si dawson

I had a weird dream last night. So, as usual, I tapped on it.

Thing is, I could feel that while it was help­ing, it wasn't really get­ting to the root of the prob­lem. In my dream, I dunno, I was in this weird war zone — kindof. I had a gun, there were peo­ple out to get me — all of them, it seemed. Very odd. When I woke things weren't very clear, so I was strug­gling a bit to con­nect with it.

So, I did what I often do — pulled up a text edi­tor, cleared my mind, and just started typ­ing. What­ever popped in my head I wrote down — par­tic­u­larly the stu­pid stuff. Almost like auto­matic writ­ing, I sup­pose. Med­i­tat­ing around the sub­ject would do the same thing, but this way I have a record.

Here's what popped out:

WHY IS EVERYONE STILL OUT TO GET ME? [nice big header to keep me focussed]

• or hurt me
• or make things dif­fi­cult for me
• or trip me up

And a lit­tle light­bulb came on in my head "trip me up"? WtF? That's.. odd.

Per­haps unsur­pris­ingly, a very spe­cific inci­dent came to mind. When I was 7, run­ning along in school, some ran­dom kid sit­ting next to the path stuck his foot out & tripped me up — just for laughs, I think. I grazed my hands & got a bit upset.

On the scale of things, how big is this, I mean. Really? Get­ting tripped up at school? It's ridicu­lous. I know peo­ple that have been caught in the mid­dle of mass mur­ders. Killed dozens of peo­ple in wars. Been repeat­edly raped for years. That's trauma. Get­ting tripped up? It's so triv­ial it's laughable.

And yet.

I started tap­ping on this, and the pic­ture started to open out.

pic by jeaniepaul

The thing that's impor­tant to remem­ber is this: What's tiny to an adult is gigan­tic to a child. Also, at that age, we have very lit­tle expe­ri­ence & our brains haven't even fin­ished devel­op­ing yet (they don't until our early 20's).

You can pretty much guar­an­tee that we will inter­pret things in a way that is both wrong, and child­ish, to our adult brains. How­ever, we never stop & reassess these sit­u­a­tions. Even as adults, we take these child­ish inter­pre­ta­tions, and they become our truth. Our core beliefs. The basis for our lives.

For me, this innocu­ous sit­u­a­tion left me with the beliefs that:

• I couldn't trust anyone
• Every­one was 'out to get me'

This trust issue is some­thing that's been nig­gling me for years now — and of course caused prob­lems in every rela­tion­ship, inti­mate, busi­ness, or oth­er­wise, that I've ever been in. How­ever, until now, I haven't really been able to see below the surface.

Could it all stem from that one silly inci­dent? Now, there was another kid who tripped me up on my birth­day once (same school, boy oh boy). But those two inci­dents com­bined together? Sure. Definitely.

It's ridicu­lous, look­ing back as an adult, to see such a for­get­table inci­dent caus­ing such long term dam­age, and yet this sort of thing hap­pens all the time.

There is no inci­dent too small. Remem­ber, we were chil­dren then, we saw things in a child­ish way. If we're look­ing to heal our­selves, it's impor­tant to pay par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to the kinds of things that as an adult we now see as triv­ial. If we still remem­ber them, they're still in our con­scious­ness, in our aware­ness. So they're sig­nif­i­cant, no mat­ter how they might look now. In fact, a good rule of thumb is — the sil­lier & more triv­ial it seems, the more impor­tant it really is.

After all, if an event is really that triv­ial, why have we both­ered to remem­ber it all these years?