A GoodTherapy.org Featured Column written by Judith Barr, MA, LMHC
In the Prologue of Power Abused, Power Healed, I quote Claude Steiner, author of The Other Side of Power:
“The personal is political; our personal struggles follow the same patterns and motivations observed in local, regional, national, and global politics.”
I have rarely read an article that so very clearly depicts this truth as a recent in-depth article from news and opinion website AlterNet. The article, Bush Era Horrors Will Haunt Us Until We Truly Face Them,* tackles the issue of our reaction to breaking news of the misdeeds of various members of government and governmental organizations during the years the Bush Administration was in office. Predicting that the recent report of past abuses in government “will have its brief time in the media sun and then be swallowed up by oblivion, just as each of the previous flaps has been,” this piece offers the following words of wisdom:
“We can’t just ‘move forward.’ We need to face who we’ve been and just how badly we’ve acted, if we care to become something better.”
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This is indeed true of our focus and attention relating to the revelations of abuse… and also of a more subtle, but just as important, aspect of our lives: the inner wounds and feelings, rooted in our childhood, that are still alive within us.
As I have said so many times before, we live in a society and world that, sadly, at present often seeks a “quick fix” for painful feelings and situations. We try to manage, control, suppress, repress, think away, wish away, even spiritualize away our pain, both present and past. But, the consequences of forgetting our individual, our national or our global past leads only to a re-burial of our wounds…which, in turn, leads to these same wounds rising again and again to the surface, to haunt us from our underground. Read the rest of this entry