You Get With This Or You Can Get With That

One way that I try to have control over my life is through perfectionism. I would like to say that this trait is due in part to me being a Virgo but I know better than to give that response. Perfectionism give me the false belief that I am in control. I don’t have to tell you by now (if you’ve been reading the blog) that this was born out of childhood trauma. Because I had no control over what was happening in my life, when I got older I subconsciously did everything in my power to control the tiniest detail. Early in my healing journey I was able to work through this and slowly let go of control. I’m not completely free from perfectionism but I am much closer than I was a decade ago.

A couple of years ago I was reading a book about duality and the way that we see things through a dualistic lens. The goal that this book was trying to get the reader to reach was the fact that there is no duality and in truth all is one. Nuance and complexity can be challenging to understand and even more challenging to integrate. Think about it like this. Two things that seem diametrically opposed, can both be true at the same time. We can feel grief and peace at the same time. We can feel great love and great pain at the same time. And that feels confusing because life is so much easier when things are in a neat and tidy box with a cute bow around it.

I can get down with the fact that someone hurt me but to acknowledge that I have also hurt someone (maybe even the same person) is a hard to accept. And why is that? Puritanical practices and beliefs tell us that something has to be one or the other and there can be no overlap. But life doesn’t operate under such extreme duality. Yet each day we try and fit ourselves into the defined boxes that make other people feel better. We rob ourselves of understanding the dealing with the complexity of life.

Perfectionism and people pleasing are the two skills that I learned early on. I pretty much lived my life off of theses two pillars. And duality works well under these skills because if I only see life as “this or that” then I will work hard at sticking to one side of the spectrum and making sure I get that aspect “right”. Meanwhile the other side of the spectrum is also valid but I ignore it and as a result my life is imbalanced.

Envision a see-saw. We all, I believe, played on one as a kid. In order for the see-saw to work there had to be another person on the other side. True life isn’t meant for there to be a continual back and forth but a balance where you and the other person are both being held in loving compassion. The back and forth means that my needs get met more than yours and then the weight shifts and then your needs get met over mine. There’s always an imbalance. I believe that true love and true power allows for the complexity of AND rather than OR. This has been the most challenging aspect of my healing journey thus far. To know that two things can be true at the same time. My world doesn’t shatter when that happens though internally it feels as such.

Honestly I’m still grappling with this work as we speak. I think that’s by design. The more conflicted we are about holding two seemingly opposed truths together at the same time the more we are likely to pick a side. Duality wins and we categorize things as good and bad. Through that labeling we can treat what is bad as evil and do so much work to try and not slip into those traps (though we do time and time again which only perpetuates the shame spiral, but that’s a conversation for another time). We yearn to be seen as good, to be right. And if that means that we have to sacrifice someone else, even our own truth, in order to stay within the cozy confines of the good/right box then that’s all that matters.

We find comfort in teetering between two opposite ends of the spectrum rather than living with what is.