If you’re a Marvel super-fan like I am, and have seen Thor Ragnarok you may remember a scene where Loki and Thor are breaking out of a prison of sorts and resort to a ploy called “Get Help”. Long story short (spoilers here): Thor and Loki pretend that Loki is hurt in order to catch some guards…off guard…and then Thor subsequently throws Loki into them (as super heroes do) and they make their escape. The lead up to the scene is Loki recognizing that he’s about to get thrown through the air and tells Thor “I’m not doing ‘Get Help'”, indicating that this is a well known tactic they’ve used before.
Getting Help For Real
In an effort to link my love for Marvel to mental health this is actually a great metaphor for how we can look at our own problems! Often times we are in prisons of our mind (or circumstances). Life can deal us severe blows, and our own mental habits can torment us. We feel helpless, but we are not. Still it takes work and risk to break free from these emotional confines.
One way is to…get help. Like in the movie, when we try to work out a way to free ourselves, it’s seldom through pleasant or painless means. We have to do a lot of introspection, we have to have courage, we have to explore parts of ourselves that make us vulnerable – and we often times see these steps that we need to take and we say “No Way” or… “I am not doing ‘get help'”.
Even though help is the things that is needed, it doesn’t come for free. Any challenge worth undertaking is going to require effort, risk and perseverance. We can always choose to stay where we are. We can choose to not risk the discomfort of getting hurdled through the air that is our recovery journey, but the result of not taking these steps is that we remain in the prisons we are encased in.
I often remind my clients, and implore any of my readers, to take heart. The journey to healing is challenging, scary and uncomfortable. We don’t want to Get Help, but we know we need it.
If you’re going through something right now, and you recognize your own avoidance to getting help, then I encourage you to be brave, take that step, and see what it teaches you.
