Beautiful Uncomfortable Humanity

All the best lessons I learned about being uncomfortable came from group therapy.

I had preconceived assumptions about what a group therapy program would be like before I found myself participating in one 3-5x a week for 2 months. Not all of them were wrong.

It could be awkward listening to other people talk, or talking in front of others, even more so. There were a lot of cringey group activities and ice breakers. Some people were frustrating to be around every day, and others made me wonder if I frustrated them.

I think the genius of group therapy is the inability to escape humanity that doesn’t look like what we curate for ourselves. Doing the work, showing our damaged guts to people we would likely never cross paths with anywhere else, examining theirs, too-

It’s uncomfortable as hell, but that’s the real fucking magic of it all.

When I think about all the ways I’ve grown and changed on this healing… journey….

Wait. I have to say that “journey” makes all this sound so much prettier than it is, and it feels like bullshit to call it that. Healing hike? Healing trudge? Healing… let me open Thesaurus.com real quick for some “healing journey” alternatives.

Healing safari
Healing commute
Healing odyssey
Healing walkabout
Healing expedition
Healing junket lololololol

When I think about all the ways I’ve grown and changed on this healing SLOG, the most meaningful transformation in me has come from softening to others and accepting their emotions, their stories, their presence in spaces I want to keep myself protected in, and their humanity.

The traumatized urge to shut down, ice out, and ignore people I’m worried may hurt me- that hasn’t served me well. My brain would like to think it’s protected me from countless unfortunate fates, but I have no evidence to prove it has.

The traumatized urge to make myself small so that other people don’t feel unwelcome emotions around me- that’s the other side of the same sword. My brain protects me from danger, it thinks, by keeping people around me happy.

When you show up every day to sit in a sterile room with nothing anyone could throw or turn into a weapon, in a building where the bathrooms are designed so you can’t hang yourself or slit your wrists with broken pieces of mirror behind a locked door, where lunch is always served with a spork- when you go to that place, and you cry or you don’t cry, talk or don’t talk, but you’re always showing up- you are forced to face something you’ve likely been running from your whole life: Discomfort.

For me, the truth of it was there was no moment I suddenly felt like that whole experience got “better.” There was no Breakfast Club coming together over our differences. We showed up to different people and emotions every day. The ice breakers were continually cringe, and there were people I sat next to that made my body retract because they felt like a threat.

I listened to a man rant for 30 minutes one day about extremely triggering, sexist shit. I wrote over and over in my notebook “You are safe. Breathe. Stay in this moment. Let these emotions teach you.”

Then I opted not to go to the program the next day, the only day I took off not because of catching Covid in the middle of it. I emailed my group therapist, explained I felt triggered around that man, and I braced myself for her to tell me something about having to fight through triggers or whatever.

They ended up moving him to a different program, and I came back the following day. My therapist applauded me and my choice. I didn’t retreat when he began ranting while I was there. I noticed how my body felt- VERY UNCOMFORTABLE- but I didn’t assign an outcome to that, and I was ultimately not in danger.

Then, when I was regulated, I made a choice to not subject myself to that again. That’s not running from anything. That’s a boundary.

I learned I can sit with uncomfortable feelings. I don’t have to immediately try to protect myself from them. And also? I can set boundaries around those in the future. But, like, I can’t know where to draw the line if I run the minute I feel triggered, you know?

So group therapy, for me, was all a practice in facing and living with discomfort- and not just my own.

Breakthrough #1: I can sit with my own discomfort.
Breakthrough #2: Other people can sit with their discomfort.
Breakthrough #3: We are all only responsible for our own emotions and boundaries.

Something really powerful began to unwind from there.

Because if I can come to a place where I can not only let uncomfortable emotions come and go, but also recognize the lessons they are teaching me- instead of shutting down or running or putting up a wall- then why would I deprive people around me of that same opportunity?

One example:

I don’t like when my kids are sad or mad or acting out. It makes me feel uncomfortable for me AND on their behalf, but mostly on behalf of the people around us who must be thinking how terrible of a parent I am, or worse- how bad my kid is. But, depriving my children the time and space to feel and move through those emotions (in safe ways) doesn’t make me a better mom. My kids difficult emotions are just as valid as the emotions others feel in response to them.

This messy healing marathon isn’t ever going to bring us to a point when we get to the top of a hill and see Utopia below us, where discomfort doesn’t exist because we’ve fixed all of our problems. The point has never been to take us to better, perfect places.

This gruesome and sometimes bloody healing march is here to teach us how to focus inward on what’s going to get us another mile down the road, and to stop comparing our progress to others. The point is to humanize ourselves, and humanize others by proxy.

This sometimes shitty journey will eventually take us to the top of a hill, and we’ll look down and see another messy place with messy people, and we’ll finally feel confident that we have armed ourselves with good boundaries, and our hearts are open enough to hold the entire spectrum of emotions we may encounter. And that not only can we survive discomfort, we can learn from it, and we can hold space for the people we encounter to have the same opportunity.

I think there’s likely no better environment to get a crash course in embracing discomfort as part of the whole human experience than group therapy, but it’s certainly not the only place we can learn to build that skill.

Every time we choose to stay present when we want to shut down to protect ourselves, every time we make a conscious effort to recognize and give discomfort a name, every time we give ourselves the opportunity to see what will happen if we simply stay in that moment- that’s the real magic.

Utopia will never exist, but Beautiful Uncomfortable Humanity is real, and I like it here.