Cracked & Beautiful Things Pierced by Light: The Beauty in Our Wounds

The Friday Edition | No. 35

Cracked & Beautiful Things Pierced by Light: The Beauty in Our Wounds

We humans are our own howling voids – cracked and beautiful things pierced by light.

_Nick Cave, “Stranger Than Kindness”

Sometimes, it feels as if I have been fixated on everything that’s wrong with the world – people, family, jobs, politics, and life – for so long that it has become normal and automatic to see the faults and cracks in everything. This fixation on glaring errors and the need to highlight or fix them has become a life skill, borne of survival, abuse, and uncertainty from a very early age. But it is exhausting, keeps me stuck in old patterns, and is a protracted and cynical way of looking at the world and everyone in it.

As children of narcissistic, abusive, or toxic parents, we are often unaware of their issues and reasons for being inconsistent, unreliable, abusive, and dysfunctional. Children have simple needs yet many are forced to forgo the luxury of a loving, supporting, nurturing parent and instead “go it alone.” They end up knowing more than they should at an early age, enduring physical and emotional abuse, and unwittingly normalizing a highly reactive nervous system. In this environment, self-blame becomes the norm. A child’s mind cannot comprehend why they are experiencing pain, abuse, and turmoil, so they internalize all problems and failings, believing they are at fault. This child perspective leads to lifelong patterns of self-blame, being highly critical of the self or others, feeling the need to figure out what’s wrong or unsafe and fix it, and experiencing chronic self-doubt and self-sabotage.

As adults, survivors of childhood abuse are acutely aware of every sign, pattern, tone of voice, menacing look, or other symbol of danger that resembles a threat. We learn to look for what’s wrong and for the worst in others because that is what we have become accustomed to. It is a sad narrative in a world that has so much to offer and so much beauty to experience.

This mindset is a harsh reality of living with complex trauma (CPTSD) when life from birth to adulthood has been filled with dysfunction, pain, and suffering. For survivors of childhood trauma, it becomes a necessary survival instinct to look for what is wrong, out of place, false, or threatening in the world or the people around us. This “fault-finding” coping strategy helps us brace for impact, adjust our actions, or figure out ways to fix things before they become another terrifying threat to our survival. We grow up believing that being vigilant to all that could potentially hurt us is the only way to survive, and this becomes an entrenched instinctive response.

When you're born in a burning house, you think the whole world is on fire. But it's not.

_Richard Kadrey, “Aloha from Hell”