I did some work on the workshop I'm setting up for the tutors in the Step Up Tutoring program. Terror consumes me as I think of someone attacking me or my ideas. It makes me tongue-tied, even as I practice it.
People say, "Just don't care what other people think." I keep saying, "I don't care what they think. I care about what they are going to do to me." I realized yesterday, or realized more clearly, what it is I'm afraid of. No, it's not the opinion of others. It's not even their behavior; it's the fear their behavior triggers in me.
I suffer from PTSD. Mike used to say he saw me as someone who had been tortured. That's what it felt like. My dad trained me to always challenge anyone's opinion. He was a follower of the Socratic method. Recently, I opened up Plato's Dialogues. OMG! There was my youth. Everything I said was followed by a challenging question. I slammed that book shut. I'm not saying Socrates deserved his death sentence, but I will say treating a child that way is a form of cruelty.
While I could feel my father's delight with the ideas I generated, I never got explicit praise for them. He never said that's good. Instead, when I came up with a good idea all below the age of fifteen, he died that year, he would sigh and say, "oh, Buddha came up with that," "Christ came up with that." etc. I was competing with some of the great philosophical minds and coming up short—what a surprise.
Here's the problem. While my dad encouraged challenging everyone's ideas regardless of what they were, turning me into a walking talking iconoclast, my mother was a soul that couldn't stand any contradiction. If she said it would rain, and I asked why she thought so or pointed out the sky was blue, she would attack.
I learned only shortly before she died that she considered any contradiction to her opinion an act of disrespect; she saw me as putting her down. We were watching TV together. She commented that an actress was very beautiful. I had just thought a minute before that I thought she was rather unattractive. I said," That's interesting. I don't think so." My mom said, "What do you always have to put me down?" Huh? Given my dad's training, it would never have occurred to me that just having a different point of view is a way of putting someone down. It's not like I said; your opinion is worthless. I thought the moment was a great opening for us to discuss our differences and better understand each other. You would have had an easier time convincing me my mom was from Mars than convincing me of her real position when I was a kid. It was hard to understand when she did say it, and I was in my late fifties or early sixties.
That last comment was said calmly; it was just her truth. It was a surprise; I was saddened, but I wasn't retraumatized. When I was young, she would go into full verbal attack mode. I know now that she was terrified, in panic mode. The energy she put out was horrific. Her words were devastating. She told me that I was stupid, crazy, mentally deficient one way or another, a bad person, and her favorite, Nobody. Her words were hard to take, but the energy behind the attacks is the source of my trauma. I was always surprised by her attacks. I didn't get what was going on. How can someone as bright and as observant as I was not get what was going on? I have no idea.
I did get two boxes of books packed up for shipping. I will not be going to the post office until after the fifteenth. That's the final date the post office says they can guarantee the arrival of a package in time for Christmas. I made the mistake of getting on one of those Christmas lines once. No, I'll wait until after the fifteenth.
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