1018 TWINKLE TWINKLE—REVISITED 12

As with all people, my parents were raised within the confines of their times.  Mom, born in 1913, answered to authority (most especially male authority) with good natured subservience.  Dad, being our family's authority figure, asserted his King-of the Castle stance, openly.  And then, there was Grandma, who proved an exception to the rule until her dependency upon Dad's generosity catalyzed a change which created the appearance of subservience whenever my father was home.

 Lauren and I sure did have a host of complicated character traits to emulate—some from Mom, others from Dad and Grandma.  Interesting, isn't it, that people marry their opposites and then wonder why their children are so different from each other.

With that thought in mind, here's what makes sense to me:  If one child adopts a certain trait from one parent then a sibling will adopt the opposite trait from the other parent. (Why?  For reasons which will be explained, sometime later) Once we add Grandma's traits into the mix, comon sense suggests lots of traffic jams producing head-on collisions.

Thank goodness, strides in social science continue to reshape the behavioral patterns of each generation.  Otherwise, women, trussed tightly in whalebone corsets, would still be wearing powdered wigs, floor length hoop skirts, and bloomers while dancing to the tune of the minuet with men in tights.  Heels.  Ruffles.  And wigs.

With one quick look at history, we can see behavioral patterns in need of change. Let's take a look at this close-to-crazy mindset for example:  Decades ago, beginning with Twiggy, the western world developed an unhealthy adoration of models and dancers whose bodies hover close to anorexic.  Thank goodness, the womanly curves of iconic superstars like Beyonce and Jo-Lo are influencing our mindsets to come full circle, today.  (As one of my next stories unfolds, you’ll see why that example holds special meaning for me.)

During my childhood, Dad, being the head of our house, felt free to expose (express) his needs, frustrations and opinions aloud while a dichotomy of compliance and frustration simmered silently within his sweetheart's mind.  After all, every person is born with an independent spirit, right?  Every person includes women with bound feet.  Bound brains.  Voices bound by suppressive submission or subconscious repression.  If a woman's voice drowns out the voice of 'her man', guess whose voice is bound to keep the peace at any cost, his or hers?  

In short, Dad had no clue that he'd developed thought patterns, which had freed his mind to drive all over the open highway while Mom's original patterns of thought had been confined to a narrow comfort zone that could only travel down a one-way street—Dad's way or Dad's way.

Unfortunately, neither came to see that the slow-mo, evolutionary process of social change which exchanges old mind sets (patterns of behavior) for new.  If the old and the new do not find a peaceful way to blend, then both comfort zones will feel as painfully tense and torn as though stretched on a rack.  One pulls forward; the other pulls back.  Power struggle.  Tug of war.  

If you ask:  What makes change so difficult on all sides, I'd reply:  Change breeds confusion.  Confusion creates inner tension.  Inner tension ignites an underlying sense of deeply frustrated discontent.

Change is hard when we've no clue that we're power struggling over mind sets progressing in infinitesimal steps toward change-for-the-better-all-around.

One day, decades down the road, Jack will be flabbergasted to go toe to toe with 'his Jennie', so certain will he be of having done nothing wrong.  As behavioral patterns change, opinions and mind sets shift, concerning that which feels right vs. wrong.  And as soon as one person feels wronged by another, fur begins to fly.

While watching me grow up, you’ll get a bird’s eye view of the ways in which societal changes have always tried the minds of men and women (families and nations) from one generation to the next.  

Within every generation, well educated folk seem to be perpetually stymied as to why relationships tend to unravel when family life moves from one stage toward the next.

Each time tables turn—as they tend to do—anyone who remains in the dark about classic conflicts that accompany change will feel unseated, insulted, betrayed and egocentrically wounded to the core when authority is in the process of changing hands.

Since change and conflict go hand in hand, common sense suggests that we choose to understand the process of change and the art of conflict resolution before the blame game turns open highways of communication into a series of traffic jams, where fender benders escalate into head on collisions, causing love to feel so mangled it's junked.

*I firmly believe that if every wounded ego could tap into intelligence, we'd all learn how to sidestep injurious moments before defensive reactions wreck hearts and spirits beyond repair.  Unfortunately, the ego cannot develop solution-seeking skills.  That role belongs to the Neo cortex, which must be trained to maintain control over egocentric patterns of thought if conflicts are to be respectfully resolved.  Hence my reason for inventing The Line of (ego) Control.

*A couple of posts ago, I asked:  Which character trait is most in need of strengthening when change begins to take place?  At first, I'd thought the answer to that riddle was humility.  Why?  Humility is in direct opposition to—Ego, which is responsible for power struggles, both external and internal.  Whereas an external power struggle proves to be a wrestling match between two egos seeking dominance, one over the other, an internal power struggle proves to be a wrestling match between a person's ego and intelligence.

*I firmly believe that deeply valued relationships need not be totaled and junked if we’d gain insight into when to listen in a self disciplined manner and when to open up and express our thoughts and emotions honestly and respectfully.  Of course, the first person we must open up to honestly is oneself.  If denial blinds you to emotion repressed subconsciously then you can't be true to yourself or anyone else.

*Though most of my parents’ generation did not see the brain as a tool box, capable of fixing the broken aspects of life, my generation (the self help generation) ran with that idea, and while raising my family, I created five tools that continue to save our sanity when life gets too crazy to comprehend.  Presently, all five of us put these tools to good use, every day.

*Fortunately, this tool box fits snuggly inside each of our heads, suggesting it accompanies us every place we choose to go.  It's also important to note that the tools inside this invisible tool box are so easy to understand that a four year old mind can make good use of each one.

*Unfortunately, there are times when the lock on each tool box is in need of adjustment—but then—nothing’s perfect, right?

*Actually, it's amazing to think of how readily solution-seeking knowledge is squeezed beyond recognition when defensive (egocentric) reactions cause the lock on my tool box to jam.

*When the lock on my tool box jams, negatively focused thought patterns turn my brain into a vice, capable of crushing intelligent thought until I can feel nothing but pain.  At those times, my instinct to cocoon while restructuring my thoughts makes sense.

**Though I consciously practice what I preach, every day, I cannot expect to perfect the lock on my tool box, because perfection does not exist.  On the other hand—I've come to understand what causes the lock on my tool box to jam.  The lock on my tool box jams each time PTSD grabs control over my mind's ability to problem solve with agility—as proved true two years after my Dad's death—then again, two weeks before Will's cancer surgery—and most recently, several weeks after Mom passed away.

**The fact that I was just shy of three when trauma rendered the natural development of my independent spirit senseless suggests a wall of self protection layering up over that particular terror for so many decades that no matter how many layers of defensiveness I've worked to peel away, the depth of my fear of abandonment remained insulated from conscious awareness until two weeks before Will's surgery—in fact … I remember a time a while back when my therapist commended my courage, so deeply had I probed into my subconscious during that session of EMDR.  I remember the naiveté of my response:  I'm not afraid to probe.

***My lack of fear while probing, suggests my having had no conscious clue of this fact:  Unprocessed terror, repressed for decades in subconscious pockets of my mind, would not emerge, full force, until most of the layers of my protective wall had been peeled away, thus, exposing the raw vulnerability that rendered me unworthy of love, at last.

***Over these last several years, I've been probing my memory while working to identify those times throughout my life when a frightening experience tapped into this unprocessed, repressed state of terror which severs my connection to adult intelligence, rendering my thought processes to little more than static.

***And having written that, perhaps my therapist was planting seeds of courage, knowing the nature of the task that lay ahead …

***Though I had no clue as to why fearful experiences jammed my mind with static, you'll recognize those times when PTSD usurps control over my think tank as each story unfolds …

***Ever since Will's surgery, I've experienced heightened sensations of fear, and though this state of mind feels awful, intuition suggests these tremors of terror point to the emergence of raw vulnerabilities, resultant of PTSD, which had remained undiagnosed until recently.  Presently, I'm very much aware of how much courage I need to muster in order to exhume unprocessed terror so debilitating as to have repressed the most traumatic aspects of two life changing experiences.

***The closer I come to exhuming my original reaction, the scarier it feels.  Why?  Because a vital stage of my development got stuck in denial at the age of three—seriously, can we pass calculus without processing through algebra? 

***So rather than humility, perhaps courage is the first and most difficult strength to muster—courage to peel away at layer after layer of my self protective wall until the strength of my adult intelligence has fully reprocessed a little girl's subconcious terror of abandonment—and once my intelligence restructures my mind in a healthy fashion, I'll do more than believe myself worthy of love—I'll feel so worthy of love as to rid my think tank of abandonment issues, once and for all.  As to why I'd felt abandoned, well, that will soon be seen ...

***So okay, here's why I want you to sit in the back seat of the car next to me:  We're driving so close to the scariest moment of my childhood that I can feel the lock on my tool box jamming up, so I need you to hold my hand while my intelligence musters the courage to probe ever more deeply into subconscious beliefs, which, in their unprocessed state, persist in terrifying me, today, concerning all I'd misperceived—about myself—at the highly impressionable age of three.

Hopefully, while you're holding my hand, I'll muster the courage to remain so securely connected to my intelligence that—oy—who am I kidding?  My heart is racing and my stomach is in a knot—I'm that scared, right now—