Wounds As Gateways

What feels like wounds are new parts of you being born.

I write this to share that your relationship to your ‘wounds’ can change.

’Kintsugi’ is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the cracks with lacquer that is mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.
Photo courtesy of: Australian Cultural Fund

You carry memories in your physical, intellectual, emotional, or energetic body of having been ‘wounded’ by one thing or another. The purpose here is not to declare ‘wounds’ as either good or bad, something to be wanted or something to be avoided. The purpose here is to explore how to make transformational use of your ‘wounds’.

In the radical responsibility context out of which Possibility Management emerges, the experiment I will be offering you is to stand in the place where you are 100% responsible for everything that happens to you. Moreover, this experiment is to take radical responsibility for the conscious and unconscious benefits of telling particular kinds of stories about those things that happened to you.

No one can force you to take radical responsibility. This would be like trying to force an acorn to prematurely sprout, or trying to force a chick to prematurely hatch out of its eggshell. No one can force you to experiment with taking more responsibility than is ordinarily considered to be reasonable. However, no one can stop you either.

What we have found during more than forty years of empirical research is that successfully taking radical responsibility creates radically beneficial results in your life, results that you cannot create by taking less intense levels of responsibility. For more on this check out the website: radicalresponsibility.mystrikingly.com

We have also discovered that the experiences you might now relate to as ‘wounds’ are new parts of your Being coming to life. The times you most poignantly re-experience your ‘woundedness’ are the times the new parts of your Being are ready to be born. Once the new parts of your Being actively participate in your life, you don’t need to remember your ‘wounds’ anymore, like the acorn and the chick naturally abandon their shells.

From the perspective of radical responsibility, if you have been ‘wounded’ by something in the past, you have actually ‘wounded’ yourself in order to eventually give birth to a sleeping part of your potential.

For example, if in the past, somebody touched your body without your permission and you let them do it, you might carry the ‘wound’ that people do not respect your body. As a result you might adopt any of an amazing variety of creative strategies to try to prevent a similar kind of ‘wound’ from ever happening to you again, such as:

• You might avoid meeting with people altogether and binge-watch Netflix instead.
• You might wear shapeless black clothes and get piercings and evil-looking tattoos so that nobody could possibly be attracted to touch you.
• You might suffocate yourself in a cloud of depression threatening to infect anyone who gets too close to you.
• You might develop the habit of shredding any offers of intimacy with sharp cutting words rather than enduring the fear that might arise when receiving a hug.

The process which is begun by taking radical responsibility for the ‘wound’ of crossed-boundaries — whether the boundaries were physical, intellectual, emotional, or energetic — can give birth to formidable boundary-maker — respectful as much towards yourself as towards others.

What this means is that your wound of suppressing outrage and hatred that has existed since allowing yourself to be touched inappropriately or without permission — for example — by a man can transform into the consciously unleashed power to break a man’s nose before he even notices that you have moved. The very presence of this newly born part of your Being can force any man around you think twice before touching any woman as a sex-object again.

Carrot Nose Breaking training in a Possibility Lab.

Each of your ‘wounds’ represents a powerful transformational resource if approached from radical responsibility.

As a man, you might, when you were younger, have inherited the ‘wound’ from your father or another male authority figure that, “I cannot trust woman because they always leave me.” You might have forgotten that the ‘wound’ is not actually yours because it feels intrinsically real and influences your life. As a result:

• You might also fail to notice that in order to live in alignment with ‘your wound’ you force the women in your life to leave you. Now at 30 or 40 years old you have still not experienced the tenderly-dynamic spaciousness of an authentically relating with a woman.
• Your marriage is falling apart because you have not developed the introspection and nonlinear possibility skills that are central to creating real intimacy with your partner.

The new part of your Being waiting to be born could be an adventurous Queen-maker spaceholder for a Feminine Being to unfold and journey with you into new territories.

The ‘wound’ of trying to please your parents by adopting values that are not your own does not bring your own life to flourish because it stops this new part of your Being from being born. How can anyone relate authentically to you if you are not authentically being yourself?

What if you start relating to your ‘wounds’ as precise motivation for learning your next relational skillset? Your inner work can revolve around discovering the elegance of being ‘wounded’. The metamorphosis of your ‘wound’ into a newly unfolded part of your Being is complete only when you let the ‘wound’ fall off like an old scab while maintaining your integrity and boundaries with your newly acquired skills. After the new parts of your Being come alive in your life the ‘wound’ is no longer necessary.

However, if you decide to keep the ‘woundedness’ around you as part of your self-image then you become increasingly crippled, less and less capable of creating intimacy or collaboration. Perhaps you know someone like this? Such a person’s boundaries only has for aim to protect what can be called their ‘Marshmallow Zone’, a tape-loop of habit patterns forbidding people to get too close to them. For a ‘wounded person’, defense of the ‘wound’ is more important than the need for authentic intimacy.

When the Beings of two ‘wounded people’ live close enough to each other that the Beings’ longing for closeness competes with the defendedness of their individual Marshmallow Zones, the result is ongoing low-level guerrilla warfare. The war is usually won by the person who can prove with dramatic reasons, stories, gestures, and emotional outbursts that they are the most ‘wounded’ one.

When you succeed in being the most ‘wounded’, your partner is forced to walk on eggshells around your ‘wounds’ or your retribution quickly follows. Even if love remains, your Marshamallow-Zone-protection-strategy can produce a stalemate that lasts for decades, or until one of you dies with a cold, empty, broken heart.

It is probable that most of your role models only demonstrated how to use your so-called ‘wounds’ as weapons of mass destruction — your explosive or implosive reactions triggered when anyone makes the slightest move in the direction of your protected area.

I want you to know that it is possible to end your loneliness and separation. However, after reading this, you might feel frustrated about how much time you’ve wasted locked in your protective Marshmallow Zone instead of exploring Being-to-Being life-dancing. You can decrease this frustration by admitting that the art of using your ‘wounds’ as birthing-catalysts is not taught by your parents, your teachers, or your neighbours. You are learning this new, right now, at the cutting edge of human consciousness. And what you can learn, you can also share with others.

However, mere knowledge of the possibility of transformation is not usually enough for transformation itself to happen. There are hidden agendas. People have a very good reason to keep their ‘wounds’ protected in their Marshmallow Zone. The reason is: Gremlin.

Your Gremlin is that part of your psychology that will destroy any possibility of transformation at anytime to protect new parts of your Being from being born. Why should you block new parts of your Being from being born? Because birth means change. Any change in your Being seems to endanger your survival strategy’s current ability to keep you surviving as usual. But do you want to continue with the usual? The point is that you probably have a new goal now. No longer is mere survival enough for you. Engaging ‘wounds’ as a doorway through which new qualities of your Being can be born unleashes new dimensions of living, not merely surviving. Birth opens a new future for you.

In ordinary relationships, ‘wounds’ become your Gremlin’s unlimited source of argument, depression, and discord, a Germlin’s favorite food (yourgremlin.mystrikingly.com/). Any time your Marshmallow Zone tells you that somebody has triggered your ‘wound’, your Gremlin is justified to take revenge on them. You might be keeping at hand any number of friends, partners, or colleagues to use as targets for your Gremlin’s emotional outbursts.

The question then becomes: What will it take for you to stop walking around as a ‘wounded’ person? What will it take for you to stop beating yourself up for allowing these things to have happened to you and instead step into a new identity in which you are bigger than those incidents? How could you exit your agenda of crippling self-disempowerment, revenge, and secret superiority? How could you leave behind the embarrassing stories about the things that happened to you and use the same incidents as powerful gateways to new capacities? How can you take responsibility for living more whole?

If you decide that your sense of loneliness and separation have been going on long enough, here are several experiments for exiting your Marshmallow Zone and being vulnerably present with another Being.:

1. UPGRADE YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO YOUR ‘WOUNDS’: Trying to ‘heal or transcend your wound’ does not give you as powerful results as using a ‘wound’ as a valuable gateway for learning new skills and nurturing new parts of your Being. Learning new skills and birthing new parts of your Being happen simultaneously. Regard your ‘wound’ as an invitation from the Universe telling you exactly what to practice to abundantly live full out. As the new parts of your Being are born, these are the parts best able to learn the new skills. It may seem like a paradox, but it is not. You can already do this. The undefended naked baby you were when you were born had the lungs that you needed to learn to breathe in a wildly bigger world than your mom’s belly. It is scary as hell… and it is possible.
2. BECOME AN EDGEWORKER: Practice going to the edge of your Marshmallow Zone (‘comfort zone’) and staying exactly there. This does not mean to be adaptive. This does not mean to give in to other people’s ‘needs’ or ‘wounds’. It means to stay present and awake with your Sword of Clarity held out in front of you. Keep paying attention and breathing, noticing the subtle fluctuations of what is happening within you and around you. Your purpose of staying on the edge is to experience a different quality of intimacy. Standing at the edge keeps you vulnerably present, exactly where intimacy happens. Inside your Marshmallow Zone life is suffocated. You are not vulnerable. You cannot listen, connect, or make moves. Standing at the edge of your Marshmallow Zone, life is electrified. From the edge, you can fly. Do not let the old patterns created by your ‘wound’ take over. Practice negotiating intimacies so that deftly taking care of yourself becomes a more powerful weapon than regarding yourself as being ‘a wounded person’. New territories of intimacy in 5 bodies (5bodies.mystrikingly.com), previously blocked, are now accessible for exploration with a whole new level of integrity and creativity (intimacyjourneyers.mystrikingly.com). You can do this together with other practitioners in a weekly Possibility Team (possibilityteam.mystrikingly.com/) and make it your personal transformational-journey playground.
3. TAKE ON A NEW SELF-EXPERIENCE Shift your identity from being a ‘barely-defended wounded person’ to being a ‘continuously-born-into-new-parts-and-dimensions Being’. Your new identity shines through ongoingly surfing your transformational processes that we call ‘Liquid States’ (liquidstate.mystrikingly.com/). Losing your previous identity as being a ‘wounded person’ is a necessary part of the ‘death and resurrection show’. This Phoenix-type experience is easy to understand theoretically, but scary to navigate in reality, because you cannot know who you might become. All the strategies that you created for relating with others and ‘safely’ negotiating intimacy are no longer valid without your old identity of ‘being wounded’. Being clueless about how it goes now is the ‘death’. The ‘resurrection’ gains strength through enjoying the freedom-of-movement from integrating your ‘wound’ as part of your birthing process and focusing on applying your new skills.

Love,

Anne-Chloé