Captain Pain Demands A Change

My courageous friend Lori wrote this week’s post, and managed to relate it to Thanksgiving. NBD, considering she has a mind that can multi-task at light speed.  Be careful if you spot her sharing your dance floor. She’s been known to remove clothes at random.

On the surface, I probably don’t look like a woman whose self-leadership muscles are ever flexed. In fact, I probably appear rather disorganized, running to the store with wet hair, flip-flops and no list in hand. But I don’t sweat the small stuff.  I know which goals matter to me and which don’t. And I know what motivates me: (1) desire (2) competition or an adversary and (3) pain. Pain is what I’ll focus on for this post because, like it or not, it’s always been the biggest catalyst for change in my life.

I find pain an even stronger motivator than desire. For example, I might say that I desire a clean house, but the truth is most days I’m fine having a kitchen just neat enough to avoid roaches. There’s no pain for me in not being the next Martha Stewart. However, while I don’t need to be super-model skinny, I was recently superficial enough to be compelled into exercising by the pain of no longer fitting into my jeans. Trivial examples? Well then, since it’s Thanksgiving week, let’s shoot the biggest turkey in the woods and dine on the meat of the matter: I change when it’s too painful not to, when what worked before stops working, when I’ll go insane if I don’t, and for me, that meant changing the entire way I looked at the world.

Though I have long professed to have faith in God, I didn’t act like I believed God was in control. I lived like I was in control and felt that if I just worked hard enough I could make things and even people go my way. For example, I spent years trying to change my husband, a mostly intractable man. Were those years painful? Not enough. I guess I got something out of that dynamic because I didn’t truly recognize my “let me manage you” habit it until I began to deal with my husband’s mother on a daily basis.

When my mother-in-law got sick, I was certain I could prolong her life IF she would listen to me, let me get her to the right doctors, let me feed her the right foods. She didn’t listen, and it was agony to watch her make choices I knew she’d never recover from.

One night, the nurse called me to say that my mom-in-law needed a blood transfusion, would die if she didn’t get it, but was refusing it. I rushed over to sit by her bedside and argue/cry/cajole her into it. She wasn’t refusing for religious reasons. She was refusing because this was her third fight with cancer. She was ready to give up. Finally, I got that. Turned out that her lab results were mixed up with somebody else’s. No transfusion needed, and we had many more months for me to practice letting go.

But sitting there that night, crying with this woman I loved so much and letting go of my need to intervene was the first painful step towards recognizing how much of a control freak I was in other areas of my life.

This is what self-leadership looks like when it is motivated by pain.

It happens when somehow, be it by the grace of God, the word of a friend, or some other revelation, I become aware that I need to make a change. I see that to continue in whatever pattern I’m in is getting me nowhere, and, in fact, causing me or those I love some sort of emotional, spiritual or physical discomfort, some sort of PAIN.

In so many Twelve Step programs they say there are three As in recovery: awareness, acceptance and action.  Pain is part of the awareness step. The late Jim Morrison said “Pain is something to wake us up . . . Pain is something to carry like a radio.”  It’s like a fire-alarm alerting me to danger. Well, sometimes it’s more like a splinter, barely noticeable until it gets all infected and oozy.

To have self-leadership, we must first be aware we need it.

Discomfort can be a powerful indicator.  Recognizing our angst, we can move on to acceptance that something needs to happen or change. Then we can take action. Because inaction? Way too painful.

What about you? Are you more motivated by pain or desire? Or is desire a bit like pain, a hunger or a thirst that must be quenched?

Lori Walker is a graduate of Westmont College and Cal-Poly, San Luis Obispo. She mothers three kids and delights in being married to a witty but headstrong contrarian. She also teaches ESL at Santa Barbara City College. Lori blogs on writing, teaching and teen books here (http://lhwalker.blogspot.com/).