Listening...without judgment

What do you do when hurt manifests in your life? Maybe someone is currently and actively hating on you. Or maybe your thoughts are of past or recent slights, deep wounds, and traumas. Maybe your hurt arises from your feelings of fear, anger, or hate. However hurt manifests in your life, what do you do?

Do you depress the feelings; anesthetize your mind? Maybe your anesthetic is drugs or alcohol, ice cream, shopping, gambling, exercise or…just name your addictive behavior of choice.

Do you let your feelings capture the real estate of your mind, while you run over and over your strategies for how to manage the hurt, get revenge for it, stop it? Do you lose sleep while your thoughts circle and circle the drain of your pain?

Do you act out your feelings on innocent bystanders in your family or workplace? Yell at your partner or kids or co-workers? Take out your hurt on the grocery story clerk?

Do you turn your anger upon yourself, mentally berating yourself; or maltreating your body by over-feeding or starving it, or with self-injury (sometimes also known as having “an accident”)? 

Or do you become still and listen to the wisdom from within that tells you how to heal the pain? 

Many of you—friends and those who have attended my workshops—already know that, as a child, I was a victim of incest, sexual assaults by my father. Well, now you all know. I will not write about what happened; rest assured you can safely read on without finding any details of what that experience was like for the child I once was. 

Instead, I want to write about healing from the effects of that experience, which has included development of the 7 Childhood Treasures framework and deepening my understanding of their influence in my own life. I started my healing journey just over 30 years ago and recently entered a new phase of it.

Rescue Me

My best friend has been by my side--or, at least, at my feet--for just a little less than a decade. Shannon, a beautiful Black Labrador-mix, adopted me in the summer of 2006 at a dog rescue where I volunteered. Terrified of literally everything new she encountered, Shannon had what is known as fear aggression. After virtually no human interaction for the first 18 months of her life, tied up in some Ozark backyard, she was almost wild. She bit the dog trainer. She bit me. No trust; no sense of relationship bond between dog and human; no faith in love, certainly, nor even in compassion or pity.

We were a perfect match because I suffer from the human form of fear

Shannon, Whitefish Bay, WI,
September 2014

aggression. Shannon's deep-chested bark, snarling and snapping snout, and deadly-silent run at a daily world of terrifying monsters (e.g., a scrawny, gentle granny-cat) were echoed in my defensive snap, scowling brow, and quietly narrowed eyes whenever I felt in danger from a world that still, too often, seems full of the monsters of my childhood.

The modern objects of our respective fears carry no real threat, 90% of the time, but that didn't stop either of us from the very real emotion of terror...or the swift reflex of defensive aggression. As I have worked to continue mining, refining, and polishing my Childhood Treasures of Trust, Independence, and Faith, Shannon has worked right along with me. Each of us has benefited from the growth and progress of her best friend. Each of us has been the other's teacher.

From a near-wild dog who could not be touched, she became a dog who loved to be stroked and could, with enough patience in the human hand, relax with her belly open to the sky. From being terrorized by my tired, 19-year-old cat, and by the swoosh of a propane ring's lighting, she became a dog who could walk down city streets on a leash, past bikers and skaters and joggers, sprinklers wacka-wack-ing, and children squealing. We traveled together; she walked in the Smoky Mountains and on the beaches of Door County. Sometimes she stayed home when I traveled, and learned to trust pet-sitters. She bit no one else ever again.