Post Traumatic Growth

Rephrased from the above video:

Is it indecent or obscene to be happy after something horrible like the holocaust 

OR

 Is it indecent and obscene to never be happy again after something horrible?

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          I am a survivor of severe child abuse, and work with survivors of domestic and sexual violence, and other trauma. Regarding the above question, I found in myself, and in some of those I work with a reluctance to let go of the trauma and move on because what feels obscene is to “Forget”. To let go feels dismissive of what happened, making it seem as though it never happened, and as though it lets abusers off the hook.

         All the logic in the world didn’t solve my need to not trivialize what I had been through by letting it go. But eventually I realized I didn’t need the open, oozing wound to remember what had happened. I just needed a healed scar to memorialize what I had been through. At age 16, I had my appendix out and I have a light scar. It serves to acknowledge that I had surgery, but it doesn’t hurt me…. it’s not open or bleeding, and it doesn’t cause me any pain or difficulty. After the surgery, I didn’t poke the incision to keep it hurting and relevant. Rather, I worked to help it heal, and allow it to heal.

         I looked at my scar one day and realized that I didn’t need an open, bleeding psychological wound to memorialize what I had suffered. I just needed a little scar of some kind. So I allowed myself to fully heal, and memorialize my past in a way that seemed fitting ….. for me it was in poems that both expressed the darkness I had been in, and light that I made my way to.

        When I work with clients who struggle with this, I explain wounds and scars, and help them find a way to memorialize their suffering and “create a scar” in a way that allows them to let the wounds heal. I think society does this with big events…. deaths, mass shootings, holocaust. But for an individual who has suffered, often in lonely silence and obscurity, where is the monument, memorial, or acknowledgement of what happened to them? Usually there is none, so I help them create one.

        For you, if you need one, I will help you create one. What you went through has meaning and changes you, but you don't have to keep suffering.