Healing
A dear friend of mine told me when she had a deep sorrow weighing her down, she would wake up in the morning feeling light and happy, and then, within a few seconds she remembered. This mouldy, dark, cold, damp feeling crept in and kept holding her the whole day. For years.
This is trauma. It won’t let you go, it will occupy all your thoughts, feelings and inner mechanisms. It will move you, become you, take control over your life.
My reaction was self harm. Not in the way that many people do, like cutting myself with a knife or such, but I wasn’t taking care of myself. My life revolved around others, and I wasn’t even on the list. I didn’t do what I wanted, I didn’t do what I needed, as if I was waiting at the end of the queue for someone to give me permission to take what I need.
It never came.
Instead, I got deprived step by step by every single thing I had. Rock bottom after rock bottom. Losing everything, then when I thought I’m back, losing even more. I had to recreate my whole life. Had to rethink how to live, because my default way wasn’t sustainable.
And then I started to rise. To take back - not back, it never really worked that way for me - so to take what I need, and to get on the driver’s seat of my life.
It wasn’t easy. And wasn’t fast. It was years and years of hard work. Going up a spiral staircase. One step forward, two steps back. Stumbling again and again. And I’m still not where I would like to be. But I’m getting there.
The main thing I needed to do was to listen to myself. To my soul telling me her pain. It’s not easy. It is painful, and it takes years of hard work inside, to face every hurt again, as my soul is telling me, and to tell her “It’s alright now. You are safe now.”
What does it need? Well, first of all, safety. Safety to live, to be, to not to worry about everyday problems. And then it takes courage. To face all the darkness inside. That dark grey purple mist, spreading in the air, suffocating everyone… but I need to keep going until I find my soul, as a little girl. In chains. Who learned she was not important. I listened to her.
All she had learned was to step back and wait for her turn. That never came. So she just did what was expected from her, that maybe, just maybe, she will get some acceptance. Some… love.
Instead, what happened was something else. So she did what was expected of her. What she knew, what was her comfort zone. Something she did with the smallest energy - because she didn’t have more. To disappear. To give and not to take.
What someone does at stress, in minimum energy, boiled as a frog, from their comfort zone, can be very different. It can be what they grew up in, what they saw the people around them behaving, simply copying them, what they learned as teachings, how to avoid being wronged, by people who went through disaster, or anything that seems to be “the” way to live, to survive. A way of existence, copied from broken people who passed down the transgenerational trauma and the “best way to cope with it”. More often than not, these codes are just a reaction to trauma. PTSD, in its real sense. It was self destructive in my case, but it’s not always that. Some people can have reactions that are actually aggressive. They have been hurt so they don’t try to disappear, but to prevent in any way from getting hurt again. Any possible way.
If I lived through something difficult and it alters my perception of reality, it’s simply post traumatic stress reaction. It’s not a disorder, as if something terrible happened to you, it will leave you broken, and it takes years or even decades of therapy to get back to “normal”. Sometimes it’s not even possible. But if these wounds aren’t treated, if our primary - and very natural and justified - reactions solidify and become universal laws we pass down, or even laws by which a nation is governed, that’s when we talk about a disorder, because from the first moment, no actual work has been done. No solution has been given.
And then generations grow up after generations, having these primary trauma reactions as their guidelines. In the meantime obviously life doesn’t stop, as my great grandparents were hurt, so as my grandparents, my parents, and myself. And I see the same happening to my children.
I cannot unsee these patterns in the recent terrible events. It’s really easy to judge them from our comfortable sofa saying “they have always been doing this” or “why can’t they make peace”, or sometimes being afraid of people expressing their rights to exist. I’m not talking about politics and this article is not here to make a statement. Obviously - and I think it should be obvious, unfortunately it seems to be out of common sense for many, even for political forces - human rights need to be respected, whatever the conflict is. The stronger part always has more responsibility, but the situation has escalated to a level of a humanitarian catastrophe. No matter how hurt someone might feel inside by recent or historical events, nothing can justify the complete annihilation of a whole nation. The world that calls itself civilised must find an immediate and lasting solution as “they should simply stop existing”, which is the narrative by words and actions of many, is not tolerable.
Unfortunately, as simple human beings, other than making our voices heard on the demonstrations, spreading some news that we find, we cannot do a lot. What I think we can still do is that whatever side we are at, we can listen to what the other party has to say. I just want to tell everyone, “hey, listen, isn’t it obvious”, but it really isn’t. There are so many different viewpoints and “brainwashing” we say - for the others it’s just “news”, and our news is “brainwashing” for them - but what we can do is to sit down with someone, even online, and ask them: “what do you want? What do you think the solution could be? What do you feel deep inside when you think about the other side? What do you expect them to do? Do you think they want to hurt you? What could be the reason why they behave in such a way? What have they gone through?” This way we might understand something of their point of view, and they might understand something of ours.
This is where “othering” ends. And othering is the first step in every hate that leads to genocide. To make someone believe that the others are not just like us, if they do something wrong to us, it’s not because they have their own valid reasons, but because they have something inherently bad in them, and they have always wanted to simply stop us from existing.
Well, actually political forces even seem to be doing just that, but we still can talk to the people. I really don’t know what the solution on a high level should be, right now the first step is ceasefire, this insane massacre must stop. It only creates more reason for future generations to fight back, more people with PTSD, destabilising the region - and the rest of the world - for centuries, because everyone acts from a place of hurt. Hard and impossible it is, there is no other way but to sit down with each other and tell each other one's pain. Tell them what you, your parents, grandparents, great grandparents and so on, went through. Show each other the grey photos, the few objects they had left behind. The keys to the inexistent houses, the letters… or the nothing, because everything was lost. Tell each other the stories of what you heard from them, or what you discovered yourselves, as it was so painful they have never spoken about it. And you will feel tears from your eyes coming down, hearing their pain. You will feel their story is so much similar to yours. And that all this time your problem was not “them” as a nation, but those who painted them with black paint. Who “otherised” them. Who built their power on your fear of them. And mainly those who get rich from yet another war.
We really need to learn to behave like humans. To stop the guns and listen to the voices. Before another nation disappears from this planet. “Never again” is for everyone. It’s not the privilege of a few.
Comments
Post a Comment