Trauma survivors don’t own the territory of good, but we are some of its most loyal subjects.

Good might make you feel good when you are a little kid. It might make you feel safe if you grow up in a crazy household. It might help you imagine that love is possible.  It might give you hope that your boss will promote you.  Good can motivate you to persevere, it can help you survive, it can endear you to others, sometimes.

But there is something about good that goes beyond rational judgment. Good can become a religion. Good can feel like it is one of the natural laws—break it and you die.

The commandments of good are that if I can just be good enough, perfectly good, if I can just get it right, then somehow in a feat of backwards time travel, everything bad that ever happened would undo itself. If you can just be good enough, no one will ever see your worst moments or know your shame, including you. The problem with good is that there is no middle ground. If you are not good, then you are bad, or horrible, or unlovable. You have to desperately cling to good in order not to fall into the abyss of bad. I’m not even sure that I can even do this dichotomy justice but I will try: Good is staying on that flimsy ladder over the crevasse on Mount Everest. Bad is falling off of the ladder.

I can get exhausted simply thinking about the many, many years of trying to get it all right. Living by so many rules always trying to be good. It was an endless and impossible task. And even now when I am tired or feeling lost or something triggers an old fear, I can find myself back in the fight to be good. Back in the place where that is all I want—to be good, to get it right.

The good news is (and it won’t feel like good news at first): At some point, if you let yourself begin to grow, good begins to crack. Growth is just too big for good. 

When good begins to crack --what protected you—the illusion of safety that good provides—is no longer there. There can be shame, because all of what you have tried to hide in the cupboards and drawers of good starts to come out in to the open. Sometimes it can crack all at once in a crisis and you can go from good to a disaster in one move which can oddly feel like a relief. But more often than not it happens in increments, in jerks and starts, and it mostly feels anything but good.

Good is an internal tornado and an external affair—you are working off an imagined external judge and jury, or as Anne Lamott once described—you are treating everyone in your life like a flight attendant trying to make all of the passengers happy.  But if you can tolerate this messiness. If you can tolerate the terror of being what you have been calling ‘bad.’ You can come to understand something crucial: good is a very, very small world.

It's an astonishing realization—when you come to see your world of ‘good’ is actually quite small. It makes you sit kind of blinking and squinting suddenly at your life—with the clarity of a new set of glasses, or a really bright light shining on the landscape ahead of you.

I had a dream not long ago that I was living in a house that I had lived in for years and I pushed open a door in a back room and found that there was actually an entire house that had been there all along. I had been living in this tiny space, and all along there had been this huge, expansive space to live in. In the dream, I stood in this doorway and stared into the space with both disbelief and sadness. It had been there all this time.

And that’s where you build the muscles to live without the old protections of good. You stay right there on that threshold—between the rooms of good that you used to inhabit--- the old, small, safe space—with your feet on the threshold of looking out into the new, unknown, expansive space that can hold it all. It’s been there all this time—waiting for you.

© 2023 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD