Chapter Five: Troubleshooting And Repairing A Broken System

Chapter Five: Troubleshooting And Repairing A Broken System

We are lost if we continue to ask the therapists, gurus, ministers, or best friends for emotional and spiritual assistance for the rest of our lives. It initially may appear disorienting and disillusioning when we finally discover for ourselves that there is no permanent assistance available from anyone that will bring permanent healing changes to ourselves. We must come to terms with the reality that, as a human, we must eventually stand entirely on our own two feet, stop suffering through life, and live it fully, with true integrity.. No Bible and its prophets, our political or spiritual leaders, or anyone else can save us from our responsibility to become completely self-aware, or even enlightened.  With our evolving insight into the nature of Consciousness and God, and our identity embedded within this creative principle of the Universe, we see that we can become either agents of a loving, regenerative force, or,  in our ignorance, become the malevolent architects of Armageddon, and our mutual destruction.  Thus, we must learn how to troubleshoot and repair, and even transform our dysfunctional human existence, or our collective unconscious self-destructive intentions continue unto their inevitable dark finish.

Growing up, I was not provided with many clues for how to successfully manage the labyrinth of life and my mind, and how to troubleshoot and repair them as needed.. The maps provided for me were incomplete and mostly inaccurate. My life had been characterized by early and intermittent, and mostly unintentional, wounding by my parents, especially by my father and older sister. But outside of my family, there was a culture that supported this toxicity, while supplying many of its forms of institutionalized and normalized darkness.

My early exposure to the Christian religion was also traumatizing. My young self could see through its parade of self-debasing interpretations of God and Jesus, and I was confused and often repulsed by its ignorant and hateful theology, and many of its so-called Christian stories.  The threat of eternal damnation to Hell first given to a six-year-old boy did not go well with me, and I had my first taste of judgment against this cult of people, laughing with other non-religious friends at the stupidity of all such beliefs and nonsense, yet wondering if somehow these misanthropic statements might have some truth behind them.

I could not find other helpful guides, other than consistent loving support from my mother, my uncles,  and my mother’s parents, who always wanted the best for me, and my father, though he sometimes appeared to me as a confusing trickster.

Politicians and religious leaders often prey on people who don’t understand the world, and their relationship to it. People continue to wonder why the world is the way that it is, without investigating their role in its creation from moment to moment in their consciousness. I don’t. wonder about such things anymore. I just wonder how long civilization will continue before either healing through addressing these issues or disintegrating into chaos and civil war, as ignorance ignites itself into its inevitable self-destructive fire.

For instance, history will eventually record for the remnants of American civilization how easily gun promoters, local sheriff’s departments,  and politicians gaslit the rest of society through their distorted and often time evil interpretations of the 2nd Amendment.  These outliers pretended to be spokesmen for America’s basic rights, all the while denying all Americans the sense of safety and security from the dire, deadly threats by the many deranged men within society. The gun promoters rallied around the most flawed reasoning, manifesting a cult of death and mutual destruction.  They railed against their interests, believing in their obvious cultural con.  The disaster spreads like a virus with the continued normalization of this gun-loving insanity..

Guns, glory, gold, gonads, and gore. . . how much is enough to make you happy, American male?

In the 1950s and 1960s, America’s economy was booming, and our country also grew into its role as world policeman, which followed its involvement in World War II. As a country, it was pleasant to think of ourselves as the defenders of freedom and liberty, and the liberator of the damned, especially after its world-saving performance of WWII.

The Defender Dan story serves as an allegory for my understanding of the American male experience of the brain and its function, and the “Baby Boomer” generation in general, of which I am a qualified member. At the top of the page, I have inserted a picture of Defender Dan, a toy machine gun that was produced and marketed in the 1960s, and which continues to carry immense symbolic value for me.

Defender Dan was a plastic and metal representation of a powerful tool of war and served our culture’s need to normalize and promote aggressive role-playing behavior for males. This machine delivered simulated death by plastic bullets and was a manifestation of the cultural perception that a need for such violent toys existed.

The promotion of the use of these toy weapons happened concurrently with the execution of the Vietnam War, but one can review history to see that in each era that there has been war, there have also been toy weapons made available for children.

These toy weapons represent our culture’s unconscious support for common knowledge-based attack/defense postures and the mutual bullying behaviors that frequently appear in human relationships. Symbolically, these weapons helped to prepare our male population for continuing as unconscious human beings, who, when feeling threatened, would rather “shoot first, and ask questions later”. This toy perfectly represents the tool for manifesting that intention.

Men, especially those from lower economic and educational backgrounds, were to be enforcement agents and soldiers for war, for our American economic and philosophical imperialism. Psychologically susceptible American boys, through the practice with and the use of such toy weapons, were being prepared to continue in their father’s footsteps. Our leaders stressed that our international bullying behavior was intended to enhance world peace and protect individual freedom and liberties.

The clinging to and the use of “adult versions” of weapons of war by spiritually underdeveloped citizens such as white supremacist terrorists, shows the power of the potential for evil arising from excess fear and the perceived need for protection from the effects of one’s errant philosophies.

My physical relationship with Defender Dan began in 1968. At that time, my mother worked at the Oak Lodge Fire Department as a dispatcher. The department had an annual toy drive, where they collected and distributed donated toys to disadvantaged children within the local community. One of the toys donated was called a Defender Dan Machine Gun. It was not a new toy, as it had “minor damage” that made it an acceptable toy only for a boy, and a father with mechanical skills, who might be able to troubleshoot and repair it. It was reckoned that there would be a real disappointment to a family if the toy was given to them and they could not fix it, so the toy was pulled from the pool of gifts. My mother asked for it, and she was “gifted” with the defective toy, which she gave to me as a Christmas gift.

I was thirteen years old at the time, and when I opened up the gift at Christmas, I thought that I might be a “little too old” to be receiving and playing with a toy gun, even one as massive as this huge gun. I mean, this thing took up a lot of space (as do hurtful and self-destructive and other-destructive thoughts and judgments within our minds)! It was quite an intimidating-looking piece of hardware. I set the machine gun up and proceeded to fire about 20 plastic bullets at my sister (also symbolic of the fact that all war is fratricide) before the gun jammed up internally, and it would only misfire after that. Some friends of my parents showed up with their teenage daughter to visit, and it was then requested that I move the machine of war to the basement, much to my sister’s and to my parent’s relief.

I was confused as to what was expected from me. Why was I given something to play with that had known problems? Didn’t I deserve something that was new and perfect? My dad was disinterested in helping me fix it, and, in fact, he was not mechanically inclined enough to offer much help. I certainly did not have a fully developed skill package in troubleshooting and repairing this fairly complex mechanical system, but I liked a good challenge, and I thought that this endeavor might be worthwhile.

Ann C., a daughter of friends of my parents, came downstairs to talk with me, while her parents continued to talk with mine. I tried one final time to get Defender Dan to work, but I could not get it to function properly and with consistency. I began dismantling it, trying to understand how it worked so that I could find the problem and attempt to repair it.  And I also thought that I might be able to impress Ann just a little bit if I were to succeed in fixing the machine.  Dad came downstairs and saw the gun parts spread all over the basement floor, accused me of destroying the gift, and then proceeded to remove his belt and whip the hell out of me, right in front of Ann. That one hurt a lot in different ways, for sure.  In one sense I succeeded, because I am sure that the sight of a thirteen-year-old boy getting his ass beat with a belt was impressive. I was horribly shamed, with the feeling of shame not being unusual to me.  Defender Dan, and all of the supporting behavior and attitudes behind its existence, was to become synonymous with fear, and shame, in my mind.

My response to my father’s attack was to give up troubleshooting and repairing the toy. I did not treasure Defender Dan, and after my initial attempts at its repair failed, and my father’s shaming behavior, I took that as further affirmation of my lack of competence and value, so I took a hammer to the toy, smashing it into smaller, more useless pieces.

“Some men just want to watch the world burn”,

and this is one example of that principle in action, and why it arises in the first place. I placed the heap into the garbage can while trying to forget about my latest “failure”. I then moved on to the next challenge facing me as a thirteen-year-old young man, which was to come up with a good story that might prevent another beating.

Designers and builders of machinery, or creators of ideas or new forms of art, are encouraged and empowered by their society and their own “creator within” to bring into the world of form their latest creations. Creators are happiest when they bring something new, or an updated version of the old, into the world. With the power of creation carrying us across the ocean of life, we can’t help but use that power to make idols, icons, and images that represent that which we are grateful for, or what has given us protection or sustenance. I am sure that fathers over the history of humanity have given crude versions of their primary tools of trade or weapons of war to their boys since the idea of gifting first arose. And, the father encouraged the boys’ interest in protecting himself, his family, and in a more recent evolutionary development, even his ideology. Yet I have to wonder how giving the gift of fear, isolation, shame, aggression, and the potential for violence is the highest quality gift that our “creator” has to offer to us

Each human child is dependent upon the quality of love, safety, and prosperity of the family household, and these are primary factors that greatly influence a growing child’s evolutionary path through consciousness. The parents are by intention also designers, builders, and co-creators of the early life and consciousness of the new child, even if it is the DNA that determines a greater portion of the heritage. My father spent five years at a local university learning about psychology, child development, logic, philosophy and religion, and yet his successful mastering of these subjects in school did not translate into insight as to how to best parent his children. My mother studied Dr. Spock and others, yet did not develop the insight necessary to know that placing a blanket-wrapped crying baby in a car in the garage at night until dad left for work so that he could sleep missed the bull’s eye for perfect childcare by the widest of margins. All creators strive for perfection, and most parents are no exceptions, yet that desire for excellence is difficult to identify in dysfunctional families, especially by children who were negatively impacted by chronic parental mismanagement. Victims of wounding carry the pain well into adulthood, and even unto death, in situations where the trauma is never made conscious or gets addressed in a loving, healing manner.

I never have met the lucky ones who had the perfect birth, infancy, and childhoods. Like me, childhood was probably a mixed bag for the majority of people on this planet. And, there are a few of us who were born physically handicapped, and it leaves us to wonder why human biological creative energy manifested itself in such a unique way. These physical handicaps are visible to all who look their way. And, those who transcend their physical handicaps are honored for their courage, and their achievements in life. Yet, what about the rest of us, who may have been born with another type of handicap, a handicap of the human spirit, caused by a diseased culturally inculcated consciousness?

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True freedom is NOT about accumulating guns, money, or politicized religion as damaged males continue to interpret these symbols.

I might have been born with a predisposition towards an overly ignorant, fearful mind, or those deficiencies could have evolved from my parent’s faltering attempts at nurturing. I do know that I was handed and told to repair a ‘defective piece of equipment” throughout my education as a young person. Just what was this “defective piece of equipment” that I am referring to? Of course, I am referring to self-destructive mental programming created through societal, historical and genetic predispositions, cultural conditioning, individual and collective ignorance, and all vitriolic, bullying, war-mongering behaviors.The “piece” consisted of poor self-esteem, and a sense of being ignored, undervalued, and lonely. I was hyperactive, restless and discontented, and I suffered from a feeling of not being heard or fully accepted as a child. I would let the immune system of my mind run overtime, resulting in excessive attacks against myself and others, and excessive posturing in passive/aggressive approaches to insecure and troubled relationships

My parents and my culture made their compelling arguments for trying to convince me that their paths and understandings were righteous, and I just needed to become mature enough to understand and find where I fit in this challenging place. All that I know is that the world sure appeared to be a fucked up place. And those who have successfully adapted to this fucked up place sure don’t like to be told the truth that they are also living in a fucked up place, and that their adjustments with and accommodations to the fucked up world keep the world, as well as their own puny little life, all fucked up, whether they are aware of that fact, or not.

My parents and my culture told me to become the best person that I could be. Yet, they insisted that I make do with their conflicted standards of understanding and behavior, adapt to it somehow, and to live my life with it. I could also try to “fix it” if I had the time, inclination, and courage to learn more about it, interact with it on a different level, and become a conscious witness to its healing evolution. I have written extensively about toxic masculinity, and there is a direct relationship between the damaged American male, and the incidence of gun marketing, distribution, sales, use, murder and terrorism within our country. Enough is enough, my fellow male (and supporting female) citizens who are hypnotized by the destructive potential of their judgments AND their weapons of war and by the extremists that so effectively promote twisted values to our diseased society.

We live and operate in the background of our oftentimes toxic patriarchal culture. Our culture is broken, which leads to broken people and families. Yet, collectively, America has created a culture of denial, where we don’t look at our fundamental problems together or confront them directly. To the extent that the broken individual might indicate a brokenness of our culture, is the extent that the broken individual is marginalized and minimized by the entrenched power brokers of our civilization and their sycophants.

A conspiracy of silence is an agreement, either formal or tacit, between two or more parties not to discuss some matter nor to reveal any information concerning it, especially to avoid blame, embarrassment, or other discomforts. It also points to the promises that we keep even though we may have never consciously made the promises, which become the strongest pillars supporting the platform of our culture. There are multitudes of societal requirements that are not written down, and we all unconsciously obey these edicts, edicts that we never would have obeyed had we been given a conscious choice. They become either the shell that we must emerge from, or remain the ball and chain attached to our spiritual ankles.

We are all part of an economic, social, and religious system that cannot always and often won’t hear our cries for help, but also causes much of the suffering that inspires our agonized cries. Calls to 911 or 988 may work for some, but most others who need help will ignore or bypass those options. Our unwillingness to speak or reveal our deepest, truest self revolves around issues of compromised senses of safety and emotional security, which are exacerbated by trauma, shame, and denial, and by our oftentimes oppressive, life-devaluing surrounding culture.

I have personally experienced toxic masculinity, toxic religion, and toxic capitalism. These issues are challenging to recognize and successfully address, due to thousands of years of cultural normalization of unacceptable attitudes and behavior, and a conspiracy of silence maintained to preserve and protect the status quo. Personal family, and/or cultural toxicities tend to stay ignored, overlooked, or even denied by those with little time for insight, introspection, or interest in other people’s points of view on these troubling issues.

I have witnessed many failed or failing systems, human and mechanical, for most of my life. In any system, we come to expect that certain inputs will deliver desired outputs while maintaining some sort of balance within the whole process. But we need good information and a well-ordered and maintained internal system to get the desired results. If we can find the errors in reasoning and historical conditioning, which contribute mightily to each of our narratives, we can begin a search for the underlying truth behind all situations and shed the cloaks of illusion that continue to clothe so much of the human race.

Some Stories Of Traumatic Wounding

The effects of trauma mute the potential for storytelling from about ninety-five percent of all sufferers.  The stories about the wounding that our religions, culture, and families have wrought upon humanity throughout the ages could fill hundreds of millions of book pages.   I will limit my stories to three main themes:  The impact of trauma upon indigenous people by the white race as reflected through my family experience and education, the impact of trauma on my father, and ultimately, myself, and the impact of trauma upon my first wife, Donelle.

My grandmother Beatrice Henry was a granddaughter of the marital union of an English sailor by the name of George Gay, who had crashed his ship off of the coast of Northern California in 1829 and quickly relocated to near Salem, Oregon, and a Willamette Valley Indian woman from the Yamhill/Carlton tribe in 1863.  My grandmother, who was one-fourth Indian, lived in an era when it was best to ignore one’s Indian heritage, for there was much disrespect for Indians exhibited by the white race, with many basic rights denied to them, and she became ashamed of her Indian heritage.  I was to note later in life how this shame and her internal compensation for it appeared to make her more intolerant of other races not white in nature, especially those of Asian descent.  This shame was, ultimately, led to our family to not applying in time for membership to the Grand Ronde Indian Tribe, and we lost all potential tribal rights and incomes from their settlement with the US government, as well as their casino ventures.  My grandmother, mother, and uncle all had more native Oregon Indian blood than many of the present members of the Grand Ronde Indian reservation.

My grandmother, when it finally came to her time of dying in 1995, came to live with my wife Sharon, and me for the last three months of her life.  She had been discharged from the hospital after cancer treatment, and her kidneys had stopped working as a result of the unnecessary chemo and its destructive impact on her weakened body she had received after the encouragement to my mother and uncle from her oncologist.  When she arrived at our home, she was toxic and could barely recognize us, lapsing in and out of consciousness.  One night, she cried out, and we came running into her room, to see what was happening.  My grandmother stated to us that she was seeing a large group of Indians dancing in a circle around her dying body, giving prayers to the Great Spirit, while attempting to create a safe atmosphere for her to experience her last living hours.  She awoke the next day, totally rational, and she was able to get out of bed for the first time in a week.  She was back to her normal self again, though she was still dying, yet she no longer was burdened by the shame of her heritage.

In 1991, my wife and I traveled north to British Colombia, Canada to visit a friend, Carolyn.  Carolyn requested that we bring up a case of tobacco so that some Indian friends of hers could use it in prayer offerings to the Great Spirit.  We were to drive to the Alkali Lake Indian Reservation, a now world-famous tribe of Indians who had turned the corner on their alcoholism and were, almost to a man and woman, on the difficult path to recovery and healing from their wounds.  We were to stay a night in Chief Gladys’s home and attend an evening sweat lodge ceremony, where the tribe was seeking healing from the generations of abuse at the hands of Catholic priests and the surrounding community of white people.  There was so much sexual abuse, beatings, and early deaths by this tribe, and it was no mystery to me why, previously, there was so much alcoholism within this tribal community.

I had attended several sweat lodge ceremonies in the past, yet most had been arranged by white people emulating what the Native Americans had been practicing for hundreds of years.  The sweat lodge is a cleansing, healing ceremony, and an important part of the spirituality and tradition of Native Americans.  This sweat lodge was populated mainly by the women of the tribe, with my wife Sharon and I as honored guests of the ceremony.  The heat from the steam was so intense that I buried my face into the ground.  Yet, the higher the heat, the greater the capacity to purge ourselves of our grief, and wounds.  The women screamed and wailed together in the most heartbreaking chorus that I had ever heard.  Their collective pain, grief, shame, and suffering came out in this sacred space.  They were no longer hiding from their traumatic wounding from the Catholics, they were directly confronting it, while the sweat, and the tears, rolled down my face, I knew that I had experienced the most powerful display of collective intent to heal that I had ever witnessed or experienced.

The Catholic Church has been at the forefront of abuse of Indigenous peoples around the world for at least the last 600 years.  In a Church declaration in the late 15^th century, it was documented and ordered that explorers operating under the guidance of the Catholic Church were allowed to imprison, enslave, and steal from any Indigenous peoples that the whites encountered in their journeys of exploration and conquests of the “new world”.  In 2022 Pope Francis visited Canada from July 24 to 29^th, with stops in the provinces of Alberta and Quebec, and the territory of Nunavut.  The trip mainly focused on apologizing for the Catholic Church’s role in the Canadian Indian residential school system and reconciliation with the country’s Indigenous peoples.  Thousands of children had been murdered, or starved to death while learning the “white man’s ways”, many of which were buried in unmarked graves, and hidden from sight from the outside world.  As you might imagine, his outreach did not bring great peace and healing to the Indigenous peoples, and it may take generations for true forgiveness to happen between the Chruch and the Indigenous people.

In 1993, while working for an electrical construction company, my boss and I had several conversations about Native Americans, my Indian heritage, and the rights of all peoples within the United States.  Rich R. stated emphatically to me that anyone of Indian descent had no real rights, other than what the government saw fit to give them.  After all, Rich emphasized, they were defeated by our race, our religion, and our government, and the only rights they deserve as a defeated nation are the ones that the white race sees fit to give them.

The story with a direct impact upon me as a young human being is the story of my father’s upbringing, and its impact upon his attitudes, and understanding of how to be a parent.   Beryl Donald Paullin, was a product of the Great Depression, having been born in 1927. His Father, also named Beryl, was a Fire Chief who was respected within the community and also feared in his home because of his abusive nature and alcoholism. I know little else about Grandpa Beryl (also known as Bruce), other than he also served in the military, during World War 1, and is buried in Willamette National Cemetery, as is my father.  My father kept my sister Pam and me away from Grandpa Beryl until we were teenagers, that is how much my father wanted to protect us from the oppressive presence of his father. While in our early teenage years, Pam and I did visit with Grandpa Beryl at his La Center home twice, and I visited him in the VA hospital before his death. In his later years, he was sober and seemed like a pleasant enough man.

Dad’s mother Elsie was the classic abused wife, suffering also through physical and emotional problems while married to “that Brute”, as my father referred to him. I also know little about her, either, other than she lied about her initial pregnancy, blaming it on “strangers”, and that she hid in shame from her early behavior for much of her life.  I later learned that Elsie secretly gave birth to a daughter in 1922 at age 15, which she gave up for adoption. So my dad and his brother and sister had an older sister that they never knew of, until very late in their lives.  Elsie even passed on the lie that she told about her early pregnancy to her daughter Susie, when Susie became pregnant with Sharyn out of wedlock in 1953. Sharyn was given up for adoption,  even though she was a “love child”. This lie was to have devastating consequences late in Sharyn’s life, when Sharyn sought out, and then found, her biological mother Susie. Rather than telling Sharyn the truth of her biological origin, Susie repeated the lie of her mother, that she had been raped. Wounding was wrought upon Sharyn’s heart in unbelievable proportion in 2016.  Sharyn prematurely died in 2017 from pancreatic cancer, just months after hearing the lie.  This wounding is now called intergenerational trauma. .My wife Sharon made sure that Sharyn knew of her loving origins before her death.

Elsie had kidney disease, was one of the first Oregonians to receive a kidney transplant, and that she died shortly after my birth.  John Edward was my father’s older brother (Ed preceded him in death by 3 years) and Ed was removed from his home and placed at their grandparents’ farm in Oregon City at 6 years of age, after nearly being beaten to death by his father Beryl.

Gloria (or Susie) as most people now know her, was the younger sister, and both Susie and my father suffered under abusive conditions for most of their childhood. Both my father and my aunt displayed some symptoms of PTSD for most of their lives, as well as both being products of the age at which they grew up.  Over the years, Dad found a way to manage his life much more successfully than his sister Susie, for sure.  Susie carried a most unfortunate and hurtful story about my father all the way to the end of my father’s life, which was that it was my father’s fault that Edward was almost beaten to death, because my father, at four years of age, tipped over a lamp, and broke it.  Edward’s near-fatal beating supposedly arose from that event.

My father loved his older brother Ed, through all of the years of his life, though he loved to challenge Ed about the mess that was always present in the yard on Ed’s farm.  Ed loved to collect old and junk cars, much to the chagrin of his neighbors, friends, some family members, and the local police department.  Sharon and I started sharing in their love beginning in 1995, when we all started sharing breakfasts, and family gatherings for the first time.  My Uncle Ed was a masterful storyteller, and I always enjoyed it when he grabbed my ear, for his epic tales about family, friends, and his work at the Crown Zellerbach paper mill, where he was the lead electrician for over forty years.

In 1943, at 16 years of age, Dad enlisted in the Marines, as he wanted to serve his country, and get away from his family of origin, as well as he thought of himself as a “dummy”, with no faith in his ability to successfully finish high school at Benson Poly Tech. His mother promptly collared the local Marine Corps recruiter and forced Dad to return home from the service. He re-enlisted in the Navy the moment he turned 18 years of age and was assigned duty on two different warships, the West Virginia, and the Wisconsin, during his two years in the Navy. Upon his return from active duty in 1947, he returned home, where he threatened his dad with death if his dad ever laid a hand on his mother again. Dad moved on from that relationship with his mother and father, not seeing either of them again for quite some time.

He started college at the University of Portland, studying Psychology, Logic, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, and other courses, from 1947-1952. He wanted to understand the human mind at the deepest level, and his curious mind about other issues only left him after my mother died in 2009. But he had to delay his search for the truth about the broken human mind, as his now hyper-busy life got in the way of him finishing his studies of the human condition.  Dad formed a great friendship and relationship with Father Delaney, who taught at the University of Portland, and in whose name the Delaney Institute was named. He struggled a bit with his schoolwork, but he did stay at it for over five years, which did not result in a degree.

Note: Intergenerational trauma did not bypass me, and much of my father’s, and grandfather’s, wounding was passed down to me, though I never allowed it to pass through me, as I had no children, and I was ultra conscious not to bring harm to others..  I was to later pick up my father’s mantle, and I have made my own attempts finish the job that he had started, which was understanding the human mind. And, like my father, I rebel against the spiritual and philosophical authorities of the day, sometimes sharing with the readers of my blog and Facebook readers my insights.

Dad still had a fire in his heart, and an incredible desire to succeed. He worked harder than anybody around him, the sign of a classic “overachiever”. He endlessly drove himself, and he was going to overcome his upbringing and prove to the world that he had a higher value than the poor self-esteem that his verbally and physically abusive father had inculcated in him with. His perfectionism and zealousness for order and efficiency were utilized to his best advantage in his future employment with the US Postal Service. That same attitude tended to, at times, challenge others, especially those that he attempted to help, or manage, as both a general manager with the Postal Service and as a friend and family member. A person with a passive/aggressive personality, like me, had the most difficulty with him. Those who were self-assured or had found their voice, and engaged him directly, had the best relationship with him, and he enjoyed engaging with others in stimulating, challenging discussions. Those who took the time to get to know Dad, also found a way to love him, despite his rough edges. But it was hard to get to know him because too many times he would lead with a derogatory remark, or insult, and bad first impressions rarely get changed.

Some thought that my father was a horse’s ass, but that is the view one sometimes gets when in second place, having been passed by his racehorse of a mind. A man like my father, who lived a full life, could have his book written about him, and not scratch the surface of all the people that he impacted, positively or negatively, and all of the experiences that he had all of the humor that he shared, and all of the wisdom that he developed.  My sister, my wife, and I wrote several pages of “Beryl-isms”, which are quotes directly from my father about life in general.  I have presented a few of his “top 50” statements, which he repeated many times over the last few years of his life.  In parenthesis, I have included a few of my replies to his common statements that I used to give back to Dad as part of our “conversation”.

1). Don’t wait too long to retire. People think they need to work those extra years, they work that extra one or two years, thinking they need the money, and death takes over, and they never make it to retirement (well, Dad, I retired early, but we will have to wait and see if that has any beneficial effect on my longevity.  Right now, my main goal is to try to outlive you, oh immortal one!).

2). Oh those rich people, all of that money, and they still have to die anyway! (and the rest of us, we have to die too, darn it!)

3). Why do you need to know, are you writing a book? (well, as a matter of fact, I am!)

4). I really took the system, didn’t I? (after being retired and on pension for 35 years, contributing $22,742 to your pension, and getting over one million dollars back, I would say that you did!)

5). Come back again when you can’t stay so long (well, I am working on that one!)

6). Don’t you have something better to be doing? (yes, but you are the priority of the moment, so try to enjoy it while I try not to suffer too much)

7). Sure am glad that I am retired, or is it retarded? (um, I won’t touch that one)

8). I might be here, but I am not all here (then where is the rest of you?)

9). You know, having a dog like Rocky adds 7 years to my life (yes, but your dog took 7 years off of mine!)

10). (to any waitress) Say, you sure are looking good this evening. Would you like to come home with me and serve me my favorite meal? (Argh! So embarrassing!)

11). I am not trying to be pretty, and I never will win any beauty contests (I can’t argue with you on that one)

12). The doctor needed a urine, stool, and semen sample, so I just left him my underwear (oh, boy, what a bad joke!)

13). You couldn’t hit a beach ball with a banjo! You couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn! (comments made to me both as a youth when pitching or batting on little league baseball teams, and while playing golf with him as a child and as an adult)

14). When I get to Heaven, I am going to have a talk with the “Old Man” about my wife dying before me.  Wives are supposed to outlive their husbands.  Either I should have died first or we should have died at the same time (Maybe mom finished her work before you did.  In what form would you have wanted a simultaneous death, like in a murder/suicide, or in a car wreck?)

15). Son will we all meet again in heaven? (are you sure that you really want to hang out with the same crowd for eternity?)

16). Heaven is not ready for me yet, and Hell is afraid that I will take it over, so that is why I am still here (maybe you are still here to provide a few more lessons for the living.  I know that I sure am getting a crash course!).

17).  I am in no hurry to die.  Nobody I know has ever come back from the dead and told me what a great time they are having after death. (yes, and wayward religions continue to capitalize on that mortal fear, ignore the fact that heaven is here and now, and do not effectively teach us how to die to ourselves and our fears and suffering to experience heaven in advance of bodily death)

18). I provided care for you all of those years when you were young, now its your turn to take care of this old man (I should have read the contract more carefully before my birth!)

19).  You should always be best friends with your sister.  Never let anything get in the way of that friendship, because she will find a way to love you to your death, as you should love her as well (Well, Dad, you sure have shown commitment to both your brother and your sister, especially over the last twenty years.  Somehow you all endeared yourselves to each other.  Thank you for being a success in that aspect of family love, and overcoming the chaos created by your parent’s relationship.  I think that Pam and I are on a good course right now)

And on and on it could go. My dad was a great storyteller, and fountainhead of wisdom, one-liners, humor, self and other deprecation, and sarcasm.  My personality was so much less colorful than my father’s, yet it is easy to see that I truly am my father’s son.  I have many of his same attitudes, and I replicated many of some of the same deficiencies in my own life that my father also experienced.

My father died on September 15, 2017. Dad died in his bedroom on a Friday evening and had the look of awe and wonder in his eyes and face. He had found his promised land, where loneliness, depression, and dementia disappear, and where ‘bums’ are converted back into the saints and angels that they always were, but were rarely recognized by others as being so. It took nearly my entire life to release my misunderstanding and judgment towards my father and allow for him to express himself in the only way that he knew how to, while still providing loving protection for him in his time of greatest need.

I met Dion on our trip to South Africa in April of 2023, where he came to be my tour guide.  In the 1980’s he had been imprisoned by the white supremacist apartheid government led by P.W. Botha after participating in a peaceful protest.  He and 81 other protesters were incarcerated for nine months, with many of them tortured every day.  He told me that had the USA not boycotted South Africa for its apartheid ways, he would have mysteriously “vanished” like hundreds of protesters before him.   Dion had nightmares for many years after his incarceration.  He was traumatized, and his property had been stolen.  He found that his healing was a very slow process, though by talking about the trauma, its emotional impact upon him lessened over the years.

The Catholic representatives had condemned apartheid since the 1950s, but there was not enough of a presence in that country to have any meaningful impact.  It wasn’t until a certain critical mass of internal, and external, protests, and in some cases attacks, against the government of Botha, and then de Klerk in the 1990s, that change began to happen.  The late reverend Desmond Tutu of the Anglican Church was a huge force for doing good over those years.  It has been said that there was not a lot of praying to go on inside of the sacred walls of the late reverend’s church.. There was concrete planning going on to overcome an oppressive, murderous, apartheid white Christian government.  Thoughts and prayers are akin to mental masturbation and are just forms of narcissistic procrastination, so the real workers for good get busy.  Only real, accountable action in this world has any real, lasting, transformative power.

After the elimination of the apartheid government, a truth and reconciliation process was proposed and supported.  The Reverend Desmond Tutu promoted the truth and reconciliation process, where victims of abuse, and family members of those tortured and/or murdered, were allowed to face their tormentors in a safe environment.  The problem was that there were no representatives from the former government, or leaders of the white race-based churches who continued to support the atrocities, nearly to the end.  The cultural power brokers were let off of the hook, while those that they inspired were the ones who had to face the music.

Dion Fabe’s extended monologue to our tour group about the traumatic cultural effects on individuals, and their entire racial/ethnic community, from South Africa’s former white supremacist/apartheid national misunderstanding was a compelling story in collective wounding, confrontation with those oppressive forces, and the difficult path to healing while co-creating a new national community.  Dion and his wife currently support up to 16 distressed babies at a time, often at their own expense. These neglected, abandoned babies are from mothers with alcoholic/drug-addicted backgrounds.  He also manages “Hannah’s Place Of Safety”, a Facebook group using his charity’s name that I follow.

The most challenging story for me to tell is about my relationship with my first wife, Donelle, and aspects of her journey. She figured largely in my life before my sobriety. I first met Donelle, through our mutual friend Randy, in 1971 when I was a sophomore in high school. She was the most beautiful young woman I had ever met, gorgeous beyond all description, and she was incredibly intelligent and a very caring person, too. I had a sense that I had witnessed my future when I first saw her. I did not see her again for several months, but she had left an indelible mark on my soul, and I just could not forget her. We started dating two years later.

My life experience with Donelle ended up becoming some of the most compelling, heartbreaking, and depressing experiences that I could never have envisioned for myself, or her. She had a nervous breakdown late in her senior year and was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. She would report to me that she felt like she was being controlled by something within her.  She could not verbalize it, and she could only proclaim:

“I am controlled, I am controlled”.

She was briefly hospitalized and was placed on some powerful, experimental medications. She experimented with recreational drugs, and she was pretty accepting of me when it came to my drug use. She did not try to discourage me from using but instead found a way to fit in while our friends and family used drugs together. At this point, the damage that drugs were doing to me was overshadowed by the thrill and rush of their effects and the socially connective activity around their procurement and use.

I was hesitant to marry Donelle, fearing that she would yet again destabilize, and collapse into psychosis yet again. She had several “mini breakdowns” during the period from 1973-1979 that were controlled through new medications, or additions to her old regimens of drugs (she took up to four different pills at a time, several just for side-effect mitigation of other medications!). After dropping out of college the first time, in 1976, I began to spend some real time with her again, just working the swing shift at the Post Office during that period. It was a relatively stress-free period, though I was quite the party animal. We were married in September of 1979, after having lived together for four years.

Donelle was making great progress, and she only needed to finish her last term to graduate in great academic and practical standing. Well, it was too good to be true, because she had the worst breakdown of her life to that point, resulting in my need to have her committed to the Oregon State Hospital in July of 1980, less than ten months after our marriage.

I absorbed more than my share of alcohol and other chemicals to help me cope with my dysfunction, while I watched my lover disintegrate, and then, occasionally, resurrect herself, from the effects of her disease through medications. Yes, we both had lifelong diseases to fight, but hers was a losing battle. She eventually became a homeless street person, and the State of Washington finally accepted responsibility for her care after I walked out on the whole process. That was around the time I began my search for the truth, though I was working with very few clues about which direction to head in.

Over the many years that I knew Donelle, I tried to be the best support person that I could be, but I was damaged goods as well, so I failed in my mission. She deserved better than what I could give her because I suffered under my limitations of selfishness, addiction, and sense of personal powerlessness. With mental illness, we all tend to fail together as a family, as a culture, and as a human race. Those who can bring forgiveness, insight, compassion, and a sense of the Spirit are the true blessings for the sick within our society. The great gift we can give is a non-judgmental listening ear, and to keep our hearts open to the stories that are told.

In 1987, I visited Donelle at her apartment near Camas, Washington. We had been divorced since 1984, but I still kept in touch with her on occasion because I was concerned for her. I had just gotten sober, and I wanted to make amends to her as part of the Twelve Steps. This time, she was in the middle of a complete multiple personality disorder type of nervous breakdown. She had candles lit throughout her apartment, and the setting was quite eerie. I sat down with her to talk, and I noted that she looked so young and innocent, and I was struck by the change in her appearance and countenance. As she spoke to me, I felt like I was witnessing a six- or seven-year-old girl, with a new persona that was now speaking through her. She told me about heinous abuses she’d suffered while institutionalized. We talked for a long time that day, and she was wise in unexpected ways.

I had occasional contact with her from 1984 through 1996 but then didn’t hear from her for over two decades. She died on my birthday in 2022, further cementing for me our connection. The hardships of her adult life resulted from her relationship to traumatic abuse as a child at the hands of a pervert and a beast of a man. They were magnified by our damaged male-dominated culture, poor professional mental health care options, as well as any unknown genetic predispositions she may have had. The most painful aspect of Donelle’s story is that she never got to tell it, at least not in a way that could have helped her overcome the traumatic abuses she suffered from her family, the people tasked with caring for her in the institution, and society.

Telling Your Story and Why It’s So Hard

Having a life narrative allows us to shape and control the way we see the world and the pieces of ourselves that we share. But I’ve met so many people who don’t have a life narrative. They don’t have a story that embodies the wisdom that they’ve gained and the problems they’ve overcome.

This is part of the conspiracy of silence. It’s not an intentional silence, but it’s a silence based on the fact that we don’t have words to talk about our pain. And this conspiracy of silence is taken advantage of by the people around us, as well as our political, religious, and economic leaders. The culture takes for granted that if we have nothing to say, we’re doing okay. If we don’t know how to say our truth, then our silence is interpreted by others as a tacit agreement or as we have nothing to offer, when, in fact, we do.

Humans have both a loving and a lying nature. But our tendency to lie overrules our tendency to love. We tend to hide behind our lies, and often, in doing so, deceive ourselves first and foremost. We keep our secrets close to our chests and fear the day when everyone finds out. The conspiracy of silence embodies all of the shameful ideas that we have thought and acted upon. A compelling part of this conspiracy is that others also share in this activity of keeping dangerous secrets, secrets that are attacks against ourselves and others, and the truth. This mutually imprisons all of us.

On the other side of the spectrum of our grand conspiracy of silence lies those who have finally embraced their healing potential. The conspiracy also indicates a hesitancy to talk with others about our spiritual potential, and our innate ability to connect with and manifest a more aware, intelligent state of being. We may remain silent because of our own perceived inadequacy in presenting a supporting and compelling argument for our point of view, fearing indifference and rejection from others. Some shut down all points of view in disagreement with their own; others feel resistance to any truth not already understood and applied. Many just turn their heads, and their words, away from the resistant person. It takes strength to successfully confront negativity while maintaining compassion and equanimity, thus not being threatened or degraded by the contact. This is a critical part of the conspiracy of silence. We become invisible to each other, the less curious we are about others, the less curious we are about ourselves. We become invisible to ourselves when we sit on our voices and fail to listen as our inner voice cries out for justice, peace, healing, and change.

The conspiracy of silence is all about preserving the established order and enhancing the status quo, and it is built right into the framework of our collective consciousness. Our collective common knowledge attempts to keep us in alignment and resonance with each other, no matter how out of phase with the truth that this knowledge may be. The resultant toxic silence has become the manifestation of religious, cultural, and political conflicts intended to keep most members of society from talking about underlying issues related to trauma, wounding, oppression, misogyny, child abuse, patriarchy, and a whole spectrum of issues. The conspiracy continues whenever evolving people become too fearful to speak their truth and share their insights for fear of being further attacked and marginalized.

Not expressing ourselves honestly and openly results in our early demise, spiritually as well as physically. Some aspects of life just seem to elude our ability to effectively communicate around them and never get incorporated into our personal stories, and thus they add to the collective conspiracy of silence. Also, other people’s stories and garbage get backfilled into the holes and empty spaces within our own stories,  becoming embedded within us and adding to our internal confusion and chaos. We must choose to no longer adhere to old, worn-out patterns of behavior inculcated into us by our culture, our religions, our so-called teachers and teachings, our misunderstandings of our parents, and our creator. We each must penetrate the conspiracy of silence and bring the light of a loving heart and healing words to the hidden darkness. Our outdated sense of self will have to end, and we will have to find a new path of consciousness for this present-moment healing event to have any hope of transforming the heart, body, and soul. We need to follow new paths of consciousness while dispelling the illusions created by our society and our fantasy thinking. The conspiracy of silence has to be exposed and disrupted, again and again, if necessary, to stop the silencing of our true identities.

If we don’t speak up for what our needs are, then how are we ever going to make any progress with ourselves, within our families, and with this culture? Regardless of how difficult it may be, we, as human beings, are responsible for bringing our truth and our stories, no matter how incomplete they may be, to the collective experience, including our family, our friends, our co-workers, our neighbors, and our religious and political leaders.

I believe that we need to address difficult human emotions and problems by expressing them skillfully. I spent most of my career as a systems analyst, doing electronic and computer design engineering and electrician work, and in that profession, I did a lot of troubleshooting and repairing of systems. I assisted in the building and subsequent technical support of the operation of multi-billion dollar chip fabrication plants in Oregon, and I helped maintain the pumping and delivery systems of the entire fresh water supply to the City of Portland, among many other less economically significant endeavors. I love functioning systems, and I am intensely curious as to why some systems succeed and some fail, even after successful periods of operation. My intention is always to bring repair and balance back to any malfunctioning system. And one of the first steps we always took when working on any system was to understand it. Before we can begin any process of repair, we have to understand the system. And so, that’s where the process of finding your story starts.

Troubleshooting Your Broken System

There is the story of a beautiful 1957 Chevrolet that Fred had owned since his father purchased it for him as a sixteen-year-old.   Fred kept the car exterior in perfect condition, washing and waxing it monthly.  Fred kept the interior spotless, and the car sparkled in the sunlight.  Yet, last year, it stopped running.  Fred did not have enough money to pay a mechanic to repair the vehicle, and he had no experience with engine maintenance and was fearful of undertaking the study necessary to become proficient as a mechanic, so the car just sat in the garage for weeks.  There was to be a car show and rally at the local fairgrounds one weekend, and Fred wanted to be there.  He called up his friend Jerry who owned a towing company, and requested a tow to the fairgrounds.  Fred’s car made it to the rally, and he was glad to be, mixing with his many local friends and acquaintances, and showing off his car.  The afternoon, though fulfilling and fun, was coming to an end, and Fred had to turn his attention to how to get his car back home.  Jack, an old friend from high school,  came by to tow the car but asked Fred if he could look under the hood, and perhaps see what was wrong with the engine.  Fred was uneasy about having someone touch his car, so he politely declined.  He called up Jerry and had his car towed back home again.

Like Jerry, the vehicle for our conscious awareness needs a tuneup from time to time, lest we risk a total breakdown.  We have to develop the willingness to open up the hood and take a look around, or we will have to be dependent on therapists, gurus, ministers, psychiatrists, or other well-meaning professionals to tow us around, rather than being the autonomous human beings we were created to be and are capable of becoming..

Being a broken human being rarely gets a lot of positive feedback or life-affirming attention from others. It certainly is not a lifestyle choice for those who choose to awaken, which I finally did at the age of thirty-one. How did I attempt to bring healing to my broken interior? I acknowledged that, of myself and my old ways, I was heading nowhere, and that I was doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. I did not have childhood training nor spontaneously developed capacities for insight, positive change, and growth until late in life. I needed to develop the emotional and spiritual fortitude to look at the entirety of my life, and then incorporate the experience for my greater good, which also impacts the whole of life more positively. By developing the power of insight, I brought a new level of healing and awareness into this new, present moment of experience. Some call this process mindfulness, though I just call it taking personal inventory and improving my conscious contact with my higher power, as I learned through practicing the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I have come to believe that there is a power greater than the past understandings that live within me, capable of restoring me to sanity, no matter how often I might fall.

Part of maintaining sanity is to allow for a continuous evolution of understanding and experience of who we are, and what God or Higher Power is, apart from religious dogma, ignorance, politics, and superstition. If we only continue to believe in things that we don’t understand, like our religions and their man-made or God-inspired theories, it becomes nothing short of superstitious reasoning if we are not also already inspired internally by this Truth.

There was no minister, church, support group, therapist, Care Unit counselor, Indian guru, psychiatrist, mother, father, sister, wife, friend, daughter, son, pet dog, or Jesus Christ figure that could dig into my unique version of the human soul and remove the thorns that had been thrust into my side since my birth. My internal wounding and the resultant unsustainable suffering became the impetus to begin my inward journey, to face the absolute darkest areas of life itself, and then mine the treasure from my unique relationship with the dark force or shadow.  To not face me would mean to continue living the secondhand/passed-down story of dysfunction that I inherited from our culture and my ancestors. We can never completely heal from our trauma without first becoming aware of our internalized, unconscious subservience to those controlling agendas.

Troubleshooting is a form of problem-solving, often applied to repair failed products or processes on a machine, a system, or even a human life. It is a logical, systematic search for the source of a problem to solve it and make the product, process, or person functional again.

It means gaining understanding and asking questions, like:

• What is the history and intention behind the original system design?
• Has the system ever worked properly?
• Does the system presently work?
• What is the history of the problems?
• Are the problems a failure of the system and its original design, poor overall maintenance, and/or ignorance or malfeasance by the human operator?
• Can this process be improved or stabilized without a total rebuild?
• What are the best options for repair?
• Who is going to help me?
• How much can I help myself?

How to Describe Your Problem Completely

The first step in good problem analysis is to describe the problem completely. Without a problem description, we will not know where to start investigating the cause of the problem. Is it a systemic failure? Is it limited to just one component or an individual? Is it transient or constant in nature? This step includes asking ourselves basic questions.

1. What Are The Symptoms? Who or what is reporting the problem? What are the symptoms and feedback messages? How do we fail? For example: loop or repetition of unnecessary or unwanted behavior, or quitting before a process is successfully completed. Is it intentional or unintentional performance degradation? Is it an incorrect attitude and belief? What is the effect on all relationships?

2. Where Is The Problem Happening? Determining where the problem originates is not always easy, but it is one of the most important steps in resolving a problem. Is the problem isolated and specific, or common to multiple arenas within life? Is the current environment and understanding capable of being supported by a personal healing intention, or are broader, more socially encompassing changes necessary? Are there currently cultural power brokers attempting to dictate the way life’s route should be traveled? Is the source of the history of the problem purely an individual one, or is it universal in its expression?

3. When and Under Which Conditions Does the Problem Happen? Developing a detailed timeline of events leading up to a failure is another necessary step in problem analysis, especially for those cases that are one-time occurrences. We can most easily do this by working backward: start at the time an error was reported (as exactly as possible, perhaps using the timeline approach), and work backward through available memory and history. Usually, we only have to look as far as the last time we experienced conflict or despair, however, this is not always easy to do and will only come with practice. The intersection of society with the individual always creates multiple layers of interaction and mutual expectations, with the potential for far more failures than successes. Does the problem only happen at a certain period of one’s life? How often does it happen? What sequence of events leads up to the time the problem is reported? Does the problem happen after an environment change, such as after creating new friendships, getting another job, or moving to a new neighborhood? Responding to questions like this will help us create a detailed timeline of events, and it will provide us with a frame of reference in which to investigate.

4. Under Which Conditions Does The Problem Happen? Knowing what else is happening at the time of a problem is important for any complete problem description. If a problem occurs in a certain environment or under certain conditions, that can be a key indicator of the problem’s cause. Does the problem always occur when performing the same task or with the same people? Does a certain sequence of events need to occur for the problem to surface? Do other aspects of our lives fail at the same time? Remember that just because multiple problems might have occurred around the same time, it does not necessarily mean that they are always related.

5. Is There a Fundamental Flaw in the System? Does It Appear Ubiquitously? Some designs just never quite reach their true potential for the system’s operation and stability, and they require a total paradigm shift to see the process differently and bring repairs to it. If we have tested all available solutions and nothing works, we have either approached the problem incorrectly, or we have exposed a flaw in the designer’s understanding and/or a failure in the implementation of the designer’s intention. We may have reached the most recalcitrant of problems, which are those that are expressions of a normalized unconscious dysfunction.

Asking these questions of ourselves and examining our lives is difficult work. The desire to fix a treasured object that has been damaged, bring a cure to a child’s disease, or end one’s suffering is the manifestation of love. Love must be the guiding light while facilitating repairs and regenerating any broken person, place, or thing. Bringing a hammer to a situation that requires a jeweler’s screwdriver is a typical overreaction, is self-defeating, and reveals a life needing greater sensitivity and insight into itself. We want to repair and improve, not damage further and destroy, so a conscious process must be undertaken to initiate repairs to any malfunctioning system, human or mechanical.

Finding the Problem, and Freeing Yourself

This is big-picture troubleshooting, for sure. And change can be hard. In any electrical circuit, resistance to the flow of current is ubiquitous. To reduce resistance, we can either tune the system by adding capacitors and inductors, shortening conductor length or increasing its size, or increasing the applied voltage, all of which effectively reduce resistance. There is also the second law of thermodynamics issues, which are entropy, heat-related circuit degradation, and eventual chaos. For humanity, the resistance to the flow of healing energy is also ubiquitous. Yet, we also have options for tuning our spiritual system by increasing our capacity to embrace, understand, carry, and transmit higher consciousness, which utilizes its unique healing algorithm. Like in a high-resistance electrical circuit, those who vehemently resist change and do not embrace their healing potential will eventually have their life system ruled by the spiritual equivalent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, where degradation and chaos reign supreme.

Stories where our unique personal values have been sacrificed to maintain some unloving sense of family and/or cultural order, or disorder, will be fertile grounds for exploration in your life. Also, the over-processed junk food narratives of the collective human experience can become coupled with our own unique and vulnerable sense of self, which fosters self-defeating patterns of thought and action. Regardless of the perfection, or the imperfection of our upbringing, problems inevitably arise throughout the entirety of life within this world that we share. Yet, if they can be seen within a more expansive context, where we can become more self-aware, consciously engage in troubleshooting and repairing our own issues, and become open to traveling new paths of consciousness, the negative effects can be minimized, and resilience and spiritual competency can be maximized. The intention is to help the broken or underperforming person experience enhanced functionality and, thus, experience a greater good.

Healing is a powerful current that runs through us, whether we recognize its presence, or not. Those who recognize it have the potential for an amazing life. Finding the root causes for our individual and collective brokenness allows us to change our lives for the better. We can live a purpose-filled life, inspired by the desire to be the best version of ourselves while serving the highest interests of each other and the Earth with all of its life.

In the depths of our being, we carry scars that aren’t always visible to the naked eye. These scars, borne from traumatic experiences, shape the way we perceive the world and navigate our lives. So far in this book we have taken an amazing journey—one that dives into the realm of personal, collective, and intergenerational  trauma. It’s a journey of acknowledging, troubleshooting, and repairing the wounds that haunt us all.

We must first acknowledge the importance of facing  trauma head-on. Far too often, as individuals we bury our pain deep within, or as a society we cover it with false or misleading narratives, hoping it will disappear with time. But the truth is, repressed emotions and the effects of a  misrepresented history only fester, manifesting in ways that affect every aspect of our lives. By acknowledging our trauma, we grant ourselves permission to heal and move forward.

Healing from trauma can be an arduous path, and it is often traversed with the guidance of social scientists, historians, and mental health professionals. They possess the knowledge and expertise to help us navigate the complexities of our emotions. Seeking professional help is not a sign of weakness; it’s a courageous step towards reclaiming our lives. Therapy sessions may elicit profound insights about ourselves, unearthing buried pain and finding solace in the process. These can be transformative experiences that sets the patient on the path to healing.

Yet, as we venture forth, we must also address the impact of societal stigma surrounding trauma. Misunderstandings, judgments, and dismissive attitudes can further compound our pain. I’ve encountered the piercing sting of societal stigma firsthand. It made me question my worth and silenced my voice. But through resilience and support, I found the strength to rise above these misguided perceptions. It’s essential for society to embrace compassion, empathy, and understanding when it comes to trauma.

In this chapter I have delved into the heart of our journey—the troubleshooting process for personal trauma. While each individual’s experience is unique, there are common threads that weave through the healing process. Here is a summary of the potential paths to take towards healing to help us navigate toward healing:

1. Acknowledgment and Acceptance: Face trauma with honesty and acceptance. Allow all of the emotions that arise, for they are an integral part of the healing journey.
2. Self-Reflection and Insight: Engage in self-reflection to gain insights into the root causes of trauma. Identify patterns, triggers, and behaviors that may be hindering progress.  Encourage affected family and fellow members of our diseased society to do the same.
3. Cultivating a Supportive Network: Be surrounded with a network of understanding and supportive individuals who can provide comfort, guidance, and encouragement during the healing process.
4. Seeking Professional Help: Reach out to mental health professionals who specialize in trauma therapy. They possess the tools and expertise for guidance through the healing journey.
5. Self-Care and Coping Strategies: Engage in self-care practices that nurture mind, body, and soul. Explore coping strategies such as mindfulness, meditation, journaling, or engaging in creative outlets that bring joy.
6. Embracing Resilience and Growth: Embrace resilience and acknowledge the growth that has been experienced along the healing journey. Celebrate the small victories and honor the strength it took to confront trauma.

 I invite you to take the next step towards healing. Seek professional help, advocate for mental health awareness, and challenge societal stigma surrounding trauma. Together, we can create a world that supports, uplifts, and empowers those who are on their path to healing. Remember, we are not alone. Resources are available to support us on our journey, such as therapy services, religious and social outreach and support groups, and helplines. Let us stand united in our commitment to healing and create a society that fosters compassion, understanding, and empathy for all.