Pain and Reality

Sharon and I saw Shutter Island this weekend.

*SPOILER ALERT*
Read no further if you have plans to see this film.

The film's hero is called upon to investigate a missing prisoner situation in a high security hospital for the criminally insane. As the story advances we learn that he has experienced traumas similar to many of the institution's "patients", and his memories of these traumas seem to mingle with the histories of the residents.  It turns out that he has in fact been deluding himself; telling himself an enormous lie.  He is himself an inmate of the hospital/prison, but the memory of his crimes and the circumstances that lead to them were so intensley painful that he developed an elaborate fantasy to block them out.

This all struck me as a moderately exaggerated version of what many of us do frequently.  We fear that we can't deal with the pain of loss, disappointment, abuse, regret -- so we pretend its not there, all to our own harm.  The deadly disease is there, whether we acknowledge it or not, but the shocking reality is that we can handle the truth.  Sadly, we are often more comfortable with fantasy than the risk of finding out that this is true and dealing with the change that loss demands.