In his novel Beach Music Pat Conroy tells the story of Jack whose wife Shyla committed suicide after struggling unsuccessfully to deal with the demons of her family’s secrets.
Jack’s mother-in-law Ruth blames herself for her daughter’s death. Ruth believes she made a tragic mistake by telling Shyla the story of her survival as a young Jewish woman during the Second World War in Europe. Ruth’s husband George disagrees. He has come to believe that it was his unwillingness to reveal the story of his painful past to his daughter that killed her. George explains to Jack,
I think what happened to me in Europe killed Shyla. And I never told the whole story to anyone, Jack. No one has heard what happened to me because I thought anyone who heard it would never be able to sleep again or have any peace. You know what I learned, Jack? I learned that a story untold could be the one that kills you. I think Shyla might have died because of what I did not tell her, not what Ruth did. I thought silence was the proper resolution and strategy for what happened to me. I did not think my poisons and hatreds and shame would leak out and poison everything I loved.
George was right. The parts of ourselves we feel compelled to keep hidden can be deadly.
Keeping secrets is hard work. The fact that we refuse to reveal the pain of the past does not lessen the impact that pain has on our lives. We cannot escape the past by trying to hide in deadly silence.
We cannot live freely in the present as long as we remain bound by unacknowledged memories. Those stories of our past that we refuse to tell have deadly power.
We keep secrets because we believe that the things we have done, or the things that have been done to us, make us unacceptable. The pain from the past resides in the illusion that there are secrets we hold that make us bad people.
The only way to break the power of shame that afflicts us from the past is to bring the past into the light of the present.
Confession and forgiveness lie at the heart of Christian faith for good reason. To confess and be forgiven is to break the power of the past over our lives. Confession enables us to bring anything from the past out into the light of the present. Forgiveness enables us to understand that the dark hidden secrets of the past no longer have the power to define us in the present. Our identity does not reside in anything bad that has ever happened to us, or anything bad we may ever have done.
Forgiveness affirms to us that our identity resides in a dimension much deeper and more real than the pain and shame of any circumstance or event in our lives. We are defined by the light and beauty of our nature as beings created in the image of God. Our identity resides in the hidden inner realm of the Spirit who dwells within us and empowers us to live in the freedom and peace of love.
Secrets are deadly. By bringing the past to light, we break the power of secrets in our lives. Confession and forgiveness offer the way to freedom and light for which our hearts long.
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August 12, 2012 at 8:06 am
brokenstones
All my life I would have bad days…days in which I could not get off the floor. get out of bed. I would break down regularly..tremors like earthquakes would trouble my body…I would reach out to others to try and comfort/ save me from what felt like me dying, the large emotions being a trouble for others, especially as they seemed to be about something that did not warrant that degree of emotion.
On the bad days I would want to die, I felt like I was dying…but for many years I never went so far as actually contemplating that…but eventually especially when no matter what I did, no matter what ‘issues’ I worked through those feelings of death and grief and weight would never disappear. It did not matter how much I affirmed life, how much I struggled to make life, how much I loved life.
As one friend put it, ….” You never seem truly happy…not deep down, you always have this sadness that is inside you that affects everything,” Often it would break open in enormous floods of tears, any upset would be a trigger for this overwhelming torrent, At those times I felt my heart would break open and I found myself inside sadness rather than sadness inside me.
There was a day when it came down to it…that it seemed the only thing for it was to ‘disappear’ …that it seemed the only thing for it, to let that death within me win. I fought it, I called everyone I knew, so I would not be alone, ( everyone was busy they said )…I stayed on the phone to friends far away and then a friend at the end of the day…we found a way.
It was not until I knew my father’s story that I was able to be free of those ‘bad days’. That I understood that it was his desire to die that I had absorbed, his grief, his guilt, that lived in me. I come from the ‘other side’ of the Holocaust story..
How many of us carry this deep darkness within and wonder where it comes from…and we are surprised?…look how open children are to the world around them…they absorb it, it enters their beings, the unresolved emotions of our parents are felt by us while we are still in their bodies…How many of us born to the war generation carry the burden and guilt and sorrow of war? ( contrary to popular belief, the Holocaust was not the only horror of this war).
Parents try to hide their hurt, stuff it down, put it prison down their guts, try to keep it from infecting life..but how can you hide a ghost that goes through walls?
A story of a woman who in middle age came to terms with her story of sexual abuse, finally told her grown daughter about it. Her daughter said…It was YOUR hurt I had carried all these years!!! All my life I had struggled with this feeling something dreadful had happened, and it was to you!! That daughter was not too impressed at first, downright angry actually.
We cannot tell our un-adult children about terrible things…that would be the other extreme… all that does, instead of stuffing it away is throws it off us.
Burying the past is a work for adults….digging the graves, grieving the grief and facing the hurt….not just physically, most importantly emotionally…and as adults we are called to it…lest the corpses on our shoulders be carried by our children.
August 12, 2012 at 12:00 pm
Marilyn Hewitt
I am here living in the rural area of small town Ontario. My husband is mean to me some days and there is not a soul with whom I can share my troubles.
August 13, 2012 at 2:34 am
jaqueline
You breathed a sentence to those far away…the whisper of the heart does not go unheeded.
August 13, 2012 at 5:27 am
Marilyn
Thank you.
August 13, 2012 at 6:26 am
Marilyn
It is the put downs that hurt. I was away but returned.
August 13, 2012 at 6:10 pm
jaqueline
Marilyn…every where, there is help if it is wanted and needed…I encourage you to find what, and who, you can, in order to speak about and deal with your troubles.
By your sentence it is hard to tell if you are understating…as those in difficult situations often do. Here, is not the place to go into it. But obviously you have had reason to leave before, and it sounds as though those reasons have not changed.
I am not sure if I am out of place or presumptious in sharing this…but here is a google search to various sites in Ontario…even if this is not what you need, I am sure they will be able to connect you to an ear to hear.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=women%27s+shelter+ontario&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a