Living With Trauma: The Healers, 5

There is strength in disempowerment. Hello? Yes, Gentle Reader, you heard me right. There is strength in being disempowered. Who would have imagined? I have written already about the Horrible Knowledge of Life. Well, this could be called the Terrible Wisdom. It comes principally, and only, through suffering. This wisdom, perhaps could be called applied and experienced knowledge. I have long had this gift. Any child who has been consistently bullied by his peers, beaten and bruised by both a violent older sibling and by his mother, verbally abused by both, and emotionally bullied and at times sexually interfered with by his father, is not going to turn out normal. Add to the mix a child who is gifted, preternaturally as well as intellectually and artistically, with a profound sense of empathy for others and a nascent sensibility for social justice and you are going to wind up with a unique mix of qualities, characteristics, traits and problems. When I was as young as six, I already knew that I was different from other kids, and boy, did they ever reinforce this to me. My mother and teachers were all impressed by my intelligence, and very young wisdom. My father didn't seem to notice or care. My brother hated me. Other kids reviled me. And those obstacles made me wise. As a new Christian I became filled with the Holy Spirit, an experience so powerful and overwhelming that I am still, forty-six years later, digesting and understanding what happened to me. I have been able to move forward on the strength of this experience, although it has often confused the crap out of me. I have, since, never had a sense of not belonging entirely to God, though I have gone through periods in my life where I have really tested this, and even tried to run from it for a while. Still, with or without overwhelming spiritual experiences, suffering, trauma, affliction, and social exclusion change us like nothing else. It isn't simply that these things harm or damage us. In another way, this is how we become wise, and we become wise with a wisdom that others find frightening, threatening, even terrifying. Suffering strips us absolutely naked of all the costuming and masks that we wear in order to feel safe as we pretend to negotiate our way through life. When you are left crying out, or stifling the screams, in the most absolute pain, helplessness, abandonment and vulnerability, there will be no masks and no costumes that are going to fit. You are just going to lie there in your blood, in your naked and ugly (yet even more beautiful!) humanity. This is a most difficult reality for others to face, because those of us who have been disempowered are transformed into mirrors for others. We gain in wisdom, we know at a level and depth that we never even knew could have existed, what it really is to be human, and what we are and what others are. This is because we know what others are capable of but we also discover unknown strengths in ourselves as we learn to live with the consequences of other people's abuse and ill treatment. As I am reading about the very troubled history of the Latin American countries I am just constantly amazed at what the indigenous, mestizo and African people had to endure, of ill treatment, slavery, rape, abuse, systematic slaughter, constant threat and constant oppression they had to live under throughout the colonial era, and what this must have done to shape and form the cultures of Latin America. Even if my own life hasn't been a cakewalk, I shrink and tremble to imagine how I would have coped as a slave in a plantation or household, or as an indentured laborer in a silver mine. This much I do know. The suffering may in some ways damage us, but it also shapes, forms and informs us with that Terrible Wisdom that will also equip us as healers and shepherds to others who are languishing in these very troubling and confusing times we are living in. Because after being knocked to the ground by the truth, we are no longer afraid of it.