Category: what’s it like to be mentally ill?

“BEWARE THE FURY OF A PATIENT MAN”

For Michele

“Must I at length the Sword of Justice draw?
Oh curst Effects of necessary Law!
How ill my Fear they by my Mercy scan,
Beware the Fury of a Patient Man.” —John Dryden

For years, I have been patient. “Calm, cool and collected”, as a departing friend at a state hospital once described as what he would remember most about me. Even in a madhouse filled with pedophiles, felons, psychopaths and the broken, I did my best to keep that part of my core self intact. I had the fight of my life doing it.

I wanted to break the madmen in half. I wanted to give victims the justice they deserved from the felons, who had escaped a stay in prison to come here. I wanted to drag the pedophiles into the woods, torture them, castrate them, then string them up and bleed them like a slain deer.

But I never did.

Growing up around truckers who would get furious over the slightest thing, having a father who worried more about outward appearance than the mental health of his own children, beating them bloody by flogging with a 50s-style thin leather belt in secret, I learned what a horrible thing true anger was. My lesson should have been to vent my own anger freely with all possible violence.

But that is not what I learned at all.

What happened to or in front of me terrified me, showing instead what evil looked like, and not the kind you see in movies, but true evil. As in, satanic, demonic and in every opposition to God’s will kind of evil.

Be kind to those who hurt you and spitefully use you. Do good things for others whom you don’t even know. Love, without condition, those who declare or show themselves to be your enemies.

These are things I retained from my life outside of school and my father’s business and home life. A dual life I had no way of understanding. By circumstance, a dual life forced on me by a man who wanted to appear to be a Christian, but, in secret, raped and whipped his children. Sometimes I felt I would go, or had gone, insane under his fucking rage and depravity. Aware that no child should ever have to endure what I and my siblings did, I felt but concealed and contained my rage, believing that, on the most basic level, abandonment (which he often threatened) was far worse than any whipping.

Ralph Leon Smith Sr. was a monster for the ages, yet he was not unique, and far from the worst. I’ve since read accounts of the deeds of both men and women who were in a class by themselves. Human beings who, on the inside, had shed every basic characteristic of humanity and given themselves to madness, power, greed and more.

How could I feel so hurt when compared with what others had endured, often to their dying breath?

The victims of the Holocaust…

I have never been able to reconcile the two. They are at odds with my living code and sense of self, my soul.

Because even as a child, no matter what I endured, I felt the most outraged at–and for–my sisters.

How I wanted to love them. And how I did love, for so long, siblings who went through what I was sure was more horrible than anything I endured.

Because girls were different. Old movies where the scene of a man slapping a woman triggered me. Badly. My father using the belt across my mother’s face fractured my soul and that part of it was lost. Since then, like Lord Voldemort, I’ve dropped many pieces of my soul all across the Eastern seaboard.

Out of all of this, I have one sister left, of four, whom I treasure, love unconditionally, and adore. She’s the youngest, and a special woman who endured too much but faced it with courage and honor, and raised an amazing family of her own. She once told me that after I left the House of Pain, she occupied my room. She sensed me in there, as she described it, as a piece of my soul left behind to protect her. I no longer doubt her.

But things happened with my older sisters. By terrorism and manipulation, our father encouraged snitching on one another. He divided us and put canyons between us that can never be closed. I have no love for my oldest and my next-youngest sisters. For years I pretended to love them. I honestly tried to.

I failed. Say goodbye to another piece of my soul. The failure to love and forgive cost me. It hurt me, but I buried that for a long time. Even that has a price. Terrible as it is, I’ve put paid that one.

As a child, then a teen, I usually spent my anger on myself, but I, being an asshole, could not stop myself from lashing out at neighbors. I destroyed property mostly, causing damages I never had to pay for. Oddly, I knew to pick on those whom I’d have no motive to quarrel with, so suspicion didn’t fall on me. Not once did the police question me. Occasionally I was seen in the act and punished. Not often. All the shit dumped on me had to come out.

With age I was able to reign it in. Then, I began to truly withdraw, avoiding party invitations and eventually dodging weddings and memorial services. I discovered I liked being solitary, closed off. Shut inside and watching movies and playing video games. I especially loved playing video games with my children, like we did with Candyland and Cootie when they were wee ones.

They were the only good things in my life, and then they were gone forever. My soul broke with my heart, leaving me grieving to this day, feeling guilty, as if I failed them, and missing them more every day. I keep expecting the phone to ring, then picking up and hearing, “Hi dad,” and it never happens. The emptiest I’ve ever felt.

My one salvation is my God, what’s left of my family, and 3 very special friends, Maggie, Jane and Kevin. They love unconditionally and constantly. They know my madness and they support me with kindness and understanding. They insist I’m not mad, just broken. And they genuinely want me to be happy.

There’s still the danger, though, of testing my patience. Even I don’t know my limits. Last night as I wrote “The Return of the American Asshole”, I pondered this scary subject.

Dan, the man who would remember me as “calm, cool and collected”, was right. He saw me broken down to my rock-bottom self. I’d hit hard, with 3 botched suicide attempts and possibly some brain damage from pulmonary arrest.

Three heart attacks. Mini strokes including impaired speech. Deep psychological trauma. Children who preceeded me to death. How much was one man supposed to take? I felt like Job.

But though I did question God, I never gave up my faith. And so I lived by my code. Honor, loyalty and love. Protect, defend, forgive. Simple as that, as Jesus taught and I learned, through personal agony…decades of it.

Abuse. Psychological, physical, sexual. They turned me into a monster. A monster I had to control. A monster nobody knew was hidden inside me.

And now that monster roars from within, challenging that control, threatening to break loose and feed its anger again on those I fear. The monster thinks it can protect me, avenge me, but I know that it will only destroy me.

ABeware the fury of a patient man, for if you fail, his soul will finish dying when his terrible wrath is unleashed. That wrath will consume all that stands within striking distance of the monster’s awful fangs and claws.

Take “Positive Thinking” and Shove It

CAUTION: this post deals with sexual abuse and suicide. If you are feeling suicidal just scroll down for information about help. Some readers will find this post disturbing.

All my life, I’ve heard — no — had — Norman Vincent Peale thrown at me. In case you don’t know who he was, he was a religious hack who wrote a book about how to change your life with “The Power of Positive Thinking”. He probably got a lot of people killed.

I’m not going to give a boring recap or critique of the book. I am not in the habit of regurgitating pseudopsychological bullshit.

Nobody throws that positive thinking doctrine at me and gets away with it. I’ll throw curse words at you that you’re never gonna forget. Please don’t make me do that. I really don’t want to.

“Dr. Peale” made a name for himself. He wrote more bullshit in his life than anyone else besides Billy Graham. At least the latter had the honesty to solicit your cash after his crusades. I’d rather someone be a thief and be up front with it; at least they aren’t guilt-tripping you like Pat Robertson or selling plastic buckets as life preservers the way Jim Bakker does. And at least he wasn’t overtly antisemitic like John Hagee (my auto spell doesn’t have your name, Pastor Hagee, jeez. I wonder why? You should sue!)

Pseudochristian writing is as old as the first Easter. And with it comes all the bullshit you know and love: Medieval demonology, the execution of witches, the thievery of the Templars.

Then the bloodshed of the Crusades stained the roads from Europe to fallen Israel, then we just had to let them get into our heads with writings that led to the 20th century and beget idiots like Peale. Not so much an idiot about making money; but definitely a man out of his league with psychology. And why, you ask, all this animosity, and why my claim that he took lives?

Because he, like so many other straight, white conservatives was a preacher who “reformed” his church, thus perverting the doctrine of Christ, who taught that true evil is real and that in our lives, we would suffer. He never promised an easy path, but instead warned against false teachers and fake messiahs. Peale had an answer for that: Think positive.

His first book was absolutely torn apart by critics in the mental health field. In fact some were outraged.

My mother bought me a copy. Fucking ironic, isn’t it? I mean, she and my dad would come into my room on Saturday nights (Saturday was always my night) and take me into the den so she could mount me on the sofa while my father watched TV or read the newspaper, or joined in. Perverts.

My father berated me every single chance he got. He called me a retard, threatened to send me to two different mental hospitals (Crownsville State or Spring Grove, whichever was on the tip of his tongue). He called me stupid. Then, so many names I can’t remember them all, he criticized everything I did, tore it apart, made me feel like I couldn’t do anything at all because I was such a retard. He damaged with his words whatever his whippings, that left me bloody, or the sexual abuse hadn’t fucked up yet. In the end he turned me into a scared shitless little kid who hated himself. The days I could venture out to ride bikes or play football became more rare. I’d lie by my window and listen to my friends, way down the street, playing at dusk, and cry myself to sleep. No child should go through that, okay? Not one.

This verbal abuse combined with trauma from being flogged until I was bleeding or tortured in ways none of my siblings ever knew because of all his kids, he hated me the most. After he could no longer control my older brothers and sister, he took out his rage and need for control on me.

He did a fucking number on my head. Years of this went on. I sit here now, and can barely believe that one man can live who survived all that. And when I began to show signs of having been through too much, my mother thought I might benefit from good old N.V. Peale.

It was such crap that I couldn’t read it. The world, I knew, didn’t work that way. But I started to feel guilty. The people he wrote about, they were so much stronger than me. There was something wrong with me.

Because my world worked the opposite way. I didn’t take him for the crank he was until I learned more about mental illness.

I remember when the trial of the State of Maryland vs. Ralph and Betty Smith (my parents) was over. How people said, “Now you can move on” but never told me how to. I was angrier every time I heard it but knew that if I told them what a mess I really was I’d get a lot of flak. I held my tongue when I just wanted to scream, “What do you know? Fuck you! Walk a mile in my shoes and you’ll scream to be let out.”

And that’s the problem. Some things cannot be magically forgotten, no matter how positive I think.

It’s not over. Never will be, not for me. There’s too much damage and too much pain. Trauma isn’t a skinned knee that you put some Neosporin on, then bandage and go skipping merrily on your way.

Since then I worked years in a union job. I was good, but still very sick. Focus isn’t easy with trauma and the dissociation that goes with it. I had accidents and injuries and sent out product that couldn’t even be used. After that I wound up in a dollar store, three hours a night, four nights a week. I had come full circle. A total loser like my father had predicted, because I had trouble getting through those three hours. I was growing worse and didn’t understand why. Because I knew by then about PTSD. I thought that I knew everything about it. How was it getting worse? How could the Universe be that cruel to one man? I began to drink, cognac, whiskey, rum, vodka, you name it. Just make sure it’s the whole bottle; I wasn’t a bar fixture. I drank while walking home or in private. Because, fuck everyone else.

When I tried for the third time to kill myself I came damn close. I was given the chance to have a bed at Springfield Hospital (which was one my father never mentioned; one last joke on that piece of shit). I was told it used cutting edge trauma therapy. I grabbed that bed up.

Nobody there told me to think “positive”. They didn’t call me lazy or a failure and not once did I hear the word “retard”.

First, the doctors and my therapist allowed me to be sick. They didn’t tell me I had to move on. In the Men’s Trauma Group there were no comparisons; we were all encouraged to tell our stories and we were given treatment. Gently, one step at a time, each of us being on different levels of capacity for effort. One day one of the two women who ran the group saw me outside and said I could be the “poster boy” for PTSD. And so I could be.

I loved my time there. Being treated as who and what I was, I felt somehow liberated.

Since then, in ongoing treatment and assisted living, I’ve made a serious mistake. I tried to be more than what I am, and someone I’m not. The old thinking I was programmed for has never left; I feel like a freak and a failure even though my monstrous parents are long since dead and buried. That’s not fair, but it just doesn’t wear off. I feel that more intensive treatment is called for, but physically I’m running out the clock. So I say “What’s the use?” The tendency to give up is so pervasive that I may never again seek that kind of help.

***

I used to be able to draw and paint. I walked away from it; nothing I ever did was good enough and none of my work was spared the bins. I don’t think I can do either anymore what with my left hand shaking all the time.

In my mind I know it could be caused by lots of things but I go straight to Parkinson’s disease, one of the worst case scenarios. Negative thoughts not from pessimism. From trauma and learned behavior.

Personality disorders are learned behavior and thinking. They are most difficult to treat, and positive thinking isn’t part of that treatment.

In the hospital I was taught cognitive behavioral therapy. It challenges one to not think positive, but to stop and think about what they are doing and saying. Since having covid, my memory has trouble with the list. It consists of various types of actions, responses and spoken words that indicate one is acting on learned behavior that is flawed. If I say “I’m going to fail” for example, cognitive behavioral rules tell me that I’m engaging in fortune telling, which of course I cannot really do. I’ll post a link below for the list.

Another part of cognitive therapy is being “mindful” and I like this part. One day in one on one therapy, my doc unwrapped one of the biggest, deepest red strawberries I’d ever seen. It was organic, he said, and I had never heard of that. He instructed me to take a bite (it was too big to eat otherwise). I was to slowly chew, paying attention to the taste, the texture, and to clear my mind of all but the strawberry. He explained that people often gulp down a burger for lunch, talking to a friend or coworker, never really tasting, fully, the food. And we carry that behavior into every facet of life, and it’s not merely flawed, it’s sad.

I’ve never enjoyed a strawberry more.

Cognitive therapy works. I have to get back to it and do as much on my own as I can. You’re not thinking positively or negatively; just concentrating on the moment. What you’re doing and saying. Particularly what you’re thinking.

One cannot undo a lifetime spent living with mental conditioning that has hobbled oneself and kept them reinforcing every bit of said conditioning (I would do things to sabotage my relationships or jobs because I was convinced deep down that I’d fail anyway).

But one can learn to live each second more aware of what that conditioning has wrought, and once there, changes start to happen. But that is far from easy. It is a tall fucking order.

One problem is that extensive damage can never be cured. Recovery is not complete. That’s not possible. I know this, know my limits and obstacles. But I can at least accept some of them.

***

The problem with positive thinking is that whoever attempts it will invariably fail.

It’s superficial and does nothing to address what lies beneath. The core behavior and thought patterns taught them from an early age when they were helpless and defenseless.

When the failure comes, and it always does, the first thing a person does is to get angry with themselves. They see weakness where a simple task, being positive, is too much for them. Some act out, angrily lashing out. Others, determined to get it right, keep trying…and falling short.

It is enough for me to know that suicides lay in the wake of Peale’s egregious con. You tell someone that simply thinking positively will get them a coveted job. They don’t get the job but they won’t blame you, they’ll think you’re full of shit, but they still blame themselves. With a string of failures already behind them because they need professional help, what do you think will happen?

You hear that his wife has left him.

Next thing you know you’re attending his funeral.

No one knew him well enough to give the eulogy. You surely didn’t. His wife, filled with guilt, stands to one side, sobbing.

The pastor does the eulogy. It’s generic and wooden. None of it needed to happen. But that’s lost on you because you believe you gave him everything he needed to succeed. “Think positive, Hank.”

You’re lying to yourself. You gave him a phantom tool, one that got him to commit suicide.

The human race is not made up of failures and successes. It’s not made up of dark, negative people and those who live charmed lives. Everyone has the same potential at birth. Sure, some have different talents and gifts, but it’s still potential for great things. When natural development is interrupted by evil acts and resultant trauma, the future has been changed. Not just for that person. The world suffers. A man or woman deprived of love and proper care as a child now has less to offer. They’re damaged. They need help. They rarely get it in a system that still neglects and minimizes them. Society still stigmatizes them. They suffer from attendant physical illnesses and it all falls apart. Born with incredible potential, they linger in a health system that isn’t staffed or funded to help.

We see a mass shooting. Suddenly we want mental illness treated, like yesterday. But it doesn’t happen. There’s no budget. Conservatives think mentally ill people are faking to get benefits. That’s when they use “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” and “they’re draining our budget” when both are lies and the worst of insults.

America eats its own. Men like Norman Vincent Peale only ever made money for lying and getting people killed. Self help books are a huge industry. Almost all of it is total bullshit. Don’t give charlatans your money. Seek help. Ask for references. Don’t give up.

If you’re stuck to your sofa and need a shower, but can’t make yourself do it, you’re not lazy. You need help. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you fail because you are too negative. They don’t know you. Tell them I said to fuck off. This is your life we’re talking about. You can be in real danger and not know it yet.

If someone tells you to “move on,” you tell them I said to go to hell. There are too many armchair and shithouse psychologists out there. Piss on them. Most of all be wary of church and “spiritual leaders” who all have agendas, and you’re not on it; your cash is.

Finally, don’t forget what I said. Seek out help from professionals with good creds. I don’t want you to suffer, and it breaks my heart that you do. There may not be a cure, but there is help. You just have to want it.

If you are feeling like a failure, not measuring up to the expectations of anyone else, and you are thinking of calling it quits, believe me, I know how you feel. But the best panacea I’ve ever found is in the act of helping someone else. The ways to do that are infinite; you don’t even need money. Just observe and the door will open. Knowing that you have made a difference, however small you may think it is, is one of the most magnificent feelings anyone can ever have. It cheers you, warms you in your heart and tells you that no, you are not worthless. You’re a decent person. But first, before all else, you need help. And there is nothing wrong with that.

IF YOU ARE FEELING SUICIDAL

For help if you are feeling suicidal, call 911. You need to be seen in a safe place by people who want you to live.

If you don’t want to go that route, call the (US) National Suicide Hotline at

1-800-273-8255 or click Here.

Thinking about suicide is a deadly sign. I can’t bear to think of the world without you in it.

For more information on cognitive behavioral therapy, click here.

Sources: Wikipedia, Google Search

Author’s Note to you, the reader:

I didn’t care until recently whether I had followers or not. Or whether I got “likes” or not. You’ve changed that. With over 60 followers, the other day I received 8 likes in one day. To most bloggers, a thousand is a disappointment. But for me, 8 broke my previous record. I found myself grateful and humbled and I want to say, thank you. To my new followers, I hope you have the chance to read all of my posts. Part of my goal here is for everyone who visits to get to know me. To hopefully find something you can use, learn or at least enjoy. Let me know in the comments section if you can’t access something and I’ll fix it. Feel free to leave comments and tell me what you’re thinking. I’d love to know.

I want to help others like me, to let them see that they are not alone. The only way I can do that is by telling my life’s story and being honest, not holding anything back. To show my damage in all of its ugliness as well as the decent part of me who empathizes, loves and cares about people I’ll never meet. I hope also that still others will gain something to simply think about. I’m not an authority on anything; I offer only a raw look at my feelings and my thoughts. A long life gives one many stories to tell, and I hope you’ll browse and read and continue to keep me company. I’ve realized that I need you, I appreciate you, and I love you. Until tomorrow, be well. Many thanks.

One Time, I Helped A Neighbor Change A Tire…

People are travelling for the Christmas holiday. They do this against the advice of experts, doctors and their local officials. They are lonely and don’t want to be lonely on Christmas. After being lonely for most of this year, I understand the feeling. It can be a sad thing to feel like you’re alone. Sometimes people who are alone hurt themselves and I understand that too, because I’ve done things to hurt myself. Bad things, bad enough to die. I don’t like it when people feel so alone and sad that they hurt themselves, sometimes not ever living another day because of it. It’s sad and I can’t help. That’s another bad feeling. Being unable to help someone who is in danger. Who just needs someone to make them see that they’re priceless and can’t be replaced.

But there have been times, too few, I fear, when I did help someone. Sometimes we help but we don’t know what happens after that. Sometimes I think about them, and I hope they’re okay. I hope that they are happy.

What really does happen after we’ve helped another person?

Only they and God can know that. We don’t. All we get is the feeling, which never seems to last long enough, a feeling that feels nice. It comes from neurotransmitters that hook up with things called “receptors” in our brains. These cells get to soak in dopamine and serotonin and give almost a “high” of goodness. Better than any drug, at least to me.

One day in early 1981, a neighbor in the apartment next to mine was trying to change a tire, and I felt sorry for her. She obviously needed help. So I changed the flat for her spare, put away the jack and lug wrench and she thanked me and I hurried back inside.

Because I wasn’t really as nice as I should have been. She was not pretty but we were both single and I didn’t want her to get the wrong idea.

Sometimes, at night, I used to hear her crying. She must have been very lonely. I felt sympathy for her. But I avoided her.

A kind word, a simple greeting, could have helped to make her feel better, but I didn’t want to do those things. Looking back, it shames me. Maybe I always felt ashamed because that was a long time ago, but I can’t forget that. I hope she found someone to love who would love her back. I hope she’s still out there, that she’s happy and healthy.

I’ve never really regretted being nice to or for helping someone. I’ve very often regretted turning my back on someone in need. Or being very mean to others. That wasn’t part of my soul. It was because I was hurt and I was very sick. My help had meant nothing.

One time I was in my father’s dispatch room routing deliveries. It was very early. A young man came in from the parking lot with flowers in one hand. He began to speak with a lisp and asked if anyone would like to buy flowers. At the time, Moonies were still around and that means he could have been in a cult. I didn’t like Moonies or their leader, a fake “reverend”, and I was mad that he was in there. I was also a conservative and had a problem with the stereotypical mincing, lisping man who must have gotten up very early to try to sell flowers just so he could eat. I yelled at him, “Get the fuck out of here!”

He was shocked, probably as much at the implied violence in my tone as by what I said. He stammered, frozen. I stood up and walked toward him and this time shouted something even worse. The truck drivers were also shocked. It wasn’t the me they knew. It scared them. When the young man fled through the door a couple of them asked weakly, “Why’d you do that, Mike?”

I said something about the guy that was so awful that I’m not going to say what it was.

To this day I regret the words. It would have taken seconds to hand him some currency and take a flower. But my hatred and bigotry prevented it. I gave full control to that hatred and bigotry and it haunts me still.

One time I saw an older black man outside the supermarket just opposite a liquor store. He asked for some spare cash. I could see in his face–on his face–why he had asked. He needed a drink or he was going to drop. If he made it to the hospital alive, I knew they would give him small doses of liquor. If he didn’t get it he could die.

I did not judge him for being an alcoholic. Or black. Or asking for what he needed. I gave him fifteen dollars, which came close to cleaning me out, but it was plenty for a pint. I never saw him again but I remember the tears of gratitude in his eyes as he thanked me and said, “God bless you.”

I’ll never forget it. That…was a good day for me. Did I help him to live another day? Probably. But he wouldn’t live much longer and I knew it. That hurts. He was a good man, I could tell. He was just as nice to me before he got the money as he was after. I recognize gratitude when I see it.

One day I ate a meal in McDonald’s and was going toward the trash can on my way out. A woman with a child beside her came in, and of all the people in the lobby, she walked straight to me. She had even more kids in the car as well as an elderly man. I believed that they lived in that car. She asked if I could help feed her kids. I had no cash but told her to order what she needed. It was strange. She ordered a lot of food. The total cost was 19 dollars and change and I swiped my card. I left but as I turned around she said “thank you” but returned her gaze quickly to the people getting the order together. She was starving. I had gladly helped, but I oftentimes have thought about her. I put a band-aid on a gash and felt good about it. I don’t feel very good about it now. I hope she got help. I hope they have a roof over their heads, pillows to lay their heads on, and full stomachs.

The misery in this world can swallow you alive. And I’m very grateful for the people who taught me these many years that cruelty is evil, compassion divine, and all we have to do to learn the difference is to make mistakes, usually emotional ones. Mistakes that haunt me helped to keep me from turning into a monster; which is what I once was becoming. I’d been so unloved, so demeaned and so violated that I began to fear everything, hate everyone and I had no idea why I felt so much awfulness all the time.

But feeling worse when I hurt someone never left me. And sometimes good people crossed my path and taught me how satisfying it was to be treated with kindness, liked for who I was in times that I needed it most. God knew that I was hurt. He knew how angry I was. How sick I was. He never reached down from heaven and cured me, but he gave me the miracle of being able to learn in spite of the things standing in my way. To learn what to do with the better part of ourselves is a true miracle, a gift. The kind of gift we can share with each other.

One very important way we can do that is to not travel this Christmas. Stay at home, do video calls, and avoid putting family and friends at risk for Covid. It will hurt you for the rest of your life if one of them died and you think you may be the one who made them sick. Ask yourself if it’s really worth the risk when you could wait and everyone can celebrate next year, happy, healthy and whole. Ask your higher power what’s right.

I love and appreciate my followers and my friends. This morning I got to help some of my friends work through a problem. Maggie had her phone freeze on her and didn’t know what to do. I texted her daughter while she used Messenger on her tablet. I merely acted as a go-between but it was very touching to see this family of three come together to solve a problem. They are truly a close family and I’m so blessed to know them. They live in New York but are all far apart. Even if they weren’t, they will not be getting together on Christmas. As a close family I can see that this makes them very sad. But they love each other so much that they refuse to put each other at risk.

That’s love.

That’s caring and compassion.

That’s sacrifice.

They set examples for me even when they don’t know it. They are some of the people who shaped what I am and made me think back on mistakes and learn from them. Every day I learn from them. Every day I love them more.

Be a family like their family.

Stay safe, and may God be with you in your lonely times.

In The Assembly Of Fools, I Must Really Stand Out

History is full of terrible shit. War, murder, disease, children starving to death, being sold, sent to work in mills and other shitty places where crude conditions and then primitive machinery killed them.

All of that is more than history, though. It’s how things fucking still are. Just because it’s not right in front of you doesn’t mean it ain’t there. Those lost immigrant children? Nobody talks about them. Can I really be the only one? Is it possible that, in all the world, no one else cares about thousands of kids who were kidnapped by the United States and then vanished? Look at what we have allowed. Look at what we have turned into. I can’t really be the only one who sees it that way, can I? In this pitiful world of idiots, am I the biggest of them all?

Why, after all this time, do I bother thinking about them? Why does wall-to-wall coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic keep all other news, all other investigative reporting, off your TV screen and out of your online news? Why the fuck has the story, whether true or false, that Trump is taking hydroxychloroquine been the main subject on cable news all week?

We are an assembly of fools. We are ruled by greedy, power-drunk fools who shouldn’t be allowed to slice lunch meat. We are fed garbage that manipulates our emotions by the people who claim exclusive rights to the truth. We buy what they want us to because the same four commercials run every break the networks make. They know you’re in shock, hypnotized by constant horror stories. To get through that, the commercials have to get offensive.

In one ad, Progressive Insurance has to have a conference call on video and that should piss off everyone who’s had to resort to video conferencing, but even more so people who they sell their shit to who can’t see a friend in person and have to Zoom just to catch up (not to mention the families who had to say goodbye to dying COVID-19 patients that way). Because let’s face it: phone calls are insulting these days. If someone won’t face time with you, then they must not really give a fuck, right?

And in fact, the commercials are designed to jolt you from your numbness induced by the constant idiotic shit that’s zombified you. The Geico commercial where a family complains about the plumbing is revolting and insulting. First because they think tap dancing sounds like bad plumbing. No, it doesn’t, and no one would think that; for pity’s sake, they’d be far more likely to think they’re in a haunted apartment. But the sad truth is that they would know exactly what the fuck was going on. And the revolting part, that’s easy. If you like this fucking commercial, you’re too far gone and cannot be fixed. Look at this fucking shit! The whole family dressed the same, tap dancing while cooking, eating, brushing teeth. What a load of insulting ignorant bullshit. It’ll wreck your fucking nerves. You should never be the same after seeing it. But one thing is always going to be true: it’ll surely rouse you from any stupor.

Then there’s the goddamn drug commercials. I looked it up because I was sure I was wrong. Humira was advertised for skin disorders. But hadn’t I seen another ad that said it was for Crohn’s disease?

Sure enough, I had. It’s used to treat other shit too, no pun intended. I wonder how many millions of people take the goddamn stuff, but I’m not looking it up. I really don’t give a shit. I may stand out in an assembly of fools, but I take no joy from it; my masochistic tendencies only go so deep.

Now I sit in a wilderness. It was already this way when COVID-19 broke out. It’s worse now, of course. I shrink from others, even friends. I don’t know why. I need them. I depend on their friendship, support and love more than I am able to express. But there’s the depression, so black and suffocating that it renders inert every good thing you can think, do or say. There’s PTSD and the nightmares. Those fucking vile nightmares…and the will to live or even move gets sucked away like wet sand on a beach being taken by a storm. Until there’s nothing left but a body. A zombie that can’t even express what’s led me here, because I’ve forgotten how.

I’m in an adult mental health rehab program. It has saved me. Kept me alive, off the street. Helped me heal at times. The healing stopped long ago.

At first they were my SSDI rep-payee. They got my check, I got a hundred bucks a month. Years went by, my doctors changed. They left because they were pressured to condense visits into 15 minutes. One doctor apologized to me for leaving. He knew he was helping me. He said, “I can’t help you without your input. Fifteen minutes is not enough. It takes away from everything I do because I spend more time updating records and inputting data, and in the end, you suffer and I can’t take part in that. It violates every ethical value I believe in. I can’t treat for mental health with cookie cutter medicine.” Therapists also bailed and now I can’t remember how many years it’s been since I’ve had a session.

It was money, of course. When I became my own rep-payee, I lost Medicaid. Suddenly my copays were adding up. They pulled me into the office one day. Two Indian women. Backed me into a corner and said that if I couldn’t pay my outstanding bill I’d be kicked out on the street. Because if I wasn’t paying, services would be denied. And if that happened, the housing program would “discharge” me, which is a Cloroxed way of saying I’d be put on the street. Where, of course, they knew I would die.

Once I actually had to write an essay on why I should be “allowed” to remain in the program. Wait. You want me to tell you what? Bullshit. You want me to beg for my fucking life, because you’ve got my file, and you know I’ll die out there. You know goddamn well I can’t afford an apartment. You know I don’t have the living and coping skills to survive even if I could afford a place of my own. You’re telling me to beg for my life to be spared.

I wrote the essay. I was allowed to stay. So I was allowed to live.

I’m now in the top tier of the program. I live in what’s called “assisted living” which is a major step up from “supported living”. It’s where I belong. I live in a two-bedroom condo in a wonderful neighborhood surrounded by nature, with my best friend as a housemate. Things are good most of the time.

Until the cycle of depression hits me like I just ran into a fucking wall. And hitting the wall is beyond the understanding of anyone who doesn’t do it. It’s horrible.

But being denied the chance to regularly see a therapist has taken a toll. Where usually I love to listen to people, and occasionally help them feel better in so doing, I can’t at times like this. They become a burden because depression and PTSD, intrusive, racing thoughts, combine to make them toxic and suddenly, everything is about me. There’s no room for anyone else. I have nothing to offer, no comfort to give, no patience even for myself. Indeed, I hate myself. Somehow despite being fucked, beaten, raped and almost murdered, I managed to work for thirty years. So my SSDI check is too large to allow for Medicaid; you should see my bills. Stacks of them in three different places. Without a paper shredder sometimes I have to burn them in the fireplace because they have personal information. Not to worry, though; they’ll keep coming.

One bill went from my cardiologist to a collection service. They called me one day. Among lesser charges was a $200.00 fee. It was for the radioactive isotopes from a nuclear stress test that I missed. Hey, I get it: medical imaging isotopes are in short supply. The biggest facility that produced them shut down long ago. They’re expensive and hard to get.

But I had to tell the woman on the phone, who wasn’t the least bit nasty and was being quite professional, “Look, that test was scheduled for February 14, 2018. It’s exactly the time I would have been leaving for the test that my son overdosed on fentanyl and died. I got the call. I couldn’t be there. I couldn’t save him. My daughter was already dead. Now my boy was gone, too. I was supposed to keep an appointment? I got billed for it? Ma’am, I never understood that level of coldness, not from a doctor. I told them what happened. They either didn’t believe me, or they didn’t care. They should have been sympathetic. They weren’t. They were so cruel on the phone. So now I see another cardiologist, I like him better, and Dr. Alex Chudnovsky who works on hearts, has no heart. So you tell him this: he will never see that money. I’m not paying for something I had to miss because my son died.” The collection woman was crying. She said she would pass it on, but it might affect my credit. I said, swallowing a sob, “You think I care about credit? Lady, my children are dead.”

The rehab program never reacted. They have a whole team that meets every week. They go over the current conditions and recent events of their clients. No one ever said a fucking word. I never got a card of sympathy. No text. No call. When I went into the back offices to pay rent a number of staff who knew me saw me. Not one person spoke to me. Not even in greeting. I found it a singularly horrifying, offensive and heart-rending experience. How fucking heartless are these people?

I’ll tell you. When my facilitator told them I really needed therapy after my son died, you know what they said?

They told her I could have one therapy session at a reduced rate. No shit.

Two years later, I can’t forget such a fucking cruel thing. They left me damaged and bitter. If I ran a program like that, I would be passionate. No one would fall through the cracks. I’d tirelessly beg for donations. I’d show prospective donors what mental illness is really like.

It’s a mental health rehab program. And here am I, expendable. If I’m lost or kicked out now, they get to say they did a good job and I brought the end on myself. After all, past suicide attempts often end in a final, successful act. They’ll cite statistics and write me off not as a failure on their part, but mine. And nobody will ever be the wiser. I told my facilitator today, “I’m expendable. How you think I feel? I began tracing my roots. I found out Daniel Boone is my 6th great uncle. How do you think I feel, knowing there’s such strong blood in my veins, yet I’m running out of fight, no matter what I’ve survived? I feel expendable.”

With COVID-19 killing people in every state, I don’t say any of this in an effort to get your sympathy. I don’t need sympathy from you. I want you to learn from me. To notice that this world treats people like me as if there’s no use for us. That such attitudes and treatment are counter to the concept of rehabilitation. That nobody should feel expendable, worthless and soon their number will come up. And no one will ever miss them. That everyone will forget. Because they never mattered in the first place. And that final realization is enough to break their hearts beyond anything they’ve ever experienced.

There’s no excuse for allowing your clients to be untreated. No excuse to allow money to stand in the way of saving lives. No excuse for never expressing any sympathy or acknowledging in any way that a client lost both of his children while under you care. God forbid you actually let that person feel valued, cared for, supported.

God forbid anyone should take helping mental people seriously.

If I ever say again that I’m not bitter, contact me and call me a goddamn liar. Because I am bitter. I’m offended. I’m outraged that people take up a mission only to reveal they never cared at all. Why treat us like this? Just line us up and shoot us. It’d be more merciful. I was in contact with a second cousin on Ancestry. Suddenly she stopped communicating. Probably because she sees I’m a mental case and a fool. Toxic.

That’s a good idea. I’m gonna go on Facebook. Everyone on my friends list who never interacts or communicates with me will be blocked, never again to have the chance to be exposed to my mental illness or to realize I’m a fool. I didn’t get on social media to collect pictures of people who aren’t really friends. Good idea, cousin.

Mental health workers: I’ve just thrown a gauntlet at your feet.

You got the guts to pick it up? You want to prove me wrong, or just a fool in an assembly of fools, like you are?

Nightmares Of A Different Kind

Look. I’m a wreck from head to toe and it was already bad enough before I got sick. By my count I’ve had the flu four times since Christmas, or the same one with relapses, I can’t really tell. The fever, cough, diarrhea, headaches…. Running nose.

But lately the worst by far would be the runaway nightmares. Not quite like PTSD nightmares, yet the same except they’re jacked up on steroids and LSD. Because they are vile.

Do you ever dream about being chased or trapped? Of course you do. Almost everyone experiences those, maybe not regularly, but at times in their lives when they are most stressed, or feeling isolated. Beyond that thin requirement, no one really knows why our own minds torture us so.

In fact….No one even knows why or how we dream. It’s the Undiscovered Country. We still can’t figure out why we get sleepy and then sleep, although case histories have informed us that going too long without it can induce a myriad of horrifying symptoms, one of the worst being hallucinations. Go beyond that and the person simply dies. There is a specific disorder, Fatal Insomnia, and like the name says, you get it, you die.

That would be merciful next to PTSD nightmares which are augmented by fever, as I am finding out on my own. I do have insomnia and sleep apnea, a seemingly unlikely combination, yet it is so. And since Christmas, I don’t remember any nightmares being as fucking traumatic as those of the past week. They’ve been during deep sleep, however brief, and they’re some of the worst I’ve ever had.

I’ve talked about dreams before. In my post “Bolero Hats and Thunder” (see my archives) I described a particular nightmare that had prophetic elements to it. Oh, I lived to tell the tale. That’s not really all that good. The demon comes back.

Don’t start thinking I’m being hard on myself here or saying something controversial because I fancy myself some asshole who’s been through enough to know everything. I only have one reason I want attention. That is so you or someone you love never ends up like this. Early intervention with PTSD can ease some of the suffering. I recommend regular therapy whether single or in trauma groups by experts you must personally vet. I also recommend talking to your doctor about possibly taking certain medications and absolutely you must consider exercise and diet. See a dietician who can access your records, don’t rely on web sources and, whatever you do, please don’t buy snake oil from TV ads and infomercials. Those should be banned by the FCC. Nothing about them is proven. “Doctors” who endorse these fucking products are quacks. Remember what’s at stake here. Your mental health and your physical health are not separate things. This is your life we’re talking about.

I have no answers for PTSD dreams. The syndrome is an actual physical condition: post traumatic stress disorders cause multiple symptoms in people including eating disorders, panic episodes, flashbacks which can lead to a dissociative state of mind, resulting in the mental reliving of incidents that may have happened long ago (studies by hospital trauma teams have turned up a disturbing connection between PTSD and serious accidents in the workplace and on the highways because of “distraction” by episodes of dissociative states), nightmares and sleep disorders, coronary disorders including heart attack, blood pressure disorders, digestive system disorders including IBS and IBSD, severe depression and severe hypomania which resemble bipolar disorder but really aren’t, and behavioral changes of each end of the spectrum, notably a disinterest in sex or a promiscuous and risky hypersexual lifestyle. There’s more, but the combination of any of these are different in all subjects; no two people are alike.

Articles, books and papers by professionals have tried for at least a century to lay out what PTSD is and what causes it and how to cure it.

In ancient times warfare caused the same psychological effects as it does today. By the time of Alexander the Great, battlefields were strewn with bodies and body parts. Guts, brains, entrails filled the air with a stench any medic or close combat veteran or villager today knows and can never forget. The night would bring sieges of battlements by crude artillery, or it would fall silent except for the screaming and piteous cries of the dying. For some, one battle was enough. Others took longer. To even think PTSD wasn’t real is to overestimate humans then compared to now. What always happened was something recorded as far back as ancient Assyria. That’s not even considering what happened before. Hunters wounded in a violent battle in prehistory by a mammoth or an even worse animal trying to claim the kill would never be the same. It would not be called “PTSD” until late 1979 when Vietnam veterans were in- country one day, on a jet the next, arriving home in 48 hours. We can assume a little about veterans of earlier wars. Post-World War Two and Korean Conflict veterans were treated at Veterans hospitals stateside, and depending on their symptoms, kept for the rest of their lives or released. Others went straight home. One distinct difference between 1941-1945 and what followed is that returned soldiers could proudly wear their dress uniforms and be welcomed home by adoring crowds even in small towns. To some this and the travel time on a ship to the states could have been a help in transition. Buddies supported each other, some listening, some talking, but even with that, heroes always had problems. Artilleryman Frank Cunningham once had to take a Thompson or an M-1 Garand and charge a Nazi machine gun nest. The MG-42 was the heavy machine gun feared by allied infantry and artillery alike; it spat bullets at such a high rate that charging a position was considered suicide. The troops called it “the zipper” and there was rarely only one. A fixed gun in a bunker window was called a “murder hole”. The weapon had only one weakness: the assistant gunner had to change barrels because the rate of fire made them overheat. While the change and reload time could be fast, it did give infantry time to find better cover, or, in Frank’s case, time to get close and toss a grenade and eliminate the position. He was awarded a medal, one of several.

In a report I once read, the authors claimed that mild cases of PTSD cleared up on their own or with minimal professional treatment. I dismissed it out of hand then and I still do. MRI studies have shown that there are actual changes to the brain and they’re not just real, they’re permanent injuries. Some images show profound changes while others seem minimal, and yet no matter what, the subject suffers from the same range of symptoms. That means that a dramatic change has taken place which disrupts everything down to the interruption of neurotransmitters and how they are used by their receptors. That’s really tragic. Soldiers come home different. Storybook marriages end, sometimes messy, sometimes deadly. Victims of domestic abuse, from battered spouses to sexuality abused children lose who they were. In the case of protracted emotional and violent physical abuse accompanied by sexual abuse, the surviving child will, at the instant of the first abusive act, cease to develop normally. Development is arrested and a new child evolves and continues to do so in progressively dysfunctional ways long into adulthood, even after the brain has finished development, in the late 20s. This is due in part to learned behavior, which is collectively known as personality disorders, of which there are many elements within each that can combine to defy any certain disorder being named. The resultant diagnosis is “Personality Disorder, Unspecified”. And it’s damnably maddening to treat just it is for a patient to cope with even if he or she understands the mechanisms involved. Later I’ll put it differently: the symptoms of personality disorders and PTSD often appear to be the same.

IN YOUR DREAMS

When he came home, no one really noticed anything about him that seemed to stand out. Frank Cunningham married, had one child and never spoke of his experiences in Europe under Generals Bradley and Patton. A few times, he told his daughter a small story. She became a nurse and came to know he had to have nightmares and other problems. So strong was he that there was never anything again that he was afraid of. That’s also a symptomatic response to the hell he endured and witnessed. After a war, what is there to be afraid of? Once, as a political figure, he threatened infamous mobster Crazy Joe Gallo, the man who was suspected of taking part in the public hit of mob boss Albert Anastasia, head of the Anastasia crime family. Crazy Joe even hired a black hitman to assassinate Joe Colombo, the head of the former Profaci crime family, now the Colombo family, after Colombo drew undue attention with his pronounced activities in Italian-American civil rights, as they knew it was a scam he used to make money from donations while calling out the FBI for carrying out biased operations to target Italians as gangsters. Colombo was shot at a rally and paralyzed, and died 6 years and change later. Between these incidents, Crazy Joe once badly frightened a schoolgirl when she was going home from school. When Frank Cunningham heard of this, he waited for Joe Gallo. When next he saw the mobster, Cunningham somehow put the fear of God into the man. He was one of very few Crazy Joe ever backed away from. To put this into perspective, Joe Gallo was as evil and dangerous a man as any other gangster in the Mafia’s heyday. Being a rogue and having earned his mob sobriquet, he was a loose cannon, and as such, perhaps one of the most dangerous men in New York. Gallo was shot to death while dining in Little Italy in 1972. He went out shooting and bravely drawing fire to himself by charging to the front door to protect his family. Now picture a man who towered over him one day and made a man like Crazy Joe Gallo walk away. He never did fuck with a civilian in Cunningham’s considerable jurisdiction again.

That’s just one possible outcome of PTSD. You fear nothing. You’ll protect anyone no matter who threatens them.

Along the same line as fearlessness is something far worse and far more dangerous: daredevil, disinhibition, compulsive risk taking behaviour. The exact mechanisms for this are still being studied, but what we seem unable to agree on is that thrill seekers and professional daredevils have a different and opposite set of key instigators than risk takers. Complications of the argument are that dopamine and MAO are certainly involved. But what’s the difference?

Academically, I cannot say. I disagree with some conclusions based on my own experience. A thrill seeker can be labeled with a “personality type” which frankly I don’t have any patience for. I see them as people who like the rush of hazardous sports and activities, with personal injury avoided with skill gained by experience. Racing accidents, downhill skiing matches, cliff diving and extreme sports are never without casualties, but that is hardly anyone’s intent.

On the other hand the risk takers are without such concern, usually acting compulsively or impulsively; consequences and hazards are put on the periphery or completely disregarded. When still a fairly new driver, I loved driving fast. But I had neither the experience, and therefore skill set, to perform at high speed. I came very close to dying or killing someone else multiple times. It wasn’t as if I constantly drove insanely, but at times and under certain conditions, something came over me that I have never been able to describe. A warm summer evening, a good rock tune on the radio, girls watching from another car…. Who can tell? When the light turned green, I floored it. Nuts. Who can really tell me what the hell that was? Because I was fearless unless I saw the bright blue bubble gum machine on my bumper. I started to be more aware and made sure those 1977 Pontiacs were not in sight before letting whatever chemical that took over loose. Chased many times, but in a high speed chase, never caught. Why that was a point of pride shames me now but I didn’t care then. Oh, I didn’t want to be caught; the risk was the fun. I even lost choppers twice, and that’s almost impossible.

Along the way though, I racked up over 35 accidents, including totalling the same car three times. I know, I know. Sounds like bullshit. But it’s true. It was a ’93 Mazda 323, a tiny but tough car. Eventually I was just too scared, as my condition worsened, that I had beaten the odds for far too long. It wasn’t a question of if I would kill someone; it was a question of when I would.

But also, there were accidents when I wasn’t speeding, doing donuts, cornering or ruining tires by burning the rubber clean down to the steel belts and kicking up sparks in the night. The dissociation that hit me without warning also made me ram several cars in the rear. But the risky, uninhibited behavior wasn’t limited to driving. It fueled my sex life, it egged me into dangerous situations and I never seemed to learn my lesson.

Be careful; taking risks, mood swings and serious depression, feelings of being worthless, suicidal thoughts, dysfunctional relationship history and other symptoms of behavior can be diagnosed mistakenly as borderline personality disorder, or BPD. You have to be clear when consulting a doctor. The overall behavior involved with PTSD can closely resemble BPD. The problem is how you proceed with treatment and the incredible stigma of BPD as compared to PTSD. People who are diagnosed with BPD are shunned very often. Although the disorder is treatable and has been observed to ease with age while PTSD does not, word searches for it have sad questions. People ask if a BPD patient is dangerous, is sociopathic, lies constantly or if they’re even capable of love.

Any person is potentially dangerous, and there’s no use in denying it. How many times have you seen a reporter stick a microphone in some shocked person’s face after a neighbor shot and killed someone? Know what they say? “He was always so pleasant. He’d do anything for anyone.”

There’s no stone engraved that says only certain types of people can kill. Nothing, by the same playbook, says that a person with PTSD can’t perform a job, raise a family, be a good mother or father. In fact, people prove it every day. The same is true of schizophrenics, behavior disorder patients, those with OCD, autism and everything else. What remains to be solved and mitigated are the dark dreams of the sufferers of trauma.

We know so little of the brain and dreams, that nightmares are bound to be, as you’ve probably found out yourself, a mystery. Some sources claim a difference between stages of sleep and dream intensity. Some still cling to old school beliefs that people don’t dream except in the REM state, although we know by now that every stage of sleep can produce dreams. The data show several periods of dream sleep during a normal night, with dreams lasting seconds to perhaps even an hour. During the deepest sleep if a nightmare occurs, and people are awakened suddenly, sleep paralysis, that warm place which coming fully awake from is a long and frightful struggle, keeps one from moving or speaking. Experiences tell us of a history of”old hag attacks” during this time, when people feel a “weight on their chest” and see some witch or ancient demon sitting astride them. That would be fine if sleep paralysis alone could account for it, but it doesn’t even come close. The reason: a large amount of literature on the subject contradicts it completely. Not that sleep paralysis isn’t real. But cases go back as far as ancient history of other people witnessing the hag attacking someone else who was sleeping while the witness was awake. Last year I heard a first-hand account of such a case. A mother and daughter sharing a studio apartment: the mother, apparently unaware, slept. The daughter awoke suddenly and saw a hag attacking her mother. She of course woke her mother up and the hag vanished. What’s even more frightening is that the daughter swore adamantly that the “hag” was sucking energy from the mother’s mouth into its own mouth. Steeped in folkloric horror stories, this unfortunately seems quite likely to be very true. It explains why victims wake to feel weight on their chest and trouble breathing. Indeed, the realm of sleep is one of both delight and suffering. It also accounts for six to eight hours of sleep leaving one feeling sick and weakly lethargic.

AUGMENTED NIGHTMARES

There are many things that can cause nightmares to become so severe that they are actually traumatic in their own way. Factors such as health, diet, drugs (OTC, prescription and illicit), smoking, increased stress during the day’s work routine, the deterioration of a relationship, having a loved one gravely ill, financial situation and others all seem to play a part, like extras on a film set. You may not notice them, but they affect the quality of a film nonetheless. For a silly example, I give you Jurassic Park 2: “The Lost World”. It was a silly movie from the beginning to the end, but some of it had sillier moments than others. The extras made for some of the most hilarious bits, like when the T-REX was chasing its infant, carried in the back seat of a convertible by Ian Malcolm. On a street scene, some Japanese tourists are running away, in a tip of the hat to classic Godzilla movies. It’s so quick that if you blink you’re going to miss it. But all things considered, bit players are not so trivial after all.

Of all the bit players when it comes to PTSD nightmares, one of the most powerful is a low-grade fever. You don’t need much, but a fever tends to strengthen at night. When I’ve dreamt this last week, the result was always so bad that my attempts to stay hydrated during the day ended up with something getting drenched in urine during deep, dreadful dreams I couldn’t escape.

I don’t mind telling you this. These are things rarely addressed openly except for the distilled and impersonal websites that range from reliable information to medical myths. The internet is a digital minefield.

WHAT YOU DREAM MAY HAVE SIGNIFICANT MEANING OR NONE AT ALL, DEPENDING ON WHAT YOU READ

I’m a believer that for every nightmare, there are infinite possible reasons, and none are simple. If I agree that the human brain is still the real Undiscovered Country, then dreams are important. They do carry significant meaning, no matter what experts want to fight about. Leaving their quarrels behind is easy for me; I know that ultimately, they tangle so because they don’t know.

LABYRINTHINE TRAPS: RECURRING

My first nightmare of the week was memorable. Influenced no doubt because I fell asleep watching TV, and was surrounded by electronic devices which affect the level of ambient electromagnetic energy (which is claimed by various studies to affect the brain), I found myself with Rachel Maddow in some sort of after hours setting. She was a really funny, charming and somewhat eccentric. Or she’d had a few drinks. We were alone for a second and she was dressed in her normal suit. Then the fever and my PTSD kicked in and ruined my brief time with someone I admire.

She suddenly had guests and she was kicking back. Somehow she had long hair and let it down. She got wild, and began showing strangers large flip cards which morphed into gifs with sexual acts. Different kinds, all graphic. Then she turned into a full figured blonde who was evil and menacing. She chased me, and the building was old, very old, with once stained wainscoting and hardwood floors, all now gone to seed; scuffed and dust-covered. The hallways stank of old urine long ago soaked forever into the hardwood by pets. In a building with no air conditioning. I was running, trying to escape her. To escape it. This place was a true labyrinth, dark, dusty, no way out, one hallway turning a corner and leading to another. I never got out, but toward the end, the corridors shortened, there was little room to move, and yet several doors lined the dim scene. I knew that none would lead to freedom.

Of course, I awoke with wet crotch to find that the second airing, which begins at midnight eastern time, was halfway through. Rachel Maddow was calmly interviewing a guest. I turned the fucking TV off and went to the kitchen to kill the fever. A combination of one Alka Seltzer tablet in half a glass of water chased two Extra Strength Tylenol. Fuck a fever, I thought. Fuck Rachel Maddow too. I’m never watching her again unless I have a pot of caffeine-loaded Starbucks Veranda brewing. No offense, Rachel, mon ami.

Two nights later, weary from the constant coughing that had my intercostal muscles either sore or excruciating, depending on whether they were upper or lower, and again with a fever that rose as the sun set, I fought sleep. I drank coffee and took Tylenol. You think it helped, right? Cause you really want this post over already, don’t you?

No. It didn’t work out that way. Never does, for assholes. Why on Earth would you have imagined otherwise? Did you forget whose site you’re on? Shame, shame on you.

And this time it was even more terrifying than the first. A long time ago I had a 1970 Mustang Mach One. It was white with black GT stripes. I was traveling, not in the past, but some weird-ass future, a road somewhere in Columbia, when it turned suddenly into a dirt track with steep earthen sides, a deep cut into the ground, if you will. I got out to search on foot for the way out, as one wasn’t visible and had to be hidden in the repeated colors of piles and cliffs of clay and dirt. I knew I had passed a yellow diamond caution sign but the symbols on it made no sense. Why had the road stopped? Why had I continued to follow the way forward into a trench? What the hell was this, anyway? Was some tunnel being built? That made no sense; but I found myself climbing a less steep part of the trench’s side and was horrified. Huge “Safety Yellow” construction equipment worked at digging and moving dirt and typical Maryland clay. Menacing things, more than double the size of anything I’ve ever seen. At the top I also saw that so much dirt had been excavated that towering piles of it like mountains prevented me from seeing the way out. I slid down to return to my car and a guy in a hardhat said it was gone. I looked back to where I had left it and it was gone. Looking around I could see part of the right side under a new steep pile of dirt. The hardhat dude handed me a large manilla envelope and a red file folder and said to file a claim later, but for now get out of the area.

This began a frantic flight to freedom. First I found a shack for the construction company, entered it and found secretaries at desks like they were in a corporate building. What the fuck! Scared, but refusing to panic, I followed their directions through a door. I kept coming to places that got lighter over time, with a few windows to see the sunshine I had not seen at the beginning.

How long it all went on, I don’t know. Buildings seemed to connect through a single unmarked door. The doors gave way to new carpeted hallways and large spaces ranging from sparsely furnished and deserted to a doctor’s waiting room with sick children, all unaccompanied by adults. I got the hell out of there by asking a receptionist which of the many doors led to the street. I used the one she lazily pointed to as if she had to answer the question every day.

It went on and on. At one point I became aware that I was coming awake but I went right back to it. The next large space I found had a tall ceiling, full of big windows. The doors were big, leading out to wide, concrete steps and a concourse to a courtyard. All ultra modern, very pretty, but a dead end for me. I found that it was enclosed by tall stone walls with planters on top with ornate trees. I was able to hear traffic close by, but there was no way to scale the walls. They were at least a dozen feet tall.

I finally saw a highway through one section of a building but there was no exit. Two Russian women cursed me and said I was never leaving.

EVEN WORSE

Last night was a real ordeal. Fighting like hell to stay awake was useless. Somehow I found myself in a hybrid version of my childhood house in Pasadena and the worst house I ever lived in and still have nightmares about despite its demolition in early 2005. Parts of it were dirty and old, I found myself cramped onto a cot in a small modified section next to my older sister. For all intents and purposes we are enemies and have not spoken since summer, 1988. In the dream, we were close. A long time had passed and we were older. Our parents, now long dead, could be heard downstairs. Hurling curses and insults at both of us. My sister had a boyfriend but he turned out to be a real turd and left her. We were both desperate to escape the house. I climbed down an unfinished addition being built and I think I was scouting places to go for refuge. I’d seen the houses in real life but not since the 1970s because they’re in Greensboro, NC. But we weren’t there. We were in Pasadena.

Coming back with no ideas, I hugged my sister and cried. It looked like escape meant running with no place to go. I didn’t want that for her. But then it got really twisted. For comfort we became closer over time. Not in a good way, but not exactly crossing a line. One night I saw her getting dressed and holy shit, she had a penis!

What the hell? She’d managed to have a kid while being a hermaphrodite?

This wasn’t my sister! I knew who it was but there was no time to even cope. My parents were sex offenders but had passed some test and qualified to house orphaned children. They began taking up spaces until I had no choice but to leave. I frantically packed what I could in a backpack, but as the children settled in, they began to attack each other with extreme violence, including sexual assault and flesh eating. Before I could escape, I awoke, once again wet of crotch and deeply troubled. The sound of blood gushing through arteries filled my ears even as I gave up trying to forget my horror and revulsion. I took a half milligram of Klonopin, drank coffee, having washed and changed into my day clothes.

Interestingly I had not fallen asleep with the TV on. The power to everything was off. And chillingly, I awoke at the stroke of three, same as the night before: the third hour, the hour of shadows, or demons.

I have had evil spirits haunt my dreams and torment me many times. These experiences are not to be trivialized; they can do damage science denies. Have you ever heard of someone who died of a heart attack in their sleep and someone invariably says, “At least he didn’t suffer”?

How do they know that? If needing to find a restroom in a dream (as happened in the three dreams I’ve described) ends in either waking up a wet mess or making it to the bathroom in time and pissing for ten minutes straight, then demonic and torturous nightmares can certainly trigger a heart attack.

It’s a matter of contention, but the ancient Hebrews believed that nocturnal emissions (ejaculation during sleep) was a grave sin. Even the old testament relates the unlikely tale of a bride of several husbands who refused to impregnate the woman, “spilling their seed on the bed” or, in modern lexicon, “pulling out” instead. So God killed them.

So prevalent this belief in sin seemed that some scholars claim that the demonic succubus was invented. This was a female demon which sexually assaulted men in their sleep, thus accounting for the mess they awoke in.

Really? Like, everyone else automatically knew that a guy in their tribe or camp had a wet dream? Well, according to some interpretations of the law, he had to confess to it, and a succubus became the perfect reason to let him off the hook. Not being an expert on ancient Hebrews or their laws, I take the tale as true simply because incubi and succubi really do date far back to ancient times.

Then again, so do satyrs. The fact remains: there’s still so much we don’t know about the brain and the weird things it does. I’m so often amazed at what humanity has accomplished in the relatively short history it’s had on Earth. Pyramids that morons still claim humans could not have built, and therefore were erected by extraterrestrials. Angkor Wat, an enormous city surrounded by the largest religious structure ever built. So many wondrous things we as humans have done. Leaps in disease diagnosis and treatment, machines that can detect damaged areas of the brain, caused by great psychological trauma. We’ve sent men to the moon despite legions of idiots who say it was all faked by Hollywood.

Yet myths and false and dated beliefs are not going away anytime soon. We still don’t know why we dream. We guess. We do sleep study after sleep study. We can treat mental illness but not cure it. We can’t even cure the worst sleep disorder in existence.

All we can really know is what we experience and share. Eventually, who knows what we’ll find? Knowledge doesn’t come easily and usually not very quickly. We search. We learn from small clues.

All I know is this: mental illness sucks. PTSD sucks. Nightmares suck. Fevers suck. And PTSD nightmares combined with a fever?

Absolutely dreadful.

With the coronavirus spreading, let’s take a moment to remember that if you’re experiencing fever, you’re going to have your dreams change to black and terror-filled shit that no one should have to endure.

The Silver Linings Playbook

I slept on and off. It’s rare to go more than three hours at a time sleeping these days. But yesterday it lasted all day. Then the full moon arose. And whatever anyone else says, whether scientific or statistical, empirical, anecdotal or pure horseshit, the full moon does affect certain people adversely. Scholars can go shit in their hats, too. Too many people with letters behind their names have already been caught making flawed, even false conclusions, and usually it’s for a buck. They need funding for their college-based group, they’re publishing a book or paper, and who knows what.

There’s science, then there’s the unknown. Sometimes there are unknowns which science refuses to even consider possible. For example there’s the Full Moon Effect. No, I’m not talking about werewolves. And crime statistics do not support the claim that a full moon means an increase in crime.

However, there’s beat cops and emergency responders who will tell you something more. They’ll say that it’s a night when the weird shit happens.

The weird shit? Well, yeah, but not weird like funny, humorous. Sick and tragic stuff. Freak accidents at home. Suicide attempts that are unusual in nature.

I know one thing for sure. Being mentally ill and suffering through the most symptomatic days, those are horrible. I’m in a depression right now. I don’t even want to write this shit. I don’t want to be doing anything.

Depression may not be sitting and crying and sobbing. It’s usually a really big deal. I got no energy. No desire to do anything. I hate to move or breathe. I don’t know what triggers a fibromyalgia flare up, but it was here. I hurt from head to toe and Tylenol won’t touch it. I was on a popular medication for a while and it helped but I was always falling, fainting and losing my memory.

And then there’s anxiety and panic attacks. A few hours ago I started trembling. My whole body shook violently and I couldn’t catch my breath. I thought the world was ending. I wanted to lie down and let it happen so it would all be over. A Klonopin helped, but I’d rather be free of that shit.

No one who doesn’t suffer from severe symptoms of bipolar and PTSD can know what it’s like to have all of the symptoms show themselves at once. And maybe I’m not ready to blame the moon phase, but when I looked up and saw it, I hated that fucker with everything I had. Getting flashbacks, terror attacks, have pain pounding through every cell, that shit sucks. And I got nothing to say that you can call positive. The lights I put up last week now make me feel like stomping them under my boot. Christmas is a vile time for me. How could I have imagined otherwise? It was once my favorite time of year. Now, just a reminder of death and loss and how alone I am.

I owe money on copays from years back, and can’t see a therapist. And no one understands me. Some claim to, and I appreciate that sentiment, but no, they don’t understand my crazy. I thought I could tell one friend anything. But for a while now, I’ve been getting told to stop, and they’re impatient, sometimes claiming an incoming call, sometimes when I can tell I’ve gone too far and they just don’t want to hear any more.

That’s okay. I understand that; it’s the way it’s always been, all my life.

Then, even though it was never a movie I’d pick, I watched “The Silver Linings Playbook” with Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence.

I related to them. Having a mental illness and being misunderstood, being ashamed of having to take meds, I’ve been there. I knew the drugs they mentioned. I’m even on, or have been on, a few of them.

It struck me when he was out running and Tiffany would catch up to Pat, and doggedly try to get his attention. They shared an attraction, but he wouldn’t admit it. I think it’s her best role, but it left me confused. I wish I could have met someone like her.

If you see any of yourself in me I have some advice.

Life ain’t no movie. You ain’t gonna be kissing Jennifer Lawrence. You’re not gonna have the energy to dance. You won’t like crowds and you’ll never ever perform in front of them. And no one will ever understand you as much as you wish they could. They’ll make fun of you. They’ll tell you to change the subject or they’ll make excuses to get away from you or hang up. They’ll tell you they love you, but never in front of anyone else. Don’t be bitter. It’s just how they are. They ain’t like us. Be happy for them. Because there are already too many of us.

It’s good to think positive. Have goals. But I don’t know about a silver linings playbook. It’s just a fucking movie.

But I like it anyway.

Mister Softee And The Kid With The Dirty Mouth

Had a biopsy yesterday. Need one more, I fear. My time may grow shorter than I thought it would. And I never thought I’d make it this far.

I’ve been an asshole for so long that now, looking back, I’m both amused and ashamed. But mostly amused.

Because when I was a quiet, abused kid, I had coping mechanisms that, looking back, I didn’t think of that way.

In the hot summers, from 1965-1973, I and my siblings had a few things to look forward to. It wasn’t much. But to us, any Oasis in a sea of barren sand was a treasure. One of them was the summer ritual of the Good Humor man making his rounds, jingling the bells in his open cab truck.

He had ice cream sandwiches. The Good Humor Bar. Toasted Almond and Chocolate Eclairs. Nutty Buddies. Twin pops.

When I was younger it all seemed so innocent. But it wasn’t. Maybe nothing ever was; I don’t know. Seemed like it. Well…for a while. And that was okay with me.

He’d get out from the right side when you stood by the side of Dutch Ship Road. In the back of the truck and on the right side there were small doors from which incredible treats came. He wore a change holder on his belt. It was loaded with coins. That was part of the ritual. He was always nice, polite, very kid-friendly. He was our hero.

David Stinchcomb ran a Kool-Aide stand. He was very good to my younger sister and gave her free drinks in Dixie cups. No small thing considering he lived on Edgewater Road and had hills to negotiate on his bike.

God bless him. Her life was already so miserable.

Then of course we had Sealtest dairy. They delivered fresh milk in glass jugs with foil caps. Mom could leave a list in an aluminum box with a cork lining. Butter, milk, eggs, orange juice and even ice cream sandwiches.

But my favorite was always Mister Softee. I can never forget the creepy ice cream cone-headed mascot or that magical music box. I could hear his truck all the way down in Boulevard Park, across Gray’s Creek, and I knew we were next. What magical treats he had! Soft Ice cream in cones. Sprinkles. Round ice cream sandwiches called Cartwheels. And everyone’s favorite, the banana boat, a banana split served in a plastic boat.

NEMISIS

Sometime between these years my behaviour changed. Out of sight from my house, over on Edgewater Road, I attacked without reserve. Without remorse. Without mercy.

Toward the end. Before my father heard the shit I was doing and made me spend my summers working for him in his Glen Burnie warehouse so he wouldn’t get any more phone calls from outraged neighbors.

The first target was the Good Humor man. He often had a young teen girl riding the hump on the right side. She was a “helper”.

Bullshit. What was a grown man doing riding around with different girls doing? I had no money for ice cream and that pissed me off. The beautiful older girls pissed me off. Talking to me in baby language. Fuck that; I asked Mr. Dressed-in-white, “Does her mother know your helper is sucking you off?”

And “Does her dad know she sucks your dick?” Mr. White Suit was not listening to any more of this. He asked me my address. I didn’t give it and he forbade me ever to approach his truck again.

On to Mister Softee. One day all I had was a nickel. I asked what I could get. This motherfucker gave me the frights. Sometimes you just know, especially if you’re a victim. He was a monster in an inverted sailor’s hat, a slob never having any business handling food. He said that for a nickel he could maybe give me a squirt of ice cream in my hand. Now there’s no way I could get a hand far enough in the window to get a squirt of ice cream in my hand. That meant I would have to go inside the truck. And I wasn’t about to let myself fall for a trap like that.

I said, “Fuck you, asshole. Does your wife know you trick little boys inside your truck?”

Yes. At 12-years-old I did have such a vocabulary.

He got mad but just closed his window and drove on.

But I wasn’t done. I was on a mission. I wanted him to quit and go away. It got to where even if there were other kids waiting, if he saw me, he wouldn’t stop. So I began to hide in the woods. When he stopped and opened the window, I’d come out and ask him if his wife knew he liked to have little boys. I asked him why he came in cream cones before filling them with vanilla ice cream. I told him his wife was with other men while he was working. I said she told me it was because he had a tiny dick.

Twelve years old and I was driving this guy mad. I was an ice cream dude’s terrorist.

And I knew more about sex than anyone else did. The other kids didn’t know half of what I was talking about. But after a while, they got on me for constantly ruining their magic moments with the Mister Softee dude.

One day I popped out of the woods and accused him of something so evil and foul that he asked where I lived. I didn’t answer. He asked the other kids. For once, they stuck up for me. No one told him. Boy was he pissed.

I’d pushed my luck far enough. A friend’s mother sent over a treasure trove of comic books. I knew it was a trick to keep me inside, but it was okay with me. You ever heard of Blackhawk or the Metal Men? I had Justice League, Action Comics, Charlton Comics, Aquaman, you name it. Classics I wish I still had. But…it worked. It drained some of my rage, desperation and idleness.

But I look back, you know? A bit of shame and lots of mirth. Because for a while, I was the kid who was the bane of an adult’s existence. I can still picture him getting into his truck and popping a pill or taking a toke and praying that he would not see me that day.

It was a bad gig. No doubt. But for a while, by acting insanely, I preserved my sanity.

To this day I can’t eat Good Humor or soft serve ice cream.

I’d rather eat thumb tacks dipped in cobra venom.

NIGHTMARES and PTSD

Everyone has bad dreams. The word nightmare is commonly used to differentiate between a simple bad dream and something far worse. These are sometimes quite vivid and even unforgettable. If you forget your dreams, it’s okay. That’s normal. Normal for others is remembering every second of a dream. They’ll wake up and tell you a novel out loud.

It’s interesting stuff because we don’t know yet why we dream. How we dream. Why some remember and some rarely do. Nor do we know what dreams mean because sometimes, they come true to some degree. Consulting dream interpretation books is akin to reading a newspaper horoscope.

It used to be accepted that dreams came in REM stage of sleep, but now we know we dream in every stage of sleep including while we’re falling asleep.

This happened to me once while I was a teenager. I was nodding off, and saw a succession of faces most finely detailed. Some brought no trouble to my mind. One did. He had blonde hair and a sailor’s cap with the brim turned down like Gilligan wore. I snapped awake. The guy was as evil as the thing I’d seen in my room upstairs a decade earlier. As evil as my father was.

I never could forget that face. It was stamped in my mind.

Years went by. I drove a tractor trailer for B Green & Co. and was on the old back dock one day looking for the forklift driver, Jerry. I couldn’t hear his lift running so I walked into the warehouse and turned a corner, where I came face-to-face with the guy I’d seen so long ago, wearing the hat I had seen him wearing. He was chilling; my blood ran cold with the look of hatred he fixed on me. A song was playing on a nearby radio: “Walk, Don’t Run” by the ventures.

PTSD affects the brain in ways that show up as abnormal on MRI results. The greater and more prolonged the trauma, the more areas that show abnormalities there are.

I’ve found that science is far behind what those with PTSD often learn on their own: that they are more receptive to the paranormal but can seldom control it; that they have vivid and traumatizing nightmares; that their social skills are never going to develop properly; that relationships are often stormy because self-esteem is low and they “settle” for the first person who gives them a second look, even marrying them after a few months of mostly sex dates; that they are never at peace or comfortable except in places they’ve gotten used to and that those places aren’t always good, therefore there is no peace, and the comfort is like a habit, an addiction, a cacoon.

Nightmares are a symptom of the disorder that isn’t reported in every diagnosis, but which is quite prevalent nonetheless. I generally do not count “old hag attacks” which the term nightmare comes from. I’m talking about sick, disgusting, horrible shit that leaves one so shaken that it counts as a trauma all by itself. The entire day or two following such dreams see the sufferer depleted, depressed and dissociatively useless and morose.

No matter how long I’ve researched, I’ve never come across any way to mitigate such dreams. No medication. No herbal remedy. No amount of exercise, no matter what you do, it’s going to happen.

I can’t even find any literature on the subject that I actually find believable.

Typical PTSD dreamers seem to have themes running through a particular dream. It is most often centered on whatever grieved or terrorized them, even if there were multiple traumas, as is the case with me. So of course I have many dreams caused by trauma that are very different. Sometimes only one element is present. Sometimes there are so many that I awaken sick and useless for a week, with migraine headaches, a need to eat unhealthy food or to smoke more than usual.

This Sunday morning as I slept I had one of the most tortuous dreams I can remember, relentless and truly terrifying.

I was back in private school, only it was a place I’d never been. Old. Hulking, with many floors and several wings. But I couldn’t find where I belonged. Where my classes were, where my dorm room was. At one point I settled into a room only to find it occupied by a girl I didn’t know. But there were no girls, only women. College age, more like, and I was just out of place. They knew about this and began to torment me, sending me all over this labyrinthine hell. At one point I was accused of wronging someone and she accepted my apologies. I reached out to hug her and she screamed and turned away. That’s when the real torture broke like a rogue wave. I had pain and grievous wounds. I kept being stripped to my jeans and bare feet. I remained as meek as I could. I just wanted it to stop. My mother called and said she and my father had lodged a complaint with the headmaster and that to make it up to me, I would be given Mac computers and other shit. I refused and said for them to get me out of this hellishness. She said they would come for me. In a snowstorm they evidently tried. In a yellow school bus. I went to meet them and found the bus empty, hollow and burned. The dream ended. I was stuck.

Nothing necessarily means anything. A psychologist would try to get to the source because the dream obviously distressed me even after waking. I was wobbly, very weak and light headed and dizzy with reflux enough to spit on a rat and watch it be digested.

What the therapist would do is note my fear of being naked in front of others and say lots of people have such dreams. What I would say is, there was over a decade of my life in which I had no privacy, no control over my own body, was sexually abused and traumatized so many times I wonder how I’ve lived with it for so long. I would also say that labyrinths and being chased through them by tormenters is another terror I frequently face in nightmares. And the antagonists being women is new.

Uh, wait. Is that because I’ve been writing about how I felt more respect for my father and more betrayed by my mother?

And being trapped and abandoned? Nothing new there. The screaming girl I tried to hug is new. I never, ever give unsolicited contact of any kind to anyone, nor do I want it done to me. I rarely shake hands because I can get empathic impressions that way and I’m tuned to the negative feelings only, nothing good. I’d just as soon we didn’t shake hands if you don’t mind.

Some of it makes sense to me. I have no one to talk to about this stuff. The other day I tried and was cut off by “I have to take this” which was followed the next day by a different reason. So I quit. I surrender. I’ll do it myself.

Which is bad.

That breeds more nightmares.

Brent

In my time, although I have burned many bridges, I’ve been blessed to know great friends who helped me through some very bad times. One was Brent, a guy living in a group home with me and four other people.

Brent was a character. He had schizophrenia but it was somewhat controlled by medication and excellent support. He wore a fiddler cap with his long blonde hair cascading from beneath. His oversized wire rimmed glasses gave him a distinct look. But it was fitting for his character.

He was the only man that I ever met who got a ticket for running along the concrete median without a flashlight on a summer night on Ocean Highway in Ocean City.

He once lost his wallet. Had some roaches shoved down in the folds. He got a call from OCPD, letting him know that someone had found and turned it in. He was ballsy enough to go to the station to pick it up. And they gave it to him, with the MJ joints still inside. Knowing that, you’d think he was the luckiest bastard who ever lived.

Perhaps. Then again, I’m still on the fence about it.

One time he was collecting old bottles in a kid’s wagon. Not altogether that strange, really.

Unless, of course, you count the fact that he was wearing a ceremonial native American chief’s bonnet complete with the full feathers and everything.

And maybe that wasn’t really so bad either; if only he wasn’t walking on the shoulder of Interstate 70, a highway illegal for pedestrians to access.

A westbound State Police cruiser (going the opposite direction) had a trooper and a fresh cadet. One can imagine: “Damn, did you see that?”

and the answer: “Yeah, I saw it. Some days I hate this fuckin job.”

They had to take the next exit, come back and put Brent’s wagon in the trunk and drop him in a safer area.

And no. He wasn’t a kid then. He was in his late 20s.

Anyone with schizophrenia will have delusional stories. I got to know Brent well enough that I could sort most of them out. I won’t go into those because I simply don’t have any interest in making, or appearing to make, light of them.

Because he was such a kind soul and a devoted friend. He loaned me smokes when I was broke, money when I was out of meds, and he fed me when I was hungry. He gave me company when I was lonely and couldn’t sleep.

I’ll always remember the nights we sat on the porch, talking, listening to the radio and smoking cigarettes or cigars. Jimmy Buffet, Columbian coffee and Marlboros. And damn good company.

Brent once made the news. He was driving a straight truck. I never asked, but I rather doubt he had a license. The headline the next morning was “Man Goes On Rampage In City, Damages Parked Cars”.

He said he didn’t know how many cars he hit. But to get a headline like that? Oh, yeah. He fucked shit up.

Once he was pepper sprayed by the police but managed to get away. Face and eyes burning, he ran into someone’s back yard. There was a pond, you know, the kind for goldfish and frogs and Lilly pads. He was sloshing water on his face when the owner awoke and said he was calling the police. Brent lied and said a gang of kids had used Mace on him. The owner invited him inside, helped him flush his eyes, gave him a towel and a glass of wine and sent him on his way. Of course I believe that story. He’s the only one who could run from the police after being pepper sprayed and come out of it with a free glass of wine!

I loved my friend Brent. I guess he’s just one of those people you can’t help but love and therefore can never forget. Only a few times in our lives do we meet such extraordinary people. They’re a true blessing. Brent taught me patience and understanding. He let me see the rough edges of himself, and that was an honor.

Before you judge? You have to get to know someone.

Before you hate that which you do not understand? You have to gain understanding.

Otherwise you’re wrong.

Yes, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Does Work.

CAUTION: CONTAINS TRIGGERS AND ADULT CONTENT! Read slowly and back out if you need to.

In 2005, I was in group therapy with an excellent doctor at Springfield Hospital in Maryland. He used the sessions to give us a look at several approaches to recovery. One of them was cognitive therapy. It worked. He gave us a single sheet of paper with a bullet list naming types of self-destructive and defeating thinking and the reasons people tend to use them.

I was resistant to most therapy because I was a victim of things people did that, at the time, were unspeakable. Newscasters wouldn’t get this shit on a written script. It was a taboo subject; incest, child sex abuse. Newspapers could do a bit more but never outside the lines.

When Neil Armstrong took his first step on the moon, I was already wounded. Had been for as long as I could remember. I was fascinated with the Apollo 11 broadcasts, I remember when he stepped off that ladder, and yet…most of me, lying on a rug in front of the TV, was somewhere else, having things done to me that can never be forgotten.

It was in the same room that my mother and father “taught” me about sex. And would continue to do so until 1976 when I was actually asked if I wanted to stop. I had to summon courage to say “yes” because it seemed like another typical Ralph Smith goddamn trick. He would lay manipulative traps like that. Ask a question and if he didn’t like the answer, give out a rage-powered beating.

I had already, though I didn’t know it then, displayed behaviour and symptoms of trauma. The severe kind. Everyone’s different, that’s true, so I can’t speak for my siblings, who seem to be more functional than I. Oh, they all got the same shit as me, but I guess something in me made me especially susceptible to damage and an inability to cope with it.

Ruminations are wandering, smothering trains of thought triggered by various things. If I see the sun reflect through a tail light on a parked car, for example, I’ll likely be taken back in time to a memory or emotion from the abusive “teaching” years. Back when I noticed the world around me. Back when I could drink grape soda or have a grape Tootsie Pop without getting violently sick. The both of them are now forever linked to a particularly bad stretch of time I survived, though I was surely dead inside, and died many times.

Ruminations can be synonymous with brooding, but the word has a broader meaning. Ruminating can be positive. Nostalgia for a simpler time. Or dread and anger associated with oppression and terror because there was never really a simpler time. You had to grow up early because life picked you for shitty things. Ultimately, though, ruminating is not going to do you well if you can’t control it.

There’s hope, though. You can get control over these thoughts which cause everything from dissociative thinking to depression and suicidal thoughts.

Look it up. Read about cognitive behavioral therapy and ask a therapist about it. Find one who knows it and believes it’s effective; it’s a current fad that is being used deceptively, even though it has been around a while and there is no reason to listen to those who hawk it as snake oil. “Lifestyle coaches” are worse frauds than California Psychics, who continue to run TV ads despite repeated reports to the BBB. If you don’t have sufficient insurance for therapy, work out payment agreements. Severe PTSD and the ruminations it causes are no joke.

Self-defeating thoughts such as “I’ll never win” are viewed in cognitive terms as “fortune telling”, something you shouldn’t be doing to yourself; you have no business being that hard on yourself when you don’t know any more what’s going to happen ten minutes from now than you do ten years from now.

A trick I learned from the doc was more mindful eating. You know, you go out for a burger and you wolf it down, barely tasting it. Now, go get a nice juicy organic strawberry and close your eyes. Clear your mind and concentrate on the strawberry. Feel the texture and the juice, let the flavor and the bite of fruit linger on your tongue. Chew slowly, never letting your thoughts stray from what you’re doing. Take this challenge with anything you like. Think of it like this: a kid eating cereal, staring vacantly at the back of the box. Or… A wine taster, sipping delicately, swishing the sip around in the mouth, over the tongue, concentration and pleasure plain to see on the face. That is the difference, simplified, between rumination and mindfulness.

Another neat challenge, if you’re in a safe place or you have a companion, is to take a walk. Doesn’t have to be far. Along the way, turn off the phone. Notice the smell of the air. Where I live, it’s full of honeysuckle and wild flowers and tree blooms. Look at the yards you pass. What’s in them? I used to walk past one that had a very old grindstone, complete with seat, on the front lawn. That’s cool, but driving past, you’d never see it. Challenge yourself to spot one thing that strikes your fancy as unusual. When you return home, you’ll be in a better mood, maybe not a great one considering what you’re dealing with in life, but you’ll still be better.

The article below is correct if extremely general. If you’ve read my stuff, then you know how much more I should be doing with the concept. But with severe, crippling or disabling damage like mine, there’s a roadblock. It’s a direct counterpart to cognitive living. It’s learned behaviour, often diagnosed as “personality disorder” or disorders. Due to repeated events and conditioning you can’t seem to fight back. Learned behaviours are comparable to what happened to dogs in a shuttle box experiment some years ago. Dogs were placed in the boxes. The box consisted of two compartments, the sides of which they could not spring over. Each compartment was connected to the other but could be closed off, keeping the subject restricted to one side. This was done. The compartment they were trapped in had a grid on the floor. The subjects received electric shocks from the grids, which they could not step off of because the compartment that wasn’t equipped with a grid was closed off. After a set number of these non-lethal shocks were administered, the barriers to the other side of the shuttle boxes were removed. The shocks resumed, but the dogs made no movement at all. Even when shown that moving to the other side stopped the shocks, when placed back in the grid boxes, they took the shocks.

This is learned behaviour at its most basic; in this case the behaviour was called “learned helplessness”.

It’s what prisoners who are institutionalized have to fight. Ten years or more and sometimes less is all it takes to teach helplessness. A life restricted to a place and a never-changing routine, with no ability to make any decisions whatsoever, and what results is someone who can’t live once they are paroled. Many break conditions of parole or commit felonies and plead guilty just to get back inside. Some commit suicide. They’ve done their time, but they’re hardly free.

With the case of the shuttle box dogs, eventually they were able to make it to the other side, but the process of teaching them to do it was arduous for their handlers. Learned behaviours and personality disorders are difficult to treat; so much so that the “bible” of psychiatric diagnosis was expected to have this entire section edited out.

Cognitive therapy is a real thing. It is a long road to travel. No one recovers from trauma disorders. But with guidance and hard work, with early intervention, living with it is possible. My case is hampered because I went misdiagnosed for so long, and because I cannot afford therapy on Medicare. Not even once a month. You don’t have to end up like me. I have no fight left.

I’ll tell you this, though. And I mean every word. You are reading this for a reason. No one reads my posts. I have a free plan and whatever I post gets buried fast, especially on Reader but also on search engines. I’m sure you’ll recognize that you are here for a reason. And that if I tell you that you are special, that the world needs kindness and empathy and that you can get to a higher level and make a difference, you have a choice. You face a decision. Choose wisely. Time is running short for us all.

https://www.psypost.org/2019/06/mindfulness-appears-to-diminishes-depressive-symptoms-by-reducing-rumination-53885