During this shift is when I really started to pay more attention to the aspirations, which is a crucial component of this program and its effectiveness. To sum up what the aspirations are, they are five challenges that help us to acquire character attributes in re-creating our personal identity. As you move up along the aspirations, you get more privileges and freedoms, etc. but that is not the point of the aspirations.
Contrary to what many girls believe, moving onto higher aspirations like Humility & Honor and Trust is not all about the privileges you earn like Facebook or cell phone use. Although these privileges may be nice to have, earning these aspirations is a way of marking how much progress you’ve made along your journey and a way to show the rest of the community the hard work you’ve been doing.
When I first came to GBA, I started off on the first aspiration, Respect and Gratitude. I moved up to the second one, Courtesy and Compassion, in just about three weeks’ time and thought this all was going to be fairly easy.
I looked up to the higher aspiration girls in the community and I told my therapist in one of my first sessions that before I left Greenbrier that I wanted to make it to at least Humility, if not Trust. I had no idea how hard I was going to have to work to make that goal become a reality.
I moved off of the first two aspirations fairly quickly, I never had much respect or courtesy issues throughout my life so these weren’t much of a struggle for me.
I was moved onto the third aspiration, Empathy and Forgiveness, in September and this is where all my work really began. Obviously, I knew what having empathy meant, but putting it into action was a whole different story. It was much easier for me to have empathy with my friends, but I couldn’t understand how it was even possible to have empathy for someone who was doing dumb things or causing hell in the community. It was also really hard for me to have empathy for my mom when she was making me so angry all the time and getting under my skin with everything she said.
At that point in time, I doubted I would ever figure out a way to have empathy for these types of people. I don’t remember at what point in time I had this realization, but during one of my sessions I figured out that my mom has a whole lot of stuff on her plate and half of it doesn’t have anything to do with me! With this being said, I realized that I shouldn’t take things so personally from her all the time. When she’s in a snappy mood there could be a million reasons behind it, and it doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with me.
For my entire life, up until this point in time, I had taken everything she said to heart and internalized it, enforcing one of my negative core beliefs that I was broken and couldn’t be fixed. As soon as I had this powerful realization, is when having empathy for people started to become easier. I used this realization I had and applied it to everyone, not just my mom. When girls were doing something I didn’t agree with, being rude, etc. I looked at the situation in a totally different per- spective. I didn’t know everything they were going through at that moment in time, and instead of being critical and judgmental, I tried to be supportive towards them and put myself in their shoes.
The second part of this aspiration is forgiveness. Being able to forgive someone else or yourself is one of the most challenging things to do in life. Forgiving someone is not saying what they did was ok, its saying that it is no longer going to affect you in a negative way and
you are willing to move forward from it.