Tag: the monster within

Hey, Friends, What Have We Learned This Week?

What’s a topic or issue about which you’ve changed your mind?

What can anyone at all get out of my posts this week?

Anyone? Some are way ahead of me. Others are just mystified that I share so much. But mostly I go unnoticed. I’m not an influencer. Not widely read or known. I’m nobody. Just an asshole who’s honest about being an asshole.

But this week was kind of different from from my usual complaints about life. Or my stupid observations and even worse interpretations.

Because this week, I came close to really losing myself. “Beware the fury of a patient man” is truly a term that applies to me. Being two steps from Hell feels very real and dangerous to me. And certainly, my sister Michele was right: my soul has been shattered. Pieces of it, scattered around, I don’t know where. One, subconsciously left behind simply because I loved my siblings, like she and my youngest brother, and I feared leaving them behind. But, had I remained, even for another month, I would surely have gone insane.

I don’t know how my sister senses things like those, but all of us emerged with “gifts” that typically show up in extreme trauma victims. Later she would become a survivor, but all of those retain those same perceptions that, all are born with, but by reason of extraordinary survival challenges, develop to degrees many people never imagine. Or believe.

All my dreams were long since gone by the time I turned 14. I worked that summer as a carpenter’s helper, and he so impressed me with his patient and humorous, gentle nature that I decidid I, too, wanted to be like that. The foundation was there, all I had to do was to build on it.

But such was my anger and trauma that my coping was crude. I couldn’t be kind, or gentle, and the monster we each have sleeping inside us just became more hungry, demanding to be fed. I had to go through a lot more, to mature with time, to learn how to ignore it. Decades slipped past.

My ability to be patient would eventually come, but it took a lot out of me; it’s a fight that never ends and the initial caging of the beast was only the beginning.

Rarely, I encountered people who threatened the security around my personal creature. I came damnably close to disaster when aggressive assholes decided I was a good target. No longer a coward, but somewhat willing to engage in combat, I fought instead that hungry demonic thing in me that screamed, “Let me OUT, you know you want to. Together we will avenge your soul!”

That kind of payback would have cost me my soul. It would avenge nothing. You can’t get back what’s lost, not your fragmented heart or soul, not your lost childhood, wrongly destroyed though each was. Its over.

But nothing is over in your mind. That is a battleground that will be fought for until the end of your life.

In the clip above, you saw a movie scene that still makes me weep. Sometimes, I can’t stop.

John Rambo. All he wanted was something to eat. And nobody cared to let him, starting with the sheriff.

This scene, at the end, is entirely accurate. It has been played out too many times in too many places. If this 80s movie isn’t your cup of tea, or if you just never got around to seeing it, I recommend it. There’s nothing major in this scene that I think is off. This is a man who was triggered, whose guard against the inner beast was dropped, and it ended up this way.

And while every sequel that followed this film was ridiculous to the point of being comical, and this as a standalone film is perfect, the ultimate takeaway is this one question: is it really possible? The answer is, of course, yes.

Now, watch this. It’s vloggers reacting to “First Blood”, and mindfully pay attention to the facial expressions of each as the final scene plays out:

Most end up crying. But not all. One woman looks up, almost as if she is about to roll her eyes. But she doesn’t. She’s clearly keeping busy holding in her own monster, and it’s hard. Dasha, in particular, is very emotional. In empathy, she already sees where this is going. It clearly hurts.

I was shocked at their reaction to the brief glimpse of all the police lights flashing outside. How could they not have seen that coming?

These reactions are priceless. None of them knows what the end scene has for them, and when it’s over, they’re somewhat stunned.

In the book, they don’t know, Trautman shoots Rambo. Call it a mercy killing. Things had gone so wrong that they couldn’t be fixed. Rambo had been triggered, mindlessly obeyed training and rage, and once released, that beast must be exhausted, played out and then caught and killed. His life was over. It was over when he was drafted.

All trauma patients harbor The Beast. All fight their own battles to cope, to survive, to keep their worst hidden, not from others, but from themselves. But triggers can be anything, anywhere. And this week I was triggered and sunk to helpless victim behavior because that’s what I learned so long ago. Victim behavior is, ironically, one of the things that I didn’t even know was holding back my personal beast of rage, vengeance. I would freeze but not fight. Could not run. I just stood there. For years.

I lived by a code. Be kind. Be polite. But kill when given the order to fight. To this day I call people sir or ma’am. To this day I search for honor, a thing I lost or never had. And that sandbag and rock base was such a small part of it all. Exchanging fire with an MG nest, you don’t forget. The sound of bullets tearing through foliage a foot away from you is horrible. You think at least one round will surely get you.

You know, it’s the same feeling as being under my father’s lash gave me. Live? Die? Go mad? Which will it be? But you never think it’s going to be like this.

Not this. So many years of hiding, suffering, shamed by even a spouse if you had a nightmare, shook for no reason, or cried. You’d better not cry. You do that and you’re a pussy.

You can’t laugh. You’re inappropriate. You can’t talk. You’ll piss everyone off. You can’t go out. “Everyone” will surely be watching you and thinking how crazy you are. Your life is gone.

I keep thinking. That time the old man held his .357 magnum against my head. Scared, yes. But not until later did I realize that I wouldn’t have cared what happened either way. The threat of death can only cause so much fear after you’ve already lived with it all your life.

Now I seek peace. Honor. A place I can call home.

But I’m sure that it is not to be. It saddens me. My reaction to what I know from experience to be stalking behavior proves that I am not an honorable man. That I will never find peace or my own place. No, I am not honorable. I am not even a good man. I’m just an asshole. There were better ways to handle it. Those ways I cannot do. It is disgraceful. I am ashamed.

But I will never be able to go shopping again without scanning the cars going by, or the people inside, because I fought being triggered and ignored red flags. Trying to keep the beast trapped. My post about not testing the patient man whom you know to have a violent past stands. Don’t push them. Don’t mistake them as being what they cannot possibly be. Predators make the world hostile for more than their victims: they make their victims to be potential time bombs that endanger others. And if most never act on triggers the way Rambo did, please understand that it can happen. That it does happen.

My advice is that you take these past few posts to heart. Be kind, be careful, be gentle to and with others. You don’t know what battles they are fighting. Pray for them. Get them to trust you and let them talk. You just might be saving lives by showing that you care. Otherwise, please just leave them alone. Never start a war you can’t finish. As for what lessons I’ve learned, I think you know by now.

“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.