When I first received my Fibro diagnosis, I immediately put on my researcher hat and delved into articles and journals to figure out what was causing this madness in my body. As with most chronic illnesses, there are a lot of theories to why people get fibro. One that popped up over and over was the theory that a physically and/or mentally traumatic event occurs and causes the central nervous system to go berserk.
This caused a particularly bad train of thought to leave the station. For days I thought about what horribly traumatic event I experienced in my past would have caused this. Over and over, and each time I came up empty.
Truth be told, my life has been about average on the fucked up scale. Just enough to give me some valuable life lessons and funny drinking stories, but not so terrible that people feel bad for me and think it is amazing that I am where I am now.
Most of this thinking was done as I walked the dog in the bright sunlight, and as I realized that I couldn’t isolate a point of time, I started questioning why it was so important for me to find this root cause of all my pain and fatigue.
Knowing about the event wouldn’t change where I am today. It wouldn’t magically cause my CNS to normalize.
Hell, maybe I had blocked the event because it was so traumatic and digging it up would make things go crazier.
Or maybe it was a super traumatic event at the time, but now, with a few more decades of experience, it doesn’t seem like a big deal.
Maybe something traumatic happened to one of my parents or grandparents and the response was written into our family DNA, so that my body responded to the same event as trauma but my mind never registered it.
Finally I realized that there was no point in trying to get to the root cause, because it wouldn’t matter in the end. There was nothing I could do about historical events, there was a possibility I could do more damage, and the more time I spent trying to figure out what went wrong meant less time doing things to make me feel better.
I had to take a long laugh at myself when I came to that realization, as this is essentially the same advice I give clients.
Many times when things go wrong, we will readily identify a solution. However, there is always a need to figure out what went wrong in the first place. Who messed up. What name can we put on a report to blame things on. Generally my stance is that I don’t care and am not going to spend my time leading an organizational witch hunt when I could just fix the issue and move on.
I don’t know why we are wired this way, where finding someone or something to blame for the issue is more important than fixing it. I see this scenario play out every day in political theater, in businesses, and in relationships.
Maybe we all need to take a step back and ask ourselves if we should spend our energies fixing an issue instead of assigning blame. For some issues, getting to the root cause will be necessary to truly fix an issue, but I am betting that for 90% of our problems, if we let go of the need to assign blame, we can find solutions that let us move on.