Good Will Hunting

Your pain will stand still until you make your move.

After life fucks you over, it leaves you with the sole responsibility of figuring out the aftermath on your own. Even worse, pain’s threshold knows no bounds.

As you remain stuck consumed by your pain, life has no trouble standing still enabling you to feel your pain. And for as long as you don’t make the choice to heal and move on, you will remain stuck.

Friends? Family? Spouse? — Yes, they can help, but to an extent. Only you can make it right.

Similarly to showing a friend the best way forward, beyond your opinion, you can’t make your friend cross the road. That’s a choice they have to make on their own. Plus, crossing the road is complicated.

Look left, look right, and look left again. And only cross when the robot is green, blah blah. It’s a mental jog that transcends into an intentional choice.

Similar to healing, it’s a mental jog that transcends into moving past your pain. You can’t heal without facing the reality surrounding your trauma and emotions.

The Good Will Hunting film elaborates this so well..

Good Will Hunting is a beautiful film about a smart but troubled young man named Will. Will grew up in different foster homes and suffered physical abuse in three of the foster homes.

Adult Will has been involved in multiple assaults i.e. grand auto theft, impersonating an officer and resisting arrest. He is an ex juvie convict and he is on trial for another assault.

Bad guy so far, right?

Well, I like to think that the story was named Good Will Hunting, emphasis on good, because Will is not a bad guy. He is just stuck in his upbringing repeating its violence. And until he moves past it, his past remains the centre of his reality.

Moving past experiences with a painful impact is not easy, I know that. So, I am not writing this to tell you to “just do it”.

Will Hunting is a smart man. Untangling his life or remaining stuck is not a conundrum I would attribute to him as he is smart enough to make good choices.

When life appears to be plain, stupid and unsatisfying to his brilliant mind, Will logically explains his reality away.

He is aware of the trauma his awful childhood caused him. And yet, this does not make him want to take advantage of the out-of-jail conditional therapy he is being afforded.

He is convinced that people lack the capacity to understand the reality of who he is and his pain. Smarter than all his friends combined, Will is a janitor, mostly because of his self-limiting self-worth, which he logically explains away.

Will Hunting’s pain

Though Will makes the most of his everyday normal obligations, he also lives with the pain his childhood inflicted on him. In fact, his pain is what stops him from being actively ambitious.

Just like the time he dumped his girlfriend, who, compared to other people in his life, challenged him mentally. Will dumped his girlfriend because she confessed her love for him and asked him to move away with her to California.

This particular scene shows how Will’s past experiences interplay in his present life, clouding his intrapersonal views. It is evident that, though Will is doing relatively okay, pain still lingers in mind. He sees himself through the lens of his childhood experiences.

Unlovable.

Will and his fears

Finally in a relationship that’s forcing him to confront his fears, Will tells his therapist that he is scared his girlfriend is too perfect. He is weary of the moment she will start to look like everyone else.

To which, his therapist tells him that perhaps he is not afraid of his girlfriend not being perfect. Perhaps he is scared he will stop being perfect and she will see through him.

Will, smart as he is, lives his life afraid of the moment it will crumble. After all, he still exhibits the violence he grew up exposed to. In spite of his enormous book knowledge, Will is still a little abused boy who never received loved.

And now, as an adult, rationality and logic makes more sense than love. How could he suddenly be loved?

It does not have to be this way for Will though. Especially because pain does heal with time, but only if you are doing something for it to heal.

Will’s experiences are also valid. He has every right to be angry and not trust people. But also, his experiences do not, in any way, assert that he will never be loved. On the contrary, Skylar loves him.

He just feels undeserving of the love unable to see past his childhood life.

Only you can set the will for healing – “Your move chief“

We see the first gleam of hope and self-introspection when Will has a second unconventional session with his therapist.

The therapist highlights to Will that in spite of his genius and his book knowledge, he is still a little boy afraid of himself and of confronting himself in the the way life truly requires.

In fact, Will is so smart that he is able to read texts and make sense of how they apply to real life. But he lacks the courage to apply these learned lessons to his life and finally grow into himself.

He sees the world through narrow lenses harbouring his pain and experiences. Instead of using his mind to take charge of his future, he uses his mind to convince himself he is okay, and he is above anyone’s help.

His mind and his horrible experiences have somehow come together to weave an intense reality that’s filled with knowledge and logic but lack emotional intelligence.

While he grows in knowledge, he never truly grows past his trauma.

Surrender pain it’s power and then let it go

Skylar is gone.

Will is asking his therapist if the reason he dumped Skylar is because he has an attachment disorder and a fear of abandonment, to which his therapist agrees.

If I had to be specific, I’d say Will has a fearful-avoidant attachment style, characterised by being both dismissive and anxious depending on context.

His therapist admits to Will that he had a childhood similar to that of Will. In this scene, Will and his therapist are not talking about the consequences of their childhoods. No. They are talking about their experiences as they are: painful, brutal and fucked up.

In fact, his therapist does not want to give Will a textbook psychological analysis of why he is who he is. He simply wants to affirm Will that what happened to him is not is fault.

4 words said with conviction… “It’s not your fault”.

That’s what it took for Will to cry about his pain as a victim and not as the cause of it.

Powerful as they are, these words wouldn’t have held any meaning if Will did not admit to himself that they are true to his life. Him crying was brought by the meaning he attached to the words.

He had to believe these words.

This scene is raw, heart-breaking and also pleasing. It is a reminder that you’re not responsible for other people’s actions, especially as a helpless child.

Most of Will’s trauma stems from his childhood. A time where he did not know better to assume responsibility for himself and how he lets people treat him.

But now, as a grown up man, Will has more power than he thinks. He has a say over his life. He can take over, heal and move on.

It is a shame that saying this does not magically erase abuse and trauma. But as all you have, it is on you to extend yourself love, kindness and forgiveness you desperately needed when you were young.

Continuously healing after acknowledging your pain

Dr Brian. R. Little, a Psychology professor speaks of something he calls acting out of character. He defines this as your ability to change. And this change comes from the need to adapt to what our environments dictate.

“When you think of who you are as a story that’s driven by your recollection of the past and how it conditioned you, “acting” out of “character” takes on a special significance”.

Dr Brian R. Little

In the end, Will does exactly this. He acts out of his character. And maybe his past will still continue to want to have a say in his life. Either way, Will rewrote the narrative when he went after Skylar and left the bubble that enabled his pain to thrive.

Sometimes it will be hard and sometimes it will be a piece of cake. But for as long as he actively chooses to defy the story his pain wants to write for him, he will continue to act out of his character and heal.

His life won’t begin and end with a painful childhood.

If you are dealing with any painful experience that’s making the world seem bleak and hopeless, I want you to know that you have more control that you think. And certainly, healing is not an easy journey but still, you have a say over your life. And there is power in facing your demons head on in spite of the discomfort.

Take it from Good Will Hunting.