10/19/2022
The inner monsters we distract from are not nearly as dangerous as the monsters we create to avoid them. As painful as early life traumas can be to confront, they are seldom as destructive and difficult to transform—as the behaviors and addictions that we develop to bypass them. As children, our defenses and distraction techniques saved us, but, as adults, they become a self-fulfilling prophecy, concretizing and locking us in with our early pain,
blinding us to the fact that we are now better equipped to work through our memories than we were as children. It may have seemed insurmountable back then, but it no longer is. If we can turn around and face them now, if we can resist the tendency to cover them over with layer upon layer of distortion, we can re-claim our trauma and work it through to resolution. There is no way to escape wound-body memory. It is always there, awaiting its moment of integration. Better to turn around and embrace it. Once
a monster, now an opportunity for genuine transformation. JB
