The Replays

Right there again…

The young boy stood up when his name was called, his clothes a combination of Sunday best hand-me-downs from his large family. With weak knees he walked up to the table in the courtroom. The man in the black robe, the Judge he knew, was going to ask him a question about his family life. The question was if his Mother and Father loved him, if he felt safe. This could be it? They could take him away from his Mom and Dad, and in that moment he spoke of all the love, all of the everything that they meant to him. In tears of the thought that he would never see them or his brothers and sisters again, he showed the truth of that love, the world that he knew. There was an issue with his oldest brother, who at that time was just a monster in his mind. His oldest brother would have to leave the home, would have to stay away from this young man who he had terrorized with violence and molestation. That was not his parents fault, he poured out every ounce of love he could possibly find in that courtroom. The family was allowed to stay whole, the oldest must leave the home. Within a few short years the oldest brother would be allowed back home. The love that the boy had given wasn’t enough, it wasn’t good enough for anyone, they had to have the love from the oldest, not his.

Those years that followed that day in court were filled with the throwing up of walls in every direction. The distrust of what people were telling me, the acting out in hopes someone would break a wall, show me my humanity. I could have been so many things, but I regressed into the fear of my own walls. I didn’t apply myself to life, I applied myself to the other thing, the destructive things. How could I love myself if my own Mother and Father didn’t was stuck in the back of my head, never good enough. I know today what a bunch of malarkey that is, but I didn’t know it then, I made sure to reinforce my bad thinking with bad behavior just to prove I was right.

Ten years ago, I could never have written these words. I didn’t have the abilities to examine and understand some of the most basic of emotional and societal responses. I didn’t have the tools needed to take apart the old jalopy and put it back together without missing a bolt, a nut, or a fender. I did a lot of that part of using what I know now to rewrite what I thought then, what I was before. I consistently use this tool kit, not only on my own lifetime, but also when considering others, accepting their accumulation of rewritten parts, and original pieces. But this unexpected replay was like a gift, yes, a gift that at first looked like a flaming paper bag on the porch, but a gift nonetheless. It was so out of place, that I asked friends and colleagues if they had ever had something like it? And as with anything I started looking it up. From what I can gather, it was supposed to be there, it is part of the recovery promises.

To make sure that I was not experiencing some kind of episode, I looked into the science of it all. It appears that this is more common than we usually consider. He was difficult for years until I left at 17 and went into the Army. We understood he had borderline personality disorder by then, and I was growing in size. He was 375 to my nine and ten year old 160. But by the time he had moved back in at about 14, I was well over 200 and he couldn’t push his weight around. When I got out of the Army he tried something one last time, I let him have it. He was little trouble after that and eventually found medications, or a way to even out better. He is in a state assisted home up north now, and we see each other at the Holidays, but it is all just ancient history, and we did all grow up in many ways over the years. The other part of it, is coming from my own feelings about it. Sometimes these things can be caused by a psychosis, one which in these current societal changes can easily appear. The kind of replay that I had was more of the educational kind. That it was no longer a valid trauma, that all of the aspects of the trauma were already well past any place where a valid current trauma concept could anchor it. I was done with the memory, or more importantly, I was done with the emotions contained in that memory. Like I stated, I could not have written this ten years ago, because I had no ability to understand this way of taking life, as life is. Using innate knowledge and cognizant practices to make a better sense of things. If you haven’t done any in depth soul searching, self managing, life changing, some of these things are difficult to understand. But if you have done even a little, then some of what I have said may resonate a truth somewhere. It is a part of the manner in which I find change, a better way of thinking, and a sober outlook on life, troubles, and the replays.