A few thoughts on When Something Bad Happens To You.
(I'm getting this from what it's like to be hit in the face. Hasn't happened for a while, and it was never my parents who did it, but I think the basics apply)
There is a bit of a delay before you realize what has happened. Confusion, doubt, denial can happen. In fact, the deeper the wound, or the more sudden and damaging the Bad Thing is, generally the more "shocking" it can be, in terms of you going into a bit of a state of shock and not being able to grasp what is going on and what has Just Happened. The parade of faces shouting "Get Over It!" are expressing their own frustration alright, but they aren't doing much good at this point. You don't even know what "It" was.
Once you realize you have been Hurt in some way, feeling hurt is a pretty natural and proper response to it. You have been hurt, and so you feel that. You feel betrayed if you have been, and you feel abandoned, fooled or blindsided if that happened. There is a real tendency to retreat slightly as this point, often to recover, or to get your head together as the numbness of shock is replaced by actually feeling what happened. There is a tendency to want to warn others that they too could be hurt like this. There is a tendency to talk with others who have been hurt too. The parade of faces shouting "Get Over It!" are expressing their own frustration alright, but they aren't doing much good at this point. You are still processing what "It" was, and how exactly "It" happened, and most of all, what "It" will mean to your life now.
Once it becomes possible to live a life which deals healthily with the fact that Something Bad happened once, but which life, you decide, will from now on no longer be Only About That, resolve sets in. You have a life, with connections and activities which are in no way related to What Happened. If What Happened kinda "sticks with you" a bit, kinda haunts you without defining your life, you may also now have a fraction of your life which you devote to fund-raising, blogging, support group attendance (creating or running), interviews, memorials, charities, novel writing, documentary making, whatever. The parade of faces shouting "Get Over It!" are expressing their own frustration alright, but they aren't doing much good at this point. You have both "Gotten Over It" and "Moved On" as much as you are going to, and this is The Scar. When we are hurt, people have to learn to get used to scars. Scars aren't weak. They are a tiny part of ourselves where we were once hurt, and are now tougher there than other people, so it looks weird to them. Not every scenario in life is about being tough, but in that one area in which we Were Hurt, tough is what we've got.
