Many people fear that once they start digging deep into themselves, they’ll find things that would be too much to handle. They fear what they might find, so they never start looking. This concern is legitimate and understandable. I have faced this several times in the last years.

But were these fears justified? Was my carefulness reasonable, or have I worried about something that I shouldn’t have?

My Experience

On my journey to self-discovery and healing, I had to face tons of shocking, devastating, and incredibly painful memories, feelings, and realizations. Many of them seemed unbearable and way bigger than me at first, but finally, I could always find a way to handle them somehow.

When I feared from going further on my path and looking for truths and answers because of what I might found, my therapist always said to me that my “inner wisdom” would never throw anything at me that I wasn’t ready to deal with. I can’t say this made my worries disappear, but it might have eased them. Several years later, I believe in what she said because my personal experience confirmed it.

Our Ability to Disregard the Truth

Like for many people, the most painful memories of my childhood were buried deep down somewhere in oblivion. They were blind spots in my past that I couldn’t remember, or even if I had remembered, I couldn’t understand and feel their significance and horror. I just tuned out, as if these events had never happened or they happened to someone else but me. The feelings involved in these experiences were far away, detached from me.

I think I am not a special case in this regard. Although I suffered several traumatic experiences, mostly emotional abuse, that I didn’t remember or considered normal, these were not isolated, extremely traumatic events, but mostly chronic unhealthy environmental influences that I saw as the usual way of life. But for many unlucky others, there are more extreme examples of completely forgotten traumatic events like sexual abuse, physical abuse or a loss. Long forgotten, as if it had never happened.

As I started therapy, turned my attention to my childhood, and forced myself to recall forgotten memories and feelings, I found myself in a long, tiring process. Looking back at how helpless and desperate I felt in the beginning at this process, I would have surely crushed if someone told me about all the memories and their pain that I went through uncovering my past in the last years. Knowing then what I know now would have surely killed me. But this never happened. I simply couldn’t remember. I couldn’t. And when someone tried to suggest me something about my feelings or the painful nature of my memories, I disregarded it without even thinking. It didn’t get me. It couldn’t get me. I was protected by some magical force that didn’t let anything inside that I wasn’t ready to deal with.

The Two Faces of Alternative Realities

People have an enormous capability and capacity to ignore or shut out memories or realities that are too much for them to handle.

On the one hand, this ability can make you blind and keep you in the dark. It can make you stuck in made-up worlds of illusions. You can delude yourself with it, drifting away from reality. We all know the guy who imagines himself being a superhero (which no one is), just because he can’t deal with his own weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Or the girl who goes crazy when his actual boyfriend doesn’t call her for a few hours, but she doesn’t realize that she always chooses men who are distant, unapproachable, and unreliable. That’s why it is important to question your views, beliefs, and actions from time to time.

But on the other hand, this ignorance can literally save your life. Without these blinders, you wouldn’t be able to survive traumatic experiences, especially in your early childhood, when you have a minimal capacity and support to work through traumas. This same self-protective feature of our brain is what saves us on our inner journey. It lets us remember, but only as much as we are ready for. Through my therapy path that started about four years ago, three years of serious work had to be done until I finally realized my serious issues with my mother and women altogether. These are the most fundamental, the earliest, and the most painful problems I have, but if you’d ever asked me about it in the first three years (a few people tried), I would have certainly laughed you out. I would have said: “I may have many issues, but not with relationships, that’s for sure!”

Internal and External Events

Unfortunately, external events can happen to us that are too much to handle. We all know that. We can’t control what life brings us. I had certain traumatic events in my life that I wasn’t ready for, that turned my life upside down, made me and my delusional world fall apart, and set me off on my journey for self-discovery. But on my inner quest, although I had to face many severe difficulties, I never found anything too early or too impossible to handle.

Am I Right?

This is what I have been told, this is what I have experienced, and this is what I believe in. But am I right? I don’t know. Maybe you tell me I’m wrong. Maybe some people out there are crushing under their newly discovered memories. So the question remains an open one. Should you worry about what you’ll find in your subconscious? What do you think? What is your experience? Did it ever happen to you that your subconscious threw something at you that was too much or too early to handle?