Member-only story

How I Forgave My Abusers and Escaped From Victim Mentality

Duncan Riach
5 min readApr 7, 2018

My eyes opened slowly. Above me, I saw a meadow of beautiful pink and violet flowers. The scene was filled with a light that danced between the blossoms and washed across the field of soft, delicate opulence under the shade of the trees like the gentle rising of water on the underside of a dock in summertime. The magnificence filled my heart to overflowing and the sweetness spilled from my throat and eyes like an offering to myself reflected endlessly in mirror placed before mirror.

But the magnificence was not only in the image before me, nor just in the choice of subject to reproduce, but also in the way it was painted: the movements of the brush, the pleasure of the action that created it, and the state of flow of the painter himself.

“It’s so beautiful,” I said to my therapist, in awe of the Monet in my self and my self in Monet, in the sweetness of the pleasure of living, in each stroke of the brush, and in each click of the keys beneath my fingers. “Now I understand why people pay millions for them.”

“Yes, even people who don’t know what it’s called know it when they see it,” he said.

The word transcendence suggests separation or to go above or beyond. But the way to transcend is to go through: to fully commit to and experience the very thing we wish to…

--

--

Duncan Riach
Duncan Riach

Written by Duncan Riach

Top Writer. Self-Revealing. Mental Health. Success. Fulfillment. Flow. MS Engineering/Technology. PhD Psychology. duncanriach.com

Responses (4)