Many moments in life have strong feeling tones, which we have long forgotten, but which reside somewhere in our memory. The first time you went to the circus, perhaps; or the first time (and only time, for many) you saw Bambi (does it perhaps say something about our culture that this movie and Old Yeller have largely disappeared, or seem to me to have?). The feeling is very specific, and even if it is similar to other such emotions, calling it say “excitement”, or “sadness” is akin to treating all shades of red and blue the same. This is imprecise, and unhealthy.
Last night I was dreaming I was playing soldier as a child, with imaginary guns. We used to do that, both with our hands as guns, and later toy guns, and pine cones as grenades. There was considerable negotiation and argument as to who shot who first.
As I interacted with that boy this morning, there was an underlying sadness, which I entered into as deeply and as specifically as I could. I entered into “that”. He played at being a soldier because he was afraid. Guns empower you; violence empowers you. At least you are shooting back, versus cowering and waiting to die.
And although all this likely sounds hokey and absurd to people unused to this sort of work, I am “talking” with all these newly discovered parts of me and encouraging them to share their experiences with me, everything, without hesitation.
One of the reasons I infer I was traumatized as a baby is that I will often wake up verbalizing like a baby, just saying nonsense syllables over and over. My operating hypothesis is that I must have been babbling in the night and my mother, who was presumably very tired of waking up to care for me, came in and screamed at me to shut up. The process was interrupted, and I started shaking.
That part is incomplete, unfed. And I think many people have things like this in them: they just don’t take the time and make the effort to do this very difficult work. So this morning I imagined holding that baby in my arms, and telling it is was safe, until it started cooing like a happy baby, and some sounds came out again, which I allowed, while pendulating my head back and forth, which I have read helps in neurological processing. There are many emotional upsets in me, but this is where the shaking comes from. I am sure of that. We will see what happens.
And I will finish this post by referencing the notion of rooms. It has since been eclipsed by many horror films, but back in the day The Shining was quite scary. One of the oppressive things, to me, about the hotel was the many rooms, and you never knew what lay behind each door, what history, what horrors.
I would submit that in large measure our psyches are like hotels, with many rooms, and behind many doors there is a static scene that is lost to conscious awareness. We both have to learn to interact with these scenes with our conscious awareness, and animate them, bring them to life; and to get all the scenes to interact with one another. They are all parts of us. This is how flow throughout the whole self is facilitated.
I suspect Jack Nicholson has many unopened doors.