Posted on 08/04/2026 7:49:37 AM PDT by BusterDog
Whenever I think back to my childhood, everything seems fairly joyful and innocent. And then, one day, my mother told me that I once got locked in a bathroom with a bucket full of water as a kid. That was scary, but thankfully, nothing happened.
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Had a sibling who stuck a paring knife into an electrical outlet. Fortunately, it had a wood handle.
“...falling through ice on a river..”
We were taught this ditty.
“Ice skating is nice skating.
But never skate where the ice is thin.
Else it will crack and you’ll fall right in
And come up with icicles under your chin.”
Just where was mom?
“Don’t come crying to me if you kill yourself.” So not a helicopter mom.
Good on you.
Those were the kids we never wanted to play with because they were retards.
You should have seen them try to play baseball with us....
Yeah, especially when the adults decided to join in after they’d enjoy a typical summer day cocktail hour(s).
By the time I reached 3rd grade I could tell if a cut would need stitches. I also knew whether I had a concussion. The latter which lead to an interesting encounter with a school nurse. She sent me back to class because I did not have a fever. The teacher sent me back to the nurse. It was only after I threw up all over the nurse’s desk that she called my mom. And boy was my mom livid.
I once pushed the lighter on my mom’s car and then touched the red hot thing at the end. I had little round circle scorch marks on my freshly burned finger.
**...the dangers your typical teenage farm boy dealt with in a single summer in the 1960s/70s.**
The list is long! But I will be brief.
1960: After being Dad’s sidekick on farm tractors for about 4 years, he decided I had observed enough by age 6 to put me on the Oliver 88 to harrow plowed ground, while he plowed with the John Deere 730 in the same field.
Four months later, a week before turning 7, he put me on the Deere to rake straw, while he left to cut a neighbor’s oats. I thought I was big stuff driving that tractor for hours with no one around.
Another neighbor told my dad that summer: “Ben, you’re gonna have that kid so sick of farm work, that by the time he gets a driver’s license, he’s gonna drive away and never come back!”
I still have my Jarts set. I’ll let them go cheap if you want.
Then there’s bag-o-glass..😁
Yeah, well, I jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.
It was only a 12-inch jump to the ground, but it’s still true that I jumped off the GGB.
And we all survived!
That includes me—I rode a bicycle several miles to junior high school in traffic (including air force base traffic), without a helmet every weekday back in Tucson!
I ended up skipping seventh grade, so only commuted by bicycle one year.
No one wore helmets back then. The didn’t even make helmets for bicycle riders!
And I imagine that neither parents nor the school system let kids get to school on their own nowadays. Not so good!
“Wow. I had no idea that even pre-birth trauma can influence one’s later life in a negative way…”
In over 90% of the lesbians I have worked with, the mother was angry at the father while pregnant with the daughter. The daughter is born disliking men and has no idea why.
I tell men o be extra nice to their wives when they are pregnant.
“How I miss the 70s.”
Ditto.
True story.
Ha ha ha… That sounds like a real kid thing to do, throwing your shoes down the outhouse to see how far down they go!
By REM I assume you are referring to Rapid Eye Movement or EMDR. It works as a desensitization tool, but does not remove the original trauma.
I spoke extensively with a psychologist, Dr. Allan Botkin, at the Chicago VA Hospital who was using EMDR to treat people with PTSD. He modified it in that he had them do it with their eyes closed and found it induced an after death communication experience.
Induced After-Death Communication (IADC)—a brief therapy for trauma and grief—was discovered in 1995 by Dr. Allan Botkin while he was counseling Vietnam veterans at a Chicago-area VA hospital. He wrote an excellent book, “Induced after Death Communication : A New Therapy for Healing Grief and Trauma.”
EMDR works temporarily by creating emotional escape routes in the brain by creating new bridges between brain hemispheres. It does NOT remove the original trauma.
Over the years, I’ve done quite a bit of PTSD work with excellent results. I use a modified technique that reprograms the original perceptual programming event that created the stored traumatic memory. Skip Rizzo, a psychiatrist at USC created a similar technique combining virtual reality and psychotherapy.
One guy had been driving his truck in Vietnam when he hit a mine that killed his buddy in the passenger seat. After that, he became a tunnel rat. His trauma was so extreme that he cried as he was telling me about his experiences thirty years later, after a life of alcohol and drug addiction. It took me about thirty minutes to totally remove the guilt associated with the trauma.
The key to healing is that the emotional subconscious where the traumatic memory is stored cannot differentiate between imagination and reality. By reprogramming the emotions attached to the original events it releases the trauma permanently.
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