You Can Be Too Open

A client of mine recently went on a retreat where the facilitators asked participants to share something traumatic they’d been through. My client didn’t feel particularly safe, so she said she’d like to pass. But the others kept pressuring her. At one point, they started chanting, “Op-en up! Op-en up!” like a mob at the Colosseum. She stormed out of the room. I told her I was proud of her.

There are so many things wrong with what happened to her. But the story also exposes a persistent misunderstanding about healing. For over a century, Western culture has been fascinated by a "pressure-cooker" model of the human psyche: that we’re unhappy simply because we hold too much inside. And there’s some truth to this. We can’t heal what we don’t bring awareness to.

But healing isn’t just about hitting the piñata of our hearts until our emotions explode all over the floor. It’s also about the slower work of learning to relate to ourselves with more kindness. And overriding our inner protectors isn’t kind.

Sometimes the voice that says, “I don’t want to talk about this” isn’t simply resistance to healing. Sometimes, listening to it is the healing: learning that we’re allowed to have boundaries, that we don’t owe everyone — including ourselves — immediate access to everything within us.

The Buddha once used the metaphor of a salt crystal. If you put the salt crystal in a small glass of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But put the crystal in a wide river and you barely taste it. In other words, we suffer not just because of what happened to us, but because of the way we’ve learned to hold it.

I’ve never met a human being whose pain came only from not being open enough. In fact, you can be too open, especially when openness comes from the belief that you’re broken or bad and need to rip out the rotten thing inside you. Notice how you are relating to yourself. Start there, and what you're ready to say and who you want to say it to will fall into place.

As always, if you’d like to be held through your process, reach out and we’ll set up a free coaching call.

Lucian Freud, "Unfinished Self-Portrait" (1956)