HMN 2024: The One Issue You’ll Spend Your Life On

Source: Ivan Leidus, Wikimedia Commons

We in the West, and particularly in America, love to believe that we can overcome anything with enough hard work. When we’re younger, while we acknowledge we have this or that struggle, we assume that at some point in an imagined future it will be behind us and we will be issue-free and moving unencumbered through the world.

I’m sorry to say this is just not true. I believe all of us have one issue, which is our main struggle throughout our lifespan. It can indeed get better, easier to deal with, and less disruptive. But I don’t think it ever goes away completely.

What am I talking about? Well, for everyone, it will be something different, but here are some of the classics I see in my work with people: a deep-seated fear of abandonment that colors my relationships and makes them less easy; a belief that I’m not enough as I am but I have to do something or be something to be worthy of consuming the world’s oxygen; a fear of intimacy that makes me acting “as if” I’m a real person in 99 percent of my human interactions; a deep-seated belief, almost at a cellular level, that I’m permanently flawed and nothing I ever do will fix that.

You may identify with more than one of these issues, but I would challenge you to reflect and try to identify what is most core to you. I used to think we all had a few issues we work on. But I now suspect that if we really get to know ourselves, if we work our program diligently enough, we will come to understand ourselves with a certain simplicity that reflects the truth of who we are. There is one issue that underlies all others. It’s almost as if we came into this life with the spiritual curriculum of working this issue, that we were born with it even though there were probably also environmental contributors along the way as well.

Why is it important to recognize this? I think there are at least two reasons. First of all, knowing and recognizing the truth of who we are gives us far greater control over how we live our lives. We are no longer pretending to be something we are not but aligning with the reality of ourselves. If I know I’m prone to panic at the thought of abandonment, that knowledge is a powerful antidote to the worse disruptions of the condition. I like to recommend a simple mantra to my clients with their core issue: “This issue is in me. I am not in it.” Holding it in this way recognizes that we are, at some level, larger than any of our particular problems. It may be disruptive, disturbing, and sometimes even destructive, but we are always, always bigger than the sum of our parts and our problems.

The second reason I think knowing our issue is important is because it instills a necessary humility into our lives. Recognizing that we are limited in how much we can fix ourselves, that we will run out of time before we run out of issues, is a humbling and sobering truth, seasoning us with tolerance for ourselves and for others.

So look yourself in the mirror and recognize the fault line of your character, that it is innate and to some extent intractable. I think with enough acceptance, we will learn to be grateful for this condition, as it has likely propelled us forward more than anything else toward becoming who we were born to be.