Healing
“That's
the thing about a human life—there's no control group, no way to
ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had
been changed.”
Elizabeth
Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
My friend, Melissa, has a
wisdom saying: “At forty-five, you have to give up blaming your
parents for messing you up.” By then, she believes, you must take
responsibility for your own life. In other words, no more blaming
Mama for everything. I only wish someone had told Sigmund Freud that.
Most of us were yanked
around to some degree as kids—whether at home, or at school, or
when we didn't get selected for the baseball team, didn't make the
cut for cheerleader, didn't get a superlative of any kind (speaking
for myself, of course), didn't make the score we wanted on the SAT.
When we have these disappointments, we learn how to deal with real
life. But disappointments are not truly damaging unless we make them
so.
Bullying, on the other
hand, is horrible, whipping your child is, in my opinion, equally
terrible, and trafficking kids should result in life in prison as far
as I'm concerned. There are terrible things going on in the world and
always have been. When children are the harmed by adults, it changes
them. It takes away their innocence and causes them to be anxious and
depressed. There is no excuse that can abolish the harm inflicted,
explain away the damage, or erase the scars. I am not saying at all
that real and lasting harm isn't caused by adults preying upon
children. It is.
However...at some point,
we have to pick ourselves up and go on. We have to take on our scars,
and whenever possible disconnect them from the original trauma. Not
because it didn't happen, not because someone else was not to blame,
but simply because it does us no good to keep blaming and shaming our
perpetrator. We can only change what is under our control; what now,
years later, we are keeping alive with our rage. No matter what
happened to us as children, we are bigger than that trauma. There is
more to us than our wounds.
We truly don't know what
we would be like now if bad things hadn't happened when we were
children. There is no way to know how we would have turned out if
we'd had the perfect mother, the most attentive father, the best
teachers and made pitcher on the baseball team. We can speculate, but
we cannot know. There are examples everywhere of people who grew up
living in their cars, who nonetheless, have made something of
themselves. Children coming out of war zones, and internment camps,
who have gone on to lead productive lives. And also, examples of
people who had every advantage life could possibly offer them, but
ended up in the gutter anyway. What matters is what we do right now.
Will we allow grace to heal us?
In the Spirit,
Jane
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