no one is coming

“Perhaps it is the only thing that can force some people to resolve their deepest conflicts. Successful patients often come to regard it as the greatest opportunity they ever had for personal growth and development—truly a gift. Seeing illness as a misfortune, especially one that is undeserved, may actually obstruct the healing system. Coming to see the illness as a gift that allows you to grow may unlock it.” Dr. Andrew Weil

we know that the logical conundrums of mental illness can (sometimes) be treated with talk therapy, and that hope and agency and the capacity for personal transformation play pivotal roles in recovery from mental illness. Instead of downplaying the importance of those factors (which we do when we focus myopically on biological correlates that can’t be proven to exist), we should be exploiting the mind’s superlative built-in healing powers, which we know exist.

crying is a tremendous tool to have. I realize its healing potential now. For years, I was deprived of experiencing it. I mourn for that, believe it or not. As a man, you grow up trained to tough it out, suck it up, man up, etc., ad nauseam. You grow up thinking women who cry at the movies are addle-brained ninnies. Guess what? The joke’s on us. Crying is priceless. It’s cleansing. I can’t begin to describe the benefits if you’ve never experienced them. (If you’re a woman reading that last sentence, believe me when I tell you in all seriousness, there are, indeed, men who literally know nothing about crying; men who’ve never experienced the benefits, have no idea there are benefits to it.)

You should realize up front that, even if you’re ready to apply this (which you might not be, yet), it’s likely to be disorienting and painful. Take ownership of your situation. Be the responsible party—the person without whom none of your problems would exist—and claim ownership of your problems. Be the owner of record. Be the problem. Admit that you’re where your problems start, and where they end. Sounds awful, doesn’t it? After all, you wouldn’t be in the situation you’re in if it weren’t for those people (whoever they are: your parents, your ex-, your boss, the bullies in your life) who traumatized you. You wouldn’t be suffering if it weren’t for the unjust external circumstances that brought you so much pain. Everything can’t be your fault. Surely the people who visited trauma on you should get some of the credit. Hey listen. Yes, those people were evil. Whoever bullied you, raped you, beat you, lied to you, tortured you, put you in hell. But meanwhile, here you are, now, suffering. Whatever happened, happened. And it sucks. Terribly. But from this day forward, what happens to you is up to you. It’s not up to someone else to fix. It’s your life. You have to own it now.

Seeing yourself as the victim of your problems deprives you of the power to solve them. As a result, you’ll always look outside yourself for solutions. You’ll look for external fixes: drugs, therapy, sympathy, articles, books, advice. But the things that need fixing aren’t on the outside—and guess what? The “fix” isn’t going to come in a cardboard box. It’s not going to fall out of the sky, into your lap. Once you begin to see yourself as the sole owner of your problems, it’s possible (then, and only then) for you to also be the solution. This is a radical change of perspective for most people, because most people truly believe their problems were thrust on them by outside circumstances and other people. And it’s true, external events can be cruel. But trauma is internal, not external. It’s a truism that trauma specialists know only too well: There is no such thing as a traumatic event, per se, because trauma is what you experience; the trauma is not the event itself. It’s what happened inside you. It’s rare that you can fix something that happened to you by going back out into the world to right the wrong. I’m not saying you shouldn’t seek justice if an injustice was done. What I’m saying is that justice and healing are two different things. If you were raped, the rapist should be put in jail, yes. Definitely. But putting the rapist in jail doesn’t unrape you.

But be clear: Past events are in the past. You can’t change them. So don’t even try. Stop worrying about things you can’t change! It’s wasted energy.

Focus on what you can change. Mostly, that’s you.

Your current situation is what matters.

Own the situation so that it doesn’t own you.

Psychologist Nathaniel Branden has an even more brutal way of putting it: “No one is coming.”

No therapist is coming with the magic insight that’s going to unlock the doors to Hell and set your spirit free. No book (including this one) is going to give you that special, priceless advice that’s going to turn your life around. No Zen master is going to show you the key to enlightenment. No miracle pill, no miracle solution, is going to put things right, like magic.

There is no magic.

No one is coming.

The moment you can accept that no one is coming (which I’m sure you already know, anyway, somewhere deep in your heart)—the moment you can embrace that concept—it’s a transformative moment, because it means you are the one with the ultimate power. No one needs to come.The fact that no one is coming means you have nothing left to fear.

Of course, if you prefer to remain a helpless victim, waiting for someone else, or some external event or thing, to change your life, you can do that—you can choose to remain a helpless bystander and hope for an eventual miracle from the outside. But you may be waiting a long time.There was a period in my life, during my 10+ years of major depression, when I thought every problem I had was not of my making; I’d simply been the victim of various unfortunate circumstances (which were mostly someone else’s fault, of course). And you know, honestly, a lot of my problems were caused by external events, some of them my fault, some not. A lot of it was situational. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I now own the consequences of those past events; I own the trauma. The trauma is my reaction to those events and their aftermath. That’s something I own. No one else can claim it.