Claim your power to choose: therapist reacts to “Nutshell” by Alice in Chains
Everyone said to listen to this unplugged version, so we're doing it that way. Immediately, it sounds like it's going to be sad.
This is haunting. This feels like depression in my body.
And yet I fight, and yet I fight this battle all alone
No one to cry to, no place to call home
That feeling is so weighty. It's so heavy to carry.
As the person who wrote this song and is singing it, he actually has all these people around him. Literally, there are people in his band that he could speak to, he could talk to, he could open up to. It's just an interesting thing to note. I don't know their relationship.
I was reading a Rolling Stone article about them earlier, and it said that they would oscillate between being really close and being really far away. When they were really close, it felt almost like this enmeshment. A lot of it was Layne's drug addiction. He was addicted to heroin, and actually of this playing, I think that he was completely in the throes of addiction. He tragically died about six years later.
When recording this song, he was in the throes of addiction, in the throes of the pain that comes with addiction, and feeling completely and utterly trapped. And it sounds that way. It sounds like mourning your own life.
That is what depression feels like. This is what addiction feels like. It feels like who you are has been taken from you. You're somewhere inside yourself, but there's something else that's controlling your body and controlling your decisions.
My privacy is raked.
I think this references the idea of him being famous, and his addiction being so publicized. He has no privacy. I saw something really interesting when I was doing research about Alice in Chains. Someone came up to Layne and was like, “You're alive. Oh my gosh, I thought you had died.”
How horrible would that be, to have people spreading rumors and saying things about you, to constantly have that information about your downfall being repeated back to you?
And yet I find, and yet I find repeating in my head
If I can't be my own, I'd feel better dead
He’s basically saying, if I cannot gain control of myself, if I cannot be the one that is in charge of me instead of this addiction that is completely controlling me, I'd feel better dead.
I'm looking at this mountain that's ahead of me, this mountain that I have to climb to get back to myself, and I just don't think I can do it. It looks like Mount Everest, and I've never even been trained how to climb a mountain.
I feel like this is so real. “Nutshell” is such a gift to anyone who struggles with addiction, with depression. It's like a hard-relate song, and I also think the title nutshell offers us something. I imagine the meaning of it is like, “This is how I'm feeling in a nutshell.”
If you are struggling with addiction, you can just listen to this and it can be a relatable song. This idea of a nutshell is a really powerful thing when we think about it. When I'm thinking about the song, what I hear him saying is, “I'm somewhere in there, but I can't get out because this shell is too hard. The shell of addiction is too hard. It's sucked me in. It's too in control.”
It’s about when we feel choiceless in our life. It sounds like he feels like he has no choice over what happens to him, about what he does in his life. It's like addiction is choosing for him, depression is choosing for him. His pain is making his choices.
When we feel that way about a large area of our lives like addiction, we paint our whole life with the brush of lacking choice, and we forget all of the small choices that we do have control over. That’s exemplified in the song where he says he has no one to cry to. That's not true.
There are choices. There are people around him that he could reach out to.
Yet I fight and yet I fight.
Okay, that's a positive choice.
I keep fighting this battle all alone.
That's a choice.
No place to call home.
That may or may not be a choice, but we can often create homes inside of ourselves in a variety of different ways. We can make choices to take steps to do that.
The point is that when we feel like a big area of our life has no choice — whether that's addiction, whether that's our relationship status, whether that's our job situation — we paint our life with this huge brush. We're like, “Oh, I'm just in this nutshell, I'm trapped in here.”
But the truth is that when we're cracking a nut, most of us these days don't have nutcrackers in our homes. Let's pretend it's a really hard nut. It's going to take a couple of times smashing it on the table or trying to peel it to get it open. It's small choices that will lead you to have the ability to control the bigger areas in your life that you feel choiceless against.
Let's take addiction as an example. If you feel like you don't have a choice over your addiction, that addiction is ruling your life, a small choice that you could make would be to reach out for help.
Now, that's not going to immediately solve your addiction, right? That's not going to immediately crack the shell of your nut. But over time, getting help from people and finding a support system and having them help you will realign your choices. Maybe it's harm reduction, maybe there's medication for certain drug addiction to help with withdrawals.
Whatever it is, you have choices in your life. We forget that. We forget that it's the small choices that lead to the shell cracking open over time. It's not usually one big thing.
When you listen to this song, I want you to take a moment and think, “Where am I this person? Where am I painting my life with the brush of choice? Where am I painting my life with the brush of, ‘I am consumed and controlled by this?’”
I know that part of you can make a choice to reach out to a friend. It can make a choice to start therapy. It can even make a choice just to wait. That looks like giving yourself five minutes before you go for the alcohol or for the drug, saying, “If I still want this in five minutes, then I'll do it.”
You can make the choice to delay your addiction. You can make the choice to exercise, you can make the choice to start journaling. You can make all of these choices in your life that might not seem like they will fix things right away — and they won't. But over time, they will crack the shell. Then the nut will come out, and you'll be free.
If you want to help people crack their shell, we need you to do that with us. We have hundreds and hundreds of people who open up about their struggles in the comments on our support wall, on our Instagram, on our YouTube every single day, and we want you to help us support them. We can't do it on our own. Volunteer, and we'll train you: heartsupport.com/swat
