Harmony by Teresa Joyce, NAASCA representative in the United Kingdom To have harmony in life illustrates that you can handle life within different areas: to include your career, health and within a relationship; to be able to work towards your goals, within that harmony which brings with it an orderly life; also pleasing situations are accompanied with a great sense of congruity. Harmony describes things that go together within an agreement for most of the time, for some it is found within meditation, which brings such things as mindfulness through the art of focusing, becoming emotionally and mentally clear. If people are living within harmony with each other, they are living peacefully without the need for domination or trying to change another to their will. It’s an acceptance of a difference within the whole which brings forth this peace and harmony, with little more than that acceptance. I sit here relating with you today when the world has little choice other than to communicate within the situation of coronavirus; lives are being lost within this tragic situation. Harmony is deeply required if we are to fight this situation together. Everyone needs to play their part no matter how small, because in not doing so the unthinkable is very much biting at our heels. If there is an occasion when harmony is shown to belong, it’s within the fight to save lives and to aid those around us that may require our help. Right now, the world needs and is asking all of us to bring our particular strengths to the party within this global pandemic.

So many elements need to fall in to place before harmony can be achieved. Acceptance is only one of them because it's only by really accepting our life that any balance can be achieved. As with all things, the scales need to balance to achieve such harmony, and the scales of a child abuse survivor have always been weighted to one side. A life without all aspects intact will never achieve a perfect standing to enable them to find that much-longed-for harmony. But their circumstance will remain unchangeable because their memoir has already been written and disharmony was the order of the day.

When we are children, it should have been the natural order of things but within child abuse, it's lost. Just how do you cultivate the good in life which brings that harmony, when you have only ever been shown the darkness? When all that seems to be felt is frustration and pain within a life that has been shattered. It’s a heavy energy that goes against the flow of life whilst travelling in the opposite direction than harmony.

For a child abuse recovering adult, understanding their abuse means the upheaval of so many emotions and at times that emerging ever-burning question of ‘why me’? It’s certainly a question that they can be forgiven for asking but it’s also a question that can never truly be answered. No child should live through such an experience, but it’s that adult that requires the need of asking. As a child, that question was so far beyond their grip and it will take that adult many years to even address that question because, on asking, it’s always that child deep within that will feel the impact of its painful absorption. Harmony is an emotion for all in which to feel within the journey of life when harmony is understood, but in doing so for that adult child abuse survivor it only reiterates the confirmation of its absence.

Emotions can be likened to a tidal wave. When the water below is so deep and dark, whilst all along shifting with the tide, it's so very difficult to avoid the waves whilst clinging on to the rocks, but it seems to be their only survival. There is no harmony when you're within a riptide and nothing could be less harmonious than the absence of calm water. For them, it can feel as if they are locked within the prefect storm – battered by the wind and hammered by rain, with all absence of a blue sky as the elements create their version of harmony.

Harmony can be a combination of different notes when all are playing the same tune, but it only takes one instrument to hit a different note to put the whole melody in jeopardy; someone stepping out of tune disregarding all others. That adult child abuse survivor has spent their life playing a tune where they were never accompanied, there was never an orchestra in which to guide their path toward any accomplishment of harmony, all the notes struck would have been at the hand of their abuser without any correction even considered.

It's true to say that harmony is a state of mind just waiting to be unearthed and, given time, they will.