Page 38 of Rat Park
Another pause. “No.”
“Would cutting the Romeros out of your life help you go to work?”
“No.”
“Would cutting the Romeros out of your life help you contribute to society via volunteering?”
“No.”
“Would cutting the Romeros out of your life help you pay taxes?”
“Taxes? No.”
“Would cutting the Romeros out of your life make you a kinder person?”
A breath. “No.”
“Would cutting the Romeros out of your life make the people you have wronged happy?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Would they find out?”
“Not unless I tell them.”
“Would you tell them?”
“I mean…no. That would be impossible.”
“Okay, so they wouldn’t even find out, so it’s safe to assume the answer to that would be ‘no’. But, for argument’s sake, who is one person you could tell, if you did punish yourself?”
“I don’t know. My mom?”
“Okay. Imagine that. You turn up at your mom’s house. She lets you inside. You sit at the kitchen table. You tell her, ‘As punishment for what I have done to you, I have cut the people I love out of my life.’ Is she happy?”
Dominic turned his face away, closing his eyes against the image. He felt sick, his stomach a tight ball twisting around. He couldn’t reply, even though he knew the answer to the question.
Ian let the silence stretch. “Wouldyoube happy? Would it assuage your guilt?”
Dominic shook his head as if dislodging the question from his head.
“Okay. Then, how about this? Something happens. Flor finds out about some of your past, and he forgives you. The instinctive thought, ‘I don’t deserve this’, pops into your head. Right now, we can’t help that thought occurring. That knee-jerk reaction is informed by your past. However, we can influence what happens next.
“Instead of indulging in the painful but convenient, ‘I don’t deserve this so I’m going to pull away and cut all these ties which are wonderful but exhausting to maintain and will cause me to have nothing to lose so I can use again’,” Ian said, all at once revealing the truth behind the push and pull of Dominic’s desire to have and to not have, and what not having would allow him to do. “Instead of thinking that, a healthier alternative might be, ‘I understand I feel like I don’t deserve this, but allowing this in my life will help me be happy—’”
“That wouldn’t work. I don’t—in that moment especially, I wouldn’t feel like I deserve to be happy, so it would just make it worse.”
“Okay. Then how about, ‘I understand I feel like I don’t deserve this, but allowing this in my life will help me be a person who can better give and enrich the world around me’. This will allow us to focus on doing, on making changes, or pursuing positive things, without the excuse of ‘I don’t deserve that’. Because as painful as it may be, right now, that feeling is being used as an excuse.”
Dominic let out a slow breath.I don’t deserve this, but I can have it because it will do more good than harm.
What a terrifying thought.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I can ever think like that.”
“You don’t have to know the results yet, Dominic. If you only did things you knew the results of, you wouldn’t do much of anything. So let’s try. Let’s challenge those thoughts. We don’t have to excuse our past, but we can still seek forgiveness from ourselves.”
Dominic shook his head. Forgiveness seemed impossible.
