Franklin Taggart's Unconventional Life Blog

Trauma. The relationship ends, the baby dies, the firing happens, the illness takes over, the collectors call, the accidents happen, the abuse, crime, and calamity all take their toll. The nervous system goes into hyper-protective mode, senses heighten, adrenaline courses through the body, focus narrows, and for the time being, my defenses are up. Strangely enough, the pain doesn't arrive until later. When the dust has settled, and I'm left alone to process what has happened, then the pain comes. My mind is flooded with thinking - thinking about the loss, thinking about an unknown future, thinking about who's to blame, thinking about revenge, thinking about how I can manipulate the Universe, thinking about putting a gun to my own head. All this thinking keeps the pain alive, and feeds it. Behavior becomes impulsive. I yell at my kid, I curse at my wife, I become self righteous, I power up, I justify my actions because I'm in pain. My compulsions ultimately become futile...

In conflict, I take on one of three roles: Victim, Rescuer, or Persecutor. In Victim mode, I fixate on the injustice, the wrongdoing, the trigger; pointing my finger at the persecutor, avoiding responsibility for the emotional state that my own fixation is creating. In Rescuer mode, I step in to  help, overstepping my boundaries, and taking on responsibility for feelings that aren't mine, trying to fix. In Persecutor mode, I shift into anger; blaming, raging, powering up; heaping shame and contempt upon the Victim. As the drama unfolds, I dance from role to role, and as I dance the conflict grows, the pain that I'm attempting to avoid grows, and the elephant in my room shits all over the floor. All of it, every role, all the pain, all the drama are products of my own perceptions. They don't exist in an objective reality. They are purely constructs of my own mind. As long as I'm in the drama, there is no relief. Like the old movie War Games, where the hacker and the comp...