post 4.1.1.1 Dad's Memories and Seizures

Dad was in counseling and he ended up having seizures.

There is a lot of family history and family story in that.  History is things that happened.  He did use his veteran's benefit to have sessions with what he called a psychiatrist.  I was in fourth grade or younger when it happened, so how it was set up and what the degree of the person counseling him was, I have no idea.

It only came to my awareness when he had to have someone from work pick him up because his license had been taken away.  It was an older man from work that he liked and admired, which was a really rare thing.  To hear him talk, most of the people he worked with were shirking idiots who gave him a hard time.  One guy he disliked enough to call him The Weasel when he talked.  

Story is what importance, what cause and effect people assign to the things that happen.  My Dad had seizures.  That happened.  He had to take two pills several times a day for the rest of his life.  He had to wait until he was seizure free for a year before he got his license back.  And stress did seem to be a trigger, so I fully believe that going to the vet hospital and getting psychiatric care, and digging up a lot of painful childhood memories, triggered his first one and possibly others.

I do not believe that Grandma gave him seizures.  I also don't believe that Mom's nursing training gave her quite as much authority as she always assumed.  She was an LVN from the very beginning of that program.  According to my sister, a person with comparable training these days would be called a nurse's aid.  

Yes, I believe that Grandma and Aunt D visited in the hospital and said he wasn't having anything like seizures while he was having one on the bed.  And I believe that the ones he would have in his sleep were subtle enough that someone else might have missed them.  I'm even willing to believe that they were being willfully ignorant because they didn't want to have to deal with Dad having a seizure problem.  

I also believe that building a house across the street from the mother that he was trying to distance himself from wasn't the best idea that Dad ever had.  But that's hindsight.  He probably hadn't realized that as a new husband and father, he would be distancing himself from his mother, or that she'd be resisting that very natural process.  Maybe he did need to have counseling to realize that she was a little nuts.  

I'm sure that this post had a point in the beginning.  But I'm going to stop now, rather than try to wrap things up.  Partly, the software isn't letting me scroll to the top of the doc easily and partly I want to think about things a little.  

post 4.1.1.0 Counseling and Memories

I've signed up for counseling several times for different reasons. Partway into the second round (at UCD, the counseling center, due to difficulty in completing assignments), it dawned on me that I had more memories of my father's childhood than I did of my own.

That was probably not numerically true. But the stories of his childhood were full of abuse and resentment and if I thought of what was holding me back, what made me feel anxious or why I didn't have much experience interacting with other people, it was the memories of the stories of his childhood that seemed most vibrant and significant. Not only did I experience his childhood injuries by proxy, I learned to discount my own childhood as unimportant in comparison, and the memory of his childhood was what motivated him to keep us sequestered from the world.

Other kids got to wander through the neighborhood, meeting up with friends and going from yard to yard.  We had to stay inside the chain link fence that circled our yard.  On the up side, we were the kids who had a dedicated dirt pile to play in, and it did attract a few of the neighbor kids on a regular basis.  We also had Tonka toys to play in the dirt with, even though we didn't have any brothers.

I'll say more about that later.  This post has touched an old pain and I would rather not define myself by it.  

post 5.1.0.0 Things I got out of Counseling (there's another post of this)

There are three things that I got out of counseling:

1. Always carry a pen.
2. Always wear a watch (superseded by cell phones)
3. Small talk doesn't have to be meaningful.

Post 5.0.0.0 Short Dream While in Counseling

The verbal equivalent of a dog sniffing your butt.

One of  the dreams I had while in counseling was of walking up to people I met on campus* and rubbing shoulders with them - first one shoulder and then the other. With the motion came the awareness that this part of the dream represented the fact that small talk has a meta meaning, which is: you're important enough to talk to.