Skip to main content

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.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more