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I checked in with myself this morning to see how I am feeling in comparison to how I felt yesterday morning.  I found that I am OK.  I feel proud of myself that I instantly recognized yesterday what I was feeling and how I arrived at that ‘grim reaper’ state.  I feel proud that I was able to escape that feeling state through my process of recognition and choice so that today I am free of it’s grip and can live now being happier.

I am thinking this morning about all the baby plants my sister so sweetly and carefully dug up and transported from her property in north Texas to mine here in southeastern Arizona.  I need to find a place to plant them into the ground, a task that’s made harder because of the two months of dryness and increasing heat that all life faces here in the cycle of seasons that lead up to the coming of our hoped for July monsoon rains.  Nothing I plant will live without daily watering, and the more plants I have to take care of the more time I have to spend watering them.

And as I puzzled about my unfinished landscaping projects and thought about where I can temporarily make this spring’s garden arranged carefully around the watering range of the two 50 foot soaker hoses I picked up yesterday, three words popped into my mind as if they were displayed in the air in front of my face:  Scrambling for Mercy.

Immediately following this odd mental display I saw in my mind three images appear as if they were pearls connected on a string.  I saw:

– Twenty children at a party excitedly and very noisily taking their turns at being blindfolded.  With a stout stick in their hands, they wildly swing at a brightly colored piñata that’s tied to a rope swung over a tree limb.  The free end of the rope is yanked up and down so the piñata spins and leaps through the air until finally some lucky child makes solid impact.  As candy pieces spill though the air, all of the children scramble in and grab as much as they can of prized loot.

–  Next I see a similar interaction between children and candy.  In the excitement of watching a holiday parade children stand on sidewalk curbs, poised on their toes, bent at the waist like sprint racers at the starting line, waiting for someone to heave candy into the air so they can all scramble again for their prized loot.

– Next I see some imaginary setting that involves coins being tossed into a group of children or adults, and another scene where paper money is thrown into the air as people race and scramble to grab it.

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I have to look closely at the mental gymnastics my right and left brain are doing right now to see how any of these thoughts actually fit together.  What information is passing back and forth between my insightful right brain and my linear left brain that is trying to make sense out of any possible connection between how I feel, what I am preparing to do with my day, and these thoughts about ‘scrambling for mercy’?

First, I want to know more about this word MERCY.  As I’ve mentioned before it is our right brain that knows about a word’s life – its connection into history, action and multiple meaning.

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MERCY

Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French merci, from Medieval Latin merced-, merces, from Latin, price paid, wages, from merc-, merx merchandise

Date: 13th century

1 a : compassion or forbearance shown especially to an offender or to one subject to one’s power; also : lenient or compassionate treatment <begged for mercy> b : imprisonment rather than death imposed as penalty for first-degree murder
2 a : a blessing that is an act of divine favor or compassion b : a fortunate circumstance <it was a mercy they found her before she froze>
3 : compassionate treatment of those in distress <works of mercy among the poor>

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Well, look at this!  My right brain instinctively and intuitively KNEW that the image of scrambling for MERCY as if it was candy or money were right on target.  My left brain is still waiting for more information…….

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As I peer behind the curtain of my thinking this morning, I know that I started with my appreciation that NOW I understand when the ‘grim reaper’ feeling takes over my life, when the vast storehouse in my body of trauma-related memory-feelings steals away all awareness of anything different, I have ways to process this experience because I understand it.

As I wrote in yesterday’s post, I can always try to avoid being overwhelmed by my trauma memory-feeling state.  I can recognize it when I ‘blow it’ and miss my opportunities to avoid its being triggered.  Once it does get triggered, I now have information about how to settle my body memory down so that the feeling becomes quiet again.  Once I find ways to ground myself in my body in my present moment, and once the terrible (very real) body-based trauma memory feeling states can be lulled back to sleep again, I can participate in all kinds of different ways in my present day life like I never could before.

My left brain is happier now that it can see the ‘before and after’ connections in my thinking right now.  Before the ‘scrambling for mercy’ thought-image appeared, on some level I was thinking about the uniqueness of my perspective on everything I think and write about.

I did not ‘scramble for mercy’ yesterday in a panic to make that terrible ‘grim reaper’ feeling that had overwhelmed me go away.  I have practical understandings about trauma triggering today, and I have increasing practical experience in how to live better when it happens.  Once I understood this today, I also understood that not once in my extremely abusive childhood did I ever have a glimmer that mercy existed.   I could not possibly have begged for something I did not know existed, nor could I scramble for it.

That might be a rather unique fact that others with severe infant-child abuse histories might not share.  I can’t say that this realization about finding better ways to endure today and about having to find these ways within our own self because no mercy ever existed for us and was not available to be scrambled after, begged for, waited for, expected or anticipated, or ever granted at all.

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I am not going hunting for some earlier root-word connection (back to before the 12^th century) for this word MERCY, though it puzzles me I don’t easily see this word’s clear footprints leading back into its past.  How are the meanings of MERCY as they connect to compassion also connected to merchandise transactions?

I have often said that traumatic conditions in a malevolent early environment signal a growing body to prepare for either plenty or scarcity of resources.  The trauma-altered changes that are required during development to help ensure survival then signal to others the conditions of the world a person was made in.

Nature, on its own, has no more interest in anthropomorphizing human experience than it does in anthropomorphizing the experience of a stone.  In this word MERCY, in its history and in its connotations, I suspect that we can find the cold, hard practicality of nature being reflected in human language origins and uses.

There was no mercy in my childhood because my mother did not have enough resources in her childhood as she developed to end up with the resource of mercy to give it to me – EVER.

I am surprised at this moment to realize that I have been led to discover a connection between what I have always said about a major difference between my mother’s early experiences as they led to her demise and mine.  Even though the abuse she did to me was probably far more severe than what was done to her, mine did not damage me in the same way.

When a parent wields MERCY over a child and hands it out manipulatively and meanly, as was done to my mother, an entirely different developmental growth pattern is followed than when MERCY does not EVER exist at all.

We can talk about this in terms of ‘conditional’ love, but it has nothing to do with love.

In the root origins of our word MERCY there are connections to prices being paid, wages and merchandise.  These are concepts directly tied to commodities (resources).  When MERCY is given and taken away viciously, maliciously, conditionally and unreasonably, does the child who has been made dependent in their emotional survival on parental actions come to understand that people, too, are no more than commodities (objects)?

My left brain makes a very clear connection here:  My mother’s father was a successful stock broker before the crash of 1929.  Did he so think about life in terms of ‘commodities’ that he infected his emotional relationships with the same kind of thinking that he applied to his profession?

Was his wife, and were his children nothing more than commodities?

This now leads me to a new thought I have never had before:  To what extent was the damage done to my mother in her earliest formative years accomplished not only by her mother but also by her father through processes like these I am just now thinking about?

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In the Absence of Mercy

I have mentioned this before and here it is again:  My life as an infant-child was simple.  Even though it was full of horror, suffering, trauma and abuse, it was simple.  I wasn’t treated like a commodity.  I wasn’t even treated as a human being.  I was always, consistently and permanently just ONE thing:  the devil’s child.

I didn’t ever deserve mercy.  Mercy was not in my mother’s world toward me.  I represented the part of my mother’s ‘badness’ (she projected en masse out on me) that kept my mother as a child from receiving the mercy she so desperately wanted – and needed.

I have never wanted or needed mercy.  For some reason after my trauma-memory-triggering of the ‘grim reaper’ reality flooded me yesterday, and as I found my own way out of that state so that I am OK today, I realize this.  For me, mercy has nothing to do with it because the experience of mercy never built my body, nervous system, brain, mind or relationship between self and others in the first place.  Unlike what happened to my mother, nobody ever involved the commodity of mercy in their transactions with me for my first 18 years.

At the same time I can say at this moment that it’s very strange that the zero-mercy of my childhood very well saved me from turning out like my mother did, I can say, “How cool is that!”

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