Bearing the Unbearable

Bearing the Unbearable

I read with horror about the 9 year old who shot her instructor with a submachine gun at a shooting range as her parents videotaped this horrendous accident.  And this morning I read a piece by Gregory Orr in the NYT titled When a Child Kills. The first line of his piece is “When I was 12 years old, I killed a younger brother in a hunting accident near our home in upstate New York.” 

This piece is not about politicizing the use of guns. It is about how to help children when tragedy hits, and the unpredictability of accidents. We like to think we are in control. But sometimes we are not. He says, and I am paraphrasing, that when tragedy happens, we seem to be more willing to take on guilt and self blaming than to face something scarier: accidents happen. We live in a world that is random and unpredictable. “Self-blame and shame isolate the human spirit”, he says. Isolation is devastating and counters healing. Speaking of the unspeakable, the tragedy, the accident is difficult. But the alternative, silence, is worse and leaves deep scars and wounds.

This is so much of what therapy offers: a place and a compassionate person where one can be with unbearable feelings; where one can rail at the randomness of accidents, cancer, early childhood abuse, having a child with Special Needs.

Nope. Life is not fair. Somehow we have the illusion that it should be? Really? I, for one, want to help speak the truth about what is real.

How do we find the courage to walk through this pain? To quote an old  song, “I get by with a little help from my friends”.  My real friends who will be there with me and not try to put a band aid on things to cover it up.

I have a friend whose mother killed herself when he was 4 and everyone told him his mother had gone on vacation. No one spoke about her again. And a young teen client whose mother died a long agonizing death from cancer. No one talked with this girl about what her mother was going through week by week. They thought it would be too upsetting for her. And so she was left in isolation all by herself to wonder, hope, fear, and not know. How agonizing.  Within months every picture of her mother was removed from the house. And there was a 2 year old child whose 7 year old bother was killed in a bike accident. As this child grew up, everyone always asked him how his mother was doing. No one asked him how he was doing. He was alone in his suffering with a mother driven to a nervous breakdown. He was alone feeling guilty that he could not make his mother happy again.

So you get the picture.....tragedy happens. My only plea here is to find some way to talk to a child about his/her suffering and help him/her accept that when tragedy happens it happens and cannot be changed, prevented, or blamed on someone. Give the child unconditional love and permission to feel what they feel even though it may feel unbearable. Love, kindness, acceptance, talking it out makes the unbearable bearable.