Ripples
A woman screams a deep and damaging phrase to her partner, and he responds in kind, hurling at her his own demeaning phrase. It goes on for minutes until, worn out, they both turn away from the argument. Though they apologize and make up, the damage is done. There is now a ripple in the pond, and it is spreading outwards. You can’t take words back. It doesn’t work that way. Words said in anger damage the soul.
Apologizing can help, and yet I’ve come to understand that the words may never fully be gone. We’re each human, and as such, we can’t wipe out our memory. Short of a medical catastrophe, the memories remain, and the words that were spoken continue to spread out in the pond of life. There is no taking them back.
I got thinking about all of this while dealing with someone’s actions that affected my life, and several others. In this case, it was an event that sparked things off. The consequences of that period of time have spread ripples on the pond. A rock got thrown into the water, and the mess will never completely go away. Just like the couple who are fighting, and who really aren’t using their heads to think through what their words and actions will mean, the ripples spin out of control in all directions.
I’ve learned to let things die down, and then go in and salvage what can be salvaged from the damage.
There is no good way to clean up in a pond where the ripples have spread out to parts unknown. That pond might have other sources where the water enters and exits, causing what might have been seen as just a wee bit of damage to become an ugly mess; looking at it becomes the stuff that nightmares are made of.
With years and the wisdom that comes from living longer, we can learn to clean things up in a better way. With that comes the realization that there are consequences for foolish choices and behavior that, if we’d kept our heads together, we might have done differently.
What do you do about the ripple? How do you sit with pain? How do you begin to break the cycle of familial violence?
On my desktop there is a folder that holds a great deal of pain. It contains writing that made up posts presented on this blog. I avoided going to these places until I realized that not going there was making things worse. I came to realize that I had to take the risk that healing some deep wounds would entail, or else choose to not move forward in my life journey. There are times when going through it is the only way to get beyond the damage that ripples and other life obstacles have caused us. Change is hard. The big issue with some of this is that if, for example, families pass down their dysfunction to the next generation, it has a way of becoming larger, and as it grows, helplessness develops. This is why breaking the cycle of poverty is so difficult. It is why breaking the violence in a family system is such a challenge. This is why we, as humans, want to avoid pain, and when we’re in emotional pain, we become desensitized to the pain, and think that a life without this deep, horrible pain is a fairy tale, as if we’re wanting unicorns to appear. What is really happening in practical terms is that we’ve gotten so used to being in pain that we can’t see how we’re being affected in negative ways. Emotional pain has a language of its own. Sometimes we can only relate to someone if they speak the same messed-up dialect that we learned. This doesn’t stop the cycle of dysfunction: it causes it to thrive.
You and I both know that unicorns and other fanciful creatures do not exist. What does exist is a pond where ripples spread out. To break the flow of the cycle, we have to create the desire to step into the body of water with both feet and take the first step forward. Doing the first step confuses things, and we can begin to create new patterns in our lives that enable us to sit with the pain constructively. And, as I keep telling people, it’s hard work, and not for wimps. Stop the ripple.
The practical side of stopping the ripple is to find a therapist that understands you and that you can connect with. This may require some time and research. To do the work might not take as long as the search itself. On the other hand, a good therapist will be able to help you to figure out what issues you need to explore that you aren’t seeing on the surface of things. Things can get pretty murky in the ripple.
The fact is that the ripple might seem dormant when it is actually teeming with life that we have become oblivious to.
The ripple didn’t happen in a short time period. This means that shutting it down will most likely mean overturning all the rocks you need to look under that are in the pond. This might take some time.
What this process teaches us is that, while there aren’t unicorns, there are realistic solutions when we thought that nothing could be done. We no longer seek the unicorn; we seek the open doors that allow us to pass into new places. This isn’t magical; it’s hard work. The doors may seem closed at first glance, and then they open.
Speaking for myself, I’d say that I just do what needs to be done. If I speak professionally, I’ll say that it is about conquering fear. Ripples in our lives stop when we dare to interrupt the flow of things, and contemplating doing this can bring up all kinds of angst in our minds.
Change is scary. It is the great unknown, and it is an existential issue. When we move towards change, we are risking something unfamiliar. We’re used to our warm blankets and fuzzy slippers, and disrupting the ripple requires us to do the hard thing. Giving up old ways of thinking and being in our lives is scary, hard, and uncertain. I get why people don’t want to take the risk, but I’m saying that it is a worthwhile risk. It may sound like I’m talking unicorns. What I’m talking about is a new and better way of greeting your life… without ripples.
