It’s true … we are in this TOGETHER!
The Peak Living Network is not about self-help. I believe the entire concept of “self-help” is actually a mistake when it comes to emotional healing. Not only does your recovery not have to be a solitary project, it can’t be; trying to heal on your own will move you only small distances — if it moves you at all. This is why consumers of self-help literature keep feeling like they’ve found the answer, only to see the benefits of each new approach fade over time. The result is that we keep hungrily grabbing up the next self-help approach that comes down the line and getting our hopes up again.
Emotional healing is collective. Either we heal in large numbers or we don’t heal much at all.
Human beings are not mountain lions. Throughout almost the entirety of human history, we have been born into tribes and clans where our membership was secure from the moment we emerged into the world. We are a species of animal that watches over each other, that shares food, that sleeps piled together, that cares for the sick, that gathers for wedding and funerals. It is only in the last 3% or so of our history that we have not lived in this manner, and so the need and desire to live in community is genetically programmed into us at the deepest levels.
The reason we are longing for connection is that we were built to live connected.
So one of the main reasons why we’re all struggling with feeling wounded and dissatisfied is because of ways that connection in our lives broke down, or because it failed to exist in the first place. Either the people who were supposed to be watching over us were hurting us instead, or there wasn’t anyone watching over us, or periods of each. Since aloneness is one of the most profound sources of our injuries — perhaps the single most profound source — it’s not surprising that we don’t heal well alone.
It’s not your fault that you keep trying to make changes in your life but those improvements mostly slip away each time. Stop dumping on yourself about the resolutions you haven’t been able to stick to, the diets you haven’t stayed on, the exercise programs you’ve dropped off of, the jobs you haven’t quit. Instead, start looking for how to build allies, working together for mutual healing and growth. This is what PLN is all about.
(This post is excerpted, with minor changes, from Lundy Bancroft’s book The Joyous Recovery, forthcoming in January 2017)
Written by Lundy Bancroft
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