TRANSCRIPT
I remember about 20 years back, I first heard the concept of hell in the hallway. One door closes, and you’re trying to get to the next door, but the next door hasn’t opened yet. So you are stuck in the hell in the hallway. I remember when I first heard that phrase, hell in the hallway, it rang so true to me because I was in a hell in the hallway. I was in a phase of transition in my life. I had finished college. I hadn’t yet become a therapist. I was lost. I was confused. I was trying all sorts of different things. I wasn’t in a relationship. I so desperately wanted to have a girlfriend, but I couldn’t find one who really matched with me. Also, I don’t think I was emotionally healthy enough yet to have one. I didn’t know where I belonged. I didn’t know where I should live. I didn’t know what I should do for work. I felt like I got this great education that I wasn’t doing anything with. I didn’t necessarily have all that much money. My family had broken up. My parents were divorced. I didn’t have a family of my own. My friendships were confused. I didn’t have friends who I was really bonded with. I was in a kind of long protracted existential crisis.
And so just the idea of knowing that there was a phrase, there was a concept that other people had gone through, and the idea that I was going in a direction, that really helped me. It was just a question of making sense of what direction I was going in. And I’m gonna tell you what my salvation was because it came from a few different things. One of the main things was really to study my history, to study where I had come from. What was this place I had to come from? Who were my parents? What was my childhood? What were my traumas? What had they done to me? How had I reacted because of it? How had this made me into a person who I became? What were my strengths? What were my weaknesses? I was really doing massive, massive, massive amounts of self-reflection. And to the degree that I have self-knowledge now, I think I was a lot more clumsy. I went down a lot more blind avenues. I really didn’t know myself so well.
I was also developing the ability to discern this truth inside myself, to really figure out what is healthy and what wasn’t, to be able to figure out what is reality and how can I move forward. Another thing that I was doing is that I was working. I was getting out into the world. As confused as I was, as much as I was in pain and grieving and lost and frustrated and angry and feeling sad, I was getting out and working. I was being useful in the world. I was being a productive member of society, as people sometimes told me. Having co-workers, having a boss who told me what to do, doing a job, being paid for doing this job, it really gave me a sense of self-esteem.
Another thing was I was developing friendships. Friendships with other people who were in their own version of hell in the hallway. So I had companions. I went to support groups. I went to Al-Anon for a while, a group that was for families of alcoholics. Nowadays, I’m not that interested in a lot of it. I’m not interested in a lot of their philosophies, a lot of how you’re supposed to grow in Al-Anon. I don’t like all that, the God stuff and the higher power stuff. It’s not for me. But at the time, I felt nothing was perfect in my life, and in a way, this was certainly better than not being there. So I went a lot. Incidentally, it was in Al-Anon that I first heard the concept of hell in the hallway, and I was very grateful.
The thing that I loved also about Al-Anon is I got to sit back and listen to other people tell about their stories, their life, their hell in the hallway, their paths, their confusion, and the solutions that they had. And some of it actually was incredibly useful to me. I found people in Al-Anon who actually were real role models for me, people who really inspired me to be better and to be healthier. And also what I found, and these people were incredibly useful to, was people who were partial role models, people who had certain aspects of their personality and their life experience that I really thought, this is great. This is what I want to get out of this hell in the hallway. And yet I saw other parts of them that were troubled and confused, and I thought, in denial, maybe even deluded, that I thought, that is what I don’t want.
And then I saw other people in Al-Anon and in my life in general who I thought, these are people who I want almost nothing of what they have. I don’t want to do that. They were negative role models. And what I found is those negative role models were people who were also incredibly healthy for me because I could watch and listen to them and hear again and again and again the things that they were doing in their life that were causing destruction in their life. I could listen to their negative behaviors. I could listen to their negative thought processes. And sometimes I could say, ooh, I identify those negative thought processes, those negative behaviors with my own. I could see parts of them reflected in me, and I could think, that is what I need to change. That is what I needed to get away from.
In a way, it was kind of like a form of cognitive behavioral therapy. It was quite separate from looking at my past and analyzing my past and analyzing my traumas. It was simply looking at my own adult behaviors and saying, what works and what doesn’t? What is functional? What isn’t functional? What is helping me grow and become a person who I love more and more self-esteem based? And what is not? What is more self-destructive? What is hurting my life? What is hurting my relationships? What patterns are not good for me?
So all these things, being able to sit in these meetings and just observe people, just shut up and listen, it helped me so much. But it also profoundly helped me to be able to talk, to be able to put my ideas out there and to get other people’s feedback occasionally or no feedback at all, but mainly just to hear myself speak. And while I was going through this transition, while I was heading toward a new phase of my life, to really listen to what my heart wanted, to who I really was on the inside, to what was that quiet, still voice of proof, that voice of beauty underneath my traumas, the true self within me. And to realize that I had a true self within me and that I could be quiet. And sometimes, most often in my moments of real silence and solitude, I could connect with the beautiful me inside.
Now, when I look back on that time in my life, that hell in the hallway, what I realize is, in a way, it was time limited. I did eventually come out of it. I did find a new life. I became a therapist. I got my own apartment. I stopped living with roommates. I made a little bit more money. I started building up more savings. I built more of a professional career for myself. I found more of an internal sense of stability. I found I had resolved more of my traumas. I wasn’t so desperate, so hurt. I wasn’t acting out so much. I wasn’t using substances at all anymore after a certain point. And then I look back on it and I think, you know, there was something very special and meaningful about that time of hell in the hallway. Some of the hard parts of it I wouldn’t wish on myself. I wouldn’t wish on anyone. But in another way, I would wish on myself because you know what happened? It saved me.
It was a time for me to really reorient myself. It was like I came out of my childhood into my adulthood lost, confused, and traumatized, really not capable of being a self-loving, functional, caring, self-esteem based human being adult in the world. And that hell in the hallway time was time for me to make sense of all this confusion and to come out of it because eventually that next door did open.
Walked into it, and I’m still in that place where I have made so much more sense out of my life and so much more meaning. However, to take an even further step back, I want to say one other thing: I’m still in a sort of hell in the hallway. I think until I’ve resolved all of my childhood traumas, I’m always going to be in the hell in the hallway.
In a way, I’m grateful for that because until I’ve resolved everything, until I’ve made sense of everything bad that happened to me, that still has caused me to be unconscious, to be destructive even to small degrees in the world, or self-destructive in small ways in the world, I’m still kind of lost. I’m still kind of confused.
And that full door of me walking into a fully connected version of myself, it hasn’t fully happened yet. I’ve made great strides in a lot of ways. I’m much happier than I certainly ever was in my childhood or in my early adulthood. But I also still see this transition as happening, and I’m grateful that I’m still in a transition because for me, what it means is that I’m still growing and I’m still learning, and that there’s hope that my life is still going to become better as I get older.