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Tag Archives: Christmas

‘Tis the season for forgiveness

18 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by Karen Lloyd AM in Hearing and deaf

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

acceptance, advocacy, Christmas, communication, deaf, family, forgiveness

 

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Soon it will be Christmas. ‘Tis the season to be jolly and spend time with loved ones. For most of us deaf people it’s also the season for great angst – as I wrote last year:  https://lifeanddeaf.net/2015/12/09/christmas-angst-is-coming-to-town/

This year I’ve been thinking a lot about acceptance and forgiveness.

When I was in my thirties, a friend, let’s call him Sam, hurt me deeply and I struggled to deal with my emotions about it. Sam wanted to meet to discuss what had happened but I just wanted to shut him out. During a conversation with a mutual friend, let’s call her Jane, I asked: “What does forgiveness mean?”

Sam could, I told her, tell me he was sorry, he could say sorry a thousand times but it wouldn’t change what he had done and it wouldn’t remove the emotions I was feeling.

Jane said she thought forgiveness meant giving Sam the chance to talk things over with me, sharing with him what I was feeling and the effect his actions had on me; it was about allowing him into my confidence, not shutting him out.

I thought about it and agreed to meet Sam and we talked for a long time. Sam struggled to understand my point of view because he genuinely was sorry and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t let it go, but he listened. And finally he said: “I understand now. I have lost your trust. And I need to work to rebuild that trust.”

Sam and I are still friends. Our friendship is different and both our lives have changed, but we are still friends.

From that experience I learnt a lot about forgiveness, lessons that have made my life much richer.  But forgiveness and acceptance mean different things in different situations and relationships and I’m still learning new things about it.

My father died a few months ago.  He was a lovely man in so many ways, kind, generous, tolerant, and I loved him deeply, just as I know he loved me. But ours was not an easy relationship simply because I am deaf and communication was difficult. As is common with many fathers of deaf children, he largely left the communication to my mother. 

After I left home, my parents often visited me wherever I was living. Most years I spent some time, usually in the summer, with them at the Far North Queensland sugar farm where I grew up. I went swimming with Mum and watched the cricket with Dad. It was the only time I ever enjoyed cricket. 

As we got older, Dad and I both made more effort to communicate more directly with each other but our communication was always more limited and never as easy as that enjoyed between him and my siblings.

Of course I could say that he could have learned to sign, as could all of my family. I just never expected that of my childhood hearing family. I was born hearing and became deaf when I was eight, after I had already acquired fluent English and speech.  As happens for so many people, the ‘experts’ told my parents not to let me sign. When I did learn Auslan in my twenties my mother asked one day if it would help if she too learned.  Although touched and grateful for her offer, I told her not to worry about it. She and I already had quite easy communication. I just always accepted that signing isn’t part of my relationship with my parents and siblings.

My father was 88 when he died and I was almost 60.  For others an easy man to know, he was much loved within our large extended family and his local community. Throughout my life I thought a lot about our relationship and I grieved for it, I wished we could be more close.

A few years before his passing, I realised that our relationship wasn’t going to change, there wasn’t really anything either he or I could do to change it.  It was what it was. 

I also realised that I actually did have a good relationship with my father and I did know him well.  My knowing him was based less on verbal communication and more on observing, doing, sharing and just hanging out together. 

And so I reached acceptance and forgiveness – of both him and myself – and I was able to let my father go with love. Now I grieve only that he is no longer here. This will be our first Christmas without him.

The feeling of not being close to or knowing our parents well, especially our fathers, seems to be common among deaf people who grow up in hearing families.  Recently I was discussing this with a deaf friend who told me that at her father’s funeral her siblings shared stories about him that she hadn’t known before.  One day she mentioned to a mutual acquaintance, a very down to earth deaf woman, that she’d recently been to her father’s funeral. Before she could say anything about it, this understanding woman said kindly: “And you learned something.”

This experience with my father has changed how I think about these things. I understand that many (but by no means all) deaf people do experience very difficult relationships with their parents. But I wonder now if we give too much emphasis to the verbal communication aspects and see things too much only from our own point of view.

I do believe that most parents try to do the best they can for their children. They don’t always get it right or get good advice from experts or the support they need.  It can be incredibly hard and heartbreaking for them.

I wonder now if perhaps more of us would find acceptance and forgiveness, be happier and healthier if we tried to understand our parents’ experience as well as our own and if we treasured more the non-verbal and doing aspects of our relationships with them. 

Every relationship is different, as is every acceptance and forgiveness. Some things we accept and forgive without fully realising it. For people who are regularly treated poorly, this can become something we do automatically as a form of self-preservation. It isn’t good for our own health to get upset about every insult and injustice.

In the early 1990s when I was a librarian at the State Library of NSW I was out one day with my hearing boss. I had purchased my ticket for some forgotten event and was waiting nearby for Val to buy hers.  Preoccupied with people-watching, I was startled when Val joined me, all upset. 

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“I just told that ticket seller off,” she said. “Did you know how rude she was to you when you were buying your ticket and had trouble understanding what she was saying?”

“Oh that?” I said. “That stuff happens all the time.”

“Really? I had no idea! How can you put up with it?” she asked, shocked.

“You just do,” I said. “If I got upset about it every time it happens I’d be a nervous wreck.”

We might turn a blind eye to people who are rude to us because it’s not worth the emotional energy of trying to – usually unsuccessfully – challenge it. Sometimes forgiveness means letting go and moving on.

But it doesn’t mean giving up and putting up with all the terrible ways that people and society often treat us.  

It was Val who one day told me that in every difficult situation we always have three choices: accept it, change it, or leave it. I have often used this bit of wisdom in all kinds of situations and generally I find it to be true.

But sometimes it isn’t practical. Not for us deaf people.  Some things are unacceptable, leaving the situation may not be in our best interests and changing it is difficult because change depends on other people changing their behaviour.

This is true of things like abuse of our rights, poor education, prejudice, discrimination in the workplace, exclusion from the community.  In these situations we can adopt a form of acceptance and forgiveness (“for they know not what they do”) while we do the long-term work of changing it. 

Many deaf people find this very hard to do. So many are angry. So many are terribly hurt and damaged by the treatment we receive. Quite understandably they rail against the injustice and demand their rights in ways that achieve little if any change. And so many struggle with mental health issues.

For 30 years I dedicated my life to advocating for the human rights of deaf people. I loved it and am proud of the advances I helped achieve. In many ways life is better for us now than it was 30 years ago. In some ways it isn’t and some of our achievements are being eroded, especially by mean-spirited governments. There are still a lot of ignorant and uncaring people out there and we still have a long way to go.

I believe now that our society is not yet mature enough to accept deaf people, or indeed disabled people in general, as equals.  Hopefully one day it will be, and it’s important that we all continue to work towards this, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Have I given up now that I’ve retired from active full-time advocacy? No way!  I still believe advocacy is vital and I still help Deaf Australia a bit behind the scenes, still support and encourage friends in their advocacy efforts.

But I believe that we all need to find some kind of acceptance and forgiveness that makes it easier to live our lives in positive, healthy ways.  I believe that we all spend too much energy focussing too much on the hurt and the negatives. We need to change how we think.  We need to focus more on the positives in our lives.

The negatives will still be there and we will still need to work at changing them.  But when we accept, forgive and count our blessings (and we all have some) we are stronger and more able to cope with the negatives.  We are more able to keep them at a distance and live our lives with health and happiness.

A good place to start is with our own families this festive season. We could do what Sam and I did all those years ago. We could allow them into our confidence, talk things over with them, share with them what we feel and listen to their point of view. We might be surprised by what we learn.

Or if that’s too hard, and for many people it will be, we could do what I did with my father. We could think about how love takes many forms. It’s not all spoken. Much of it is based not on verbal communication, but on observing, doing, sharing and just hanging out together. 

I wish you all a joyous and forgiving Christmas!

 

Christmas angst is coming to town

09 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by Karen Lloyd AM in Hearing and deaf

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Christmas, communication, deaf, family

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Christmas is coming, and with it the angst1 so familiar to those of us who find ourselves the only deaf person in a gathering of family or friends.

Most of us belong to hearing families, many of whom don’t use Auslan. Even for deaf people who don’t sign, who rely on lipreading and perhaps hearing aids or cochlear implants, participating in group conversations can be difficult.

So family gatherings can be troubling, and rarely more so than at Christmas, when family is so much a part of the festivities. We want to be there, we want to be part of our family, but we so often feel excluded.

When I ask deaf friends if they had a good Christmas the replies usually go like this: “Ah, it was good to see everyone, the food was yummy, too much as usual, but you know how it is, everyone had a great time talking and laughing and mostly forgot to include me so by the time the day was over I couldn’t wait to leave.”

Unlike many I have heard about, my own family is pretty good. They tell me from time to time what the discussion is about. They sometimes tell funny stories directly to me while others listen. With my husband’s family, John takes on this role. It helps, but it’s not the same as being in a group where everyone signs and communicates easily.

I once took one of my sisters and her husband to a gathering of Auslan-using friends and interpreted only sporadically for them. Afterwards my sister commented on how educational it had been for her.

“Now I understand better what it’s like for you in a group of hearing people,” she said.

A friend, let’s call him Jack, whose family has deaf and hearing members who all use Auslan, once told me a story about a dinner with a hearing aunt. The aunt had also invited a hearing non-signing friend and as the dinner progressed, she and her friend engaged in an animated spoken conversation.

Feeling excluded, Jack decided to make a subtle protest and began to chew his food loudly.

His aunt looked at him and frowned. He stared back meaningfully and continued to chew loudly.

Finally she signed to him discreetly, “Shh! You’re eating noisily! You’re rude!”

Jack signed back, “You’re rude! You’re only talking to him! I’m here too!”

“He’s important!” signed the aunt.

“I’m important too!” signed Jack.

This wasn’t a Christmas dinner story. Deaf people have these experiences all year round, but we seem to feel the pain of them more acutely at Christmas time.

It’s important to do our best to educate our hearing family and friends about how to communicate with us and how to include us in family events. To help us, here are a couple of resources:

http://limpingchicken.com/2014/07/10/communication-tips/

http://limpingchicken.com/2015/12/05/charlie-swinbourne-12-tips-to-ensure-deaf-people-arent-left-out-at-christmas/

Encouraging our families to change can be a long, hard and often unsuccessful road. Rather than endlessly struggling with our own hurt and frustration, I have come to believe that it’s kinder to ourselves to chill out about it a bit, look at it from different perspectives, not just our own, and use strategies to better care for our own wellbeing.

In family gatherings no one is more important than anyone else, and that includes us. Of course every family is different and family dynamics can mean this isn’t always true, but generally speaking, in families everyone wants to feel that they are as important as others.

As deaf people we spend so much of our lives fighting to have our needs met and our rights respected that it can be easy to forget this point. But within the family it is a key point. Sometimes hearing family members also feel their needs aren’t considered. As deaf people our needs are sometimes a bit different but are not more, nor less, important than anyone else’s.

This year we will have Christmas with John’s family, who are less experienced at including me than my own family is. Over the years, John has become better at it, but there are times when he gets caught up in the conversation and forgets. Even if I kick him under the table or give him a meaningful stare he will sometimes respond with a blank-faced, “What?”

So I have found it’s more effective to remind him just before we arrive at such events that I’m going to need him to tell me from time to time what’s happening. And to remind him that saying, “They’re talking about the cricket. Bob thinks the Aussie’s aren’t so good this year and won’t win,” is much more helpful than just saying, “They’re talking about the cricket.”

John tries hard, he wants to do it well, and he does from time to time tell me what’s going on and check that I’m ok, but these things aren’t easy for him either. We have had many conversations about it and he has shown me perspectives I’d never thought of.

Conversations in groups of people can sometimes be about things that don’t interest him. So if I ask him aloud, “What’s she talking about?” it can put him on the spot because he doesn’t know and doesn’t want the person speaking to know he wasn’t listening. He isn’t there to be my interpreter and I don’t expect him to listen to and interpret everything.

Conversations also frequently overlap and sometimes John just hasn’t heard something I’m asking about, he’s been listening to a different conversation.

Sometimes in families there are dynamics that impact on people’s desire or ability to interpret or summarise conversations.

If Aunty Val and Aunty Flo get into an argument about some ancient family history, others may not want to enflame it by repeating any of it for us. A solution might be for someone to tell us quietly in another room, but we might need to ride out our frustration until a suitable moment.

If Grandpa and Dad are discussing some scientific theory that no one else understands, others are only going to be able to tell us they have no idea what they are talking about, it’s some science thing. This can annoy us. We think they just can’t be bothered to explain it to us. But sometimes it really is true. Contrary to what many deaf people often assume, sometimes hearing people really don’t understand things they hear.

Over the years I have become less troubled by the angst so many of us feel in gatherings of hearing people, and my mental health is stronger for it. Conversations with John and others in my family have helped me to better understand the dynamics from a hearing person’s point of view as well as my own.

I have also learned strategies that help me. These include getting involved with the setting up and cleaning up, turning on the TV captions, having one on one conversations, and just zoning out and turning my thoughts to my own interests.

And I have stopped trying to look like I understand what’s going on when I don’t. I don’t care too much anymore what other people think or whether they might feel uncomfortable about my exclusion.

Sometimes I just leave the group and go and read in a chair for a while. No one seems to mind (and I don’t much care if they do) and I’m happy doing that.

And I often take my knitting with me to family gatherings. It’s ideal. I can simultaneously knit and look around, I can be physically in the group and periodically participate in the conversation and still feel I’m doing something enjoyable and personally meaningful with my time.

Perhaps this year I’ll take my knitting to Christmas lunch.

I’d love to hear how you deal with the deaf Christmas angst. However you deal with it, I wish you all a very merry Christmas!

  1. Angst, often confused with anxiety, is a transcendent emotion in that it combines the unbearable anguish of life with the hopes of overcoming this seemingly impossible situation. Without the important element of hope, then the emotion is anxiety, not angst. Angst denotes the constant struggle one has with the burdens of life that weighs on the dispossessed and not knowing when the salvation will appear.   http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Angst
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