Help Your Healing
Untie One Knot at a Time
Introduction
After some consideration I’ve accepted I believe there’s some discrepancy between our physical and psychological healing, which I find odd. Physical healing is linear, and psychological healing is meandering.
Why is that?
If you’ve ever broken a bone then you know, in general, time is your ally. The same goes for cuts, scraps, and burns. If you’ve ever experienced an event that has truly scarred your psychological well being, then perhaps you’ve experienced the relatively weak impact time can have on emotional disturbances.
What role do we play in inhibiting psychological healing?
What can we learn from our body about healing more effectively and efficiently?
I googled ‘cell regeneration’ and found that different organs regenerate at different rates, but your body is constantly going through a lot of substantial change. When all is well, we don’t even realize it’s happening. Physical healing is quiet and bustling. Meanwhile, psychological healing can be distracting and slow.
Knots
I found some inspiration in unraveling this idea as I thought about knots. Have you ever effortlessly put a knot into a piece of rope or a shoestring? Now consider the time it takes to untangle that same knot. Comparatively, it takes forever, and it takes effort, investigation, and sometimes a plan!
Think about scale, how many cells does your body shed and grow on a daily basis with no attachment? A smooth and instinctual, mostly knot free process. On the other hand, psychologically, we actively seek to form attachments and we anchor these attachments with knots.
An interesting thing about knots, after you’ve released them, is that the rope or string wants to return to the knot. You have to reinforce the natural shape. It’s odd when something that’s natural becomes abnormal.
I believe we tie most knots in response to some environmental circumstance. For a time, the knot served a purpose, but we create knots and they block our healing process. They complicate our recovery and drain our energy.
Maybe you’ve made a knot of a personality characteristic. Something you fabricated in a time of need and never untied. Now it’s a mess, and you can’t move forward until the knot is straightened out.
Personal Reflections
Here are some ideas I use to avoid knots, undue knots, and get back to ‘natural’. Not all ideas are applicable for every phase.
Self-reflection
Avoid Knots: If knot tying is so consuming, then it stands to reason that we want to tie only a few knots. Observe your knot tying tendencies and when you tie a knot judge whether it’s warranted or not. This is important because we’ve all been knot tying since childhood, we’re good at it.
Undue Knots: Knots can stay tangled for too long. Sometimes our efforts aren’t effective at releasing a knot, and sometimes our efforts even make the knots worse. Where are you engaging the knot? If you aren’t pulling on the right part of the tangle you won’t loosen the tie. Ask yourself, is this working, and have I observed any reasons why it might not be working?
Get back to ‘natural’: When you’ve released the knot but you want to go back to being tangled. How are you helping yourself stay knot free? Or, better yet are you helping yourself?
Patience
Undue Knots: Patience is a critical strategy for untying knots. When you’re patient you can investigate the line of the knot, its form and complexity. Even a tight knot eventually gives way once you’ve identified the release point. Patience means moving deliberately, if we fail to do this we languish. We can spend years trying but not actually untying the knots we’ve created.
Get back to ‘natural’: Initially retaking the knot shape feels natural. The shape you just left, is the shape you first want to return to. A good way to not rebuild the knot is to intentionally diverge from the behavior that created the knot in the first place. At first this might take regimented techniques; a schedule, a change in environment, or some help. Explore doing things differently, even if it feels ‘weird’.
Conclusion
We can move through our psychological hindrances more smoothly than we do, but we have a hard time letting the healing happen. I feel it’s because the knots we’ve created anchor us to an identity and they take a long time to untie.
‘Let go’, is abstract advice. ‘Untie your knots’, is more tangible. Reflect on the knots in your life, be patient with yourself as you learn to unravel them, and explore new behaviors to help keep your lines straight.
Take it one knot at a time.