Yesterday I wrote about the Gatehouse 8th Annual Healing the Voice Within Gala and how sometimes healing looks like a room full of people coming together to support others on their own healing journeys.
It felt good to write. Not because it was particularly easy, or because I had stumbled onto some great revelation. It felt good because nothing bad had to happen first.
That got me thinking about this blog.
Over the past while, I seem to have fallen into a pattern. Something difficult would happen. I would struggle with it. I would sit down here, work my way through what I was feeling, connect it to something from my past, and eventually find whatever lesson was hiding underneath it.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. In many ways, that is exactly why I started writing Inside Out Healing for Men. Writing has always been one of the ways I figure things out.
And to be fair, this summer has been difficult. I struggled, sometimes more than I wanted to admit. The posts reflected that because that’s where I was. I don’t want to rewrite the past few months now and pretend everything was fine. It wasn’t.
But when I looked at those posts together, I noticed something I wasn’t entirely comfortable with.
There was an awful lot of struggling.
Read enough of them in a row and you might get the impression that the struggle was the whole story. Something would go wrong, I would process it here, find some meaning in it, and then seemingly wait for the next thing to go wrong.
The struggle was real. It just wasn’t all that was real.
There was healing happening too. There was connection. There were good days and ordinary days. There were moments of laughter, gratitude and growth that didn’t demand my attention in quite the same way the difficult stuff did.
Maybe that’s part of what I’ve noticed. Pain has a way of insisting that we pay attention to it. Healing can be a lot quieter.
I’ve spent decades doing this work. Forty years in recovery. Years working through the effects of childhood sexual abuse. Years learning about myself, sometimes willingly and sometimes because life gave me little choice. And more recently, I’ve had the privilege of sitting with other men as they begin or continue their own healing.
Surely there is more to say about all of that than what happens when things go wrong.
There is what we build. There are the relationships that become possible. The things that don’t frighten us anymore. The boundaries we learn to set. The ability to ask for help. The moments when we recognize an old reaction and choose something different. The friendships, laughter, connection and occasional complete absurdity of being human.
There is also the simple fact that sometimes we’re okay.
Maybe noticing this pattern in my writing is itself part of healing.
I saw something I didn’t particularly like. I didn’t beat myself up about it. I didn’t decide those posts shouldn’t have been written. They were honest reflections of where I was when I wrote them.
I just don’t want them to be the whole story. So I’m changing direction a little. I’ll still write about the difficult days when there is something worth saying. That’s part of my life, too.
But I want to spend more time writing about men healing, not only men hurting.
About what happens after we’ve survived. About what we build when we finally have some room to build it.
And maybe, every once in a while, about absolutely nothing going wrong.