When I was young in the 1950s I wondered why people died so young. People often were dead by 35 or 40 or younger, especially if they worked in Construction or manual labor or restaurants. Or they hung on somehow and died in their 50s. I wondered why people lost most of their teeth before they were 35 or 40 and often had to wear false teeth full plates.
A part of this was being meat and potatoes men, especially because even then women tended to live 20 to 30 years more than men did often. So, men would work really hard so their wives and lovers could outlive them by 20 to 50 years. This was what I noticed in the 1950s. Was this a good thing? Whether it was good or bad or not it was the way things were when I was a child growing up.
Some of this was diet and this was before people started going to gyms and working out and jogging too. Jack LaLane was just starting to go on TV and selling Glamour stretchers through the mail to exercise with. He hadn't started singing his goodbye song to all the women who worked out with him every day from Los Angeles where he broadcasted his exercise show from.
But, in addition to diet and exercise the main way you extend your life and your sanity is by rooting out childhood traumas.
I was listening to Chelsea Handler on HBO Max where she has a comedy special there late tonight when I couldn't sleep and she was talking about how the death of her oldest brother who was also her best friend in a climbing accident in Jackson Hole, Wyoming basically ended her family's happiness and joy when she was 9 years old. Her Psychiatrist helped her get to realizing this incident harmed her when she was young in a profound way and that she hadn't processed this yet and this helped her a lot learning this about herself.
I got to thinking about this and realized just how important it is to each of our sanity and health and how long we live to find ways to process our traumas and grief from childhood.
I was thinking recently about traumatic events in my own childhood and they fall into two categories:
1. Medical events that traumatized me.
2. Harm done to me by people in my life.
The medical events for me were whooping cough, and a concussion caused by rock climbing with my father when I was about 9 years old which caused me to have seizures for about 5 years until my cranium grew enough to relieve the pressure on my brain which was causing the seizures.
However, the Harm done to me by people in my life I'm still working on more. I've sort of processed the medical events.
The events caused by people are harder to process because often it's harder to figure out intentionality of the people involved in harming me. Some people are NOT self aware at all and never will be.
Empathy is something I have always had for people which is actually much more useful than just sympathy for other people. And one of the things self aware people like myself are aware of when they have empathy is how many different forms of PTSD awareness other people have in their lives.
What I mean by this is: "As an intuitive I have never met a fully sane person in my life".
In fact one of the things all people need to know that to some degree "All humans are crazy in one way or another".
It's just how bad and how dangerous is their craziness to me and to my friends and family?
That's really the only useful question here from my point of view.
But, when you realize that no one is completely sane it is very helpful in trying to stay alive because if no one is sane completely this means that staying alive might mean different things to different people.
For me, processing harm done to me then goes into several categories:
Category 1: People who intentionally tried to harm or kill me.
Category 2: People who were too messed up to really understand what they were doing fully.
Category 3: People who weren't self aware and had no empathy possibly even for themselves.
Or I suppose a person could also be in all three of these categories at once.
So, I guess what I"m saying here is that processing (at least for me) it's easier to process medical things that other people didn't have a lot to do with rather than trying to make sense of people who harmed me psychologically or physically or usually both while I was growing up and even into my 20s.
Even though everyone is supposed to be responsible for all their actions whether they are children or adults often this is not really true.
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