For those of you who don’t live with gamers or who have not heard of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_effect_2" target="_blank">Mass Effect 2</a>, it’s an action role-playing space epic video game. As any good space epic goes, there is a species that is the cause of full colonies disappearing overnight. Commander Shepherd, the main character, is tasked with stopping this relatively unknown destructive force by taking his eclectic team planet-hopping to save the galaxy. The graphics in the game are absolutely stunning, the dialogue between species is thoughtful and well done (probably prompted by my childhood love of the Redwall books), and your in-game actions and dialogue choices impact the characters around you and your relationships with them (and even carry through into the next game).  Some of you might even recognize one of the characters as Yvonne Strahovski, who plays Sarah Walker in the TV show “Chuck”.

So, now that I’ve outed myself as a nerd, or at the very least the wife of a gamer, what does this have anything to do with blame?

One of Shepherd’s team members is a woman named Jack. Jack was experimented on as a child by an elitist organization called Cerebus. She somehow managed to escape and ever since has been a very hard individual. She keeps to her quarters away from the main traffic areas of the ship. She is suspicious the moment anyone asks anything close to a personal question.

For those of you who might play the game, I don’t want spoil anything so I won’t tell you how this situation arises, but at some point in the game Jack runs into a friend, Aresh, who was another child who had been experimented during same time she was. They talk for a minute, re-establishing a connection and they start to talk about what happens when the conversation gets weird. As the conversation continues, Aresh reveals that he is trying to <em>rebuild</em> the set of experiments that were performed on him.

Wait, what? That’s crazy. Why would anyone try to duplicate the awful experimentation performed on him as an innocent, defenseless child?

“I’m rebuilding [the experiments]. What they were looking for… It must have been important. So I’m going to try to find it myself. They must have had good reasons for what they did!”

I was only half paying attention to what was happening on the TV screen until this moment. It struck me: what a fascinating take on how people process traumatic events. Aresh wasn’t trying to harm other people; he was only trying to find meaning in what happened.

You see two people who experienced the same situation growing up and it produced two different effects. One is inked from head to toe, is a loner out in the universe and keeps to herself. Another, haunted by what happened, seeks to try to find the good intentions from the perpetrators, even if they are buried deep. There must have been a good reason that they found it okay to experiment on kids. It must have been a case of sacrificing for the greater good. He was trying to discover the greater good so he could finally put his past to bed.

I am aware that this is a very extreme analogy for people like you and me. We aren’t on a spaceship bringing justice to the universe, but the one thing we all have in common is that bad things happen to us and we all have to find a way to deal with it.

Some people (like me) shove it way down into a jar inside and shut the lid. They keep filling the jar until it explodes. Some people deal with it head on and are abrasive to everyone around them until they can work it out. Some people give the past its space but keep everyone at a distance for the rest of their lives. Some people, like in the case of Aresh, go back to the scene of the crime and try to find evidence of a heart or conscience somewhere—anywhere!—even if there are only tiny scraps of it left.

From the outside we all can see that Aresh has a few screws loose, but he can’t see that. To him, having lived through that, the only way he can come to terms with what happened is if he suffered for a greater cause. He is dealing with his lifelong pain the only way he knows how.

What about you? Do you have a coping mechanism that you go back to in times of need? How does that mechanism affect you and the people around you in the long run? How do you come to terms with your memories?

A lot of people I know would tell me to “give it to God.” But what does that really mean? How do I actually just give it to God? There is a measure of pain I need to work through on my own. Giving it to someone else so it can magically disappear feels like I’m giving up and letting the other party win. It feels like a cop out and like I’m not strong enough to slay my own dragons. Sometimes I can’t tell if that’s a pride thing or a human thing.

I can identify with Aresh on a level because I like to think that people carry around the same heart and brain that I do. So when people commit crimes without batting an eyelash or, as one of my friends said, “sit over their Wheaties in the morning trying to figure out ways to screw people,” I have no way of processing it. It’s outside of my understanding of how the universe is supposed to work.

Thankfully, there is no right or wrong way to handle grief or pain. Can you identify with Aresh? How do you process painful events? How do you put your past to rest and find peace?

<em>Photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/annakie/4431762093/" target="_blank">Annakie</a></em>