Do not tell people how to cope with
traumatic experiences. If they don't want to vent to
anyone, let them. If they want to vent to a boy they met a week
ago, let them. If they want to tell strangers on the internet,
let them. If they want to paint their story on the side of their
house, let them. If they aren't hurting anyone, let them cope
however the hell they want. And don't you dare ever say,
"If that really happened to you/if it was really that bad,
you wouldn't be doing [insert whatever here]." Because
everyone handles traumatic experiences differently and you have
no god damn right to judge what is or isn't a real coping
mechanism.
Traumatic experiences are
broken bones of the soul.
If you engage in the
process of recovery,
you get stronger. If you
don’t, the bones remain
porous, with permanent
holes inside, and you are considerably
weaker.
A lot of
people feel like they’re victims in life, and
they’ll often point to past events, perhaps growing up
with an abusive parent or in a dysfunctional family. Most
psychologists believe that about 85 percent of families are
dysfunctional, so all of a sudden you’re not so unique.
My parents were alcoholics. My dad abused me. My mother
divorced him when I was six…I mean, that’s almost
everybody’s story in some form or not. The real question
is, what are you going to do now? What do you choose now?
Because you can either keep focusing on that, or you can focus
on what you want. And when people start focusing on what they
want, what they don’t want falls away, and what they want
expands, and the other part disappears.
There are a hundred things she has tried
to chase away the things she won't remember and that she
can't even let herself think about because that's when the
birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's
always raining a slow and endless drizzle.haunting
the places in her mind that she rarely ever visit
All parents damage
their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass,
absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others
crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little
pieces, beyond repair.