CRIME & SELF-PUNISHMENT

I have had quite a few queries as to the lack of blogs lately. There are a number of reasons, the most important is sheer lack of time – if you have read the latest News Update on www.pkctech.co.za, you’ll understand.

The other reason is a bit more difficult, our area has been targeted with a spate of burglaries lately, fortunately, only attempts in our case. This has caused my usual positive attitude to take a nose dive and I find myself becoming a person I didn’t ever want to be – negative and prepared to do bodily harm to any intruder.

Crime is a fact of life and certainly not unique to South Africa – I can assure you that while our overall crime statistics are amongst the worst in the world, there are areas in supposedly safe cities elsewhere in the world, where things are even worse.

How you deal with crime is the differentiator – you can be a victim or you can be a survivor. I have never been a victim of crime, I absolutely refuse to be one, but I have survived:

• Being hijacked at gun point in my own driveway;
• A home invasion where my wife got woken up with a pistol in her face;
• Four attempted break-ins at our house – all stopped by our dog waking us up;
• Preventing a break-in at our neighbor by responding to odd noises at 2:00AM.

The Oxford Dictionary’s definitions:

• Victim: a person harmed, injured, or killed as a result of a crime, accident, or other event or action
• Survivor: a person who copes well with difficulties in their life

While I was not physically harmed in any of these instances, there was mental harm. A psychologist friend described trauma as any event where you, those near to you or your property was threatened.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a condition of persistent mental and emotional stress occurring as a result of injury or severe psychological shock, in other words trauma.

The bad thing about PTSD is that it is accumulative – each instance of trauma is added to the previous ones and your brain processes it as one huge extended trauma. While you deal with the first three or four instances, the next one, even if it is minor trauma, may send you over the edge into full-blown PTSD.

In my mind, admitting to being a victim is a negative emotion and accepting what happened without being able to do anything about it.

By being  a survivor I am not in any way minimising the trauma, I am merely saying it happened, now deal with it as life tends to go on, whether you are on board or not.

Which one would you rather be?