Life & Therapy

As a kid, I absolutely loathed the job of emptying the dishwasher. One day, I was playing with a friend, and my mother told me to do this dreaded task. I felt that this was incredibly unfair, and voiced my opinion quite loudly. I made my arguments, I fought it, I listed all my reasons why I should not have to do this chore. My friend watched quietly for a long time, then when she saw an opening, pointed out that in the time that I’d been fighting and complaining, I could have done the job and we could be playing already. As it stood, there was no getting around the fact that my mom could outlast the temper tantrum, and that the dishwasher was still waiting for me to empty it. This was not something I could change, and my friend in all of her 6 years of age, had given me a true nugget of wisdom in her observation.

In life, there are some things that we just have to do- things we can’t get out of. It could be a confrontation that we wish we could avoid. It could be going in for a medical test, with the possibility of frightening results. Maybe there is a truth about ourselves that we are afraid to face, because it would force us to change our way of life. These inevitable, scary things are non-negotiable, and we can spend a ton of energy trying to avoid facing them, fighting the inevitable in our minds.

At some point, all this avoidance becomes dread that is felt so viscerally, it is worse than the actual task at hand. The dread and resistance grow to be such a burden, we become paralyzed. In this paralysis, the task morphs into a insurmountable hurdle. The energy consumed by dread outweighs the energy it would take to actually face and deal with that which we are dreading. As my friend said, “In all that time that you were arguing, you could have emptied the dishwasher, and we could be playing by now.” In all the time that we build up our dread, we could have faced our issue, and be reveling in the relief of having dealt with it already!