How the Injury Pile Crushes You
Part III of the Injury Pile series
The more we cling to the Injury Pile, the more difficult it is to go after the things we really want.
The first step of dismantling the Pile is to understand exactly why it has this effect.
This is a necessary step, because in general brains do not like to give up the Pile. Mine basically reacted to the idea like a fire-breathing dragon protecting its horde of gold, except the gold was all the reasons I had to feel ill-done-by. So it’s important to understand going in how the Pile blocks us, or we’re likely to abandon the attempt and let the dragon return to snoozing atop its horde.
To see why the Injury Pile has this effect, let’s go back to the example of the job interview. In this example, I don’t get the job I had my heart set on, so I add it to the Injury Pile. I share the Pile with everyone I can think of. I tell them all why it’s super fucking unfair that I have to work this hard and still not get the things that seem to come so easy for everyone else.
As I explained in the last post, this reaction protects me from pain. As long as I’m focused on how unjust the situation is, I’m able to defer my sadness and disappointment. If I keep insisting that this situation shouldn’t exist, then I don’t have to face the fact that it actually does and feel all my crappy feelings about it.
So as far as the pain-blocking agenda goes, the Injury Pile is pretty much a success.
But consider what it does to the agenda I actually started with: getting a job I really like.
When I focus on why things are unreasonably hard for me, I do three things, each of which makes it more difficult to achieve this actual goal:
I cut myself off from how much I want a different job. If I really let myself feel how much I want it, I’d run smack into the pain of not getting it this time around—and the whole point of the Injury Pile is to deny that pain. So I push away the desire by focusing on the unfairness instead. And that’s a problem, because creating action is what wanting is for. If I can’t actively feel how much I really want something different, then I have zero internal push toward going after it. I feel the injustice of not having the job that I want, but not the drive to keep going after it.
I put myself in an indefinite holding pattern. When we’re in Injury-Pile mode, we don’t take action to fix the problem, because we don’t think it’s our problem to fix. We’re basically saying to the universe at large, You made this mess—you clean it up. Make things fair, and then maybe I’ll try again. In the job example, this would mean I don’t try to see what I could learn from the interview experience. I don’t think about changing my approach. I don’t strategise about how to get a foot in the door. I stomp around demanding reality to adjust itself into a better shape instead.
I focus on where I don’t have power. When we’re trying to prove to ourselves and everyone else that the cards are unusually stacked against us, we’re necessarily looking for the places where we’re acted upon. We’re laser focused on any examples of how the world is preventing our forward momentum. So we spend no time looking for the places where we could be creating momentum anyway. We set our brain on a mission to find all the reasons our actions have no effect. Which means that rather than finding ways I could change the job situation or even game the system, I gather up all the reasons it’s pointless to try in the first place.
As you’ve probably already noticed, there’s a powerful feedback loop here too. The more I focus on where I don’t have power, the more it feels like the only way for anything to change for me is for the world to change first. The more evidence I find that the cards are stacked against me, the more true it will feel that I have no power. The more cut off I am from how much I wanted the new job in the first place, the less reason I have to question any of this. Why would I go after anything important, when this is how I’m seeing the world and my place in it?
So much for that better job I wanted.
Notice how much this process actually magnifies whatever effect the initial rejection might have had on my life. Sure, I didn’t get the job. But once I put it on the Injury Pile, I turn that initial rejection into proof that I won’t get the next one or the one after that either. I prevent myself from looking for ways I could change the outcome of the next interview. I make it pointless to try.
This is the hardest and most important thing to accept about the Injury Pile.
It looks like a righteous demand for redress, but at bottom it’s a powerful act of self-aggression. It’s a smack in the face to the idea that we can have more than we have right this moment. It might feel like we’re standing up for ourselves, but the result is more like pissing on our dreams.
Understanding this truth is how we start to shift the Pile. We only created it in the first place in order to help ourselves. But, in the long run, the Pile is not a way of being on our own side. It’s a way of giving up in slow motion—injury by injury, day by day, year by year.
I don’t think that’s actually what any of us meant to choose when we started these Piles in the first place. And once we really see their effects, it becomes possible to choose something else instead—fire-breathing dragons notwithstanding.
I’ll address the remaining steps to dismantling the Pile in an additional post, since Step 1 seems to have taken over this entire instalment. I’ll also address an important question I’ve gotten from several readers and clients: what about when things are actually super-duper unfair? How are we supposed to dismantle the Pile when genuine, societal injustice is one of our injuries, and should we even try?
Find out in the final instalment.