Figures.
Just when you think you’re winding down (with anything, if you take a look,) something shifts and there we go up the curve again. That’s why that ring that is said to have been given to some long-ago king worked so well. You know, the one that said, “This, too, shall pass.”
I was emailing my friend, Sarah, which is how a lot of these blogs get started – as emails to friends, and I said that I found an email from her dated sometime in 2006 about some project she was working on that had to do with trauma and I couldn’t recall what she said she was doing.
She said she remembered talking with me about how incest is a “life preparation tool,” or something.
Well, no. It’s not exactly a “life preparation tool.”
I’d hardly suggest inciting incest to prepare anyone for life. A lot of people can only interpret what I say as meaning that the end (being fine and whole, with or without any incest incidents, justifies the means (incest.) That’s not what I say at all, but people don’t have a place to file what I did say.
I did say that from a place of wholeness, nothing bad ever happened and no one was ever harmed.
But with people barely wrapping their minds and hearts around forgiveness, they are not hearing the gratitude or the acceptance without making up other stories about it. I was once married for 7 years to a man who refused to even meet my father because he was so angry at the thought of incest.
It’s hard to even language where I am about it, because the culture doesn’t contain that perspective, though I’ve been attempting it regularly here for a few years now.
In fact it is hard to “release trauma,” because we think there is trauma there to be released! There isn’t. There is only our mistaken thinking.
My friend, Wayne, told me Sunday that he still thinks that I have “turned denial into a coping mechanism.” Well, sure, I can find places where I do that. Still, that isn’t what I said, either, nor what I have done.
Some day, maybe I can say what cannot be heard and be heard.
These sig quotes say it, too, in a broader way. Other people have tried to say this. There is clarity out there. It wouldn’t matter if I’m the only one. There is still truth to be had.
Love, Ann
“To empathize does not mean to join in suffering, for that is what you must refuse to understand.”
A Course in Miracles
Text, Chapter 16, 1st sentence
Page 330
“You move totally away from reality when you believe there is a legitimate reason to suffer.”
Byron Katie
“Loving What Is” page 288
