Until you actually face that which terrifies you the most, you will forever run.

Sven Erlandson

Most people make psychology, the understanding of human nature, appear much more complicated than it really is. They dismiss it as a tawdry topic, too experiential to be taken seriously as a science. Psychology as it should be is morally sound, honest, and very simple. But it’s also ugly.

Psychology has given me what feels like an overly simplistic view of people’s problems. The root of all suffering, anxiety, and depression is unprocessed pain. The solution is to teach people how to process pain, first deliberately and then organically. The act must be deliberate at first because most people who are suffering have spent years deliberately avoiding their pain. The body will be confused at an attempt to change a long-standing pattern of emotional avoidance. Plus, actually turning towards the black hole of pain your heart is terrifying. It might even feel like death. So, we run for our lives towards addictions and other compulsive distractions. They feel much safer by comparison. Facing the pain takes a ton of courage, and usually support. I believe therapists in their most helpful form are just supporters on your path to emotional wholeness, not the coddlers or prodders many of them have become. The trouble is, even therapists often have not dealt with their own pain, so they can be of little help to you in dealing with yours. When someone doesn’t deal with their own pain, the expressed pain of other people usually makes them very uncomfortable. It’s a trigger. 

It feels fruitless for me to even talk further about reprocessing because talk contributes little to the process. All those years I spent reading books about self-help, psychology, and even trauma was just time I wasted avoiding my pain. Get a good therapist, one who will help you bring down the walls you’ve built around yourself and finally face your real feelings about your life. Or, if you do self-therapy, make sure you have support, even if it is virtual. Emotional wellness takes more than just showing up—it takes courage, the strength to step out into the unknown and ease into the well of pain hiding deep inside you. All of the problems that exist in this world stem primarily from people’s avoidance of their own pain and externalizations of such pain, which begs to be felt. Changing the world starts from within, by facing yourself in all your ugliness. If you have the guts to do that, everything else will feel easy.