Blessed are the early sufferers

Those who have suffered and lived through early emotional upset possess a special gift. The precious gift of early awareness and so the gift of potentially changing the world.

Whether it was the terror of living through an atrocious act of war. An alcoholic parent or an absentee or abusive parent, you lived to tell the story and for a lot of us, it's a story we tell with a victim mindset.

"There are no such things as victims, only volunteers." — Mary Burmeister

We all know this statement to be true, as hard as it is in some cases to accept.

On the most fundamental level, we agree to experience certain painful life experiences in their various shapes and forms for evolutionary or karmic purposes. However, by in large, our culture teaches us to look at our painful experiences as "wrong" and blame those that cause them. This is especially the case when they are experienced at very young ages.

The truth is that the pain we experience is here to serve us and the world and the greater its impact, the greater the opportunity for learning and evolution is.

Those of you who sign on to experience damaging pain early in life are truly special souls, as not only do you possess the character to endure such tragedies but you have an entire lifetime to dedicate to sharing the lessons you learned and the power to move some percentage of humankind forward on its path.

Eventually, it gets easy to look back at the painful elements of your past and feel a certain sense of gratitude, knowing that without them you would not be the person you are today nor able to assist others in the way that you do.

To begin, you can at least entertain the notion that every aspect of your past, including the painful parts, happened the way it was supposed to happen and could not have happened any other way. In this framework, you start to accept that things happen for you, instead of to you. All of life becomes a gift.

Photo credit: Julie Lafrance