My sister headed off last week to walk the Camino, she’s started
in the south of France and is walking to Santiago de Compostela in northern
Spain. For her, it really is a pilgrimage and not just a chance to post a
selfie on social media. Five years ago, this week, she lost her sixteen
year old son Jude, to a brain tumour and is struggling with the loss more this year,
than when he died. The truth is, she hasn't fully grieved her loss and is
trying to find some way to work through it and so, she thought that walking the
Camino would help, and something she felt she had to do.
Around the time he died, I was going through a very rough patch
too which went on for some time. It was the culmination of all the
traumatic events that had happened in my life and they came back to haunt me in
one crashing blow. One day, I was sitting thinking about all that had
happened and feeling sorry for myself and asking the usual, 'Why me?' 'Why did
I have to go through so much?', wallowing in self-pity and then, another
thought struck me. I thought, 'Well, why not me? Yes, why not me? What is so
special about me that I should I be exempt from suffering? And, if not
me, then, who?’ Could I point a finger at anyone and say, 'No, give my
suffering and pain to them'. And I couldn't because as much as we might feel
there are some who do deserve to suffer, (like the Tories) no-one really
knows what is going on in anyone else’s life or what burdens they may have to carry
so, why not me? And that was a big turning point.
There is a lot written on the subject of trauma and forgiveness
and it is often said that, in order to move on from past traumas, we have to
forgive. I’ll be honest, I always had difficulty with this and I know others
who think the same. I’ve forgiven no one for what they have done to me but what
I have come to realise is that it is not those who have injured us that we have
to forgive, it is ourselves. This was
another step forward for me, to forgive myself for having allowed myself to be
vulnerable or for putting myself into a situation where others could use or
take advantage of me. I did not always
have control over the events or situations and often, my biggest fault was naivety,
believing people to be friends when they were anything but. In forgiving myself however, I have been able
to make peace with the past and move on and the days or sitting feeling sorry
for myself or ruminating on the why’s and wherefores are now over.
They say, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger and I have to
admit, it was touch and go with that one for a while but in watching my nephew and
my sister struggle and fight for his life, how could I throw my life away so, I
soldiered on through the pain, like my sister is doing now, soldiering on across
northern Spain. And that is all you can
do with that kind of pain and sorrow. If
it is something that happened in the past, there is absolutely nothing we can
do to change it. All we can do is sit with
the pain, grieve our losses and eventually, we move on or at least, find a way
to live with it.
I now have a full understanding of how and why things happened
the way they did and the part I played in it.
That is another important step on the road to making peace with myself,
being able to look back and admit to how I contributed to some of those events.
I don’t mean that I consciously sought pain or suffering but because I wasn’t
acting with full consciousness, it was almost inevitable that I would attract
the wrong type of person into my life. I
had a victim mentality and may as well have been walking around with a large
sign above me saying, ‘use and abuse’.
Growing up in Northern Ireland and being brought up Catholic, didn’t
help either as both those things feed into the victim mentality.
I’m reading a book at the moment by Dr Gabor Maté. It’s called
When the Body Says No and it is about pyschoneuroimmuno(endocrino)logy(try
saying that after a few beers!) It details how stress is linked to cancer and
how there are similar patterns of personality/behaviour in a lot of cancer
patients. They are usually people who can’t say no and who insist in taking
care of everybody and everything. Then,
they end up ill with cancer and when their past is delved into, there is
usually a history of abuse of some kind, usually in childhood, where they were
unable to express their emotions in a healthy way, especially anger and
remained that way into adulthood and so they are still operating from a place
of sub-consciousness.
I thought this was interesting, especially this week, when it was
announced that Willie Frazer had died from cancer which he had been battling
for some time. Willie Frazer was the founder of FAIR – Families Acting for Innocent
Relatives – and was full of hate and anger. His anger was understandable; he
lost not only his father but several other family members at the hands of the
IRA. He could not make peace with the
past or let it go, and it may have cost him his health and his life.
Also, on the news this week, was the result of a government
consultation on plans to deal with the legacy of the Troubles where it was revealed
that a majority opposed an amnesty for veterans. I have to say, I was very disappointed to
hear this. There has been a lot of
suffering in Northern Ireland and anyone who lost a family member or friend in
the Troubles has my deepest sympathy. But, you cannot change the past and if
you have lost someone, how can you ever really get justice? You can’t bring
them back.
But, there are still a lot of people here with the victim mentality
who won’t let the past go. They wear
their suffering where everyone can see it, they are victims, they keep dragging
it up, like the scab on an old wound, they can’t or won’t leave it alone, picking
at it and picking at it, never giving it time to heal. Each side, claiming
victimhood, at the hands of the other.
There are very few of us who get a free pass through life and
don’t have challenges, pain or loss to deal with at some point. We can piss and
moan about it forever and a day but it won’t change anything. In the end, there is little that can be done
other than to sit with the pain, face it and deal with it, cry, go for a long
walk, find a way that works for you to get through it because you have to go
through it, there is no way around and if you don’t deal with it, it may be
waiting for you further down the road or it may be quietly eating at you, in
other ways.
Thankfully, I have now come out the other side of my ‘pain’, and
while it was a tough road, I can look back now and see that it was both a
learning experience and a period of great personal and spiritual growth and I
would never have fully grown up without facing that pain and dealing with it. I still have no forgiveness for those who
were instrumental in contributing to my suffering but I can see now how nasty, weak
and pathetic they really are. I’m not angry at them because I don’t have the energy
to sustain that kind of anger and they’ve taken up enough of my time and energy
and they’re not getting any more. Actually,
not only am I not angry, I don’t really feel much of anything for them, they
just don’t really matter and maybe that’s the best place to be. Maybe that is forgiveness?
