Emotional Healing – Desperation is the Requirement

No-one outside of ourselves creates a sense of desperation.  We create it.

The sense of desperation for a solution to a problem to be brought about comes from within.  To escape, to obtain, to keep.  Desperation is the point at which the emotionally driven urge not to do something is overwhelmed by the emotionally driven urge to do the thing that gets the thing.  It is the urge to win.

Desperation is the urge to do something you have never done before.

During desperation we pace floors; become angry at ourselves; others and life in general.  But we are energised.  We are passionate to the point it feels painful.  Aaaargh!  That is desperation.  Who is to blame for it?  No-one is – it is a part of the process of being alive.

During the time I was researching for a cure for my OCD, my obsessions, my phobias, my depression and panic attacks I kept reading scientific papers that said ‘incurable’ or ‘can be managed but cannot be removed’ or ‘the amygdala shrinks irreversibly’ or ‘this is due to a permanent misconnection in the brain’.

I repeatedly read how exposure therapy did not work in removing most cases of OCD and obsessions and how others like me had basically ‘had it’.

Sufferers like me were supposed to just accept our lot.

The difference between the people who write these things and myself was they were trying to please an intellectual audience while I was the desperate schmuck in the middle of the problem they were writing about.

I refused to accept what I was reading.  I would not give in.  I deserved freedom from my multiple conditions.  I had worked hard in the external world for others all my life and I would work hard for this now for myself; I had turned and gone into my experience rather than continually avoiding it.

The emotional responses inside had got much more intense because of this but my determination to succeed was powered by the urge to get rid of them.  I was desperate.

I was frustrated by the lack of good, solid information available on how to get well.  But my desperation got me through.  Desperation and the emotional fuel it generated became my launch pad.  I would try anything, risk anything, go anywhere and yes, I would even pay some money towards it (heaven forbid, eh?).

Oh, how I festered on my desperation.  But I needed it.  You see, desperation and all those painful emotions (particularly the anger and frustration) is the requirement.

Without desperation I would never have got better.  Never developed the urge to heal no matter what the ‘experts’ say.

If you are desperate to heal and find yourself whining about your suspicions of ‘those out there wishing to exploit your sense of desperation’ just take a step back and rethink – no-one else created that sense, you did.

It is the requirement for healing emotional disorders and for doing pretty much any other thing in life truly worth doing when it finally, ultimately, unavoidably needs doing.  Look at any difficult area of life and you will find that sense of desperation, when you felt cornered, was the moment that occurred just before you got yourself out of a fix.  It comes with the territory of life.

Desperation changes lives for the better.

It moves proverbial mountains; it rewires brain patterns; it makes you strong; it knocks down all those intellectual opinions telling you what you need to do cannot be done.  It makes what looks impossible possible.

Desperation: it could be the best friend you ever had.

Regards - Carl