Telling the Truth

connecting the dots of my life

Tag: Childhood Trauma and Survival Skills

April 14, 2017

Living in a haze

Living in a haze
of trance-like ghosts
we move through life
reenacting scenes
from childhood
played by ear
with great skill
and small vision

I’ve been thinking about my father, and the strangle-hold of symbolic behaviors I adopted in order to survive with my will intact.

My father lived in a haze of his own trance-like ghosts and scripts. A small world in which he was determined to survive my grandfather’s brutality.

Almost invisible and automatic, his ghosts and scripts drove him to replay the roll he learned by heart as a child. He hoped to keep himself safe, and demonstrate his superiority without disrespecting his father.

When he was in his 80s, Dad shared with me a recurrent dream. It troubled him greatly. So much that he sometimes began crying as he talked about it. The dream returned from time to time right up to his death at age 96.

In the dream, he’s in a physical fight with his father. Fighting for his life. No one else is in the room. It seems they’re in a barn. Both my grandfather and my father were tall, strong men shaped by years of hard physical labor on family farms.

Eventually, Dad wrestles his father to the floor, wins the match, and wakes up, caught in a nightmare of guilt and self-judgment. He disrespected his father. A cardinal sin, according to Dad. According to him, just having the dream proved his guilt.

Taking the measure of my father’s struggle against his guilt and self-judgment, along with his early, harsh judgment of me, helps me understand him. It doesn’t take away any blame for what he did.

It does, however, invite me to pray to our Creator, “Forgive him, for he knew not what he did.” Dad lived in the haze of his own trance-like ghosts and scripts. Unable to see beyond his own survival.

This also invites me to face my trance-like ghosts. Scenes from childhood played by ear with great skill and small vision of myself and others.

It’s Good Friday. A good day for self-examination and forgiveness.

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 14 April 2017
Response to WordPress Daily Prompt: Measure

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March 15, 2017

Upside down and inside out

The glories of being intuitive do not include being correct. As I’ve noted before, intuition is as flawed as any other remarkable gift. My intuition is prone to wander, prone to read things wrong, prone to finding a way to make it all work out so I’m still on the ‘right’ side of things.

I didn’t choose this. It’s how I survived childhood and youth as the first-born daughter of a clergyman who believed he was right and I was wrong.

My instincts back then were correct: I was NOT always wrong. Not that I could do much about it back then except pray for the day when I would be an Adult Woman. An Independent Agent living by her own instincts, not yours or anyone else’s. And, of course, with God’s blessing.

I had no idea what it would mean to live according to instincts and intuitions shaped by years of resistance to homegrown and social trauma. Even so, I was often on target, especially when I was dealing with other people and their situations.

Going through old notes from 1994, I recently discovered a small phrase I used in a forum. The phrase is simple: ‘upside down and inside out.’

The notes referred to Karl Barth, German theologian of the mid-20th century. He wrote and taught during Hitler’s reign, the Holocaust, and in the aftermath of World War II. Plenty of trauma going on there, don’t you think?

In the 1980s, when I was a graduate student, Barth invited me to turn my mind ‘upside down and inside out.’ Not to play tricks on reality, but to discover a different way of discovering and naming truth.

He argued that because of human confusion in and around us, we cannot trust our instincts. His theology is a grand effort to show how this works—turning our minds upside down and inside out. So that what we call good or even ‘normal’ is not necessarily that.

So today I’m back to thinking about my instincts. Instincts honed and shaped by what we now call childhood PTSD.

Back then it was all about survival. Getting through without falling apart (even though I fell apart regularly, especially on the inside). I dreamed of arriving at the magic moment when I could live without threat of imminent punishment or humiliation.

I left home at 16 years of age to go to college, never dreaming what my lifetime learning agenda would be. Especially about myself and my instincts. I thought thriving meant living on my own, having a job and maybe even a boyfriend.

Yet thriving isn’t about having a life or even letting go of things programmed into me as a child. It’s about welcoming, affirming and living as the woman I already am.

Put another way, it’s about living on the other side of letting go. I want to name and own what I love about myself and about life. I welcome this opportunity to turn my let-go thoughts and feelings upside down and inside out. I have much to put to rest, and much to bring back to life. Just like those beautifully upside down, inside out flowers and plants in the artwork above.

Elouise ♥

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 15 March 2017
Lovely artwork found at akiane.com
Response to WordPress Daily Prompt: Instinct

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