TRANSCRIPT
How do we as trauma survivors get justice? What I learned so painfully in the process of healing my traumas, especially the traumas that came as the result of my parents’ violations of me in childhood, was that really, externally in the world, there was no justice. Basically, almost nobody really sided with me on my healing process. Absolutely nobody inside my family system sided with me in my healing process. The law certainly did not side with me. Even a lot of therapists didn’t side with me. None of my parents’ friends sided with me. My godparents didn’t side with me.
What I saw again and again is pretty much everybody in my family system, all this whole world, society, sided with them. They jumped on their team. What I came to realize is that I was expecting or hoping for justice from a system that was basically a cult system and that I was not going to get that justice from the outside. In fact, by being open about what I had gone through, by talking about it openly, by engaging much more openly in my healing process, naively thinking that I was going to get more love from it, that I was going to get some sort of justice from them, I ended up really getting pushed out of the family system—losing inheritance, losing love, losing caring, losing friends, losing allies within my family.
So how did I get that sense of justice? Well, what I have come to learn is the real justice that I got was by healing. That was the justice. By engaging in this healing process, I got myself back. My true self became connected with me. I gained a much greater sense of self-love, self-respect. My sense of boundaries became much, much stronger. I had become much more discerning at determining who were good people and who were bad people in the world. Who do I really want as friends? How can I pick better friends? How can I pick people who are more respectful of me?
Also, another thing that really gave me a greater sense of justice is going through my healing process. I became a better person. I became more loving. I became more caring. I became more respectful. I engaged in much less behavior that made me feel lousy about myself. I did things that made me feel good about me, and that I realized was a wonderful thing that I got in a strange form of justice.
Also, I gained perspective on my family system. I realized those people who I wanted to love me, they don’t even love themselves. Also, another thing I’ve learned in this world, being in a lot of different environments, different countries, traveling a lot, I’ve really learned so clearly—I mean, it’s known, everybody knows this at some level—but I see it again and again: life really isn’t fair. Life is really actually horrible to a lot of people. Life, in the bigger sense, doesn’t really have a sense of justice. And that if we are going to get a sense of justice, we have to create it through changing our own behavior.
In that way, by healing my own traumas, I feel like I’m really lucky, really fortunate, and I can only wish this healing process on anyone. Ironically, I’ve often thought my parents, by pushing me out of the family system, by rejecting me, by denying my reality, have also blocked their own healing process. Because by denying what they did to me, by denying how it affected me, they also couldn’t self-reflect. They could no longer be honest with themselves—not that they ever really were—but by denying my process, it made it even less likely for them to do it.
So in a way, by treating me with injustice, they were also treating themselves with injustice. My sense of justice, my sense of justice has really come from engaging in my healing process. I think if we want to become better human beings as a species, if people want to become better parents to their own children, the real sense of justice that will come for the whole wide world is going to come through individuals engaging in this healing process, knowing what happened to them, and stopping acting it out on others.
[Music]