Random Thoughts From Childhood Series-System Malfunction
July 31, 2009
SYSTEM MALFUNCTION
Mat's Memories From Childhood
When I entered Ivy House I felt guilt, fear, anger, loneliness, and emptiness. Not only did I feel abandoned, but I acquired distrust for adults. As a young child viewing everything as very black and white, it was always adults that caused me pain during this time of my life. It was adults that got divorced (my parents), an adult that abused me (mom’s boyfriend), adults removed me from my family, adults placed me in Ivy House, and adults sent me to school which was run by more adults.
To compensate in dealing with these new flush of emotions, my body would react in two distinct ways. These responses were completely involuntary. With my body already saturated with multiple emotions, ( some I had never experienced before), any additional inflow would result in a complete crash. When I had an outburst, it worked something like this. More emotions would flood an already saturated body creating a caustic cocktail. My fail safe, I’ll call it my internal circuit breaker, was to trip which would keep my emotions from overwhelming me. It would instead malfunction and not trip. This would cause my emotions to overwhelm my system resulting in one of my uncontrolled outbursts. However, when dealing with adults something a little different happened. When confronted by an adult or meeting with an adult about my behavior, my emotions would come to a trickle and my circuit breaker would trip, which put my body in a kind of lock down mode. My vocabulary would plummet to about six words; no, yes, I don’t know, and ‘cause. On top of that, a protective barrier would encase me. This turned me into Fort Knox! No adult could touch me! I’ll dub this the “Terminator Syndrome.” With no emotions, how could I get hurt? I usually sat in silence and used a combination of my six words and a shrug to respond to adult questions.
These involuntary responses made me appear crazy and out of control to the outside world. They were not the responses I wanted to project, basically an uncontrollable melt down kept taking over my body. I was screaming inside to get out, but was paralyzed by my body’s response to a perceived danger of the outside world. That in turn, made me at times unable to control my emotions and/or actions. While the outside world was trying to help me and banging to get in, I was inside banging to get out! Only time and persistence from me and the outside world was going to crack this safe…..
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