"When you have experienced trauma and ugliness and pain, the necessary emotional processing of that trauma, ugliness, and pain is not going to look neat and tidy."
What she meant was: Intellectuals want to use talk therapy to talk their way through, we think that if we can understand and put words on it, it will go away. She said not so fast. That it's a drawn-out and ugly process, and if we understand that, we won't feel like failures when we have to pull over on the highway and cry until the highway patrol comes and asks us if there's something wrong with our car, because we will understand that IT WILL BE MESSY.
Yes! This is close to what my therapist told me. I had to walk THROUGH the wreckage to get to the other side. I couldn't walk around it or over it without learning how it got to be that way, and without learning the tools to "clear the debris." That was a powerful image for me. I actually had to deal with the wreckage from the storm.