Why did I sleep so poorly and wake before dawn today?  What do I do with the millions of thoughts, swarming around like gnats, each untouchable?  I try to swat them away.  I do not want to hear them.  I don’t want them to be a part of me.

I used to have an inner directive about my research and writing that I could in the end say things about the consequences of severe abuse from birth that I knew no therapist would ever tell a client — because they didn’t know them.  Now I laugh a macabre laugh.  Nobody can afford any therapy any more.  There is no access.  How do those of us who had such a terrible mess made of the first 18 years of our life get help for anything that happened to us, let alone for the difficulties those experiences back then cause for us now?

Or is none of it supposed to matter?  Do we just need to do what my sister calls it, “Put on your big girl panties,” and get on with our lives, moment by moment, the best that we can?

I get the feeling that I have so much information buried, hidden just below the surface — but I am supposed to leave it there?  Leave it untouched, waiting for future generations to discover in their own time, because we have too much on our plates in the world right now and it is all too much for anyone to hear?

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I have a very clear idea at this moment about how this all can work.  I walked away from my research and my computer and my writing and remembering 5 months ago.  I simply pushed back my chair, got up, walked away and didn’t turn back — until now.  It happened the instant I knew I had found what I was looking for:  ‘substance p’.

SEE search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=substance+p&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307

Substance P is a neurotransmitter related to the sensation of pain.  It works the same way if we are feeling something as physically wrong for us as it does if we feel something as emotionally wrong with us.  That means to me that our sadness is not something to spurn and discard.  It is a part of us we need to cherish and learn from.

 

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Partly my mission up until that point was to show that our nation’s reliance on pharmaceuticals to treat ‘depression’ and ‘anxiety’ was no different than a reliance on anything that we use to take away our perception of pain.  I knew there really was no difference between psychological pain and physical pain because both are indications to the body that there is something hazardous affecting an individual within their environment, and both elicit an immune system response.

 

I knew that we run the risk of basically saying to one another and to ourselves, “That’s OK.  Go ahead and keep your hand in the flame.  Take these pills.  You will not feel it.  But by all means don’t take the pain seriously as a signal to you that there’s something wrong with your life.  Don’t try to find out what it is, what caused it, how it affects you.  Don’t change anything.  Just ‘remain productive,’ get on with your life, quit whining and complaining.  Nobody cares and neither should you.”

 

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So in my own life I turned away from my studies and from my writing, and tried to create a sanctuary for myself, tried to forget everything I am and everything I’ve become as a result of early, chronic, consistent, terrible abuse.  After all, our society tells us, “That’s all in the past now.”  That’s a lie.  It is NOT in the past.  Everything that has happened to us remains right here in the present instant, accumulated in our body, in our body’s memory, and affects every interaction that occurs all the way down to the molecules in our body and how our genetic code is continually manifesting in our bodies.

 

So what?

 

We are not supposed to ask the questions.  We are not supposed to know the answers.  Thinking is supposed to be carefully modulated so that we avoid knowing the truth.  Be a nation of smiley faces, plugging along, separating the good from the bad, letting people ‘get what they deserve’.  Don’t pity ourselves?  Don’t ever think you had it worse than anyone else because we all know how much worse other people have it?

 

The more we don’t know our own reality the more we separate ourselves from ourselves, and hence from one another.  Are we simply a glamor culture founded upon the powers of distraction and the pursuit of not knowing the truth?  Every time an important question bubbles to the surface of our awareness we are supposed to turn away and forget it.  If we can’t do this by ourselves, then we better go get some kind of pill to help us.

 

Where’s the salvation in that?  Where’s the learning?  Where’s the connection to reality and to what is really going on?  Where is the taking of new information and using it to create a better world?  Are questions and wondering forbidden?

 

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For example, what if I were to ask important questions like, “What is the difference between the experience of abuse for the child that is singled out in a family as the chronically abused one, and the siblings who are the witness abuse survivors? What is the difference between them in regards to the long term brain and body changes they each receive as a result?  Is there a possibility and risk that by our unwillingness to ask these questions and to look for the answers on the bigger level that we are saying there is no difference between them, and that a witness and a victim are in effect ‘the same thing’?  Where, in this picture, do the perpetrators fit in?”

By being willing to pay close attention  to the lessons of trauma we can become  crystal clear about cause and effect, culpability and accountability.  Both witnesses to abuse and victims of abuse have their shared portion of experiences related to peril.  In addition, they each also have their own experiences that are distinctly different.

 

Is there in effect a forbidden zone, a boundary in our thinking and learning that says, “STOP here, beyond this point there is no passing?”  Is that part of what continually keeps the after effects of trauma alive and well, running just under the surface of our culture like a poisoned and toxic ground water that remains so close to the surface that the well being of at least half or our citizens is being jeopardized on some level daily — and nobody is really supposed to care?  Does the adage, ‘pay lip service’ apply here as we all like to decry violence and abuse but will not do anything individually to stop either the actions or the effects — not even within ourselves?

 

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“Chin up.  Suffer in silence.  Don’t admit the truth.  What you don’t know can’t hurt you.  Don’t make such a big deal of it.”

 

Is this really all about not wanting to separate the victims from the not victims because somehow the not victims carry some sense of guilt, shame and responsibility for what victimized the ‘others’ in the first place?  Or is it that we live embedded within a culture that insists it is right in saying that “People get what they deserve?”

 

That leaves the not victims exonerated from whatever guilt they might be carrying so that they never have to dig down and take the guilt out and look at it.  It leaves the victims holding the bad bag feeling as if somehow they deserved what happened to them and they have no right to complain.  Not ever.  “Don’t rock the sinking boat?”

 

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That leaves us with a vast gray area where people who really do suffer somehow just have ‘bad genes.”  When all else fails and there is no other logical explanation, blame genetics.  Who cares that research is showing how nasty early experiences trigger most of these genes to misbehave as they had to and continue to adjust for a person’s survival in a hostile, toxic and malevolent world?

 

We make choices as a society just like we make them individually.  If nobody calls anybody on their behavior, where is the balance, reason and health in that?  Pharmaceutical companies who make billions off of the results are the monster engines powering health research — physical and mental-emotional health.  We don’t question this.  We literally BUY their results as if they came straight from the God of the universe.  The power is in the pills?

 

The word ‘pharmaceutical” stems from the Greek word ‘pharamkos’, which was the chosen sacrifice that was killed after all the ills of a people were projected onto it.  Kill the pharmakos, all troubles of the people are vanquished.  Blame the victim, ‘de-capacitate’ the victim, shut them up, make them go away and all will be well for everyone else.

 

What if the sacrifice doesn’t want to BE the sacrifice?  What power do they have to resist?  True mental health and well being is being treated like an obsolete technology itself.  Who cares if vinyl records disappear off the market as they are being continually replaced by newer and better recording technologies?  All that matters is that we have access to the music itself.  Well being for the masses?  Who cares if it has been replaced with tiny pills in throw away (well, maybe in some places recyclable) bottles?

 

Shouldn’t we all just be so grateful?  We don’t have to suffer.  We don’t have to work at well being.  We don’t have to ask the tough questions and find the tougher answers.  Access to well being has been equalized and guaranteed to all?  And if we refuse to take the pills?  If we dare to question Big Brother’s machine?  Well, who first asked “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear it does it make a sound?”

 

I have always thought that question was ludicrous.  A tree falling and hitting the ground makes vibrations, dislodges and upsets all manner of life that exists within its branches, etc.  Only egocentric humans would assume that the world revolves around us.  I can personally say anything I want to about how the abuse I suffered was preventable, that I would rather it had never happened in the first place, that it changed the development of my brain and body into being one geared for the most efficient survival in a life-and-death threat world, and that this childhood created a lack of well being in me that operates on my molecular level.  Who wants to hear this noise?

 

Better that I either suffer in silence — which is what I am doing if nobody hears a sound I am making — or shut up, pop my pills, and get to work fitting in here.  I mean, how productive is the truth?

 

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