The self-harm no one talks about
continuously denying ourselves the present
Has it ever occurred to you that the majority of your pain might be fictional and unnecessary? Hear me out.
I recently started practicing the art of being present and separating my identity from my mind. I’m doing this by being more aware of my surroundings and my thoughts, and by learning to observe them both without judgement. I quickly realized that the last time I achieved this state of « being » as my baseline state, was when I was a younger child.
We always see posts about how life was better as a child not necessarily because we were young and clueless, but because we let ourselves be, and let ourselves experience. When we were in pain, we let ourselves be in pain, experience and feel it, then we let it go and on to the next adventure.
At least, that was the case in my experience. In fact, I feel I’ve experienced more trauma and objective ‘pain’ as a child, yet the intensity and frequency of pain I feel as an adult seems more significant and unbearable.
What does being present have to do with anything?
I feel that as an adult, I’ve lost track of my purpose, I’ve lost myself and I’m looking anywhere for meaning. I started relying on my mind to guide me. I gave my mind power over me. In other words, my thoughts and feelings started to dictate my identity, and therefore my life; and that gave my life meaning. I was happy with that.
Of course minds and thoughts are extremely unreliable and it wasn’t until recently that I discovered that I am not my thoughts and that I should not have to be ruled by my mind. I know it sounds very abstract and I’m not even sure that I’m expressing myself properly enough for how important this realization was to me.
As I started to practice being more present, I slowly began to understand and see that I truly am not my mind. That life is happening outside of my mind, and that my mind should be a tool that I can leverage to better understand and experience the world around me.
What does this have to do with self-harm and punishment?
A lot of the things that hurt me years ago, still hurt me today when they should not. As a child, I used to be able to feel things and let them go. I don’t think I ever got over anything as an adult if I’m being honest. I am afraid that we focus too much on our traumas and base our identities around them. I understand that it takes time to heal from certain things. At the same time, I definitely used this as an excuse to keep reliving the same traumas mentally over and over again, since I forgot how to live.
There’s a passage from a book I’ve been reading lately, that perfectly describes this:
“The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn't necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or "mental movies." Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past…
…So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person's own worst enemy.”
The Power Of Now, by Eckhart Tolle
I was torturing myself over and over again, almost refusing to let go of anything that brought me pain- no matter how big or small the pain was. I quite literally became melodramatic about anything that hurt me because of how attached I was to my pain. I knew nothing outside of it, so it was all I experienced everywhere I looked, and it even became a part of my identity. A pained and wounded child, that is who I was for the majority of my life. I took on and accepted the role.
I hate to admit it, and it triggered me whenever people told me to simply ‘let it go’ but that is the conclusion of pain if you want to start living again. I’m not telling you to [simply let it go]. I am asking you to choose to live in the moment. To choose to be present. I believe that by doing that, things will be ‘let go’ of their own.
It’s not about ‘forgiving and forgetting’ or ‘getting over it’; it’s about being present. I implore you to try that and see how you experience life each time you do. The rest will follow as a natural result.
I am not my mind. My mind is an aspect of me that I can choose to observe without judgement. I am the observer of my mind, the captain of my soul and my body is my vessel. We are so much more than our minds, and there is so much more of life that exists outside [our minds]. Look around you, that is life. My point is: do not allow your mind and your past to rob you of what you have now- the present.
In my humble experience, there is no point hurting over the past when we are fortunate enough to experience the present moment. We fail to see the life we are blessed with because of how much residual pain we have accumulated over time, it blinds us to the reality that is NOW.
Denying ourselves the choice to experience the current moment that we are fortunate enough to have, by perpetually tying [every present moment] to our past or spend it worrying about the future is a form of self harm.
This first ‘daring’ read, but I hope you found this useful. I would love to hear your thoughts on this. My goal is to elaborate on a lot of the points I touched on here- I still have so much to add so stay tuned. Thank you for reading/listening. If you enjoyed this piece and would like to show support, you are welcome to do so at Buy Me A Coffee. I really enjoy writing here so far and can’t wait to see where this goes. ^.^ - Farah marianne
I discussed this with my therapist once and she suggested it also has something to do with not always having to be responsible for ourselves as children. As an adult we have to be responsible for ourselves all the time, which is quite a burden when modern life is so messy
this was so beautiful. i will definitely come back to this post as often as needed, to be reminded of the gift that is — the present moment.