A man wakes up one day to find he has become irrelevant to his family.
He loves his family with everything yet his needs are disregarded; but he continues to put them first. Only to find that he has lost the sense of who he is as a person, as a man, as a self. He has grown to feel invisible at times as if he is a fixture in the background of the living room or kitchen. As if his value within the family was called into question a long time ago, and his need to feel appreciated was swept aside. What is truly root of this situation and how did his life get to this point? I cannot say for sure as each man I have ever spoken with has their own story as to how he ended up here.
He knows that he is tired, he knows that he feels fear and that loneliness in a house of loved ones has become a familiar reality. He awakes at the same time each morning, handles familial responsibilities, goes to a job he feels little passion and love for so that he may support and fulfill the needs of others around him. But how did he end up here? Did he lose himself in the race of feeding hungry mouths and working hard for the validation and approval of those who matter most?
His shoulders feel heavy with the burden of responsibility, where is his sense of levity and when did he last laugh out loud? When did he last feel truly alive, conquer a mountain with his physical body, or swim at the depths of the ocean?
A man once told me that he felt that his child self was such a distant memory that he had almost forgotten how to play, and what it felt like to engage with his inner boy. Had it not been for his fervor and love for Jujitsu he’d have completely lost his inner boy in his pursuit toward future goals at work and in the fulfillment of never-ending responsibility. He described to me the deep desire to play again, to laugh and smile uncontrollably, simply just to feel alive and operate at pique happiness.
He just felt so damn tired and heavy inside. Was this it? Was this all that life was going to be for him?
No, this is not all that there was to this man’s life, he needed to begin choosing for himself again though. He needed to learn how to be present with his internal landscape, to sit with his true self, the one he left behind so many years ago. Unbeknownst to him though, he had a goldmine of experiences full of wonder, excitement, and sheer happiness from his boyhood, or from little glimpses that he had forgotten about from his manhood.
I sat down with this man and I taught him how to live in complete presence with himself, how to use these long forgotten glimpses of happiness to completely transform his life. In happiness, in living again rather than existing, in uncontrollably laughing out loud again. A client once told me that he had begun to literally see the world in brighter colors, blueberries seemed to be a brighter shade of blue at the market, and the green of new life in the springtime seemed to be a brighter and more vibrant green. Suddenly he found that he was fully experiencing his relationship with his children, it was all new to him, but he also couldn’t help but feel that he was simply returning home to his true self.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock
Was there more to the article? It hardly offers any advice after a long explanation of the problem. Just therapy and the blueberries look bluer?