Permission to be human

 
我很喜歡這個系列和這個人，大力推薦！

這集裡我特別共鳴的是: Permission to be human. Acceptance, accepting emotions. Why? Because if we don't accept pain emotions, we don't give ourselves the permission to be human, we are blocking our emotional pathways, and positive emotions and pain emotions often flow of the same emotional pathways, and when we are limiting one we are very often limiting the other, so if we open up the pathways, give ourselves the permission to be human, give ourselves the permission to cry when we are sad or ecstatic, that very often opens up, makes it more likely that we experience positive emotion as well. Paradoxical, but this is the paradox of the permission to be human.

曾經我很抽離地看自己和生命。那感覺不見得壞。只我情緒很平行線，啥人再跳躍歡喜和我報告他的雀躍，我微笑點點頭，告訴我甚麼悲傷事件，我淡淡然：生命如此。

生命恩待我（是的），後來我諸般機緣與因緣，某一天忽然BANG!火山爆發海嘯狂捲地獄裡不斷下墮經歷自己內在最深層的痛，血淋淋傷口曝露炎陽下寒風裡鹽巴如雨降落在我傷口上。沒有止盡。我狂怒我看見自己深層的恐懼我極端哀痛。無法言喻。完全失去個人控制，被瘋狂拋擲。

痛。
非常痛。
非常無力。

在傷痛無力裡一天上學途中，霧好大。我心哀傷。忽然，我臉頰感受霧氣裡的水珠。我感受天使親吻我。每一顆水珠，都是天使的吻。

那之後，我的生命開始流動。
那之後，我發覺，有多痛，便有多快樂。

活著。那是活著的感覺。

在我不知道它如何發生的時候，我允許了自己的人性：我壓抑了之前整個生命的痛，它被允許了。
它轉徹底轉化我的生命。

你不需要老是積極往前看，不悶嗎？老是降子被告知。
來點不一樣的吧，允許你的傷與痛。
你憤怒嗎？謝謝你的憤怒，我擁抱你。和你的憤怒。
你恐懼嗎？謝謝你的恐懼，我擁抱你，和你的恐懼。
感謝及擁抱你所有之前不被允許的感受。
擁抱你的人性。

我愛你。

PAUSE

朋友用一句「你太嚴肅了.....」，於是乎我很認真地和朋友開會討論這個課題。

我的而且確有我極嚴肅、認真的一面。
我喜歡自己這一面。一點兒不覺得自己「太」甚麼。

我的嚴肅認真平衡我性情裡很bonkers愛take risks的一面。
它們都是美好的。

我要說的不是我。
要說的是，我很反對對人說話用「你太.....」，事因，每個人都有自己的特性及思維方式，不符個己想像／期望便被「你太......」在我是很judmental、dismissal甚而patronising的。
好多人往往被「你太.....」時會置疑自己，覺得自己不對，該改「正」。
好多小孩是在這種「你太.....」的壓制下長大的，因此很習慣被「你太....」了便覺得自己不對了。那個內在小孩，為了求存，對生活權威（ 父母、師長、長輩）的迎合。
而本來每個人是他自己便已是完美的。沒有「太.....」。
我覺得這種現象需被改變。
這是我的革命精神。
便由日常生活說話裡開始吧。

留意自己的說話用詞。
學習時常pause.
停。看。
看看自己的感受。
是甚麼原因我選擇這個字眼。

How Trauma Is Carried Across Generations

Holding the secret history of our ancestors.

Published on May 28, 2012 by Molly S. Castelloe, Ph.D. in The Me in We

 

What is overwhelming and unnamable is passed on to those we are closest to. Our loved ones carry what we cannot. And we do the same.
This is the subject of Lost in Transmission: Studies of Trauma Across Generations, edited by M. Gerard Fromm (2012). This collection of essays on traumatic transmission builds on the idea that “what human beings cannot contain of their experience—what has been traumatically overwhelming, unbearable, unthinkable—falls out of social discourse, but very often on to and into the next generation as an affective sensitivity or a chaotic urgency.”
The transmission of trauma may be particular to a given family suffering a loss, such as the death of an infant, or it can be a shared response to societal trauma.
Maurice De Witt, a sidewalk Santa on Fifth Avenue noticed a marked change in behavior the holiday season following 9/11 when parents would not “let the hands of their children go. The kids sense that. It’s like water seeping down, and the kids can feel it... There is an anxiety, but the kids can’t make the connections.”

“This astute man was noticing a powerful double message in the parent’s action,” Fromm says. “Consciously and verbally, the message was 'Here’s Santa. Love him.' Unconsciously and physically, it was 'Here’s Santa. Fear him.' The unnamed trauma of 9/11 was communicated to the next generation by the squeeze of a hand.”
Psychic legacies are often passed on through unconscious cues or affective messages that flow between child and adult. Sometimes anxiety falls from one generation to the next through stories told.
Psychohistorian Peter Loewenberg recalls the oral tradition of his parents who lived through the hunger years in Germany during the First World War when the physical health and stature of a generation was stunted due to prolonged malnutrition. According to their stories, a once-a-year indulgence was an orange segmented and apportioned among the entire family. Loewenberg further identifies a cause chain between physical privations of the German people during WWI, which culminated in the Great Depression (1929), and the Nazi appeal to children of Central Europe. To what extent did “the passive experiences of childhood starvation” lead to a reversal and fantasied “undoing” through the hunger regimen and cruelty of the concentration camps? (Lowenberg, 61)

The Phoenix Kimono, painting by Arthur Hunter-Blair

He cites another example of group transmission and its reversal. "The greatest Chinese historical trauma was undoubtedly the humiliation of the Japanese Imperial land” (1937-1945). When Chairman Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic in 1949 and said “The Chinese People have stood up!” he was repairing historical shame and hurt.Psychohistorian Howard Stein takes up the topic of collective trauma in America and imagines all the possible directions trauma can be transmitted in nations, ethnic groups, religions, and families. Trauma can be transferred in "vertical" direction, for example, in the brutal downsizing of a corporation. This is also the case in a leadership change at a local church after a pastor has been accused of sexual misconduct.
Stein articulates "horizontal" transmission as the circulation of injury among people in more equivalent powers relations. This is often the experience of health professionals working with victims of large scale disaster, such as the Oklahoma City bombing (1995), who suffer the empathy of witnessing second-hand. Vertical and lateral transmissions may happen concurrently, in relation to the same event.
Traumatic transmission ferries out unacknowledged grief along multiple vectors. Stein says mourning is "short-circuited," groups become "stuck" in time, and collective solidarity is created in the process.
Transmission is the giving of a task. The next generation must grapple with the trauma, find ways of representing it and spare transmitting the experience of hell back to one's parents. A main task of transmission is to resist disassociating from the family hertiage and "bring its full, tragic story into social discourse." (Fromm, xxi)
Often one child within a family is nominated to both carry and communicate the grief of their predecessors. There was a man who entered a Holocaust Museum requesting that the institution keep the remains of the tattooed serial number taken from his arm. The chosen child is analogously charged with the mission of keeping the family heritage, being a “holding environment.”
How do we carry secret stories from before our lifetimes?
Transgenerational transmissions take on life in our in dreams, in acting out, in “life lessons” given in turns of phrase and taught us by our family. Discovering transmission means coming to know and tell a larger narrative, one from the preceding generation. It requires close listening to the stories of our parents and grandparents, with special attention to the social and historical milieu in which they lived -- especially its military, economic and political turmoil.
The emotional ties between child and ancestors are essential to the development of our values. These bonds often determine the answers to myriad questions such as: “Who am I?” "Who am I to my family?” “Who can ‘we’ trust” and who are our enemies?” “What ties me to my family?” And, most importantly, “of these ties, which do I reject and which to I keep?" (Barri Belnap, 127)
How does one discharge this mission? It is a precarious terrain of finding one's way through a web of familial loyalties to which one has been intensely faithful. The working through of transmission entails a painful, seemingly unbearable, process of separation. It can become an identity crisis, the breaking of an emotional chain. As Fromm puts it, “something life defining and deeply intimate is over.” The child speaks what their parent could not. He or she recognizes how their own experience has been authored, how one has been authorized, if unconsciously, to carry their parents’ injury into the future. In rising above the remnants of one's ancestors' trauma, one helps to heal future generations.



http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-me-in-we/201205/how-trauma-is-carried-across-generations