“You know that place in your mind you go to when you can no longer manage the pain? That place where you go and you are safe and everything is okay?”
I looked her straight in the eyes as if she were completely mad. And my mind, scandalised, kept repeating: what on earth is she talking about? I have no place where I stop feeling what I feel. I do not. There is no such place.
She continued:
“Exactly. Go there now.”
99% of my mind was screaming: there is no place, do you not understand? It hurts whatever I do, I have nowhere to run. Fix it, you are the doctor. But I did not say that out loud. I stayed quiet and kept looking into her eyes. I smiled, probably bitterly.
“And every time the pain becomes unbearable, go there. You are safe there. And nothing hurts.”
A few tears started running down my cheeks. I have no idea why. I thanked her and walked out of the door the same way I had come in.
But 1% of my mind started searching. As if, despite the 99% who knew that place did not exist, 1% was holding on to hope. Maybe because hope was all I felt I had.
I was in one of the worst periods of my life. I had lost two people I loved, and on top of that I was going to acupuncture, trying to solve some medical problems I did not know where to begin with and which had been hurting for months.
And it did not seem to be working. Until this old woman, who had obviously not learned it at acupuncture school, planted in my mind, with a few words, the idea that there might be a place inside my head where I could take shelter when managing reality became unbearable.
How you build a safe place in your mind
I instantly imagined a place with perfectly green grass, somewhere next to a waterfall, where it was perfectly quiet. I know, I know, it probably would not be quiet next to a waterfall, but next to mine it was. Find your own place. It is not real, so it can be however you feel like making it.
Then I asked myself how it would feel to be in that place. What perfect quiet means, how my body feels when it is not in pain, how long I would want to stay there. I did not want only to “see” it, I wanted to experience it.
In the days and weeks that followed, every time things got hard, the 1% of my mind, now 5%, then 10%, pushed the same words at me:
“You know that place in your mind you go to when you can no longer manage the pain? That place where you go and you are safe and everything is okay?”
Then I saw the waterfall. And after seeing it for a few weeks in a row, guess what? Suddenly, to the question “you know that place in your mind?”, the reflex answer started being “yes, I know it.”
It was already familiar. It became safer and safer in there, I felt safe simply because it had become familiar and because, little by little, I had loaded it with the expectation that I ought to feel better there.
It grew with every day that passed. I cultivated it only by revisiting it.
You are wondering whether that healed me, are you not?
How would it be if I said it did?
No, seriously, how would it be for you if I said that this was enough to heal me?
What would you prefer to hear? And why would you prefer to hear what you would prefer to hear?
The reality is that I do not know how much it mattered in the healing process. In a few weeks something resolved that had been going on for months.
Maybe from a treatment, maybe from what I was doing in my mind, or maybe just from time and my body’s capacity to solve the problem. Maybe a little of each. I will never know for certain.
But do you know what I do know? That believing in that waterfall made the problems a little more tolerable for as long as they lasted. In those periods when I felt I had no control at all, I held on to something I knew depended only on me. I internalised a part of the control.
As for the treatment the doctor offered, of course I would have preferred something that worked instantly, I would have preferred science and medicine to be closer to what we were taught they are. And I am glad every time they are.
But in the absence of those things, I accept and happily administer myself some hope, at any hour of the day.
I choose to believe.
Because hope is a personal choice. Just as belief is a personal choice.
Quote of the day
Hope is not just a feeling. It is a cognitive process.
Martin Seligman
About the author
Andrei Roșca is a change strategist working one to one with founders, C level executives and senior managers who perform well on the outside while carrying a constant internal load. The work is nervous system regulation under real pressure, not motivation and not mindset. 13+ years of practice, 510+ clients, 8120+ individual sessions, through Whisper, Center for Strategic Change. Sessions are online, in English or in Romanian.
If this described your situation, start here: Coaching for overthinking executives. Or read more about my background and method.