Your problems are not wrong. They feel awful but they’re not pathologies to just try to zap away. They’re meaningful and purposeful processes designed to wake you up to something new, increase your self awareness, and expand who you are. They’re your personal growth trying to happen.
Your difficulty has an inherent purpose, and even though it messes up your life, that’s not its purpose. Its aim is to make you grow. With the right tools you can discover how even your worst problem is your doorway into personal transformation.
If you think about it, this is the exact opposite of what we’ve all been taught. Everything we hear about mental health, relationship problems, work issues, and so on, centers on trying to get rid of the problem. We’re really big on quick fixes, suppressing symptoms, bypassing conflict, and generally trying to make it all go away. So, claiming that our problems are meaningful and purposeful is the antithesis of what what we’ve been told—“Be happy, pull it together, don’t be so sensitive, be normal like everyone else, and if you’re depressed, or anxious, or phobic, get some medication to mask it.”
Nowhere is this “conquer-the-problem” attitude more prevalent than in America. It’s part of our pioneering, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, industrious spirit. But the one place this doesn’t really work is with our life problems. Rates of depression, anxiety, and attention deficit have sky-rocketed in the last ten years. The more we try to tamp it down with potions and pills, the worse it gets.
Saying that problems have something valuable in them flies in the face of everything in conventional psychology and psychiatry. They view problems as illnesses to cure, not as meaningful processes to unfold. Even the more holistic approaches to therapy tend to view our emotional wounds like one would view a physical wound–as an unfortunate trauma that requires interventions to make the pain go away. Your wounding is viewed as a poison for which you need medicine.
This is all backwards. The poison is the medicine. Everything in your life, including your worst pain, aims, ultimately, at helping you transform who you are. It’s not just about making your symptoms disappear, or even healing the wound; these are important things to do, but there’s something much deeper and profound going on when a problem enters your life. It’s your calling. It’s your sign that transformation is trying to happen. The problem itself is just the seed, the impetus, the agitating force to get you onto the path of change, growth, and consciousness.
This is actually an ancient idea that I’ve updated to modern times. The first healers–medicine men and women–were called shamans. They were the first psychologists (as well as the first musicians and spiritual leaders). The term, ‘shaman,’ means ‘wounded healer,’ ‘one who knows,’ and ‘one who sees in the dark.’ In ancient tribal cultures, a person afflicted with what we’d call a mental health problem, was viewed as a potential healer, because their wounding was considered a calling to leave their everyday, normal existence, and dive into the spirit world, or what we would call their psychology or process. Their poison was their medicine.
Problems are purposefully designed catalysts for your growth and expansion. to put it succinctly, your problem is your process. Your wounding is the doorway to transforming your life on the deepest level. Pain and suffering hurt, and we want it to go away. This is totally understandable. But the reason problems happen is to irritate, disturb, frustrate, hurt, and even threaten to kill us, in order to get our attention onto something we need to wake up about.
Why do we need to wake up about things? Waking up means growing, and growing is the essence of life–creation, transformation, change, expansion, process. Life isn’t about one static state of being. In fact, the more you try to establish an unchanging, set condition for your life, even if you’re sitting on a mountaintop meditating, the more problems are going to find you. This is just how nature works.
A problem has a purpose, and despite the fact that life pain is an awful experience, making you suffer isn’t its primary purpose. It’s designed to get your attention. It’s an alarm signal calling you to yourself to bring your focus onto the hidden directions trying to happen in your life.
Just wanting to get rid of what bothers you without getting its message is instinctive but it’s an attitude rooted in a simplistic understanding of life—and it’s ineffective. An accurate psychology of the human mind changes our perception of problems as meaningless mistakes into meaningful opportunities for profound change and growth. Once you have the tools to dive into and unfold your process, you’ll be able to experience real transformation.
Martin Luther King said a riot is the language of the unheard. Your problems are like personal riots; they’re your process calling out for attention. They need you to wake up to what you don’t yet see, hear, and feel.
