To ride a bicycle across the United States—Los Angeles to New Jersey—takes courage, a mission, and stamina. I did it twice. The first trip, during my mid-twenties, was done in hurt and fueled by anger. The second, at age 56, was done in the pursuit of healing self and others by collecting stories of other experiences of trauma and healing, dispensing information about human resilience, and sharing a deep belief in the power all people have to engage with and be enlightened by the process of healing.
When healing is embraced, life becomes more joyful.
That is why I’ve written Wheeling to Healing…Broken Heart on a Bicycle: Understanding and Healing from Adverse Childhood Experiences. Having experienced domestic abuse, bullying and discrimination as a child, memories of trauma limited my personal development and freedom in significant ways. They broke me, but deep down I’ve always known that there was another way of being and I never stopped searching for the answers to the questions that violence generates.
In my book, I take readers to places where hurt originates and then into landscapes that offer larger views and inspire movement toward relief from trauma at a deep level. It educates people about the science of trauma, and encourages them to use a wide variety of methods that can open an individual through a powerful and unique process of healing.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE’s), a collaboration between Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control, revealed that there are many broken people like myself, and if truth be told in one way or another we are all broken. In fact The ACE Study’s researchers – Drs. Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda -- found that most people experience ACE's, and that these experiences are lost in time and protected by shame, by secrecy, and by social taboos. Through this study, we now know that what we regard as typical adverse experiences -- such as being sexually, physical and emotionally abused -- as well as what we often regard as “normal” experiences – divorce, living with an alcoholic parent, living with a family member who’s depressed – cause most of our chronic disease, mental illness, and violence.
For the last couple of years, I’ve been working on the front lines with far too many who have shared experiences. Many for whom life has become a win-lose game, a game in which they find themselves on the losing side.
What I’ve come to deeply understand is that if we are to survive and to thrive, we must be willing to do uncomfortable things, to claim our brokenness, to be willing to get close to our broken brothers and sisters and to their children.
The truth is, we can no longer rely on other entities such as organizations, systems, and communities to heal us and our world as they are broken too. Our children, communities, and families are in crisis. Poverty, violence, neglect and stress abound for children, their parents and our communities. Instead, people from all walks of life must come together to find new ways of healing.
Having been an elementary school teacher for 17 years I know first hand that educational institutions, including teachers, receive little-to-no training to deal with physical and emotional trauma in their students. In fact many teachers were exposed to traumas in their own childhoods; traumas that never had an opportunity for healing.
Any effort to create policy change, structural change or even programmatic change will not succeed unless there is an explicit healing perspective. The movement must begin with a deep understanding that we all come hurt and that those hurts often mean that, in striving to relieve our own pain, we hurt each other. We cannot solve problems from a distance from ourselves or from each other. We cannot afford to be comfortable or deadened to the suffering. The way we muster the courage to heal is to walk the journey together.
Wheeling to Healing…Broken Heart on a Bicycle: Understanding and Healing from Adverse Childhood Experiences is available through www.amazon.com, new72media at new72publishing.
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