What If We Encourage One Another to Heal?
Originally written May 2014.
Some ruminations on really unhealthy ass advice from friends and loved ones after a break up from a romantic relationship, and why we need to learn to encourage one another better than we do.
Pt. 2 | The Beauty of Intentional Healing, Written in Extended Metaphor
photo by sharon mccutcheon
I am simultaneously perturbed and baffled by the encouragement I’ve been getting from people (just a week after my break up—someone tried to hook me up with their nephew?) to “get back out there” and start dating again.
First of all, I don’t know where “there” is. I’ve never been “there”—I have never just randomly and casually dated people in my life, so why on God’s green Earth I would begin what I personally consider asinine, self-defeating, and pointless behavior at the age of 29, I do not know. I am much too busy being awesome and accomplishing fairly important things to waste my time, energy, and affections on “hanging out” with some person and hoping it manifests itself into something more.
Second, I am somewhat peeved on behalf of the individuals that I am constantly encouraged to just “get back out there” with and use as a “rebound.” The rebound concept makes me so angry.
A rebound is a thing that happens in a game. These men?
They are human beings with feelings and genuine lives of their own, that I would prefer to be meaningful part with and augment—not manipulate them into using themselves up to nurse me back to health.
If someone was really sick or had a broken bone, we wouldn’t encourage them to go throw up on or wallop someone else with a baseball bat to feel better because, of course, feeling better is not what happens—we just spread the illness and cause more pain.
So why in the world do we encourage people to barf their unstable feelings and spirit on another person—which we are, of course, encouraged to hide (aka, lie about) until we get close enough to that person that they want to take care of us and help “fix us?” Or close enough that we can latch on and drain them of their good will. (For the record, there are terms for this—a man who does this is an incubus; a woman who does it is called a succubus. If we want to go gender neutral: Energy Vampires.)
After all of the draining and using so they can feel better, the original party is still barfing or has a broken bone, and now another super sad or pissed person is running around with the same condition…looking for someone else to inflict it on as encouraged by their friends or a poor personal decision.
Please don’t encourage me or others to “use” people because it will supposedly make us feel better. It doesn’t, at least not in ways that are helpful or genuinely meaningful.
Please don’t encourage people to cycle the issues we’re experiencing rather than deal with them. Because that may well be what someone else’s friends encouraged them to do to our friends, and that’s why we’re even sitting here trying to make our friend feel better.
There’s nothing wrong with healing—in fact, everything is right about it. Encouraging (and even not discouraging when we realize it’s chronic) non-mutual bed-hopping and relationship-hopping is not helping or healing—that’s barfing on other people and breaking their legs.
We as people are supposed to encourage one another to heal. We as friends should actively support it.
And if we are this people—please, let’s heal. It is both absurd and hypocritical to be in a funk about what someone did to us…while we’re doing it to other folks. And if we’re going to keep doing it to other folks, I’m completely disinterested in hearing about the funk we’re in.
Because that’s not caring about love and justice. That’s thinking we can take a dump on the world ourselves, while expecting that we somehow get to avoid all the shit.