One of the surest and simplest ways to numb deep pains you don’t understand is to engineer superficial and concrete pains you do understand. This is the root of self destructive patterns, which exist in the main because the path to happiness lies in deep relaxation and self knowledge, and if deep pain waits in the places you need to get through to go there, then you will instinctively and self protectively avoid them, avoid conscious deep relaxation, and avoid thinking about emotional growth except when it is forced on you in relationship counseling, or when you hit rock bottom. For most people, for most intents and purposes, as I recall having said, growing and healing amount to the same thing. There was likely no pristine time for any of us fully free of pain, although in an ideally attuned home early infancy can be satisfying, I assume.
These avoidances are highly logical, but cannot end well. Only in knowing that fear and hurt, by befriending it, by connecting primitive feelings with present power, present kindness, present “parenting”, one might and with justice could say, can these places be cleared for more effective, more peaceful, happier living.
Most people are driven all their lives in directions they do not understand. This is masked by obsessions, and accidentally-on-purpose long and short term fuck-ups of all sorts. That, in any event, has been my own experience. I have always known I am much too smart to be this stupid, but I have not been able to find an alternative. Every time I tried to leave the cage I was prodded with pointed sticks, and could in any event not find the door.
However, I think I have now found it, perhaps them.