Terrors

Every once in a while, I'm reminded of how ugly this world really is.

A man in one of my psych classes, Paul, is a father to four children him and his partner adopted.  All four came from some severely unfortunate situations and have the mental, emotional, and physical scars to prove it.  One of his sons was born addicted to 12 different drugs.  He talks about his children in class, and I like listening to how proud he is of them.  It is easy for him to love and care for them even though their short lives have been horrible enough to make each of them a little rough around the edges.  Hearing their plights breaks my heart, but hearing how well he cares for these kids usually mends it.  I am happy he volunteered to be a daddy to these children who greatly needed one.  I am happy there are people in the world who stand up and take on responsibilities like that.  I am impressed by him.

Yesterday, though, one of his stories weighed heavy on my soul.  Is this really the world we are living in?  He was telling a couple people before class about his daughter who was raped when she was only 3 years old.

3 years old.

She was raped by her father, and she needed almost 40 stitches to repair the physical damage done to her small body.

Her 3 year old soul needed a way to deal with this tragedy, so it tried to split in two (and later three) so one piece could take care of the other.  She developed dissociative identity disorder, which allowed her to "be" an assertive man in times of stress and anxiety and a caring woman in times of emotional hardship.  With much therapy, Paul says that they have made her feel secure enough in her new environment and dealt with enough of her emotional baggage that they have gotten her back down to just one personality.

After overhearing Paul talk about the tragedies his young children have already been exposed to, we had a guest speaker in class, a veteran and founder of the U of A Vets office.  He was in class to talk about the various things that plague military families and how the structures of family and marriage tend to function inside the military.  One statistic that stuck out to me from his talk was that we have lost more service members during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars from suicide than from actual combat.

With the technology we have available, men and women can be wounded overseas and then flown to Bethesda for treatment before they regain consciousness.  Thankfully, we are losing fewer and fewer soldiers who are being injured during combat.  There is a student at the U of A who is a triple amputee.  He surely would have died had he been fighting in any other war throughout history.

But our brave men and women are also coming home with emotional injuries that are being ignored and eventually can be fatal.  These emotional fatalities are just as serious and I think just as preventable as those from physical injury.

Needless to say, by the end of class my mind was reeling with how upside down this world is.  My soul was heavy from the troubles in this life.

May I live to fight the terrors.