“If you want to live the rest of your life recalling the trauma I’ve caused, that’s up to you.”
I was told this recently by someone very close to me. This person has shown me incredible love over the course of my life, but they have also caused me great pain. Hearing it and the rest of the conversation that accompanied the statement brought up a lot of different thoughts and feelings in me. One of the key ideas I thought of was: “Aren’t I entitled to feel the trauma of my past? Isn’t it natural to remember?”
In addition to thinking about that idea, I also thought that it felt a little bit like the person was turning responsibility for the consequences of that trauma back on me. Like it was up to me to get over it, to make something of my life beyond that trauma, to move on, not to live in the past, etc.
To this, I say, “bullshit.” It is important to remember, to mourn, to grieve, etc. I certainly don’t want to live a life that consists only of thinking about the traumatic things I have been through, but I am also certainly not going to let the person responsible for some of that trauma tell me implicitly that I should “get over it,” or, in words they would prefer to use, “heal it.”
Healing is an interesting thing. In short, I think the best evidence of healing is being able to see things for what they really are. It also seems to be a good thing to be able to grow positive and chosen fruits from trauma and other bad experiences. If we can do that, we are definitely on the healing path. It is definitely not about moving beyond trauma, and it is most definitely not about forgetting trauma because it would be convenient for the person responsible.
We don’t need to make them pay for it. Especially if they can reflect on it, they are already growing from the experience of inflicting that pain. But we also don’t need to go in the opposite direction. Hold the difficulty of it. This is life. There are no easy solutions to things like this. Look at everything, at it all, and know that you are greater than it.
This is a real lesson for men in the face of the #metoo campaign. I think men have taken lots of different stands on the issue of the abuse of women, stands ranging from denial to defensiveness, from #notallmen type responses to grandiose confessions. But in my mind it is important not to think that it is our place as men to try and solve this issue, to be able to explain it, or anything like that.
We are part of a system that validates those who act abusively towards women, whether we consider ourselves to be involved in that system in an individual way or not. We can deny or confess or victim blame as much as we like, but it won’t make the problem go away now, nor erase it from memory. We have to learn to hold the difficulty and persistently bring consciousness to it.
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