Brushing The Dirt Off The Gems…

When I was a boy I was befriended by a gentleman on whose porch I would park my bike each school morning. His house was near my bus stop and I lived a mile down the road. He was a professional geologist and had traveled the American Southwest collecting rocks and minerals. He had a large collection of fluorescent minerals, which glowed beautiful colors when UV light was shone on them. I was fascinated. He was an educated man, a prospector and an inventor; he and his wife were friends of my family. Among other things, he taught me how to shoot a pistol and throw knives. He also taught me to appreciate things which are there, but out of sight, covered up and hidden.

His usual tools were a small hand pick & hammer and a round paint brush with soft bristles. When I asked about the brush, he replied that important rocks, minerals and gemstones are often found just lying around on the surface of the ground or imbedded in the walls of already-excavated rock faces, which the pick & hammer can easily dislodge for examination…but the really important tool was the soft bristle brush, which could brush the dirt away to reveal the gemstone or mineral crystals covered up by the dirt. That was many decades ago, and I’ve never forgotten that lesson.

In many ways, I think that’s my calling in life, to help people brush the dirt off the gems.  So many people contain gems, gems of inner abilities and possibilities, but the dust and debris of life and injuries from the past have obscured these and they’ve lost sight of them. An individual’s great challenge, therefore, is to set to work clearing away the debris covering the gems.   But how do we do this?

Let’s look at a small example: a married woman in her late-30’s or early 40’s has several children and lots of “moving parts” in her daily life. She also has a history of physical abuse in her childhood which she is aware of but rarely discusses and has made the rational decision to “put it away and not think about it”. In short, a case could be made that she is compensating for her inner woundedness by immersing herself in extraverted activity. However, the historical woundedness also prevents her from getting too emotionally close to people, especially her husband, and this is where the difficulties arise. Emotional closeness would open her up to feeling the pain of the historical abuse and betrayals, and in order to steer clear of feeling the one she winds up not being able to go to a place of closeness with her husband, because it was in a context of closeness that her original wounds happened.

This is the unavoidable trouble with compensating too much for an inner wound; it sets the stage for other areas in life to become “off limits”. In a way, the very mechanism intended to minister to the inner wound, the compensations, wind up adding to the amount of dirt and debris that gets sifted onto the old historical wounds, obscuring and complicating them…and only making it harder ultimately to heal them.

We should also mention the reality of “daily life energy” or emotional energy at this point. The fact is, there is only so much life energy we have within us each day, and we have to respect that fact. Emotional compensations for managing inner woundedness often take a great deal of energy to maintain during the day, and that often leaves us with less energy to deal with all the “moving parts” in our lives. This effect gets more pronounced the older we get; the routine life load we used to be able to handle becomes untenable as time marches on. So we have to watch where we’re “leaking energy”, or spending too much energy in subtle ways we don’t even see the significance of. Remember the financial advisor recommending you not allocate more than 25% of your monthly income to your mortgage? Why? Because then you might very well wind up not being able to support your other life endeavors financially. Well, the same principle is in play here in the emotional realm…allocating too much energy to the compensations may leave you with not enough energy available for other matters – like closeness with important family members.

So, what are we to do? Get into therapy with a therapist you like and trust, and share the inner woundedness that your compensations are no longer able to conceal. The magic of conversation, of sharing, of gradually letting out the covered up feelings is tremendously healing. My father used to say the best way to get a skin wound to heal is to clean it up and then expose it to the air…don’t cover it up for longer than necessary with a bandage. The same is true for our inner wounds. This is what brushing away the dust and debris from the gems is all about. So many people never get to enjoy the brilliance of their inner gems because the compensations they’ve developed are having the unintended effect of obscuring them.

In future posts I’ll address in more detail some particular details mentioned in today’s post.