This is not my usual spiel, but it is something I keep coming back to. I’m on a war movie kick, and this particular scene resonates with me. Like most everything else in my head, the best way for me to make sense of it is to write it into submission. So here I offer you the highly amateur film based philosophy of one overtired writer with a mental health career.
There is a scene in The Hurt Locker that depicts a roadside (or more accurately a middle of the damn road) bomb. James uncovers an explosive device and begins to carefully disarm it. Cue the discovery of several more all intertwined with the first.
This is what mental health work is. We brush away the top layers, searching for the wire. Once we find it there is the meticulous and terrifying process of disarming it as best we can. And sometimes, most of the time, we pull it carefully, oh so carefully away to discover it was actually in a nexus of wires, all of which need disarming and removal.
We want to light a fuse and watch it burn. We want to blow it to the sky and never see it again. We can’t. We’ll destroy everything beneath it if we do. Sure, that surface might not look important, might be somewhere we don’t want to be to begin with, but destruction leaves new problems in its wake.
The only option is to continue slow, meticulous, piecemeal removal of the fuses until it’s all as safe as it’s going to get. In the end, we have the space where the bombs were. It isn’t a complete recreation of what was there before the bomb was armed. It’s something new, different. Yet still a valid, valuable bit of real estate in our minds.