You Draw the Good to Yourself

You naturally draw the good to yourself. Good thoughts, feelings, and good happenings can come your way as crystal-clear water flows unimpeded through a mountain stream. Like stream water, it depends on there being no impediments. In daily life, there are obstacles because we live in an imperfect world. The psychologist Donald Winnicott wrote in his book Playing and Reality that our objective in a healthy life is to achieve what is good enough. 

To this, we would add that things needn’t be perfect, unimpeded, or without obstacles all of the time. There are and will be problems; there is no escaping that human fact. However, as gravity pulls water downstream once obstacles are removed, the dissolution of pathological negativism and destructive attitudes and relationships frees us to feel all that is good in life. In fact, the bad stuff, problems, and mistakes often have the most to teach. We stay open, learn, and grow from the good and the bad.

In weekly study groups, Dr. Michael Eigen, a long-time eighty-seven-year-old colleague living in New York, teaching at NYU, and having written more books than Freud, affirms that as healthy humans, we are opening, constantly opening, and changing. It keeps us on our psychic toes so that we don’t rest on our emotional rear end, drop to the ground, and refuse to go on when disappointment strikes. By staying with it through thick and thin, terrible happenings and wonderful inspiration have time to marinate, and voila! Something is created; the good things we draw to ourselves by staying open and seeing things through.

Another important psychic fact is that the difficult, the bad, and the worst are compostable. Tough stuff, trying circumstances, and troublesome relationships are there to teach us something. They’re compost in the heap of things, people, and situations that haven’t worked for us and even been traumatizing. The composting process breaks down the hurt, self-doubt, and horrid memories so that we feel what we need to feel and learn what we need to know.

By letting go and allowing the unconscious to compost bad and traumatizing experiences, healing and helpful mind/body memories can surface and establish themselves. They keep us from what hasn’t worked so we don’t make the same old mistakes. We have room to grow into what is new, even new mistakes! Remember, there’s stuff to learn even from fumbles and stumbles, sometimes especially from them. What matters is that we have the wherewithal to always keep moving on. As I tell my patients, the healthy psyche is a forward-moving and future-oriented psyche, moving toward and drawing to itself what is good and whole.

*Winnicott, D. (2005). Playing and Reality. Routledge.