Beginning with Endings - Memoir Stuff

In my beginning is my end, in my end is my beginning.

I could be quoting from T. S. Eliot's "East Coker."  Or just echoing ancient concepts.

Where/whenever this concept was born in my brain, I need to start my memoir with the idea that I look back at my younger self through the lens of over fifty years of "counseling."  I use that word, instead of "therapy," because the first time I reached out to a stranger for help was in high school when I met with the "guidance counselor" Mr. Anderson.  When I haven't been counseling, I've been learning about how people function through formal and informal education.

Since high school I've seen many therapists, psychologists, and assorted mental health practitioners.  They've all given me succor of some kind and left their theories behind as lenses on the sadness, confusion, and self-hatred that have often been my companions.  I haven't, of course, questioned my ability to find joy and my resilience.  Happiness rarely questions itself. 

Learning spiral with explosions requiring explajnations

My experience has been that growth toward emotional/spiritual health is a spiral.  Over time I get better as I keep circling back and over the same challenges dressed in slightly different clothes.

There are two important aspects of my early experience that I now believe have impacted my later life. 

First, I probably have a moderately damaged brain.  I say this for a couple of reasons.  "Research has shown" (as the saying goes) that children born to highly anxious or depressed mothers have trouble with socio-emotional development:

"From early infancy to late adolescence, findings suggest alterations of brain structure and function in frontal, temporal, and limbic areas in children born to mothers who experienced prenatal anxiety. These brain abnormalities may underlie associations between prenatal anxiety and children's behaviour, though more research incorporating neuroimaging and behavioural data is necessary to determine this."

So I was born a bit unstable and then landed in a household filled with tension and anger.  I was babysat by an older sister who would tie me up or hurt me to take care of me.  In my youngest childhood, my Mom could blow up for "no reason" and slam out of the house.  I needed to be aware at all times or something bad could happen to me.  This hypervigilance itself, with it's extensive need of the neurotransmitter cortisol, had an impact on my brain, as "studies have shown."  Trauma and/or high stress in childhood leaves the hippocampus smaller.  The hippocampus is the foundation of memory.  So now, late in life, I have a better understanding of why my memory is so shitty.  Trauma also shrinks the amygdala in children.  This smaller size is associated with greater fight or flight arousal in adults.

Understanding that many of my thinking/feeling challenges are biological in origin has been "healing" to my self-hatred.  I can now have some compassion for myself as I see that I'm built to have strong and even excessive emotional reactions to perceived threats.  

Add to childhood stresses the adolescent experience of being assaulted in 8th grade and then as a young adult being kidnapped and raped by two fat men when I was 18 (two incidents for which I received no counseling or therapy). These events also offer some basis for later emotional decision-making that might seem peculiar to others.

Second, this early trauma occurred in a house that also had a lot of passionate connection.  I loved my mom in an emotionally-enmeshed way.  I felt like she knew my thoughts.  She was loving and physically demonstrative.  When she loved me, her love was all powerful.  So when she would slam out of the house in rage (at my father or my older sisters) and I thought it was my fault, I was deeply wounded.  

Add this intense fear of abandonment to a wobbly brain and you get one of my longest pathologies -- my inability to let close relationships experience natural endings.  I spent decades of friendship with two men who didn't really approve of me.  I also used to be part of a largely female friendship group that I'm no longer part of and when I used to see them on Facebook together having fun without me, I would cut myself in my rage at my awfulness and how my terribleness drove people away from me.  I treated every possible ending as being about what a wretched person I am, rather than being about the other people's needs and decision-making. I believe this is called negative narcissism.   

My wobbly brain with its potent mix of fear and desire was also the ground on which the seed of Christianity was sown.  It also helped me stay married for 48 years.