Thursday, September 5, 2019

Bullet

Imagine you’ve just gotten shot. 

It was a stray bullet from someone target practicing but being dumb at it, and your injury was a flesh wound, but it hurt like you had had all your teeth extracted without Novocain. 

As you are standing there in shock, clutching your side and holding it tight to halt the blood flow—without much success—the doorbell rings.  

Grunting, you shuffle over to the door, and open it. 

“Hey kiddo,” your friend chirps out with more vigor than you have heard since Halloween. “Let’s go have some fun, how about river rafting?” 

You stand there with blood seeping through your fingers, oh, no, you think, Howard (the friend) faints at the sight of blood.   

Okay what do you do now?  Pull the friend in, tell him to pull himself together and bandage you up? Excuse yourself, go to the bathroom and tape up your side and go with him? 

No, chances are you want to go to the hospital. You want a sterile environment with the best surgeon available. 

The same goes with psychological wounds. You want someone compassionate enough to allow you to vent your story, and savvy enough to see what really needs attention. (Triage.) 

Maybe the bullet is still lodged in your beautiful flesh. You want someone to take it out, and do a good job of it. (And someone to get you to your place of healing.) 

Sometimes we are tempted to bandage up our own the wounds saying they are trivial. Lots of people have it worst,” you say. “They got shot in the heart.”  

Yet, small injuries, like splinters hurt, and need taken out the same as bullets. 

We don’t numb ourselves with substances so we don’t feel that splinter. No, pull it out. It will hurt for a minute, but the healing will come and you will go on to live a long enthusiastic life. 

I’m not talking about people who like to whine so they will get attention, I’m talking about people who muscle it through, and ignore issues that are best faced and extracted. 

Pain is there to be attended to. Now, after the surgery is the time to celebrate. Pull out the champagne. 

In Martha Beck’s Finding your North Star (that thing that drives you, your life purpose) she says that everybody ought to go to therapy, even if you don’t need it, it’s like God is rubbing your tummy, 

According to Beck, a lack of enthusiasm for life is always a sign that the deep self is hurt. Every person’s essential self is pure productive energy, and yours will send you into a fulfilling life almost automatically if your emotional psyche is in good repair.  

What am I doing here on this page

Good question. 

I see a lot of people walking through life with a slack jaw. That tells me they don’t find life to be the exciting adventure they thought they would have when they came here.  And true, I want that enthusiasm for life that sounds so alluring, and so I read and write and endeavor to help myself, and in the process assist others. 
That’s my goal. 

You know they say that we can help each other because our holes don’t match? The holes I am talking about are the holes in our psychological underwear.  

So the story goes, we all have a frog’s suit that we pull this way and that trying to cover the holes in our underwear so people don’t see them. (Or even to hide them from ourselves.) Except what we don’t know is that under that underwear, is the true princess. 

 Or prince. 



This is off the subject but too good to miss. 
It’s How Wolves Change Rivers 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q

The introduction of wolves into Yellowstone after a 70-year absence, created an unprecedented flourish in the ecosystem.