Positive Results by Sabrina

“You should write a book” I told her.

“Like so and so, I’d probably have to wait until my mother was gone…”

I’ve been thinking about this conversation for years. Because here’s the thing, many of us feel this way. There are stories we want to tell to heal ourselves and to help others heal but we know that they won’t be received well by our family members. When we read the trauma stories that have been published, it’s easy to empathize with the victims and wonder where the protectors were, because we’re seeing one side of the story.

 We blame the protectors for not being there, not knowing better, not doing more but in very rare instances, we don’t actually know where they were. Sometimes they were working multiple jobs just to keep a roof over their families head because that’s what they thought was important. They weren’t drinking and partying and ignoring their children. They were doing the best with the tools they had at the time.

And there’s the rub. We’re healing from their best. We’re trying to fix the broken pieces so that we can do better for our own children. And we too are doing the best with what we have. And our children will have to heal from our scares. If we do things right, they will have better tools, resources and knowledge than we had. Their healing will be easier and their scars will be less. But we’re all human, so no one is getting out without a few scars.

So, what can we do for ourselves?

1. You CAN value the strength, skills and stamina you developed without excusing the pain and suffering.
2. You CAN choose to act, be and have differently than how you were raised without apologizing.
3. You CAN accept that you’re playing with the cards that were dealt. You’re surviving and yes, had you been dealt better, you would have acted differently.
4. You CAN share in the ways that feel safe for  you, if sharing helps you process, address and heal.

It’s easy to play the what-if game and drown in the sorrow of the life you wish you’d built. I don’t see the harm in thinking about that life, temporarily. Social media makes it really easy to see where your high school and college friends, who had very different resources than you, ended up. You have the same education but you didn’t have the same support and therefore you ended up going down very different roads. Acknowledge the pain and then you get to choose what you do with it next. Do you let if fuel you to make the small changes and deploy the resources that are available to you now? Or do you open another bottle, numb your feelings and plant yourself like a dying houseplant, right where you are?

Some mantras my friends use:

“I am proud of who I am today.

I may not be where I thought I’d be, but I’m proud of where I’m going.

I use the obstacles of my past as stepping stones to a brighter future.

I am rebuilding myself with the love, support and unconditional love that I deserved all along.”

Let’s have our “Lion King” moment. Remember, the past is in the past. “The past can hurt…you can either run from it or learn from it.”

You have options. You have very different resources, networks and community available to you now. You may not be able to change everything, but everyday, you can change something.

What are you going to work on this week?