Mistakes, Guilt & Forgiveness: the Tragedy of Error

Content Warnings: infidelity, sexual abuse

I have explored a certain kind of meditation in depth. Some call it Dark Night of the Soul; some call it the Inner Child or Inner Monster meditation. Regardless of the name you know it by, it is that frightening experience in which we face the dark, ugly truth of our own actions and pasts. If we stay the course, it can be a life-altering experience each time it is done.

I am also a follower of the Dark Goddesses: Kali, Skadi, Hela, Erishkigel, Baba Yaga, Sekhmet, Medb, Hecate, Persephone (the Queen), the Morrigan, Coatlicue. I explore the mysteries of life - not the happy verdant plants. I seek the mysteries of the mud in which the primordial soup was mixed, the blood that comes with both life and death, the body wastes that carry away toxins that could kill us and still might if we don't keep them buried or somehow taken away from our homes, the snot that keeps our delicate tissues from breaking down, the tears that cleanse our eyes of physical and emotional hurts. I embrace the stench of death and the crap of life.

So when I came across this situation, it intrigued me. (Names and details have been changed.) This is roughly how the tale was told to me by a friend, Victoria Pendler, a Welsh hedgewitch.

Brent is a big guy, the kind who prides himself on his strength. He is Heathen, antifa, and listens to his wife when she talks about feminism. With three kids, his family is his life.

Lauryn, the wife, had initiated several discussions about them becoming polyamorous, which ended when Brent changed careers drastically and Lauryn suggested their life was already too chaotic to pursue something as serious as the kind of poly relationships they'd been talking about. Brent agreed.

A few years later, Lauryn offered to let a friend of Brent (and acquaintance of hers) to stay at their home when she left her husband over emotional abuse. Within a few weeks, the other woman left, nearly destroying Lauryn and Brent's marriage, and making threats against the couple.

When I came in to help, I first listened to the story as they presented it. Brent was devastated. He'd believed he was pursuing a poly relationship possibility, but had made several mistakes along the way, including engaging in sexual activity before telling his wife that there were even feelings.

Lauryn felt betrayed because she had always talked about needing to discuss relationships beforehand due to being cheated on in the past. She believed Brent simply couldn't love her if he would so easily dismiss her and her needs in the situation, but she also couldn't believe that he was capable of such behavior. She said several times that she'd never once thought he could do this because of his own history with being cheated on. 

I spoke to Brent about the situation in detail, and several things raised flags for me. When I asked him to describe the sexual encounter, he spoke of "freezing up," feeling pressured and desperate. When he explained that he had felt so guilty he'd immediately showered in very hot water, I asked him if the encounter had reminded him of his childhood sexual abuse. 

At that point the floodgates opened. Brent had been molested by a family friend as a child, and the way that the other woman had approached him had been in the exact same, passive-aggressive, emotionally wheedling way that he had experienced decades before. In a nutshell, he had felt raped again.

Once we'd explored that, I pointed out that Brent's past did not excuse his behavior. It only gave us something to work with to restore his wife's trust in him, as well as something to address to prevent a similar situation from ever occurring, which seemed very important to him. He agreed that the realization didn't excuse him, and he vowed to work on his relationship and on his inner child issues.

Several weeks later, I followed up with Lauryn and Brent. They were doing well, communicating thoroughly. Brent had asked Lauryn to outline specific actions he could take for werguild (restitution) to her, and she had given him some assignments that focused on him getting to know her more deeply and taking on more of a controlling role in his own life, which I felt was an insightful move on her part.
However, Brent still spoke of the incident with a great deal of self-loathing and guilt.

I realized that he was stuck, blaming himself for not being strong enough to overcome his childhood trauma and stop the whole thing from happening. Having worked with childhood trauma and inner child situations before, I could see that his approach, while understandable, was sabotaging his ability to grow past his behavior as his wife and family needed him to do. He was trapped in endless loops of understanding but being afraid to take charge and change his behavior in a meaningful way.

Right now, we are working on getting him to the point where he can forgive himself. Since he is such a big fellow, he is seen as masculine, manly, and the like. He has internalized this perception, and feels that he should not be able to be victimized in any way. He seemed a bit shocked when I pointed out that his actions during and after the sexual encounter stemmed from him being almost desperate to not be seen as a victim, and that it had lead to the majority of the lies that Lauryn had been hurt by.

Brent's inability to forgive himself for being weak, traumatized, and only human is actually impeding his ability to NOT be weak and traumatized. While I had been concerned he might use his childhood as a get-out-of-jail-free card, instead he considered his trauma to be a sign of his failure as a man.

Brent has a long way to go, and Lauryn is still struggling with her own feelings about things, but they both need to forgive themselves for being effected by their pasts in order to move on in a healthy way.

I hope this story helps others going through similar situations. We cannot use our pasts as an excuse, but we also can't act like we are capable of dismissing any effects our pasts might have on us, how we react to situations, or how we feel about things. The emotional situation is ALWAYS valid. How we deal with it determines how healthy it is.

Letting Go: Mourning the Right Decision

We like to think of things as simple. If we choose the right career, the bills will get paid and vacations will be possible. If we find the right life partner, the birds will sing us awake in the morning and we will fall asleep with the sounds of love and laughter in our ears.

But life is not clean and straight-lines. It isn't fluffy clouds and rainbows. And, most of all, it isn't simple.

At the deepest level, we want our decisions to be clear. We want to make the right choice and feel the rightness. We want weights to be lifted from our shoulders. We want a smile to creep across our faces with how right we were.

Right decisions should make us feel good. But they don't always. Sometimes, we are faced -  with an impossible choice and, no matter what path we choose, it won't feel good. We will still need to mourn the death of that other possibility.

I once lived in a house with a great bedroom. My bedroom had a 3/4 bath attached. My bedroom had a (non-functioning) fireplace. My bedroom had a closet under the stairs, so the ceiling - and even the closet door - had a severe angle in it. My bedroom had a broken doorknob, so I could take the doorknob with me as a kind of lock on my bedroom door.

When we moved, we moved to a farmhouse. I picked out my bedroom, which had a vent through which I could see down into the living room. Even better, I could listen to the movies and TV shows my parents watched after I went to bed. My brother and I could pack up snacks in a back pack and roam the large hills in which this new home was nestled. When the rotation was right in the summer, the mooing of cows would wake us too early and set us on our adventures. We touched electric fences, stared down bulls, climbed to the tops of the tiny mountains around us.

The choice to move was a good one. Never for one moment did I think it was the wrong choice. Yet, as we packed up to move out of my bedroom with it's angled closet, 3/4 bath, and broken doorknob, I cried.

Looking back, I see the wisdom that my 10 year old self had in that moment. Even when it's the right thing to do, you may still need to mourn the path you did not take.

I have made a decision. I have several dreams for my life. Most of them are possible to do at the same time, but I realized that dividing my time and resources as they currently are will result in neither of them being fully realized.

I have to give one of them up to let the other come to fruition.

It's the right choice that I've made. I am also pretty certain that I will eventually pick the other dream up again. In the meantime, I am sad.

I'm sad that I had to make the choice. I'm sad that I can't carry both dreams right now. I'm sad that all the work I've put into the dream left behind has been, well, left behind. I am sad, but I made the right choice.

We need to allow ourselves to give vent to the negative emotions without worrying about whether it's appropriate to HAVE those emotions. Emotions are always appropriate. Behaviors based on those emotions are a different story.

Let yourself mourn the right choice. You can be scared when you move. You can be sad when you had to cut a toxic person from your life. You can feel guilt when you can't afford to help someone out.

These feelings are okay. Feel them. Honor them. Then move on with your right choice.

It's Okay to Not be Okay

An issue has come up several times in the past few weeks. Someone who is undergoing a severely stressful situation, ends up apologizing or otherwise feeling guilty for breaking down.

I'm here to tell you, it is okay to not be okay.

Sometimes your life takes a turn that is just plain shit. When that happens, it is completely all right to mourn it, to hate it, to break down, and to not be as strong as you think you need to be.

Strength is not a hundred percent all the time. Sometimes strength needs to be recovered. Sometimes strength needs to be washed in tears. Sometimes it's just not right to have to be strong in the face of a shitty situation.

You are not a lesser person for doing this. You are not weak. You are not fragile. You are not wrong.

People need to learn that it is okay to cry. It is okay to be upset. It is okay to be angry and sad. It is okay to break down.

Those emotions, those reactions, are perfectly valid. Even if they are not the endpoint, even if they are not permanent. We can have temporary emotions. And sometimes, those emotions can be negative. They can be more negative than we want them to be. That does not define us.

In the words of Moana: This does not define you; you know who you are, who you truly are.

Tragedy and gun control

I love freedom. I love the freedom to get online and buy cheese made in Australia, or fruits that only grow in Indonesia. I hate that I can no longer get cigarettes that taste like chocolate or vanilla.

I love freedom.

Children being guided from their
school in Sandy Hook, CT, after
a shooting that killed 21 kids

But I hate what people are willing to do with their freedom. I want cheese and flavored cigarettes. But some people want to lash out their rage, and they lash it out on children. Whether those children are the direct victims, such as during the recent tragedy in Sandy Hook, CT, or the sons and daughters of the victims, as happened earlier the same week with a shooting at a shopping mall in Oregon, children are the victims.

Outside the Aurora theater shooting

One of the victims of the shooting in Oregon had a step-son, 13, who suggested that the reason she was shopping that day was for a gift for him, a gift he had requested. Is it right that a 13 year-old be burdened with that guilt? What about the survivors of the school shooting? Survivor's guilt is extremely common in mass shootings.

As a mother of two, you can't convince me that the kids near to each of these victims isn't riddled with guilt. My son, a cancer, cries if he even THINKS that something he did MIGHT result in someone's death or harm.

Now the debate is, already, turning towards gun control.

I have a very middle-of-the-road view of gun control. Living in rural Nebraska, guns are a way of life around here. It isn't "do you own a gun?" It's "how many guns do you have?"

We hunt a lot out here. I like the idea of DH and the kids learning to hunt. I learned to hunt and I regret not having more experience with that. I like the independence of bringing home food.

We also believe in protecting our own. Our friends, family, home and land - these things can and will be defended with a bullet, if necessary. But this can be done with the same rifle or shotgun used to hunt large game.

However, I don't agree much with handguns or assault rifles. I can understand handguns to an extent - in the city, you don't often defend your home and body with a four or five foot long rifle- but anything that has "automatic" or "semi-automatic" in the description is a little much for me. Essentially, hunting animals, good; killing people, bad.

The problem I have is this: the more that guns are available, the greater the need to defend oneself from guns. So then you have to have a gun, also. But that means that someone out there might perceive your gun as the threat and get one of their own. It's a psychological arms race, right here in America.

Some of the more recent shooters

Now, I have heard, and I understand, the idea of the 2nd Amendment and a militia. But a militia is a trained and organized group. Random people walking around with multiple high-powered handguns is not a militia, and never will be. And let me be perfectly clear, I do not believe in gun control that eliminates ALL gun ownership. Nor do I believe that any such law is even on the radar for any governmental agent or agency in the United States.

That said, this whole problem comes down to two things.

One, each person who owns or deals with guns needs to take responsibility for themselves. If you go out and "rid the world" of someone who you don't like, you have justified your actions to yourself, but not everyone may agree with you. Even worse is when someone else's justification results in the death of someone close to you, or someone like you, racially or religiously, physically or philosophically.

Take responsibility for what you do with the freedoms that you have, because freedoms can be abused, and no one believes that they are the ones abusing them.

Two, we need to work more towards solving the problem of violence that this country has. I don't mean locking more people up. That only results in more violent violence.

We need to start addressing the economic, social, and even psychological problems that lead to violence. The people who have committed these crimes have a reason for it. That reason may be dramatic or illogical to you or me, but they are valid to the perpetrator, and that's why people are dead.

Love is the cure

Some of the causes of violent crimes, just off the top of my Psychology-minor head, include: mental illness or depression, poverty, a feeling of hopelessness or bullying, a feeling of frustration or revenge, unfulfilled sense of entitlement, fear of the way the world is changing. There are so many more.

These are the problems that need fixing. The isolation that so many of us feel, the pressure to be more and more successful in the face of rising inequality, the hopelessness that many of us have in trying to better ourselves with a rising wage gap and higher costs of living and education.

Every little bit helps. Even a smile could be the difference in someone's life, and you would probably never even know it.



Related links:
Mother Jones - A Guide to Mass Shootings in America
A Timeline Of Mass Shootings In The US Since Columbine
Eleven facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States

The Power is Mine (and Yours)!

This evening, at supper (honey chicken, stuffing and honey-cinnamon roasted radishes!), bug informed me that he could use his x-ray eyes to see that ladybug had a broken heart. To fix it, he offered to give her some of his heart-healing power, which he did by holding his hand over her chest and making a laser-y, swish-y noise.

Fear my powers of cuteness and latex!

I, being the on-the-ball, pagan parent who takes advantage of every learning opportunity, jumped on that wave and surfed it.

So, I told bug that that was called "energy transfer," which, as I expected (this isn't my first rodeo, after all), got him curious. He asked about it and we talked about how people can give each other some of their power, or energy, and how that can help people do things, or change how they feel, or heal.

Strangely,  bug looks just like this after 6 candy bars.

Then I showed bug how I give energy, and he giggled a lot. Stormcrow showed bug how he could siphon energy off people.

Then, reality crashed down: "THAT's all the power you have, mama?" Talk about a blow to the ego...

We talked about how not many people believe in powers and how that keeps us from being able to have bigger powers.

Do I think he got it? Kinda-ish.

Now you know; and knowing... Hey! I'm not in G.I.Joe!

But it's a good start, if I do say so myself.