There is no cure for trauma. It is the gift that goes on giving. This morning on the news, in the same five minutes, I have heard that they have caught the waste of DNA that bombed the London Tube, an eighteen year old loser nurtured on hate (ISIS has claimed credit for the bombing, surprise! surprise!); about a protest in St. Louis, Missouri about a white cop being acquitted for killing a black man, and that all the Asshole In Chief, President Dump, could think of doing in response to the killer earthquake in Mexico last week, was to tweet about Mexico being one of the world's worst countries for crime.
We are all victims. To cure trauma is to go into absolute denial about our human condition. Trauma is our human condition. It is the air we breathe, and contaminate with car exhaust, factory smoke and second hand cigarette smoke. We all face this rather scary condition called mortality, or, impending death. This plays a far greater role in informing and affecting our behaviour than we would care to reckon with.
In the meantime, we cope, some better than others, some worse, but cope and manage is often all that we can do.
There are redemptive experiences.
I just had one of those today. From time to time my life seems to appear before a review panel, and that is what could be really happening. Perhaps in the Court of God I am being arraigned before the Great Judge and some of his angels to determine what has been going on with my life and to do a reset. These times often take the form of depression, sometimes severe, sometimes mild, but this is not depression. It is rather a reset time for working redemptively with trauma.
As some of you already know, Gentle Reader, my life has not been exactly a walk in the park. I was brought up by woefully unprepared and dreadfully unequipped parents. They really didn't know what they were doing, which I understand to be a very common experience for people of my generation. I particularly relived one of many episodes of abuse. Although abuse was a daily experience for me (beatings from either or both my older brother and my mother, shaming, and sometimes being verbally abused, shamed and sexually molested by my father), these things all had a cumulative effect.
I recalled in lurid detail one day when I was beaten in turn by each one of them. I went up to my bedroom weeping and howling in pain, shame and distress. I must have been ten or eleven years old. It was a Sunday and my father, likely nursing a hangover, yelled to me that if I didn't shut up then he'd really give me something to cry about.
I lowered my voice, but continued weeping for well over two solid hours that afternoon. After dinner, where I gave no one the time of day, I returned to my bedroom where I resumed weeping till bedtime.
Remembering that incident yesterday, while seated on a park bench, I reflected on how that incident, among others, literally ruined my life and all my future prospects as an adult. My parents, who should have been there to support, encourage and build me up, had managed to destroy me and render me useless to do anything successful with my life. I would not be able to go in the natural direction of a child of my intelligence, gifts and abilities. In the following years I did terribly in school, and because of the wretched soap opera that my family was, I could only cope and survive with no energy, direction or support left over to take a concrete and positive direction in life. All I could do was hold on to what I already had, working at low-paying survival jobs, unable to finish my postsecondary education, and clearly my parents were to blame for everything, as I was working hard at making the best possible use I could of what little I had left of a life.
The sense of depression continued into this morning. I was also thinking about suicide. Never a good sign, but always a symptom of some underlying issue.
While seated in the coffee shop this morning for two hours with my sketchbook I thought and prayed very carefully about what was happening. I concluded that suicide was not, and never would be an option. It would be giving up, it would be caving, and the recovery that I have been enjoying thus far has been soundly predicating on my refusal to give up.
But I still had to get to the bottom of this intense sadness, this sense of being useless, of being unloved and unwanted.
When I resumed my walk I prayed and asked God for guidance about what was happening. It turned out that this was not a suicidal depression I was in but a period of life re-evaluation. I walked past the sumptuous palaces and mansions lining Southwest Marine Drive while thinking and praying. When I turned onto a quiet street, it was though a still small voice within was whispering in my ear the words: "When your family was being so cruel to you, Aaron, were they successful in breaking you?"
I reflected, then replied that no, they weren't successful. I never accepted the lie that I deserved any of their ill treatment. Rather, I hardened myself against them and for a while hated them as cruel bullies who had no right to mistreat me.
As I continued to walk and reflect, it occurred to me that this was why I was not able to continue my life in a conventionally appropriate way. My parents, as anyone's mother and father, were my first role models and my prototypes of authority. I discovered, while still a child, that their authority over me was bogus because they were abusive. I no longer trusted them. This actually made me strong and enabled me to resist them and move in rather a different, very radical direction.
I would never make a lot of money as a radical. But my natural intelligence and insight were considerably sharpened by having to fight and resist those idiots in my family. I would never be able to trust authority again, hence making postsecondary education and work extremely difficult at times.
But I did grow as a caring, compassionate human being with a burning thirst for social justice.
I did not turn into a bourgeois with a nice income and lovely progressive liberal values to go with a beautifully stocked wine cellar.
I am, as it were, a dirt poor radical, self-educated, well-read, well-travelled and well-spoken.
I have never had to barter my integrity in order to get ahead in life.
Despite my poverty, I would call my life a sweeping success.
This is one example of working with trauma in order to be healed of its effects.
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