When I look at people through a mental wellbeing lens, I roughly distinguish four types:
1) the naturally balanced person;
2) the traumatised person that is unaware of its trauma;
3) the traumatised person that is aware of its trauma but doesn’t have a solution; and finally
4) the traumatised person that has found working solutions, aka the artificially balanced person
Note that these are in no way academically recognised categories of humans; it’s simply an paradigm that works for me until something better comes to mind.
Now you may think; why is everything about trauma these days? Well; almost all of us have some kind of trauma, big or small. For some it causes nothing more than personality quirks, for others it stops happiness in every thinkable way, and all the shades of grey in between.
The reason why so many people are analysis and discussion that subject, is that Covid caused something unexpectedly beautiful; it stopped the entire human rat race, that we all hated but that no one could arrest, dead in its tracks. That tiny respiratory virus halted the world and for the first time since perhaps the Renaissance (and I being dramatic?) mankind is globally rethinking happiness and the purpose of life.
I was thinking adding the period just after World War 2, but I don’t because our grand parents and great grand parents were too traumatised and too busy putting bare necessities back into their life to ponder on life and happiness.
But I digress. The first category of naturally balanced people are in my view rare, but they exist. These are the people that grew up in absence of any trauma. Their parents were healthy minded, relatively happy people, who were (cognitively and emotionally) intelligent enough to raise their child to become a healthy minded, relatively happy human adult themselves. If that description sounds a bit alienated, you’d be right; I have no clue what that’s like; I can only tell by deduction. These people are some of my former class mates who still live where they were born, they married their high school sweethearts, they have every day jobs that make them happy. Their passions are generally still there over that they had when young. They never needed to migrate to other countries or pick up an extreme sport to become happy; they already were.
I look at them with a mix of envy and dismissal; I would love to be like that, but I can’t. My mind’s natural state of being natural state of being is not happiness; it needs to be fed happiness externally.
The second category of people covers a big part of mankind. Whenever people vote for Trump, scream at a cashier or indulge in excessive alcohol, substance or food abuse, you can rest assured you are dealing with this category.
I was like this for the biggest part of my life; flip flopping between externalizing my problems and considering myself an absolute failure; in absence of the right understanding of why I was behaving like this, that was the only reasonable conclusion I could draw whenever I ran out of people to blame. And yet I wasn’t ready to accept that I had a problem am that could be fixed, because that means I own it to the world to solve my problem and stop being that asshole.
It is the type of person I have compassion for but limit interaction with. If they are not ready to be helped what good could come from that? Just as a crab needs to feel real pain before shedding its old shell, a painful and dangerous process, our psyche needs to cook in its own misery long enough before embarking on that journey.
The third category is where things get interesting; you become open to the idea that this is a problem that can be managed and that it is your problem ONLY. Note your parents, not the people that assaulted or sexually abused you. Accepting that, doesn’t absolve them from guiltbut it doesn’t change that fact that ownership for what happens lies only with you. This is where people start enquiring with others and seeking help, guidance. Many books are read and slowly you get more acquainted with being vulnerable. At first with an embarrassing amount of awkwardness but soon fully embracing it and possibly at times overdoing it.
This is where you start reading a lot of books, perhaps even start talking to a coach, counsellor or eventually even therapist. You don’t have answers yet, but you start looking. This where people become either teacher seekers or teaching seekers; some people know they need solutions, but they are not ready to take ownership. They try to outsource the solutionand end up latching on to a teacher, who will solve the problem for them. These people are not out of the woods yet, because a good teacher will knock them back and clarify that they own the problem themselves and a teacher can only assist, but many teachers are not good, they are just after money and lock dependents teacher seekers into long term and expensive relationships. The teaching seekers typically fare better, absorbing from each teacher what works for them and then moving on.
These teaching seekers eventually end in the fourth category, where solutions are starting to work for you and a road to healing lifts off. That process can take a big part of the test of your life. Depending on the level of trauma it may be a simple enhancement to your life or a game changer. In case of PTSD it complex PTSD it may be a life long gradual improvement.
Will there ever be a 5th category of people that have come full circle; a return to a natural state of happiness? I honestly don’t know. But it is that light at the end of the tunnel that I intuitively know must be there, because whilst from day to day I may not see much consistent improvement, from year to year, I most definitely see things getting brighter.
If you like to understand more about this topic or want to connect in coaching or counseling, reach out to me .
