More About Dealing With Trauma

Trauma To dance around the sun by schakoyana

Last night, my last dream had me sitting all of a sudden bolt upright in bed. It was of an event that happened recently (this week) in New England, USA concerning a parent murdering his child and committing suicide.

Derry, NH, father killed himself and 6-year-old son by carbon monoxide poisoning

It is happening all of the time, too, since we live in Coo-coo Land in the USA as, of course, the Las Vegas murdered amply shows.

Father suspected of killing ‘young son,’ then himself in Foxborough … Sep 22, 2017 – A 22-year Army veteran who was twice deployed to Iraq shot and killed his six-year-old son and then killed himself here Thursday night, an act of domestic violence the boy’s mother warned authorities four years ago she feared would happen.

Well, we have a fairly frequent happening here in the Northeast USA of people killing their children. Mostly the men do it, but women do so, too. Obviously we are failing in mental health treatments here in the USA.

Then we have the pedophilia, too — like the type that Cardinal Law indirectly condoned. What is wrong with our species?

Why can’t we all just act nicely with each other and other species? … Yesterday I was playing with a young squirrel on a pine around a foot from my window. So I said while laughing,” I love you and here are some kisses” and I smacked my lips into kisses three times. Staring at me, he opened and shut his mouth three times.

We did that game twice before he disappeared up the tree in my attic. He lives there with two other squirrels. They may be siblings.

I’ve had around twenty generations of squirrels there. Why shouldn’t they reside there? I don’t use it and it is compensation for them for humans taking over my whole neighborhood and increasingly so … such that not much else will be left here except people and buildings everywhere in times to come.

Sometimes I introspect. I consider that about four percent of the human population is born genetically to be sociopaths. Then I think about the way that that number can rise to twenty or more percent in dysfunctional societies such as mine.

Then I go onward in thought to the fact that I traced the affliction in my own family to the German side of my family (expressing in males) back to the 1600’s. The ones, though, that I know the most about are my brother, who is shunned by my sister and me, my uncle, his son, my grandfather and my great-grandfather.

They are/were very crafty and bright. Yet there is something wrong with their brain pathways and areas of the brain related to ethics, compassion and self-restraint.

Brain scans show it, too.

Then I start feeling sorry for my two female cousins since they had to put up with two of these monsters and my sister and I only had one in the family. Double my brother and make one of him as my father? Have a monster as a father AND a brother? Well, no thank you. No thank you big time!

So we have around twenty percent of these people messing up the world. Where do we go from there?

One answer is to say that I can’t do anything since I am one little person in the world. Another is to say that I can help a few people along the way as I move my life forward in time, such as when you give food to a homeless person. Yet a further one is to say that I will go all out to be my best self and serve social and environmental betterment as best as I can and pay attention to my effort rather than outcomes, the latter of which can never be discerned in the long run.

My friend Steve, a psychotherapist in NC USA, has hinted to me that he went into his psychology practice due to something happening to him as a child akin to my growing up with a sociopathic brother. Whatever it was, I’m sure that it was dreadful since I, myself, know from direct experience.

In any case, he wrote me regarding our dealing with trauma:

With love, pain and hope that the following thoughts are somehow useful to you, in whatever way you choose to use them. I have had moments and still occasionally have dream experiences like the one you are describing. They used to come over me more often and more persistently than they do now. Acceptance of “what is” was helpful. But there is something worth mentioning now, something else unexpected that I experienced when hitting ‘rock bottom’ years ago. In the depth of despair, deep in the pit I helped dig, there appeared a completely unanticipated light, a ray of hope, a form of hope that is beyond childish “wishing and hoping” (i e, without reality-orientation or the assumption of personal responsibility for ones behavior). This abiding hope beyond hope takes its shape in the form of recognition: None of us can comprehend enough about our existential situation to understand all its dimensions, much less its implications for what the future holds in store. According to the Qum’ran Scrolls, not one among us knows the whole tale. As long as I am becoming everything I can be and doing the best I can do, according to ‘the lights’ I possess, then by hoping for the best not only can we experience a release from the despair but also a sublime contentment deriving from the realization that we are (despite many failings) our best selves. What more can be asked? What more can be done? Peace. – Steven

Don’t think for a moment that you do not have the power to change the direction that society takes. You do! You just have to believe that you do. We all have the power. It’s just a matter of aptly applying it.

In my opinion, there are two techniques to serve the world. One is to be loving and kind. The other is to fight like all hell let loose in the way that my sister did against the teenager boys, strangers to her, beating and kicking up another one, who she came across while riding down the highway. She turned her car around to confront them. Then you have the POWER!

The combination of caring and fighting  is excellent!  I know this for a fact. We can’t be stopped. Nope.

P.S., I have red shoes somewhat like theirs in the following video and eleven years of modern and ballet dance lessons, but I am sixty-seven years old. Yet I can make the same moves — just a little more clumsy and more grounded — less lithe … less in the mode of defying gravity. I’d have to be hunkered down a little more. … The choreography, though, is a snap for me … as are their viewpoints.

Just now one of my friends told me about a massive murder in Florida. We endure so many murders in the USA. So I’m going to dance my way through them and pay attention to words like the ones from my friend, Steven S. Doing so is the only way to get through the mess.

Police respond to shooting at high school in Florida | fox8.com

fox8.com/2018/02/14/police-respond-to-shooting-at-high-school-in-florida/

27 mins ago – PARKLAND, Fla.—The Broward County Sheriff’s Office in Florida is responding to reports of a shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. … Aerial footage from CNN affiliate WSVN showed a number of people lying on the ground outside the school, being treated for injuries …

 Yeah, we are rising upward! The moves come easily then.

Sally Dugman is a writer from MA, USA.

 

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