Upon locking my personal sense of safety into our house after my ride home from hell, I don’t recall rushing upstairs to peer anxiously into the full-length mirror, hanging on the back of my bedroom door. I don’t remember wondering if those insults slamming my body are true. I don’t remember locking traumatic memories out of the conscious portion of my mind and throwing away the key. I just remember shutting the front door behind me and calling out: Hi Mom! I’m home! What’s for dinner? I’m starved! As per my habit. And if you ask why I'd do such a thing, I'd reply: My defense system is well practiced at channeling my processor to switch off reactions based in fear, frustration or resentment in favor of turning on my persona, which a-c-t-s as if I am fine no matter how traumatically mind blowing an experience may have been, and in this way do I move forward, one step at a time, sporting a smile—just like always.
You see, denial did not gain control over my mind at the age of eleven, because I'd had sound reason to develop the defensive persona of an academy-award-winning actress way before construction on Dad’s dream house had ever begun. So let's picture me sitting down on a bench in that van having no clue that my processor has switched off, freeing my persona of invisibility to click in, enabling me to 'act' as if I don't have a care in the world each time I'm squished between the sweaty bodies of two smirking guys who toss snide remarks back and forth about how much space I take up while their hips shove rudely into mine from both sides. And if, from time to time, the red hot poker of humiliation does hit a nerve that’s not 100% numbed, well—all my trusty defense system has to do to put me out of my misery is to press the reset button in my brain, marked ‘repression’, which stuffs every cognitive awareness of distressed disgrace ever more deeply into that black hole, where self conscious awareness—seething with fearsomely anguished, deeply frustrated resentment—is mercifully knocked out cold, and since this well-practiced defense mechanism has been emptying my conscious mind of any reality too painful to bare (to myself) since the age of three, Mother Nature has patterned my brain to safeguard my strength of spirit from feeling as insignificant as a sardine trapped inside a tightly packed can, terrified of being eaten alive!
Whenever I step into the bowel of Hell, which conveys me to and from the house of God, we’ll watch the high-spirited child, lovingly nurtured by both of my parents, disappear into denial as soon as any menacing presence feels too close for comfort. However—rideafterrideafterride—my social self-confidence will do what my body cannot—namely, shrink up and play dead until, with the passage of time, here's what develops in its stead:
Subconscious insecurities, layering up behind my ‘I don’t care’ facade ...
Once my persona walls off all sense of conscious awareness concerning my physicality, my self image will remain stuck in such a ‘bad’ place that my deeply repressed negatively focused attitude will barely discern prepubescent changes, which will soon reshape my body from just plain round (though not rotund) toward—actually—naturally shapely.
Once my persona walls off all sense of conscious awareness concerning my physicality, my self image will remain stuck in such a ‘bad’ place that my deeply repressed negatively focused attitude will barely discern prepubescent changes, which will soon reshape my body from just plain round (though not rotund) toward—actually—naturally shapely.
The fact that denial has layered up so deeply within me as to have empowered the subconscious portion of my mind to wall off and lock up all awareness of despair, I seem to cope well with any situation that proves beyond my control to change for the better in short order. However in order to keep my eyes closed to realities, which prove too painful for an eleven year old think tank to process with clarity intact, my defense system must dig its heels ever more deeply into Denialand, suggesting why each time I hear the van honking its horn, denial casts a hypnotic spell over my brain that draws me mechanically out of the safety net of my home. And thus will we see my socially disgraced spirit reduced to a zombie-like state of being whenever the driver‘s hand, sitting on the horn of the van, announces the bullies readiness to pounce on a maiden whose distress signal is utterly numb.
As to the fact that unprocessed (and therefore unidentified) distress awakened, night after night—well that’s a whole other nightmare. And once that portion of this story unfolds, you’ll see what my psyche endures when subconscious terrors, buried alive, scratch their way to the surface in the dark of night, empowering repressed furies to tear my cheerful persona into shreds ... and as this is a true story, there's no way in hell that I can authorize my retired persona to arise and whitewash intuitive truths which have emerged from behind my wall of denial so as to end this portion of my story on an up note and a smile—sorry—no can do ...
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