November 16, 2005

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                     The World As A Reasonably Safe Place

  
  

  I had occasion this past week to write to a friend about the differences between his sense of safety, that the world is a reasonably safe place, which he has had since childhood, and mine, as I have this only as a construct added laboriously as an adult.  It is in the bonds of early infancy and early childhood where this is created - this knowing/faith/trust that whatever befalls us, it has at least an even chance of working out without disaster.  

  
  

  "The difference between you and me, the difference,  the big difference, is that your mother loved you and you felt that, even as other things were difficult, while my mother was both psychotic and depressed.  Her task was to annihilate my sense of a good self and replace it with negatives (you are ugly, stupid, never ever enough, etc...) embroidering at times with physical abuse.

  
  

  There was never anyone for me, never felt loved except with my high school sweetheart and that carried its own bomb.  I never ever felt safe.  My father gave me my only sense of safety, and that was not reliable.  When I was five, hands bruised from being hit, I counted the days until he would be home from a business trip so I could ask him to tell mom not to hit me like that again.  She countered with, "You are away leaving me with two very difficult children and I know what to do, I know what's best."  He was raised by a sadistic step-mother and I suspect that my mom looked positively benign in comparison.

  
  

  Even that illusion of safety shattered  in high school when he began on occasion to partake of her violence and joined her when she would start to hit me around the head when I was studying, usually after I would plead for her to leave me alone so I could study.  His death from a heart attack when I had just turned 17 swept away the last shreds of the illusion that he was a source of safetly. 

  
  

  The moment I found out he was dead, I ran to the back of our one acre, climbed up on my retreat, the old hen house roof, and screamed and screamed in fear, for there was now no one between me and mom.

  
  

  So this feeling of trust and faith that comes to you, even if you struggle for it at times, is truly an integral part of you.  I must constantly try to create this for myself.  It is fragile, it is ephermeral.  It takes very little to knock it out of me.  Bump.  Oh,  excuse me, I just lost my sense that the world can be a safe place, my sense of a good self, cobbled together in adulthood, just fell on the floor and broke.  Sometimes I'm too tired to try to find it right away, paste and glue and tack it back together.  And sometimes, for a while, it is just too hard to care that it's gone.

  
  

  The dark side, sadness, feelings of loss, knowing that things never will be truly OK, is familiar, what I've known since I was a child.  It doesn't really go.  It's stubborn, it lurks and will always come in underneath the good the minute there is a crack in the structure to leave it room. Celexa slows that down, closes off the cracks, or almost does, enough so that I can push the dark away and reclaim some light, but not always.  Love slows it down too, but I trust that less...

  
  

   

  
  

  pearlbamboo

  
  

  copyright.  e.p. hodges
  

  • 12:54 pm
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