Beneath The Violence in Aurora, Colorado…

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

WHITNEY HOUSTON – AN UNEXPECTED LEGACY

In his eulogy for Whitney Houston, Kevin Costner acknowledged the questions Whitney carried in her heart … Am I good enough? Am I pretty enough? Will they like me? He went on to say that it was the burden that made her great and the part that caused her to stumble in the end.

I listened to Kevin speaking lovingly and respectfully about Whitney and I wept. Oh Whitney! You stumbled from not knowing if you were good enough? I could have helped you with that. As a psychotherapist, I work with people all the time who suffer from the same thing. It didn’t have to bring you down.

To begin with, it’s so sad you felt that way. And it’s so sad you had so many resources with which to get help and never found someone to help you with your own painful questions. It’s so very sad. And it is so sad that so many people feel that way.

So I say to you, Whitney, to your daughter, Bobbi Kristina, and to millions all over our world . . . if you are suffering from questions like these about whether or not you are good enough, it is possible to heal this suffering to the root.

As we can see from your struggles, Whitney, it’s important that people know of this possibility. Too many in our world don’t know. Too often in our world the help advocated and given only offers bandaids and techniques through which to manage the pain, manage the questions, manage the aching, broken relationship with self. The bandaids and quick fixes delude people into imagining they’re healing, while actually it keeps them stuck, haunted by the inner world of ‘not good enough,’ that’s been pushed further into the ground and not at all resolved. But you can find people – psychotherapists – who truly know how to help you utilize those agonizing questions, experiences, decisions, and feelings as a passageway through to real healing.

There is hope. Imagine what it would be like to heal your experience of not being good enough. Imagine what it would be like for you. And imagine what it would be like communally, as each person who doesn’t feel like she/he is good enough heals individually and, as a result, has a healing impact on our world.

Imagine, Whitney, if that healing becomes part of your legacy!

© Judith Barr, 2012

The Tragedy in Norway – An Escape Hatch in Action

Violence in our world is multiplying. It’s painful to read about, think about, feel. But if we turn away, instead of really resolving the problem, we feed the escalation.

Last week in Norway, we witnessed frightening, painful attacks. Anders Breivik killed and injured people in downtown Oslo and gunned down teenagers at a nearby camp. The consequences of this tragedy in the present day are huge and deep. Many want to simply blame and punish Anders Breivik. Although he must be held accountable, blame and punishment won’t bring real healing to the individuals affected, the town of Oslo, Norway, or our world. In addition to the present reality, Anders Breivik was almost certainly acting out ‘escape hatches’ developed in his psyche in childhood.

If you were at the point where you felt so much – sorrow, hurt, anger, fear – you thought you couldn’t bear it . . . what would you do? When I ask people this question, we discover their escape hatches.

As children, when we are traumatized, we instinctively protect ourselves, doing whatever we can to get away from the pain. We numb ourselves, close our hearts, deaden our bodies, strike out aimlessly . . . even before we have mental concepts or words. When thoughts and words become available, they are added to these responses – decisions we make about ourselves, others, life, and about how to escape suffering. Among these decisions: I’m leaving – running away. I want to die – kill myself. I could kill you – attack the other. I’ll go crazy!

With time, actions are too often joined to the feelings, concepts, and words . . . usually unconsciously. What was once vital self protection, now becomes a defense – hard, brittle, and even destructive – and typically ends up creating the very thing we intended it to defend us against. Think about it: All of the above decisions created to escape suffering end up creating suffering.

What if you’re a child who spends your first year with parents in conflict – openly or beneath the surface. Then, they divorce, your father leaves but begins a custody battle to take you away from your mother. The tension, split, abandonment, custody fight, create so much suffering for you. You feel you can’t bear it. You decide unconsciously: Someday I’ll get back at them and make them suffer like they’ve made me suffer. You’re bullied and abandoned in later childhood, and you make the same decision again.

You spend your early years being outwardly compliant, but as you grow you become rebellious. Eventually, perhaps unaware you’re fulfilling your early decision to make them suffer, you make an actual plan for revenge – not on your parents, rather on parent substitutes . . . current leaders and future authorities being trained for leadership. Eventually you enact your plan, conceived as a defense against pain, an escape from suffering many years ago early in your life.

Hearing the news, your mother ‘escapes’ and hides out, and your father tells the media you should’ve killed yourself to save him shame. Whether you know their reactions or not, they’re showing the whole world what you grew up with: Your mother would escape and hide out; to escape from his own feelings of shame, dad would have you kill yourself. How tragically painful!

So, unconsciously, adults act on these young, raw, primal feelings. The example above is actually a compilation of details from the life of Anders Breivik, woven together by my understanding of how we try to escape suffering from our earliest time.

Escape hatches aren’t just true of Anders Breivik. They’re part of being human, whether we want to know it or not. People are killing themselves and others – domestic violence, suicide bombings, school shootings, wars, and more. People are wreaking havoc on life . . . in fruitless efforts to escape their own suffering. Until taught, children don’t draw boundaries between feelings and actions. Sadly, many adults don’t either: not knowing they’re having young feelings, they act on their feelings like children . . . only with the force and power of an adult. Children still alive inside adults are running rampant through our world, under the guise of adults. Whatever their childhood wounds, decisions, and feelings, people act them out at the expense of us all.

These childhood decisions – conscious and unconscious – have more power to drive a person’s life and impact our world than most of us conceive.

Denying this won’t help our individual or communal situation. Hate or fear isn’t going to solve this. Punishment is no resolution. Nor is giving up and letting it happen. Responding by creating more suffering isn’t, and never should have been, an option.

We need to handle things in the present, but we also need to understand what’s happening under the surface within us, individually and collectively, and work to heal the way we respond to suffering.

If we don’t hide our heads in the sand, we can utilize our minds and hearts to help resolve the acting out of escape hatches in our individual lives and in the life of our world. It isn’t a quick fix process. But it’s well worth investing our time, energy, and commitments in this task. Here is a handful of things you personally can do to help, for starters . . .

  • Commit to find your own escape hatches. If we each find our own escape hatches, we are taking a first step in taking responsibility for our part in the problem.
  • Commit to not act on your escape hatches, even while you still think and feel about them. If we make acting on our escape hatches unacceptable to us, we give ourselves the task, the challenge, and the opportunity to heal to the root the long-ago pain that caused us to create the escape hatches.
  • Build your capacity to feel your pain, whether pain from the past or pain in the present day. If, instead of escaping, we are willing to feel the pain that existed and is still alive within us, as well as the pain that exists today . . . we will be able to prevent the creation of needless pain and suffering that would come from avoidance and escape of pain.
  • Help your children and the children in your life build their capacity to feel their pain. If we help our children feel their feelings as they come up, we give them an option other than escape hatches.
  • Be attuned to your children and the children in your life to sense if they have an escape hatch they need help with. We need to be very attuned and very sensitive here, but our children really need our help with this . . . and so does our world.
  • Be attuned to family, friends, colleagues in your life to sense if they have an escape hatch they need help with. This is also a very delicate matter, but you could make a real difference in a person’s life if you can help him/her not take destructive action to escape pain.
  • If you can’t do this on your own — and who can? — find a really good therapist who understands escape hatches and isn’t afraid of feelings.

Acting out our escape hatches can undermine our greatest possibilities and dreams and can create terrible destruction. Utilizing our awareness of our escape hatches well — on a thinking and feeling level — can open doorways to healing that most people have no conception of . . . yet.

© Judith Barr, 2011

IF WE ARE EVER GOING TO HAVE A CHANCE OF HEALING OUR SOCIETY FROM THIS KIND OF VIOLENCE. . .

People keep asking ….
How can this happen?
How can someone do such a thing?

People keep talking ….
For example, Angela Leach, a representative of the American Civic Association said . . . “Whatever drove this individual to do what he did I cannot possibly fathom.” 

People blame and have contempt . . .  “He must have been a coward; he decided to end his own life  when he heard police sirens” – Binghamton Police Chief Joseph Zikuski.

People feel and try to figure out what to do . . . “I am heartbroken for the families who survived this tragedy,” Obama said, “and it just underscores the degree to which in each of our countries we have to guard against the kind of senseless violence that the tragedy represents.”

But guarding against it won’t prevent it.

People don’t seem to want to look inside themselves and see how we each contribute and how we each need to be part of the healing.

It begins in our childhood…

Children are afraid to feel . . . their feelings in response to pain and trauma are too much for little children to feel; so they bury the feelings and find a way to escape from the pain. When they grow up they are still trying to keep their feelings buried and escape from the pain.

Other people doing the same thing don’t help! When you are trying to keep something in your own psyche buried, you often have contempt for someone else who is dealing with that same thing openly.  You may call a woman a “drama queen” if she expresses her feelings. You may call a man a “wuss” (or worse) if he openly expresses his feelings. If you are afraid to need, you might have contempt for someone else who shows their need openly…You may term them “needy”. Or if you are afraid to ask for help, you might be contemptuous of someone who asks for help (calling them “helpless” or “incompetent” when they do.)  With this additional layer … adults make children and other adults afraid to feel and express their feelings.

Our world is in such a state now. There is so much fear of feeling that even in the name of helping people many doctors and even therapists give people medication so they don’t have to feel  . . . and teach them ways to manage their thoughts and feelings, instead of working them through.

So … we aren’t taught how to be with our feelings, without either repressing them or acting out on them. We aren’t taught how to express them safely. We aren’t taught how to discern which feelings are those we need to act on and which feelings are those we need to follow into our own hearts for healing.  

Say you’re in your home and you smell smoke. You’re afraid. If that is here and now fear, you will act on it to find the source of the smoke and see if it’s a fire that needs to be put out. Or someone else has just started the wood stove for today, usually your daily task in the house.

But let’s say when you were a child, your house burned down. You smelled the smoke but were so young you didn’t know what it was. Now you smell smoke, and you panic, even the smell of someone having lighted a match to light a candle.  You may go find out if there is danger in the here and now, but the panic you feel is from long ago.

We escape from the pain and the fear . . . just like we did as children.   We probably have many ways to escape. We may know some of them, and we may not be aware of others.  Some everyday escapes:  using alcohol, drugs, work, sex, “tuning out,” exercise, watching TV, escaping into a book.  Even more serious escapes:  running away (when the going gets tough – from a relationship, from a job, from therapy), killing oneself, killing someone else, going crazy…

If we are not helped, held, comforted, and responded to when we feel our feelings as children, how can we be expected to be able to bear them as adults?

If we are not helped to learn how to feel and express our feelings as children, how can we be expected to be able to feel them and express them safely as adults?

If we are not helped to know which feelings are here and now, needing to be acted upon, and which feelings are from our childhood, needing to be healed, how can we be expected to know the difference as adults?

If we are not helped to build the capacity to stay with our feelings and not act out on them, how can we be expected to do that as adults?

There are a lot of outer things people may think of to do in situations like the Binghamton tragedy. There are a lot of people who may think prayer or action is the thing to do. I can tell you from experience . . . in addition to prayer and action, people need to learn to do their inner work with their own feelings – both from long ago in their childhoods and here and now . . . if we are ever going to have a chance of healing our society from this kind of violence.

My hope, my intention, my prayer…is to help reweave the fabric of our society, so the parents can teach their children something new because the parents are doing their own inner work of psyche and soul.

(c) Judith Barr, 2009