Becoming aware of inner sensations, our primordial feelings, allows us access to the direct experience of our own living body along a scale that ranges from pleasure to pain, feelings that originate at the deepest levels of the brain stem rather than the cerebral cortex. This is so important to understand, because traumatized people are terrified of what’s going on inside of them.
- from Trauma and Memory, Peter Levine.
This is an extraordinary time for me, and I’m hoping my great disappointment won’t detract from the rational message I’m trying to convey. When I do experience it I’d like for it to be productive. Otherwise it’s just wasted energy.
It’s 3 a.m,, July 25, 2018 and I’m somewhere in the middle of the Colorado mountains waiting and watching the beautiful stars.
It always feels good to be in the woods around this time every summer. It’s a place where I find a renewed perspective and healing. Times like now.
The iPhone I’m pecking on is at arm’s length from my face yet I still can’t clearly make out any of the words. And it’s not because of the early hour, for I’ve had nearly six years to digest the outcome of a bicycle accident with a car.
It’s that the quiet solitude here drowns out the distracting city noise so I can read and write with better focus.
I can’t help but What am I doing here yet again? Why did I survive? Wasn’t I just supposed to give up and die like in the movies? I may be pretty naïve, but even I am not that foolish.
While I don’t think it’s fair for me to judge myself on what I did or didn’t do while unconscious. Technically I shouldn’t feel a need to question my judgment at all.
Still, I can’t understand how, when I was lucid and quiet, I could only fall down and submit to someone beating up Sophie and I.
This person’s actions resulted in our separation for a week, most of which time I knew not her condition, or if she was alive at all. The wet-behind-the-ears rookie that hurt us had the unenviable task of patrolling a desert campground occupied by a whole clan of degenerates.
His efforts outdo the implications of my bicycle accident, but I believe it’s because it was more recent and therefore fresher in my mind. But I think it’s mostly because of the large number of amazingly similar circumstances.
Lying helpless on the warm ground, the smell of rubber from the tires, the sense of urgency all around, flashing lights of emergency vehicles and the squelched voices from two-way radios, and more. I probably even experienced some degree of dissociation as a survival mechanism from the stress.
I’ve often wondered what exactly happened after my bicycle crash, besides the obvious physical implications to my body. I think, given my lucidity and certain awareness my and Sophie’s ordeal in the desert shines some light on this.
The origins of this most recent trauma had its roots, oddly enough in a decision I thought would actually increase our margin of safety; by avoiding a pretty hard-core, scruffy group of campers.
I thought they were just a rough-edged family of the sort I’d seen a number of times while searching for a campsite. In hindsight I realize they were more like squatters than I’d have guessed at the time.
I know because I saw those degenerates myself and chose to park closer to the road to avoid them. What a sketchy looking group of people. But in moving closer to the campground exit I unknowingly also put Sophie and I closer to the thug with a badge who arrived at the campground bent on finding trouble.
If he’d left us alone he’d most certainly have found it further up the road. Maybe he wasn’t even bent on finding trouble but the sight of any off-leash dog made him see red. Either way, he may have turned out to be a lifesaver for, once he left the sketchy people up the road probably knew it’d at least be a day before he returned.
That might have made Sophie and I fair game to the people up the hill, who might have been the ones really bent on finding trouble.
And what a great target we made; a potbellied cripple with an “ancient-looking” dog and no visible means of protecting himself. Though they had no way of knowing, Sophie wouldn’t attack anyone , for violence has never been a part of our lives.
But our vulnerability wouldn’t preclude anyone from shooting her or both of us on the spot. So with no witnesses, and no one waiting to hear from us back “in the world” we were a sociopath’s dream.
Today I had a feeling that I’d be dealing with the cPTSD from all the inner crap I’ve begun accumulating as long as I can remember. Like when I was seven and terrified to play peewee league football. I’d rather have been home, safe in my imaginary world of “cars and trucks” and watching cartoons.
It’s what I do even today, looking out over a smoothed, rolling valley that was underwater eons ago. As the sun rises, I can see the cars and trucks on State Hwy 131, the sounds of their tires on the pavement and engines humming. The cattle are just dots in the ranch lands below us. But it’s different now- I call the shots.
But, in the face of my father’s insistence I couldn’t refuse. There was no way out of the situation and it always felt like injury was imminent. It would become a pervasive theme throughout my youth.
All the other kids at football practice looked so much bigger than me and I was constantly terrified, mostly that they’d see my fear. After that first impact with someone else my fears subsided a little but they always returned in full force before the next practice.
I never knew that it was okay, that being scared was perfectly normal. It could have been a good lesson for me to learn then and to also refer to later in life, when I’d be scared and in need of inner comfort.
It might even explain why I feel the need to be boondocking way out here now. But the fear I learned during peewee league football came to be a precursor to how I’d handle future fear. And I still had several peewee league seasons to go to reinforce my fears instead of learning healthy ways to process them.
I can still smell the foam and molded plastic of my helmet. I can still feel the back of my old man’s huge hand on my neck and the scratching sound his fingers made, scraping over my helmet as he adjusted the chin strap. And the leathery smell of a new football.
I can also still smell the plastic-y shoulder pads and remember the twisting positions I made in order to buckle the straps. Putting on the pants actually felt good in that it was as easy as putting on church clothes. To my father these were church clothes.
But the worst moment of all is my memory of the earliest trauma I’d yet experienced, It was the taste of blood I suddenly had after getting run over by a kid with the football running full speed toward me.
I had been benched most of the game which did nothing to inspire my confidence as it was. But I was literally caught flat footed by the awful scene unfolding in my direction. Both of my feet were planted as I stood, stock still. Upon getting hit, I fell straight backward onto the cold ground. I remember the crowd cheering the kid in the end zone. It was surreal, as if everything happened in slow motion.
As I fell, my body and my head hit the ground hard but did not bounce. As I slowly rose, I noticed that, despite the taste in my mouth I wasn’t bleeding anywhere.
These aren’t fond memories for me.
It has significance now because at this moment, 3:19 a.m. I am wondering, as I did then, what the hell am I doing here, so scared and feeling so alone like in that football game? The darkness doesn’t help. Things now aren’t slo-mo. They’re quite the opposite, with me trying to get my thoughts down as they flood out from deep in my memory.
Forget all this beautiful scenery and the natural formations, for I’ve seen it all before. Its meaning has long since ceased to distract me from my work if I choose. There is plenty of time for that later.
But I write with this in mind: Forget the idea that I should “just get over what happened forty-plus years ago.” I can’t now and I never could.
Just as a person can’t help how their body and mind react when unconscious I can’t help how I feel now. The memories of the old bully who pushed me around behind closed doors and into doing things-like contact sports-just won’t go away.
I’ll debate the merits of this to anyone who says otherwise. Living in my home then was a contact sport in itself. And there’s no getting over it without a hell of a lot of self-awareness and effort.They each must nourish the other.
What about my friend Michael Colcombe from the Catholic middle school I attended? I bet that Father Jim Kredel loved that little boy’s mouth as he teased Michael’s hair. So sinful.
Did Michael just get over it or is he fighting those memories on certain occasions, too? Maybe just the sight of Father Jim after Christmas mass, and then being told by the good priest that Michael was committing the “mortal sin” because Michael tempted Father Jim?
Could it be a coincidence that Michael and I were close or were kindred spirits? We were both getting screwed then, in very different but no less traumatic ways. And our tormentors got away with all of it- and still would if we let them.
Father Jim was shipped off to another parish to find himself another young trophy boy to whom he’d give the “sacrament of confession” for his “sins.”
Meanwhile my old father threw me around the house while my mother stood by, silently watching. She never once tried to stop him or speak on my behalf, making her equally complicit.
Then, in keeping with the church’s example my mother told me as a young adult that I “just need to get over it; that doesn’t matter now-it was a long time ago.” But no denial of it from her. She knows exactly what she let happen. What’s wrong with those people?
“You know your father loves you,” she’d say, probably not unlike what the priest said to Michael: “You know Father Jim loves you…”
Why then am I hiding in the woods, writing about this when I should be sleeping? Why do all my accumulated traumas show up this time of year and now also in February, too? And why is the skin on my chronically wounded left leg look like so much raw hamburger? It’s this year’s special outer manifestation of my inner turmoil, that’s why.
Think I’m kidding? Maybe the 2015 carving on my leg will give you pause to think about it-it sure did me. I don’t know what led me to think that it was a good idea to seek retribution on someone by hurting myself but I do know such contradictory and repeated behaviors are all too common for cPTSD survivors.
While it did nothing to quell my upset then I knew it worked for others, though I couldn’t figure out why. Surviving a violent bicycle accident was the sort of pain I could never inflict on myself, and I’ve never been inclined to hurt myself again anyway.
Still I know well the creepy spirit that encouraged me to hurt myself had been there all along, in the risky behaviors I’d done all my life: bmx bicycling, extreme sports like skiing and bicycle endurance events and triathlon. Not to mention peewee league football.
I’d tried to kill myself through “legitimate” means all my life. Thus I know that dark side when I see it.
It now only rears its ugly head during the two time periods I’ve come to call Trauma Season. And none of that risky behavior brought any sort of relief to me, though, looking back on each occasion I hoped it would.
I’ll still never understand why people do it even though I was immersed in so many similar activities myself.
But I do know now that my only relief can come from taking this anger back to the source-my parents. I hope they either read this or hear about what’s within, for you can always be sure that at least one person knows the true evil that drove you while I still lived in your home-Me.
Let’s see, who else got screwed who should “just get over it?” How about my first ex-wife who was molested by a superior in the navy? One night this brute took her virginity and the next morning she had to salute him. Then she met me and got really screwed.
If only I had “just gotten over” my childhood traumas as my abusers urged me to perhaps I’d been a better husband and father. Or a husband and father at all.
Yet I still have the grace, or maybe the fear to not seek retribution from my abusers. They’ve long forgotten, or chosen to forget what evils they perpetrated. They, in effect “just got over it” so why couldn’t I? But have they gotten over their own childhoods? Hell, no. They’ll never know what they’ll never know and they don’t care to find out.
My parents, in fact, conveniently “just got over” everything and anything troubling in their own behavior because it suited them. They always will, for my sycophantic siblings validate all the shit my parents stirred up in my life. Like in the desert in February, 2017, there were no witnesses beyond the perpetrators.
As fearful as I was then, and still sometimes am - afraid to leave the house with Sophie for fear of backlash from some wrinkled and unhappy old fart or an equally cranky and arthritic old nag who needs something to bitch about at the grocery store.
The irony is that my own parents fit this description. So why would anyone leave the house if they can’t be civil? If that were the rule most people would never leave.
Like my father and like the young pussy that hurt Sophie and I in February, 2017, and like the drunks who pretended to just be “regular guys” but drugged me and beat up Sophie who stood by me while I was unconscious. And like both of my ex-wives, whose lives could have been so much better in every sense had they never met me.
Like the cranky old witch of a grandmother, who set a shitty example for everyone within earshot. She’d spew her vitriol like so much stinky cooked cabbage stuffed with god-knows-what. This is the person who raised my father and taught him about “love” and “family.”
Her dislike of her own son spilled over directly into my life, too. She’d magnanimously hand me a present around my early December birthday, telling me “it’s for your birthday and for Christmas.”
What example did that set for me? Yet my father said nothing about this important rite of passage to a kid because he bought the bullshit, too. Another Moreno sycophant from an earlier generation, too afraid to speak on behalf of his son to his mommy.
As a kid, my grandfather was a grumpy non-entity just like my mother’s parents, who I never got to know beyond my father’s insistence that she’s “cuckoo.”
On my birthday, grandma (father’s mother) could have bought me my entire kiddie wish list but as an adult I see how none of that matters. All I remember is her magnanimity, and the fact that my own dickheaded father’s dickheaded father looked more like a toad-faced midget troll who’d only speak when liquored-up with tequila. What a twisted group.
All things being relative, getting molested by a priest or getting emotionally and physically beaten down by a should-be-trusted adult bore little difference to each other in terms of trauma value to us as kids. It hurt us both to the core.
But I was one kid in a small family, not the tenth of eleven kids. Put your most twisted self in Father Jim’s holy shitty shoes and ask yourself who would be the best target of opportunity.
Should I feel thankful that it wasn’t me? What kind of a trip is that to lay on an eighth grade kid? Survivor’s guilt for each other fed our friendship, though neither of us knew what was happening to the other at the time. Michael still probably has no idea what went on behind closed doors in my house.
But that’s okay because I think he had it worse in the long haul. That’s not to absolve my parents of one goddamn thing they pulled on me. As I said, all things being relative.
So when are Michael’s Trauma Seasons? What triggers Leslie’s memories of being brutalized? What triggers do she and Dixie and Kami share when it comes to my own reprehensible ability to first pledge my love then take it away on our very wedding day? Intimacy? What’s that?
And what about Alyssa’s sense of self-worth as she went through her entire life having to explain that her father left her and her mother when she was only a baby, Perhaps I did keep her free of the emotional struggles I went through when I was a kid. But, in leaving I took away any choice she had in the matter.
Maybe Alyssa would rather have had me around, at least sometimes, even if I was an asshole. But my leaving was a strong statement that I’d never overcome my own past and that my biggest fear of becoming the same violent prick that my father is.
But I had a conscience, even if I was otherwise an idiot. But being conscientious in itself is a great example to set for your child, though there’s much more unidentifed damage within me then to make it sound so simple.
Sadly, that’s the biggest truth of them all; I still haven’t overcome my past. But so what? How different would her life be with an asshole of a father instead of believing she had a father who just up and left her?
I remember feeling so happy that my first ex-wife remarried a nice man who appeared to be the gentle soul I wish I could’ve been. But who the hell literally gives away their own child to someone else under these circumstances?
A scared and ignorant codependent asshole who somehow feared that his parents would swoop in and take her away, as they did so often when I grew up, that’s who.
And my parents, from whom the source of the bullshit could be traced had the audacity to think they could be Alyssa’s grandparents. Again I ask-what’s wrong with those people?
I wasn’t an emotionally healthy person nearly all my life and had no idea I needed help. I remember my parents once trying therapy but I guess the reality of their shittiness was too much to bear so I’m sure the therapist became the bad guy. So I learned that therapy is a damn waste of time.
Once I left Alyssa and her mother I swore that my life was a bust and that I’d make certain my life wouldn’t add up to anything. In that I have succeeded. It was my idea of a noble gesture that’s really just misguided bullshit. That’s how it goes when you have toxic parents and no counsel you’d trust on anything.
What did my parents think I’d ask them, who supported so many pedophiles over the years - priests, Penn State football coaches- for guidance on my daughter? I didn’t trust their guidance of me. And of course my parents never approached me to offer anything. Emotionally distant people should never have kids.
To those I know who’d been horribly abused I’d say “God help them all” but I have a hard time believing that Michael, like me, even believes in a God. How many times does a little boy have to be knocked to the floor before he realizes-or allows himself to excuse his reality before admitting to himself that it’s wrong?
And how much sanctimoniousness did Michael have to swallow before he allowed himself to admit what was happening to him was wrong?
It’s a shitty birth lottery that, even today leaves me wondering how different my life would have been had I not grown up with assholes for parents. Clearly I HAVEN’T JUST GOTTEN OVER IT.
People don’t “just get over” anything.
I’ll never forget my first bicycle race and how happy it left me feeling. Same with pulling 60+ down Cottonwood Canyon, my first sexual tryst, both of my wedding days, honeymoons, road trips with Sophie to the high mountain plains in the Outback.
I shivered under stars I couldn’t take my eyes off of with only Sophie for company.
BUT THE SUN THEN FELT LIKE MAGICAL WARMTH ON MY FACE AND SOPHIE LAY RIGHT NEXT TO ME. LOOKING OVER AT HER AND THEN AT THE INDESCRIBABLE BEAUTY OUTSIDE I COULDN’T HELP BUT CRY BECAUSE I WAS SO HAPPY TO BE THERE WITH HER IN THAT BEAUTIFUL, TRANQUIL PLACE. FOR THE FIRST TIME I FELT BOTH INNER PEACE AND SAFETY.
Hell, my first feel of a woman’s breasts ame in the least likely of places; the same Catholic middle school. As I turned to walk out of my classroom sister Eileen was turning to walk in. As tall as I was growing then she was even taller. The next thing I knew I felt as if I’d fallen face-first into a couple of down pillows.
Her usual bad-assed frown turned quite upside down by that and I’ll bet it took a lot more that ten Hail Mary’s and ten Our Father’s to be absolved for the first and only time she was aroused by a schoolboy.
It’d be a funny story today if it weren’t for the strong possibility that Father Jim might’ve been forcing my friend Michael to his knees at that very moment.
To this day my own abusive parents are still religious about making church services and giving money in support of a religion that protects pedophiles. My parents would continue to be abusive toward me, too if I let them.
NO, I DON’T “JUST GET OVER” MY TRAUMAS ANY MORE THAN I FORGET THE WONDERFUL THINGS. WHO COULD?
It’s taken me a lifetime to realize this simple fact: Anyone who tells you to “Just get over” anything years later is either trying to cover up what they’ve done in an attempt to keep you silent. Or they have issues with the same subject that you do, but either don’t know it or don’t want to face it.
Saying “just get over it” is also a convenient way for them to avoid talking about something they don’t want to think about. It also serves the dual purpose of making it seem like your fault for raising the subject at all.
It isn’t just perfectly catholic, it’s perfectly human to remember things that shaped you into who you are today.
The scars on your knees from your skateboarding days, or the first time Tommy Tutone broke daddy’s little girl’s heart in the third grade, or the first time a priest’s touch made you feel more special than you could ever feel in a family of eleven kids.
Like Sophie and I in the desert, Michael was a perfect target, and no witnesses to complicate things there, either. No one would believe him, least of all my parents who continued to support the good father. But I believed Michael.
All of that shit piles up and becomes a great predictor of how you’ll handle life in general. It’s determined by how you handle the early traumas and at what developmental stage they actually began to occur. First though, you and your parents will have to know what’s traumatic in the first place.
That knowledge never came to pass in my nuclear family because it’d require my parents to face their own dark pasts. Doing so could have been a turning point for everyone, but that would have taken balls for them to admit.
My parents had no idea how unhappy and unhealthy they were alone, let alone when married. And then with a baby. To the extent that my siblings are sycophants in towing the family line today, their experiences then, theoretically at least, were more positive. It was simply too exhausting, even for my parents to be shitheels 24/7.
“Insanity is hereditary,” my mother was fond of saying, “you get it from your kids.” Another great child-raising platitude today keep in mind when your kids have kids.
Hidden in the recesses of their minds my siblings remember what they’ve seen, and I don’t blame them if they’d rather not think about it.
None of it was their fault any more than was mine, so why screw things up now more than they already are? It was a long time ago for them, too but it still has an effect.
I wish they hadn’t seen the abuse and heard the screaming, either for it instilled a deep-seated, subconscious fear that it could be they who was on the receiving end of my father’s wrath.
But Our Father, like his own father was no different than the scared little man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, afraid of being revealed for what he truly was.
So whether it’s scar tissue on the inside or on the outside of you our experiences shape our worldview and will strongly influence your thinking and behavior. Don’t believe me? Read Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score.
It’s a short book - before a long look - at your own body, ALL of your body. Go ahead, I dare you to see with an open mind what your own body has written all over it. Don’t be afraid of what you’ll see there; other people can see and they will judge you for it. If your mind hasn’t opened after that then look again and again, if necessary.
Scars you didn’t remember or even realize were still there suddenly reveal the traumas you’ve ignored- or tried to ignore- but are clear and telling enough to observant strangers even if they aren’t visible in your mind. They’ll say a lot about you without your ever opening your mouth:
“Didn’t get enough of daddy’s attention,”or “That guy’s a real crazy bastard/gentle father/great person/mama’s boy/naīve fool/nine-to-fiver/pushy bastard/(non) conflict-oriented/spendthrift/never on time/always apologizing/always giving/uber religious/a wallflower/a shitheel, etc.
I’ve been all of those things, sometimes many of them at once. All anyone needs to do is look at my body and listen to how I present myself to find out how I’ve treated myself on the inside, too. I have spent considerable time trying to see myself through a stranger’s eyes and I’ve discovered two things:
First, despite my best efforts I am a mirror image of my parents in more ways than I’d ever want. Second, my parents also mirror their parents, but far more than I’d allowed my grandparents to influence me. And it wasn’t because of proximity, for in living with my own parents I also lived with their parents.
Family is, by definition a beautiful thing. But my nuclear and extended family redefined the notion into an ugly reality.
And yes, observant strangers must see these inner scars in me because I can see theirs in them. I needn’t point any further than the White House for proof. That guy didn’t get enough attention from his own messed-up father who didn’t get enough attention from his father, etc.
It’s on display for the entire world to see. But, like neighbors who hear the kid screaming next door but don’t do a thing about it, or the parishioners who knew a child was being raped but said not a word, nobody says anything about any of it.
The dangerous part about his and his family’s dysfunctional existence is that it validates others who share equally screwed-up lives, since income, social status, etc. means nothing to familial dysfunction. It is what it is, wherever it is.
My blue collar father and emotionally distant mother shared an address with white collar neighbors. Growing up I wasn’t fooled by my family’s pretentiousness and I’ll bet the neighbors weren’t either. I always felt a certain distance between us and them. If only they’d heard my screaming maybe they’d have done something to help me. Maybe they did.
I recognized early on that something was terribly screwed up in my life and that it’d eventually have to change. But how, when, and what I’d have to do I’d have to find out for myself.
Of course I didn’t know that then, I just needed to get away. Today, I’m still running and hiding, following the lead of the hurt child inside. But he often runs in circles, naively making the same stupid mistakes and paying the price for it.
It’s another major chronic symptom of cPTSD. To someone who deals with cPTSD and doesn’t recognize this dynamic will be held back in life forever. That’s included me for decades and still could, if I let it.
Marriages are no place to discover let alone to resolve such things, nor is parenthood. Such real-life situations aren’t laboratory tests in which findings about extensive personal traumas can be made. Especially if one or both parties are severely traumatized from childhood, like my parents and a zillion more everywhere. Like I was.
It’s exhausting work, trying to create a positive relationship with yourself. But if we can see far enough into our own behaviors to put things into a real perspective we’ll learn that we never “grow up,” and that we’re all still hurt little children inside. And that’s okay. Some survive those days quite well and move on to have reasonably happy and healthy lives.
But some of us are so afraid of conflict we back down from things even before there’s anything to back down from. I do it constantly.
“I’m sorry this,” and “I’m sorry that,” only leaves the door wide open for “grown up kids” bullies to enter and do their best to create the worst.
People like that, once given a taste of a little power dedicate their lives, or at least some part of it to pushing the boundaries. “What more can I get away with?”
Some get locked up, some are found dead by their own hard, some become priests or misguided, overbearhbg parents. And one notable bully even became president. “Torture works,” he insists, with no apparent awareness of the implications of his statement.
Watching a bully, any bully in action is, indeed torture.
And in this the world will always be cursed.
