In my life mostly the traumas I have dealt with were medical traumas like Whooping cough at 2 and a Concussion from rock climbing with my father at age 9 with sometimes night time seizures from ages 10 to 15 years of age until my cranium grew into adulthood and the bone pressure upon my brain went away that was causing the seizures.
However, in the process I had no serious medical interventions of any kind because my father was not really into American formal Medicine other than a doctor giving me B-12 shots because he thought that might help me. However, the good thing about all this is I was deferred from being drafted into the Army and Going and dying in the Viet Nam War.
However, then there were other traumas that happened in a chain reaction to the above traumas like realizing that stress caused the seizures I had at night from ages 10 to 15 and my parents realizing that the kind of stress that helps one through college might kill me. So, I went from being an A Student in Grade School to a C or D student in Junior High School because I believed I was going to die anyway from these seizures so what was the point of being an A student if I was going to die soon?
This had further reactions in that like I said above I wasn't drafted into the Army and wasn't sent to Viet Nam to die and the fact that more boys my age died in Viet Nam (born 1948) than any other age of boys that died there.
So, these traumas in the end were one on top of the other. However, I did go to college and I did study Computer Data Processing which is what they called it then which was a combination of computer programming and technical knowhow around IBM computer equipment. But, also then it was all punch cards that we used on a mainframe and we had key punch machines to punch cards to test if our programs worked right when we actually ran them through the mainframe computers.
The point is learning to process your traumas in a way useful to your survival and the survival of your families and friends is often a life or death process for many many people around the world.
I was lucky in that I had really good and stable parents who helped me through all these things and into college and beyond. I did go to college and then work some and then go to college and then work some and by my middle 20s I was studying to be a psychologist when my live in Girlfriend got pregnant and I needed to go to work full time to support us better.
I never became the psychologist but I was always interested in how one can process their traumas so one's life can be more functional and useful to oneself, to one's family, to one's friends and to society in general.
So, one of my many ways of healing myself was to write especially in the style I learned to write in which started with writing about Arcane in 1980.
As I continued to write between 1980s and now often I would reread what I had written and often feel more and more healed by reading what I had written.
So, I guess I'm advocating here writing about your life in one form or another whether it is fictional or truth or a combination of truth and fiction as a way to heal yourself that helps you and your family and your friends too.
By God's Grace
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