What is comfort and what's so wrong with it?

A few months ago I decided to start telling friends more about what I think about the world. Even though a part of me is frightened of losing friends and alienating people as as result, in my heart of hearts I know that for me to keep growing I have to get more real, get more fully aligned with my true self and actually live, instead of pretending to live!

Its a tough mission but I wonder what the point is otherwise?

The date of the book group meeting arrived and I decided that my book group friends, (who are all trained therapists!) would make a good and thoughtful place to start. I began that evening, before the others joined us the following day, by talking about comfort with my host and her husband. To my surprise they weren't immediately dismissive and got the point of what I was saying (though I'm sure they felt as though I was going a bit far!) they were kind and respectful and listened till late at night. They asked pertinent questions that helped me clarify my ideas as did the rest of the group the next day. Apart from sharing my ideas with my closest friends, people who already know and have discovered this stuff for themselves I realised that I hadn't shared much with the other people in my life and I knew that as I do want to communicate this stuff and of course fear was at the bottom of this avoidance, as ever!


Thinking about the search for comfort as a major organising principle upon which so much of human activity is based seems strange at first. After all, we all want to be comfortable, what's so awful about that? Its easy to see though, how our drive to attain comfort, at least at the superficial level, is a negative propellant by thinking of it as being on a continuum....


People use a variety of means to manage their feelings of discomfort, distress, upset and emotional pain. Ever used heroin to numb the terror and pain of being physically and sexually abused by your family throughout your childhood? Hmm, probably not eh? Had a glass of wine or a beer to conquer your nerves at a party? Seem a bit more familiar? Its basically the same thing. In all the significant ways our culture (in other words the families we grew up in) encourages us to manage distress by avoiding it and we have been endlessly creative in developing innumerable ways to do just that. Don't drink,smoke or do drugs? Ever do a bit too much of something? Running, watching telly, shopping, eating, working? Ever wondered why or what you were avoiding by doing those things to excess? In a way its not the thing itself that's the problem its why we are doing it, what our unconscious motivations are and what the implications of these reasons are for ourselves, children, the planet might be if we were able to stop! More on this later...As an aside here; whether people use socially acceptable means to dissociate or not is not the problem, the 'war on drugs' is futile not just because of the hypocrisy involved but because it doesn't so much as touch on the reasons people actually use drugs. This is what I mean when I say the compulsive, ceaseless drive to attain comfort is a negative but exceedingly powerful force in the world, however, resistance is not futile!

In the example I gave above, at one end of the spectrum is somebody regarded as a social outcast, someone who is, temporarily at least, unable to function in 'normal' (!) society. At the other end we see many average, high functioning, high achieving persons. Despite the differences they were basically motivated by the same thing- the flight from discomfort, pain, agony. How much of human activity is just that? When I stop to really consider this question my mind frankly boggles! The drive to acquire more property and possessions, more worldly goods to demonstrate your success- a home, a spouse, even children; all of these are ways in which we declare to the world that we are 'doing well' that we are successful ‘adults’. To a crack addict, 'doing well' is not running out of drugs, not getting sick, not getting caught by the police and successfully numbing all traces of the terrifying traumas within. To someone who is a high flying,’succesful’ professional, the same things apply; unless their work, or health or possessions (including that wine collection!) with which they comfort and numb themselves from their traumatic histories are threatened or taken away they feel fine- not that different from the junkie at all.


We have constructed a culture which is all about not feeling, we are all, as I said in my first post... brought up not to feel- to seek comfort at the merest hint of feelings breaking through our defences. Often people come to therapy because they no longer feel comfortable, or they're in a crisis that, in some way, has brought them in touch with their inner pain. Often this is due to a loss of something that was preventing them from feeling pain and in its absence their pain wells up, overflows and threatens their equilibrium- their ability to feel comfortable. Many people decide to stop using drugs or alcohol, enter recovery and realise they had reasons for wanting to numb out for all that time or they have a child who develops a mental health problem or they discover infidelity in their partner or they lose their job or get cancer or they meet any other major life challenge and the painful truth starts leaking out. And it hurts, I've been there and it really does hurt! Most people want help simply to stop the pain, make it go away so they can continue as normal. Such a goal might be addressed by a short course of CBT available through the UK government's new Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies' programme!

Some of us realise that simply stopping the pain won't bring about profound change and what we need is profound change- a radical rethink of who we are and what made us this way. In exploring that we unearth a journey that takes us deep within ourselves and our histories, it has miles of grief and inevitably demands having to explore pitch dark, scary alleys. At times the journey toward our truth, the truth of who we are and what we have experienced; to discover what lies beneath all our defences is so isolating that we'll need to stop and grieve that too. This journey to regain a full, heart, soul and mind connection with ourselves, the connection we're all conceived, if not born with, is ultimately the only way we can enable ourselves to live and feel as spontaneously as we are capable of. In fact to survive and evolve as a species this is exactly what we need to do! If we gave up comfort seeking and avoiding the truth that the casues of our pain hold for us, both about what has been done to us and what we have done to others, we would be fully aligned with our true selves and free.