The Runaway

You don't like hearing it, if you are a Runaway, but you have not escaped. Not anything. You drag it around with you like a ball and chain. It alters your relationships, your jobs, your sense of yourself, everything--all because you are running from it.

You may feel that you have successfully escaped, but actually, you've only made things black or white. That thing you run from, whatever it is, is the black, and you are the white. It's bad, and you are good. Your past is bad, your abuser is bad, your family is bad, your childhood is bad, the things you did in the past are bad--but you have separated yourself from those bad things now, so, whew! everything is okay now. Right?

Wrong. All that has happened is that you have split yourself off from aspects of your own emotions. All the love and sorrow you feel for family members, all the wistfulness you feel for your memories, etc., all of these have been relegated to the unconscious, so that you can feel, literally feel, as if these things don't matter to you anymore. You wonder about this sometimes, how it is that you don't feel anything for these people, events, times or memories, and sometimes it even worries you, but you don't really want to spend too much time figuring this out, because way down deep you fear, that if you do you will be overcome with emotion.

But if you ever do become infected with pieces of shrapnel from your unconscious, when it blasts out of you unexpectedly you just attribute it to PMS, a bad day at work, or just being in a bad mood. You don't connect the dots between the two worlds, the one you've run from and the one of the present--which is, by the way, very much like the one you've run from. You don't look at the patterns of your own behavior that have created the world that mirrors, at least to some degree, the world you run from. You don't even realize the similarities between the two worlds. You just keep running.

Runaways tend to run from anything that makes them uncomfortable--even someone else's emotions. They don't tend to have much patience for the pain that their new friends and loved ones express. Instead, they basically give everyone who "whines" in their hearing a "get over it" whack on the back of the head. The central objective is to run--even if they have to move to Ethopia to do it. Geography works just as good as that whack on the head.

Runaways come into therapy when their own behavior disturbs them. They want to understand why they have done the things that they have done. But what so often happens for Runaways is that they find the person, event, place or thing to blame for the choices that they've made, they separate themselves from those people, events, places or things and that's all that they think they need to do. They have found an explanation for their own behaviors. Now the people or events they blame become the black enemy from which they must escape in order to take charge of their own lives. But, of course, as we've said, this doesn't provide real healing, only an illusionary escape.

So, how does one stop running? Well sometimes it takes a tragedy like the death of one of those despicable people in their pasts or a serious loss of some other type to make them begin to feel all of the love that they've always felt but didn't know they felt. Then there is all of the years of absence and loss to deal with, on top of the sorrow. This is the adult-child who hates his father until Dad dies. Then he grieves inconsolably, not only for the loss of his father, but for the loss of all of those years they could have shared, and for the fact that he never allowed his father any room for limitation and humanity.

Runaways must be willing to consider the possibility of gray. They must be willing to allow room for other people's mistakes. They must be willing to recognize that love is bigger than mistakes. Love doesn't die, even when we try to kill it.

Runaways must change some of their thinking and beliefs. If they are to heal, really heal, not just run, they must learn that black and white thinking is not only ineffective, but completely irrational. They must be willing to find and heal both the blacks and the whites. This means catching themselves in the act of self-betrayal, by recognizing black and white thinking when it occurs. This means catching themselves in the act of self-betrayal by recognizing the subtle mental posturing that they are doing that keeps them out of touch with their own feelings. This means plummeting the depths of their own shadow material.

That's not an easy job. But when people do it, they reconnect with people they have loved and lost due to their own cold choices. When people do it, they learn the art of forgiveness. They pass through the barriers in their own psyches that have prejudiced the past and the people in it and begin to see clearly all of the many different colors of the truth. In so doing their anxiety decreases, their dysfunctional behaviors subside and they become whole people.

We must encourage the Runaways in our lives not to stop growing, to explore the reasons why they can't feel anything, to come to terms, real terms, not black and white terms, with their pasts. It can be done. And on the other side of it is real human connection.

Love and Peace,
Andrea