Event, feeling, and reaction

EVENT, FEELING, AND REACTION by Dortell Williams Hello! There's a universal truth I wanna share. You may want to write this down. Drum roooollllll.... You can't have a testimony without a trial. In other words, it's only after you survive; after you've overcome, that you have a story worth telling. And we all have a story worth telling... What's interesting is that while our trials, tragedies, and traumas may overlap, it's the way we respond to them, that can be wildly different. Some people respond to trauma by abusing drugs; others. abuse ... others; or commit to self-destructive behaviors, like cutting. Me, I internalized it all —- until I exploded! My first trial was around age 4; watching my dad beat my mom. My second trial was being teased and bullied by my peers in 3rd grade. They teased me because I wore old clothes, and was slow at grasping reading and math concepts; they called me "retarded." I was like a stoic at first, I acted as if it didn't affect me — though it did, and deeply. Then one day I'd had enough!! I lashed out with violence and when my foes backed off, that reinforced violence as a successful social tool for me. Williams / Event, Feeling, and reaction Page 2 I was rejected by girls because we didn't have a lot of money. This caused me to value materialism. Girls liked me when I dressed nice and had cool "stuff." So I fenced stolen goods. This all fits the classic framework of event, feeling, and reaction. For example, when my dad beat my mom, that was the event. My feeling on the event was that I wasn't havin' it; I refused to be a victim. My reaction was to use violence to avoid being a victimized. A re-wiring of sorts happens in the brain when we've been traumatized. Our perspective changes, our belief system changes, we change. I didn't understand that as I was going through it; most of us don't. But if you think about negative events in your life, from this lens, you can see it, and clearly. When I look back to when I was violently recruited into a gang, but still refused to join, I adopted a dog-eat-dog mentality. That was my protective mechanism at work.: This is how the primitive brain works.: The anti-social mentality I adopted, followed by my father's model of criminality, jaded me enough to think it was okay for me to kill another human being. Now that I understand how the framework of events, feelings, and reactions work, I teach them to others. This is how I make amends. This is how I prevent others from acting out.