But I thought I would write a quick post in reaction to a conversation I had last night with a woman in a bar. She is having trouble with her boyfriend, they have a boy together, and both had very troubled childhoods: her parents had a really ugly divorce when she was 6, and his mother left the family when he was 3 without notice.
As she was leaving I told her: remember you are both scarred human beings and you don’t really know why you do half the things you do.
And I was remembering, remembering arguments I’ve been in. What happens is we carry all these little harmonic emotional strings in us which vibrate to certain frequencies easily. They are attuned to hear, for example, contempt and rejection, even when it is not there. This triggers a whole cascade of reactive and largely unconscious responses.
This is how you get into huge arguments over nothing.
And it occurred to me that freedom is detuning all those string. It is processing all the hurts, first, but then all the instincts, such that you know them and feel them, and can allow them the proper and healthy place in your life. This is mastering “the body”. This is mastering sin. This is human perfection.
And it occurred to me as well that if I had been a perfect listener, I would not have offered advice (I didn’t offer much, but some), but done the task of helping her see herself more clearly, and figuring out how to solve her own problems. True emotional problem solvers are facilitators. They are not doers, or advice givers. We are all born with all the knowledge we need. We just suppress it with all the other things we cram into our closets, and leave in the dark.