The Need for Kindness

Are you able to remember kind people in your life when you were a child?

Kindness can be allowing us just to be noticed, to one other person.

I know when I was even a very small child, I felt alone.

Feelings were not spoken of in my family, nor at school, in those days.

In school I constantly had two experiences. What I sat feeling. What I sat seeing and hearing.

It was not until I was in my mid forties that I met up with a psychotherapist with whom I worked for eighteen months. Tackling painful feelings. In myself, reaching the very root of each one, step by step.

Prior to that, I had experienced pain over certain issues or circumstances, as though a knife had been plunged into me.

A friend had so importantly, for me, said, “First, you have to change yourself.” That was so very true.

The smallest child needs their feelings heard/understood.

We can help change our communities and world by enabling parents and teachers to understand that by listening to and responding to a child’s feelings, even if with a hug, we are also caring for the child deep within ourselves.

Many adults today within England (I have not lived anywhere else) have not grown up emotionally and are still three-year-old children at an emotional level, crashing around in other people’s lives and being very destructive. They have no concept of other people’s personal boundaries.

If kindness were usual within each road and street of each of our communities, listening to each other’s needs, would we need politicians?

Caring for our own feelings and caring for children and adults’ feelings, is true kindness and awareness.

Margie McGregor
August 2020

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Woodstock, Oxfordshire, UK