captaincliff

Lacking the distinct emotional memories a clear chronology or unable to block the intrusive thoughts and anxious feelings in a safe or secure manner (to better understand and process them), the mind is left to interpret stress, trauma and forbidden feelings on its own and may even create substitute fears, irrational phobias, and symbolic “feared objects”. An out of proportion fear of the dark, bogey men under the bed, snakes on the plane, sharks in the shower and the “Beast” in Lord of the Flies comes to mind. Minor and temporary childhood fears are perfectly normal, but ongoing emotional reactivity, physiological arousal, and startle responses in adulthood are not. For a soldier returning home it may only take the sound of a backfiring car or an airplane  flying overhead. One feels immediate anxiety and panic to such triggers and is usually uncomfortable to even begin to think about repressed/ forbidden/forgotten traumatic events in their past.

Embracing all aspects of ourselves and our life experience, a common and noble therapy goal is unfortunately delimited and diminished when there are multiple psychological, emotional, and social/familial roadblocks in the way. Some of those roadblocks we place there ourselves to protect oneself from unwanted emotional pain. Others, however are placed there for us, to protect someone else and their need to avoid pain or take responsibility for causing emotional pain to another. A sense of betrayal by ones superiors or primary caregivers and guilt about betraying ones own cherished beliefs, life principles and personal convictions can lead to a spiritual/moral injury, an especially deep psychic wound at the soul level.

That said i do realize there’s always going to be a push and pull between the inner and outer forces of light and dark, between animalistic desire (lust) and rational (ethical) mind, morality (conscience) and immorality (sin) and even the human ego’s need to remember and need to forget or disregard (or unconscious repress). In fact, the biblical Israelites did it pretty much every time Moses turned around or shlepped up Mt Sinai to get better spiritual cell reception with Yahweh the Supreme God of Israel. The people waved goodbye, wished him well and then immediately forgot and began sinning and fornicating like feral dogs. They also started re-worshipping the earlier idols and deities like Astarte the sexy and plump fertility goddess and Ba’al, the Golden Calf statue. Of course compared to the Roman Empire later on with it’s ubiquitous sex and phallus obsession and general penchant for excess in practically everything, the fledgling Israelites were relatively well behaved.

Basically they (the early Hebrews) acted like I did at age 12 when my parents went away on vacation to Nassau and I “accidentally” cut off part of my sister Julie’s lower lip with a pair of orange scissors from the kitchen. My grandparents were babysitting and my sister was around six years old I think but I kinda forget, ha. I really thought I could do what the macho cowboy guy on Bozo’s Circus did with a leather bullwhip and a young circus lady who was instructed to “stay absolutely still” and hold a long unlit cigarette in her mouth …but I missed, even tho it was pretty damn close….but no cigar. God I felt horrible!! I still do. To be fair (to myself) I really despised cigarettes altogether and once also put an exploding trick pellet in my mother’s pack of Virginia Slims. She (my mom) liked to remind me quite often that it blew up and almost lit her satin and lace negligee on fire.  Let’s look at it this way. Either “when the cats away the mice will play”, “idle hands are the devil’s playground”, or when somebody tells you “dont push the red button” or “be careful this plate is really really hot”….alot of people are going to go crazy pushing that exact bright red button over and over or burn the living shit out of themselves touching the forbidden magma hot item. Dont ask me why. They just do… especially people with ADHD. Either way, I really wish that didn’t happen. Again, there is no do-over for such a thing, and I still regret it.

Any way you cut it (pun intended), the Israelites in their long road to becoming observant Jews and stand-up comedians messed up, screwed around and broke a lot of established rules that God said quite clearly to keep sacred. Moses, like a frustrated overwhelmed single parent with multiple young children with ADHD also lost his cool completely and angrily threw down the sacred stone tablets with the Ten Commandments inscribed on them breaking them into many pieces.  Jesus, if there was EVER a time for industrial strength super-glu, a nearby Home Depot and/or a really good stone-mason with a chisel that can keep a secret, that was it. In a sense that could be conceived of as a monumental spiritual crisis as well as biblical Humpty Dumpty moment. Putting the 10 Commandment pieces back together again was not going to be easy, but let’s keep going.  King David did it too. He coveted, blasphemed and temporarily lost his moral compass and he did it in plain sight of God no less!  At least Adam and Eve knew to try to hide their holy transgressions and even attempted like a first graders to make up a good story, ie. let’s blame it all on the snake, even tho Yahweh was omnipotent, omnipresent and certainly no fool.  Obviously there’s no way King David got holier-than-thou bonus points for messing around with somebody else’s wife and then sending her husband Uriah to his death just to get him out of the cheating picture. I love that old TV show Cheaters. Can you imagine if Joey Greco showed up in a van with video cameras and sound mikes to ambush interview King David while he was shtupping Bathsheba? Something tells me Joey would have ended up without his head and/or with a large round slingshot stone embedded in his forehead, not to mention a pretty awesome viral video on You Tube or Ogrish.com.

Either King David played the golden lyre like BB King, Jimmy Hendrix and Jimmy Page combined (to please his God) sang like Pavarotti, and composed songs like Bob Dylan and Irving Berlin or there’s something else involved here that is incomprehensible to most mortal men and women of today. Bottomline: people go astray, lose their way, and break fundamental rules and societal laws, including some of the basic moral principles and religious commandments that God, Allah, Jesus Christ, Buddha, the Boss, and Big Daddy in the Sky all would agree are vitally important. Yet, these same imperfect people also can and often do eventually find their way back to personal redemption, forgiveness and God, as in their “higher power”.

Payoff Pitch:  I believe the most important psychological point is the following: what makes or breaks human beings is whether they transgress against and/or fail to live up to the very things that THEY themselves believe in and see as crucial elements and critical aspects of their personal moral code of conduct and core beliefs. The Chosen people may or may not have been actually chosen by God but they at the very least had to choose themselves whether to go along for the much longer than expected Exodus from Egypt (like give or take forty years) There’s really nothing like a 40 year shlep in the desert to clear out the old cobwebs and superfluous clutter in ones head. Since that time Jews have chosen to be observant (or not) and what exactly to embrace as their core values, spiritual beliefs and religious practices. Hooked up to a lie detector, I would assume many Jewish people today vary a great deal in their individual definition and belief about what constitutes a sin, a moral transgression, reincarnation, God, and even what (if any) religious belief or holy commandment is perceived as most important to uphold. The point is that a person’s central values in life and spiritual beliefs are highly individual, self defined and unlikely to be confined to some nation building document like the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights. Nor are these internalized beliefs and core values necessarily the same ones espoused by an organized religion, a political party or a college fraternity. Instead they represent the structural supports and weight bearing walls of ones personal identity and “sense of self”. You can knock out a window of a house or even a minor wall or two, but you cant mess with the basic foundation, and especially critical points in the overall structural design or what civil and structural engineers call it’s structural “integrity”. The results of doing so are…well, either catastrophic or “corrosive” to the building’s sustained strength and stability or in this case a person’s longterm emotional well-being, sanity and health (mental,physical and spiritual). Again, I’m referring to someone’s deepest personal beliefs and most central values, their SELF-DEFINED inner sanctum, their internalized Holy of Holies, their personal Ark of the Covenant that all together helps to give a person’s life necessary meaning and positive purpose. Even dyed in the wool atheists, secular humanists, Wikkans and cultish worshippers of Christopher Hitchens or Carl Sagan have deep convictions and core values. This goes back to a previous discussion and blog I posted about “moral injury” and what makes somebody (often a person with PTSD) become suicidal or just not want to live after going through extraordinary hellish experiences such as surviving military combat, suffering physical and sexual abuse as a child, being sent to a Russian gulag or a Nazi concentration camp. Said another way, what makes some people’s body and soul shrivel up over time and their zest for life wane under terrible unrelenting stress while others remain exuberantly alive even if they have been kept in solitary confinement and have three times the normal cholesterol level for their height and weight. The riveting and popular cable show, “I Shouldn’t Be Alive” is counter-posed with it’s unpopular mirror opposite, “I Wish I Were Dead”. Of course that show doesn’t exist because nobody wants to pay to sponsor or produce the latter and there are no companies or corporate entities that would want to advertise their products on such a program. Hollywood executives would no doubt agree considering it to be, “Way too much of a downer and too boring to market commercially”.

This is also possibly why the so called emotionally “sensitive” and empathic people in society often appear to suffer the most and are afflicted more often with depression and anxiety and, in reverse, why bloggers are now writing absurd but intriguing articles like,”What We Can Learn From Psychopaths”. Because true psychopaths feel no guilt, regret or remorse, and because they operate pretty much 24/7 by their own selfish gene and self centered  “code of conduct” (which basically means, “the person that matters the most is ME”) they generally proceed in life in accordance with their own warped principles, just like Dexter, the charismatic serial killer does on TV. MY kids love that show. Psychopaths are pretty much the opposite of  guilt-prone, highly emotional, sensitive and empathic people. I would guess the majority of people operate in the middle somewhere. The psychopaths wearing spiffy Nazi SS uniforms in war and the sociopaths in society who commit unspeakable crimes like murder, rape, torture and serial killing pretty much believe they “had” to do what they did’and they dont feel bad about it.

So going back to my favorite person, me (not really, I’m actually a closet masochist) what are my deeply held beliefs, core convictions, and what are the structural supports of my personal code and/or my spirituality? What are yours? Notice I never said religion once because a religion is a different thing even tho for many people some of what Im talking about might overlap. We only have a finite number of what Joseph Campbell called “creation myths and mythologies” to believe in and give our relatively short lives psychological, cosmological and existential order and meaning.  The same is true of our central notions about “existence” (our own purpose for living). Victor Frankl, a concentration camp survivor himself also was keenly aware of this in his seminal book, Mans Search For Meaning and in his humanistically derived logotherapy.  If I remember correctly it was all about human will, choice and especially personal MEANING.  I think I’m saying that alot of things can suck on your soul, your life energy, your Chi, your passionate emotional nature, your creativity, etc. but that the most harmful moral injury is when one believes they have commited serious violations to their personal logos, and to their very core beliefs they carry in their heart about human existence and about ones life and its fundamental purpose. Purpose goes even farther when one is asked to define their individual reasons for being alive.

Most people will just think I am asking if they are “gainfully employed” at a job that uses their specific talents and “God given” abilities, and Im sure NOT doing so can lead to depression and lower self-esteem.  But most former professional athletes (and professional soldiers who survive combat) dont kill themselves, just certain ones do. As usual we are now chasing down the medical model rabbit hole to see if their brain injuries and repeated concussions are a primary reason, and again, it might well be a contributing factor. But the much better question, now supported by some clinical findings and research is……..did the one who killed themselves also come back home and carry (or develop over time) inordinate guilt, shame, anger, grief, and a general sense of having let God Almighty down, as well as their fellow soldiers, teammates, squad, platoon, family, etc.and were they more often the kind of person that was highly sensitive to that kind of “perceived failure” and moral injury? As an example, if a trained professional soldier deeply believes that all children are innocents in war and to be protected, did they see, witness or participate in the wounding, maiming or killing of children during their deployment?  Of course people who are severely depressed, authors who have serious writer block, poets who’s husbands cheat on them (can you say Sylvia Plath) are at a higher risk for suicide too, but Im referring to a kind of typically NON-IMPULSIVE, progressively building process of losing ones faith, meaning, life purpose and also having internalized strong negative feelings that they had broken some extremely important personal code and fundamental life-affirming principles/beliefs. Moreover, do they feel that there is no way, no ritual, no therapy to recover, to fix it, to make amends, to correct it, to take it back or maybe more to the point, “clease the stain on their soul”.

So eventually I will tell you how this idea came to mind when I was fumbling with a few old pictures of my biological father Lawrence, including his by now faded wedding picture with my mother, his sister Bernice, my cousin Donna and my aunt Bobby. In terms of forgetting and failing to remember and commemorate pivotal losses, I’m thinking there is also a stain on the soul of certain families too, and the question is how do they live with it? I suppose in the end, and after all the intellectualizing is done, it all comes down to forgiveness and loving oneself as is. Once that occurs, a person can eventually regain their self-regard, their will to live, and their respective place in the human race…..an evolutionary process that is as much spiritual, personal and psychological as it is anthropological, cultural and collective. Talk about a Lion King moment….

Finally, it is wholly legitimate to question ones dependence on a certain sleep medication like Ambien (Zolpedim) especially when attempts to goggle the manufacturer (Sanofi) return obscure and somewhat suspicious web sites that appear constructed by international PR firms to exude openness and transparency while simultaneously hiding relevant corporate data, exact locations, updated drug warnings and actual contact numbers. It’s not that web sites for pharmaceutical companies dont exist. It’s just they’re nearly impossible to figure out (due to multiple hostile corporate takeovers and repeated name changes) just who’s in charge of what. One starts to feel like Michael Moore without the baseball cap, sweaty morbidly obese body and permanently disheveled appearance trying to figure out who runs a mega enormous “French multi-national pharmaceutical maker and global healthcare provider” and more importantly, who’s front door to knock on or break down if you need to execute a Jason Statham style “I havent slept in a week. We need to talk” intervention.

Maybe I shouldn’t worry so much about it. The new FDA warning story only came out yesterday, but I already have had about 3452698 friends and acquaintances find it important enough to text me, call me and tell me in person. Maybe I’ll go to Costco and stock up on a pallet of chamomile tea and a triple pack of Valerian root. I beg you my dear friends and readers to please not tell me to drink decaf coffee in the morning. I might still get that job interview at the nuclear missile silo and I need to stay frosty.