Cat Got Your Tongue?
Fine Art America | Elizabeth Lucas
SILENCE
Story | Truth
Boundaries | Protection
Scapegoating | Confabulation
REALITY
The Sounds of Silence
Simon & Garfunkle,
arr. Soren Bebe
Fine Art America | Elizabeth Lucas
The Cat has had my tongue for almost thirty nine years.
I let the Cat hold onto my tongue,
thinking that I was protecting my daughter
by not disparaging her father.
In reality, I was a wonderful teacher of ‘protection’.
And, I have awakened to the realization that, over the years, I became a Scapegoat.
No longer am I going to play this role.
I am getting rid of both the Cat and the Goat.
Where is Truth? What is Truth?
How to protect a child from painful truth?
Does silence of hurtful truth create a boundary of protection or destroy trust?
A Story can become Truth, which can give rise to multiple ‘Truths’.
Childhood trauma and memories can create different stories with siblings,
even though in the same family.
And what happens after trauma in the young or the old? Is traumatic memory, conscious and/or unconscious, a form of PTSD with remnants that float
in the brain and undergird thought and action……and life?
These multiple Stories – do they turn into a confabulation as the years provide more information? And where does the information come from?
The ‘informer’ can have his own story, omitting critical events and statements
or adding opinions …a partial Truth.
Does the life Story then become a confabulation?
A confabulation that determines a ‘Truth’ that then governs the life?
The Voice of the Informer vs. The Sound of Silence.
A Reality check is in order.
What REALLY happened?
Confabulation
Why do our brains make things up? ….the narrative that we tell ourselves about our lives.
“Why does the brain, when it is missing information, make things up …the interpretation of your life as a story that sometimes changes retrospectively.
Why, when the brain is faced with missing information, does it just make things up? We tend to think of memory as a recording device that faithfully stores our memories and plays them back on demand. Memory isn’t like a video camera; it’s more like a patchwork quilt, stitched together from fragments of past experiences, and guesses and expectations. When memory fails, from injury or aging, the brain doesn’t always leave a void; sometimes it fills in the blanks with details that are completely false.
That’s what confabulation is.”
David Eagleman, neuroscientist and author
War veterans and PTSD are closely associated. And PTSD enters into the framework of this Story as it evolves.
My son was was born two months after my husband left for VietNam (February 1971). He returned home in November, 1971 and our daughter arrived three years later (December 1974).
Recognition of PTSD entered this Story ten years after our divorce, about 20 years after-the-fact. My son relayed the story of his dad’s first PTSD episode in the car while driving to Sierra Vista ….in the mid 90’s. He waited until a few years before his death in 2019 to seek professional help. The Silence of trauma.
In the late 70’s and early 80’s, PTSD was largely unrecognized.
I’ve often wondered how much of what unfolded during those ten years after VietNam was, in some ways, aftereffects of war? Those early years were marked with challenges that unraveled and destroyed our childhood friendship-turned-marriage and ended in divorce,
The boy I knew in high school and the man I married was not the same person who became the father of my children – an attorney who served divorce papers, and, in his words, “an attempt to shape you up”. What had happened to our head-to-head conversations that we had sitting in his backyard, holding hands and admiring the garden we planted during our college years?
One year after VietNam, our family relocated to Tennessee where my husband attended law school on the GI bill. I ended up in sinus surgery due to a 9-month chronic sinus infection.
The Sinus Surgery Snafu story discusses the origin of my complex, orofacial history and is my impetus for creating this website – the integration of orthodontics/dentistry and orofacial osteopathy.
An anesthetic awareness experience and an intubation injury occurred during this December 1972 sinus surgery and remained unrecognized until 1998. My oral surgeon purposefully triggered the anesthetic trauma in his dental chair with a laryngoscope and subsequently surgically uncovered the extent of the bone injury in my palate during the 1972 sinus surgery; the bone was necrotic, microcirculation having been compromised by four hypercoagulation genes.
Thus, my anesthetic trauma with injury, which is now recognized as placing a patient at risk for PTSD and/or autonomic nervous system dysfunction, remained unrecognized for twenty-six years. Another form of Silence.
What allows someone to change their world view?
What prevents someone to NOT be able to grow and change as life unfolds?
Life experiences lay the foundation in ‘knowing”. Knowing is NOT belief.
Knowing is what we learn not only in our mind but also is a ‘felt’ sense
within our body that innately differentiates ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
Knowing is also enabled by other options offering nothing but failure.
Change is inevitable,
…which is what happened with me because of my health
and the path I found myself taking that produced results when all else had failed.
And our marriage suffered.
This change disrupted trust and support within our family system.
Within five years, the family disintegrated.
My childhood friend, sweetheart and husband
slowly transformed into my adversary.
The lack of support and the anger that grew when I did not follow his demands,
the labeling of my mother, of me and of my daughter,
eventually ended with divorce.
