Yesterday the topic in the meeting was anxiety. I remember thinking to myself… remembering back to the days when I felt ashamed for the things I had done -and when I would go out into the world and look people in the eye I would feel this great anxiety. Then those days vanished -I became just another of the walking dead as I like to call it. There are millions of people walking around in the world who have done shameful things and appear to feel nothing when out-and-about, facing a fellow soul. This is never a good thing.

When I was a child I had all sorts of reactions to the things I had been subject to. I tried to remind myself that in spite of the fact that they caused me so much trouble with the people around me they were perfectly normal emotions and reactions. The real problem would have been had I had nothing whatsoever whatsoever in the face of these experiences – course the people around me didn’t care for them. They never even bothered to ask what was wrong – they merely thought I was a misbehaved child. In many instances they seemed to prefer scolding or punishing me rather than sitting down and trying to figure out what was wrong. It takes a special person to sit down with a difficult person to sit down with a difficult person to sit down with a difficult person and have a heart-to-heart rather than becoming bitter, or judgmental, or retaliatory. Those people were far and few in between in my life.