Protecting Our Wounds
Our lives can leave us with wounds. I have a bad shoulder from shoveling snow one year. The moral of that story is that a snow blower is cheaper than physical therapy. If I do the exercise to strengthen my shoulder regularly my shoulder is fine. If I do not, however, it can become weak and more susceptible to pain. One interesting piece of this is that I know that whether my shoulder is in a good place or not, I am protective of it. This affects how I carry things, reach for things, play with my kids… and on and on. Daily I am protecting.
Our lives can leave us with wounds, and sometimes they are physical. Others are from the trauma of things that happened or were done to you. They can be from the neglect of things that were not done. Like any wounds, this can leave us trying to protect ourselves from being hurt again in that same place or way.
We are adaptive and we learn. We learn to protect ourselves. No one wants to be hurt again. If someone close to you did not care for you, if trust was betrayed, if needs were left unmet, we can create defenses to keep ourselves from needing to experience these hurts again. But sometimes these tools, habits, or patterns in our lives leave us unable to connect to others in our lives. We are left isolated and unable to trust and let others care for us, because what if they don’t? What if they take advantage or hurt us? What if they find my wound?
The adaptive changes that we make affect our lives. You may be really good at figuring out what others need, at meticulously dotting all “I”s and crossing all “t”s, at thinking and planning for all possible outcomes. This can make you a hard worker, model employee, and the person who gets it done.
What happens when these same laudable skills are taken into the context of a couples’ relationship? What happens when the thing that protects your wounds and has made you successful in one area of your life get in the way of a safe and relationally intimate relationship? The wounds keep you from letting others care for your needs in emotional and practical ways because… What if they don’t?
The adaptive behavior that has helped you in one area of your life is holding you back from what you want in another.
Sometimes the process of therapy is adding new skills to what you can do, or refining skills that are present. Other times the process of change involves recognizing the skills that have helped in our success in one area are also holding us back in another area.
We cannot change the path that got us to where we are. We can, however, choose to lean into our own agency and seek to change the way that our wounds affect how we engage in the world now and in the future.
Kyle McClure, LCPC