Kindness Can Cure, Too

She had been one of the angriest patients I had ever seen. Yelling and screaming so much and walking out of my office so often that I had figured she was out of my practice.

She had been traumatized — not only raped, but abused in other ways — which she had been unable to detail.

Her husband had brought her back, and I gave her a little bit of medicine, slowly, then, I had been finally able to speak with her directly.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She looked confused, for what…

“For the men, and all the horrible things they did to you. I am sorry for the male sex and for the human race and all the things they did that they should not have done.”

She started crying in my arms and I really didn’t have much more to say. We stood there and I helped her wipe her tears.

I tried to reassure her, however, that there were good examples of the male sex. Like her husband who was coming to pick her up, and mine, who had already come to the office and was waiting for me in the waiting room.

She told me her husband’s mother had been hurt a lot like her. We talked about how very good men could be.

She wanted to meet the husband who took care of me. She was as delightfully sweet as I could ever remember seeing her be.

I am constantly surprised by what members of the human race are capable of doing, treating each other with cruelty.

We ought to focus on the simple, powerful ways people can be good to each other. Sometimes religion helps, but I have no note that all too often people who profess religious beliefs are still capable of being very cruel to each other.

There are wonderful people, who while being atheists or agnostics, still respect the species enough to be “mostly harmless” to other members of the human species.

Just be good, please, as much as you can.

Stand up for goodness and niceness.

I can’t even predict, most of the time, what behaviors can become traumatic to a human.

Sometimes, for example, an anonymous remark by a passer-by who probably thought he was joking has caused years of pain.

For example, I remember now a young woman, eating funnel-cakes at a state fair in the midwest, who was told by an anonymous passer-by that she was “too fat.” She developed a case of anorexia (an illness where someone does not eat enough) from reliving that remark in a dream, and required considerable treatment to help her eat enough to live.

Be good to humans.

Be nice to humans.

You may know better than I do what will help make you that way.