We have become a civilization obsessed with taking care of ourselves, and somehow we have become remarkably bad at living.
Every feeling requires a name. Every discomfort requires an explanation. Every difficult season requires a diagnosis, a boundary, a retreat, a podcast, a bath, a journal entry, or three business days of “protecting our peace.”
We have become extraordinarily interested in ourselves.
And there is a particular danger here for people who were abused as children.
A wounded person is hungry for an explanation. She wants someone to tell her why she feels the way she feels, why relationships are difficult, why certain situations frighten her, why she cannot seem to move forward.
That hunger is understandable.
It also makes her vulnerable.
There is an entire industry willing to hand her a vocabulary in which almost every discomfort can be traced back to the wound. The childhood becomes the master key. The symptom becomes evidence. The trigger becomes revelation. The boundary becomes virtue. The diagnosis becomes identity.
And suddenly the thing that happened to you begins to become the thing that explains everything about you.
This is where compassion can quietly become captivity.
There is a peculiar kind of predation in convincing a wounded person that she must remain perpetually fascinated by her wounds in order to remain safe.
She is taught to monitor herself endlessly.
How do I feel?
What did that bring up?
Was I triggered?
Is this dysregulating me?
Is this relationship safe for my nervous system?
Am I abandoning myself?
Questions like these can be useful. Asked endlessly, they can turn the soul inward until the whole world begins to orbit the injury.
The irony is almost comical.
We have been told to heal by becoming increasingly preoccupied with ourselves.
And then we wonder why we cannot escape ourselves.
Real healing may sometimes require looking backward. It may require grieving what happened, understanding what was distorted, learning new patterns, and receiving genuine help.
But eventually the eyes must come up.
There are children to raise. Meals to cook. Friends to love. Work to do. Promises to keep. Beauty to notice. A world outside the self that has been waiting patiently for our return.
The goal cannot be to become an exceptionally well-understood victim.
The goal is to become free.
And freedom is a wonderfully inconvenient thing.
It asks us to become responsible for what we do with what was done to us.
It allows us to say, This happened to me, and it mattered.
Then, eventually:
It happened to me, but it does not get to tell me who I am.
Perhaps we have forgotten something our ancestors understood without needing a twelve-part podcast about it.
A person can be wounded without making a religion of the wound.
A person can rest without worshipping comfort.
A person can understand herself without endlessly studying herself.
And a person can spend a lifetime being told to protect herself from life, only to discover that life itself was the thing she was created to enter.
There is a time to look inward.
Then there is a time to open the door.
Someone needs you.
B🤍
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