Silence Is Golden

Hi Silence,

I don't know the details of what you went thru as a kid or what your children experienced. But you are grappling with complicated thoughts and feelings, which have immense ramifications for you and your family. Justice is a a murky, elusive, complex concept. Many levels. Many different belief systems. But pretty basic at it's core: We live in a society and we are all connected, so if an individual commits morally reprehensible acts that harm others then there should be negative consequences, commensurate with the destructive force and consequences of his/her actions. Philosophers in every culture have wrestled with this idea since the dawn of civilization. Or at least when our frontal lobes evolved enough to create these thoughts. Since then a lot of amazing thought has been put into this. By folks with more gray matter than most dozen people. It's worth reading some philosophy books to explore the subject. The issue can be consuming. Justice, revenge, killing a sexual predator to prevent future victims. Unintended negative aftermath to victims/survivors. Sadness. Guilt. Children horrified when they learn that the abuse they experienced led their father to become a murderer. Impossible-to-predict consequences...

You may want to avoid considering feelings and emotions. Focusing on moral justice and possible courses of action is cleaner, less messy. You may not want to hear people tell you that killing a person is wrong. And that you are a good person and should not kill.

My thoughts about your situation are slightly different. I am a pacifist but I understand anger, pain, revenge, preventative strike. I don't think you need to hear that right now. So I will ask you the simple questions that someone else asked me 25 years ago. Not long after a brutal kidnapping and 3 days of torture and sexual violence. Before I became a pacifist. The questions that I initially dismissed as trivial. Then they kept popping up. At odd times of day and night. Haunting me until I paid attention to them. Which I reluctantly did. And later the questions became life-changing. I suspect that you will be tempted to disregard them as irrelevant distractions as well...

The questions are simple:  

What are you doing with your energy?

Where are you focusing your power? 

Are you doing absolutely everything possible to heal yourself (and your children) or are you distracting yourself with other issues?

Some things to think about maybe. 

I wish you well.

feralcat