Patterns, Walls, and Shadows
When it comes to “the work”, I am all in though I often resist it with heels dug into the proverbial ground. When I refer to the work, I mean the conscious effort to look at past trauma, and repressed parts churning in the subconscious including shadows that cast their influence from the hidden places of our mind. Shadows are not the same thing as dark energy. I perceive myself as a being of light and of dark, and the shadows are those parts of my being, whether light or dark, that I repress and deny.
I carry a lot of shadows. There is a perspective articulated in the Mankind Project about putting the shadow in front of you. Being aware of negative messages or beliefs do not cause them to vanish; shadows exist because there is light. But having awareness of the shadow, seeing it (in front of you!), allows for accountability and agency over how I exist and show up. If I carry the belief of, I’m not good enough, that belief, running in the subconscious background, will drive what I do (or don’t do), the choices that I make (or don’t make) but without my conscious understanding. For example, that negative message might cause me to write less or to not make a call to a brother/friend to have lunch or breakfast without me realizing the underlying belief driving those choices. With the shadow in front of me, I get the awareness—I see it, and at that point I can choose whether to stay in the comfort of the shadow (or not).
Awareness is good, and by no means does that by itself lead to different choices. And I have gratitude for it even when I remain emotionally and mentally stuck in certain patterned behaviors that no longer serve.
Over the weekend, I gained awareness of a lifelong pattern.
During a man’s work a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a lot of energy that triggered a boyhood memory of when I climbed into my wooden toy chest. Inside were mainly tracks for hot wheel cars. I left the lid slightly ajar and before I climbed in, I did the same to the closet door. I looked up at a shaft of light coming from my room. I spent a lot of time playing in my closet or just being there because it was as far away from the world as I knew how to get. I always kept the door to my room closed, and the closed closet door was a second wall. But sometimes, I wanted to retreat more, and being in the toy chest added a third wall.
The memory wanted resolution (pull the boy out of the toy chest), and I am working though that process. The memory replayed in my mind, not to retraumatize, but because some part of me has decided I’m ready for healing. The feelings are intense. The set of memories where I’m in the toy chest were pivotal moments in my life’s path. And I felt trapped between a terrifying emotional wall of where I’m feeling that the resolution lies and the realization that with my awareness I cannot walk away (repress). I felt trapped. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to escape. And as my frustration mounted, my mind spinning, I realized that was my life—from my earliest moments of self-awareness, I figured out ways to put myself inside of walls. It feels like the act of existence is too scary for my mind to fully accept—and it needs walls.
There is the pain of life from which I wanted protection. But it’s also the way my mind intrinsically functions. My mind rarely goes quiet. Thought constantly floods through and over it around many things, analyzing past actions and the paths forward with potential outcomes, and I bring constant intensity, with a merging of feeling and thought. I lead with Introverted Intuition which works by identifying patterns and meaning. Pattern recognition was one of my top strengths at work because the flow of work relied upon processes which relied upon dependable functional patterns and when there was a problem, my mind was wired to see it. But pattern recognition works by gathering a lot of data and then running comparative analysis of past experiences to understand meaning. There is no off switch. Analysis can run for minutes, hours, days, months, and yes, even years. There is no dimmer. The most trivial of conversations or decisions go through this intense processing.
When it comes to myself, my mind feels like a trap. The overwhelming flow of thought and feeling is like trying to paddle upstream in a white-rapids river. Typical of an INFJ, my mind holds on to pain—not out of a victim-hood mentality, but out of a driven need to understand the pain, why it happened, whether it was justified or served any purpose. Was I to blame? Pain is not just stored, it’s felt, analyzed and dissected over and over and over again, and in the process, the pain itself ingrains itself into emotional memory, reinforced and remembered, becoming all the harder to release. Because the sad truth is, the kind of meaning or purpose that my mind seeks is often not there, and that itself creates another kind of trap. I will never find what doesn’t exist—a quixotic quest with no ending.
The world is also a scary place a lot of the time, and as much turmoil as my mind has, it feels safer than the chaos outside of it. From the perspective of my inner world, existence is a trap, a cage, a place of walls with little room to breathe. And my mind has naturally replicated that perceived truth in my physical world as well.
I’m grateful for the awareness. I think that in places, I will be able to embrace a different perspective. In the case of my triggered memory, I’ve let go the feeling of being trapped because of that awareness. The internal image of being pushed and blocked between two opposing directions has faded. My little boy in the toy chest has become a metaphor for living a small, scared life. It’s time for the part of me trapped in the toy chest to come out and play. There is a piece of work that must be done, and it feels like a descent into a valley of terror. But I will not walk into the shadows alone. And I will walk with faith.
