I’ve equated my inner work over the last few years to various metaphors: a boat on a river; climbing mountains; cleaning up an overgrown garden.  Lately the one I’ve been relating to is the carving of a statue.  I think of it the same way Michelangelo did, as though the statue is already there and just needs to have the right bits carved away to reveal it.  I’ve never carved anything out of marble, but I imagine it has to be done carefully if one doesn’t want to accidentally remove too much.  I also imagine it requires a great deal of patience.  I’ve seen videos of stoneworkers, and they must be the most patient people on the planet, diligently hammering and chiseling away at the rock to make it do their bidding.

My personal work has been much the same.  It’s said in therapeutic circles that a person has to really want to change in order for the process to work, and I’ve found that to be true many times.  Digging in the dirt of one’s psyche is an incredibly humbling process, one that brings a person up against every perversion of their soul, whether by their own doing or someone else’s.  Every time one of those perversions reveals itself, you have to ask yourself, “Do I really want to deal with this? Will it be worth it?”

The unflinching self-appraisal required to do this is difficult to convey.  As I said, it’s a very humbling process, one that absolutely requires the suspension of personal judgment if one is to get through it without self-destructing out of self-loathing.  That suspension of judgment itself requires being aware and accepting of the reasons for the personal flaws that become evident once one holds up the proverbial mirror and takes a really good look.  It’s potentially horrifying, but if you’re armed with the knowledge of why your inner reflection looks that way, it makes it easier to start chipping away at the stone enclosing your true self.

Suspension of judgment is a lot harder than it sounds.  Our culture and society are steeped in multiple layers of judgment that cover us like stifling blankets on a hot day.  I had to turn everyday life into a meditative exercise in which I constantly monitored my thoughts and feelings, and whenever I identified myself being inappropriately judgmental, I would simply label it by thinking “judgment” and redirect my mind elsewhere.  I’ve been doing this for months.  It’s been exhausting, doing the equivalent of gently but deliberately hammering away at this stone, knowing I would someday be rewarded.

I’ve been feeling the cracks in the stone slowly develop over time, giving me the encouragement to keep hammering.  As Leonard Cohen says, “the cracks are how the light gets in”.  What I once referred to as The Screeching Harpy of Judgment has been reduced to The Slightly Annoying Owl of Judgment, which is fine with me as someone who identifies with Athena.  At the beginning of my process of identifying judgment, it happened a lot, which was frustrating and potentially self-defeating if I fell into the negative loop of judging myself for judging myself.

Buddhism has a saying: if you’re going to beat yourself with a stick, just beat yourself with a stick, don’t beat yourself with a stick for beating yourself with a stick.  So I did that.  Over time I found myself judging myself less, which became a positive feedback loop: less judgment led to less judgment.  The cracks were appearing.

Then something shifted recently: the inner equivalent of a big chunk of marble finally falling off, showing part of the statue beneath.  I still don’t know what it looks like as a whole, but what I can see looks interesting enough to keep chipping.

In the process, I’m finding judgment transforming into something far more useful: wisdom, also appropriate for Athena.  The nature of my particular mental difficulties means I have had a division between my intellectual self and my emotional self for a very long time, a division I’ve only recently become aware of.  Awareness can be painful if it involves shattering an illusion, which there is a lot of in therapy, but with awareness comes the possibility of discovery.  In this case, I discovered wisdom is the bridge between rationality and emotions, whereas judgment merely widened the chasm.

As a result of this bridging, I’m experiencing a great deal less inner chaos and mental chatter.  While I used to spend a great deal of time essentially engaged in inner combat on one level or another (or sometimes more than one), that has largely abated.  I have no doubt it will happen again, but maybe it will be easier to get my inner soldier to stand down next time.  That part of me has largely been driven by emotions my whole life without the benefit of rationality.  Now that the latter is tempering the former, hopefully convincing it that defensiveness isn’t necessary will be easier.

Replacing judgment with wisdom in the process of chipping away at the psychic stone surrounding my true self is easing and speeding the process.  Now that I’ve been doing it for a while, I know which tools to use for which problems and how to apply them properly so as not to incur damage (i.e. retraumatize myself).  It’s time-consuming and pain-staking, but yes, rewarding.  I once asked my therapist how long therapy would take, and he said, “longer than you want but shorter than you think”, which I’ve found to be true, but also think was his way of saying “don’t focus on how long this will take”.

Because in truth, the work is never done, whether you are a mentally healthy person or not.  As human beings, we are never “finished”.  There is no time at which we can proclaim ourselves to have achieved some pinnacle of perfection and can then stop and just kick back.  This probably goes double for those of us saddled with extreme trauma and the maladies that accompany it.  For me it means accepting that I am an ongoing work-in-progress, probably will be forever, and that I have to take medication to stay stable enough to continue that work in a positive manner, no matter how resentful I may be of that fact.

Learning to view this personal work in different ways has been critical to the success of that work, ways that include all of the metaphorical visualizations that have been so important these last few years.  I can either see myself as a hot mess of baggage to sort through, or I can see myself as an overgrown garden with the potential for great beauty once its cleaned up.  I can either see therapy as an interminable process, or I can see it as taking a boat trip down the river each day or climbing a mountain.  And I can either see myself as an impenetrable wall of emotional shielding, or I can see myself as a block of marble waiting to be transformed into a statue, one chip at a time.