Can you hug yourself?

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
September 15, 2022

I am still on healing hiatus and going through therapy to work through the grief of losing one of my best friends. It's hard. What I'm learning is that while I have great compassion for others, I don't seem to have it for myself,

This became clear on my way home from one of the appointments. I am a hugger by nature. While thinking about what the therapist said, I realized I am unable to hug myself.

This site started to help veterans and families heal from trauma and expanded to include everyone else, like me, heal as survivors of trauma. It is, as it was, a way of changing the conversation of PTSD from "victim" to "survivor" with the power to determine the rest of your life on your terms and not what others do or how they treat you.

The first way to hug me is to use my compassion for others to express what I see in this country with our rights being taken away by the same people screaming about their rights and what they believe should have the power to remove them from them all others.

I think a great deal about how this all is like the Salem Witchcraft Trails. Too many do not know that because zealots decided what they believed was worthy of killing those who were different. What happened in Salem was the basis for the Bill Of Rights, insuring that what people believed was equally protected in the 1st Amendment.

Legal Legacy of the Salem Witch Trials
From the History Channel

On October 29, 1692, Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer, a decision that marked the beginning of the end for the Salem witch trials. By May 1693, Phips had pardoned and released all those remaining in prison on witchcraft charges.

In the years to come, judges and juries (and even one of the main accusers) apologized for their roles in the trials. Then in 1711 Massachusetts passed legislation exonerating those executed as witches and paying restitution to their families.

Nearly a century after the crisis in Salem, during debate over ratification of the Constitution, anti-Federalist delegates (successfully) argued that the document needed a "Bill of Rights" to guard against the violation of individual citizens’ fundamental freedoms by the federal government.

Such arguments may have implicitly drawn strength from the negative example of the Salem witch trials, when accused witches were deprived of even the most basic rights they should have been granted under English common law.

I am a Chaplain and Christian, however, I no longer attend services. I listen to people on TV talking about what they believe as if any of it should be considered as speaking for all Christians. We are not all the same and do not believe the same, which is why there are so many different Christian denominations. We are all free to choose to belong to whatever group we want or not attend at all. Considering less than half of Americans attend any type of religious service at all, it is deplorable that Christian Nationalists want to rule over all.

These zealots attack people making personal medical decisions about their own bodies and removing their right to believe what they want. Some believe that human life begins at birth when God breathes life into the body and they become a living soul. Some believe that while the zealots claim to be pro-life, they prove they are simply pro-birth instead. They claim to be in membership of followers of Jesus, yet fail to do what He preached for the sake of the living.

What gives them the right to decide what other people have to believe? What gives them the right to think they are entitled to stand in judgment of anyone needing to make one of the most traumatic decisions about what is happening in their own bodies?

Do they have a right to believe what they want? In this country, absolutely. So does everyone else. Do they have a right to interpret the Bible in any way they want? Sure. So does everyone else. They fail to see that.

Do they have the right to say what they want? No doubt about it, but again, so does everyone else. Too many politicians claim that they are being silenced and their supporters feel the same way, however, they fail to see that everyone else has the right to disagree with them while they enjoy the right to say what they want and then complain about being silenced in the next sentence they utter.

I am appalled listening to some of the zealots and with some others, they make me laugh by how much they get totally wrong, but they have the right to be as uninformed as everyone else. Their supporters have the right to believe them or not. That's a wonderful thing because no matter if we like what they say or not, we all have the choice to listen to them, or not.

Going back to the need to hug yourself, while other people get things wrong, or think unlike you, that doesn't mean you need to stop liking yourself. It doesn't mean you have to stop speaking your mind just because some people won't hear you. If other people won't try to comfort you, you can comfort yourself. If you have no one to talk to that will understand what you need to say, then find a therapist or group. When you get to a time in your life when you realize you can't hug yourself, that's time for you to take a look at all you have to give others and begin to give it to yourself!