A predicament is a difficult and usually embarrassing situation from which there is no easy way out, a catch 22, damned if you do and damned if you don’t .
We often hear a lot of “if only” or conditional statements, when predicaments are faced(Stage 4 Grief).
Examples would be, “ if only I’d quit smoking ten years ago, when I was warned, I wouldn’t have stage four cancer now”. Or if only we’d listened to the warnings about climate change twenty years ago, we wouldn’t be facing extinction now”.
Take the person who been given a terminal diagnosis of lung cancer, the doctor warned them twenty years ago they had to quit smoking, and they didn’t listen. They still smoke two packs a day. They are embarrassed, “if only” they had listened to the doctor twenty years ago, they wouldn’t be dying now. They wonder if they should quit smoking now, well they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t, and that’s the predicament. There are no easy answers, nothing they do now seems to provide a solution, they are going to die, smoking or not. What are they supposed to do?
Stage four grief is where we can really get stuck in the predicament, we have a terminal diagnosis, it seems there is no way out, what are we supposed to do now?
In comes the ego, rushing to our rescue, its tactics are distraction, diversion and displacement, three well know psychological defense mechanisms. The ego says “there must be a way out, we need to do more research”, and off we go, burying ourselves in tons of research, avoiding the painful emotions of grief. As long as we keep our mind busy we avoid dealing with our emotional pain.
Climate change is a like a cancer, its eating away at our life, we are in a predicament, there’s no easy way out, we had plenty of warning, which we chose to ignore, and now there seems no way out. If we stop burning fossil fuels today our entire economy will collapse, and we’ll all starve to death and anarchy and chaos will prevail. All,of our options are to painful to consider, there’s no easy way out. In steps the ego, “ we need more info”, and off we go reading and researching, avoiding our pain. We read every article, we follow the news, we keep our mind focused and we don’t feel our pain.
Our emotional pain hasn’t really gone away, it’s been pressed down beneath the surface of consciousness, into the unconscious. Emotion must be understood as an e-motive force, an energy that motivates behavior, consciously or unconsciously. Repressed emotions always find a way out, but having been repressed they are often very distorted, and can be quite negative. Sudden seemingly unprovoked negative outbursts can occur, further compounding our predicament.
If every waking moment of our life is preoccupied with dwelling on the predicament we shouldn’t be surprised if our sleep is disturbed. We are reading and researching, and keeping abreast of the news; there is so much information we are taking in, and much of it is emotionally laden as well. The result of all this is that our unconscious mind is working really hard as well. Unconscious emotion and unprocessed news are mixing together in our unconscious mind, and this won’t be good. Soon even our dream life becomes consumed with the predicament. We dream every night, whether we remember of not, house keeping dreams are normal, the subconscious mind is sorting and filing everything we’re taking in, feelings and facts have to be processed and dreams are a part of that process. However, if we are overloaded, unfiltered, unprocessed emotion slips into the unconscious, and now nightmares occur. The unconscious dreams are full of archetypal imagery, dragons and demons are often found here, and they can be quite terrifying, the landscapes in our nightmares can be apocalyptic in appearance, death and destruction abound. nightmares can be seen as an extreme formulation of the fears and feelings that we have been avoiding by our preoccupation with the news. The egoic defense strategies have repressed our pain, but now in our nightmares it’s breaking out.
We truly are in a predicament, it seems no matter what we do we are going to die. And there it is, we are afraid to die. The unknown is terrifying, we have been given a terminal diagnosis, we are going to die. What does that look like? What does it mean? What’s going to happen to me? Will it be painful, will it hurt? Is there life after death? Is it really the end? What’s going to happen? I don’t understand? Death, dying, decomposition, and decay it’s all so awful and it’s happening to me, and what’s going to happen to my family.
By focusing and obsessing on the predicament we have repressed all these horrible questions and their accompanying terrifying feelings into the unconscious. No wonder we’re having nightmares, we are in one. It’s time to face the facts. That’s what the nightmare is trying to convey.
Living in the solution means we have to address the real issue, death and dying, our impending mortality.
We have to sit down and examine our beliefs about death, and how we really feel. We have to stop all distraction and personally deal with the biggest question of life, death.
If there is a solution to our dilemma, this is where the answer will be found. What do I really believe and think about death, and what do I really feel?