THE LOCK NOT THE DAM
“A lock is simply a chamber with gates at either end. By emptying or filling
that chamber with water your boat can move up or down into a new section
of the canal or river.”
–– Canal&River Trust, UK.
Let’s take a minute to talk about pain. And why good people suffer. Let’s embrace the fact that all of your happiest moments came eventually because you sailed onto the Lock of Emotional Regulation rather than damming yourself up on the Pond of Pain. These intentional decisions to feel our grief when we need to and to let it go when we must, help us heal from true tragedy and hardship.
As a young man I lost someone important to me. It was painful and, to be honest, still is decades later. And though things got worse before they got better, I was lucky to know this: the only way to survive the grief and to truly honour who he was to me was by moving through the pain. Not avoiding it.
In facing my grief, I asked for a lot of help. I did not do it alone. I reached out to my wife, family, friends — and even colleagues and fellow students (I was doing my masters at the time).
In counselling I learned how to relate to the loss of my loved one as the locks at Lockport relate to ships. I learned to lower the gate to let the pain in when it was safe to do so. I would raise the gate to protect myself from the pain when other things needed my attention. This involved a lot –– including Kleenex –– and it required me to continue working through the pain in many small ways when doing so was necessary. Those small bits of resilience and compassion, taken together, added up to something much greater: acceptance, love, and clarity in the face of loss.
More recently, I’ve achieved years of sobriety using essentially the same method. In the past, when I flooded with pain or that feeling of not quite belonging, I wanted to drink. However, learning I was resilient and could respond to pain—raise or lower the gates of the lock—the numbing crutch of alcohol lost its appeal.
With a lot of help and support from my people, I have created a virtuous cycle of Emotional Regulation. Because of this, it has become much more natural for me to sail through my cravings and not to drink. I feel the reward of not drinking. The reward makes me not want to drink any longer, which makes it easier not to drink. And so it goes. It adds up to year upon year of sobriety. Virtuous cycles are wonderful, self-fulfilling patterns.
Sadly, temptation is like Whack-a-Mole: another one is always bound to pop up! A smaller, more recent one is YouTube at lunch. I don’t need to watch soccer or baseball highlights while I’m eating. I can just eat lunch.
Long story short: good therapy doesn’t fix you. Good therapy (or anything, really) helps you see what sucks, what is great, and the meaningful stuff in between. It helps you be more emotionally regulated. Knowing that, we can figure out what stance we want to take, and what we want to focus our energies on. Good interactions with ourselves and others help us see clearly those things that desperately need elbow grease or simply acceptance. Or TLC. In any good interaction, each human’s capacity and resilience gets noticed. Cultivated.
Friendship, parenting, coaching, and even therapy, after all, are meant to help people live on their own terms without denying reality while avoiding harm to others. The blessing is that this applies to both parent and child; coach and athlete; therapist and client. The responsibilities are different, but the call to raise and lower your locks as you need is the same.