Life
Graph
“If
you have ever made a graph of your life—writing your birthday on the left side
of a paper and today’s date on the right, filling in the major events that have
made you who you are—then you are likely to note that the spikes in your pain
bear some relationship to leaps in your growth.”
Barbara
Brown Taylor (An Altar in the World, p. 157, “The Practice of Feeling Pain,”
Harper One, 2009)
I
taught Psychology in a trade school for about six years. One of the things I asked
students to do was to make a timeline of their life, blocked off in decades and
within each decade, each year. To write on the timeline anything that happened each
year that impacted them either positively or negatively. Keep in mind that most of these students were
young adults, just starting out in life, so their timelines only stretched for
a couple of decades. When we did this exercise, I was astounded at how much
trauma most of them recorded and how casually they described it—as though it was
normal to have a lost a parent to drug overdose by age 20. Sexual abuse was so
pervasive that I started to track the numbers. Turned out that about sixty
percent of the women and twenty percent of the men reported sexual abuse as
teenagers. That seemed extremely high, until I remembered that having a
sexually inappropriate experience at the hands of someone you knew had been considered
“normal” until very recently. If not normal, at least typical and unsurprising.
When I casually
polled my peers, none of the women had been unscathed. Many of the men had had
brushes with sexual abuse but were far less apt to talk about it. They were
more likely to describe physical abuse by a father or coach or bullying by their
peers. Suffice it to say, we now recognize abuse in a different way than when I
was a young person. We are more aware of it, people are more likely to report
it and to speak openly about it now, and that is progress. Perhaps the Me-Too
movement is at least partially responsible for that change.
In drawing
a timeline, one can see when the trauma happened, how it affected them, whether
those effects have lasted, how they coped at the time, and how they cope now. Even
when we are not consciously aware of the lasting effects, when we start mapping
it out on a timeline, it become clearer. Most of the people who seem have survived
more-or-less intact, had been to therapy, or had talked at length with a trusted
friend. Talking to a safe person usually helps to put the incident, and the
residual feelings and repercussions, into perspective, and to realize how
common they are. One doesn’t feel so alone and singled out when they know that
such a high percentage of people have had the same experience.
As I’ve
said before, pain not something one seeks out, but it will be part of every
human life. Perhaps not in the form of sexual abuse, since that is only one
variety of psychological pain. There are so many to choose from. The hope is
always that we can overcome the trauma and learn something helpful about
ourselves in the process. We witness first-hand the depth and breadth of our
psychological strength and resiliency when we are able to address the trauma,
move through it, and incorporate the experience. It does not define who we are;
it is only one experience among many. But it helps to talk about it to someone who can help. Soul wounds leave scars, and they can mark us for life—or they can
change us in ways that we feel good about. Getting help is usually the key.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment