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Raising Oneself

Reading this essay reminded me of my childhood friend C who had been a victim of sexual abuse by a close family member. It took her many years to ask for help at which point her parents intervened and nightmare ended. What C learned through the experience, that her parents could not be relied upon to protect their children - they were not able to see the signs of trouble writ large which we as her friends from school could see. We were the ones asking her if everything was okay at home. The oldest of our group was not yet a teen. C has a younger sister who she hovered over manically. That did not stop until we graduated high school and went to college. 

C felt guilty about leaving home and leaving her baby sister with parents who had proven themselves delinquent. C was overly generous with her time and mental resources for anyone she considered her friend. I was one of them and a grateful beneficiary of her kindness. Even back then, I recognized this was not typical for a kid my own age but assumed C was just different and accepted it. Yet, she struggled to ask for help or confide in me for a long time. There must have been the presumption that she was in the parental realm unlike us, she was the one to solve problems not one whose problems we could solve anyway. 

A common thread found in people with these shared childhood experiences is a heightened sense of empathy and an ability to more closely connect to others. This is not to say that the negative impacts of their childhood are diminished, Nakazawa says, but that many are able to forge meaning out of their suffering. “People begin to see that their path to well-being must take into account the way in which trauma changed their story,” she explained, “and once they’re able to do that, they can also see how resiliency is also important in their story.”

I have definitely experienced first-hand that "heightened sense of empathy and an ability to more closely connect to others" with C. She was the parent of our friend group though we were not quite able to label it that way. We attributed it to maturity and being a kinder, more caring kid than the rest of us.

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