My Story, Part I - Lonely in Childhood, Adrift in Adulthood
MY MENPATHIC JOURNEY FROM LONELY VICTIM TO SUPERHERO. PART 1 OF 3
At home, as the only HSP, I was the observer in the family; As such I never felt understood or valued. That’s me on the far right.
It’s taken me several decades and numerous experiences to finally feel at peace with the world. This is the first of three parts of my MenPathic Journey.
Feeling Out of Place Everywhere
Sound familiar?
I’ll bet most of you reading this can identify with this statement. It didn’t matter if I was with my friends, at school…which was never the best experience…working meaningless jobs, or even later in life as a university-level lecturer and administrator… I’d never felt comfortable.
My Early Years
My earliest memories are mostly happy. As the middle of three children growing up in the ‘60s and coming of age in the ‘70s, what did I know about unhappiness? I had a roof over my head, clothes on my body, and food on the table every night.
Mine isn’t a story of growing up in poverty; my parents owned every home we lived in. My father was a high school graduate, the first in his family, and a self-taught and US Air Force-educated electronics engineer who became an accomplished mathematician, painter, a great dad, a loyal husband, and a solid provider.
The pinnacle of his career was working at Mission Control in NASA’s spacecraft center and later at Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories in California.
My mother was also a high school graduate. She worked outside the home for a brief period when I was in high school, in a part-time position cutting fabric one afternoon per week in a local sewing store. My sister worked there full-time following high school while she attended a community college.
My mother represents the origin story of my empath and HSP traits, which I would later coin as a MenPath. However, my neurochemistry was unique from birth; as Dr. Elaine Aron argues in her book, The Highly Sensitive Person: How To Thrive When the World Overwhelms You, when early caregivers are distracted by their own needs, have a perceived lack of resources, or some other issue that might interfere with their ability to make their newborn and/or growing child a chief concern. As a result, the child may develop a heightened need to pause and evaluate when confronting perceived threats. If the infant/child feels that his needs might not always be met, there is a good chance he will learn to be cautious and afraid.
I was never hungry or without love. However, much later in life, I realized that a definite pattern developed during my childhood, further evidence that my mother was unable to cope with the stresses of raising three children.
Something wasn’t normal
Throughout my childhood, my mother averaged three hospitalizations per year—which my siblings and I thought was normal because it was our only reality. Didn’t every mom become ill and have to be hospitalized? These serial hospitalizations were consistently associated with a vacation-like existence for us kids because my dad would be forced to shop for groceries, a responsibility that was maternal in the 60s, and would buy us all kinds of treats my mother wouldn’t have approved of us having.
The sugary breakfast cereal “Froot Loops” was the forbidden froot in our house, but when Mom was in the hospital, our consumption of such taboo items (and likely the resulting sugar highs) skyrocketed. Another treat that started as a hospitalization-associated benefit was chocolate milk made from powdered Nestle’s Quik, whose marketing messages convinced me that rabbits also liked chocolate milk. It later became a staple in our pantry.
For me, there was an inherent inner conflict occurring during her hospitalizations; I missed her, but I also enjoyed the reprieve from her overly critical micro-management of my every move.
It wasn’t until I was 12 years old that I realized that my mother’s hospitalizations weren’t the norm. I was deeply embarrassed when I learned that other moms had never been in a hospital except to give birth. That was when I figured out that my heretofore nuclear family life was vastly different from that of 95 percent of my friends.
The realization that my mother’s most dominant personality trait, one that proved to be my Kryptonite, as well as her overall frailty in both mental and physical health, occurred after we moved to California in 1970. Shortly before we moved she contracted meningitis that imparted what was to be a life-long seizure disorder that included violent shaking fits (tonic-clonic, grand mal seizures) that occurred without warning. Though almost perfectly managed now for decades, those early episodes were to become not only my most vivid and most frightening childhood memories but frequently used by her as a manipulative threat to govern our bad behavior.
“You’d better behave or I’ll have seizures tonight,” she’d say to my brother and me when we were becoming close to surpassing her ability to cope with our behavior. The threat was enough to stop me in my tracks…and she knew it. I feared the terrifying sight of another grand mal seizure, the foaming at the mouth, as well as seeing her eyes roll up in her head.
Like most children who experience manipulation by similar threats, I assumed personal responsibility for her seizures. They were my fault. She’d said as much. End of story.
This narrative is not about outing my mother as a narcissist, as I long ago forgave her my ill-treatment and as later directed at those I cared about. I describe it here to demonstrate how an incapacitated parent can unwittingly influence the development and reinforcement of HSP traits and behaviors in children as old as 10-12 years of age.
Anxiety ruled my life
As an infant, I was diagnosed as having colic, a frequent, prolonged, and intense crying or fussiness in a healthy infant, further evidence of my HSP status very early in life. I was the middle child of three and the early riser of the bunch. I was always the only one to stay awake during long car trips; I was the sensitive one with all the allergies to fresh fruit, nuts, and other foods. I had all the hallmarks of the HSP child. Still, it went unnoticed and undiagnosed chiefly because, during the decades of my childhood and adolescence, the psycho-medical consciousness of such a trait was non-existent.
As a young boy, I developed several nervous tics, batting my eyes and wrinkling my nose like a rabbit, as well as making brief grunting noises. My parents thought I was mentally ill, so they took me to the family doctor. At eight years of age, I was hospitalized for a case of nerves and underwent all sorts of diagnostic tests that no otherwise healthy boy of eight should undergo. At the end of my hospital 10-day stay, there was a loose diagnosis of some stress-related disorder.
However, this was around 1965, and I wasn’t referred to a psychiatrist or a behavioral therapist of any kind —neither was I medicated. I think our family physician knew that I was reacting to my mother since she was also his patient at the time and for whom he routinely prescribed Valium, the hip tranquilizer drug of choice for housewives in the 60s. The nervous tics lasted well into my twenties and drove me crazy. Even as a young adult, watching me on a videotape at a friend’s wedding blinking and twitching was excruciating.
I wanted more than anything to stop these nervous tics and would pray that whatever god was listening would intervene and rid me of this need I felt to twitch and blink. Unfortunately, no divine deliverance was forthcoming. They remained a part of me until my mid-thirties and then gradually disappeared.
Oddly enough, they disappeared after I severed most of my emotional ties with my mother.
No divine help from above
This brings me to the topic of religion. I said that I prayed for the tics to be taken away and that I hoped some god—an old man with a long white beard in my child’s mind—would deliver me from their daily torture. I grew up inside of the fire and brimstone preaching I heard from the ultraconservative Southern Baptist church we attended in Texas.
If I was already afraid of most things in life and easily manipulated both at home and at school, the church was the perfect setting for those who wanted to use fear further—particularly the threat of hell—to affect changes in my behavior. I was convinced I was going to hell because I was told precisely that every single Sunday morning and Wednesday evening.
I’d have bet my $0.50 weekly allowance that no one in heaven had nervous tics. No, I was going to hell, and that was that.
My dad’s faith seemed real to me later in life when, as an adult, I could objectively observe my parents. My mother’s faith always seemed superficial… maybe because her narcissistic personality prevented her from critical thinking or having a context for religion that didn’t involve her at the center. After all, the focus of the entire church construct was directed outward and upward. In brief, it wasn’t about her, and narcissists need everything to be about themselves.
5th grade with the worst teacher in the world
School was always difficult for me as I preferred to be an observer instead of a learner. I didn't have a learning disability; I just found most of the topics uninteresting. I was more interested and distracted by the expressions on the faces of my fellow students and the details of my teachers’ physical appearance than I was in Texas history and learning my multiplication tables.
This is one of the hallmarks of an HSP - we tend to focus on the minutiae.
By the time I reached the fifth grade, my elementary school experience had reached a crucible regarding my grades and my motivation to learn what was being taught. However, what occurred in the 5th grade impacted me significantly for decades.
My teacher/torturer, Mrs. Frazier, was one of those rare teachers who picked on students she didn't like. She liked to bully boys in particular. Lucky me, right? As the fearful, nervous kid in the front row, continually batting his eyes, I was an easy target.
She was known for her frequent referral of students to the Principal’s office for physical spankings (this was Texas in the ‘60s when beating kids in school wasn't just acceptable but expected and encouraged…fuckers).
The principal, Mrs. Pearson, paddled me numerous times. She was equally old and crotchety as Mrs. Frazier and twice as evil since she seemed to revel in the referrals.
She was the Nazi Dr. Mengele of L.F. Smith Elementary School in Pasadena, Texas, always eager for fresh young bottoms to be referred her way.
How could educators gain so much satisfaction from spanking young children? Why did they think violence of any kind would correct behavior? I am still in disbelief that my parents co-opted such behavior. Today, in some countries, they’d be arrested for child endangerment or abuse.
Victimized by cruelty
“I swear on my copy of The Elements of Style, the closest thing to holy writ in my possession, that what I am about to recount is the truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me, Strunk and White.” ~Baz
If this doesn’t blow your mind, you’ve done too much blow
I arrived in class on a Monday morning and immediately noticed that there were two rather thick textbooks among the disorganized mess inside my top-lifting desk. I was horrified at reading the words in all caps that confirmed what I already knew - that they were the “TEACHER EDITION” textbooks.
I couldn’t imagine how they got there. It was Monday morning, and we were all lined up in the hallway, waiting for our teacher to unlock the door. Even though I’d been spanked by Mrs. Pearson and humiliated in front of the class by Mrs. Frazier numerous times that academic year, this had to be the lowest level of depravity to which she would descend to single me out for additional embarrassment.
She began that day by announcing that her Teacher’s Editions textbooks were missing. A ripple of reaction spread like an aftershock through the class. In my head, the familiar companions of fear and humiliation battled for superiority.
She said she would allow the guilty party to come forward and admit it (in front of the class). If the guilty party did so, there would be no punishment.
It was pure classroom theater, and I was dying a thousand deaths in my seat. Had I been afflicted with poor bladder control, I’m sure I would’ve left a puddle on the floor beneath my desk.
She limped in her characteristic polio victim’s gait directly over to my desk and lifted the top. She crossed her arms, staring down at me, not unlike Prof. Severus Snape had at Harry Potter in his first year at Hogwarts.
But unlike Harry, I was a highly sensitive boy who could not do anything but shut down in response to a strong female authority figure. It was, after all, all I knew how to do. I started to cry.
She lifted the books high in the air, one in each hand, like sacred tomes handed down from the gods, sneering at me while my classmates looked on in horror. They started whispering about me: “Why would he do it?” “How did he do it?”
How, indeed? It was the one question no adult ever asked, including my parents.
I was a 9—or 10-year-old kid who didn’t have access to a locked classroom on the weekend. How could I have done what she so publicly accused me of doing? It didn’t matter; I was presumed guilty, and my punishment was waiting in the Principal’s office.
Drop ‘em again, young Baz.
I tell this particular story for two reasons, the first being somewhat selfish.
If the dead can hear us, I want Mrs. Frazier to know that she remains the most detestable human in my experience. She is right up there with Hitler and Mengele, not that I’m old enough to have known them…but you probably get my meaning.
Take that, Mrs. Frazier, you sad, twisted old mass of wasted humanity… and you, too, Mrs. Pearson… with the badly dyed hair.
Yes, that’s my non-compassionate side speaking, which my Zen Buddhist side cringes. Hey, reality here.
It illustrates that HSP children can be further traumatized and have their HSP traits seared into their psyche when repeatedly manipulated by adults who are entrusted to care for them. My parents and the school officials involved share the failure to protect me from this type of bullying.
Had post-traumatic stress disorder been better known in the mid-sixties, there is no doubt that I would’ve qualified for the diagnosis. But it would be several years later, after surviving 15 years in a dysfunctional marriage where I was assaulted both physically and psychologically and possessing the scars from both, that I would be diagnosed with it and only then begin to put the pieces of my HSP and empathic puzzle together.
—End of Part I