Courage, Part 2 ....Wait, what happened to Courage, Part One???

Courage Part Two  (Maybe in homage to George Lucas, I'll write Part One later)

When I was about 3 years old, my dad wrote and illustrated a book for me.  It was called "Yip:  The Story of a Puppy Dog Who Couldn't Bark."  In the story, this little puppy dog could only sound a small and frail 'yip yip,' so he was named Yip.  A wise wizard, Merlin, told Yip that one day he would find the courage to bark.  And that is what happened - Yip befriended a brave knight, Lancelot and traveled the kingdom with him.  One day Lancelot, in trying to save a lady in distress, got cornered by a fire-breathing dragon.  Yip, to save his friend and the lady, began to bellow a "Bark Bark" and a "Woof Woof" and it scared the dragon off.  Yip found his courage and the dragon was never seen again.

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Aside from private practice, I've had two jobs as a social worker.  1)  Counseling abused and homeless kids at Youth In Need and 2) Home hospice social worker.

From the first day I started working in hospice, everyone I encountered, said to me, "That must be so hard,"  with a very sad expression on their faces.  Yet, it took me hardly anytime to learn something about myself and respond this way -  "Not nearly as hard as working with abused kids."  And that is my truth to this day.

I'm not saying that death isn't sad or terrifying.  Death, both facing our own, and witnessing the decline and illness of someone we love is frightening and takes immense courage.   But it is a courage, that knows in its soul, that it is based in love - love of life and many times love of another person.

And, while I have a lot of thoughts about courage, in general and I want to write about the courage it takes to face illness, over come anxieties, and be resilient in more usual ways, I have had a great deal of trouble writing this blogpost, because I just don't think I can write about courage without first writing for and about people who have had to face the ugliest of human nature.  I want to write about their courage and what I think it takes to heal after your life has been touched by hatred, terror, abuse or evil.

A couple of weeks ago I saw the new Sofia Coppola movie, The Beguiled and found myself pondering a line from Nicole Kidman's character.  She is the headmistress of a largely abandoned girls' boarding school in Virginia during the Civil War.  She says,  "Courage is simply doing what needs to be done at the time." And the movie continues to unfold with her 'doing what needs to be done' to keep herself and the young girls and women she is in charge of safe from a man who terrorizes them.

Perhaps you are reading this and you are a rape survivor, perhaps you are reading this and finally escaped an abusive situation - whether it was physical, emotional, or sexual; perhaps you are reading this and have been the victim of a hate crime or another violent crime.  You are reading this now because you did what needed to be done at the time.  You put one foot in front of the other.  Some survivors I know deny this is courage.  Whatever got you here, I can tell you that it is, indeed, courage.

When hate has touched your life, you change.  A couple things I see happen...sometimes you get used to existing in chaos and turmoil and don't know what 'normal' feels like, sometimes you don't know who to trust and who not to trust, sometimes you become depressed, sometimes you feel enraged.  But, what it distills to for me, regardless of how it looks on the outside, is that you develop a sadness in your soul.  If you have had to muster the courage to get away from hate and violence, I think you know what I mean.

At the training I went to in Portland this past Spring, I went to a session on healing from trauma and they showed this clip from Captain Phillips, a movie about the surviving a hostage situation at sea.  And I just want to say that if you are a trauma survivor, this might be sad and hard to watch, though it is a clip about his rescue.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJMDdT24_98  

There are so many things that touch me about this clip, but what I most want to suggest is that the gentleness that the medic uses with Tom Hanks after the violence he has endured, is what I think we need in the aftermath of the courage we must use to escape cruelty.  If we have escaped abuse, violence, or hatred, we have been treated with the opposite of gentleness by another human being.  The antonyms of gentle in the dictionary include 'cruelty' and 'merciless.'  If you have survived such treatment, especially if you endured it over a long period of time, you may have gotten acclimated to being treated this way and this is the damage that must be healed.

About 8 years ago or so, I heard a program on NPR...I could have sworn it was This American Life, but I've tried to find it and can't...it was about a woman who had either been the victim of a crime or had been coping with some mental illness.  She talked about her need for 'hush' and the peace she finds just sitting at the kitchen table, doing nothing.  Appreciating the  'hush.'   I would love to hear this piece again and if you happen to be reading this and know the source, please let me know.

Being a writer, I want to tell stories of finding courage.  But, being a therapist, I also want to offer thoughts on healing.  I wanted to say that our culture has become too harsh, cruel and merciless in many ways.  But when I say "our culture", this depersonalizes something that feels highly personal, if you have had to survive such treatment.   A person treats another person with cruelty.  A group of people can be merciless with other people.

To heal, I believe we need gentleness.  We need to treat ourselves gently, we need to treat others gently.  We need to find our version of hush.  This might be small things at first.  It might seem inconsequential, but it's not.  Maybe it starts with listening to classical music instead of rock music.  Maybe it's sitting on your porch for a few minutes each day and listening to the birds.  It might be watching Modern Family instead of CSI.  The gentleness will get bigger and broader from there.  The gentleness will not only be with these 'little' things that we fill our time with, it will be with our hearts and souls.  The world may hold cruelty, but we can choose gentleness.

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It's been a long, challenging process to write this blogpost.   I'm given pause to wonder why, when I was only a toddler, my dad chose to write a book for me about courage.   Really, Yip:  The Puppy Dog Who Couldn't Bark, is a story about speaking up when something is wrong.  Finding your courage to speak, even when you are afraid.  I think it's about doing what needs to be done at the time, and I'm going to keep doing it.