How to Dismantle Your Injury Pile
The final instalment
This is a four-part series. Read previous instalments: Part I, Part II and Part III.
In the last instalment in this series, I explained all the ways the Injury Pile is keeping you from getting the things that you really want. In this post, I am going to tell you how to let go of your Pile. After I explain the steps, I’ll also talk through how to approach the process when you’re dealing with real-world injuries that are truly, self-evidently unfair.
Step 1. Choose on purpose.
You do not have to get rid of the Injury Pile. You can hold onto every single injury and talk about them for the rest of your days. No one can stop you from doing this!
The only issue is, that’s not a super great plan if there are other things you really want. Our brains try to tell us that we can keep our Piles and still get all those other things. This is a lie. We can either have a good shot at that stuff we want, or we can have the Injury Pile. It’s our choice, but it is a choice. (Check out the previous instalment if you need a reminder of why this is an either/or situation.)
To solidify your choice to move forward, create or revisit your list of things you want and why you want them. Notice how much bigger, more expansive and more fruitful this list feels than the Pile. Get crystal clear about the fact that letting go of the Pile is for you, rather than some obligation or a rule.
Step 2. Find and feel the pain at the bottom of the Pile.
The whole point of the Injury Pile is to escape pain. Which means as soon as we let the pain in, we begin to drain the Pile of power and create a path forward.
But if we just ask ourselves why we feel bad, we’ll only get another litany of why things are unfair. To identify the real pain, we need to sneak around the Injury Pile defences. The trick is to come at things from the opposite direction, by focusing on what we would have gotten to think and feel had events gone our way.
To return to the job search example I’ve been using, the question would sound something like this: if I’d gotten the job, what would I be able to think and feel that seems impossible without that result?
Let’s say my answer is that I’d think I have value in the world, that I matter. I’d feel like I’m worthy.
That means the pain at the bottom of the Pile comes from the absence of those exact things.
So without the job I don’t think I have value in the world. It doesn’t seem like I matter. I feel unworthy. When I think those things, I feel sad. Despairing. Let down. Rejected. These are the emotions that I need to feel in order to get unblocked. The more I do that, the less need my brain has for the Injury Pile.
When you have your list of emotions, think about what comfort you can offer to the part of you that feels so sad or disappointed or abandoned or whatever it is. Whenever you find your brain wanting to resurrect the Injury Pile, think those things instead.
Step 3. Locate power, refuse self-blame.
Brains love blame, and if they can’t blame the world they will definitely blame us. Either things are colossally unfair, or they’re actually all our fault.
Do not let your brain get away with this crap. Despite what it is telling you, your choices are not limited to counting up all your injuries and counting up all the reasons you suck.
There is a third choice. You can put your focus on where you have power right now. This means asking questions like:
What parts of this situation are under my control, and how do I want to act in them?
How do I want to show up for myself in this moment?
What can I learn or practice that would benefit me here?
What resources—internal and external—do I have to support me moving forward?
These questions are Injury-Pile blockers because they get us facing forward and using our skills. They get our brains looking for a path between where we are and where we want to go, instead of assembling all the reasons it’s extra hard for us to get there.
Step 4. Find your advantages
When we’re in Injury-Pile mode we’re focused on all the ways we’re ill-done-by in comparison to others. It’s like we’re on a ladder and we are only looking at the people above us. We forget that for other people on the ladder, we seem to be the ones who have gotten a leg up.
In the case of the job search, this would be like complaining to myself because someone got a job through their parents’ connections, but failing to notice that I have a partner who will support me while I look for work.
Finding our advantages is similar to identifying things to be grateful for, but it’s more targeted. It directly counters the Injury-Pile tendency to see ourselves as particularly deprived and unsupported. It encourages us to look at what we’ve been given and ask how and why we want to leverage those resources.
One caveat: similar to blame, there can be a tendency here to flip between extremes. So our brains can go straight from telling us we’re deprived and don’t have any advantages to telling us we’re spoiled and squander our advantages. If this starts to happen for you, take your list of advantages and add in examples of the work you’ve put into making each advantage count in your life.
When it’s not all in our heads
In my hypothetical job search, I turned something that happens to everyone into another piece of evidence that things were particularly hard for me. But what if the situation were different? What if something had happened to me that was demonstrably unfair?
Let’s say I was the victim of social injustice. Or political violence. Or I was having to cope with some other crime or illness or even just people being unbelievable assholes. Maybe my brakes randomly failed or I was hit by falling debris. Despite their differences, in all these cases I find myself in a situation that most other people don’t have to deal with—and through no fault of my own.
For better or for worse, the reality of this unfairness doesn’t change the fundamental situation all that much. The Injury Pile will still block us, no matter how legitimate it is. The steps are the same if we want to move forward.
If that sounds to you like another unfair thing—like first we’re unfairly injured then we have to do all this work to fucking emotionally engage the injury?!?—then I am right there with you. It is 100% complete bullshit that this is how things work.
And, yet, I am sorry to say, this is how things work.
But there is one key thing we can do to make the process easier.
We can go into it aware of the difference between feeling the pain of the injury and co-signing the injury.
This is crucial because our brains like to argue that if we turn away from the feelings of injustice to focus on the underlying emotions, that’s tantamount to saying what happened was OK. That letting ourselves feel the pain at the bottom of the Pile is like letting the bad guys win.
This is maybe the biggest lie our brains tell us about the Injury Pile, and that is really saying something.
Dismantling the Injury Pile is not the same as saying nothing bad happened or that it was OK that it happened. Feeling the pain is not saying the injury was acceptable or fair. Letting go of the Injury Pile not a form of capitulation. In my experience, it’s the exact opposite. Setting aside the compulsive energy of the Injury Pile is what makes our future victories possible. Feeling the pain at the bottom of the Pile is how we win, because it’s how we get free.