If You’re Not Having Fun You Aren’t Really Healing
It’s not all about misery and rumination. Healing should be filled with joy and beauty too.
My best clients have a bad habit. When they come to me, they’re looking for answers. They’ve been in self-help and trauma recovery for a long time, and most of them have a long list of tasks they want to achieve. I want to have a better relationship. I want to get over my childhood trauma. I want to eat better, sleep better, get a better career, and feel better about who I am. Box after box just waiting to be checked off.
Time after time, I have to take them aside and point out the trap they’ve stumbled into. While they see their search for continual self-improvement as a noble thing, I can see it for what it is, rumination, dissociation, and a quest for better, better, better.
They’re so focused on getting over the next hill, getting across a magical finish line, that they’ve lost sight of the rest of the journey along the way. Specifically, they’ve forgotten how to enjoy themselves, how to enjoy their lives. They’ve fallen into the trap of thinking they have to finish what they started before they can gain permission to celebrate themselves and their lives.
