On Pain by Inadvertence

You know I read a lot of case histories of abuse, sexual and otherwise and other terrible events visited by parents on helpless children.  But I was thinking that in my case and in many others the pain wasn’t overt and obvious.  It was the subtext.  Let me explain:

     As you know we all have needs that change as we grow up and evolve.  And parents, when caring and loving, fulfill those needs.  Natural and normal.   But suppose they don’t.  Then you grow up unfulfilled, but you don’t know it since you never had your needs fulfilled in the past.  You don’t know you should be hugged and adored.  You don’t know that you should be cherished and protected.  You don’t know that you should be talked to kindly with care and asked about your feelings.  So what happens?  Since you don’t know that should be the end of it.  Ahh, not so, because the body knows better than our conscious/awareness; it registers pain and it stays and drives us even though we never know it is there.  Isn’t that amazing?  So you cannot get on with your life.  I never knew there were needs that had to be fulfilled until decades later when I felt them; either that, by some accident, someone fulfills a need or two: a stray hug or pat on the head, and are suddenly aware that something is amiss. 

      I have already accounted how I went to a friend’s house when I was twelve and their mother was in the kitchen, leaning against a butcher block discussing life with them. I ran home and told what I had seen at dinner.  My dad yelled at me and I never knew why; it was a rebuke against them that I wasn’t aware of.   

   Then two years later I was walking out of a café and it was a circular glass affair where a mother and her young daughter were going in.   I
 heard her say, “You know people are not perfect , and you have to learn to accept other humans sometimes with their flaws. “   Five or ten seconds, at the most. That’s it.  But I never forgot those words, nor the faces of  those two people.  Why? Because I never knew parents could talk to their kids. It was an epiphanic moment, not conceptualized as yet but it had a great impact. Later, I realized it was pain by inadvertence.  It was not what my parents did, but what they did not do.   It was missing and that is why I never knew about it; until I saw it and learned something that stayed with me.   And what they did not do left my needs unconscious; in the oubliette.  Yet, I was a mess, could not learn, could not sit still or concentrate.  I was driven by unfulfilled needs; i.e., pain.  This was a pain that no one could see, yet I was sent to doctor after doctor for a constant running nose (my tears found another route).   You cannot deceive those needs nor forget them because the body won’t let you.   The title of my next book ought to be “death by inadvertence.”   This is not a joke because those needs we don’t know about are killing us; they give us heart attacks far too early and also cancer.   You see, it happens because the needs not fulfilled are pain and that calls into being repression.  It is that repression pushing back feelings that will kill us.  And all that goes on without our knowing it. 

Those are the needs we are never aware of.  We have to read books about  “attachment theory” to get a hint about it.  Imagine, we need to read a book and theory about holding your child, looking at her in the eye with love and talking to her a lot.  It is like reading a book about the tribes along the Amazon.  It is so alien. 

  You do not get over those needs and “get on with life.”  They cut short your life so you cannot get on with it; oh yes, for a while you can but you can’t fool mother nature and she will get you while you are not looking.