We overcome rather than resolve

Sometimes it takes years to catch up with our own subconscious feelings. We may have a glimpse of it, a peak over the shelf, but we don’t quite understand. Or, the notion may be swimming around in our heads and we just can’t quite put it into words.

It is the ability to put something onto paper or explain it to someone else that helps us to understand how we feel. Movies butcher this idea. We see psychologists helping patients to reach some final and ultimate realization about themselves. They quickly go through the therapy and then voila! they realize that it wasn’t their fault they were abused. Now it’s all sunny skies and chirping birds.

Life does not work this way. Understanding how you feel takes work. This work may be the process of talking things through, or writing or building houses. But we are better off if we avoid envisioning some final realization, and instead, think of it as a gradual process of understanding ourselves. There may be some final realization, but there may not be. The best we can hope for in working out our problems is management, not resolution.