Bubble Beneath the Sea

Posted on February 3, 2006 in Adolescence PTSD Rage & Annoyance

I’m still not feeling safe about talking about my personal PTSD experiences after yesterday’s clashes. The evangelism mistake isn’t unique to those who jumped on me: I’ve done it myself. This wasn’t my own invention. The repetitive tongue-lashings that I received as a growing person were the school where I learned the craft of overreaction.

Once, as a Boy Scout, my Eagle-Scout-I-Can-Do-No-Wrong brother dropped me off at a scout meeting. As I walked in the door, a deaf kid playfully hit me a few times. I ignored it: his blows weren’t all that hard. When I got home, I found that my brother had reported this to my mother. The two of them assailed me for “not having stood up for myself”: in other words, I should have pounded the other kid into submission. They were angry. They called me a wimp. I reminded these two Catholics of the Golden Rule and of the call not to be violent. My brother used his favorite word to describe me at the time: sanctimonious.

What a quandary they put me in! On one hand, I was supposed to bash this guy. On the other, I understood the greater consequence of violence. I had no desire to end up suspended from the troop, placed in juvenile hall, or left with the memory of a bloody nose or worse on another person’s face. Here was my own family pushing me in that direction. Only my father — the stick-bearer — said I did the right thing.

I’ve only described one of the worst double-binds. They said they did it because they cared about me. I don’t believe it. I believe they did it because they felt I was an embarassment.

Seeing that I come out of this, you can begin to understand the pattern of passivity followed by rage that I exhibit when people begin to nitpick. I don’t like going from 0 to 60 in 60 seconds any more than other people like the sudden “surprise” when I finally react. Slowly I am learning to understand how this happens, how asserting myself at an early point in the interaction saves me woe.

Remembering incidents such as the cold-hearted Boy Scout conflagration causes me to pump up invisible inflateable dolls of my family. Sometimes I physically punch or claw at the empty air. It’s a wonder that I have never hit anyone in the intervening years, most of all any of them. So I can give myself credit: I’ve never practiced elder abuse and I have never taken my frustrations out on the bodies of other people, especially my wife.

I merely explode, shout, scream, walk out. I imagine myself inside a bubble at the bottom of the sea, the pressure increasing, diminishing the size of my shelter. I have two choices: either make myself smaller and wait for the water to invade my nose, my ears, my mouth. Or break the walls of the bubble at the start, get the murder of the brine over. In the most overwhelming of these states I want to die.

The trick, I find, is to escape the metaphor. To not be in that bubble at the bottom of the sea, to cut off confrontations before they start. To make my boundaries distinct and to enforce reasonable consequences. To not let anyone drive me out with their nitpicking, mockeries and derisions. To know that I have a right to respect. Stendhal quotes Casti in The Red and the Black: “The right to hold one’s head up all year is dearly bought by certain quarters of an hour which must be endured.”

I know how “dearly bought” dignity is. Every time I lose it, I lose my sense of safety. I see people disappear. I ask “Why are they afraid? Don’t they know that I mean them no harm?” There’s a projection in that: you see in childhood, I lost all ability to act in the face of attack. And with that came a numbness, a loss of the ability to recognize when I was under attack. So I delay confronting or ignoring the abrasive behavior of others. Until I have nothing else to do but fight or drown in the bubble beneath the sea.

Writing this I wonder if others have any idea what I’m going on about. I believe however that there are others who do. One of the worst parts — if not the worst — is the loneliness. My family did a nice job of isolating me, of making me feel the freak. It’s taken everything to undo their foul, mean-spirited instruction.

Like these others, I don’t want to hear how strong I am. I want to hear that I can feel unassailed. I’m overdue for safe places.