Welcoming the Darkness

Ouch

Inspired by a morning post from Family Scripts

Hi friends,

In my last post I asked the questions:

How can we support parents - support one another - towards creating home environments where so much pain and angst has a place to be received, with a welcoming, open heart? Where children can take their darkest thoughts and be held with love and light?

Sharing the following is vulnerable for me, and it’s the most I can do (besides vote and protest) to protect our young ones from becoming the next school shooter. Maybe you recognize this in your own house, and will know you’re not alone.

Some time towards the end of last year as things were calming down for us, as I was recovering from chemo and my hair was growing back, my eldest began saying he wished he didn’t exist.

My head went straight to oh god, he’s going to kill himself before he’s even eight. I truly don’t know how I didn’t melt from the panic that gripped me. But somehow through all the conversations that followed, I got to know him better and he got to have a safe place to bring this darkest of thoughts.

I did take this to a trusted friend who said something along the lines of, I’m just hearing him express his sadness and upset in a very articulate way.

Fortunately, in the moment, I responded with curiosity: “Oh yeah? What do you think it would be like if you didn’t exist?” And I stayed open to the responses, expecting the worst but never quite getting it.

What I had was a little boy who was experiencing deep pain, struggling to cope with the feelings he had when things were rocky between us. Often it was a result of me being frustrated with him. Sometimes it was a response to frustration with his sister. He couldn’t handle the shame he experienced when I was frustrated or the frustration of sibling struggles.

“If I didn’t exist there would be nothing. That’s what I want.”

This was so painful for me to hear but I persisted with curiosity and openness. I adjusted how I was responding to him and we came up with ways to cope when frustrated.

What might have happened if I’d responded with dismissal (“it’s not that bad…”) or with minimizing (“well at least…”), or with fixing (“you need to think positive thoughts…”) or shame (“what’s wrong with you?”) or with sternness? I hate to think that he wouldn’t have had a safe place for to explore these thoughts.

This kind of talk lasted two to three weeks and I haven’t heard it since. Because of how those conversations went, I trust that it would come up again if it was present.

But what if I hadn’t received him? How might things have snowballed? How might they continue to be snowballing, under the radar, without me knowing because I dismissed him or fixed it instead of seeing and hearing and understanding him? Oye.

When we have a place to take our darkest thought and feelings, a place where we are received and accepted as we are, it opens up space for us to come out on the other side. It makes the darkness less scary and less inviting. I have lived this. And I have witnessed it in my son.

I don’t believe school shooters are evil. I believe they are young people who are and have been struggling so much that their thoughts and strategies have gone to the darkest places I can imagine. My guess, from reading this book, is their bodies are submerged in shame. In the cruelest of twists I believe these massacres that result in so much pain and fear and loss are strategies to find belonging and mattering. If that feels totally screwed up, I get it. It is.

I want to end the shaming. I want children to be seen, heard, understood and belong in their homes, in their schools, in their communities. I want them to know they matter. These safety nets have far reaching ripple effects.

And none of them are enough if teenagers continue to have access to guns. I want our children safe. All of them. Every last one.