Healing And Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 20

I have just crossed a milestone in my own recovery from trauma. It began over a week ago when I really started to admit that PTSD for me was a bogus diagnosis. It doesn't mean that I was never traumatized. Of course I was! We all are! But, rather that making it into a mental illness did little to help me overcome and plenty to help me self-stigmatize. Then a couple of days later, just one week ago today, I had an inkling. I did a quick Google search for the person who had particularly traumatized me when I was still in my early twenties. Just to make sure I pulled accurate results, I added his wife's name to the search, and there she was, recently widowed, being profiled in an article about her ethnic community. It turns out that her husband died in 2013. It didn't say how he died. I estimated that he would have been around sixty when he passed away. Perhaps I should be feeling a little bit ashamed of myself for the way I reacted when I read this bit of news. I don't feel at all ashamed. I was overjoyed. The person who put a curse on me, a so-called Christian leader, was now dead. I felt suddenly set free from that toxic shadow that he and his cohorts had dumped on me just one month before my twenty-third birthday. I was dancing on his grave. Not even a shred of remorse did I feel for him or his widow over his passing. I felt like a German Jew in April 1945, upon hearing of the deaths of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. It isn't that I wished this man any ill. Simply, I was rejoicing because I felt finally set free. I will explain further here about what happened, though I am sure I have previously written on these pages about this tragic event in my life. I was involved and living with a Christian Community called Dilaram in 1978. The leader, Dan, the man who died recently, was a very charismatic, and very dictatorial leader. He also seemed inordinately fond of me. I realize now that when I expressed my desire to leave, that he was taking the news like a jilted lover. I didn't care. I had to get out from under his oppressive fist and live my life again. But it was already too late. I had invested way too much of myself in this community and at a primal, unconscious level, they had become like God to me. I didn't know this at the time. So, as punishment for going AWOL for the day (honestly, I did not know that I was no longer permitted to go on an outing for the day with a friend) at eleven in the evening, I was called before a counsel of the six leaders of our community. I was told that God had told them to tell me that all the rest of my life would be wasted useless and fruitless for disobeying the community and they pulled out of context several Bible passages to justify their judgment (how ironic that just a couple of years later those very same things became their own fate. If God was actually trying to talk to anyone through those passages of scripture, then it was likely to them and not me). Then I was told to leave the house and the community that same moment. That's right, Gentle Reader. I was tossed out on the street by those "Christians". Late at night and in the dead of winter. Fortunately my mother was available to take me in that night. I had done not one single thing to merit this punishment. I had been praised and admired and respected as a contributing member of that community, especially as a person of faith and compassion and spiritual gifts. Their only reason for getting rid of me was very simple and rather puerile. Dan, the leader, a married allegedly heterosexual Christian man had suddenly figured out that I no longer loved him, and that I had never loved him, not in the way that he wanted me to love him. He was a spurned lover, in a blind rage of unrequited love. But I was still traumatized. I irrationally believed that God had completely abandoned me and that my relationship with God would only be restored once I returned to Dan and Dilaram in a spirit of pure contrition and repentance. For years, I had to struggle against this lie, and all the energy this took really drained and depleted me for other and worthier projects. I dragged this curse, this shadow of trauma until, well, around 2013, the year of Dan's death, when I did sense a kind of sea-change in my life, of everything beginning to really come together in a cohesive, harmonious whole. Learning of his death has finished the process. I am not glad of his death so much, as glad that I am finally free from this man's curse, this shadow that even last week was still lingering. I also believe I have forgiven him, and this completes the liberation. When it comes to trauma, and all the many psychological symptoms that result from it, so often there could be just one incident, be it recent or from the very distant past, that holds us in chains. We, and those who are helping us, have a duty of facing our oppressors, standing up to them, and by refusing to give heed to their lies about us, to vanquish them. This is a process that could take years, and I believe that in my own experience, the shadow of the Self Hater was put to work for my own benefit, for the learning of humility and the getting of wisdom, and now, completely free from its dank, malodorous shroud, I feel that with greater ease than ever I can now move on. Hallelujah! I'm free!