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.”

***

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.

Further within this article, the author contends:

“Perhaps the greatest fantasy of the present moment is that there is a choice here. We can look forward or backward, turn the page on history or not. Don’t believe it. History matters.”*

This is so true also of our individual inner wounds, as well as of the outer manifestations of those wounds. So often we try to “turn the page” on our own personal history, on the abuses we have endured, and also the abuse we have perpetrated on others. But our personal history cannot be silenced. It surfaces again and again, in our feelings, our thoughts, our attitudes, and our actions. Neither can our communal history be silenced. If we do not acknowledge the misdeeds of our leaders and the ways in which we have supported them – actively or passively, knowingly or unconsciously . . . If we do not learn to utilize our leaders as mirrors to our innermost selves and as guides to healing the wounds we so need to heal . . . we will continue to make poor choices for ourselves and for our nation. This may be in relation to our terror, in relation to our money and our other resources, in relation to our protecting ourselves . . .

“However busy we may be, whatever tasks await us here in this country — and they remain monstrously large — we do need to make an honest, clear-headed assessment of what we did (and, in some cases, continue to do), of the horrors we committed in the name of… well, of us and our ’safety.’” *

“…of the horrors we committed in the name of … well, of us and our ’safety.’” Whether individually or nationally, that’s what defenses are … what we create in the name of our safety. And although as children our defenses may save our sanity or our lives – repressing our awareness and our feelings, silencing our voice, striking out – as adults those same defenses can feed the abuse of power, can cause great destruction. . . and as a nation, those defenses can destroy a world.

The work of healing individually and globally is yes! “monstrously large”! But that’s nothing compared to the energy – and other resources – we spend and spend and spend, holding onto these defenses. And that’s nothing compared to the new possibilities we can create, fulfill, and sustain by letting our defenses dissolve – leaving us not defenseless, but rather undefended – and healing our wounds beneath them at the root, in order to, as this AlterNet article states, “become something better.”

Bush Era Horrors Will Haunt Us Until We Truly Face Them

** Germany has had to do such exploration, to help understand how they allowed Hitler’s destructiveness to take over the country and to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. In fact . . .recently, on D-Day 2009, German Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel, President Obama, and Elie Wiesel visited Buchenwald. Each of them spoke on the occasion. As a psychotherapist, a person, and a woman, I was deeply moved by Chancellor Merkel’s heartful, soulful questions: “We, the Germans, are faced with the agonizing question. “How and why? How could this happen? How could Germany wreak such havoc in Europe and in the world?”

©Copyright 2009 by Judith Barr, MA, LMHC. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. The following article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the following article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment to this blog entry. Click here to contact Judith and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile