“Overcome Childhood Hurt To Thrive”
by Terra Wellington

I was a loner and had few friends as a child, but now I am the author of 10 books, happily married, and living a balanced life.

I am a former victim of childhood bullying and sexual harassment at school, but now I have formed an anti-harassment organization and regularly provide media interviews.

I started a life as a kid no one wanted and no one wanted near.  Now I am an author and worldwide lecturer.

Contemplating these recent stories told to me, to one degree or another, we all are victims of childhood hurt.  But, how do we deal with those wounds as adults?

Self-ascribed “Funny Guy” David Samson told me that he grew up in Brooklyn in the ’50s by the docks.  “It was a tough immigrant neighborhood.  Gangs.  Tough kids from tough families.” Unfortunately, David wasn’t so tough.  “Besides being skinny and small, I didn’t have the personality to take the violence and the fights.”

Once into high school, David discovered he had the ability to make people laugh.  So he wrote skits and plays, produced shows, and ran an underground newspaper.  “Eventually the tough guys wanted to do what I was doing,” he said from his Beverly Hills home.

He says that you have to take the hurt and the abuse and make yourself a better person. 

David believes that you have to go beyond just being successful and, instead, have an enriched life, including helping others without being threatened by them – giving of your time, talents, and expertise.

Dr. Debra Mandel, author of the book Healing the Sensitive Heart, says you don’t have to keep living in the past.

In order to heal from childhood hurt you have to “whole-heartedly embrace the concept that (the hurt) is self-contained.  We have to acknowledge that the pain we feel in the present is our own creation,” says Dr. Mandel while on her book tour in Phoenix, Arizona.

“Healing comes from within, not from someone else or the perpetrator.  No one has to be any different in your life except for you.”

She talks about not just being a survivor but, rather, being a thriver. 

Dr. Mandel says that thrivers are resourceful, focus on how they want to behave, and make peace with what they don’t have control over.  “Thriving is about choices and saying ‘I can do this.’”

Thrivers also behave “self-caringly” says Dr. Mandel.  They get enough sleep, eat right, and take care of themselves like they should have been taken care of when they were a child.

Fearless Living Author and Life Coach on NBC’s “Starting Over” television program Rhonda Britten was 14 years old when she was the sole witness to her parents’ murder and suicide.

She was going to a Sunday brunch with her parents.  Before getting into the car, her father pulled out a gun from the trunk and shot her mother in the abdomen, with the bullet passing through her mother into the automobile’s horn. 

Then, her father kneeled himself in front of her and shot himself in the head.  All Rhonda could hear was the car’s horn for the next 30 minutes until firefighters could turn it off. 

“I thought I must be a loser or worthless, otherwise I would have been able to do something,” Rhonda related to me from her Los Angeles home.  “But, I didn’t have the capacity to save my mother or stop my father.”

After trying to kill herself three times and endangering her life with alcohol abuse, she decided to turn her life around. 

“At 25 and after my third suicide attempt, my sister looked at me like I was hopeless, as she dropped me off at the psychiatric ward.  The look on her face told me she thought I wasn’t going to make it anymore.  That was the moment I decided to put my parents in their proper place and live my own life and take responsibility for it.”

Besides her multiple books and television work, Rhonda now oversees the Fearless Living Institute.  “I’m not interested in surviving, just thriving,” says Rhonda.

© Copyright 2003 Terra Wellington