Strange and unusual accounts from the world of trauma healing. An autobiographical short story. I am 4 years old. Back and forth. Flip flopping between a patent sense of danger, and a soothing yet toxic collapse. Not that I am aware of any of that at a conscious level. All I know is that I felt better with mom. She is the safe one. Feeling the air on my skin. Safe with my mom who is peddling us down our street, happily waving my legs around a bit.
Either way the result is the same. Then, the next moment, my first conscious experience of physical agony comes crashing down on me like a tidal wave. My left heel is suddenly on fire.
My foot has gone into the rapidly rotating spokes of the wheel. My shoe goes flying off, and a scoop of flesh is carved out of my heel. I twitch in my airplane seat, my leg drawing up and contracting, the body reliving this trauma that is still, unbeknownst to me, locked in my system.
Being carried into the back yard. My older brother trying to distract me and make me laugh, while my mom disinfects the bloody hole in my heel and bandages it up. The shock of the pain matched by emotional shock — mom was supposed to be safe! I start sweating and my core trembles, my eyes flutter open, and I am awake. Outside the window is the ocean and, just coming into view, verdant tropical green.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are now beginning our descent into Kona. Looking back, I can see the path that landed me in that airplane seat in had its first flagstone laid not only with that trauma, but also with all the attachment wounding and early developmental trauma that preceded it. At the time though, not knowing how traumatized I was, the more obvious branch in the road had been forged by the Vipassana retreat I had attended a few months before.
