With great empathy and without shying away from taboos
Andreas Salcher unfolds a map of hidden wounds and asks:
What distinguishes people who break from their wounds from those who even grow from them? How can we prevent the fear of further wounds from suffocating our longing for love?
Long-term studies show which protective factors can help people to overcome even the most painful trials in life. These findings are strikingly consistent with the insights of some of the most prominent thinkers, spiritual teachers and scientists who have contributed to this book. Reconcile yourself and the world. Because in your deepest wound lies your greatest talent.
DER VERLETZTE MENSCH was awarded the Platinum Book for more than 50,000 copies sold in Austria.
Reading samples
The most important thing right at the beginning
The wounded person begins with subtle injuries - the school of the heart begins with vigilance.
The first part of this book is intended to highlight some of the "danger zones" in which people can get hurt. These begin at birth and continue in childhood, at school and at work. Love, insults, separations and the fight for children can lead to serious injuries. We often only realize what we cause by pushing away and humiliating the elderly in our society when we are affected by it through our parents. You will find yourself in some stories, some will be completely alien to you. The extent of possible injuries and the stages of pain are unimaginable. I would never have imagined how many deep emotional injuries there are even in my immediate circle of friends. And how much they have influenced my friends' lives. Injuries start with small carelessness.
The prejudice: You won't make it. You're just too stupid. You are a failure. With every repetition of this prejudice, it becomes entrenched and turns into a condemnation of an innocent person. Comparison: In the first few months of life, almost all parents love their children unconditionally. Then comes the time of comparison. Which child walks first? Which child speaks first? Which child is prettier? Which child is more skillful?
Assessment: When children start school, comparisons appear to be objectified and systematized. Who has only "very good"? Who does not have "not good enough"? Who is the best in math? Who is failing? Who has the smartest clothes?
Of course, not every single carelessness, every disadvantage, every injustice leads to an injury. Nor do we die immediately if we cut our finger and bleed a little. It is the underlying mechanism that makes us perpetrators and victims. As victims, we suffer when someone repeatedly hits our sore spot. As perpetrators, we inflict hundreds of tiny injuries on someone, as if with a tattoo needle, which add up to the tattoo of a failure, for example. Tattoos on the skin cannot simply be washed off. Tattoos on the soul often shape people's lives.
It is the accumulation of many small injuries, always in the same place, that lead to serious wounds. The sum of all the unkindnesses and disparaging remarks then causes a relationship to die. Conflicts between entire nations build up from the accumulation of prejudices. Then a harmless occasion is enough for a bloody divorce or a war between nations. It always starts small.
Of course, we cannot banish injustice from the world and feel responsible for everything. But we can make the decision every day not to hurt. Simple questions often help: Is this good for me? Is it good for the other person? Would I accept this behavior for myself?
The second part, "Winners and losers", focuses on the right way to deal with one's own injuries. We will explore the question of why some people are broken by seemingly minor injuries and others are able to overcome much deeper, sometimes unimaginable suffering. A decisive criterion for coping is the meaning we give to our injuries. This determines whether we can develop our greatest talent from our deepest injuries.
The third part is about the art of not hurting yourself or others. Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast will teach us how we can open our senses and, above all, our hearts, even in the rush of everyday life. An open heart will always be a vulnerable heart. And only a vulnerable heart can be a loving heart. The teachings of happiness researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi show us how we can increase the capacity for happiness in ourselves and in our children. With his schools in the most dangerous ghettos, Bill Strickland shows us how to change the world with concrete projects, even under the most difficult circumstances. "The School of the Heart" is intended to entice each of us to become a little bit of a better person.
A broken bike, a broken promise and its consequences
A young boy who didn't speak a word of English came to the USA as an immigrant. His father saved for two years to buy him his first bicycle. The first time he took it out for a ride, he had an accident with a car. The bike was badly damaged and the boy was seriously injured. The woman who had been driving the car was a doctor in a hospital and told him that he shouldn't talk to anyone about the accident and that she would take care of him in her hospital and buy him a new bike. She also called the boy's parents, who didn't speak a word of English and agreed to this approach. After ten days in hospital, the boy had recovered to some extent. When he wanted to leave the hospital, he was asked to pay the costs of his stay. He referred to the doctor's promise that his treatment would cost nothing. However, the doctor suddenly no longer remembered this. He didn't get a new bike either, but his parents had to save up for another year to have the old one repaired.
What had triggered this screaming injustice in the little boy? He came to the conclusion: "If you don't know a country and its laws, if you don't speak its language, then you're going to have a lot of problems." So he took responsibility for what had happened and decided to become a lawyer one day. This story is completely typical of all the lives of those who later succeeded. The successful ones recognized every mishap as a problem that could be solved according to the motto: "Okay, shit happens, what can I learn from it now?" The failures, on the other hand, attributed the negative events in their lives to the bad nature of their fellow human beings or interpreted them as a conspiracy of fate against them. They felt like powerless victims and not as self-determined individuals. For how easily the little boy with the broken bicycle could have said: "That's the way rich people are, and I'm poor" or "Women are like that" or "Bicycles are dangerous, so I'll never ride a bike again" or "Doctors are like that" or ... But he concluded that his problem had to do with immigrants' lack of knowledge about their rights. Much later in his life, he became the person responsible for the rights of minorities and immigrants in the cabinet of US President Harry Truman.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and many other researchers have discovered that there is a group of people who have never really been able to overcome poverty, misfortune and negative childhood experiences and have remained unsuccessful in life. Looking back later as adults, they said things like: "Yes, my father was always drunk, so we were poor and I couldn't go to university." In other words, they blamed others or circumstances for their failure. The little boy in the story, on the other hand, was able to separate the insult that was done to him from himself, drew the right conclusions from it and wanted to help others in the future so that the same thing would not happen to them. As we will see more often, this is a pattern that runs through the biographies of many people who were able to develop a human quality from an injury.
