My Adverse Responses, Collected Vol. 1
Plus a comic from 2010 and other stuff
Next Week: Well, that was weird
There is another comic below, should you decide to skip the written stuff.
Completely Unrelated, Chapter 010:
Here’s another line from the poem I wrote for student worker Z, based on questions she asked and our conversations that ensued:
Remember: We try to fix our childhoods,
so be mindful about the men and women
with whom you share the journey.
Well, this is going to be uncomfortable.
Because my parents were often emotionally absent. My mom on vodka. And my dad, when he gave up the scotch, on work. So, quite deliberately, I married a woman who drinks not much.
A great decision for me.
Except she works 10 to 12 hours a day, belongs to two Toastmasters clubs, and likes to keep moving, moving, moving on weekends. Which, for me, in my perception, often equates to emotionally absent.
Just like my parents.
To be clear, there’s a lot of projection going on. And I cannot imagine being married to anyone else. I cannot imagine that, as we close in on 37 years, there is a better partner for me in the world.
But I did replicate my childhood. And I do try, repeatedly, to fix my childhood.
What’s going on?
A Visit to PsycheCentral
Here’s a quick summary of what Sharon Martin, LCSW, says over at Psyche Central:
We repeat what’s familiar
We repeat what we learned as children
We repeat what was traumatizing in an unconscious effort to gain mastery over it (herein lies the effort to fix our childhoods, as mentioned above)
We think we deserve to suffer
The Way Out
Ms. Martin goes into more depth on each of the above, as she does the path of healing, which overviews like this:
Become more aware of the relationship patterns in your family of origin
Reflect on your own behavior
Heal the underlying trauma wounds
Learn and practice new skills
Be kind to yourself
The Wired Brain
Our brains keep firing the same internal messages they created for us as children. So the sense of feeling marginalized that follows some of us, for instance, can be more about the message our brain perceives than what is actually going on.
This is what can make therapy, journaling, meditation, and exercise so useful.
Used well, these practices of healing can help connect us with the quiet awareness of what we learned as children, and we can come to see how we experience the world in similarly painful or traumatizing ways as adults.
I wish you well on the journey,
Brian
From The Archive
This one is from 2010, in response to a common bit of spam from that particular era of the internet:
You’ve come all this way. Please help me land a few more subscribers. Pleeeze?