Mr. Cellophane represents the real costs of ignoring our the suffering of our Younger Selves. And luckily, tapping can help us heal that past suffering.
“A human being’s made of more than air.
With all that bulk, you’re bound to see him there.
Unless that human bein’ next to you,
Is unimpressive, undistinguished
You know who…
Cellophane,
Mr. Cellophane,
Shoulda been my name,
Mr. Cellophane.
‘Cause you can look right through me,
Walk right by me,
And never know I’m there…”
[Fred Ebb, Chicago musical Lyricist]
What are the real costs of ignoring Mr. Cellophane?
I’m writing this morning about the true costs, the perils of continuing to ignore our Younger Selves, our young versions of Mr. Cellophane.
I fear this post may land on deaf ears and blind eyes – on our dogged and ingrained, reflexive-and-unconsciously-driven resistance to hearing the pleas of our Younger Selves. After all, who listens to even one Mr. Cellophane, let alone a whole tangle of Cellophane Children, of all sizes, ages and stages, who are all clamoring for release from their invisible but very real suffering?
At what cost do we ignore their voices? Well, I’m lying here writing this post in bed, having recently been diagnosed with both pneumonia and bronchitis. For the past several months, I have known I was pushing myself, feeling stressed out and overstretched with taking on too many commitments. And carrying on anyways, ignoring my self-care. Pushing through. It’s a tough lesson, a daunting reminder.
When I really look at it, there is a strange ruthlessness about gliding like an experienced ballroom dancer, with a fixed smile on my face, dancing all around, skilfully and deftly avoiding the old pain I’ve lived through. My pain. Although the pain is old, my current dance partner is anything but.
She’s one of my many child versions of Mr. Cellophane, though I don’t always acknowledge this. And I haven’t always even seen this, since my Younger Selves are so frequently still invisible to me, having been so long ago relegated to living away from my conscious awareness, in the dark depths of my unconscious where I can ignore them. You know, “out of sight, out of mind.”
But ignoring them doesn’t make them go away.
Instead, it just makes life worse. Ignoring the ongoing suffering of our Younger Selves colours our perception of life. It drastically reduces our joy, our capacity to live life fully, creatively and abundantly. And it costs us big-time.
The costs of continuing this crazy dance are high for us humans: just look at the staggering physical, emotional and mental health problems we all face, when we don’t take care of our stressors.
Our current reactions to stressors are specifically embedded in the feelings and beliefs of our Younger Selves, who were struggling to overcome some sort of problem they were facing. They’re connected together like an energetic cord, plugging our unseen past into our present-day beliefs and feelings about our stress and stressors. This is true, whether we’re willing to recognize it or not.
They are red flags, showing up in myriad ways, across many sectors of our lives. When we ignore them, it’s at our own peril.
Scope of the problem
- Overall, around 75% of Americans reported to the American Psychological Association that they experienced a physical or mental symptom of stress in the last month. [1]
- A 2017 study [2] showed that the top causes of stress in America were:
- Money (64%)
- Work (60%)
- The economy (49%)
- Family responsibilities (47%)
- Personal health problems (46%)
- 77% of Americans reported that they regularly experience physical symptoms of stress, and 73% disclosed they were experiencing psychological symptoms (American Psychological Association, 2017) [3]
- 42% of Americans surveyed said that stress has caused them to lose sleep[4]
- 33% said it has caused them to overeat in the last month [5] (although I’m surprised this is so low, since the World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that worldwide, adult obesity has more than doubled since 1990, and adolescent obesity has quadrupled [6]).
But wait, there’s more…
- Things such as bullying or emotional abuse can lead to mental health issues later in life, such as depression or anxiety. People who suffer from emotional trauma are more likely to struggle with addiction because they might use substances to numb the pain, deal with PTSD, or escape. [5]
- The frequency rates of stress-related mental health in 2018 was similar among young adults but baby boomers and older adults reported more stress: Millennials: 56%; Gen X: 45%; Baby Boomers: 70%; Older Adults: 74% [6]
- And that was before the pandemic that swept the world. Since then, (unsurprisingly) a new report has found that almost 8 out of 10 Americans reported that the coronavirus (COVID-19) has caused them stress [7]
- Worldwide, it has been reported that about 284 million people have an anxiety disorder. [8]
- And The Mayo Clinic reports that “Stress that’s not dealt with can lead to many health problems, such as high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, obesity and diabetes.” [9]
What does all this mean for our mental health, for our well-being?
The Canadian Association of Mental Health (CAMH) reports that “by the time Canadians reach 40 years of age, 1 in 2 have – or have had – a mental illness… Mental illness and substance use disorders are leading causes of disability in Canada… The disease burden of mental illness and substance use in Ontario is 1.5 times higher than all cancers put together and more than 7 times that of all infectious diseases. This includes years lived with less than full function and years lost to early death.” [10]
And suicide is the ultimate price tragically paid by too many: In Canada alone, there are about 4,000 Canadians who die by suicide each year. That works out to about 11 suicides each day, on average. It affects people of all ages and backgrounds. And those numbers are just in Canada. [11]
And if you think that’s a tough pill to swallow (and it is), it doesn’t end there. (Hang in, good news is on the horizon – and it’s pretty great news!) But first we need to acknowledge something else.
Our outer world reflects our inner realms…
Like I said, the costs are staggering. And our outer world collectively reflects our inner stress and our determined attempts to continue to ignore our child versions of Mr. Cellophane. Wars. Famines. Increasing levels of violence and murder. Pollution of our lands, our waters, our air. Living unsustainably on our planet.
Maybe you think that’s ridiculous: blaming our massive outer world problems on not paying attention to our traumatized Younger Selves? But consider this: if we’re living unbalanced, stressed out lives in connection to our own personal health and hygiene, how can we possibly hope to have the energy, the creativity needed to focus on some of the daunting global problems that our species is facing?
The truth is, from a neurological perspective: we simply cannot learn effectively when we’re stressed out…
Stress and creativity are antithetical to one another. And a stressed out brain always falls back on the reflexive need for protection, for rigidly doing what it’s always done before that has ‘worked’. It’s locked into this reflexive rigidity for safety because that’s how we have survived our past. In a stressed out brain, there is no space for creativity, for change, for contemplating new possibilities. A stressed out brain cannot respond creatively, it can only react reflexively.
The role of resistance
I know this may not be a popular viewpoint. I know it only too well personally from witnessing my own struggles with resistance. But “what we resist, persists.”
And resistance is a bitch. It’s relentless. Multifaceted. And cunning. It emerges directly out of our primal, unconscious need to protect ourselves at all costs.
So at one point in our experiences, it made sense to create a trauma capsule around an experience that was overwhelming and unable to be solved more effectively with the resources our Younger Selves had at the time.
Why would that happen? How would it help?
Well, for whatever reasons, neither fight nor flight were survival options. That leaves only the freeze response. Thus, our Younger Selves were encapsulated, frozen inside a timeless trauma capsule… to protect us from the threat and the unrelenting stress.
And then our Younger Selves, locked inside the stress/trauma capsules are relegated to living invisibly in our unconscious, where we have become inured to hearing their pleading cries for help, unable to witness their bleeding. They live in the realm of invisibility, just like Mr. Cellophane.
And although we may be unconscious of their ongoing existence, our bodies nonetheless remember. Or, as traumatologist Dr. Bessell van Kolk’s book title reminds us, “our body keeps the score”, even long after we’ve forgotten we were even in that particular dance. That’s when, how, and why we all first began the crazy dance with avoiding and evading Mr. Cellophane.
I clearly recognize how powerfully our unconscious works to protect us, to ensure our safety and survival. Yet, even recognizing this is not enough. For here I lay, consciously aware of the dilemma, with a diagnosis of pneumonia and bronchitis from overwork. I’m not blaming me. I’m not blaming anyone. But surely, we need to address this. In order to transform it, we actually need to do more than just becoming aware of it.
And there is a solution: tapping helps heal our past suffering
We need to accept radical responsibility for our Younger Selves, to help end their suffering. We can stop seeing them as Mr. Cellophane orphaned children and instead provide them with ways of healing their (i.e. our) unresolved old stress and distress.
To accomplish this, we have to start freeing them from their encapsulated lives inside stress-and-trauma-prison. Yup, it’s time to finally bust them free.
Now for the great news…
But the really great news is, we have the resources now that we didn’t have when we were young. And together, when we tap on the overwhelming feelings, thoughts and beliefs of a Younger Self, we can finally bring them into a new state of resolution, of completion. Because tapping on their thoughts, feelings and beliefs calms the dysregulation in the stressed-out brain… in our brain.
So we all benefit from this radical act of springing them free. Their dissociated energy becomes re-associated in us, gifting us with new energy and new levels of creativity. They help us step into our greater creative potential as humans.
Sometimes, facing what we fear the most really is what sets us free. Hacking Reality offers us each a path forward.
So many times in my own personal tapping, often in desperation, I have asked the question: Is it really even possible to clear this? The answer has always been yes. And thus encouraged, when I’ve pressed onward I have found this to be true.
There are no promises, no guarantees in life. But so much more is possible than our oldest unconsciously driven and limiting fears would have us believe.
For example, did you know psychologists and researchers have suggested that we only use about 10 to 15% of our physical brain? They have actually measured this! There is so much potential in each of us – all untapped!
Just imagine for a moment what freedom from stress and trauma might feel like…
Who knows what will be possible, once we begin to step into that potential. Tapping and Hacking Reality can elegantly and efficiently get us from ‘here’ to ‘there’. And even sometimes have fun en route!
I have been endlessly surprised, amazed and astonished by the creative possibilities that have opened up for me and for some of the other humans I have witnessed in Hacking Reality sessions.
When we calm the brain by tapping, this allows space for the Younger Self’s unresolved issues to be dealt with and resolved. And that’s when things get really interesting: when incredible, brand-new possibilities emerge. The Younger Self can finally envisage an alternate ending. A preferred new story. We can embark on a fresh new beginning.
We can do this!
As adults with more fully developed brains and way more life experience, there are many ways we can creatively assist our Younger Selves, including tapping to help heal our past suffering. They need not remain our unseen and unheard Younger Self versions of Mr. Cellophane. And with Hacking Reality, my experience has been that even when it seems most unlikely, the ‘impossible’ becomes ‘I’m possible.’
With Hacking Reality, when we begin to allow our invisible Younger Selves to heal – to finally be seen and heard – we are no longer doing the Mr. Cellophane dance. Our tapping helps heal our past suffering – and that’s when we finally get to show up in our own lives, dancing more fully, more abundantly. We literally get to tap into our own greater joy, into our creative potential.
It’s our birthright. And who knows where it might take us?
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References:
- https://www.singlecare.com/blog/news/stress-statistics/#:~:text=Stress%20statistics%20in%20America&text=According%20to%20the%20American%20Psychological,out%20of%20anger%20(20%25)
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
- https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight#:~:text=Worldwide%20adult%20obesity%20has%20more,16%25%20were%20living%20with%20obesity.
- https://greenhillrecovery.com/understanding-trauma-and-addiction/#:~:text=Emotional%20Trauma%20and%20Addiction&text=Things%20such%20as%20bullying%20or,deal%20with%20PTSD%2C%20or%20escape
- https://www.singlecare.com/blog/news/stress-statistics/#:~:text=Stress%20statistics%20in%20America&text=According%20to%20the%20American%20Psychological,out%20of%20anger%20(20%25)
- Ibid
- Ibid, (Our World in Data, 2017)
- https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/stress-symptoms/art-20050987#:~:text=Stress%20symptoms%20can%20affect%20your,%2C%20stroke%2C%20obesity%20and%20diabetes
- https://www.camh.ca/en/driving-change/the-crisis-is-real/mental-health-statistics
- Ibid
