If you see it, you can never unsee it. You hear it, it’s in your memory bank forever. Unless it’s the phone number to the pediatrician when your kid is running a 102 temp at midnight. But usually, everything you see and hear becomes part of you – good and bad. Kind of a scary, intimidating fact.
Everything you experience while living on this earth is in your brain. And subtly, or not so subtly, it influences how you view life and interact with others. A fact worth remembering when you are looking for a late-night movie to watch.
Maybe at six years old you witnessed a bad wreck unfold in front of you, with bodies flung everywhere. Or, at ten years old you accidentally walked into the path of a strung-out junkie, who thought you were a monstrous purple spider and wanted to stomp you out of existence. Maybe in adulthood your marriage disintegrated and eventually became much like the material of violent movies. Those kinds of memories never totally evaporate. It’s all there inside of your head, influencing you and your behavior.
But at this point in all this blood, guts, and gore, I will toss in a tiny bone.
Some positive possibilities can come with trauma, if that trauma is handled with wisdom and compassion. The six-year-old who saw the terrible wreck, and was wisely given the opportunity to talk about what he saw and how it makes him feel, has a much better chance of dealing with that trauma successfully. Yes, he still saw the horrible accident, but trauma expressed verbally doesn’t have such an opportunity to hide in the closet and terrorize the child for years on end.
And yes, the ten-year-old-purple-monster-spider is likely scared to death of walking alone for a long time. But on the flip side, for the rest of her life she will carry a strong impression of what illicit drug use could do to her brain. A strong deterrent if there ever was one. And with some compassionate counsel, she will be able to walk on.
Like I said earlier, at least a tiny bone.
Remember the little song from being in church as a child, “Oh, be careful little eyes what you see?” Such an innocent little song. Probably makes many of you adults feel absolutely silly even reading a column based on it. But the truth from it can’t be ignored.
What you experience in life, the good and the bad, becomes part of you. Realizing that, you would be really smart to make a strong effort to monitor everything that enters your body through your eyes, your ears, and your brain. Because everything that comes into you through those gateways isn’t always great and wonderful. And even if you wisely seek out help with the traumatic events, they still end up coloring your emotions to a large degree. Then you have to live with the ramifications, until the day you quit breathing.