This story concerning two friends is meant to illustrate a highly significant point, so—
Please do not mistake First Kiss for a Jr. Harlequin Romance.
All too often, loving parents believe the arousal of passion between a boy and a girl carries no more lasting effect upon two lives than is true of a pair of puppies tussling around on a sun kissed lawn. This makes me ask: Why does one generation after another dismiss impassioned emotional reactions ignited during adolescence—when hormones are known to rage—as NO BIGGIE? Does this belittling attitude spotlight denial assuaging adult fears about fumblings going on between boys and girls behind closed doors?
Perhaps this narrow mindset, dismissing the lasting effects of first love, is based in parental denial of the speed with which each stage of their lives is flashing by. How scary is it to realize that before we blink twice, children reciting ABC’s blossom into teens, who grow up to rule a world gone mad where doting parents are now seen as doddering old fogies, whose smarts can voice little more than: B-I-N-G-O—B-I-N-G-O—AND BINGO WAS HIS NAME—OH!
How many classic fears, layering up deep inside middle aged minds, lock the doggy door on the fact that reality will not stop barking to be let in no matter how stubbornly our defense systems dismiss? deny? ignore the throes of first love and travails of teenaged despair?
Why doth the attitudes of the sandwiched generation disrespectfully disparage the authenticity of juniors and seniors?
If we surmise that what goes around comes around then when will insight turn it’s spotlight on the fact that the absorption of belittling attitudes from one generation to the next is the name of this narrow minded, anger-provoking game. All one must do is observe angry adults acting as immature as children are wont to do to note that parents often have no more clue as to what’s best for their kids than they know what’s best for themselves—
Upon returning home from a Shakespearean performance, how quickly do we 'forget’ insight-driven words of wisdom flowing brilliantly from the quill of The Bard as being of universal value, today? How deeply mired in denial’s mental fog must we be to deflect rather than seriously reflect over the fact that Juliette be 13 and Romeo 14 when the lives of this pair of star-crossed lovers end as prematurely as proves true of their smoldering passion's tragic demise?
How many lives may be spared, today, from feeling lost in a negatively focused, emotionally distorted mental fog if conscientious absorption on the part of parents grows ever more aware of need to deepen listening skills so as to heed the fact that their kids' emotional needs hold as much weight as their own?
How might the family structure come undone when parents deny this timeless reality: From one generation to the next, the human brain's defense system is preprogrammed to repress deeper truths in hopes of clipping the wingspan of youth's naturally impassioned voice from declaring aloud—tis my birthright to love whom I love while carving my path toward developing into my existential adult self.
In truth, at the age of twelve, I'd have given anything to silence Joseph's voice from musing aloud over my friend Viv's shimmering cascade of golden locks or Heather's coltish legs, which went on forever (my choice of words expressing his spoken thoughts)—if only my 'friend' would gaze soulfully into my eyes while wrapping his hand around my raven pony tail so as to pull me in for my first kiss—oh my God—no prepubescent daydream I'd ever conjured up could top the pure bliss of a pipe dream as juicy as the one that just appeared on my screen! (In fact, not once—until my finger tips hovered over the keyboard just now—had it dawned on me that while prepubescent Annie was spinning romantic pipe dreams, Joseph was beginning to awaken from wet dreams.)
In truth, at the age of twelve, I'd not ever consciously entertained such a sensuous pipe dream with myself cast in the role of hot-to-trot heroine. Why not? Because any thought verging on the edginess of bodice-ripping sexiness would have felt far too dangerous to conjure up on my own based in the fact that my defense system had felt need to delete yet another deeply traumatized set of secrets from the conscious portion of my memory before Joseph's whistle had ever tapped into my wild side’s budding need to tiptoe as close as possible to his, circa 1956.
As not even one darkly shadowed hint of my having been coerced by a pedophile to participate in mind blowing moments (before my family had moved to the suburbs) will begin to seep out of subconscious storage until 1997 (when intuition compels me to fly to Colorado to seek guidance from a psychologist, whose piercing nature is well trained in a method of therapy designed to inspire the insight-driven portion of my mind to inject my conscious awareness with the courage to engage in painful discussions so as to awaken the anesthetized portion of my processor to identify terrors buried alive thus empowering the injured portion of my brain, suffering from amnesia, to heal itself from PTSD) Whew! I had to write this explanation, again and again, until clarity concerning that which I felt need to convey was mine.
By leaping back and forth across the time line, we begin to fathom the human brain's capacity for compartmentalization. Compartmentalization empowers our defense systems to overwhelm memory during traumatic moments by injecting the conscious portion of our processors with an amnesiac sleeping potion (adrenalin) so potent as to drug a terrified child’s brain into locking the existence of heinous experiences, which prove too confounding to understand, within the dark side of the subconscious until the child's emotional intelligence matures to the point that the emergence of intuitive powers sense the on-going development of inner strengths shaping up into character traits necessary for an adult to set out on an insight-driven quest to reawaken the sleeping portion of the traumatized child still cowering anxiously within so as to inspire our smarts to take one cautious step after another ever more deeply into the repressed portion of our psyches, feeling ever more determined to surface with strings of inter-related insight spotlighting forgotten details based in facts (rather than opinions), which fuel our spirits to encourage our intelligence to continue to master anxiety by mustering the courage to embrace every baby step forward toward empowering the frontal lobe to soothe the arousal of latent anxiety based in yesteryear's fear of undeserved guilt, emotional abandonment or personal failure so as to bolster positive attitudes to take leaps of faith away from any narrow-minded thought that ties our spirits to stakes where unprocessed fears view the world as such a dangerous place as to direct our intelligence to play every next move as safe as we can rather than muscling up our mental potential to fuel our spirits to break free of fear's chokehold so as to instill the imaginative portion of our processors with a hopeful sense of resilience that feels so natural as to inspire our processors to think out of the box in terms of viewing every person's life as a project in different stages of development, knowing that every brain houses a thought processor that is capable of experimenting with flights of fancy into the unknown—some having worked to develop an ever deepening connection to common sense than proves true of those, whose unidentified subconscious fears stimulate the defensive portion of their processors to direct their trains of thought toward negatively focused attitudes, which, having gotten stuck in a dark place during childhood, prove as much in need of emotional maturation as had been true of me—Double Whew! Clarifying the train of thought above has required a whale of patience, which proves worth the effort for this reason: Each time I muster the patience to describe the intricacy of those insights with a greater sense of clarity for you suggests that my processor is continuing to work toward deepening its comprehensive understanding of the complex functionality of the human brain. And as knowledge concerning the complex functionality of the human brain empowers my intelligence to maintain control over my defensive limbic system, I observe myself thinking clearly when everyone else is running around yelling—the sky is falling!
In short, during stormy times, I've come to call upon clarity to place everyone concerned in the same ark knowing that—some are more capable of rowing—some are more capable of quietly sighting the shoreline—some are so patient as to spear for fish, while others are doing their 'best' not to fall overboard or sink the ship, altogether. The trouble comes when ship sinkers, elected to positions of leadership, have no clue that latent anxieties, flailing about, are engaging in mean-spirited power struggles, which left unidentified and thus unresolved, will drown everyone in unhappiness except for those whose sense of clarity remains positively focused upon keeping the ark as shipshape as possible while seeking a shoreline where every survivor feels warmly welcomed to rest, relax and self nourish so as to thrive.
As portions of today’s intuitive train of thought had only been partially processed until 2019, clarity may still lean toward fuzzy; however once my processor has had time to rest from churning out inter-related insights, I’ll review this train of thought, which flowed out of the depths of my mind in one fell swoop, because the teacher in me will feel compelled to improve whatever needs changing for the better when a relaxed sense of readiness is once again mine. In the meantime, let’s free our minds to absorb whatever’s about to take place on stage as would happen in a real theater once a 15 minute intermission has passed.)
During sixth grade, I'd invited Scarlett and Rhett to snuggle under the covers where each stage of their torrid love affair informed my preteen psyche of the persistence of unrequited passions, and as Margaret Mitchell's command of the written word flooded each chapter of this page turner with vivid descriptions of emotionality bursting with life, my chest would contract with bated breath as though every detail of this Civil War tale challenged my chastity to maintain its subconscious cap on my libido, which, though deeply repressed, couldn't help but feel utterly rapt each time Scarlett and Rhett's impassioned reactions made my head swirl until finally, the sandman would appear, sprinkling my mind with dreams of love and romance, which were not theirs but mine. And each time my eyelids grew heavy, my soul, tucked safely into my solitary twin bed, wove fantasies sweet as sugar plums in which Joseph and I danced the hours away until dawn ...
When absorbing pages of love scenes describing relationships that my heart longed to experience no longer satisfied my budding need to engage in a romance all my own, every fiber of my being absorbed Scarlett and Rhett’s impassioned, academy-award winning emotional interactions on the silver screen. Not once. Not twice—but at least a handful of times as I chose to purchase a ticket to ride in their roller coaster within this darkened theater or that one whenever their timeless love story rolled back into town.
By the time I was a high school graduate, my head had been buried between the pages of that novel (which never got old) so many times that the unlikely friendship, which drew Scarlett’s fiery nature and Melanie’s soulful gentleness toward blending their opposite natures into one being, had soaked so deeply into my processor as to have been repressed within my subconscious where both sides of my conflicted character traits remained embedded, each vying for dominance though my line of self control kept Scarlett's impassioned nature well hidden in the wings from the conscious portion of my mind, which, for the most part, acknowledged only Melanie's selfless, sweetly generous spirit emanating from within my depths to star on center stage for decades to come. And just as love scenes on the silver screen faded to dark, during the late fifties and early sixties, anything that hinted at a boy getting further than first base with me saw the darkly traumatized portion of my processor raising red flags of spiking anxiety that spontaneously pushed them away.
On the other hand, during pre-teen years (and beyond) when Saturday matinees dimmed the lights, my psyche felt free to release deeply repressed, impassioned emotions to surge naturally throughout every nerve in my body. I'd cringed to see Judd Fry grasp Laurie's innocence into his arms in the darkened smoke house on Aunt Eller's Oklahoma farm. However, when Curly pulled Laurie in for her first kiss, my eyes closed while imagining myself swept up hotly into Joseph's embrace, claiming my first taste of his lips. When it came time to leap out of the surrey with the fringe on top and ride the carousel, I cried my eyes out to see Billy Bigalow fall on that knife, leaving his newly impregnated bride, Julie, walking alone through a storm with her head held high suffering in silence as this devastated young widow, now a social outcast, births her dead sweetheart's daughter, no loving arm around her waist to quell the depths of her pain, which Julie's sweet nature represses upon being abandoned by friends and neighbors knowing that her precious child's spirit is in need of her mother's smile to shine forth each time her baby is rocked safely to sleep in an unfriended cottage. OH! Cruel! Cruel World!
While June was busting out all over, I was growing accustomed to the restraints of my first 'training' bra straps which the boys in my class were seen testily snapping, left and right. We even had a math teacher, whose surges of unbridled testosterone spewed lewd comments while casting lecherous eyes pointedly at the chests of classmates who'd suffered the embarrassment of having been prematurely stacked until his creepy advances, reported to the principal, saw him sacked.
While the subconscious portion of my processor was busily absorbing all of that folderol—anything that hinted of sexual interest directed at me boomeranged off of my brain's defensive wall of denial, suggesting that not one conscious train of thought concerning my budding sensuality (much less sexuality) made its way through the mental fog surrounding the cocoon that protected the traumatized portion of my processor from anything resembling clarity. I'm not kidding.
As a matter of fact, I've learned that the traumatized portion of a child's processor will remain stuck in the dark at whatever stage of life a pedophile's touch had stimulated the defensive system of the inexperienced brain to signal the frontal lobe to flick its switch from on to off, freeing the limbic system to usurp control and reign supreme until the terrifying presence (or specter) of Stranger Danger has past—and as not one conscious memory of those mind-blowing experiences had imprinted into the frontal lobe of my brain, everything that had boggled my mental connection to clarity transferred into subconscious memory, and that's no joke.
Upon reflecting over that last scientific fact, concerning scary secrets we keep from ourselves, we can see why, while watching my seventh grade friends swoon over The King of Rock and Roll’s swiveling hips, my defense system, standing at high alert, denies my brain any conscious clue as to what Elvis's body language is conveying to his audience. As long as my defense system acts like a trampoline deflecting any thought of sex away from my processor's conscious sense of awareness, I am left to perceive of the emotional reactions of teen aged girls as being every bit as nuts as I think is true of The King's singing style, which looks so silly to me as to be comedic. Then upon arriving home, still feeling confused about my friends' emotionality, I'd encountered my mother and grandma's interchange of frowning remarks concerning this rock star's outrageous gyrations. However, their huffy rebuffs concerning his improper hip swiveling maneuvers left me as much in the dark as was true of the natural reactions of my friends. Seriously, throughout puberty, I'd had no more clue as to why Elvis (or the Beatles) made my friends feel weak in the knees than I'd understood parental reactions, directing my friends to switch their TVs to another channel.
Emotional complexity, based in the processor's subconscious absorption of deeply buried trauma, is reason for contrasting character traits to develop. And so we come to see why I'd longed to experience romance while defensively deleting the very existence of impassioned sexuality from my processor's conscious awareness.
If you still entertain the notion that ‘puppy love’ suggests preteens adoring each other dispassionately then hopefully, you won't take offense at my suggestion that the conscious portion of your processor may not have a clue as to when (or why) your defense system fools with your sense of clarity as is still true of mine, from time to time. In short, denial comes and goes. At times, our processors switch tracks from conscious clarity to subconscious anxiety spiking so quickly that we lose all track of what has just been said or what we were about to reply in response.
So anyway, one day at twilight, a pair of tightly knit friends are seen moseying down the alley, side by side, both seemingly relaxed while chatting, back and forth, about this and that when suddenly he stops walking, so she follows suit. As Joseph turns toward me, I—feeling sparks of tension begin to crackle—stand statue-like while we, both holding leashes, stare into each other's blue eyes until much to my befuddled amazement, Joseph’s free hand rises as though in slo-mo until his open palm hovers momentarily so close to my head that you could have knocked me over with a feather when, while stroking my hair, which is seen flowing freely past my shoulders, I hear him say: Gosh, it's even softer than I'd thought—and next thing I know he—
Come on! You know I'm not going to spoil FIRST KISS Part 6 by completing that sentence, right now—I mean think about it—he and I were just kids—right?
So what might this boy's brain feel stimulated to do with a girl like me who (perceiving myself as much too unattractive to draw a popular guy's heart to melt into mine) has taken little note of this reality: Over the past several months, my body has been in the process of shaping up—for the better ...
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