tilting at windmills
I recently had a personal trip wire pulled and I've been working to engage in a different experience aiming for a different outcome than the many that came before. What do I mean by trip wire? Well, wether a person acknowledges it or not, we all have wounded places in the psyche, that when triggered, send us reeling back through time, scraping along the jagged, unresolved places where our innate perfectness began to unravel, bit by bit.
Everyone has this experience though we approach it uniquely. Most of us do anything possible to deny we have patterns birthed from some long ago initial trauma(s). In time, we can't recall the origin of our pain and rest foolishly comforted by the amnesia, repeating the same painful pattern again and again.
When I reflect on the last decade of my life, I see the pattern as clear as day. I can tug on the strands until they bring me within inches of the original trauma. I've given a lot of time, energy, reflection and heart to knowing my original pain, well. And yet, there is something I still have left to learn with this particular story, otherwise the pattern wouldn't persist. The trip wire is pulled, often without my seeing it coming, and the body fills with fight or flight hormones, and releases all the internal thoughts and beliefs I've carried since that first wound. In an instant, I can go from confident and happy to meek and shattered.
I am glad to know I am not the only person this happens to but, still, that knowledge doesn't give me peace when the trigger is active. Coping mechanisms kick in, and often, they are quick fixes and don't have long term positive health effects. The unconscious mind takes the wheel and drives through the day with the limited knowledge and wisdom I had when I was 9. It is easy to metaphorically run people over, myself included. It is easy to make a mess of things, unintentionally. Which, of course, only adds to debilitating feelings of relational anxiety.
The enemy of these stories is fictional. There is no enemy. At least not anymore. Though, with unchecked patterns, we can very easily create present day enemies to distract ourselves. And, if we make the space to expand, we can grow to recognize that everyone in the story is playing out some unresolved trauma or maladaptive pattern. Pool us all together and we have a symphony of suffering that looks and sounds just like getting by.
“At this point they came in sight of thirty forty windmills that there are on plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, “Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God’s good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth.”
”What giants?” said Sancho Panza.
”Those thou seest there,” answered his master, “with the long arms, and some have them nearly two leagues long.”
”Look, your worship,” said Sancho; “what we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go.””
So what are these triggers? These trip wires... these stories we tell ourselves of grand delusion? They are our inability to see things as they are in the present moment. They are monsters we create, influenced by all the pains that came before. In one fell swoop we can assign our entire life's pain to one, ragged and innocent person. For she has stepped, unknowingly, into our shadow and pulled our trigger.
The battle then, is to grow aware. To become awake to our own delusions. To adjust the projections we place on the world and the people in the stories we tell about our lives closer to "accurate" and "true." To learn to see the windmill for what it is. And to be okay in that moment of little stress and strain... a moment that may not require our projection at all.
One of the ways in which I will do things differently, this time, is that I will, starting NOW, replace the story with self-assurance and compassion. I will repeat soothing mantras of peace and calm rather than retell a story in my mind or with my mouth of how something is unjust, incorrect or how this abstract situation takes away my power. Because it doesn't. I do that. The only monster, then, is me. Everything else... windmills.