Where it came from
I’m working on a hypothesis that only recently occurred to me: that the actual howling itself has come from a very early experience, of which I’ll spare you the details but had me screaming the place down for my first four weeks. It got sorted out in the end and of course I don’t remember a thing about it, but there are enough details in the tale for me to believe it’s true.
I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to realise just how traumatic that would have been, but if it’s always there in the background as a part of the self-organising pattern it’s bound to distort whatever’s in the here and now.
So I’m working with a narrative that the original howling morphed soon enough into the ocean of sadness that has never been far away throughout my life, even when everything else has been hunky-dory enough, but has resurfaced with the grief response from Brexit. Grief for an abstraction is easy enough to dismiss, but no less heartfelt as so many of the old certainties are suddenly stripped away.
So it’s worth going with the narrative that Brexit (and the concomitant ‘get over it, that’s democracy’) was not the cause of the howling but it did, as it were, reach down into the depths and poke that trauma back into life.
No need for blame
What’s also promising about this narrative is that with the ontology I’ve picked up from Jeremy Lent, I don’t need to blame anyone for it.
So what’s been happening is that that emotional load, which comes from so far back that my cortex wouldn’t have been doing much so there was no cognition involved, has been the engine for the weepies all along.
Immediately there’s quite a profound liberation – all the hurtful memories that bring back the weepies had less to do with what people said or did, and a lot more to do with this load I didn’t know I was carrying.
They key is finally outside the box.
So, what to do with it?
I’ll put the Indigenous wisdom on hold for the moment. Next stop: a book on the neurobiology of trauma:
Current State
The howling comes from my first month of life
This explains why my emotional responses have been inappropriately intense, from kindergarten to the present day
And with Jeremy Lent’s ontology it takes all the blame away
I now have to work on the brain habits accumulated over seven decades
I think I’ll rename this the Healing Blog now
Watch this space.