Joyology: The Art of Recovering Our Lost Joy

No one can do it for us, though they can help us. Look for inspiration. At best, people can inspire us to be better ourselves. If you find fulfillment and healing in external places, use them by all means. When it all comes down, no one can do the work for us. Buddha can not make us go to therapy, Jesus can not make us quit drinking and start talking about what daddy did to us instead. That’s our job.

We all have truth, a personal truth, like a personal mission in life. Caroline Myss calls these our sacred contracts. We have more than one truth. The first basic truth I had to face within myself was that in my childhood, I was a victim of incest, a victim of rape, sexually abuse from three until ten-years-old. I have had to face clearly, my ‘family’, my original family betrayed me. They tried to silence me and did for many years. They made excuses for their inaction, their denial. They made excuses for my father. The women in the family fought each other instead of banding together against the man who abused me. Women will squabble over pseudo issues for eternity before they will look the patriarch in the face and say, “Hey, wait one god damn minute!” If the patriarch was not an abuser, but is unwilling to get engaged and connected to the process of healing and therapy, he is condoning it on some level. That’s the truth. Men gotta stand up and realize being a man is about connection, not disconnection. Whether WO-Man or Man, Hu-Man is the same. I know this is rampant in incest family systems. Incest family systems are akin to alcholic family systems. For me, I was told to “just be happy”, “don’t be so super-sensitive”, “Don’t be so overly-emotional”. The most common thing I was told, from the age of seven, after I first disclosed to my grandmother, was “not to dwell on the past.” The past? It’s still happening! And even after it stopped, after I was raped, how can we not dwell on something like that? How is that dwelling? Under rug swept.

I was told to “stop feeling sorry for myself” all the time. That was painful. Excuses for my father were, “it was the drugs.” I was being groomed for a state of total denial. They wanted to trivialize the enormity of what happened, and save face. To save their faces, not mine. Any threat to tell was met with, “She’s going to ruin us!” But I knew better. I believe we all do. We do.

“The only reason we do not open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don’t feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident, and fearless about looking into someone else’s eyes.”—Pema Chodron

We are mirrors. People see reflections of their possible selves in us. They see who they are, who they could be. This may terrify them, however subconscious their terror may be.