BOOK ONE CHAPTER 2 (end5) BULLY FOR ME Part 14 “FESS’IN UP—NOT!”

Once my ego had been thoroughly trounced, I vowed never to ride in that van, again.  However, along with this decision came a dilemma.   In keeping with the fact that denial slides back and forth between suppression and repression, I felt fearful of revealing my humiliation to my parents, who saw me as bright, cheerful, and popular.  So rather than ‘fessing up’ to my distorted vision of ‘the truth’ (concerning my having somehow transformed into a social pariah)—I threw the baby out with the bath water by offering my mom and dad a rational reason to drop out of Hebrew school, altogether—and with my newly distorted self-image secreted 'safely' inside me, guess what compounded, consequentially?  Emotional complexity.  Why?  Because my need to hold fast to familial admiration denied my parents access to that which I'd considered the whole ugly truth concerning my confounding transformation upon moving into our new home.

And to complicate emotional complexity even more, I’d no clue of having subconsciously secreted yet another deeper truth concerning the distorted state of my self image at the highly impressionable age of three, when Mother Nature decreed that I'd have no conscious clue as to when denial would serve as my psyche's favorite defense mechanism of 'choice'.

As today I feel wholly free to expose both of those secrets, which I’d kept from myself (by way of repression or suppression) concerning the diminishing state of my self worth, I can also reveal that between the ages of three and eleven I'd experienced a series of reasons to deem myself a popular leader or a good for nothing outcast with no wiggle room between those two poles—and as those opposing poles remained side by side within my subconscious until recently, we‘ve clarified why I'd developed into an anxious over-achieving people pleaser.

If you know anything about being raised in a conservative Jewish home, you know full well that I could not have pulled off what I’m about to pull off had I been my parents' son.  However I was a girl.  And in 1954, it was highly uncommon for girls to study Hebrew, which is one reason why I was cast as the ambushed Lone Ranger on that van—lots of bullets piercing my persona—no Tonto in sight to minister to the lasting nature of my psyche's wounds festering behind my mask.

It's also important to note that this decision to learn the language of my religious heritage had been my own, because something (long forgot) that our rabbi had stated from the bima had inspired my desire to study Hebrew.  So when I told my parents that the little I was learning was not worth their expense, my dad, being a prudent agnostic, arranged a meeting with my teacher.  Upon hearing that his daughter was at the top of the class, Dad asked me to reconsider.

With a resounding NO! (which was highly unlike me), I reiterated that the class was unruly—my teacher spent most of his time yelling in futile attempts to regain control—and I was done wasting my time and Dad’s money—and as all of that was true, every word I said made sense to Dad and Mom, as well. 

So there you have it.  In order to ‘save face’, my brain maneuvered around the whole truth by slicing it in half.  And as THE GIVEN REASON made sense, THE REAL REASON remained ‘safely’ undisclosed, and having clarified that detail, here comes the moral to the story—

If you think to know any person (inclusive of yourself) through and through—please think again, because denial proves to be a highly popular, deeply complex little critter, which is why Socrates pleaded with contemporaries to:

"Know Thyself"

When Dad asked what happened to my desire to study Hebrew, I replied:  I just don’t care, anymore.  And that was factual, too, because once misery sucks eagerness dry, desire shrivels up and dies.

In short, every word I’d said was true.  And since my secreted descent into that black hole had come to an end without telling even one lie, I figured I’d escaped from hell; all was well, and life would go on just as before.  But here's why I couldn’t have been more wrong—With no conscious clue that I wore a mask to hide my shame wherever life ventured to take me from the prepubescent age of eleven on, the bully on the bus continued to threaten to expose my wounded vulnerabilities from within, suggesting that no matter what had continued to shape up on the outside, my distorted self image had been hammered so deeply into my brain as to have disabled my smarts from climbing out of that deep, dark hellhole by myself.  And as my parents had no clue that their beloved child’s self worth had become stuck between two poles with no wiggle room in between, they couldn’t see their way to help me to repair my broken reality compass, at all.

At this point several questions arise:

1. From whom had I denied the truth—the whole truth—and nothing but the truth?
2. What traumatic experience had initiated the development of my self-defeating pattern of suppressing shame years before my spirit had choked on humiliation while riding to and from The House of God?
3. Why was a popular, self confident child unable to open her mouth to shout:

NeVER AGAIN!

By the way, if you think telling half-truths to ‘save face’ hurts no one as much as oneself, please think again, because I'm about to show you what happened when another vulnerable heart reached out courageously to connect intimately with mine.  And as I can feel this train of thought pulling into the station where FIRST KISS awaits to come aboard, you'll come to see how trauma, left unresolved, creates a pattern of dis/ease, which interferes with LOVE's good health.

As one story leads into the next, you'll also come to see why self defeating patterns persist until such time as each of us hunkers down to do the work of identifying and exorcising traumatic static, which haunts the minds of adults until each subconscious abscess is patiently revealed and healed, through and through.  Whew!  Hard work but necessary if peace of mind is to disempower subconscious spikes of latent anxiety from striking down the unhealed portion of your self worth and mine, as the future unfolds.