And pain is not the point, but rather feeling how disconnected from your own feelings and those of other people you became at some point. How disconnected I became.
And THAT process is painful. It is like thawing a frostbitten limb. Nobody would argue that the fact that frostbite makes you numb means it is positive, or that there is any easy way back to normalcy, or semi-normalcy, without going through the reacquisition of feeling.
It does seem helpful to titrate, to use Levine’s analogy, and to pendulate between the difficult feelings, and remembered or conjured positive ones. Still, the process is not precise, and some flooding is inevitable. You just have to deal with it, and accept it.
And I will say with respect to my last post that I don’t deny that sometimes I am an asshole. But what I would argue is that sometimes being confronted bluntly and unapologetically is what people need. What the outcome is depends largely on how they choose to take it, which means that I can’t know in advance if being nice or being a dick is going to be more useful. It is really out of my hands, and up to them.
As for me, I have my own shit currently to deal with, and have a pretty simple choice: have a pity party, or man up and deal with it. There is no way out of a pity party, so I’m going with option B, even though I don’t like it. The world doesn’t give a flying fuck if I like it.
The world as I see it is so much more complex than the simplistic creed of “being nice”. People need to be pushed sometimes, and “allowed” sometimes (given space and time), and they need to be loved, sometimes all at the same time. There is no perfect one answer that can ever be divorced from the process of perceiving dynamically, and adjusting regularly.