I'm not sure if this recounting is as soothing as I'd hoped. The process is not a happy one. I'm aware that the next post may offend people. I really don't care. When clients of certain ethnicities are persistently bad, rude, violent, and aggressively cheap, you learn to avoid them. To avoid them is just common sense. I don't know of any girls that will willingly or knowingly see East Indian clients. Why? They don't want to get hurt.
Remembering something that once made you angry ... makes you angry all over again, just in the process of remembering. This has been abundantly supported in psychological studies (supposedly, at least -- I'm no scientist). Brain-activity measurements of people who are angry are identical, or very similar, to the brain-activity-measurements of people who are "only remembering" having been angry. This is presumably explained by anger being such an extremely powerful and potent survival tool. The good news is that remembered anger does not automatically re-conjure the primary emotions (fear, etc.) that caused the original anger.
ReplyDeleteTwo years ago, I began writing my mother's life-story, using materials that she had assembled for her long-planned autobiography -- before she succumbed to depression and dementia. I worked on this, in doses I could tolerate, for several months before having to stop. I came to feel that I was at risk of being sucked into the vortex of blackness and depression myself. The sadness and anger in my mother's life made me sad and angry; the happy things that had been in her life made me sad and angry at their unjust and irretrievable loss.
The materials for my mother's incomplete life-story now lie in my office like a poisonious snake, waiting for me to be strong enough to dare face them again. I am disgusted and angry at myself for being weak and not doing right by my mother. (Insert the Freudian psychobabble of your choice HERE.)
Based on this experience, I can only imagine how hard it would be for me to honestly write about my OWN life. And I'VE had a pretty innocuous time of it so far, knock on wood. So I think I have a bit of an inkling of how much understatement there may be lurking in your "I'm not sure if this recounting is as soothing as I'd hoped". But what I have, I also suspect, is ONLY the whisp of an inkling.
(signed) Stupor Mario