When I look back at my own life I see how traumas are cumulative over time. For example, whooping cough and almost dying changed me a lot and then blunt trauma childhood epilepsy from ages 10 to 15 and almost dying was very stressful too. Then when I had to leave my childhood church because I was too progressive for them this also moved me towards suicide from ages 21 to 25. So, learning to manage our life's traumas is very important every step of the way.
One of the ways I coped with all these near death experiences might seem paradoxical until you put testosterone into the equation. One of the ways I dealt with all this was risk taking of primarily physical risks as a boy. The closer I could come to almost dying the more alive I felt because of my near death experiences growing up. Someone else might just have withdrawn entirely from life from what I had to experience but for me I chose the opposite sort of fighting mode instead because it made me always feel very alive the closer I came to death. But, this didn't include joining the army or something like that because that wasn't a part of my family culture. We had been more very independent pioneers settling the U.S. always going back to the 1720s in Philadelphia after getting off a boat from England by way of Germany and before that Switzerland was where my relatives originally came from in the 1720s near Zurich, Switzerland.
So, for me, surviving was about physical risk taking to know that I wasn't dead and that I was still alive. So, jumping off of roofs of houses or jumping two stories into a pile of sand for making cement on a construction site or snorkeling and becoming a scuba diver or piloting my first plane in the air at age 8 was something I liked to do whenever I could. Then riding motorcycles of all sorts as young as I was allowed to do and driving vehicles as young as anyone would let me and flying planes when I could starting by taking off as a pilot by 16 or 18 years of age is what I did.
However, at some point in order to still be alive I had to begin to understand basic psychology and for me this started around 1970 or 1971 in the Library at Palomar college when I discovered a magazine called "Psychology Today". By just sitting down and reading a few articles a whole new world opened up for me where I could let go about 90% of my cultural burden by just letting go of family
pride and realizing I just had to keep myself alive and that was how I survived my 20s by just first keeping me alive and forgetting about all the rest of the stuff that was just going to cause me to self destruct.
Parents put all kinds of expectations on their children but if kids buy into this often this just kills them. They just self destruct. I was no different here. Because of the various traumas of my life already I realized unless I just took care of myself and let go of my parents expectations I wasn't going to survive my 20s.
In the end if you don't survive your life to live into your 30s what good is anything?
If you don't survive it all becomes pretty ridiculous doesn't it?
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