Mooso

Most memories from my teenage years are foggy at best, clouded by trauma and scattered by ADHD. But there is a memory that is fairly clear.

It was a warm summer day in the high school band room and practice had just finished. I am sitting with my friends chatting and hear my dad’s voice from the door. “Come on, Mooso.”

To be clear—and fair to my father—it wasn’t said with malice or a tone of derision. To be honest, at the time I didn’t even realize the wound it was causing.

I don’t remember exactly when my weight became a struggle, but it was around the time I both hit puberty and experience sexual childhood abuse, an unfortunate intersection of life-altering experiences. Before that, my parents could barely find pants that would stay on because I was so skinny.

Adolescence came at me hard, and seemingly with a vengeance. And my dad unknowingly piled on, the high school band room experience serving as Exhibit A.

As Enneagram Type 7, I move to Type 1 in stress. For those who aren’t familiar with the Enneagram, this means that in stressful moments my inner critic starts screaming like a parent at their child’s sporting event.

Adolescence is stressful. It’s even more stressful when you feel all alone in a world consumed with belonging and fitting it. When everyone seemed to have a boyfriend or girlfriend—or at least someone interested in them—I was the chubby kid that all the girls said was “nice” and wrote similar messages in my yearbook at the end of each school year.

Looking back, I realize my struggles were far more than my weight; it was a symptom of deeper, underlying wounds. But it added weight (no pun intended) to my inner critic’s voice, a voice that in some ways continues to whisper in my ear.

Even now, in my mid-50’s, I occasionally hear my dad’s voice echoing from three decades ago. He has been gone for over ten years, but he’s still here. The voices of the past can be difficult to silence.

Even now, I sometimes look in the mirror and feel the anxiety of a high school boy wanting to be wanted, but feeling undesirable. The scars still speak, even though they have healed.

In his book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Bessel van der Kolk writes, “Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.”

Overcoming that ignoring and hiding has been the work of the last decade of my life. It has been one of the hardest things I have ever done. And the work is not done.

I share all of this not to illicit pity, but to offer hope.

I know there are people all around me whose experiences, while different, are similar. I see it in the ways they speak and act. As a survivor of trauma, I recognize its often subtle signals. Sometimes I feel like the boy in the Sixth Sense, with one difference, I see hurt people, not dead ones.

Our world is hurting. I see it on my street, on our campus, and across the world. There are hurting people everywhere.

We don’t need more trauma. We don’t more wars, more violent words, more aggression, or more hatred. We need healing.

Richard Rohr says, “If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.” What we are witnessing all around us is the transmission of pain on a global scale.

But global healing starts with individual healing, one person at a time. And while the healing of one person may not sound like much, imagine a wave of healing flowing through billions of people. Imagine a viral spread of healing sweeping across our globe.

I believe every person has at least one “mooso” story, a time when words or actions created a wound. Most of us likely have many more. It is incumbent on us to decide what to do with that pain. Will we transmit it, often causing more pain in the process? Or will we choose to do the harder but better work of transforming, both as individuals and a society?