Last month I had a bad headache and Lynelle asked me what I was feeling.\u00a0 I said \u201cNothing\u201d so she asked what the baby was feeling.\u00a0 I tuned in and got the words \u201cangry\u201d and \u201cstuck.\u201d\u00a0 Later I asked the baby why she was angry and she said \u201cI was in so much trouble and no one saw it!\u201d\u00a0 Well no wonder she was angry.<\/p>\n
I thought about all the times that someone knowledgeable would have started suspecting something was wrong.\u00a0 But back in the 40\u2019s and 50\u2019s no one knew about child abuse, teachers were not taught what to look for.\u00a0 They wouldn\u2019t have known what bruises meant, maybe that the child had fallen.\u00a0 In my case, though my parents were alcoholic, they weren\u2019t violent.\u00a0 Even I didn\u2019t know how much they had damaged me until the knowledge about \u201cChildren of Alcoholics\u201d began to be public, and that wasn’t until 1984. \u00a0On that list is \u201cover-achieve in school.\u201d\u00a0 A sensitive and knowledgeable teacher might have been able to suspect that my \u201cgood behavior\u201d was because I was scared.\u00a0 Though it was also true that I loved school.\u00a0 I was lucky to be in a private school with excellent teachers. \u00a0I was intelligent and wanted to learn, and I had the learning style that schooling was designed for. \u00a0I felt safe because the rules were clear, not changing all the time, and there was clear, accurate and consistent feedback in the form of grades.<\/p>\n
The baby is angry because she was in so much trouble and no one saw it.\u00a0 Or if they did, they didn\u2019t know what to do.\u00a0 My cousin Susan told me a story several years ago, that her father had only told her recently.\u00a0 He had gone to my house for some reason, couldn\u2019t find my mother (who was probably unconscious upstairs) and found me climbing on the kitchen counter, trying to feed my younger siblings.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure he was concerned, but those were the days when you didn\u2019t interfere.\u00a0 There was the time I went down to the end of the driveway because no one was at home and Herman, my grandfather\u2019s groom, rescued me.\u00a0 My Aunt Betty, who was the most psychologically sophisticated member of my family, told me about a time when she had come over and found me alone in a playpen, clearly unhappy.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure she was concerned at the time, but didn\u2019t know what to do, or if there was reason to interfere until much later when she went into therapy herself.\u00a0 There was the time my classmates Ann Minor and Boots Thompson made me drink a doll\u2019s bottle with a rubber nipple full of salt water and put me in a baby carriage.\u00a0 We must have been visiting their parents, and the adults weren\u2019t paying attention to what the children were doing.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t stand up for myself and stop them.\u00a0 I think I felt helpless, rather than angry.\u00a0 The Black maid rescued me.\u00a0 In 4th grade, when they were having us all do the eye test, I couldn\u2019t see the letters.\u00a0 Other kids laughed at me.\u00a0 The teacher sent me home with a message to my parents.\u00a0 That might have been a time that someone might have suspected that I was being neglected. \u00a0But I was intelligent and well-behaved and quiet, so no one understood that I was in trouble.<\/p>\n
In my junior year at college, when I started falling asleep over my homework, they put me in the health center, they thought I had mono.\u00a0 But I didn\u2019t, there was nothing physical wrong with me.\u00a0 Nobody thought to bring in a psychologist.\u00a0 At the Health Center in Davis, I had broken apart emotionally, so they all tried to put me back together, shut the genie back in the bottle \u2014 I was scared enough that I wanted it shut down too.\u00a0 They were giving me 300mg of mellaril, a powerful tranquilizer.\u00a0 Later I found out that 600mg was the minimum lethal dose.\u00a0 It was a good thing I didn\u2019t know that at the time.\u00a0 I wonder if it happened today if someone would recognize PTSD?\u00a0 Probably not.\u00a0 Nor did anyone see it as a potential for opening a piece of work in therapy.\u00a0 If I had had someone to work with me with Somatic Experiencing, I might have been able to heal a lot way back then.\u00a0 But Somatic Experiencing wasn\u2019t even developed until almost 30 years later.<\/p>\n
I talk about my breakdown in Davis toward the end of another post<\/a>.<\/p>\n When I was on my own, because I had an independent income I didn\u2019t have to work.\u00a0 So I wasn\u2019t at a job where people might notice if I didn\u2019t come to work for a few days, or burst into tears occasionally, or had a full-blown nervous breakdown. \u00a0But I was hanging out with hippies, smoking pot occasionally, and questioning everything.\u00a0 After the failure of a relationship I retreated back to the East Coast, and began a long struggle with severe depression.\u00a0 I had no idea what it was, just something else wrong with me.<\/p>\n I used to feel guilty for the luxury of not having to have a job.\u00a0 What I didn\u2019t know, until I began to work with PTSD, was that I would never have been able to work a 40-hour week.\u00a0 If I had not had an independent income, I would probably be in a mental hospital, or dead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last month I had a bad headache and Lynelle asked me what I was feeling.\u00a0 I said \u201cNothing\u201d so she asked what the baby was feeling.\u00a0 I tuned in and got the words \u201cangry\u201d and \u201cstuck.\u201d\u00a0 Later I asked the … Continue reading