Helping Others, Helping Ourselves.

For as long as I can remember, even when I was a small child, I have helped other human beings in the best way I could.

I remember, for instance, a situation that occurred when I was in the sixth grade. Me and my good friend Gibson were both in band and we decided we wanted to attend a week-long special band program across town designed to help young musicians improve their skills. No one in either of our families, for reasons that have escaped memory, were able to give us a ride to and from the program. So we got information about the city public transportation system; we found out the routes, schedules and everything else we needed to know and became young city bus travelers. This was about 40 years ago at a time when young children riding city buses by themselves was quite an anomaly. Me and Gibson lived close by but far away from each other that we had to take different buses to downtown Lexington where we would meet and then transfer to a different bus which we rode together to our destination. About the second or third day of this routine I realized that my originating bus traveled much more frequently than my friends. One day when we were waiting to transfer to our respective buses I offered to wait with my friend until his bus came and then after he caught his bus I would catch mine since, as I said, my bus ran much more frequently. I didn't want my friend to have to wait for his bus alone. This is one of my earliest memories of expressing my natural altruistic personality outside of my family of origin. Back to the story. My friend caught his bus. I waited about 10-15 minutes to catch mine. But when I showed the driver my transfer, it had expired. I had not fully understood how the whole transfer thing worked. And even though I was just a kid and even though I explained what had happened, the driver refused to let me on board. I had no extra money so I had to walk the 4-5 miles home, much by trial and error as I had never walked home from that part of town before. This was one of the most traumatic experiences of my young childhood.

I have spent a lot of my life as they say "working on myself and doing a lot of self inquiry and self healing." As a result, I know myself and my motivations for most of my behaviors and my psychological self quite well. So I know, for example, that I have a natural affinity toward altruism and humanitarianism. And I also know of some things in my life history that have encouraged both of those traits to develop and blossom more. One of the most profound of those life experiences--growing up with an actively alcoholic mother.

Once I became cognizant in my early childhood of exactly what alcoholism was, my natural altruism and humanitarianism was already well in bloom. So it would come to the surprise of no one familiar with addiction in family structures that once realizing my mother had a "problem," that the family role I instantly and effortlessly fell into as a response to that was the protector/mediator for my mother and her alcoholism. I can remember every single member of my family falling somewhere on the anger scale as their primary response to my mother's drinking when I was a child. During those years that never ever was my emotional response to it. That did not come until many, many years later when I became psychologically sophisticated enough to understand and understand deeply, the reality of codependency. One of the biggest struggles in my life has been to end my codependency with many people without simultaneously becoming a sociopath in the process. Seriously. I understand why some who are perceived as sweet, innocent people become axe-murderers and why people who knew them are absolutely shocked when their deeds have been revealed. My guess? Many had a long history of codependency. It can be quite disheartening to discover that something about you that in essence is quite wonderful also places you in the direct line of fire for being completely emotionally drained and taken advantage of by many. It is also quite a shock to find out that such traits can also have a dark side. Light and shadow, the constant interplay in human existence.

© Raven/Sage Mahosadha