«Hard», «difficult» — words and images have tremendous power over us. The more we say negative words, the worse we feel. One has only to refuse such words, and life changes.
Everyone who comes to therapy secretly dreams of digging up a treasure. People are lazy or bravely wave a shovel — everyone is waiting for the spade to touch the lid, and under it — a treasure shimmering like in a movie. Now that it has been found, life will change forever. The acquired wealth will solve all major problems, and, new, transformed, you will be happy forever and ever.
I also dreamed of such a magical transformation. But once I realized — and now I share this knowledge: there is no chest there. And not because we are “digging” in the wrong place. But there is simply no chest, and that’s it. With this understanding, many despair. They just don’t know yet that if there is no chest, it does not mean that there is no treasure.
While you are waving a shovel, a pile grows behind your back, in which there are “coins” for a whole chest. They are mixed with soil and debris, but they are there. The pile has yet to be manually sorted out, the coins washed, appropriated and allowed to use them. And this, unlike «I can dig», the work is much more painstaking and requires a lot of patience. But the piles of gold that lie there — words, stories, memories — belong to us to the extent that we ourselves decide to use them. Actually, the metaphor of the treasure has become for me one of these coins-insights. And how many of them were found over the years of conversations with people!
I once noticed that unrestrained tears always begin after the word «hard»
I remember, for example, how just one word became such a precious find. I worked with a girl who had to endure a lot of difficulties as a child — she was her mother’s assistant and clever, in fact, she became a little mother to her brother: she got up at night, lulled, took on family chores. As is often the case, she could not resist the temptation to be «like an adult» — and for this temptation she had to pay with the fact that being a truly adult became an almost overwhelming test for her.
At 29 years old, she fell into despair when faced with the real challenges of her own life. And when she told me about how hard it was for her, she sobbed inconsolably. I once noticed that unrestrained tears always begin after one word — namely the word «hard.» “And this (pause, painful sigh) is hard for me …” — and at that moment she was carried away by a wave of grief. One day I pointed out to her that the word «hard» made her small, like a magic drink made Carroll’s Alice smaller: «But what if you try to replace it with the word» difficult? Or «difficult»?
After the first bewilderment and anger at my callousness, she once did just that. And, lo and behold, no tears flowed. From that moment on, something began to change, although there was a long way to go. But she was no longer a shrinking Alice drowning in her own tears.
Listen to yourself: suddenly you have such words that take away strength or joy?