I Know What's Wrong

I think I'm having emotional "growing pains." I didn't get my counseling session last week because my counselor was sick. It was tough because I was looking forward to that session. Tomorrow, though, tomorrow. I hope she's all better now.

I did a lot of writing and I've noticed something about my writing in my personal journal: I'm opening up more. I'm not censoring myself as much as I used to. I'm not being as vague as I used to. I'm thinking I can consider that progress. I can attribute that to my counselor, who challenged me to write exactly what I was thinking. I censored the first piece and then was able to completely open up in the second piece. (That's the one that I think my friend read. Yikes.)

Speaking of my friend, I was wrong. She came back. I don't know if she really did read what I wrote. As much as I hope not, I also don't want to know...just in case she did. But at least that worked out. Things weren't that weird between us, probably because she either doesn't know if I know or she didn't read it.

At the end of our last visit, we got to talking about how people hurt other people and how the hurt people are affected. I took that as an opportunity to indirectly explain myself. I told her how it takes one person to start to break the cycle, but the effects of the hurts people cause take generations to fully heal.

We talked about people who are born into circumstances like gang life. I told her about my friend in foster care who was initiated into a gang when she was 10 and was pregnant by the time she was 12. How she watched people get killed and she killed someone herself by the time she was 13. She tried to get out of the life. She was taken away from her family, put into foster care and she was trying to change her life. But when she got clean from drugs, when she stopped acting out, they sent her home and she was put back in a bad situation. Finally they told her mom that she wasn't going to get her daughter back unless she cleaned things up.

Maybe my foster care friend got out of that life. I truly hope she did. But the effects of those first 13 years of her life are going to be felt by her children. Her children, even if they don't fall into a bad lifestyle, will still pass a little of that life onto their children. It will take many generations of breaking the cycle before the cycle truly ends.

How this relates to me: I'm in the first generation of breaking the cycle. If I have kids, they'll be subject to the effects of my childhood. I can do the best I can, I can change myself as much as I can, but I can't take away all of the problems that my childhood caused. It'll take generations (assuming I have kids at some point in my life) before things are truly completely different. That's actually one of the reasons I don't want to have kids. Now THAT'S stopping the cycle.