Good Friends Help You Find Important Things - Like Your Smile, Your Hope, And Your Courage

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about this week. I had a lot of thoughts, but I didn’t know how to compile them – until I saw the picture I’m using for this week’s post. It wasn’t only the picture. It was also the good friend who shared it. She has often helped me find my smile, my hope, my courage, and even my faith. When I saw the picture and remembered the support of the person who posted it, I immediately knew what I wanted and needed to write about this week.

I chose to start blogging, because I thought it might help people who’ve had to overcome a lot of obstacles in their lives. I have overcome a lot of obstacles, so I hoped sharing what I learned as I recovered might help others. I am able to share, because I have overcome or am overcoming most of those obstacles. The word overcome is the key here. I’ve become very aware of how people who have genuine compassion see what people overcome instead of seeing trials as a set point in time. Those are the people I now see as healers.

The toxic people I’ve worked so hard to get away from saw the negatives -- to the point that they forced me to explain and re-explain until the positives were lost even to me when I was in conversation with them. If only they could have seen the successes like the supportive people in my life did.

That gives me an understanding of 1 Corinthians 15:33-34: Bad company corrupts good character. If we continue to explain ourselves to toxic people, our explanations become so pervasive that we’ll become toxic ourselves. It is okay to walk away from people who need to see a situation in a negative light. It is okay not to explain it to them over and over again in a vain attempt to receive understanding. It is okay if they never understand. You will not be alone. Someone will understand. Go and find that someone and leave the judgers behind.

In a future blog post, I’ll talk more about what I overcame in my youth. I will also talk about how the environments I overcame those things in created patterns with toxic people I’ll always be in danger of repeating when I’m vulnerable. The important thing to remember is that I overcame the obstacles, broke those patterns with people, repeated the pattern when caregiving made me vulnerable, and broke the pattern again. If I can do it, I believe that most, if not all, people can do it. It takes desire and diligence – sometimes more diligence than desire – and it can be done.

I will start this blog post from the time immediately after my father passed away. Following are some of the emotions I was forced to deal with after my father passed away:

· I was exhausted, because he was the third person and the fourth caregiving situation I’d experienced in a row, with only brief breaks between each caregiving need. Since a social worker ranked the difficulty of my caregiving situation as a 15 on a 1-10 difficulty scale, you can imagine how exhausted I was.

· I was grieving. I had lost all of the people I’d been a caregiver for, as well as several pets and other people. The loss of those I’d been a caregiver for were particularly hard because of the bond a caregiver and the person they are caring for build.

· I was confused. I had previously escaped a very judgmental and harsh fundamentalist church. Members of that church kept ambushing me while I was a caregiver -- with the goal of getting me to return while threatening the sick people I was caring for and me with threats of hell. · The threats of hell added fear to the list of emotions I needed to heal from. I had previously healed from it; however, being reminded of the hellfire and brimstone threats of my youth while helping people they were scaring face life and death issues renewed the fear.

· Presenting religion in that way is toxic enough. It becomes more toxic when rejecting their message causes retaliation gossip that leads to both family and care facility abuse. That added blame and shame to the list of emotions I had to recover from.

· Add anger to the list, because of the abuse received at the hands of both care facility staff and some family. The family story is described on page 5 of this document: http://www.pwchomerepairs.org/connect-with-pwc/newsroom/annual_report/People%20Working%20Cooperatively%20Annual%20Report%2007-08.pdf

Combine all of these emotions with comforting terminally ill people who were repeatedly being threatened with hell, and you can understand why exhaustion, grief, confusion, fear, anger, shame, and blame were things I needed to recover from. I think it will be easy to understand why my doctor diagnosed me as being in a state of trauma.

During my father’s last days, I attended a healing service near his care facility to ask for prayers for him. I hope those prayers eased his transition, because they didn’t save his life. To my great surprise, I had healers judge my state of emotions I just described as something being intrinsically wrong with me – the words evil and dark were even used right to my face as well as behind my back. When I tried to explain what I’d been through in the years proceeding our meeting, they triggered and became very angry with me. They showed that anger in ways I would never place upon a person who was in the early stages of trauma recovery.

I was already involved in helping people who were dealing with trials similar to the ones I’d been facing. As I said, I would never have allowed myself to trigger on them, especially since I understood what they were going through. That made me feel even more confused by the way people were judging and reacting to my trauma.

I should have left that environment early on, but all of the emotions I was dealing with had me vulnerable enough that I stayed. It may be good that I stayed. With time, I proved to them that I wasn’t intrinsically bad. Maybe they’ll remember that the next time they meet someone who just survived trauma in some form.

Some of the people who judged me so harshly when I arrived starting telling the story of how I’d healed more than anyone they’d ever worked with. The problem was they presented their story like I’d always been that way until they helped me achieve a level of healing I’d never known before. They used my healing as a way to win glory for their perceived healing abilities instead of apologizing for incorrectly judging my state of trauma when they had met me.

In reality, healing from the traumas of caregiving returned me to a level of healing I’d achieved before caregiving began. I have never denied that I had to rise above toxic environments of my youth. I worked just as hard to achieve healing from those environments as I worked to achieve healing from caregiving traumas. If their healing abilities had been what they professed when they took the credit for my healing, they should have known that.

What they didn’t understand is that they slowed down my healing, both with their judgments and things their judgments led them, and other people they shared their judgments with, to do that made my recovery harder. I even had a person from that environment use their knowledge of my vulnerability to take advantage of me when I employed them for a job, which caused great financial loss at a time when they knew I was drowning in caregiver medical bills. It was their judgments and the things their judgments led them to do that had me repeating the difficult parts of my story so often that the positive parts couldn’t get any recognition.

One thing they did that helped me heal was witnessing them start talking about the next person like they’d been talking about me. I even stayed long enough to witness the judgments move on to other people after that. I still remember saying, “I’m not going to talk about that person. I like them.” The answer, “I like them, too, but (and the bad talk about them started again).” Really? You like them?

Another thing they did that helped me heal was watching them be aggressive about social issues they were passionate about while judging that as a negative in other people. One lady ranted for over an hour about GMO foods and FDA reform. When I was able to get a word in, I assured her I’d research her petitions, because my caregiving situation had made me passionate about elder care reform and understanding of other people’s social issue passions. She began to draw infinity signs in front of my chest to get rid of the negativity I felt about elder care reform that she didn’t want to be exposed to. Another person ranted in an aggressively frightening manner about their gay rights concerns. When I informed them how the denomination of my religious upbringing was involved in several political campaigns designed to limit rights for minority groups and I too was concerned by the hateful ways it was sometimes done, this person yelled at me to get over my religious past and stormed off. Need I go on? Probably not.

Healing from the less than positive aspects of my upbringing began with me realizing I didn’t want to emulate the negative traits that I found frightening, threatening, or mean in the people who lived there. As I’ve said in previous blog posts, I achieved healing by peeling away one layer of the onion at a time. My first major change in environments was to go from under-educated people to very educated people who acted the same way by using bigger words. I realized I had to peel away another layer and be with people who used those big words in a more positive manner. I did that. It was the same when caregiver vulnerability allowed me to repeat my pattern and be in an environment that wasn’t good for me. I began to realize who I didn’t want to act like, and that was the first step in healing once again.

I believe this is a way we can safely employ positive thought without making ourselves or someone else feel like their thoughts caused a negative situation (a pet peeve I’ve talked about in previous blog posts). We can heal by looking objectively at an environment that’s not comfortable for us and deciding what we don’t want to emulate. Therefore, good can come out of bad situations.

We can also look at good traits people we respect in those environments have and emulate those. When healing from the environments of my upbringing, I looked to my mother as someone whose behavior I wanted to emulate. Although I feel very concerned about ego-driven healers and teachers from any discipline or religion, there are many humble and effective healers and teachers I know whose behavior I emulate.

Some of the healers and teachers whose behavior I emulate were involved in the support I received outside the previously discussed environment. With the exception of recognizing behaviors I didn’t want to emulate, my healing and finding the courage to move on came from that outside support. The friends who gave me that support never ridiculed or had me explaining and re-explaining why I needed support after trauma – they just gave it. They were able to give it, because they took the time to understand instead of judge. They asked questions if they didn’t understand. They gave compassion, with that compassion increasing as their understanding increased. That is what a healer looks like. Healers don’t make assumptions that won’t bend even with your input, don’t get mad if a person doesn’t accept their “message” about the situation, don’t get mad if a person doesn’t live the way they think they should live, don’t get mad if a person doesn’t make enough time for them, don’t think someone owes them something in return if they do something for a person, etc. One positive story comes from the friend who shared the picture that inspired this blog post. She is the wisest and most stable Christian woman I've met, other than my mother. She actually reminds me a lot of my mother. She asked me to help her understand my history with religion. She really listened. When she understood, she verified that I had reasons to be concerned for my fellow Americans, my country, and marginalized human beings after having the church tell me how to vote in my youth, especially when the reasons for that vote were revealed. She understood that I was trying to warn people for the safety of all Americans and my country. As our country has become more separated based on those religious teachings being spread in propaganda, especially on social media, she continues to validate my concerns. She also validated how having those same people ambush me and sick people with promises of hell could heighten my concerns, especially when they also used my family's sick beds as a way to spread that propaganda with promises of hell for those who didn't buy into it. Without judgment, she helped me learn to take more of a Serenity Prayer approach to my valid concerns. I have now stopped speaking up where it won't make a difference, have involved myself in organizations who can help make a difference, and am accepting what I will never be able to change - come what may. Even when I'm scared for the next generation of children in my family, I'm able to take it to prayer and recognize that only God can change the trajectory and the outcome. That is what a true friend does. I had a group of friends, led by a very good friend, who witnessed something that happened repeatedly in a public place that had them concerned for many reasons. This began to happen immediately after my Dad died, so I was in the worst of my vulnerability and the worst state of feeling the emotions I discussed earlier in this post. They were good enough friends to trust my judgment until it went so far that it warranted them stepping across my boundaries to offer help I hadn't yet asked for. One of the people was a counselor. She gave me a year's worth of free counseling. We met every week. She helped me understand that the dynamic she had witnessed was one that abusers usually hide in the darkness where they can gaslight you into not seeing the situation clearly enough to protect yourself appropriately. She took all of that time to help me unravel the patterns of abusers, so I would understand enough to break my pattern of being vulnerable to people who didn't have my best interest at heart. That is what a true friend does. I had one friend who had been relying on me for a lot of help. As my exhaustion increased, symptoms from my own illnesses increased. Several people I set new boundaries with to allow me to take care of my illnesses tried to make me look like a selfish monster who didn't care about them. They didn't offer to return the help I'd generously given them in the past, yet in their mind I was the selfish one. In contrast, this person recognized that friendship is a two-way street. As a caregiver herself, she admitted she couldn't do much to help. What she could offer was to step back and allow me to take all of the time I needed to focus on my own health. She said the way she could help was by being patient when I couldn't be in contact with her and being appreciative and supportive when I could. That is what a true friend does.

I had so many wonderful people help me recover from the traumas of caregiving, and the number of people who helped me increased when I pulled away from judgmental environments and drew closer to the compassionate supporters I already had. Through those compassionate supporters, I met more people like them. Thanks to them, I’ve either recovered or am well on the road to recovering from the emotions trauma caused: exhaustion, grief, confusion, fear, anger, shame, and blame. Because of those compassionate people, I healed in spite of the judgments some people placed on me that made healing harder than it needed to be.

Through their example, I’ve learned to always speak compassionately to anyone I’m talking to about their trauma and to apologize if I feel like or they tell me I failed. It really is true that kindness begets kindness. If bad company corrupts good character, then good company must promote good character.

If you’re facing trauma or recovering from trauma, avoid negative people who judge what that trauma does to you. Avoid negative people who are judging other people’s trauma as well. If they’re judging other people, they’re likely judging you as well. If you can’t get away from them totally, find someone who can help you recover from their words every time they are spoken in a way that hinders your healing. Unfortunately, we can’t avoid all of the negative comments all of the time, but we can create a cheering section who helps us see what we’re doing right and overcoming instead of pushing you farther and farther into the traumatic side of your story. My cheering section is what allowed me to survive and recover. I truly believe a good cheering section can do the same for most, if not all, people.

Good luck to you.