Delilah’s Mirror Episode 5: Our Capacity For Pain And Fear

It has long been my observation of myself and others that the human soul can take a tremendous amount of punishment before it decides it can’t take anymore. Then, and only then, is when real change occurs – when the fear of the unknown is not as great as the pain of the known. AA calls it “hitting bottom.”

Frankly, some of us haven’t hit bottom yet, and until we do, all the rambling we do about emotional issues, eating carb-laden foods for whatever reason, and how expensive low carbohydrate eating is, [insert gripe of your choice here] is pointless.

I volunteered in a battered women’s shelter for a time. The souls of the women there had a tremendous capacity to take pain and punishment. This is NOT a ‘Good Thing.’ As far as I could see, each woman was at one of two developmental stages:

She just left the abuser, but is still willing to go back if he says “I’m sorry” sweetly enough, OR if he threatens her harshly enough, OR if she’s afraid to be alone. She has left the abuser for the 63rd time and is finally willing to not go back no matter how sweetly he says “I’m sorry,” OR how harsh his threats become and how terrified she is of him, OR of being alone.

There is a third stage, but I never saw those women, and there was a reason for that: they’d been murdered. Their capacity for pain was so great that they died for it.

These women are not victims; they’re enablers in their own destruction.

So…how sweetly do carb-laden foods say, “I’m sorry.”? How harshly do they threaten us if we don’t stuff them down our gullets? Or are our souls’ capacity for pain so great that we’ll let the grains kill us?

The capacity for a human spirit to take that kind of punishment is indicative of a lack of knowledge of one’s own worth, or who one is as a human being and the children of a Divine Creator.