The power of forgiveness | Sammy Rangel | TEDxDanubia

Today what I am going to share with you is a story that is difficult for me to talk about and you may find it difficult to hear. I was 41 years old when I discovered that my mother had killed my brother René. He was sitting in my office. waiting to see the next patient I had about three minutes before that appointment started and when I read the article that came to me this news came to me and it said that my mother had hit my brother with a tonka truck when he was 20 months old in At that time that article was dated January 5, 1969 and my mother would have been about five months pregnant with me, the email went on to say that my brother had died at age 19 as a result of his injuries, he had permanent brain damage, partial paralysis on the side of his body and the article said that he was losing consciousness and bleeding from different places on his body while I was sitting there what I figured what I wanted to do what I knew I was capable of doing was get up and take off my coat.

I brought him walking to my car, finding where I knew my mother would be and taking her own life at this stage of my life. Obviously she had overcome a lot of the abuse, a lot of neglect and torture that she had put me through, but for some reason. I was angrier about this than anything I had experienced before and it became quite evident that at some point my family had conspired to keep the secret from me for 41 years. It was just a twist of fate that I was able to discover this. Then I knew I had about three minutes to pull myself together because I knew that, even if I wanted to, I wasn't going to get up, I wasn't going to drive to where my mother was, and, or not, I wasn't going to go.

To kill her, what I was going to do was recover so I could fulfill my responsibilities with the next patient who came to my office, but in those three minutes I relived a lot of what she had done to me. She was three years old. When my mother left me and my sister with her brother, I can remember him motioning for me to pump him through a mirror that was lying or resting in the doorway of his room and then when he called me and I knew that he didn't wanted to. I went in there but I felt helpless and then I found myself next to the bed he was naked he was fat he was ugly to me and behind him I saw my sister crying and although I shouldn't have understood what was happening and I understood what was happening passing by and pulled me to the bed and at that moment my sister tried to defend me, she was only a couple of years older than me at the time and I remember him threatening her that if she didn't shut up he would kill us both and then he raped me the same night he raped my sister, we eventually told my mother what had happened to us at the hands of his brother and she did worse than anything about it, she continued to make us see this man. affection and respect we had to spend time with him we had to sit on his lap we had to kiss him on the cheek when we greeted him and this happened for many years when I received that message I realized that my mother had answered with me where she had left off with me brother when I was 8 years old I had already tried to commit suicide for the first time many times they did not allow me to eat they did not allow me to sleep they did not allow me to go to the bathroom and I had other brothers and quite often the beatings they were giving me could be happening right here and my brothers They could be watching television or playing or talking as if nothing was happening a few meters away from them.

The scars you see on my head are not from other men, they are not from the street. These were scars that I got because, as you know, they cut off my head with objects while they beat me I couldn't go to the hospital to get stitches or to have my broken bones set part of the abuse was deeply humiliating part of their cruelty included not being able to use the bathroom and often having to walk around in my underwear in front of my siblings and my family because she didn't. They wanted me to be able to sneak food into my mouth or the bathroom or the basement when I went to do chores, so I couldn't hide the fact that eventually I did need to go to the bathroom and they wouldn't let me.

I eventually peed on myself and if I did she often made me take off my underwear and put it in my mouth and then covered my mouth with her hand so I couldn't vomit. I couldn't spit it out. and if she had the nerve to vomit she would punish me even more. I reached the tipping point at 11:00 just after my birthday. I remember sneaking out of the room on this occasion. I used to have to kneel next to her. bed and I remember crawling very quietly over the pattern on the floor that I had discovered didn't creak as loud as I sneaked it out in the middle of the night and found myself back in the room standing over her with a knife and I was debating whether to kill her, but there are two reasons that I remember that prevented it.

One was afraid, I don't think I was born to kill and the other is that I loved my mother deeply despite all that abuse and I couldn't bring her back. myself to do that and then I made a decision. I made the decision to leave and run away and that was a pretty big event because as a result of the abuse I had no friends, I had no sleepovers, I had no one in the community that I could go with. I was entering an isolated, unknown and completely unknown in the world and it wasn't long during that first year.

I was having sex. I was drinking. Used to smoke. He used cocaine. I was in a gang. It was violent and. aggressive carrying weapons had dropped out of school and just before turning 12, my 11 year old girlfriend and I buried our first child together when we went to the hospital while she was in labor, I was put in a room alone and eventually a doctor . I opened the door and he rolled over on a table like a medical table and on this table was a blue napkin that looked a lot like a tablecloth and there was something under it and then he left and closed the door behind him.

I had the feeling I knew what was underneath, but your mind can't understand it. I just shot and finally got up and picked up the paper towel and there was my dead son. He had been dead two days before she gave birth to him and thus his body. It was already starting to decompose, it was green, black and other colors that no one should see on a baby and his head was like a balloon full of water, it was crooked and on the table and there was no one there to talk to. talk to me about it or process that or have it make sense to me and I walked out of that hospital and I remember feeling less like a fugitive and more like a discard.

I felt like no one would be here to help me process it to understand my life or these experiences and I remember going from being scared to being angry and I expressed that anger through violence I escalated the type of violence before I fought but I was more defensive now I choose to be aggressive now I choose I started fights initially when I went out on the street. I remember there was a situation where a man asked me to participate in the murder while he was killing someone, he asked me to finish and I didn't dare to do it, but now after this situation, I felt like I wanted to kill I felt like I wanted to hurt someone and I remember that my friend and I chose a homeless person, an innocent victim, we beat him up and tried to kill him that day, he had done nothing to us but Finally it was my expression that made me go to prison as an adult at the age of 17 and I was sent to prison not because of the crime I actually committed but because of what a terrible teenager I was before I became an adult. because the crime they put me in jail for was normally considered a misdemeanor but technically it was enough to send me away and I ended up in a maximum security prison because I was fighting all the time I talked trash all the time I had There's no problem cursing you or trying to pick a fight for the record.

He wasn't a very good fighter, but he was willing to fight. This prison I entered had a rather hostile climate. I came into racial tension between whites and blacks. and very shortly after we got there a race riot started and it was the whites against the blacks and as a minority I had to side with the blacks if I was going to join the fight and we were quite outnumbered, there were about 10 of us willing to fight against about 30 of the men we were going to fight and it was clear which side you were on, I myself had two knives in my hand and the whites were armed with knives, spears, metal chairs and mops, you name it.

It was anything that could hurt or maim you and the order was given to start fighting when we started fighting and we were all trying to kill each other at this point a guard came in very similar to a walkway like you see up here and from above he started to shoot and when he shot everyone ran, but unfortunately my position was that my escape was between the targets and the exit door, so my back was against the wall and finally the guard who came in to start shooting left again and that signaled another round of gunfire. fighting and those white men came looking for me.

I'm doing everything I can to defend myself. An acquaintance, if you can call another person in prison, such a thing saw that I was isolated and isolated and he joined the fight to help protect me and to help me find a way out and at that moment the guard came back in and another one rang Shooting. I looked to the side and saw that my friend who had joined was shot in the side and had a pretty big hole lying on the ground. The whites ran back to their cells and I remember the guard yelling at me that if I touched him he would shoot me too but at that moment I was not afraid I had no sense of danger my friend was screaming and the ironic thing is that I have two knives in my hand and I'm looking at a group of men who are armed and my friend had no weapons and yet they shot him because he was black I grabbed my friend and dragged him 150 cells to the other side of the building he was in and it was immediately evident that the guards were not going to allow him or me to go to the hospital no one inside no one out is what they said and I asked several times and when it became clear that we were going to allow him to die, I started fighting with the guards and then other people came out to help me and finally we took over that cell room, took the keys from the guards, and forced our way to the hospital that was in the prison. and by that time my friend had already passed away, I spent the next twenty-eight months in segregation and isolation because of that, but because of my courage or my role in that prison riot, I began to gain more respect and more

power

through my gang.

Almost immediately. For the entire twenty-eight months after spending so much time in the hole that I was released into society, I remember coming in as a street punk, a kid who was just loudmouthed and willing to fight; now I'm still a big mouth and I'm still willing to fight, but now Now I have

power

, I have authority and now I have embraced hate, not just anger, and when I embraced hate I was willing to kill for any reason and I have always said that I had more animal in me than human at the time, so it's no surprise that just a few months later I was back in prison in another state for even more violent crimes as a gang leader.

At that time, upon entering that prison, I was able to take control of the prisons quite easily. I was able to have guards beaten or inmates beaten I was able to have access to resources that others would have a hard time getting and eventually that led to more encounters and while I was in that prison system I beat four more guards and spent about five years out of the seven I was there. segregated and they transferred me 17 times and what I found ironic is that on one of those occasions a man had said that he felt his life was in danger because of my presence and then they came and caught me in the middle of the night and put me on a bus and they transferred me to another prison and when I got to that prison and then as I was walking away the security staff recognized me and then they told the bus driver and his staff, this man can't come here, we are not equipped to bring him here , it is one thing to be locked up for many years and another thing to be expelled from the world completely when a man is rejected even from prison while they are left to go, so it was a deeply embarrassing and humiliating experience in many ways.

At some point I was forced to undergo treatment and at that time I thought that I can undergo this treatment to outsmart myself and also outsmart the people who are meant to give me hope and I was willing to play the game. because I was willing to fight for the carrot on the end of the stick, which was an earlier release than if I hadn't done the prison program, so I said, "I'll go." There I will play this game and in the process of treatment I remember that my counselor asked him in front of my classmates to talk about my mother, which seemed very strange to me.

I hadn't talked about my mother since I ran away from home. and I didn't feel like it and she pressured me and when she asked me to do that almost the first word I cried and I described all that abuse all that abandonment all the times she made me go to school smelling like urine all the time she he had pulled out chunks of my hair all the time he had left gaping cuts and gashes somewhere but i had no problem expressing that andThen he did something very strange, he took a chair and put it in front of me and he told me to imagine that my mother was sitting in that chair and he said what would you say to her if she was sitting here and I said I don't want to talk to her, he pressured me. and as I thought about what I would say to him I remember saying: how could you do this to me?

How could you do this to us? Why did you do these things? But of course there was no response and then he pressed me further. He asked me to sit on the chair. He had no desire to sit on that one. chair I didn't want to empathize I didn't want to understand her perspective I wanted to hate her and blame her and I felt I was totally justified in that stance because a lot of what she had done was unforgivable if you asked me, but I did and I looked down at my chair and racked my brain what. she would say and the only thing I could think of was I'm sorry.

Here I am, in my late 20s, still trying to see her as a human being underneath all that hate, then he asked me to go back to my chair and asked me how I was feeling and I expressed all those feelings of being to him. an abandoned victim being brutalized unloved, invisible to her to everyone else in the world and my turning point came with the next question, Sammy, have you ever hurt anyone the way your mother hurt you? Since then, my life has been one long apology to my victims, my brothers, my children, who I had abandoned at this moment, including my enemies who I felt deserved everything I did to them and as you can see, it is still very difficult talk about getting to this point, so I didn't want to.

Spoiling my final point, so if you're patient, I'd like to read it to you to make sure it's clear, as I feel this is the most important part of this message. What I have learned is that although the details of our lives may be different, the underlying process of staying stuck or suffering in our parts of life is the same for all of us, we cannot have to be victims of our experiences or the way we tell our stories, but interestingly, stories are the only way out and we are the ones who create those stories, we have the power to change our stories and what they represent.

I invite you all to consider whether it would be helpful for you to create the new story and a new path, and please remember that. The things that stopped you will one day sustain you thank you.