What if you can’t actually handle it?

Wake-Up Call #35

There’s this trope I keep seeing.

It comes up in the self-help world over and over.

Social media loves it big-time.

“The world/Universe/God will never give you more than you can handle.”

As you know by now, I’m a bit of a self-help contrarian.

Not that I’m in any way against personal growth, I’m all in.

I am against ideas or proclamations that get likes on social media, but all too often sugarcoat a more complex truth, and, without intention, seed an undercurrent of shame that worsens the pain, and deepens the paralysis. I call this “second wave shame.”

The “life never gives you more than you can handle” pop-proverb, to me, is one example. 

Why?

It doesn’t acknowledge the reality of life, and the world we live in.

It doesn’t speak to the difficulty of profound loss, with no rational explanation.

It ignores the nuanced, challenging and sometimes brutal reality of chronic illness, disease, and mental illness.

It denies the potential contribution of generational poverty, exploitation, and inequality.

It implies that you have what you need within you to find your way through anything life throws at you. And if you don’t, you’re simply refusing to see it, there’s something wrong with you, or, both. 

First-wave pain, meet second-wave shame.

Sure, you may be equipped to handle a lot. More than most, even.

But there will, in almost every person’s life, come a time where you, alone, will not be able to make it through.

You will be given more than you can handle.

More than you’re equipped to handle.

More than you’re resourced to handle.

More than you’re skilled to handle.

At a time when you already thought you’d hit bottom.

You can breathe all you want. Meditate all you want. Search inside all you want. Draw on your inner strength and wisdom and healing and connection to source. Read all the books, listen to all the podcasts, get all the advice. Spend all you want.

But, it still won’t give you what you need to make the moment less hard. Or, at least diminish the source of unease or distress enough to return to you the peace and ease to which you aspire.

Calling that a personal failure just piles self-loathing onto suffering. Which is, all too often, what this trope does.

Plus, buying into the false notion that “if it’s been given to you, you’ve got everything need inside you to handle it,” may well stop you from exploring the two doors that are available to you, even at that moment.

Door number one - Accept what is real, and the hardness it brings. That doesn’t mean relent, it just means acknowledging the toughness and complexity of the moment you’re in, and the ineffectiveness of your wisdom and efforts to make things different, at least to date. This also means accepting you are not, in fact, capable of handling what is being dished your way.

Which unlocks…

Door number two - Drop the “I have all I need to make it through everything” ethos and reach out to other people who do have the wisdom, the resources, the skills, the energy, the time, the emotional and energetic bandwidth to join with and, potentially, redirect your circumstance from one of pain and suffering to peace and possibility.

Will this always remedy the situation?

Often, it makes it better. Maybe not 100%, but knowing you’re no longer alone can change the nature of suffering in a profound way.

Still, even with a village in play, resolution may stay away.

There may elements of what you’re moving through, or living with, that even more expansively resourced, you will not be equipped or able to fix, heal, or resolve. At that point, a different kind of acceptance and reimagining enters the conversation. A different type of healing, linked more to surrender than salvation.

Continuing to tell yourself or have others tell you, “the very fact that you are experiencing something insanely hard is proof that you also have everything you need within you to handle it, because the Universe wouldn’t have served it up unless you did,” well intended as it may be, can make an already brutal experience worse.

Much as we love simplicity and sugarcoating, along with the myth of on-demand and omnipotent self-sufficiency, the harder things get, the more this trope harms than helps.

Nuance and complexity are where both the best and the worst things in life live.

Owning that, examining our assumptions, questioning the rush to simplify in the name of a false ease, is a practice. One that brings with it the fullness of existence. And a lessening of the second-wave shame that so often serves to deepen, rather than relieve the first-wave pain.

That’s what I’m thinking about on an unseasonably warm morning in the mountains.

Sending love lots of love & gratitude your way.

Jonathan

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Wake-Up Call #35 | Unburden Second-Wave Shame.

Maybe you’ve been moving through something hard.

Maybe you don’t feel well-equipped to handle it, even if people tell you that you are, or you should be, if you just looked harder, trusted more, and opened a wider channel to [insert X].

There may still be more you can do, more self-exploration, discovery and opening. That may help. But, don’t feel like it’s a personal failure to reach out along the way to others who may be better resourced, skilled, informed, or, at a minimum, willing to walk beside you.

Drop the expectation that you can or should be able to handle it on your own.

Together, we can find our way so much more than we can alone. Including the experience of circumstances that may not, in fact, be subject to change.

Think on it. Walk with it. And, if you’re inclined, share your thoughts or experiences in the comments.