Dear Ben:

About writing and honesty: writing is my most comfortable form of communication too, we have this in common. “I don’t understand why, but some people have considered this to be less honest or less forthright than verbal communication”- writing, and more so, typing a document before submitting it online or printing it into paper, affords the person who is typing (1) the time and opportunity to reconsider, erase and edit, and the final message submitted or printed does not include the pre-erased and pre-edited versions, (2) the freedom from caring about one’s own facial expressions and quality of voice.

When you speak to a person, once you say what you say.. you can’t unsay it, and if in-person, your facial expressions can communicate what your words do not.  But the opportunity to reconsider, erase and edit does not indicate dishonesty unless the purpose of the writer is indeed to deceive. When typing, I am calmer than when speaking, and this calm allows me to be more in touch with my emotions and therefore, to be more honest, not less.

About heroes and combat: in your June 4 posts elsewhere, you wrote: “I also suffer from PTSD… it is ever-present and ever-painful. It’s an infection which has spread into every minute of every day.. .I haven’t been shot at, haven’t witnessed atrocities. I’m a veteran and I was taught about PTSD in that context- that it happens to heroes in combat. I haven’t ‘earned’ that label”-

Maybe you did earn the label Hero for surviving the emptiness and loneliness of your childhood, for winning a years-long combat with Nothingness. Maybe it is an atrocity for a child to not have that Something a child needs so desperately: a feeling and experience of togetherness, of belonging to a group of people (parents, siblings) who get to know and value each other, engaging in meaningful conversations and activities together.

“My dad lived with us until I was 14. I don’t know what he did for a living… he just never talked about anything of substance.. fell asleep in his chair most nights. Mom would do mean things to him to make him stop snoring while we watched TV… he moved away, after the divorce… Neither of us tried to contact the other.. I never hated him- I just didn’t know him… My mother is a religious fundamentalist… I wouldn’t mind just disappearing from her life.. It hurts to be seen as ‘sinful’… she lives in a reality that is different from mine”-

Lots of Emptiness and Loneliness for the child in this home of origin. Our childhood years are referred to as our Formative Years. When growing up in an empty and lonely home, the emptiness and loneliness becomes part of us as adults.

“Dad was present but absence”, “he looked like a bum to me. He was missing teeth, was small and unhealthy. Bald on top with a fringe of long hair. I guess I was ashamed of him…”Mom is passive-aggressive and weird”, “Maybe I’m ashamed of her, too”-

A young child needs to view his parents as gods: all powerful, all knowing, all loving (the concept of god was created in people’s minds so to substitute for the parents they didn’t have as children). When one’s parents are too far removed from what a child needs them to be, the child is scared: no one to protect him and, no one to know him, no one to love him.

“I don’t know how to tell whether it is them or my perception of them that is broken. That’s the scary part. That’s where I start to question what’s real and to doubt myself”-a young child never misperceives  his parents because a young child does not have pre-existing experience with other people, previous relationships that can distort his view of his parents. A young child is a clean slate, his parents are the first people in his life: he perceives them with remarkable accuracy.

anita