Though I’d demonstrated natural qualities of compassionate leadership while attending my first urban grammar school, my befuddled confusion concerning my inability to become absorbed within the high spirited, preteen, social group at my new suburban school (at which time I was humiliated beyond belief on the Hebrew school bus) had felt so mystifyingly mortifying as to see my leadership skills retreat, leaving me to become (by the age of twelve) an acquiescent observer of the human condition in hopes of somehow finding myself socially accepted by my peers as had been true on my very first day in kindergarten (when I’d comforted crying classmates by reassuring them that their mothers would surely return). And those leadership skills had served me well through fifth grade when I’d single-handedly aborted our classroom bully from browbeating the new kid on the playground during recess. In short, no one had been a natural born leader more than me, begging the question, what specifically had caused such an emotion-based swing between those opposing poles?
By high school, the natural (but naive) crusader I’d been had felt so badly beaten by sophisticated bullies as to have taken refuge within the recesses of my mind where my unmet need to feel socially accepted had eventually over ruled my natural passion as an activist assuring others of fair play within every aspect of life.
Then, during my early thirties, upon experiencing an unidentified sense of anger stirring beneath the surface of my acquiescent smile, I’d felt intuitively driven to participate in psychological therapy for many years until my unconscious adult quest to release the deeply repressed empathetic leader from within subconscious storage met with success.
The series of posts describing inter-related childhood traumas that had caused contradictions to develop within my character traits have been published near to the beginning of my blog.
One series of posts, titled Twinkle Twinkle Litle Star describes trauma number one.
Another series of posts is titled Bully for Me
And a third series of posts goes by the title of First Kiss
All three of these true stories offer hints of a dark secret that my subconscious defense system had thought best to hide from my conscious awareness until decades of psychotherapy had reconstructed a set of inner strengths within my core that enabled me to muster the courage to face up to a deeply terrifying truth concerning my trustful involvement with a pedophile that as a child, my innocence of evil could not bear to confront alone, as is very sadly true of many too many terrified children today. And thus do mental blocks occur when life’s experience proves far too brutal for innocence to consciously acknowledge, and as long as that harsh reality disappears into a deep dark we’ll of denial as though those horrifying experiences had been non existent, the walking wounded will experience undiagnosed episodes of PTSD, as had been true of me until I was in my sixties, and puzzling pieces of my life began sliding together, offering me a mental image concerning the bigger picture of my life as a whole.
Over most of my life, my main defense mechanism against terror was—denial. However if denial distorts reality overlong then a state of mental confusion, known as PTSD develops, which cannot be repaired in the absence of astute, compassionate, professional guidance.
Thank goodness I’d felt intuitive need to follow that course of action until, eventually, newly uncaged portions of my self respectful personality re-emerged, transforming me into the self confident person who smiles back at me from within my mirror, today, feeling assured that I have chosen the path less taken—that being the path upon which puzzling pieces of my personality leaped out in 3D, and over time, as I came to identify those time when childhood insecurities would feel hot wired to some experience, today, I trained my mind to feel the eruption of an attack of PTSD, before yesteryear’s unhealed terror could be mistaken for whatever had seemed in any way similar, and by maintaining control over my thought processor during life’s scary times, I became the well rounded, emotionally grounded, deep thinking adult whom I’d mistakenly believed myself to be over most of my life.
Each of the stories that I’ve longed to relate offers snapshots of how my personal strengths developed, one by one.
🙋🏻♀️🍀Annie
