I've been trying to watch a lot of the Oprah Lifeclass series, that's been on during the past month (Oct. - Nov., 2011). For the uninitiated, they have taken pieces of various past guests from the Oprah show that go along a common theme. One of the more recent episodes was about learning from painful emotional experiences and featured Christine McFadden, who went for her daily early morning walk, to discover on her return home that her troubled ex-husband had come to the house while she was out walking and murdered all four of her children, and then took his own life. At the time of her children's death, Christine was a successful veterinarian. Her 3 oldest children were successful and well-liked high school students. Her youngest child, which was the only child by the ex-husband that committed the murders, was a lovable 5 year old. There was nothing about this that made sense on any level. This episode features Christine being interviewed at different stages thru the years, as she moves from someone just holding herself together, eventually coming to some terms with it, but still thinking there's no future for her, until a final interview in recent years when she has (surprisingly to her) fallen in love again, remarried, and had twins. One of the quotes I especially loved came from the Dalai Lama, "It's worth remembering that the time of greatest gain in terms of wisdom and inner strength is often that of greatest difficulty." It was brought out in the lifeclass episode that one of the factors that helped Christine McFadden overcome her deep grief, was the outpouring of thankful Oprah viewers that wrote in how Christine helped them survive their great grief. There were women that said they had thought about ending their own life after the death of a child, who realized they needed to not give up because of her encouragement.
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| Christine McFadden on Oprah's Lifeclass, Episode 17 |
Article:
Oprah Interviews Christine McFadden - Oprah.com: 'via Blog this'Various links to Christine McFadden at the Oprah site: http://myown.oprah.com/search/index.html?q=Christine%20McFadden
People can spend a lot of time and effort blaming everyone else for their problems. "If I hadn't....if I had only.....if that had never happened....sometimes they get so hung up on dissecting the past that they forget to make time for the present or truly work on their goals for the future. Then, to do further damage to their psyche, they allow themselves to become more damaged, rather than allowing themselves to move on. I first ran across this blog entry on the "Positively Positive" blog today and thought, if only more people could take this approach, not only their lives would be more productive, but society as a whole would be better. I remember years ago when I was in child welfare, sitting through some training where character disorders was discussed. I made the conscious decision that day that for the remaining time I had left to raise my children, that I was going to take the approach that I was going to teach them they were the only ones that could take responsibility for their own actions. I had so many run-ins with people that wanted to blame everyone else for their own behavior. I think this article really sums it up. Rather than taking you to the Positively Positive blog, I choose to link it back to the original post by Stephanie Zamora at GalTime, where the article was originally published: