Allegra Jordan on forgiveness, reflection, and self-compassion.
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Sometimes society colludes with an attacker. It is unfair, and it happens all the time. In a divorce, how many times do we see people side with a powerful but morally bankrupt ex-spouse? In sports, how many collude to support a powerful, talented but brutal perpetrator of domestic violence? How many times do our religious establishments mirror society’s brokenness, and not transform it?
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As unfair and painful as this behavior is, such trauma can be a portal to growth and flourishing. Here’s a recent example:
My husband, our dog and I were recently attacked by a neighbor’s unpredictable dog. We were at an empty intersection at night. Our neighbor’s dog, somewhere down a dark sidewalk, pulled away from its handler and charged us. My husband had ligaments torn in his hand. My dog’s shoulder muscle was macerated, and he spent six days in the hospital. This was the second time this dog had attacked, and with the same root cause: our neighbor asked a young, inexperienced handler without much physical strength to walk her large, unpredictable dog.
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What happened next added pain. We’re relatively new to the neighborhood. The attack revealed that we had moved into a nest of “mean girls.” All but one of my neighbors were either silent or colluded with the attacking dog’s family. (Thank heavens for my one set of wonderful neighbors!) The message was: “We do not care if you are injured on our street, do not inconvenience our tribal leader.”
That leader, the dog’s owner, came to our house a week later, bullied and showed no remorse nor desire to make amends. Thankfully, Animal Control reviewed the matter and issued a sensible order: walk the unpredictable dog outside of the city limits, which means about half a mile from our houses.
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A painful as this experience was, tremendous growth also emerged from it. Here are 5 things to consider if you go through a traumatic event, no matter what kind or on what scale:
- Reflection: Did you do something to cause this issue? If so, show remorse and make amends. If not, think about naming what kind of pain the situation has created. Giving a name to that pain (in this case betrayal and rejection) can help you better identify how to best care for yourself.
[Read: Forgiveness Is the Most Important Lesson We Can Learn]
- Assessment: How do you think about good and bad events? Consider taking a scientific test about optimism from Martin E.P. Seligman’s “Authentic Happiness” Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Optimism is a complicated subject, but its behaviors are learned. That means you can learn new and more helpful behaviors. After taking the assessment, I learned where I could make a simple adjustment and have a more hopeful outlook.
- Understand your brain’s filing system. Your brain takes a traumatic event and breaks it into different pieces, storing them in various places so that you won’t be overwhelmed. When something “feels like” a prior trauma, all those bits of hidden pain that “feel like” the current trauma are activated. Ouch! Everything that felt like “dog attack” or “mean girls” was stimulated in my brain though I was dealing with only one incident. When you get to the root cause of the intensification (in my case an early childhood trauma), you know why things have more power over you than they should. Dealing with “mean girls” is easier than dealing with “my entire history with mean girls.”
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- Self-compassion. When others are not kind, it’s important that you are your own friend. I needed to affirm the non-perfectionist mantra, “More and more, I am a kind person.” This self-focus takes power from “them” and returns me to the center of my soul from which I can make better decisions about who I want to become now that this has happened. I learned an important insight about my vocation that I’d been struggling with. (Kristen Neff’s work on self-compassion is considered the gold standard.)
- Exercise. “The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma” is a new book by trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk. The brain is remarkably resilient if you know how to address these wounds. Researchers have learned that movement is important to healing trauma. Get the toxic anger out in ways that won’t impact other people.
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These 5 actions can help you grow as you work through a painful situation. Practicing these 5 steps can eventually allow you to forgive a person. These concrete practices are part of the process that leads to forgiveness. According to Rev. Brenda Bennett:
“Forgiveness is often misunderstood and misapplied. Forgiveness does not mean declaring an act that is blatantly wrong is right. It does not mean declaring that hurt was not done. Forgiveness is the process of letting go of anger and vengeance and allowing a greater spirit to heal and renew both victim and perpetrator.”
How one “lets go” is not magic nor does it take forever. We are dealing with a physical brain wound that you can help get better through taking specific, careful actions. Healing a brain wound takes time. The above process took me a month to work through.
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The benefits of healing are vast: clarity about one’s vocation and purpose, and the freedom to pursue it. While I do not wish trauma on anyone, I do know that we get to keep growth, wisdom and maturity from the trauma, but we do not have to keep its pain.
This article originally appeared on Maria Shriver.com
{Image credit: Breno Machado, Unsplash}
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