“If you don’t heal what hurt you, you’ll bleed on people who didn’t cut you.” – Think Smarter, Twitter
“We repeat what we don’t repair.” – Christine Langley-Obaugh
I just watched the HBO documentary featuring two of Michael Jackson’s sexual abuse accusers called Leaving Neverland. Tough stuff. My family has experienced contact with pedophiles in the past. Thankfully, our children were not harmed, but others, who my children knew, were not so fortunate. Please look up my blog post called Mama, Trust Your Gut for more detail.
I know a lot of people stand by Michael Jackson’s innocence. He is not alive to defend himself. Still, for the sake of argument, let’s suppose that these now grown men are telling the truth in the documentary and Michael is guilty of sexually abusing young boys. Both men claim to have come to crisis points in their adult lives, where they just couldn’t hide the truth from themselves or the people who they loved, any longer. They had to open up their wounds and clean the feeling of a dirty secret, out of those wounds. They both felt that this was the only way that the wounds could eventually scab over and heal to the point of being scars of the past. Interestingly, both men seemed to come to their crisis points right around the time that they started families and they had their own children. They couldn’t fathom allowing anyone to do the things that they claim that Michael did to them, to their own precious children. Their perspective of wanting to protect their own children, showed them that what happened to them as children, was so wrong and so undeserved.
Self-care can be a difficult road to navigate sometimes. Sometimes we have such fear of being or being perceived as being “selfish” that we forget how important self-love and self-care is for not only ourselves, but for the people we love and share our lives with. We are not giving others the best of ourselves, if we are not self-nurturing and working on healing, and growing from the hurt parts of ourselves.
As a parent, I have four young people in this world who I love beyond life itself. I want nothing but the best of everything that life has to offer for my children. I imagine that most parents feel the same way. I have learned to use that perspective for myself (and for my inner child). As I have grown in parenting, I have learned that children watch a whole lot more of what you model, than what you say. Children are much more intuitive and astute than most of us give them credit for being. If we want them to learn to take care of and nurture and heal and protect themselves, than we must do the same for ourselves. We, and the people we love, deserve nothing less than pure, real, kind, love.
“Memories demand attention, and these memories will have teeth.”
― C. Kennedy, Slaying Isidore’s Dragons
“There is no one way to recover and heal from any trauma. Each survivor chooses their own path or stumbles across it.”
― Laurie Matthew, Behind Enemy Lines