I've said it before but I'll say it again. I think a respectable proportion of all of you will react to my "revelations" with groans and "Is that all?" First, what I'm going to say may well have been apparent to you when reading prior posts of mine. It wasn't apparent to me. Second, I'm sure many of you have gone through similar realizations yourselves, quite possibly at much, much earlier ages than I am now.

But to me the "astoundingness" of what I've discovered is centered not in the reality of the underlying fact, but in the psychological deformations (and life deformations) caused by repressing the underlying fact. Of course, I've known about the psychological phenomenon of repression since I was a teenager. In an intellectual way. Yet I had no idea at all of the sheer psychological power of repression and what it really feels like to have your life, and your mind, and your feelings bent entirely out of shape as the result of serious repression. And, of course, the more basic the repression the more it has huge consequences for every part of your life and self.

This is a first for me. So don't razz me as if I should have figured this out a long time ago.

Okay. For several months now, T and I have been piecing together the life story of my mother, bit by bit, stone by stone, with as much detail and nuance as possible. Friday morning, I arrived with the last serious load of facts and guesses. I shared them with T. The edifice was complete. Not only a lot of what I had gone through as a baby, but a psychological portrait and explanation of my mother. I sat there.

T looked at me and I looked at her. I raised my eyebrows at her. She looked at me and said "you first." And after being silent for a while I said "Mom didn't love me. She didn't even like me, or any of us." She had babies because that's what women were supposed to do. And we all had to put on a big show of a warm and loving family, which, of course, was entirely untrue. And this went on until her death at 86, during which time her husband died prematurely (because of her, says T), Peter went on heroin and stayed there, Don became an entirely unreprentant drunk, and Gil simply left the family and stayed away. Me, I had no substance problems (other than carbohydrates) but I lived in a far-away place in my head, from which I'd visit earth now and then.

T says that when I was a pre-verbal baby and wanted and needed all those usual connections with mother that are summed up in the word "love," she was spaced out herself. Not on drugs or anything. Her situation as a baby herself had taught her to dissociate in any circumstance where intimacy was required. All kinds of bad consequences ensued, which we'll be untangling for months, I suppose. But there's no doubt, to me at least, that it was this original problem-creating matrix that essentially formed me for life, including adult life. You don't know me as I am and always have been IRL. The persona I present here on PC is open and interactive and reactive. My real self is reserved, withdrawn, silent, without friends, always seeking to minimize (or avoid wherever possible) all human contact. I have never in my life shared things with others in the manner in which I do so here.

Well, what happened to me has happened, I'm sure, to many others. Both in terms of having been unloved children and in terms of repressing important things in a manner that completely distorts the personality and can ruin adult life. I wish there was something we could do to diminish the future risk that similar things will happen to innocent babies. PC is essentially an aftermarket repair shop. There ought to be a way to manufacture the product with fewer built-in glitches. Take care!