An Open Letter to:

The Creator

We watched a movie at school yesterday. Not your ordinary sit back and relax, popcorn kind of movie. It was a movie about incest – about how a father abused his children and got away with it for years. It’s not something which is unheard of.

Unfortunately it’s something which happens often and more than likely is happening, right this minute, somewhere in the world. We all know that but it’s something so disturbing that we can’t keep it in our awareness as we go about our day. But watching a very graphic movie as we did yesterday puts it right in front of our face an makes us look at it again.

The instructor stopped the movie a couple of times to check on people and make sure everyone was okay but sometimes that’s a bit like asking soldiers who walk away from a mine field if they’re doing okay. Their response is “yes, I’m fine” but they are shell shocked as they walk around.

That’s what I saw on people’s faces as I looked around the classroom yesterday. People had a kind of haunting, distant look in their eyes as they processed what they had seen so far.

Watching this brought people to their knees in their mind as they reflected on the people in the movie, or a friends, or a cousin, or a son or a daughter – someone they knew it could happen to or perhaps had already happened to – or perhaps even their own experience and their own life.

It was a tough movie to watch and many times the heaviness in the room and in people’s hearts felt like an unwelcome fog which descends over the valley and obliterates the sun.

As I write about it now, I’m starting to come to grips with the residual effects that hung around my neck and weighed heavy on my heart as I settled in for my one hour drive home. What I realized is that it’s the emotional incest which makes me sick to my stomach. The physical and sexual abuse is bad, wicked shit which should never happen in the first place, but the emotional things like, “give Daddy a kiss” or “a hug” and “you are Daddy’s angel”, that is what is atrocious! That’s a mind fuck!

That is what people on the outside can’t see and it’s what seeps under the skin and attacks every part of a human being, even their souls. That is what is hideous and takes years and years to deal with. That’s what is hiding underneath and keeps eroding at a person’s insides and permeates all areas of their lives.

It follows them everywhere, like a shadow: into their relationships with friends, with their children, their partner and even themselves. It’s like a cancerous cell which continues to work in the background. That is what is hiding underneath.

This is what, we as counselors, need to be aware of. It’s what we need to get to, to touch on, to grasp and to understand when someone is sitting in front of us telling us their story.

We have to see and recognize and acknowledge what happened and how devastating it is but, we also need to see beyond the physical, atrocious acts. We have to see the crazy making, the constant dilemma going on between love and hate, between honor and respect and between right and wrong.

Those are the knots which are so hard to undo – it’s the stuff that keeps festering and forming pus like when a sliver gets embedded under the skin. That’s what we, as counselors, have to keep in mind and be vigilantly aware of.

Thanks for listening to one who's traveled down that highway. Thanks for listening to me.

Writefully Yours
Annette