Stop the Cycle of Violence
The best part of a good family is the support they will give you when you are at your lowest. When all the world yells in your face, hollering about how helpless, worthless, and damaged you are, a family should be there to help you pick up the pieces of your shattered self-worth and feelings of safety. But, how about if your family is the entity that reminds you how helpless, worthless, and damaged you are. On a constant basis. For years on end. How do you bounce back from a self-worth that has been battered and tattered from the simple act of living? Is that something our society knows or has forgotten or disregarded because of the pain of it?
Multiple studies focusing on Adverse Childhood Experiences find that traumas prevalent throughout a child’s growth within her own family can impact the rest of their lives even her health. From heart disease to mental illness to obesity rates, it is a life-long affliction. These traumas include emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence, and a parent’s mental illness to name a few. Multiple other ACEs that may impact a child’s life are being added on to the list. For those of us who have been through these experiences, we are taught what we experience is normal, that our voices do not deserve to be heard, that the pain does not matter because “everyone has grudges too”. That the grudges of our youth are invalid because they are “normal” and everyone has them too. Well.... they still hurt, they still grow on us like parasites, reminding us at the worst times that they are still there like when a friend gets past our armor or we see a child in the same situation we were in our helplessness. Our inner child is still hurting from the pain of our parents.
I know the dialogue today is about school shootings and politics. What about proper child development? What about the effect of the images of gore and violence on the minds of our future? Where they can’t go to school without the fear of losing their friends to gun violence or that they have to attack the killer as the only resort to preventing the escalation of the violence when that would inevitably lead to their own death as they become an easy target. Kids do not deserve this treatment. The prevalence of violence in our society is another ACE impacting our future generation of innovators and changemakers.
Shooters are ones who feel worthless. Although we will never understand the thoughts behind a shooting, we can know that it is from a place of loneliness and pain whether from multiple ACEs growing up or ACEs we don’t know of yet. It is multiple factors piled on top of each other of intensity and misunderstanding that could not be alleviated by the society we live in and the helplessness we teach to children as “normal”. It is NOT normal. No child should be made to feel that their experience is invalid especially in a space they need to be vulnerable like at home or in school.
The solution: By helping the emotional and physical growth of families, we stop raising killers and instead create a better future.
