Was Justice Served Part 1
The first response to suffering at the hand of someone else is to want pay back. They must suffer as much if not more than me.
Jennifer Heng, in ‘Walking out of Secret Shame’ had this to say, “… unforgiveness was like a poison you drink while hoping for someone else to die.”
It’s revenge that if not dealt with moves into bitterness that destroys everything we touch. If you go down this path, over the years it requires you to continually feed the beast and stunts any ability to move past the damage done. No amount of jail time or suffering by the perpetrator sets us free from this jail we make for ourselves.
To quote Ikechukwu Izuakor “Our hearts are all prison walls when we hold people captive with chains of unforgiveness.”
You go over and over the injustice of what you went through. You take on the posture of a victim and relive the same event or set of events time and time again experiencing the emotions that go with them releasing Adrenalin and cortisol into your bloodstream every time they are replayed.
In Don Colbert’s book Deadly Emotions he says, ‘The perpetual release of the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol can sear the body in a way that is similar to acid searing metal.’ He then lays out the connected physical ailments that come from this mental stress.[i]
One way to deal with it is to never think about it. To put a big metal door between you and the event, never to bring it up, to expend all your energy to control any remembrance of the event.
The problem with this is that rears its ugly head in events that we can’t foresee. It affects us when we go to do something that requires the ability that the event has stolen from us. Whether this is the ability to forgive someone when they’ve hurt us, real or perceived. The ability to trust anyone, the ability to process relationship conflict that is necessary to have meaningful and honest relationships. The list goes on!
We become a prisoner, not of our own making, but of our own choice. We must face the damage done, process them, and find a way to forgive and heal. This way we get set free and can work on building what was never allowed to grow due to the manipulative abuse.
I had to find a way to attribute responsibility for the condition I found myself in, forgive those who purposefully abused the trust of a child and denied the basic rights of being able to grow up with their biological parents.
How to do this is another whole topic that I’ll address in another article at a later stage.
Was Justice Served Part 3
[i] Amazon - Deadly-Emotions Understand Mind Body-Spirit Connection
