I Am Choosing Peace

by Stephanie B Bucklin, HHP

Respect is a challenging aspect of this reality.

Every one of us has a heart. Every one of us has free will. Yet learning how to honor those things in one another can be difficult – especially when the people who are supposed to guide and protect us are the first ones to make us feel small.

What happens when we are disrespected by an elder – a parent, teacher, boss, or another person in a position of authority? What does a young person learn when love, respect, and emotional safety are not modeled at home?

As a child, I concluded that there simply was not enough love in the world.

I came to that conclusion largely because of my relationship with my mother. Her narcissistic tendencies made me feel small and insignificant. Instead of learning that my feelings mattered, I learned to question myself. Instead of feeling respected as a whole human being, I often felt diminished.

I have been battling that demon for most of my adult life.

There were positive influences in my childhood, too. I was a Girl Scout for much of my youth. Through that experience, I was introduced to service, community, responsibility, friendship, and the idea that we should leave the world better than we found it. I practiced these ideas as much as I spoke these words, from age 5 all the way to age 14.

Girl Scout Promise & Law

 Ref: https://www.girlscouts.org/en/discover/about-us/what-girl-scouts-do/promise-and-law.html

Those positive influences existed alongside the negative ones. I was given pieces of kindness and encouragement to mix with experiences of disrespect and psychological abuse. The contrast sent me into a loop of comparison and confusion. I could recognize healthy values, but I did not always know how to choose healthy relationships. Familiarity can feel like love when dysfunction is what we learned first.

The Anger I Carried

I was a good kid, but I was emotionally charged from everything I had experienced. I became an angry teenager. I projected that anger toward my family by screaming and slamming doors. I was emotionally reactive. Dramatic. At the time, I did not have the awareness or language to explain what was happening inside me. I only knew that I was hurting.

Eventually, the internal pain created by psychological abuse became self-inflicted pain. When I was around fifteen years old, I became involved with a twenty-three-year-old man. He raped me while I was asleep. A few weeks later, he threatened me with a knife. I blamed myself for what he did.

I did not ask for help. I never told anyone at the time. He was never arrested. I began experiencing serious emotional distress, anxiety, and depression, and I started cutting myself. I turned the pain inward because I had not yet learned that the violence committed against me was not my fault. I remember feeling numb – like I needed to see I could still bleed to feel the pain.

There is still guilt held within my body. Part of me has felt responsible for the other girls he may have hurt because I did not report him. But I was a child, and he was an adult. I was not responsible for his choices, his violence, or the harm he caused. That truth is something I understand intellectually, but healing is not only an intellectual process. Trauma can remain within the nervous system and the body long after the mind begins to recognize what is true.

Learning How to Respect Others

As I entered adulthood, I had to learn how to interact with other people while carrying all of this unresolved pain. My first long-term relationship taught me about honesty and integrity – a subject I have since written about extensively. My first corporate boss taught me about respect.

These were important lessons because respect was not something I had experienced consistently as a child. I needed to learn that respect was not simply about obedience or authority. It was about how we treat other human beings. It was about listening, keeping our word, recognizing the dignity of others, and taking responsibility for the energy we bring into a room.

I had to learn that being wounded did not give me permission to wound others. I had to learn that my feelings were valid, but my emotional reactions could still have consequences. My anger carried important information, but I did not always express it in healthy ways.

The anger stayed with me throughout my twenties. I took emotional punches throughout my adulthood that added to the rage already living inside me. By the time I reached thirty, I kind of lost it. There was only so much pain I could carry without understanding how to process it.

Fifty became another emotionally challenging threshold – a time of reckoning, revelation, and renewed self-examination.

When the Body Carries the Weight

My body had been speaking long before I understood how to listen. I often think of the energy stored in my shoulders as the physical manifestation of carrying the weight of the world. Eventually, I was diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands. That became my first introduction to chronic pain.

More than twenty years later, I have only recently begun learning about the possible relationship between suppressed anger, unprocessed rage, stress, trauma, and chronic pain. This has been a revelation.

It does not mean that pain is imaginary or that every physical condition has a purely emotional cause. My pain is real. My medical conditions are real. But I am beginning to understand that the body and mind are not separate systems. The experiences we cannot safely express may still leave an imprint within us.

What if some of the weight I’ve carried on my shoulders was never mine to carry?

What if my body has been protecting, containing, and expressing emotions I could not process when they first arose?

What if the rage beneath my pain needs to be witnessed rather than feared?

Looking at My Darkness Again (and Again)

I have dedicated much of my life to healing. I have learned how to face my darkness and begin releasing my demons. I have examined shame, fear, abandonment, self-blame, and the patterns that caused me to repeatedly choose unhealthy relationships.

Now I am looking at my darkness again. This time, I am examining unprocessed rage.

I could not do this work inside a relationship. I could not hear my own truth while responding to someone else’s needs, moods, expectations, or emotional energy. The only times I could truly look at myself were when I was alone in my studio apartment, driving alone, or practicing mindfulness and meditation in a quiet room. Solitude gave me enough silence to hear what my body had been trying to say.

What I have come to understand is that I experienced a great deal of trauma in childhood, and it left me an angry young adult. Adulthood brought more emotional punches, disappointments, violations, and losses. Each experience added another layer to the rage I had never been taught how to process.

For years, I believed I needed to suppress my anger to become a kinder person. Now I understand that suppressing it was not the same as healing it. 

Healing asks me to acknowledge the rage without allowing it to control me. 

• It asks me to listen to the message beneath the anger.
• It asks me to recognize the boundaries that were crossed, the needs that went unmet, and the truths I was once afraid to speak.
• It asks me to stop abandoning myself.

Kindness Does Not Require Self-Abandonment

I chose not to have children, in part because I wanted to stop the cycle of abuse. I did not want to unconsciously pass my wounds to another generation. Instead, I dedicated my life to healing.

That path has not been simple or linear.

I have learned that respect does not require silence, submission, or self-sacrifice. Respect includes honoring my own boundaries. It includes telling the truth about what happened. It includes refusing to make myself small so that someone else can remain comfortable.

Kindness is not pretending that harm did not happen. It is not excusing abuse or offering unlimited access to people who continue to disrespect us. Kindness does not require us to abandon discernment, accountability, or boundaries.

• Sometimes kindness looks like tenderness.
• Sometimes it looks like truth.
• Sometimes it looks like walking away.
• Sometimes it is the decision to stop punishing ourselves for what someone else did to us.

I cannot change the childhood I experienced. I cannot go back and protect the teenage girl who did not know how to ask for help. But I can honor her now. I can tell her that she was never responsible for the choices of a violent adult. I can give her the compassion, dignity, and respect she deserved all along.

I can also take responsibility for the ways my unprocessed pain affected others – not from shame, but from awareness. I can acknowledge the emotionally reactive young woman I once was while honoring the woman who learned how to respond with greater grace.

• I know what it feels like to be made insignificant. 
• I know what it feels like to carry anger without knowing where to place it.
• I know what it feels like to turn someone else’s violence against myself.
• I know what it feels like to carry the weight of the world in my body.
• And now, I am learning what it means to put that weight down.

I Am Choosing Peace

Where am I left now? I am left with the truth.

I survived experiences that shaped my nervous system, my relationships, my emotional reactions, and perhaps even some aspects of my physical pain. I carried anger because anger helped me survive when I felt powerless. I carried rage because too many violations went unacknowledged.

But I do not want to live the rest of my life inside that rage. Instead, here are the agreements I’ve made with myself:

• I am not rejecting my anger. I am listening to it.
• I am not shaming my darkness. I am bringing awareness to it.
• I am not excusing the people who hurt me. I am releasing their power over the life I am creating now.
• I am choosing honesty.
• I am choosing integrity.
• I am choosing respect.
• I am choosing boundaries.
• I am choosing kindness.
• And after carrying the weight of the world for far too long, I am choosing peace.

~S

With the recent social media posts about “I am Jane Doe” – it’s brought up a lot of emotional memories. Here’s a post I shared in response: 

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