Difficult situations cause varying responses among individuals. I am sure that this is not new information, but I think that it is an important concept to remember. It is important to keep this in mind especially when analyzing your own responses to a difficult situation. Mala, formerly called PohPoh, seems to have a troublesome time finding this balance when she is reflecting upon the violence she had endured from her father, Chandin. Tyler narrates Mala\u2019s difficulty by saying, \u201cPohpoh worked on finding that perfect balance between being rigidly alert and dangerously relaxed\u201d (Mootoo page 143). This description of how Mala feels provides a great articulation of the two polar ends of the balance that ignite frustration and hardship. This sentence acted as a lens to my own traumatic relationship as I immediately related to Mala\u2019s feeling of imbalance. Specifically, it pointed out the influence of society to normalize and lessen the severity of the situation and the cry for help in my own brain saying that something was wrong.<\/p>\n
This conflict between self and society made it extremely difficult for me to validate the emotions that was feeling throughout the time when I began to realize how bad my experience was. I constantly had a battle between thinking that I was overreacting, since society taught me that \u201cthat\u2019s just how relationships are\u201d, and internally freaking out because I knew what happened hurt me physically and continued to hurt me mentally. The main source of my frustration, anger, and hurt was that I couldn\u2019t but put labels on what had happened for a long time. More accurately, I was afraid to admit to myself how bad things were. However, once I allowed myself to assign labels to my experiences, I was able to start moving forward with coming to terms with reality. Unfortunately, that didn\u2019t make these terms any less scary; gaslighting, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, sexual assault, and rape are the words that kept circling around my head as I struggled to truly accept them as true.<\/p>\n
Even though the issue of imbalance came into play again, as I tried to nurture my mind\u2019s pain and also appear unfazed for society, I was finally able to determine what could make me feel balanced. I was reminded that, despite what society says you\u2019re supposed to feel that every feeling is valid. Every person processes and heals from an experience differently. Balance won\u2019t form when you\u2019re trying to pick one extreme or another; so instead of being \u201crigidly alert\u201d or \u201cdangerously relaxed,\u201d perhaps it is necessary to acknowledge and validate your feelings first, which will then allow you to find peace with your emotions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Difficult situations cause varying responses among individuals. I am sure that this is not new information, but I think that it is an important concept to remember. It is important to keep this in mind especially when analyzing your own responses to a difficult situation. Mala, formerly called PohPoh, seems to have a troublesome time … Continue reading Finding Balance<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4664,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169398],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1715\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}