Friday, April 20, 2018

1972— FLU Part 2: HEALTHY OR NOT, I’D HAD NO CONSCIOUS CLUE OF REPRESSED FEAR DEMANDING MORE STRENGTH THAN I'D HAD TO GIVE

Here's why my last post credited my intuitive powers with releasing insights that enhance my ability to reconsider personal misperceptions, concerning my injured self image with an ever deepening degree of objectivity:  Hindsight suggests that when it came time for me to raise children of my own, my intuitive powers proved magical.

1971
As a young mother (and teacher) of two, intuition coached me to set defensiveness aside in favor of seeking knowledge by freely attending parenting sessions offered by The Family Education Association, associated with The Alfred Adler Institute of Psychology, where I was inspired to read CHILDREN THE CHALLENGE by Rudolph Dreikurs, M.D., in hopes of raising each of my sons to develop a well balanced, self disciplined sense of self worth (while, ironically,  I’d remained blind to the subconscious nature of wounds to my self image).

2018
Both Barry and Steven, who (presently balance their personal lives with the same commitment to excellence as is true of their professional lives) have grown up to be awesome helpmates and fathers at home as they are lawyers.  (As to David, born in 1976 and still single, today, his devotion to family is in keeping with his dedication to screen writing.

In order to illustrate this sense of balance of which I write, let's consider the decision-making process of one of my sons, over these past two or three months:  Steven felt need to hire a nanny in order to be assured that his wife and child would both be well taken care of in the aftermath of Celina's abdominal surgery, which was recently diagnosed as necessary.

During the weeks when Celina, whose pain was great, was getting the runaround from our chaotic medical system (which serves the interests of big business, first), I’d cared for Ravi until the flu bug that just wouldn't quit kept me bed bound for over a month, at which time, Steven, making good use of facebook, asked friends and family for recommendations of nannies, and the woman they hired, who'd come highly recommended, made matzoh ball soup for my son’s family on her very first day, which proved to be the day before Celina's surgery.  As Steven had been coached to develop a conscious awareness of need to balance his personal and professional lives, during his youth, his intuitive, proactive approach to life and love took matters in hand so that directly before and after Celina’s surgery, his wife’s recovery and his daughter’s high spirited energy level were well cared for, freeing his mind to attend to his law practice, during the day—Kudos, Steven, once again, my respect for your multiplicity of tools, concerning making good use of your brain’s well-organized file cabinet of astute and compassionate solution seeking skills, is well founded in reality.

As to how I know that Steven is admired by many of his colleagues:  Will is hired by a variety of lawyers when medical expertise is sought by the Industrial Commission, and when asked if Steven (having the same last name) is his son, Will is commended for having raised such an upstanding member of their community.  As an aside, when these same lawyers speak with Steven, they tell him that as doctors go, Will, serving as an expert witness, calls it how he sees it rather than twisting his judgement to suit whichever lawyer is paying his fee—and so, once again, we come to see that apples do not fall far from the tree ...

Now, with thanks for your patience, that little snippet depicting Steven’s awareness of need to create and maintain a conscious awareness of balance concerning both sides of his life leads us straight into my story:

1972
Many years ago, when Barry was closing in on three and Steven was just turning one, I fell ill.  At that time, we lived in a walk up, second floor, spacious apartment in a suburb of a major Midwest metropolis where Will, being an orthopedic resident, was rarely home.  When he was home, Will was exhausted after working fourteen hour shifts unless he was ‘on call’ meaning that after his fourteen hour work day, he was the resident on duty in the hospital, over night, pointing to the fact that he'd worked straight through toward the next day’s fourteen hour shift.  Like I said ... Will was rarely home.  And when Will came home, he'd felt so exhausted as to pretty much sleep standing up, so it's easy to see why my good natured vigilance catered to his every need.

Actually, having grown up to be an over-achieving-people-pleaser since the age of three, I'd catered to Will’s every need with the same dependability that we expect the mail to be delivered, daily, rain, sleet, ice storm or shine.  I didn’t realize that that had become my M.O. just as Will didn’t realize how much he took every task for granted that I'd chosen to take on at home in hopes of easing the brevity of his 'free' time, spent with Barry, Steven and me.

Eventually, people feel entitled to whatever is habitually given away for free, so Will had not become accustomed to taking care of the boys or me.  Generally, if I did not feel well, I’d kept that to myself.  Except for this time, when I was too sick to get out of bed, and for some reason, I don’t remember anyone offering to help me with the munchkins, who certainly couldn’t take care of themselves.  Oh—I just realized why no one had thought to offer help.  Most likely, I’d not thought to make good use of my voice to say—I’m really sick—because that would have meant disclosing a vulnerability—right?  I mean, disclosing vulnerabilities might cause people to value me as little as I'd valued myself.

Needless to say, this latent insecurity, concerning my sliding self image (having been repressed since the age of three), offered me no conscious clue that my loved ones, who'd most assuredly loved me, would have lent a hand had I’d thought to open my mouth and let a vulnerability slip out. (Another secret I’d kept from myself was my motto, which proves universal for people pleasers, the world over—Grin and bear it—no matter how bad ‘it’ gets).  This is how it is when we grow up ‘feeling’ so defective as to subconsciously emotionally abuse oneself.

Thus does it become clear that children—whose sanity depends upon living in 'Denialand' where secreted insecurities concerning self worth are denied entry into conscious memory—develop mental blocks, depriving our conscious awareness of any remnant of knowledge of having suffered abuse, due to this fact:  If, during your earliest stage of personality development, your self assertive voice had been choked off by trauma, leaving your complacent good natured smile as your only shield against internal uprisings of terrorized anxiety gnawing at your slippery connection to personal safety then we can see why baring unhappiness that was too great to bear becomes such an impossibility that self deceit becomes the subconscious suit of armor within which we stuff every dark emotional reaction along with every negative life experience that proved so scary or anger provoking as to solidify the opinion of having no conscious clue whatsoever of having been a recipient, who’d suffered silently through sexual (or physical or emotional) abuse, repeatedly.  And you can believe me when I say that after decades of self protective self deceit, my choice to work toward dismantling my many-layered mental blocks, which thickened the opacity of my wall of denial, continues to be my personal quest’s most challenging, mind bending feat of courage to complete ...

Good thing that, one day in the far distant future, my inquisitive nature (which had challenged my intelligence as a parent to role model the reactions and behaviors that I'd wanted to receive from my sons) would challenge me to work toward proactively identifying and consciously strengthening the injured portions of my self image so as to name, tame and lighten up my darkly colored stains of insecurity so that whenever one of those hot buttons gets pushed, today, my line of control can stop me from turning so beet red in the face as to feel pressured from within to free deeply repressed emotion to surface, overwhelm my smarts and rain on my own parade.

Thank goodness, all I need do to suppress my need to yell out loud is to rely on my well trained brain to take an immediate time out on the spot to cool down my natural rise in temper at least long enough to consciously open my well stocked, mental toolbox, filled with the same set of well organized personal strengths as are housed within each of my son’s solution seeking think tanks in which their positively focused communication skills remain well organized in similar fashion to the way that I'd coached each of my young to clean up their rooms:  “Take out whatever you have need of; make good use of it; put it neatly away—or watch it disappear into the bag kept in my closet” ... same goes for discretionary listening, speaking and astute solution seeking skills—practice saying the little that needs to be said in front of your mirror so your facial expressions will match your hopes of clearing misunderstanding out of the air.  Otherwise, human nature's defensive attitude may sneak out, peppering the emotional climate with inner conflict that proves contagious."  Needless to say, I didn't say all of that when my sons were small and in need of good natured guidance while developing effective habits concerning social grooming—all I'd said was enough for each of them to get my drift in hopes that before lunging into fist fights at school, they'd have had practice taking time-outs on the spot at home so as to develop the mental habit of thinking smart before reacting, elsewhere.  After all is said and done, people are creatures of habit, suggestive of the fact that we tend to take mental habits acquired at home wherever we go.

When my small sons would show me their completed homework assignments, before glancing through them, I’d offer food for thought by asking each one to reflect:  Is this your first job or your best job, because if it’s not your best work, you’ve just wasted your free time away—suggesting that instead of relaxing with the family while watching a favorite TV show after dinner (like Happy Days), they’d be sitting at their desks, reviewing their mistakes before returning their daily assignments to their backpacks in readiness for school, the next day.  Eventually, as years passed, this logical consequence did the trick, meaning that being coached to consistently train their think tanks to accomplish their best work, first time around, won over just getting homework done as fast as possible.

(As Steven says, today:  You don’t have to be a genius to win the judgement that your client deserves—you just need to be more thoroughly prepared when presenting evidence than is true of the opposing counsel, who has not done his homework to the best of his ability.)

At any rate, back to 1972:  It was the rare weekend when Will was not on call.  I know it had to be the weekend, because otherwise he was NEVER home from the hospital before 7pm.  As I was too ill to get out of bed, Will had to parent (not babysit) the boys (both in diapers) throughout the weekend, and as their energy level knew no bounds and their needs were many, multi-tasking, which I'd grown accustomed to doing with a smile, everyday, utterly frazzled my tired, unprepared, stressed to the max husband, who, by Sunday night, had not one thin thread of patience left, at all.

When Will fell into bed that Sunday night, after putting the boys back to bed about umpteen times, I reached for his hand, which he did not give me, signaling me to feel at fault for being too sick to take proper care of my family, including him, and rather than making good use of the self assertive portion of my voice, which got stuck behind the lump of latent anxiety that had constricted my throat (and as I'd not yet become aware of my need to consciously develop a line of emotional control, I turned away, curled up into a ball, hated myself, and silently soaked my pillow with tears, flowing from a faucet, connected to my well of lonely, repressed (undeserved) guilt until a natural need to cure my illness saw me drifting off to sleep, saving me from feeling exactly as I had at three years old, when I’d drifted listlessly around a walk up apartment that proved so heavy with grief as to see me feeling undeserving of love unless my confounded frown of sadness was swallowed whole in favor of sweetly (though anxiously) fulfilling the needs of others rather than exposing emotional vulnerability, which was my own.  And thus did I grow up, habitually going to any lengths to win a wan smile while itching to get out of my skin.  Irrational?  For a woman in her twenties?  Raised during the forties and fifties, when a man’s home was his castle?  Who said subconscious insecurities, tattooed into the brain cells of a child at the age of three, are rational any more than our nightmares make sense unless we learn to look beneath the surface of conscious awareness so as to analyze how the ocean of strange wild life, which swims through the dark sides of our minds, proves inter-related ...

Below we see a picture (circa 1948) worth a thousand words in which
A well cared for, deeply loved, little girl with balloon
Enjoying the fair with her adoring daddy, smiles for the camera
Her long braids swept up in crown-like fashion are pretty much hidden under
A gay party hat just as
Deeply repressed fears, undeserved guilt and personal sorrows, deviling
Her self worth, can not be seen other than the fact that
Her arms (tarred and bandaged) will have been
Savagely scratched, night after night—for many years to come


Between that bout with the flu, circa 1972, and today, forty-six years have passed, and just as much has changed throughout the western world concerning gender roles, much has changed for the better between Will and me—as well as between Will and Will—as well as between me and me—suggesting that our separation, more than twenty years back, happened for sound reason just as we’d married for sound reason, circa 1966.  My goodness, our think tanks have had so many deeper truths to consciously absorb about ourselves and each other while we'd identified lessons, which prove classic in nature, concerning love and life, and the fact that we will each encounter additional opportunities to become ever more self aware as each next chapter of our lives unfolds will always be true.

As to all of the insight-driven changes, which continue to sweeten our relationships with ourselves, each other and others—well, as soon as readiness releases those true tales to pop out of memory, they'll be posted as naturally as this one has (finally) appeared on our screens, one word leading to the next until another story has been penned with a greater degree of objectivity than would have been possible when neither Will nor I had become aware of thinking of ourselves and each other as beginner adults, who'd had no clue that failure to achieve heartfelt goals was life's way of offering us countless chances to open closed mindsets, which had blinded us from recognizing classic lessons that had beckoned to our intelligence, ever so patiently, repeatedly, in hopes that the day would dawn when both of us would wake up, smell the coffee and open our eyes and ears to absorb insights, which had been percolating subconsciously in hopes of filtering through Will’s wall of denial or mine ever since childhood when terrifying experiences, scalding our think tanks' ability to think clearly, scarred the emotionally wounded portions of our minds into feeling so scared stiff as to hide any vulnerability that might dare to slip out behind our walls of denial, which, upon layering up, over time, clogged our think tanks with defensive reactions, which, acting like trampolines, blocked our intelligence from absorbing any insight that might spotlight personal vulnerabilities in need of strengthening no matter how clearly or persistently the spirit of Socrates swooped down from on high to whisper this deeper truth—Know Thyself in depth—into deaf ears  ...

BTW—today’s intuitive train of thought (filled to the brim with the richly roasted aroma of realism) brings a series of true tales to mind, so please stay tuned, because memorable chapters of Will’s life and mine, which have yet to be penned, are in the process of brewing deep within my mind, and not until every significant story in our saga, illustrating changes for the better, has poured out of memory, will the happy ending that most readers hope for, appear—word by word—on my screen first, followed by yours—highlighting the magic of the mind that proves likely once your intelligence and mine have intuitively processed the deeper meaning that is consciously conveyed concerning each person's existential need to separate from the huddle of ‘group think’ in favor of expanding our mental horizons by courageously ‘thinking for oneself’  ...







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