What Does High Functioning So Often Disguise?

[Written around 2004.]

Society considers those who function at a high level to have reached the pinnacle of success – and mental health. Many modern insurance companies won’t even reimburse for your therapy if you function at too high of a level. The irony is that most high functioning people don’t want to look deeply within anyway – be it in psychotherapy or any other form of self-reflection. They live their lives without ever really exploring why they live the way they do, why they surround themselves with their closest intimates, why they have children and raise them the way they do, and who they even are. To look too deeply inside would all too often reveal the lies beneath the façade, the pain and misery behind the comfort and numbness, the unhappiness and resignation behind the seeming success.

Most people are so traumatically conditioned in their childhoods to be unhappy by the very ones who should be loving them the most – their parents – that as they grow into adulthood they lose sight of how miserable they really are. They live on the surfaces of themselves and are terrified by too much realness. True intimacy disturbs them and they avoid it at all costs. Even most therapists and “spiritual” leaders don’t want to help their wards fully manifest inner truths because they are terrified of doing it themselves. Many themselves take psychotropic medications and other drugs to assuage their upwelling feelings and send these reminders of life’s ancient horrors back down into the depths of their souls, to be forgotten. What a world we live in, where so many of our supposedly most healed bypass their own internal healing processes through quick fixes!

It is difficult to function at an extremely high level in a sick society if you are honest. True honesty from the soul is antithetical to those who call the world’s present tune. Society thrives on denial. Society’s television censors life’s deeper message, and newspapers operate within the tightest parameters of emotional disconnection. But the worst offenders are families. Parents cannot tolerate their children expressing the truths with which they were born. Thus children learn, through painful and often silent indoctrination – and not uncommonly outright torture – to lie, because if they don’t they won’t get loved. An unloved child is in big trouble, because he tastes the kiss of death.

The only hope is to break from the systems that lie. Granted, we must abide by society’s rules if we wish to have food on our plates, but that does not mean that our hearts should lie for one instant. The only hope for true redemption is to tell the truth. And God bless you if you do, for though you will be rejected by those you thought loved you, a greater door will open.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *