Accidents – without any meaning?
Obviously, I’m a bit of an „accident-person“ myself, meaning that I lived through several of them - which mercifully all had a happy ending :-)
So I feel quite competent in observing the onset and the outcome of unexpected physical trauma, and today I allow myself to look into the often-heard question:
How does META-Health look upon accidents?
There are accidents with a prelude ...
... meaning that they were preceded by a conflict program that made them possible in the first place. To these belong most tendon- and ligament ruptures. As these structures are very strong but also embedded, they are only prone to tear when they already are weakened. This happens in long or habitual stress phases of self-doubt and self-devaluation concerning the task the affected structure has to fulfill. This is easily traced and understood in athletes who identify strongly with their abilities to run, jump or dribble.
Accidents can be provoked by a behaviour
...based upon conflict strategies and life habits:
- „Mania“ and recklessness are examples where danger signals are ignored or not even perceived. Looking deeper, we find two or more unresolved social conflicts in the background of aggression (in the case of challenged position and identity) or desperation (in case of lost position and love), or to light-headedness and absence (in the case of lost roots and flight to other levels of experience).
- „Megalomania“ or sophomoric behaviour is meant to help us overcome multiple self-doubts and self-devaluations, so we are confident and daring - sometimes too daring!
- Reduced sensory and emotional processing, like under pain medication, is also found in the so-called „Cerebellum constellation“ initiated by the feeling of vulnerability in multiple incidents. In this case we did not perceive the signals that might have prevented the accident.
- Nonchalating security for another value can happen in so-called „chunk conflicts“, when we need to get, to incorporate, or to get rid of something: a basic survival issue that makes us focus so much that we lose overview.
Breaking up a pattern
The accident itself is always a UDIN moment and a condensed stress phase on the physical level, naturally followed by a regeneration phase.
But in the behavioural strategies above mentioned, it also seems to be a resolution – an immediate, forced interruption of the conflict pattern or constellation. This can more often than not be recognized as a blessing in hindsight: the own identity and values are reviewed and, hopefully, updated by the experience that the former strategy is no longer working, nor is it needed.
Idealistically, this also happens in the „prelude-accidents“ named above, and this resolution opens the way to stabilization and strengthening of tissue and psyche.
Like my own pelvis fracture and hospital stay some 25 years ago (having had a severe fall mountain-climbing, just on New Year’s eve) freed me from certain fears and manic unease connected to an addiction to motion and exercise. At the same time, this episode led to new life choices!
What is the potential?
Not all accidents fit into these categories and are educed by the affected person. Or are they? Sometimes we can’t see correlations, no cause and meaning. To elicit the essence, we need to consider the future, or change our focus: what potential is there in what happened to us? What reward lies in railing against our fate?
Even the discoverer oft he „biological laws of nature“, Dr Hamer, would never have passed his genius concept on to the world, had not the lethal accident of his beloved son Dirk spurred him to dig deeper into the specific correlations of disease and trauma. To this father, merging vision with research was therapy. To the world, it is a gift and building blocks for holistic medicine.
Children’s accidents often relate to their parents! Just recently, I chatted with a friend to learn that her son had broken his ankle, which really stopped the family in their tracks and made them shift down, a pace they never seemed to be able to reach before. Now they, helpingly, find their peace with a new approach to family life.
We have the alternatives to either overcome, create meaning, and grow from adversities, or to perish. The thought might seem darwinistic, but no! My message is: observing accidents and their results leads us out of our self-centeredness, become helpers, healers, or an inspiration to others. Community bears us, we bear the community. Tragedies may become blessings, even stimulate evolution!
This reminds me of a very inspirational story about baboons by neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky:
Longer version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4UMyTnlaMY
Image source:
[1] Marco Verch [Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/]
via Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/30478819@N08/6050809859