I've been told that — as we age — we spend more and more time with our memories as a result of inadvertently being aware that we have more life behind us than we have ahead of us.
Maybe that's true in some ways, although I have spent much of my life being more "guilty" of looking too far ahead, rather than having some kind of anchor in the present.
Regardless, I found myself sitting here for a while, contemplating the many years I spent going to self-development and self-help workshops or one kind or another. Maybe going down that particular path was a natural extension of studying a lot of psychology while at University... all in service of trying to understand why I always felt like a misfit.
I spent a lot of money on books, and I spent a lot of money on retreats and workshops... in retrospect, perhaps I spent as much time and money as I did because the only time I felt like I was even remotely "part of something" was when I was in the company of other "seekers."
But there was something a little "off" about the whole experience, in the sense that there I would be — at 20-something and 30-something — usually being the youngest person in the room by a couple of decades. Why? Did people just not care about understanding themselves and their place in the world?
I think what I mostly learned from those years was that I was... in some strange way... less broken than the rest of the world. Maybe that sounds arrogant because I was definitely no model citizen with everything together, but I also didn't seem encumbered by many of the same "fears" that seemed to weigh down most of the world around me.
In other ways, I was more broken, or perhaps differently broken.
I recall the words of Kathleen — my therapist in my mid-30's — who once asked me if I was actually in therapy so I could "feel like something was wrong" as a means of allowing me to feel like my life was just as messed up as everyone else in the circle of people I knew.
It really pissed me off, at the time... but maybe she was right.
Several friends had asked me whether I'd "considered therapy" given that I'd just been through a messy divorce, bankruptcy, death of a loved one (my auntie), my cousin's suicide all at pretty much the same time. I felt OK... but it felt like there was a lot of pressure on me to be "not OK." And I worried that my state of relative OK-ness might just be denial... so I went into therapy, even though I wasn't entirely sure why I did so.
Did it help? Maybe it did, in the same way we might feel better as a result of going to the doctor and getting a clean bill of health.
During one of the week-long workshops I took once — on the Enneagram — I ended up having lunch with the head facilitator one day, and he made the interesting observation that "the more you truly understand yourself and live consciously as your authentic self, the more alone you'll feel."
The sensation of feeling like a "misfit" is essentially a different label for aloneness (not to be confused with loneliness, which is a completely different thing)... and aloneness can often come as a result of stepping beyond our psychoses and neuroses, and no longer being part of the "misery loves company society."
The problem arises when we seek to be part of that club as a misguided attempt at fitting in.
So does "Self Help" really help? I would submit that it does, but it may not be the help you thought you were going to get! And sometimes the insights are quite unexpected... there are ways in which our collective psyches are so broken that it is actually the state of being less broken that makes a person stand out and feel a bit like an "outsider."
But it's really not a club you should be seeking membership to...
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!
How about YOU? Have you spend much time on "self help?" Did it help you? Did you gain significant insights into yourself, and life in general? Or was it pretty much a waste of time?Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20220129 01:14 PST
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