EXAMPLE 1:
(Positive points about relationships and parents) As the 23rd Prime Minister Bob Hawke said in a recent interview with Peter Wilmoth, the luckiest decision of his life was his “choice of parents”. “I never cease to give thanks for the marvellous father and mother I had. They provided me with constant, unqualified love and affection and encouragement”.
Examples of individuals/groups on the margins
Example 2: disaffected youth
Arie Eddie is typical of many 18-year-old youths who are struggling to find employment and feel that they lack a purpose and a sense of belonging. Official figures suggest that up to 14 per cent of youths are unemployed and the situation is worse in regional Victoria where Arie lives. After being rejected by more than 740 employers he states “It constantly makes me feel worthless. It makes me feel like I don’t have any purpose and every day is hard to get through. I feel like I have no need to be around if I haven’t got a job,” Arie said. Contrastingly, Nick Jones who is participating in a program called Ignite that provides customer service training to young adults, remarks that it has had a big impact upon his confidence and pride. He says, “it has given me a great sense of self-worth and motivation”.
It is very difficult to be oneself if one belongs to marginal groups. In this case, individuals are often restricted by disadvantage or by injustice. (Being an outsider has a big impact upon one’s sense of self.) Patti Miller shows that many Aborigines lack opportunities because they are the victims of prejudice in the community. They also lack a strong and purposeful sense of self and suffer what could be called an “identity crisis”.
EXAMPLE 3: dysfunctional family (good parallel with Wayne)
Kayne is a typical disaffected youth who grew up in a dysfunctional family dominated by a drug-addled mother and an abusive step-father.
Kayne’s life changed dramatically when he found love and support in Adam’s family through the Big Brother Big Sister Youth Program. Previously, a “rebel without a cause” who dabbled in drugs and gangs, Kayne was full of hatred for himself and the world. However, he regained his trust through Adam’s unconditional love and support; he realised “…. Even Adam benefited stating, “the power of friendship is life changing”. Kayne shows unusual maturity for a young adult by showing acceptance rather than resentment. He states that he is to some degree grateful for his mother who showed him a path he does not wish to follow.
It is possible to overcome disadvantage if we have the right attitude, develop positive relationships and follow positive role models. Kayne joins the Big Brother Big Sister Youth Program and gains a positive father role model in Adam. A victim of a dysfunctional family, Kayne becomes a “rebel without a cause” and is full of hatred which leads to anti-social behaviour. However, he finds a supportive and loving home with Adam and his wife, and his life changes. So, too, does his personality. He starts to trust others and look towards a good future.
EXAMPLE 4: Aboriginal (parallel with Sandra in Skin)
Likewise, many aborigines felt an acute sense of difference during the apartheid-like conditions in Australia during the 1900s. Owing to the stolen generation policies many half-caste aboriginals were taught to despise their aboriginal culture and traditions. Ms Doris Pilkington Garimara, author of Rabbit Proof Fence, grew up at Moore River Settlement and then Roelands Mission where missionaries conditioned her to believe that Aboriginal people were dirty and evil. She says, “I actually despised my own traditional culture because we were taught to. “The blacker your skin was, the worse individual you were”. Her one deep regret as a result was that she accused her mother of abandoning her in the home, when her mother had no choice.
EXAMPLE 5: disability – overcomes disadvantage
Tim and Judy Sharp: Disabled and autistic people often suffer from social stigma and feel isolated and alienated from mainstream groups. For example, Australian mother Judy Sharp consulted 24 doctors before Tim was diagnosed with autism at 3 years of age. One doctor told her to put him in a home “forget about him and just get on with my life”. In many ways, the doctor’s attitude was typical of those who reject or discard people with disabilities and discriminate against them. As Judy recalls, “those were the cruellest words” she ever heard”.
Because of her love and support she encouraged Tim to draw and he soon became an internationally recognised artist. At 16 years of age, he was the only Australian picked to participate in the Very Special Arts festival for the disabled in Washington. Currently, there is an exhibition about him in the National Museum of Australia. He is the first person with autism to have his creation turned into a TV show, Laser Beak man.
EXAMPLE 6: disability – overcomes disadvantage
Sometimes, differences arise not only because of race or ethnicity but because of a disability, and the physical impediment can also lead to isolation and pain. Disability activist Stella Young testifies to the difficulty of trying to join popular groups at school when , with her conspicuous wheelchair, she was scorned. She remembers the girls telling her one lunchtime, “we don’t want you hanging out with us”.
Stella Young’s desire to join the popular group at school, often set her up for ridicule. Typically, she often heard the girls talking: You know, “I wish she’d just f… off.” Eventually she realised they were talking about her. So she raised her chair, went to the toilet and cried. She was often the butt of rumours. She says, “there was only one time they used disability as my weak spot and that was spreading rumours that I was incontinent and wore nappies. I was horrified by what people would think.” She eventually becomes an excellent comedian. Rather than succumb to her disability, she ends up using it as the source for her comedy shows. Sadly, she died in 2014 but achieved a lot as a comedian and disability activist who challenged stereotypes about disability and pushed the boundaries of what people in her situation could achieve.
AHN DO : biographical journey, “Happiest Refugee”,
The Australian-born Vietnamese comedian, Anh Do reflects upon the most difficult act he ever did which he believes was character building. He had to perform at the RSL at a function for war veterans that was commemorating the fallen brothers in World War Two, in Korea and Vietnam. Because of their war experiences, they were prejudiced against Asians. He performed a five minute comedy gig to complete and utter deafening silence.
A member of the crowd pretended to shoot him with an imaginary finger. To break the ice, he proves that he is just an “Aussie kid”. He tells footy, kiwi and farming jokes. Gradually he breaks the ice. Eventually the audience of war veterans could say that “this Vietnamese kid was just an Aussie comedian up there talking about his working-class childhood.” Anh recalls Dave Grant’s comment that “hard gigs were an opportunity to test your mettle: Learn from them Anh, treat them like a rare gift”. He rates this experience as one of the most rewarding moments of his career because of its degree of difficulty. “You’re funny for a slope” is the ultimate compliment.
When the Vietnamese comedian Anh Do returns on a family visit to Vietnam as a young married man, he realises that had his parents not taken the perilous boat trip in the late 1970s he would have had an entirely different life in Vietnam. He recalls that he saw a skinner version of himself selling postcards at a temple. “In that moment I had a flash of realisation. That could’ve been me. Indeed if my family hadn’t embarked on that trip years ago, I could’ve easily ended up selling trinkets at a temple for fifty cents.”
Personal stories
It is often difficult to be oneself because of language barriers. A grasp of language, particularly when living in a foreign country, is critical to forging relationships and taking advantage of opportunities. Because I belong to a marginalised group in Australia, and my language skills are limited, I often find it difficult to express myself, and build productive, fulfilling relationships. I am often misunderstood by others, because my pronunciation is stilted; also I misunderstand Aussie slang. (What is “your shout”!)
However, I am determined to deal with these language barriers, and the more I learn, the more I become familiar with English, the easier it becomes to explore my opportunities and the freedoms that comes from living in another country.
Personal experience: (migrant story): as an international student, living in Australia, I am now part of a marginalised group. I am no longer a “citizen” as I was in China, which means a different sense of belonging and relationships to dominant and mainstream groups in society. No longer do I strictly feel the burden of the duties of a citizen. I must become familiar with a new language and my lack of language skills influences my daily life, which means I cannot truly express who I am. I talk to other students at school with little confidence and my identity has changed: I am struggling with being an actor in the “side story”.
Changes in life
As The Age cartoonist Michael Leunig states, “any life lived well enough is nothing but ongoing rehabilitation”. Leunig’s comments refer to the fact that in life, our identity is constantly changing and developing. Today we are different from yesterday and yesterday we are different from two or three weeks ago. Why?
We might feel different today because of something someone has told us which gives us an insight into ourselves and our relationships. My family doctor, who has known my mother for the past 20 years, told me recently that she had mentioned to him, that she retired from her job as a pharmacist at the age of 75 years old on the day that she almost gave a customer the wrong script. Although she realised her error, she knew that this could have had dangerous consequences for an innocent person.
Some comments give us new perspectives on our lives, and on our past. Sometimes difficult experiences force us to think about who we are and whether or not we have the skills to cope. Whatever the experience or encounter it is always having an impact upon who we are and shaping us as individuals– sometimes in negative, sometimes in positive ways.
For example, I used to feel embarrassed when I was in primary school and my mother worked in the canteen. At first I was happy to see her, but I soon changed when my classmates started making fun of her accent. She spoke broken English and was the butt of their jokes. I soon ignored her because I could not deal with my friends taunting me. However, in one of my classes at secondary school, one of the teachers told us when we were studying prejudice that racism reflects the person who has said the racist remarks and reveals their ignorance and lack of understanding.
These comments instantly changed me. I developed greater confidence in myself and in my parents and my past. I now looked back on my past with some regret knowing what they suffered. I was annoyed that I was so ashamed, but I was pleased that my mother had always tried to put a good face on her hardship and helped others no matter what people said about her. I found a different sort of love. I realised how much she had sacrificed for the family. I decided then to spend more time listening to her stories of her difficult encounters with people who were often so rude to her.
Sample of children with traumatic memories:
Many survivors of natural tragedies have to cope with hostile and burdensome memories. For example, young children like Matthew Sprite who was 8 at the time of the Black Saturday fires, went through a period during which he literally hid in his shell. He would burrow under the bed, under the desk at school and, often until late at night, in the cubby house in the backyard. Basically, he was suffering from post-traumatic stress after the fire which killed his friends next door, and what made it worse was that Matthew had had a quarrel with his best mate, and believed that he was somehow responsible for his death.
As renowned holocaust psychiatrist Paul Valent says both adults and children “don’t join the dots [over emotional problems causing the physical symptoms] because behind that lies thoughts like ‘Life has no meaning because I didn’t save so-and-so’ or ‘because I killed so-and-so’. He states that the problem leads to disconnection that threatens their wholeness. “But when you kill off parts of yourself, you can’t negotiate what you will kill off. If you kill off guilt, you also kill off love. If you cut off from fear, you experience psychic numbing. You can’t be loving and creative and whole anymore.”
However, eventually his parents and the counsellor organised a mock funeral for the neighbour so that Matthew could properly grieve. When Matthew finally releases the white balloons over the graveyard of his neighbour he starts to work through his trauma – his angst, his regret, his fear and failures. His mother states that after releasing his negative, pent up emotions he “just picked up overnight. I noticed he started to laugh more and enjoy things more. The biggest change was when he was faced with information about the fire, or people were talking about what happened to them. He is now able to hear it without it affecting him.”
The school principal at Strethewan Primary School, Mr Headway said, that a lot of young children became very rebellious and anti-social a few years after the fire because they had lost so much. Alternatively, many of the victims also developed a more sensitive approach to people and their problems. Mr Headway said, “I defy anybody to match the resilience of my community and the kids in it, but just because they are resilient and keep going every day doesn’t mean they’re not extremely sad and traumatised. In many ways, they are more compassionate because of their experiences.”
Novelist and Age writer, Fiona Scott-Norman states in her book, Don’t peak at high school” from bullied to A-List, that people who are bullied or are unpopular at school are often forced to rely on their own resources and become very resilient. The moral of their stories is that all conquered their fears and went on to have successful lives. “Being bullied shaped these people,” writes Scott-Norman. “There are advantages to being unpopular at school, because you are forced to fall back on your own resources.”
Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree believes that the way parents negotiate differences is critical to family relationships, and “even if they’re very diverse differences, that negotiation of differences is a central part of how parents and children develop a relationship to each other.”
What about a tragic or life-changing accident? – a surfing accident and a knife attack
Brad Connelly had just got married and together with his wife Pam, planned a life of surfing, skiing and fun. Six months after his wedding he broke his neck in a bodysurfing accident which led to a complete change in his sense of self. After seeing a “white light” and making a conscious choice to “come back as a quadriplegic”, Brad wanted to be around for his yet-unborn child. He had to cope with the intolerable grief of his loved ones and his shame at being such a burden to his wife. He cannot cuddle his children, but derives solace from his discussions with Pam about “life’s big questions”.
“I’m a completely different person now”, says Viliami “Junior” Kama, who was 16 years old when he was stabbed at a party. Together with his mother, Viliami pursued the attackers but was filled with anger for months. Meeting his attackers in court finally enabled him to deal with his anger and his negative emotions. “I wanted revenge really badly, but now I just want to let all this go and I want to forgive you”. The incident completely changed his priorities in life and he decided to pursue his dream of becoming an actor and modelling.
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