November 23, 2009
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The Quiet Guilt
I watched The Quiet and cross stitched the other day. The Quiet is a great movie, I would recommend renting it sometime. It’s about a deaf girl who’s father dies, and she goes to live with people who had been friends with her mother, who died when she was 7. The movie has quite a bit of guilt associated with several of the characters, and it got me thinking.
Everyone has a guilt about something. Something they shouldn’t have done, or something they should have done but didn’t. Something dark and something they have a hard time even admitting to themselves.
When I was a kid, I was pretty oblivious, as most children are. One of my sisters got taken out of her mother’s house by social services because of violence in the home. She went into foster care. I was about 10 at the time, and she was 5.
My dad got weekend visits with my sister. At some point, she started throwing fits. Whenever she had to go back to the foster home, actually. She would scream and kick the seats in the car and cry. My dad had a hard time getting her out of the car to go back into the foster home. My father got custody of my sister, and the fits continued. They stopped some time after she was living with us.
Being a child myself, I was jealous when she came to live with us. For a long time, it had been just me and my father. We were very close, and we did everything together. I was angry when my sister came.
When she threw her fits, I would egg her on and laugh at her, out of my jealousy. Sometimes I think I even caused her to go off.
What I failed to realize was that she threw these fits at night most of the time.
What I failed to realize was that she hated being touched.
What I failed to realize was that she had been molested while she was in foster care.
She never actually told me, but she’s made a couple of comments that leads me to believe this is what happened.
I feel the worst guilt for treating her the way I did. What did I know, I was just a kid, right? That doesn’t matter. I still shouldn’t have acted that way. This guilt has stayed with me and it haunts me. I’ve never said I’m sorry, because I don’t know how. How do you correct something so wrong? It’s the worst feeling. How do you even begin? Guilt is a quiet enemy that eats at your soul.
Comments (11)
>:[ thats so sickening, being put in foster care is bad enough; then having to deal with being molested? poor girl…
and im sorry for your guilt…unfortunately, i’ve got no help for you, really…thats so tough :
Now is this real? Or are you just writing again?
You really pissed me off the last time.
@Bricker59 - I’m sorry. Yes, this is real.
Hmmm, not a movie person, but I’ll check it out.
I’m sorry for the guilt you feel.
I hope you can come to terms with it sometime.
that’s a horrible kind of guilt; I don’t know how you’d go about apologizing, but I hope you can work through it, hun.
Thats a very tough situation seeing as at the time you kinda didn’t know better, or at least you hadn’t really sat down and thought about the situation until you were older.Guilt is horrible, the way it lays heavy on you at all times, clouding happy moments. I hope that sometime you and your sister can talk it out, when the moment is right. =]
I will have to add that movie to my Netflix queue!
Guilt is the most painful of emotions, it really does eat at your soul.
Guilt sure does eat away at the soul. But forgiving ourselves and others is a decision. I know it is hard to do, but I do hope you will be able to one day.
You don’t get over guilt. If you do something you think you should apologize for, then do it. Otherwise all you can do is try not to beat yourself up. We all do it.
Maybe the best thing to do in this situation is to KISS (keep it simple stupid). Have you tried just simply saying “I’m sorry”? I remember feeling a guilt close to this one time and it haunted me much like this is haunting you. I didn’t know how to approach the situation for the longest time, until I just took that first small… simple step.
I hope that one day you can shake this guilt. Good luck in that.
I don’t think guilt ever goes away. It changes, consumes a part of you, and eventually you learn to live with it as you try to cage it away from the rest of yourself.
…or, at least, that’s been my experience with my guilt. Honestly, my best solution is to simply distract yourself. That’s what I do.