Today I would like to conduct a bit of a thought experiment, and since it is a different sort of thought experiment than I typically engage in, I thought it would be worthwhile to lay out ahead of time what it is that I am pondering and supposing and what I expect to get out of it, and what I expect others to get out of it.  The effort “To Write Love On Her Arms” is meant to encourage those struggling with self-harm and juvenile depression, especially females (although admittedly plenty of young men struggle with juvenile depression and the psychological effects of abuse as well), and as someone who deals with more than my fair share of dysfunctional situations in the lives of those around me, I thought it worthwhile to engage in a thought experiment where the best case scenario for several different groups of people were supposed, in the absence of firm knowledge in the interior lives or other people or the desire to pry into the lives of anyone in particular.  Given both the fact that these supposals come from my own fertile imagination, they are not intended to reflect the reality of any person or people whom I happen to know, and represent in many cases a composite sort of sketch where elements are combined from observation, experience, and reasonable inference of a wide variety of people and situations, including my own life, with the goal of both developing and encouraging empathy for other people whom we may not naturally be predisposed to be empathetic towards.  With that said, let us begin.

Let us begin with a young lady.  To even a casual observer, this young lady’s life provokes concern.  Her parents are splitting up, and she has been questioned about cutting herself.  Perhaps she dresses in black and is deeply withdrawn, perhaps she shows a response of intense anxiety or panic in certain places, like church or her parents’ house.  Perhaps she dresses provocatively and shows herself overly flirtatious to others.  Either way, she seeks in her self-harm the rush of endorphins to deaden the sense of pain in her life, and seeks either in the solace of books or pets or other people distraction from the chaos and turmoil of per personal and emotional life.  Perhaps this person’s sleep life has suffered, having extreme difficulty going to sleep, the tendency to have terrible nightmares, or the drinking of coffee at all hours of day and night to avoid the horrors of sleep during the darkness of night, while preferring a sleeping schedule during the less troubled day.  Either way, it is easy to be empathetic in such a situation, even if it hard to ask the sorts of questions that one would want to ask to a person in that sort of obvious trouble:  Who hurt you?  How did they hurt you?  Is there any way that I can help, even if simply by listening and being there and sharing out of the stock of my own lifetime of troubles?

Let us continue with the young lady’s sibling.  Our siblings should be among our most natural allies, but our families are often so deeply broken that this is not the case.  In many cases, especially in deeply troubled families [1], children are forced into very narrow roles based on birth order and natural inclinations.  An oldest child feels responsible for the family and often leaves it as early as possible, another child seeks attention through misbehavior, another child is withdrawn and lost, and another is fun-loving and provides the light-hearted comic relief in a family in desperate need of some fun.  In this case, where one sibling is obviously troubled and has problems with parents, the other child may overcompensate by being the good child and the favorite, causing difficulties among the siblings.  If one child is overly withdrawn and shy and timid, the other may be extremely vocal and sociable as a way of balancing the overall family situation.  If one child is bookish and intellectual, the other may focus on sports or some other activity as a way of providing for personal distinction.  At any rate, the sibling views the young lady as competition for scarce resources of love, affection, and attention, and natural allies become bitter enemies.  How do we resolve this competition and provide everyone with the respect and love that they need, without pitting people against each other?

Now let us turn to the mother.  She wears herself out caring for her kiddos and trying to keep a house in some kind of order.  Maybe her children feel she is emotionally distant because after work and housework, after trying to pay the bills and keep the house clean and safe she has nothing further of herself to give to needy and demanding children, especially since she has no one herself to depend on to fulfill her own various needs for intimacy and affection.  Maybe she views the possession of a house or apartment of particular size of such importance and such a priority that other needs are less important.  Perhaps she was frustrated in living with relatives and was unable to successfully deal with the conflicting demands of multiple people and multiple generations.  Perhaps she longs for another marriage, or perhaps she has been so deeply damaged by the fallout of her first marriage that she has no hope of trusting anyone else every again.  She likely has a group of friends, specifically other women of similar age and life experience, who can rant and complain together and provide some sort of informal counseling group, and she likely has such resources in either multi-tasking or handling logistical matters that she seeks to serve others through these gifts even as she uses the resources of institutions like church and state to support the precarious state of her own fractured family.  How are we to relieve the crushing burdens on such a woman, and allow her to treat others and herself with more graciousness?

Now, let us turn at last to the father.  He may be absent, in another state or even another nation.  He may be present in the same area, but largely emotionally absent.  He may deeply care for his children, or even his estranged wife, and be unable to communicate those feelings to him.  Maybe he grew up to feel that expressing and communicating feelings was unmanly or was never taught how to do so safely and responsibly.  Maybe his own troubled personal background led him to seek security within a loving family, only to find that he was ill-equipped to deal with a naggy and demanding wife and equally needy and demanding children.  Maybe he seeks solace in affairs, or drowns his sorrows and his own personal demons through drugs and especially alcohol.  Maybe he has kept his wife barefoot and pregnant or sought to cut her down as a way of preserving his own control because he feels less competent himself and is ashamed that other members of his family have sought to fill niches that by right and custom belonged to him.  Maybe he has changed from the way he once was, but finds himself unable to verbalize the sincerity of his feelings of remorse and regret for what he has done to his wife and children.  Maybe he turns his frustrations with life into a devotion to work, seeking money and the honor that results from a job well done to cover for the fact that in his personal life, he does not feel very accomplished at all.  Regardless of how he compensates for the brokenness of his family, he likely lives as a prisoner of silence and powerful but concealed emotion.  How are we to provide for the needs for respect that all have, while also teaching others how to live better lives, and to come to grips with what they have said and done, and the harm that they have caused to those closest to them?

It is not hard to see what went wrong with this family, and there are all too many families like this.  Broken people connected with other broken people expecting togetherness to make them less broken, even if they were not equipped to properly and respectfully communicate with other people and so to build trust and rapport with others.  Generational cycles of abuse, abuse of people, of themselves, and of substances, continued in their own lives because they had failed to take the time and heroic effort to struggle against and overcome their own backgrounds and simply copied the example of others before them and around them.  People viewed other people as the problem, not recognizing the deeper issues involved, even as they desired others to be understanding and compassionate with their own problems, which they clearly saw as being matters beyond their control, even as they sought to control others and others’ behavior.  In such an environment justice is impossible because everyone wants justice for others and mercy for themselves, a result that leads to people seeking to manipulate whatever institutions they are involved in and whatever people are around them in order to gain support for their position and succor against the rivals and enemies within their own household.  But while these people talk with others, they struggle mightily to talk to the other people themselves, likely because they feel too deeply to communicate with the respect that is necessary in order to build the rapport and emotional intimacy that would allow the deep problems they face in interpersonal relationships to be solved.

What are we to do about this sort of situation, though?  How are we to build the skills we need both in self-control and communication that we can both handle our own complicated and deep emotions without placing that burden on those around us and be able to deal successfully with other people, people who are often broken by the ruins of their own lives and backgrounds?  How are we to learn the right way to live, and to set a good example for other people?  How are we to maintain our high and noble ideals among the wreckage of our contemporary world, and among the deep trauma of our own backgrounds?  These are not easy questions, but if we are to live lives that are enjoyable on any level, they have to be possible to answer somehow.  Perhaps they require miraculous intervention from God to soften our own hearts, and give us compassion for the broken people around us to bind up their wounds and avoid crushing such people further, or to sharpen our minds with insight, to give us the books we need for theoretical understanding and the models we need to copy to improve our own behavior so that we become part of the solution rather than part of the problem.  If such benign divine providence is necessary for us to live the lives we were created to live, and to help make the world better than we found it, rather than make it as broken as we are, then let us hope the age of miracles is not merely past, but present and future as well.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/on-the-co-dependent-family/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/06/17/there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-i/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/vater-gott/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/02/16/book-review-my-name-is-mahtob/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/book-review-struggle-for-intimacy/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/09/08/father-figures-in-rocky-v/