A Defected Balloon

Three weeks into training as a therapist, my foremost learning has been that human beings want to save themselves from the pain but do not want to let go of the source of it. Lori Gottlieb in her book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone captures it appropriately, "Change and loss travel together. We can't have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want to change but nonetheless stay exactly the same."

Each one of my clients has been through a break-up. Their client registration forms (a form your therapist might ask you to fill prior to starting therapy sessions to know a little bit about you) state that their goal to come into therapy is that they want to move on and start focusing on themselves. Only, when in the session, they take 45 out of 60 minutes, along with 10 extra minutes just to talk about how much they miss that person who has hurt them immensely. They can feel their heart beating in their throat, they list out to me every possible way in which this person has caused them pain, anxiety, anguish, insecurity and at times even abuse; yet, in the same breath, they will tell me how they wish this person was back in their life. As I write my progress notes after sessions, I sit by myself and wonder, “Why is it that we can see when something makes us unhappy but not accept it? Why do we deny pain?”

I have been through a break-up as well. Who hasn’t, really? When my heart was broken, I did nothing different. I was hurting sick in my bones. It seemed to me, at that moment, that it all happened within one night. Clearly, it did not. It never does. We think it is the 100th blow that breaks the stone, mindfully ignoring the impact of the initial 99 blows.

Think about it this way-- have you ever played a water balloon fight? You fill balloons with water and throw them at each other. Every time you get a packet of balloons, there are always a couple of them that are defected i.e. have holes in them. This defective balloon cannot hold water and will continue to leak so it is not ideal for hurting someone because it would not have that much pressure inside. The same applies to human beings, as the ones who can hold everything inside, they burst open with such intensity that it is bound to hurt people as well as cause harm to themselves. However, the people with holes, can carry everything and regulate the amount of water they hold through their defects.

The water here is analogous to human emotions and we all are balloons, working our best when defective, imperfect and flawed. Because, if you are a perfect balloon, the pressure keeps on building up and when there is no place to let it out, your initial lack of disabilities is the silence before the storm. Here’s where mental illness swoops in and therapy begins.

Therapy can help you turn your rain into rainbows, with your own colours. It helps you understand your emotions. Healing has a lot to do with learning to regulate your emotions.

"It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters." (Epictetus)

Knowing how you are feeling, being able to recognize what is that emotion trying to communicate to you, when you need to sit with it, and when you need to let it go. Because emotions are not really good or bad, they just are. Some have a higher emotional quotient and are able to experience as well as express a broader spectrum of emotions while others might not feel so intensely and variedly.

Something I learned during my meditation practice is that emotions and thoughts are like waves, they come and they go. You do not have control over it, neither do you have to control it nor do you have to do anything about it; you just have to observe them. You can only change your reaction, how you behave in response to that emotion, giving you absolute control over how you actually want to live your life.