how to help heal our world

IN LIGHT OF THE SANDY HOOK TRAGEDY . . .

By Judith Barr

Below is a copy of an email I have sent out to media all over our country. For years I have been working to help heal the misuse and abuse of power and the violence that accompanies it – both blatant and subtle.

Some wonderful people in the media have been interested in helping and have interviewed me. A few have talked with me on air again and again. But as we’ve witnessed and experienced more and more public violence, it seems the media – as a mirror to society – has wanted to know less and less what is at the root of violence and how to heal it.

I will continue to put the truth out there. Perhaps what I’ve written below will call to you to send to media in your area. Or perhaps it will call you to learn and explore more yourself.

May we take real and deep steps to heal violence to the root in our country and our world.

Timely Interview Offering: UPDATE: Violence Now in Connecticut – Why Don’t We Want to Know?

Hello . . .

Individually and as a nation, we have just begun to deal with our grief over the recent mall shooting in Oregon…when yet again we are faced with another shocking and tragic event: an elementary school shooting in Sandy Hook, Connecticut…in my own “backyard.”

As we begin to feel another wave of grief over this most recent tragedy, we must ask ourselves: Why does it seem like people don’t want to discover the roots of violence and truly heal it? How close to home does it have to get before we open our minds and hearts to look, learn, and heal?

My name is Judith Barr, and I am a Brookfield, CT psychotherapist and author of Power Abused, Power Healed. In addition to contributing to HuffingtonPost.com, I have been interviewed in a variety of radio, TV, and print media, including, the nationally syndicated The Joey Reynolds Show, Culture Shocks With Barry Lynn, America Tonight with Kate Delaney, One On One With Steve Adubato, Financial Crisis Talk Center with Ken Gross and David Einstandig, The NAPFA Advisor, Leadership Excellence, and The Fenton Report.

If you want to take a step toward truly helping in the healing, one way would be for us to do an interview together. In that interview, I would explore with you for your audience or readers:

· What we don’t want to know about the roots of violence in any of its many forms.

· How our not knowing and exploring those roots helps to feed the violence and keep it going and growing.

· How we can help ourselves and each other turn the tides of violence around, not in a shallow, surface way, but to the root.

· That violence is not just an individual or community issue, but rather a national, multi-national, and global issue.

I look forward to hearing from you, to exploring the possibilities, and to arranging an interview.

Thank you,
Judith Barr, author, Power Abused, Power Healed
JudithBarr@PowerAbusedPowerHealed.com
https://judithbarr.com/power-abused-power-healed/

Beneath The Violence in Aurora, Colorado…

By Judith Barr

The tragedy yesterday in Aurora, Colorado, is heartbreaking. The cauldron of feelings it must have stirred in people in the theater, those left in grief, and those watching and hearing about it . . . also heartbreaking. But the cauldron of feelings in the ones who commit the acts of violence and destruction are also necessary to consider. We need to let those feelings break our hearts, too.

How many times are we going to have violent, destructive attacks – in our country and our world – and not look for the deepest root? How many times are we going to just look at why the shooter did what he did? How many times are we only going to look at computer games, television shows, movies  – or other superficial things – as possible causes? How many times are we going to call them “bad” and that’s it? How many times are we going to split hairs about who is mentally ill and who is just looking for revenge? Revenge is a sign of something unhealed.

Any person (male or female) who commits an act of violence and destruction is deeply wounded and needs help. No one is born destructive. Nobody is born violent. Not even Hitler. We are born and wounded by our families, communities, society. And we all need to look at this, to understand this.

Any person who commits an act of violence and destruction is deeply wounded and needs help. He needs help with feelings he has never had the help to build the capacity to feel and know what to do with. And how is he going to get that help in a family where the parents don’t have that capacity – were never helped, themselves, to be able to feel and use their feelings well. And how is he going to get that help in a society that doesn’t have that capacity to feel and use feelings well. A society in fact, that is complicit in numbing feelings, burying feelings, moving away from feelings any way possible. A society, for example, that supports taking medication to stop the emotional pain, instead of working to find the root of the pain and heal it. A society that allows its insurance companies to limit the kinds of therapy and the number of sessions for someone to do their healing. Limits that are bizarre in terms of any real healing being done. And therapies that can only possibly, perhaps, help the symptoms temporarily – like bandaids – never truly resolve the wound and its inner and outer consequences.

How is he going to get that help in a society that calls certain people ‘mentally ill,’ and refuses to look at the wounding in us all and in our society?

If we want this violence to stop, we’re going to need to find a way to look at our own wounding – individual and societal – build our capacity to feel our feelings healthily and tell which feelings we need to safely explore for healing and which feelings we need to act on safely, and do the deep inner work to heal our wounds that caused us suffering, continue to cause us suffering, and will continue to cause us unnecessary suffering until we heal them.

NOTE: If you have read this and think I’m making excuses for those who are violent and destructive, or not holding them accountable, you have completely misunderstood or distorted the purpose and meaning of my words. I hope you will read it again and open your mind and your heart, so that you can see and feel my efforts to help us go beneath the surface to the levels from which we can truly help ourselves heal this kind of destructiveness in our world.

© Judith Barr, 2012

AN OPPORTUNITY TO EXPLORE FURTHER . . . NEEDLESS SUFFERING

By Judith Barr

This post is in response to a comment sent to me related to my Independence post, a comment that opens a wonderful opportunity for us to explore further our use of power.

Who gets to decide what is needless suffering?
How do they decide?
How do they decide whose suffering is less than whose and whose suffering is worse than whose?
Is the suffering of the unborn child in the process of abortion worse than the suffering of that same child
. . . born into a family that doesn’t want him/her?
. . . born to a mother who leaves the baby in the trash?
. . . born to a mother who kills herself and leaves the baby to starve?
. . . born to parents who abuse the child?
Is the child’s suffering worse than the mother’s
. . . who is pregnant through incest, rape, or some version of powerlessness?
These kinds of questions can go on and on.

Where do we each use our power well?
Where do we each misuse and abuse our power? And how do we each heal our misuse and abuse of power??
These are the questions that will guide us to ending needless suffering.

© Judith Barr, 2011

Pastor Terry Jones – One Person Can Affect The Entire World . . . Even If We Never Know How

By Judith Barr

Since the beginning of my training as a psychotherapist, and maybe before, I’ve known that one person can change the world. One person’s actions, but also one person’s thoughts and feelings. That person’s own immediate world built in and around him or her. That person’s extended world of relatives, coworkers, and everyone he or she comes into contact with through a day or a week. And on and on and on into society and our world.

A clear, destructive, and dangerous example of this occurred on March 21, 2011, when Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida – the same Terry Jones who threatened to hold an International Burn A Koran Day on September 11, 2010, and then after the world response said he would not go through with it – carried out his threat to burn a copy of The Koran, the holy book of Islam. Jones held a mock trial, execution and burning of the Koran, with 30 people witnessing. He claimed the holy text of Islam was guilty of crimes.

Terry Jones’ took the action he took . . . “the consequences be damned.” His action has caused more damage than perhaps we will ever know. Certainly we do know that after he burned the Koran, 12 United Nations workers in Afghanistan were killed by demonstrators protesting Jones’ action. Nine other people were killed and 90 injured in a separate demonstration in Kabul.

Terry Jones’ behavior and all the rhetoric around it were filled with prejudice. Prejudice he learned and developed where in his early life? But it was also filled with more. What wounding in his own life was Pastor Jones acting out? Who hated Terry as a little one? Who declared him as just a tiny boy “guilty of crimes”? Who held a mock trial for little Terry Jones? Who threatened to burn him as a child? Literally or figuratively? Who gave him a chance to defend himself, but when he was unable did something violent to him . . . as violent as burning his sacred self? Who acted out the hate and fear and woundedness of their own childhood(s) on Terry Jones many long years ago? And what were the consequences on Terry and others in that person’s world? And now this is the consequence on the Koran, the world’s Muslims, our country, and our world!

We are all sacred. Wound one of us and that wounding gets passed on again and again, from generation to generation . . . until someone says ‘enough’ and does his or her own healing to the root. Until we all say ‘enough’ and do our own healing to the root!

© Judith Barr, 2011

ARE WE GOING TO PUT OUT ANOTHER BRUSHFIRE? OR . . .

By Judith Barr

TSA screenings and pat downs.
Our civil rights.
Wikileaks leaks.
North Korean nukes.
The economy.
Jobs – no jobs.
Houses.
Big Pharma.
Drug firms paying doctors.
Food safety.
What to do about Iran?
Social security.
Medicare.
Taxing whom?
Cutting taxes for whom?
Who gets the next bail out?
One election begins right after the previous one takes place.
Republicans or Democrats?
Right or Left?
Far left or Tea Partyers?
Women forced to wear red bracelets when menstruating!

One after another, we put out brushfires, trying to make everything better in our world.
We ask  . . .
our doctors to do this for us
our teachers to do this for us
our clergy people to do this for us
our congress people to do this for us
our governors to do this for us
our presidents to do this for us
our media to do this for us
our military to do this for us
our money to do this for us . . .
and on and on and on.

When are we going to realize that at this level of our evolution, the only thing we can do in the outer world is put out brush fires . . .
and that we will be putting out brush fires forever, if we don’t take a leap of faith in our development …
if we don’t deal with the real cause of the forest fire that lives within each of us.
The forest fire of our own fear of our feelings, our own defenses against our feelings, our own denial of our feelings,
and our own wounds, both conscious and unconscious, burning to be healed.

© Judith Barr, 2010