Is regaining trust possible? Thoughts on Healing and the ‘Helping’ business

Old Ideas, New Clarifications

Peacebuilding as building relationships is one of the definitions (of Adam Curle) that sticks most with me when I try to envision life and peacework in development contexts. That is another word for building friendship: it takes time, patience, getting to know one another. When friends have to be there for one another, it is the emotional connection that comes before material resources. What about international development work: a relationship of partnership based on money from one side to another, does that make for equality and friendship, trust and respect?

Capacity building through friendship is a daring idea. It needs more of us to come out of the closet and admit some things, in open sharing. Friendship is a good clue for what we can do to continue working for impossible dreams. We are talking about the same patterns and processes. And no matter on which ridiculous side we are positioned by skin colour, class, gender, we are all in need of healing our brokenness, and that takes a relationship. So far still a possibility dream, but we still hold on to it.

So, here's a toast to the workers for peace in each of us!

* Have we taken the time to befriend our co-workers and “partners” in the field?
Connect to the deep soul of the other’s culture and identity, understanding or at least opening up to see the truth in their way of seeing the world? How much time in a foreign country “sacrificing” life to the guilt trips of the West and gaining a living, without rooting in the reality here? What is it in me that prevents this?

* Who started the mistrust game? Us or them? Me or you? Are they all difficult to mistrust or is it us that have stolen from ourselves the dignity to look at them as other human beings we whom we cooperate with, not whom we “help”?

Bottom line, to get to the point in poems (where it will be impossible to catch the tail of this story, before you figure out the clues in yourself, life and work):

1. We are all in this “b-s” together! (be stupid business, or bull - shit). Why avoid certain words because we judge the reality they point to? We know cow dung (read this with Gandhi’s accent) is actually the best fertilizer for new crops.

2. None of us is any better or we are all as bad! Drowning in power relations everywhere, we could at learn from and have fun with them. So that we can leap to a third stage, where more mixed babies would develop strong identities in love based families.

3. Let's get to work with joy in the process!
Not with frustration that the other, again, failed to be on time to our meeting in my terms. Not with inflexibility and the righteousness of some knowing it all how it is supposed to be. Project planning should really be in teams with the beneficiaries not directed from overseas.
No need to keep on comparing how intelligent, beautiful or rich we are, in all possible and different senses. We need one another to advance in work and to live healthier life lessons.

*

I know everything
I just miss out on living
This knowledge
Do I need more fragmentation
As everybody seems to think?
Psychoanalysis to deal
With the evil in me?
Therapy to Work with
The Shadow and befriend it?

Or just friends to laugh with
And practice togetherness
On a daily basis.

I still feel the judge
In me looking at you
With circumspect eyes
That have lost trust
For now.

‘If you love me
Then please trust me’
I wish it was that
Easy as a piece of cake
To savour immediately
(chocolate flavoured!)

Trust building
Is a relationship
Like healing.
Involves staying
Through the pain
Together
Not only through
Heaven.

Bailing out
At the first devil in me
coming out,
the one whose kin you saw
leaves open no door
for life in 2 to go on

Friendship becomes
Real, maybe
Once it has gone
Through hell
And got back to
Life again.

*

incapacity to take in gratitude
the other gives me
unless she takes the blame
and the guilt, prior to it.

somebody has to be the goat here
we will scape-(goat)
and then eat and rejoice
over another killing
of the metaphorical other
we have not really met
in a relationship of our making.

Contradiction will not lead to the
unity we so need,
hands together,
Unless we see through it
As through a fata morgana
In the desert
open gate for self recognition

*

The other cannot meet me
See my reality, acknowledge my issues
Give me empathy and understanding
Until he has been heard in his pain

Until he receives empathy for it
And recognition for his efforts
And his beauty
In trying to serve
Other people’s needs
Mine included.

Until we learn to love
One another
In communicating,

Until we give up right and wrong
And the judge role we indulge in

Until we are able to commit together
To stay and work through the issues
With love,
Real meeting is not possible,
that is the place for healing
and new beginnings.


*

My Burundian Sister

Gold of forgiveness
In my new sister’s earrings
Brings me back to the silver of my mum
The only thing that can heal
My wounded ears that cannot hear

I know I have hurt you
In my lack of minding you
Busy with minding my own hurt
And finding solutions for it.

In the head of others
From books and rules
Before a real meeting
Actually happening

All strategies,
focused on
Maximizing personal
and not common games

since I have no space
for your wounded-ness
sooner or later
we will both get hurt from it.
Again,
unless we say stop.

Arretez avec les betises!
Des freres qui se chamaillent
Aux soeurs qui s’aiment
C’est pas un chemin
Aussi longue qu’il
Ne parait.

*


He stole something from you
and you see Evil in him?
Well,
by not being open to listen
to his broken heart and story
it is your turn to steal me
the hope in humanity.

Can you make a hierarchy
of importance here?
How about playing
For making
Things relative?

If considering,
We are all thieves of
one another’s souls.
When I fall in love
I open my soul willingly
When you choose
unilaterally
To chase me out for eternity
You break my heart too
For having shown authenticity
Misunderstood as vulnerability

When alone, well hidden
With no witnesses,
Please take a look in your soul
To see if healthy.
In that health
you will find me too.
I am there,

But none of us is ready yet
brave enough for a real meeting
where we see the Devil and the Angel
and the Angel and the Devil,
depending with whom
we shake hands first.
Before embrace.

We will hide and seek,
Hide and come out again
To seek you till the end of time
Because only with you
Can I break down the Devil in me

Evil is a collaborative effort
It needs all of us to sustain
As well as to make disappear.

*

Shalom, Maggy

It felt love, that child.
That gave her peace.

How loving we manage to be?
In this humanitarian work setting.

Love is the force that rescues
People from the hell
Of separation and hating

Homage to your love
To the force that moves you
How can we teach it?
Is the only question
In this search for meaning
Life and work linking.

If we are not it
How many more
Speech forms can love take
If we don’t feel it?

And just whom
Did we think
We were kidding?


*

Forgiveness is all that counts
This is the gate that opens up
Loving again
And the key is not outside
This door doesn’t unlock
If arguing about the issues
In the head
The thoughts,
The interpretations
We give to one
another’s
Realities.

To be efficient and
loving in the process
the choice is to also
go deeper in here
to connect to the life in me.

Our feelings are the indicators
That sound the alarm
Telling of what's going on inside.

The core issues of the soul
The needs have to be addressed
And this is putting
the gut on the table
Over and over again
[Ho- pono-pono]
so that the gut helps birth
deeper soul issues out
enlarging our possibility
of seeing the other’s humanity

when I see the truth of
your beautiful nature
when I leave evaluations of brutality
I, the judge, will inevitably recognize
Myself and my pain in it
And dive deep into our unity.

Real understanding
eliminates
judging possibility.


Real understanding opens
the heart in presence
But I can only give it to you
Because I have given it to me
When I have love sources open
Unconditionally.

*
Tiens, mon mirroir
Pour voir ta beaute
Je te donne ca cadeaux
Pas necessaire de voler
Et de perdre ta integrite

Quant tu vois ta beaute
Tu va voir moi aussi
Je suis la, aussi mauche
Que tu es beau

Moi aussi j’ai essaye de voler
L’amour des autres,
La confiance,
En les rendant la maladie
La plus serieuse.

*
My shadow side
is my beauty wounded
there is nothing evil in it
it’s the pain of heart hurt
the separation from beauty
that was cut open cut in me.

you have shown beauty to me
as a playing god, with clarity
do not stop with analysis,
healing is a relationship
just like love and with it
as ingredient,

do not send me to shrinks
evading responsibility
of looking into your own
just as closed eyes for seeing
that no sinking is possible
if we’re at least two in this.

growth only in love relationship
shrinking with outside diagnosis
From doctors who do not give
a damn about my illness.

Building peace, in and out
through personal relationships
in a community of friends
maybe.

in and through community
we can find salvation
from drowning in pain,
our collective heritage.