeology

I am being hopeful despite my body and mind denying it. I am not full of hope all day everyday but I make it a point to be hopeful on and off in a few days whether or not I feel like it. This is me reminding my body and mind that things will get better while simultaneously acknowledging my past experiences. I am not blindly optimistic, I am cautious. Being hopeful tires me but I perform it like an exercise. Slowly, a little bit at a time. Letting my body and mind adjust to it, accept it, feel safe and secure with it.

I often use ‘emotional archeology’ while talking to people who have been through trauma, recognise it, and are learning to deal with it. I have dug my memories, revisited them, over and over again. I have spoken with people who are a part of that memory in order to know their side of the story. If I believe my side to be the only one, I’ll perhaps never recover from the ugliness I fed on. So, when people tell me it helps me connect the dots of how one thing might have led to another. This is how I began understanding my abandonment and trust issues didn’t appear out of thin air. I survived all these years by using these issues as shield. My younger self did the best she could. I forgive her for that. I just don’t want to continue living like that – these issues after all led me to physical pain in the form of anxiety attacks.

I often wonder, why don’t others go through the kind of destruction of self as I did? I wonder in good faith. I feel freer with every trauma processed. I am beginning to understand what it is like to live without constant pain. I believed I like pain – I have a high physical pain threshold. I don’t panic when my body suffers from pain – I find it comforting. It gives me a satisfaction that my body is functioning and I haven’t become immune to pain. I can still ‘feel’. My greatest fear is absurdity, next in line is apathy and then, normalizing pain. Looks like a paradox, doesn't it?

My hypothesis is everyone suffers from pain – some normalize it, others brush it aside, a few process it. The ones who normalize or brush pain aside suffer from messiah complex – they try to fix/help others at their own expense. Fixing others is how they derive a sense of self, a purpose of their existence. Boundaries are almost non-existent. The ones who process pain become a bit of problem solvers – they are like catalysts. They are aware that they cannot save the ones who don’t want to be saved. Problem solvers don’t look for anything to fix but they can locate pain. They want to help but they don’t go ahead and offer it. They listen to people, ask questions instead of offering what to do in an unsolicited fashion. They don’t fix anything for people, they are aware that they can’t.

The important thing to remember is that processing pain isn’t linear, neither is emotional archeology. The pre-requisite idea here is that memory is unreliable, there’s no one reality to go back to. The aim of this emotional digging is to build a comforting and convincing story as close as possible to what might have happened in the past by taking in account experiences of people involved. The most important tool required to begin is discomfort – of feeling empty and/or angry all the time. Funding is important as well and it comes in the form of support by friends or family or online comments by people on a music video that claims to help with falling asleep. Funding is tricky and really difficult to get - because the people we ask for support aren't very comfortable with 'emotions' yet and hence don't see the point of the project. 

There might be a question – why begin something like this? The answer is simple – conflict. The ones who begin to process pain are the ones who come across a person/incident/culture/lifestyle where pain isn’t normal or brushed aside. That’s the moment when the person begins to understand that the normal she has been living in isn’t the only normal – she aspires for another normal, she eventually begins to create it for herself. The collateral damage is: she'll lose all the people she tried to fix before because those people cannot comprehend how can she be selfish enough to choose to heal herself. She'll be there with them if they see her, she'll just no longer solve their problems for them. Boundaries is the lesson she learns in the process.

Now wouldn’t it be cool for emotional archeology to be a real thing? When I say real, I mean, get paid for. That's all.