This feels right; the weight is finally lifted. Can I give it up my sovereignty and wash my hands of this? How can this possibly be wrong when it feels so right?
During my teenage years, I felt deep compassion for people. I felt that everyone was my responsibility. That I could save them. Girls, friends, my parents, the world… if only they let me control enough, they would be safe, and only I knew how. The white knuckling knight in shining armor.
I could not even control myself, much less anyone around me. I could not control my emotions, anger, hurt, and unresolved trauma. From this place, my signature move was to find the other and eagerly lay the blame on "them." Whatever that was, the system, those types of girls, my rivals, the school, rich people, poor people, capitalism, etc., whatever I conveniently felt like an appropriate target for my blame.
I took any opportunity to absolve my responsibility to the greater collective and the seductive opportunity if I could make "it," say, do or think whatever I wanted. I could make the "system" the "bad guy" and insert whatever trauma I was working out to embody the essence of that idea. If girls rejected me, something was wrong with them. If I couldn't get ahead, the system must be rigged. If they had more than me, they must have done something wrong. My convenient lack of responsibility hid the idea that I may be the problem. I would eagerly absolve all my ability-to-respond to the larger collective; how easy! Step out of my power, sit on the sidelines, criticize, and highlight. Point out where we not getting what we deserve. A very seductive position to be in, to step out of the game and throw stones at the windows with bitter accuracy and disdain. Fuck the game; it's rigged anyway. As we flip the table, taking our ball home.
Later in my life, this same feeling evolved into a type of judgment. Righteous opinions began to creep in, and a much more insidious feeling that I was owed something permeated my thoughts. There were things that I knew; these people are like this… the system is like that… all reflections of my need to be right and righteous, my need to separate and judge all things around me, to hide what was behind my behavior. I was in pain, as simple as that. A pain that was so deep, so old, and so loyal to my family of origin that it would cloud my ability to connect with my intuition. My ability to see things for what they are and no more, no less.
That's the thing about unresolved trauma; it doesn't move. It entangles and tethers us to the past. It lacks flexibility and grace.
I have participated in a type of therapy called Family Constellation Therapy, developed by German Psychotherapist Bert Hellinger. Full disclosure, it is difficult for me to see the world without this lens. I walked through the threshold, permeated by a systemic view, a view that is aware of the parts as well as the whole. Of the interconnected relationships between all things. That the victim needs the perpetrator as much as the perpetrator needs the victim. Like an entangled web begging to be resolved. As Carl Jung stated about Hitler,
"His Voice is nothing other than his own unconscious, into which the German people have projected their own selves; that is, the unconscious of seventy-eight million Germans. That is what makes him powerful. Without the German people he would be nothing."
This view begs the question. Do we all bear responsibility? Did the German people's collective victimization after WWI produce righteous perpetrators? Could an absolution of responsibility at scale produce genocide? These deep and troubling questions are up to each individual to respond to. This presents the opportunity for "radical responsibility" that we are the system, a part of the whole and everything that came before us. Accepting this fact with grace and acknowledging it for was it is, connects us to our collective and individual intuition and may give us the ability to respond differently.
John Acosta
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