Page 70 ... Mrs. Bakkoff’s big brother had been seriously injured in a motorbike accident. He had just bought the bike. His little sister watched him ride up down the street with admiration, through the windows of the family house. She saw, far off, that he had had an accident. She ran to her brother but there was already a crowd around him. She was just six years old and her neighbors in the crowd pushed her away thinking that she shouldn’t see what was happening to her brother. An ambulance arrived and took him away without her having seen him or being able top get near him.
Mrs. Bakkoff relived this drama every time she saw her brother. Every time she felt the same discomfort. This discomfort she put down to the accident. However, today she realized that it wasn’t the accident that had left its mark, what had really happened was the act of being pushed away by the crowd, the crowd had clumsily rejected her.
The events behind this story are relatively common. We naturally attribute discomfort we feel to the most logical and socially acceptable causes and to such an extent that when we are children it is often those around us who decide why we are not feeling right. We rarely think about what we are really feeling. Through the experience of those around us, through books, films, television programs, our environment progressively teaches us to put a name to what we are experiencing. Once this has been done, we no longer stop to think about our reactions to different situations. This is normal given that our fears are too diversified and personal to be catalogued. The only constant is that they are not directly evoked by what happens to others – only our own relation to the events or situations that we encounter will stimulate an emotion. And sometimes the resulting emotions are little to be proud of and difficult to admit, both to ourselves and others.