May 1, 2008
Welcome to our first newsletter. It's been a long time coming, and we appreciate your patience. If there is anything you wish to see here, please let us know. If you wish to share anything, your name will be withheld unless you give permission to use it. We would like to state what state you come from. But if this not acceptable, it will be honored.
Below is a poem written by a beautiful soul from Indiana. I think it reflects how a lot of us have felt.
Take My Dreams Away Forever
My life is complicated and seems bleak
My life is dazed and confused
I don’t know what I should be
Or how to stop from being used
I want to sleep to fade away
But no one will listen or even see
How sad and torn I feel everyday
I help everyone else, but never me
People are so prejudiced
They won’t see the pain on the inside
They make quick judgments
And choose to only see pain on the outside
Even loved ones choose not to see
Or maybe they are blinded by their own pain
There is a loss of connection that should not be
This loss is devastating and only more pain is gained
I want to be healed and put together
But feel blocked by so many including myself
Why and how are the questions I gather
But the answers are held in a book high on a shelf
Why now are my dreams and thoughts so vivid
Why did it wait to fester in my psyche
How will it go away and quit making me so livid
My dreams, my guilt, my pain go away I plea
I need someone to be understanding
I’m not making this up or being lazy
I am floating and I can’t find a landing
I hurt, I’m lonely, I’m scared; not crazy
I don’t want to die only to sleep
Take my dreams away forever
I want them gone and not to keep
I want the pain to come back never
Thank you, Indiana, for sharing your heart and intimate thoughts.
Taking Things Personal
Have you ever wondered why you get angry when someone does or says something to you? Sally is sitting at her desk in the third grade classroom. An obnoxious boy comes over and takes her pencil and won’t give it back. It was, after all, her property; and he didn’t ask. She tells the teacher, who, having a lot to contend with in a full classroom, talks soothingly to Sally and gives her another pencil. Sally goes home and tells Mom what happened. Mom just got off work and is trying to prepare dinner. Her mind is elsewhere when she pats Sally on the head and says, “Yes dear.” Since Sally can’t get any satisfaction, she sulks for a while. As with all children, their resiliency allows them to forget the incident.
But the ego doesn’t work that simply. Sally thinks she’s forgotten it; but the brain never forgets. 20 Years later, Sally is in the office with a co-worker, John, who walks by Sally’s desk and picks up her stapler and takes it over to his desk. Sally immediately jumps up from her chair, goes to John’s desk, and grabs her stapler back. In a heated voice, she spits out, “Next time, you ask me?”
Another example demonstrates how the anger doesn’t have to be about an object. It could be a misunderstood word or words lifted out of context. A landlord rents a certain amount of space to a friend. After a while the landlord notices the renter is slowly moving into the landlord’s storage space and storing things that belong to her. The renter isn’t doing anything destructive, just taking over space that she isn’t renting. The landlord also notices that the renter is using things belonging to the landlord, who by this time feels the renter is taking advantage by slowly taking her storage space and using her things without permission.
The landlord understands that if something isn’t done about it, the renter will crowd his space. The landlord emails the renter relating what she has observed. She reminds the renter that she has rented only a certain amount of space but is slowly moving into unrented space. The renter emailed back and asked if the landlord is telling her she was encroaching, using her, and stepping over boundaries. The landlord wrote back and said that they needed to meet face-to-face, that emails weren’t doing it.
When they got together, the landlord related how she felt she was being dishonored by the renter using her things without permission and slowly moving into her storage space. After a few minutes of discussion, the renter shared that she was married to a man who had set limitations upon her and drew out her boundaries, even in their house. This was one of the reasons she divorced him. The renter had misread the message the landlord was trying to convey in the email based upon her impression the email gave. The renter’s mental state of no control resonated back to when she experienced her boundaries being drawn by her husband.
In both cases, when people hurt us physically, with hurtful words, or just plain dishonoring what is ours, it registers in our brain as a state of no control or helplessness. Emotions may not register immediately but will rise up soon or later, involving one or more of the five physical senses. If there is no support system in place at the time of the hurt, or if there is and it’s treated like a small nothing, the brain is going to remember. Every time someone hurts us, one of the five senses acts as a trigger as it resonates back to the original hurt.
Every hurt doesn’t have to be same. But the brain will remember the mental state of helplessness and the emotions involved in the original hurt. By the time you are adults, you have felt the hurt so often and our anger is so entrenched, you fly off as soon as something is done or someone says something. The irony of all this, you may not understand what set us off.
There are ways of dealing with this anger. We can:
- Learn to control your emotions and mental state by preventing yourselves from prematurely flying off the handle. But all this does is create a pressure cooker that will eventually blow.
- Continue thinking you are right with your anger and let things fly. There are actually people who don’t understand why others don’t want to hang out with them after they’ve lost their cool a few times.
- Or, you can do the wise thing. You can sit down with yourself and try to see what actually made you angry by trying to discern what you resonated with. Go deep within and look at the first time you felt the same state of helplessness involving your emotions. Use a friend or therapist to talk it out. I suggest writing it out, in detail, remembering the physical senses as well.
No one likes to think something is wrong with their mentality, so looking within yourself to find faults is not going to be easy. You’ll need to go back and look at the first time you were hurt with an honest perspective. If you accomplish this, you will see from where your anger is coming and why. Once you look at the original hurt with a viewer’s perspective (this means looking at yourself like you were looking at someone else), other emotions relating to the original hurt may, over a few months time, slip away. You may also experience one or more of the five stages of grief as explained by Kubler-Ross in her book, On Death and Dying. Any time your body lets go of something physical, even weight, anything emotional, or spiritual, you need to grieve it. This is especially true when it comes to your ego/psyche. It may be a small, subtle grief. If you were affected on many levels, you may grieve for each level the pain hurt you. You may not experience the stages in order, or all of them; but grieve you will.
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We will discuss a topic we think will be of interest to you each month. Again, this newsletter is for you. If there is anything you wish to discuss or any research you wish done and don’t know how to go about it, email us. If you are not satisfied with the Peace Newsletter coming in Word format, please also let us know.
As always…
Know You Are Loved.
