I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for reading my blog. I’m pleased that you’re finding it worthwhile.
In addition to my observations on life in general, I can offer additional help to adult survivors of childhood emotional abuse.
Please go to http://helpineedahug.com and check out my e-book on recovery from childhood emotional abuse. I invite you to read “my story” here on my blog as well.
We do have the power to turn our lives around!
Yesterday I told about my rafting trip. One of my minor mishaps on the trip was falling into the boat (which, by the way, is much better than falling out of the boat) on some rapids, and smacking myself in the jaw with my paddle.
The rest of the day (Sunday) and the following day (Monday), it hurt. Sometimes I had the sense that it made my whole face hurt. Resting my chin in my hand was out of the question.
Finally, this morning (Tuesday), a small, dark bruise appeared—right on my jaw line, just to the left of my chin. It was satisfying to finally see the thing that hurt—even though I knew the injury was real.
Aren’t a lot of things in life like that? We know something’s wrong, but it’s such a relief to be able to see it? Perhaps that’s why people get into addictive and self-destructive behaviors. Something is wrong in their lives, but often it’s an “invisible” problem, and behaviors that are observable make the problem seem more real.
And often, the worst thing is the feeling is that the problem is all in our imagination.
I went rafting yesterday. Twelve miles down the American River. I’d been canoeing on the Russian River, inner-tubing on the Mokelumne River, and swimming in the Cosumnes River, as well as similar activities in numerous lakes, but this was my first river-rafting trip per se.
Interestingly, the thing that river rafting seemed most similar to was…horseback riding.
For one thing, you’re not sitting in the raft, but on the side of it, which reminded me of riding sidesaddle bareback. You have “stirrups”—one foot is tucked into a cuff on the bottom of the boat, and the other is jammed wherever you can find a tight spot to jam it into. This is to keep you in the boat when you get air—that is, when you bounce up off your seat in rapids.
So this was a little like posting in English horseback riding; rather than bounce up & down uncomfortably in your seat, you can anticipate the rough waters and lift your rear end up off the boat in advance.
Yet another similarity is that if you fall off (which no one in our boat did), your only real option is to get back on.
It occurred to me that by the time you get to the middle years of your life, most of the things you’ll do are a little like something you’ve already done. Transferable lessons, I guess you could call it. That is encouraging, when you think about it.
Recently I attended a business-related meeting. At the conclusion of the meeting, I was having a business-related discussion with someone when a third person approached and greeted the person I was talking to, ignoring me, and proceeded to start a new conversation.
Now, this scenario has long been one of my big pet peeves: people who interrupt a conversation in progress to start a new one with one of the participants, completely oblivious to the original conversation. I waited for this interruption to wrap up, annoyed at the bad manners while also concerned that the person I was talking to would completely lose her train of thought on what we’d been talking about.
Then…an interesting thing happened. The new person turned to me and said, “Hello, I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you yet. I’m So-and-So.”
Now how do you think this changed my feelings toward this person? Suddenly she wasn’t quite so rude after all; I had instantly morphed from “invisible” to someone whose acquaintance was a pleasure.
We all have the innate need to feel significant. Usually, it doesn’t take much.
I’m currently reading Little Girl Lost by Joan Merriam. It’s about the almost incomprehensible murder of an 85-year-old woman by two teenage girls. I don’t normally read such downbeat material, but I am this time for three reasons:
1. The events happened near my home, an area with very little violent crime, which makes it all the more intriguing.
2. I know the author. I took a public speaking course from Joan Merriam and bought an autographed copy of the book after she told of her experience researching and writing it. Her autograph addresses me as “one of my all time favorite students.”
3. Horrific as it is, the events in the girls’ lives that led up to their committing this crime help explain what drove them to do it. They too were victims of unspeakable crimes—and not by strangers, but by family members and friends. This is why I refer to the crime as “almost” incomprehensible.
I’m at the part of the book where we go back and look at the sad childhood of the lead perpetrator. It’s clear that dysfunctional families breed dysfunctional people. Not that any of this excuses what they did, but it does shed a more sympathetic light on it.
Are you familiar with the short horror story “The Monkey’s Paw”? It was written by W. W. Jacobs in England, published in 1902. Briefly, it’s about a talisman, the paw of a dead monkey, which Sergeant-Major Morris got from a fakir while part of the British force in India. The monkey’s paw grants its possessor three wishes—but at a terrible price.
Sergeant-Major Morris gives the monkey’s paw to his friends, Mr. and Mrs. White. Their adult son, Herbert, urges them to wish for £200 to pay the mortgage. Mr. White makes the wish; the next day, Herbert is fatally mutilated in some machinery at work. The compensation from the company is £200.
A few days later, Mrs. White, sick with grief, has an idea: use the monkey’s paw to wish Herbert back to life. Too late, Mr. White—who alone had seen the mangled body—realizes this is a bad idea. When Mrs. White joyfully runs to answer the knock at the door, Mr. White uses the talisman to make the final wish: that Herbert would return to the dead.
The “moral” of the story is supposedly that we can’t change fate. But this is a horror story; to give it too much weight would be stupid. Yet how many people live their lives as though they believe in this kind of reality—that if you wish for something good, something bad will happen in the process? In other words, you can’t win, according to this thinking—the universe is out to get you.
Food for thought: do you catch yourself thinking this way? Practice thinking of the universe as a friendly place, and expecting good things—without the horrible cost.
There are actually two ways of looking at this question: do you get tired of doing the complaining yourself, and do you get tired of hearing the complaints of others?
Most people are more likely to answer “yes” to the second one than to the first. Unless others are voicing the same complaints that we’re already thinking (which just saves us the trouble of doing the complaining ourselves), their complaints are just annoying. But our own complaints? That’s a different story….
Why do we complain so much? Are we afraid that if we saw the good in everything, people would accuse us of being unrealistic or Pollyanna-ish? Or are we afraid that if we’re satisfied with the status quo, the “powers that be” will dump a load of crud on us and spoil our fun? Perhaps complaining somehow makes us feel superior. After all, if we know better than everyone else (perhaps even God?) about how things should be run—how to drive, how to dress, how to run a retail business, how to serve food, etc.—we must be smarter than everyone else.
Have we ever even stopped complaining long enough to examine why we complain? We could give that a try! You may get a lot of surprised reactions when you ask those around you, “Why do you complain so much?” Then again, you may start a trend—a good one.
Life is a journey. Everyone probably agrees with that; it’s such a common expression it sounds like a cliché.
But what’s the destination?
Good question. Anyone who thinks they’re going to “arrive” at a place in life where they have it all figured out and aren’t going to have any more problems will be sadly disappointed. Almost as soon as we get past one challenge, we’re going to get another one. That’s how life is: we pass one test…we’re given a harder test. Just like school, except that there’s no “graduation,” other than death.
But that should be encouraging. Encouraging…because it means there’s no “hurry” to figure things out and get to that imaginary place where everything is just swell. No, we don’t want to make the same mistakes over and over again. We do want to apply what we learn from each struggle to the next struggle. That includes what we learn about ourselves, about other people, about life, about the world, and about God. And we want to help other people, to the extent that they can learn from our struggles. But that’s a limited extent; to a great degree, people have to endure their own struggles.
Enjoy the journey. And don’t be in too much of a hurry.
20th-century mathematician Alfred North Whitehead said, “Human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.” (A bagatelle is something of little value or importance.)
That’s a pretty sad view of life, yet one that many survivors of childhood emotional abuse can undoubtedly identify with. How about you?
I created
Help! I Need a Hug
A Guide to Surviving Childhood Emotional Abuse—How You Can Heal Yourself, Overcome Your Obstacles, and Embrace Your Goals
with you in mind. Click here and see what I mean:
I came across this ancient Chinese story in Marci Shimoff’s Happy for No Reason, although I’d previously heard it in church, and am delighted to have found it again.
An old farmer used a horse to till his fields. One day, the horse ran away, and when the farmer’s neighbors sympathized with the old man over his bad luck, the farmer shrugged his shoulders and replied, “Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?”
A week later, the horse returned with a herd of wild mares, and this time the neighbors congratulated the farmer on his good luck. His reply was, “Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?”
Then, when the farmer’s son was attempting to tame one of the wild horses, he fell and broke his leg. Everyone agreed this was very bad luck. But the farmer’s only reaction was, “Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?”
A week later, the army marched into the village and drafted all the young men they could find. When they saw the farmer’s son with his broken leg, they let him stay behind. Good luck? Bad luck?
The point of this story is that we just can’t know for sure what the ultimate consequences of a life event will be. We can, however, trust that everything has been allowed into our lives for a reason. The reason? To help us become the people we’re supposed to be.