How to Escape from Prison by Paul Wood

Author:Paul Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Break Out

The second step on the Five Steps to Freedom is what I call ‘Break Out’.

This is about choosing to break out of your mental prison, and not only believing it is possible to do so, but having the courage to try, the courage to get out of your comfort zone. When my brother Jon visited me early in my time in prison, he brought me an SAS cap badge with its iconic motto: Who Dares Wins. At the time, it seemed more of a reminder of the career ambitions I had once had and lost. But as I came to understand the need to take risks in order to reap the rewards of transformational change, the truth of those words kept resonating with me. To win, you must dare.

Having recognised that what’s holding you back are your thoughts and beliefs about the world, the next step is to choose to do something about those inner bars and try to regain all the opportunity you are denying yourself.

One of the reasons making this choice is so hard for people is that some of the things that constrain us are the defence mechanisms we’ve used to make our reality palatable to ourselves — the things that make us comfortable. As already noted, these defences may even have served us well at different times of our lives, but we may have reached a point where they are no longer constructive. Setting them aside is like asking a child to throw away a comforter. The way forward is unfamiliar and unpredictable, and if there’s one thing the human species dislikes, it’s uncertainty. In a recent piece of research, participants were given two options — a low-intensity electric shock delivered at random, or a significantly stronger electric shock delivered right now. People’s aversion for uncertainty and ambiguity means the subjects preferred the instant, stronger shock.

In my case, breaking out was a slow and incremental process. This is the norm. To avoid emotional and psychological discomfort, I had steadfastly averted my eyes from much of what I would need to comprehend in order to achieve real change and growth. But fortunately I didn’t need to engage with it all at once; to start with, I only needed to see the way ahead. And the first step in breaking out is simply believing it is possible to do so.

Once I discovered reading, I began to read voraciously. At first I chose books that seemed relevant to my own situation. In the early days, I would read these with a dictionary next to me to make sense of some of the more difficult words I’d come across. Perhaps the one that had the most impact upon me at this time was The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. This was a book about the prison — or rather, death camp — system in the Soviet Union under Stalin. It, along with Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (set in the Nazi death camps) taught me the value of ‘comparing down’.

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