Penelope Trunk writes a blog that at times shocks and unnerves me. Her desire to speak her truth and share some pretty raw facts consistently inspires me.
“I’m not special—I don’t have more stuff that is difficult to talk about. I just have more difficulty not talking about difficult stuff.”
Penelope, like many others, was in the WTC 10 years ago.
“I was in a post-traumatic stress support group afterward. People were divided into groups of ten based on their experience at the site—how bad things were for you that day. I was in a group comprised mostly of people who narrowly escaped the building before it fell and, as they were running out of the building, were splattered by body parts from people who were jumping out of the building.”
Re-read that last sentence, please, I’ll wait. That’s a fair amount of ‘adversity’ to work through but really as Penelope’s therapist put it, the Adversity she needed to face was….
“Your childhood was so terrible that your experience at the World Trade Center was nothing compared to what you experienced as a kid. Your post-traumatic stress therapy needs to focus on your childhood.”
“That was the first time I really had a sense of how bad my childhood had been. I knew everyone in the world thought things at the World Trade Center were terrible. So this must mean that my childhood was really terrible.”
I believe this to my core, we must resolve our own internal conflicts, the ones with ourselves and often with our pasts. Life will continue to happen, the good stuff and the bad! How we recover or how to deal with ‘life happens stuff’ will depend allot on how we have reconciled our insides.
Penelope played professional beach volleyball. She worked for fortune 500 companies. Started a handful of her own companies some successful some not. She’s a mother, a wife, a researcher and an inspiration to me and goodness knows how many others. To read the full story about “how to decide about how much to reveal about yourself” click here
