I left an important detail out of the account I just posted.

The thing that left the whip marks on me was not recalling a difficult childhood and the sad details appurtenant to it.   Many have had it much worse than I did, than my sister did, or my parents, though each of us had it bad enough.  The siblings of three of my grandparents and their families, for example, thirteen years before I was born: I can’t think of a worse childhood than you and everyone you’ve ever known being massacred by organized gangs of drunken haters backed by a powerful occupying army whose commander is determined to wipe out every trace of your ancestors.

The whip marks I felt after yesterday’s session came a moment after I was asked if I had experienced any traumas.   At first I answered no, then I put my finger on an ongoing one, with roots in my earliest life, the moment that has always stopped me in my tracks:

when an angry bully, usually with an arbitrary hierarchic advantage of some kind, steps up and tells me to put my eyes to the ground.  

I recalled a few instances of this as an adult, how the rising feeling of unfairness, and powerless to do anything but fight, enflamed nerve endings seared repeatedly when I was a boy, how needy bullies have always had an easy time locating me in a crowded room.  I’m not hard to find, I’m the one who hasn’t learned to put my eyes to the ground at the key moment so someone else can take the blows.

“Your therapist can work with you on that,” the grad student told me sympathetically.