from my journal for January 8, 1997<\/p>\n
Dana said \u201cDrugs are no escape\u201d and described a man he had once had to arrest\u2014 he was drunk, his body deteriorating, his emotions out of control, he obviously had not escaped the pain.\u00a0 <\/span>I thought of my parents, and it brought home to me what Elizabeth Goudge<\/a> had been trying to say in the final scene between David and Sebastian \u2014 something about the oneness of the pain of both victim and perpetrator.\u00a0 <\/span>I saw \u2014 maybe I should say I felt or experienced since I\u2019ve seen it before \u2014 that Mom & Dad were in awful pain, that the damage they did to me was just the outflow of that pain.\u00a0 <\/span>I saw that they themselves had been shaped and damaged by their environment \u2014 the vulnerability of a generation who grew up under Prohibition, World War II, mother had to cope with a number of deaths and grew up in a stiff-upper-lip family.\u00a0 <\/span>Neither of them actually had much chance of addressing and healing their pain.\u00a0 <\/span>I think, though I always knew intellectually, that they only hurt me because they were hurt themselves, at some level it felt personal, like they looked at Jenny and thought she was a shit and treated her that way.\u00a0 <\/span>But it wasn\u2019t like that.\u00a0 <\/span>Yesterday I could feel the oneness of their pain and my pain.\u00a0 <\/span>It felt like a deeper level of forgiveness, seeing them caught in a trap as painful as the one I\u2019ve been in.\u00a0 <\/span>This makes it possible to accept that they damaged me without blaming them, there\u2019s just damage, as though we were all caught in a war.\u00a0 <\/span>Every other time I tried to stop blaming them it\u2019s been at the cost of invalidating myself, of making it be that I wasn\u2019t<\/span> damaged and therefore all this pain I\u2019m going through is my fault, something I do to myself out of perversity or something, defectiveness, willfulness, \u201cwanting to be miserable.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
My ex-husband Dana worked for several years as a cop.<\/p>\n
David and Sebastian are a bomber pilot and a concentration camp survivor in The Heart of the Family.<\/p>\n
My father told me I “wanted to be miserable<\/a>.” I didn’t believe him, but I also couldn’t seem to stop being miserable. Not until I got on medication, and found out what normal brain chemistry felt like did I realize I had been depressed my whole life. It took several more years to recognize that the depression had been caused by early trauma.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
from my journal for January 8, 1997 Dana said \u201cDrugs are no escape\u201d and described a man he had once had to arrest\u2014 he was drunk, his body deteriorating, his emotions out of control, he obviously had not escaped the … Continue reading