Integrating the Unbearable

Most people begin healing with a fantasy.

It is rarely spoken out loud, and often not even conscious, but it is there, nonetheless. The fantasy is that somewhere in the future there exists a version of us who no longer hurts; a version who no longer gets triggered, feels abandoned, becomes anxious when a partner pulls away, or finds themselves overwhelmed by grief, fear, disappointment, or despair.

We imagine healing as a kind of arrival. A destination where the difficult feelings have finally been resolved and the difficult experiences no longer happen.

This fantasy is understandable. It is also the source of tremendous suffering. Because that destination does not exist.

The goal of healing is not to become someone who no longer hurts.

The goal of healing is to develop a relationship with hurt . . . a capacity to hurt without losing all perspective.

In the previous two posts, I wrote about how children adapt when the adults around them are unable to provide the authority and response-ability the child needs. Beneath those adaptations lives something more fundamental: what I refer to as “The Unbearable.” The Unbearable is not a particular event. It refers to the experience of being alone or separated from support and comfort with an experience that was too much, too intense, too threatening to carry alone . . . when our nervous systems were young, primitive and undeveloped.

A frightened child left alone with fear. A grieving child left alone with heartache and loss. A lonely child left alone with doubt and confusion. A child longing for comfort that never arrives.

The pain of the circumstances matter, of course. But what often becomes unbearable is not the drama or incident, or the pain of the situation itself. What becomes unbearable is being alone with the pain. Having no other steady and consistent nervous system with which to attune and regulate. The child wonders, “How do I cope with this very big movement of insecurity, anxiety, through my body?”

A client once described an argument with his wife that had consumed an entire weekend. By Monday morning he was still replaying the conversation in his head, still gathering evidence, still constructing his case. He could explain in exquisite detail why he was right and why she was wrong.

But as we upacked the experience, the hurt beneath the anger emerged. Beneath the hurt was longing. Beneath the longing was a simple wish: “I wanted her to care that I was affected, that I was hurting. I wanted her to come to me.”

And beneath that discovery was something even older: the feeling of being alone without the capacity or the resources to hold the experience himself. In the body of a child this sense of separation feels life threatening . . . and for my adult client . . . his wife’s diminishment of his concerns and perceived rejection of his need felt exactly the same.

Not because his wife had literally abandoned him. Not because she had done anything unresolvedly terrible. But because the argument had opened a doorway into an experience he had spent decades organizing his life around avoiding.

This is often how The Unbearable emerges. Not as a narrative memory. But as a somatic wave or rush; a physical, bio-chemical reaction that floods the system, and seems too large . . . out of proportion for the moment that triggered it. It can feel suffocating; annihilative.

When we talk about attachment styles, we usually speak as though they are each fundamentally different. And while they are behaviorally distinct, at the deepest level all attachment styles are avoidant strategies. Avoidant or anxious, humans, generally speaking, are attempting to solve the same problem: How to avoid returning to the experience of being alone with pain, with the possibility of death that could result when separated from resources and comfort. Additionally, if the parent is also the source of the humiliation, shame or pain, the helplessness and hopelessness of such a predicament is utterly unbearable.

The anxious partner pursues reassurance. The avoidant partner distances from vulnerability. The perfectionist performs. The people pleaser accommodates. The controller seeks certainty. Different strategies. Same destination. Make the sense of hopelessness and helplessness, the sense of “no way out,” STOP.

As Gabor Maté has observed throughout his work, many of the behaviors we later label as pathology began as intelligent adaptations. The adaptation is not the problem. In many cases it was brilliant. It helped us survive circumstances that would otherwise have overwhelmed us. The question is not whether the adaptation was wrong. The question is whether it is still serving the life we are trying to live now.

This is where I often see a gap emerge in the healing journey. Many people have done significant work. They understand their attachment style. They have spent years in therapy. They have participated in profound somatic work, psychedelic medicine journeys, Internal Family Systems, Hakomi, EMDR, breathwork, and other modalities that have helped them contact aspects of themselves that were previously hidden from awareness. They receive the loving kindness of practitioners who model holding and presence the child needed, but may never have received.

And yet they still find themselves standing in the kitchen at six o’clock on a Tuesday evening, exhausted, overwhelmed, and activated because their child will not put on their shoes. Or because their partner forgot something important. Or they are lying awake at two in the morning feeling lonely despite being married to someone they genuinely love.

The question becomes obvious: If I have done all this work, why am I still reacting?

The assumption underneath the question is that healing should have eliminated the reaction. But what if healing was never intended to eliminate the reaction? What if healing is not the removal of vulnerability but a different relationship to vulnerability?

Many forms of deep healing work create profound opportunities to encounter the original wound. They allow us to access grief, fear, loneliness, longing, helplessness, rage, and heartbreak that have often been buried beneath decades of adaptation. This work matters enormously. But there is another challenge waiting on the other side of these experiences and insights.

The person who has just completed a beautiful Hakomi session still has to go home. The person who has just experienced a life-changing psychedelic journey still has to go home. The person who finally understands their attachment style still has to go home. Waiting there are children, spouses, obligations, financial pressures, aging parents, uncertainty, disappointment, traffic, illness, and all the ordinary frustrations of being human.

The wound may have been revealed and tenderly met. The question now becomes: How do I live with what I know? How do I parent myself when I am triggered? How do I remain responsible for my experience when my nervous system is convinced I am facing an emergency? How do I recognize that I am standing at the threshold of The Unbearable without expecting my partner or my child to rescue me from it?

These are developmental questions. Therapy can help us discover the child. Life asks us to become the adult relative to the child we discover in our deep processes.

I do not believe the goal is to become someone who no longer feels vulnerable. I do not believe the goal is to become someone who no longer needs. I do not believe the goal is to become someone who no longer feels grief, loneliness, longing, uncertainty, disappointment, or helplessness. Those experiences are not evidence of failure. They are evidence of humanity.

The child inside us believes that somewhere there exists a person, partner, therapist, spiritual teacher, medicine, or practice that will finally provide enough.

Enough love. Enough reassurance. Enough understanding. Enough comfort. Enough consistency. Enough attention. Enough presence. ENOUGH.

At the heart of that longing is the fantasy of hope that kept us alive, often for decades. It chose our spouses and our jobs and our friends. As children, our survival genuinely depended upon someone else. We needed comfort, protection, attunement, and care. It made sense to believe that relief would come from outside us because, in childhood, it had to. The challenge is that many of us carry that expectation into adulthood without realizing it.

We continue searching for the one source that will finally complete the unfinished experience. We ask our spouse to become what no spouse can become. We ask a therapist to heal what no therapist can. We ask a spiritual path to remove uncertainty. We ask success to eliminate vulnerability. We ask our children, sometimes unconsciously, to reassure us that we are okay.

Adulthood begins when we recognize that the problem is not the need for enough. The problem is the belief that any one source should be responsible for resolving it.

No human being can provide enough love or comfort to eliminate need itself. Not because people are selfish. Not because they are failing us. Because need is part of being alive. It defines the human experience.

Life remains full of nourishment. A loving spouse. A trusted friend. Meaningful work. Beauty. Nature. Community. Creativity. Prayer. Rest. Movement. Service. God. None of them provide everything. All of them provide something.

This is the shift I see in people as healing efforts mature. They stop organizing their lives around relief and begin organizing their lives around nourishment. Relief is urgent. Nourishment is ongoing. Relief wants the feeling to disappear. Nourishment helps us carry the weight of need and grief with humility and gratitude.

The mature adult does not stop needing. The mature adult stops demanding that any one source become everything. They learn to receive what is available, grieve what is unavailable, and continue participating in life anyway.

One of the things I have learned, both personally and professionally, is that healing does not move in a straight line. There have been moments in my own life when I genuinely believed I had resolved a particular grief, fear, or vulnerability, only to discover it waiting for me years later under entirely different circumstances.

Earlier in my life I interpreted this as failure. I assumed the reappearance of pain meant I had missed something, not gone deep enough, or not worked hard enough. Now I understand it differently.

Life is not asking us to graduate from vulnerability. Life is asking us to deepen our relationship with it and expand our capacity for it. The appearance of grief does not mean I am broken. The appearance of longing does not mean I am unfinished. The appearance of loneliness does not mean something has gone wrong. These experiences are evidence that I am alive. Evidence that I still have a heart capable of loving, losing, hoping, and needing.

Increasingly, I have come to understand that this is not the obstacle to adulthood. It is adulthood.

The wound does not disappear. The wound becomes part of the story rather than the author of the story. The vulnerability remains. The relationship to vulnerability changes. The need remains. The relationship to need evolves and matures. The unbearable remains. The relationship to the unbearable, as it becomes bearable, transforms us.

The goal of healing is not to become someone who no longer hurts. The goal of healing is to become someone who knows how to belong to themselves, in this world, when they do.