R E A D I N G HOW I LEARNED TO SPEAK A NEW LANGUAGE You are beginning to understand the concept of JournalSpeak. I think at this time in your process it s important for me to get personal. If you ve read my book or heard my YouTube videos, you re probably familiar with my story and the struggles that have led me to be sitting here with you. I have suffered in chronic pain, and that s why I can share this journey with you so readily because I am you, and you, me. When people hurt, they all hurt the same. At the moment you are suffering, you could bond with anyone on the planet who knows that exact kind of suffering. That s what s so beautiful about being human. People are able to show empathy, and in that showing we allow others not to feel alone. This is what I hope to do for you. I know how you feel, how scared you are, and how insane it seems to believe that a psychological exercise such as this could actually cure your pain forever. When people are in pain, they know nothing else. I have been in that space, and the combination of physical agony and paralyzing fear were my constant bedfellows. I m not going to tell my whole story here as it s written in its entirely in The Meaning of Truth, but I want to highlight the points which are paramount in moving your healing forward. Also, and very importantly, I want you to remember again and again that you are not alone. I am with you, as are so many others. When I work with clients, I tell them stories often to encourage them on their way. Today I will tell you a little of mine.
Thinking back on my life, I know what went wrong, but I couldn t have predicted or controlled it. I was dealt a combination of intelligence and vigilance, and born into a family which required me to perform. In other words, I became a sensitive perfectionist, and built my life on being hard on myself, then upset about it. Hmmm. Not a great combo. As I grew older, I formed many expectations about how my life should be. You must always be careful of what I like to call the S word. Worrying about should is a very quick way to repress lots of emotions. One of the biggest expectations I had was about motherhood. From a very young age, I knew I needed to be a mother. I was literally born to nurture, and to love. And that s served me beautifully, as I m a fab mommy and therapist as a result. However... On the road to getting to today, I ve really suffered. Mostly because my expectations and shoulds spun out of control in my youth and young adulthood. At the time, I had no idea I was doing this, and you probably don t know that you re doing it too. But you are. We all are. We set expectations of how our lives should be, and when we find ourselves sitting in whatever s transpired (often exactly what we asked for) we panic that we ve made the wrong decisions, or taken the wrong path. In my story, I was stricken with acute back pain soon after my second child was born. Although I loved my children with the passion of a thousand suns, I was totally unprepared for the realities of motherhood.
I hadn t allowed for the whole story in my expectations, and when the day to day pain and disappointment of raising kids caught up with me, I was hit with a lightning bolt of pain. At the time, although I knew of Dr. Sarno s work and had utilized his methods to challenge my pain in the past, this episode tricked me completely, and I decided, This time it is real. That sentence cost me a year of my life. Even so, that s where I was at the time, and that was part of my process. I wouldn t be here with you today if it didn t happen, and I honor it. The reason it s important to share that with you today is that when I finally became desperate enough to try something different and did this essential work in earnest, I discovered more about myself than I d ever imagined possible. And my pain dissolved with each new understanding. The most important thing I discovered is that we all must learn to converse in JournalSpeak in order to survive. Polite society is the world we live in, and there is nothing wrong with that. But the internal dialogue that is happening within us will paralyze us without an outlet. I often present the query to my clients: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? The definitive answer in terms of the human condition is YES. It makes a sound; it crashes with passion in each falling. You have a choice whether or not to pay attention to it, but either way, it will resonate. When we have inconvenient feelings and very natural reactions to our lives, they make a sound within our mind/body systems.
When we fail to listen and give them a moment of our attention, they build up in strength and eventually can cripple us in pain. Learning JournalSpeak and applying it to your life is the antidote to the damage of this falling tree. It allows you to safely hear the sound it is making, giving it a steam valve and releasing the need for your brain to protect you with physical pain. Crazy perhaps, but true. In terms of motherhood, for me, I had to say out loud that I HATED IT. Not that it was tiring, or overwhelming, or too much. I had to let that tree fall hard, and listen. I had to say, This is NOT what I bargained for. This is not fun or happy or fulfilling. I hate my life, and that is terrifying because I m in it now, it s exactly what I asked for, and I m trapped in it forever. Wow. What a mess, huh? For me, sitting here writing this to you right now, my heart is about to explode with joy. Because the moment I stopped forcing it down and I allowed that toxic explosion to come out of me, I was opened up to love so much more. Although it was, of course, true for me in that moment, it wasn t the truth. I realized that I was just a sad little thing trying to create the nurturing I felt was missing as a child, and I was telling myself a story every day that if my life was not perfect, it was meaningless. That reality was so woven into the fabric of my being that I had lost sight that this imperfect, flawed life that I had was actually beautiful.
Now, this is only a snapshot of a very involved process for me, but I wanted to share it with you briefly to give you hope, and to explain that opening yourself to JournalSpeak, however painful, is the way to embracing a tremendous amount of joy in your life. Obviously, life will not be perfect. There are many things that are hard to change without a lot of effort (perhaps even impossible,) but that doesn't matter in terms of getting you out of pain. if you can learn to air your unspoken truths in the pages of your journal, you can release your pain regardless of your life circumstances. It s time to begin. The writing exercise in this lesson will be the benchmark for this whole healing process. Remember that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And each step will take a little of your pain and fear, and throw it into the wind.