“Hurting people hurt people” In a world exploding in violence, the recent domestic abuse case around the NFL and the Baltimore Raven’s Ray Rice is symptomatic of a much deeper issue than physical violence. There is obviously a lot of pain, anger and resentment spreading and manifesting within the human spirit these days. I never judge a person as much by what they do, as by what they were thinking five minutes before they did it. Or 5 hours, days, months or even years before they did it. Anger is a signal emotion. It signals undealt with or improperly dealt with emotions, commotions and often devotions in one’s life, heart and spirit that linger and metastasize like a hideous cancer-infested tumor. The world of sports, not unlike the world of military warfare, particularly as it relates to men, is often motivated, if not driven by pride, ego and testosterone. The same mental adrenaline triggered in war and by it, is often what operates, particularly in high profile athletes with incredible amounts of money, fame, public adulation and a kind of diva worship by the masses of sports fans out there. In cases where the abused wife or girlfriend relents and consents to staying with her abuser, as is the case with Janay Palmer who went on to marry Ray and insists on both forgiving as well as defending him, if not his actions. Statistics show that one out of five American women report being victimized by an intimate partner. And that of the 12,765 murders in 2012, nearly 1,000 of them were a wife or girlfriend. 7 million children live in families where severe partner violence occurred. Almost 500 women are raped or assaulted in the country every day. After seeing Beyonce’s sister Solange attack Jay Z in an elevator, also captured by cameras, we can presume that abuse by women on men may occur more than is reported as well. What “real” man is going to report that his lady beat him up? Figures suggest that as many as one in three victims of domestic violence are male. However, men are often reluctant to report abuse by women because they feel embarrassed, or they fear they wont be believed, or worse, that police will assume that since theyre male they are the perpetrator of the violence and not the victim. Admittedly and without exception, it is never acceptable to hit a partner, and the callous disregard with which Rice treated Janay Palmer, the mother of his young child and now his wife, is repugnant., but in the video you can see her coming at him either defensively or offensively to which he reacts with violence that shows he was vexed into what can be described as reactionary and momentary insanity. That she followed through with the marriage is telling. Our world is filled with anger and resentments which are rapidly turning to out-of-control rage. In most cases, anger is unavoidable; even the bible portrays God as capable of uncontrollable wrath and revenge, which somehow indirectly justifies anger expressed in advocates of a God that is angry or who can be angered, displays such anger in tantrums of global violence, called natural disasters or in some places, “Acts of God”. Acknowledging and managing anger is important to our collective healing process as a species. We have much work to be done, from the war in the Middle east to the wars in divorce courts every day, not to mention the homes across the planet, before divorce attorneys and social case workers appear. Let’s keep chatting. How do you handle or process your hurt and anger? Tonight on bishoppearson from 8:30pm – 9:30pm CST, we’ll talk about ways to manage anger by changing the perceptions we have.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 13:53:49 +0000
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