The Scar

[This past October, I wrote from a prompt every day. I thought I’d share a few since I haven’t been here in a while.]

A client of mine recently moved to Spain and, as one might expect, the transition has been challenging. A different culture, a different town, a different language. The only stable, familiar entity is his longtime partner. Otherwise, all is new. Yesterday, he shared how demoralizing it was that sometimes, he walks into his usual café to write and think, and becomes consumed by the belief that the other regulars (who he knows by sight, but they do not speak) don’t like him. This way of thinking is, of course, familiar to him. It goes all the way back to childhood and a raging father and overwhelmed mother in whose presence he often felt wrong or bad or unwanted. He’s demoralized because, surely, now that he knows this thought isn’t true – but rather is an erroneous belief he formed in childhood – surely he should be able to simply not believe it anymore.

I empathize. Many beliefs about myself have – thankfully – loosened their grip with time and effort. But, under the right – or wrong? – conditions they’ll flare up again. They’re tenacious, these beliefs. Sometimes they’re dormant for a long time and we think we’ve finally escaped their painful influence, only to have them rear their ugly little heads when we’re at our most vulnerable. Like moving thousands of miles away to an unfamiliar country where you only know one person. The experiences that caused the belief in the first place come with us because they happened to us. Kind of the way a scar does.

I warned my client that what was coming next was cheesy, but to bear with me. Then I shared my scar analogy: the event that caused the scar was in the past, but the scar carries on. Mostly we can forget about it and go about our lives. But now and then, things happen that remind us that the skin of that scar doesn’t – can’t – behave like unscarred skin. That’s just how this skin is now. We can want it to behave like unscarred skin, but it won’t. It will behave the way it’s conditioned to; no amount of wishing it were otherwise will change that.

My client didn’t want to hear this from me. He wanted a miraculous cure that would free him once and for all from this painful belief so he could henceforth move more sunnily through life. What he got instead was, “That ain’t gonna happen; beliefs don’t work that way.” Whether or not he wanted to hear this, when he did hear it, something in him settled – because of course this was really about shame: the shame he felt that an emotional scar was still there behaving like – an emotional scar. He’d never ask a physical scar to be anything other than what it was; he’d never think to feel ashamed that his scarred skin didn’t act like unscarred skin. What if he brought this same “logic” to his emotional scars? 

For a moment, he got a glimpse of what it might be like to walk into the cafe, and feel his belief rear up, and instead of berating himself about it, hold it with tenderness. Maybe he could even say to himself, “Aww, honey, this is hard what you’re doing, and hard things bring up this worry about not being liked.” He could offer to himself the tenderness he needed as a kid instead of the shaming he got instead. Just for a moment, he’d know he was okay, he was loved. String about a million of these moments together and this belief might not be so tenacious – until the next time.