Is the Drama in Your Life the Only Excitement in Your Life?

            Have you ever known someone to have a life filled with drama, only to be bereft of real, solid happiness and peace? We often call this kind of person a Drama Queen, whether it’s a guy or a gal.

            Drama can be very addictive if it is your means for self-importance in the world. When you derive all of your meaning from life by the amount of turmoil you can conjure, you know you have a problem. As I have gotten older, I tend to stay farther and farther away from this type of person. Their energy is life-sucking.

            As a young man I had a lot of drama in my life, most of it not self-imposed. But our early years are when we learn how to manage life and love. So it stands to reason, that we may try to recreate drama, should our lives stop having considerable meaning.

            I remember a time when I truly started to feel the Peace of God in my life. Strange doesn’t begin to describe the feeling that enveloped me. I was used to a life of struggle, fear, and anxiety. So, when peace came to visit, all I felt was a big, fat void. It felt strange and lifeless. It was similar, I guess, to the feeling cigarette smokers say they feel when they stop having a cigarette in their hands after they quit.

            What do I do now? What is emptiness about? Is peace a “something” to do?

            A very smart therapist told me once that I needed to take a year or two off from relationship, because I didn’t know what it meant to be alone. I spent many years fighting the assignment, until I began to reflect on what I just described about peace.

            What I really was running from in being alone… was God. Peace was the presence of God. I felt uncomfortable in the presence of Spirit, to put it bluntly. Until I could sit alone and be fine with it, I decided, I was going to forgo any kind of new relationship. This was no longer an assignment for a therapist; it was a spiritual dictum.

            I made a good choice. The first few weeks were hell. I sat alone with the television on, the computer on my lap with four open chat windows, played online games, and talked on the phone. What I didn’t do was be alone. It took weeks before I began to shut out the social media and disturbing crime dramas, which only reflected my inner turmoil even more. Soon, I began to take small chunks of time to the silence.

            There I met a surprising guest—someone I didn’t imagine still existed. His name was Bobby. He was about seven years old. He hid out in a closet underneath his brother’s clothes during the day. His only source of light was a LiteBrite with the pretty colored pegs forming the shape of a butterfly.

            He didn’t talk to me for a long time. But I knew that the key to finding peace in my silence was talking to him. So, I waited for him to trust me.

            Soon I heard a whisper, “Did you come to save me?”

            “Do you want to be saved?” I asked.

            “I don’t know,” he answered. “Can I trust you NOW?”

            I was thrown a curve for a moment by the word NOW. You see, Bobby was the name all my family called me when I was a child. Bobby was who had been abused. And I guess he felt like I had somehow betrayed him as an adult.

            Of course, this conversation was going on in my mind, as self-hypnosis, if you haven’t already figured that out. So, my job as the compassionate, omniscient observer—the place of the soul when you are in hypnotic trance—was to discover what I could do as an adult to gain back the trust of my inner child through these self-induced conversations.

            What I realized soon was that my choices as an adult had been less than healthy for young Bobby. I had gone into relationships without the consent of my heart, without inner peace, and more importantly, without the consent of Bobby. Did he feel safe? Did he feel at peace? Did he feel ready to move forward with love? Or was he still scared inside?

            These answers helped shape a new paradigm of thinking for me. I realized that living—in most of us—is a young, underdeveloped child, waiting to be nurtured by our adult self. This child can be the key to recovery for many relationship issues, anxiety and stress.

            If you struggle with something that is so deep that it goes beyond your verbal, cognitive self, you may be looking to uncover a piece of your old soul who needs to be nurtured back to health, before your adult self can be released into total freedom to move forward into peace.