Transcending A Limited Frame of Reference

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Lately I have been reflecting on the circumstances and backgrounds in which my parents grew to maturity.  Is it any wonder they had difficulty with their own lives and that those difficulties ultimately impacted me as much as they did?  I have asked myself this question.  And it isn’t a rhetorical question.

Both my parents grew up in small rural communities.  My father grew up in rural Arkansas in the Arkansas River valley.  Arkansas is not exactly a state full of highly educated, upwardly mobile and/or wealthy people.  It is what would be called a ‘red state’ in the political language of the current day (a discourse I personally find rather limited due in part to the dualistic assumption I believe it is (unconsciously) based upon).  The field of medicine had relatively little knowledge to offer about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the 1970s.

It is my impression that it was the Vietnam War that made possible the subsequent burgeoning knowledge of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  (And yet even now, some forty years after the Vietnam War ended, I have the impression many people associate PTSD fairly strictly with the life experience of veterans).  World War II was perceived to be a good war in which the Allies liberated so much of the ‘civilized’ world from the horror of Nazi brutality and oppression.  The Vietnam War was another matter entirely.  The United States’ entry into this war ultimately led to an immense polarization in our society.  Households, communities and the nation as a whole were divided by the questionable value of what the United States ultimately unleashed in Vietnam.  Agent Orange still contaminates the landscape of Vietnam to this day.

Meanwhile, in Germany, little was also known about schizophrenia in the 1970s.  And alleviating my mother’s own suffering with schizophrenia was made more challenging by the fact that she grew up in a small community.  Cities, for all their cons (pollution, crime, traffic), still offer sizable benefits as compared to smaller communities.  You are far more likely to find excellent, cutting-edge medical care in large urban centers.  It’s simply a matter of numbers and the economics of demand.  If enough people need something in a community you will eventually (hopefully) see that demand met.  Perhaps it ought to amaze me even more that my mother was not able to experience a better outcome in the short term regarding her illness since she herself was trained as a nurse.  Being trained in healthcare you might think she could have spotted signs of her illness in herself.  And maybe she did but she did not know how to interpret what was happening to her until it was quite late in the appearance of her illness.  I still have difficulty reconstructing so much of that earliest time in my own life.

In doing my own personal therapy I am working to transcend the wounds of my own past that arose in part from the limitations my own parents experienced by virtue of the circumstances they grew up in.  Growing up in rural communities in the time of their childhoods automatically set my parents at something of a disadvantage for having easy access to quality medical care provided by highly educated professionals.  It simply wasn’t something they would have been able to enjoy.  And as I mentioned above little was understood about PTSD and schizophrenia during the early years of their lives.  Thus even if they had grown up in a large city it’s fairly likely the local healthcare providers still would have not been very capable in providing them sufficient skilled care.

In short I suppose it safe to say that it is virtually miraculous that I turned out as well as I did.  The more time that stands between me and last summer the more amazed I feel by what I successfully endured and how I nonetheless decided to be a generous person in my life.  Though I do not recall really consciously choosing to be a generous person I certainly did nonetheless choose to offer so much of my time in support of other people in innumerable ways.  I wonder what it will feel like when my life truly exemplifies true real balance.  Will it feel that foreign to me?

…

As I make my way back from work I feel this strange bewilderment.  It’s nearly 70F outside today.  The world is still a bland mixture of browns.  There are some green buds appearing but it’s difficult to discern unless you really look for them.  Is what I am feeling now the way bears feel after emerging from a long winter of hibernation?  This past winter was truly the most brutal winter I have ever experienced.  And it certainly was one of the worst ones in recent Minnesota history.  I have to admit there were days when I wondered if the cycle of seasons would turn away from winter and towards the appearance of life once more.  Yes, I knew intellectually that winter would one day end but there were many days when I couldn’t feel the truth of this in my bones.  I had become winter weary.  I think healing from trauma is challenging under the best of circumstances.  But to do it in the midst of the harshest winter in fifty years is all the more impressive.  I definitely have ‘salt of the Earth’ somewhere in my DNA.

It’s been nine very long months since I began this journey of writing.  I commented on this just recently.  Nine months is the time for a woman to grow a new child in her womb.  It’s a special length of time.  In some strange way I feel myself coming alive again and yet simultaneously for the first time in a way I have never experienced before.  Spring is the time of rebirth.  And somehow this particular spring is very special as it now coincides deeply with my own rejuvenation.  For so long my own life has not mirrored the world outside.  Now it is beginning to do so.  It feels very jarring to experience alignment where it was previously lacking.  But I also feel good.  I feel inspired.  I feel relieved.  I feel hopeful.  And I feel that maybe, just maybe, the best years of my life might indeed be ahead of me.  Despite this nation of my birth that does so little to inspire me these days I feel hopeful.  Despite all the pain, confusion, grief and, yes, even agony I have felt in fleeting moments these last nine months I feel something coming alive in me now that feels as amazing as the moment I actually emerged into this world.

My session with my therapist last night certainly also probably helped contribute to my feeling of cautious optimism today.  We did a session featuring hypnosis.  I felt quite relaxed at the end of my time in his office.  Last night I had a dream in which I found myself in the imagery of an unsavory living situation which I had literally lived in earlier in my life.  And yet something was different.  I recognized the imagery as based in memory and actually snapped out of it.  I woke up.  It seems I told myself while in the dream “This isn’t real…wake up.”  And I did.

I am finally waking up.  And I feel so happy that the earth is waking up to a new cycle of life.  It feels like my lungs are expanding in a way they have not been able to do since winter wrapped us in its tight grip last December.  Seasons end.  People die.  People change.  And time waits for nobody.  It’s time for me to move on now.

It’s time for something so much better.  It is time for me to express my Full Me.

Five Things I Am Grateful For

The end of Winter
My immune system
My dedication to exercise
My intelligence
Good friends