There was something going on in Andrew's subconscious mind that I couldn't understand. I said “Hey Andrew, it's so powerful, teach me”. And so he did. It took me a year and in that year I proved to myself that there was such a thing as a powerful subconscious mind. During six months of that year I released 22 kilograms of weight using only my mental powers to do so. I was able to bring down my blood pressure by 20 points just standing right in front of the doctor and could also reduce the strength of my pulse at will. I was excited. Proof! I devoured every book I could possibly find on the subject. The Power of the Subconscious Mind by Dr Joseph Murphy was the first one and then that referred me to many more. I was off on a new journey.
So in this process of development there was a little chink starting to open up in my belief system. I could see that some of the conventional ways of medical treatment were lacking and I became open to the idea that the power of the mind might be far greater than I had previously given it credit. After a while the chink became bigger and bigger because the most important thing for a “prove-it-to-me-person” had been provided to me – proof! The case of my weight release was proof because I purposely took no other measures such as dieting or exercise to shed the unwanted kilograms. I knew that I would never ever be bored again in my life because there was just so much to do, so many things to learn about and that learning could be so much easier.
Then, on 23rd January 1987, the real stuff of personal crisis came for me. I had the most traumatic experience when three of my daughters and one of their friends were shotgun murdered in the safety of their own home. Jenny and Kirsty were twins and 19 years old, Lexie was turning 16 the very next morning and their friend was just 19 too. They were far too young to die, they were just innocent kids, blameless victims of a crazed attack.
That was a real shock to me .... and shock is the first thing that I can really recall. When I was told about it and how it happened and all the other details I was just dazed, really dazed. I didn't accept it, didn't buy it, didn't believe it and couldn't possibly reconcile how such an act of extreme random madness could happen to the members of my family. Again, going back to the idea of my basic mind-set which I have described to you, it violated that logical process I believed in which said that a logical cause would have a logical effect. I couldn't come to terms with the idea of chaos, the idea that my girls were the victims of an utterly chaotic random chance.
At first I hadn't started the anger process, or that process where I desired revenge. Revenge, hatred, bitterness, these were emotions that were yet to come. For me it was just disbelief, total disbelief – and then shock. Vietnam hadn't prepared me for this.
It was when I was in this dazed condition that the wife of an old friend from my Duntroon days reached out to help me. And luckily I had the good sense to reach back and take the hand she offered. Michael Burge, before his untimely death a while before this, had first extolled the virtues of the Insight Seminars to me and introduced me to Insight I. He too was a retired Colonel, in charge of Insight Australia, which basically runs self development programs and his wife Kathryn taught these programs. Kathryn offered the hand of help and advised me that as I had already attended Insight I, I should now do Insight II.
Kathryn was a wonderful friend in this time of grief. When Kathryn said, “Look Sandy, just do it, just trust me and do it.” It wasn't hard to trust and I really got a lot out of it. As a digression from the story for a moment, I just want to add here that when or if you ever face a crisis, you can be sure that there will be friends to help you. The help might come from a friend from a long time ago, or a recent friend, or, I believe, it might even come from a stranger. You might even be surprised by the area from which the help is offered. The important thing is this – grab hold of that help and work with it as hard as you can. Don't worry too much about thanks at the start, this can come later. Use the help. The true compliment of thanks can be shown to your friend by your willingness to work with his/her help. In the final analysis, (there's that word again) the fact of you ever actually saying “Thank you” may not even be necessary at all. Your helper might actually be performing a duty of thanks that he/she has to someone else, or fulfilling a spiritual purpose. Your chance to show gratitude will come when you recover from your crisis and have the opportunity to pass on the help. Help can be like one of those chain reactions, starting at one point but quickly spreading, by a series of links and connections, far and wide.
But back to the story. There is no doubt that the Insight Number 2 course did help me; one of the things it brought me to was a group of people that I could relate to. I was encouraged to release grief by talking about the event, by talking about the girls, by doing as much of the natural grief process as is possible. I did not get the chance to bottle up my emotions .... and for this I'm forever grateful. I've now learned that by pushing down emotions, not expressing them, having the “stiff upper lip”, not talking about events, goes a long way to causing post traumatic stress.
I had another helper too and that was my son Andrew talking to me. In the midst of his own grief about his sisters he was able to spare some emotional strength to reach out and help me. Andrew's help was a wonderful example of a man with access to his inner strength. How else, at a time of such personal trauma, could he take his mind from himself and help someone else? I learnt that it is not only on the battle fields of war or in the tunnels of Vietnam that heroism is shown. It is actually all around us.
Andrew helped me to go into my own mind and seek, find out and answer questions. And gradually I got to the stage of working with the passion for revenge, the anger that raged inside me and the hatred that I felt toward the person who had killed my daughters. And in the process of going into my mind I dealt with all the bitter questions of “Why me?” and “What have I done to deserve this?”. If you ask the wrong question, what do you get? That's right _ the wrong answer. For me the question brought up guilt. Feeling guilty does not serve a purpose. The sort of questions brought up for me were “Could I have been a better father?” “Could I have somehow prevented this? Somehow? Somehow? Somehow?” I've found that a quick way through that guilty feeling is saying something like “I did the best I could do with the tools that I had at the time”, or “I accept what I've done and now that I know I'll do better next time.”
I disciplined myself to meditate each day and, like an athlete in training, attempted short sessions at first but built up to longer periods later on. I was in meditation for 20 minutes at a time, then for 30 minutes and then for an hour a day just sitting quietly in my room with all sorts of questions (and answers) coming to me.
I really want to emphasise, when talking about the grief part of it, how important it was to talk about the children, to have fun with the thoughts that are there and not to bottle up anything. There is a strange way that guilt that can creep in at times of grief. The strange guilt is that you can feel that it is not appropriate to laugh or chuckle at the funny things the children did when they were here. You can even feel guilty for being happy that the children brought so much fulfilment to your life because you think that this thought might be selfish. The thought can torment you, “How can I be happy about them when they have died so tragically?” The guilt can also come because it is a social expectation that at such times all should be sadness. You must resist any such tendency when dealing with grief. Bring it all out in the open, talk about it, remember the wonderful things, relive the good times, talk about it, talk about it, talk about it!
There is a danger in not talking things through. The fact is that if you don't talk about it you will push it down into the subconscious mind. If the whole crisis goes into the subconscious mind without being dealt with, it could become post traumatic stress. The subconscious then deals with the crisis as hot sweats, nightmares, unexplained anger and totally irrational behaviour. Not talking about it is a reason why some Vietnam Veterans suffer post traumatic stress about the war. Some talked about it when they came home and some didn't, and the same has probably applied to all service men and women who have returned from all wars.
Now I was also lucky because I had Ian and Lara who were only 3 and 5 at the time. They