I see how dangerous hope is to you, how it threatens you.
Any glimmer of it sends flashbacks of falling down
So hard.
You are right. It is not fair! Such bad things happened to you!
I know you remember the times you tried to make things different.
I get it - there is a type of quiet to sinking deep, into the darkness:
Here no one can see me and I can't see anyone else;Here no one can talk to me, and I don’t have to speak my pain.
Maybe you can imagine disappearing into nothingness down there.
Anguish.
No… please… not again…
You say
No, thank you.
…to anything that will wake the beast.
The suffering.
When you are not numb with grief, you only remember all the times you tried, and failed. You keep asking yourself
Why? It doesn’t make sense.
Of course you are thinking
Why bother?
You look at everyone else and
You might ask them:
Why doesn’t the badness happen to you? What did I do to deserve this?
I Don’t Know Why.
Despair, did you know that you exist in everyone?
When people see your reflection in somebody else, it scares them a lot of the time. That's because you are contagious. Like a magnet, you pull at the kindred matter in the other. When I see you in someone else, I can feel the kernel of your presence - void of hope inside myself as well.
The other thing I know about you (I can see it so clearly when I am not too afraid to be near you) is that,
You know there is nothing you can do about this situation, and for you
it is more peaceful for you to relinquish possibility.1
And yet…
While there is nothing anyone can do to take this darkness away because your heart is closed;
Light is not as far away as it feels when your head is down, if only you would just allow it to enter.
This is paraphrased from IFS expert Mike Elkin in his “Despair Protocol” communicated to me in August, 2021. ↩︎
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