Learning

What We Meant

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

What We Meant


We ache to let another in,
Yet guard the words we need to say;
Then blame the one outside our skin
For failing us along the way.
“Why are you late?” I hear me shout;
I mean, “I feared you would not come.”
My longing takes the long way out
And strikes the one I wanted home.
You say, “I’m fine,” and turn away;
I hear permission to withdraw.
We bury what we need to say,
Then curse the silence as a flaw.
A plate sits dirty by the sink;
You ask whose turn, I hear disdain.
How fast we claim to know and think,
How slow to ask what caused the pain.
You push; I leave to end the fight.
My leaving tells you I don’t care.
We each defend our lonely right
And crush the bond we meant to spare.
I call you cold; you call me blind.
One moment hardens into stone.
We judge the whole of someone’s mind
And wonder why we feel alone.
What fools: we know our words fall short,
Yet swear we know what others mean.
We drag our loved ones into court
For wounds their eyes have never seen.
I never meant to make you bleed;
But that won’t make the bleeding cease.
I must speak plainly of my need,
Not make you guess the price of peace.
Before I make your words a wall,
I’ll ask what hurt I failed to hear.
We cannot know each other whole;
We can stop pretending sight is clear.

…

DCG


“It took me years of taking things personally to understand this. And once you see it, you’ll start hearing people differently.
“What someone says and what someone’s trying to say are not always the same thing. We hear the words and we assume it’s the whole message. But people don’t always have the words to express what they’re actually feeling. And so we say what’s easiest to say and not what’s hardest to say.


“So something like, ‘Why are you always late?’ might mean, ‘I want to know that I matter to you.’ ‘Do whatever you want,’ might mean, ‘I’m hurt that what I want doesn’t seem to matter.’ How about, ‘I’m fine.’ We all know ‘I’m fine’ isn’t about being fine.
“The words are on the surface. The meaning can be underneath.


“And here’s where the conflict gets really interesting. The other person reacts to the words. One person feels ignored, so they criticize. The other person feels attacked, so they pull away. Now the first person feels even more ignored, so they criticize even more. And suddenly two people who both want to be understood are behaving in ways that make the other person feel misunderstood.
“At that point, the problem isn’t either person. It’s the pattern that’s happening between them.


“This is where we get in trouble because we start turning behavior into character. They’re selfish. They don’t care. They’re impossible to talk to. But what if before deciding who someone is, we get curious about what just happened? Not by assuming that we know what they’re really feeling, but by asking, ‘When you said that, what did you mean? Are you angry about this, or is it something else?’
“Because the goal isn’t to ignore someone’s words. It’s to understand the entire message. It could be words, a feeling, or even something that they’re having trouble saying, because a lot of arguments aren’t really about the thing that was said.
“The dirty dish isn’t just a dirty dish when what someone is really trying to say is, ‘I feel like I’m doing this alone.’ And being five minutes late can become a much bigger fight when what someone hears is, ‘I’m not important to you.’
“That’s the translation error. We think that we’re fighting over dishes and minutes when what we’re really fighting over is what those things mean to us.


“So the next time someone’s words hit you hard, before you decide what those words say about that person’s character, ask this: ‘What are they trying to tell me that their words aren’t saying very well?’
“Because when you stop fighting over the words and you get curious about their meaning, you might actually find the argument underneath the argument.”

— Attribution Shannon Shall Cross

They hide the fears that need a hand 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Some children watch the doorway,
And learn to read the night;
They hide the tears that need a hand,
To keep the grown world right.
They hear, “You are so strong now,”
And learn what praise can cost;
The child who keeps the house from breaking
Is still a child being lost.
Years pass, but shoulders tighten
When footsteps cross the floor;
The danger may have left the house,
Yet breath still guards the door.
Why does a quiet evening
Feel like a coming storm?
Why does a heart reach out for love,
Then shrink from something warm?
They work until their hands are shaking,
And call exhaustion care;
But if their worth depends on giving,
Who sees the person there?
The mind can name the old hurt,
Yet tears still need their say;
To know why sorrow filled a room
Does not yet clear the way.
So grief sits down beside them,
And speaks what none could hear:
“You should not have held that burden;
Your needs belonged here.”
They need not build a life on blame,
Nor claim the hurt was right;
They turn toward what they can change,
And bring their choices into light.
They pause before the old surrender,
Let “no” stand without shame;
Accept a hand, rest without earning,
And practice when fear comes again.
They meet the self beneath the duty,
And give its hopes a voice;
The past may knock, but need not lead—
With care, they learn to live by choice.

…

DCG


It begins quietly, almost unnoticed. You’re only six years old, huddled by the door frame, watching your parents fall apart piece by piece. Maybe it’s addiction, maybe it’s explosive rage. Maybe it’s just the cold void of an adult who can no longer show up.


In that moment, something primal clicks in your young mind: “If I don’t hold everything together, there’ll be nothing left.”
This is how a child disappears—not literally, but spiritually. They learn to smile more, cry less. They learn to read the room before speaking. They become the family’s emotional thermostat. They turn into miniature adults while their minds are still far too tender, and the world pats them on the back with praise: “You’re so mature, you’re so reliable, you’re so resilient.”


But no one stops to ask: What’s the cost?
This is the invisible pain of children who grow up too fast. Today, we’ll dive deep into the psychology of that child, because the consequences don’t fade with time. They shape you, follow you into relationships, careers, and the way you see your own worth.
If you don’t understand what happened, you’ll spend your entire adult life repeating survival patterns that once saved you but are now quietly eroding you.


Let’s start with what really happens in development. When children are forced to prop up adults’ emotions instead of being propped up, psychologists call it role reversal. That’s when the child becomes the caregiver, the mediator, the counselor, the protector.
This isn’t just unhealthy; it rewires the brain. Because when a child is constantly responsible for regulating emotions—their own or others’—it creates a state called hypervigilance. You’re always scanning for danger, you walk on eggshells, you learn that love is a transaction. You bring peace; maybe they’ll give safety.
You learn that your needs are a threat, while theirs are urgent. So you erase yourself—not physically, but emotionally. Instead, a version of you grows, one that performs perfectly. You become the good kid, the quiet achiever, the therapist friend, the one who never asks for anything.
And you wear that mask so convincingly that even you forget it’s fake. But deep down, something aches, something bleeds for the child inside that you buried but didn’t kill. It’s still there, screaming in silence: “Why didn’t anyone protect me?”
As you grow up, the symptoms get more complex. You might become hyper-independent. You reject help, push people away, or never feel truly safe in love. You might freeze in moments of joy because happiness feels foreign, undeserved, even dangerous. You might be unable to rest because productivity is the only way you’ve ever felt valuable.
And worst of all, you might not realize you’re still stuck in survival mode. Because when dysfunction is normalized early, your nervous system accepts chaos as baseline. Silence feels wrong, peace feels suspicious, love feels like a debt you have to pay.
This is the psychology of a child forced to grow up too fast. It’s not just sadness; it’s complex trauma that reshapes how you see the world, and more importantly, how you see yourself.


Now you might wonder: Why would a child willingly take on that role?
Because children will do anything to maintain attachment, even abandon themselves. That choice is never conscious. It’s biological instinct. In the absence of safety, the child sacrifices authenticity for belonging. That’s not weakness, that’s intelligence, that’s instinct.
But the tragedy is this: What once saved you now imprisons you.
So many of us walk around as high-functioning adults with deeply abandoned inner children pulling the strings. We achieve greatness to earn love, we stay silent to avoid abandonment. We care for everyone but secretly hope someone asks if we’re okay.
And that fantasy—that someone will see you’re not as strong as you pretend, that maybe, just maybe, you’ll be allowed to fall apart and be held—that’s the unmet need, not of the adult ego, but of the child who never got to be a child.


The first step to healing isn’t fixing; it’s witnessing. Because until you acknowledge what happened, you’ll keep lying to yourself with thoughts like: “It wasn’t that bad. Others had it worse. I’m fine.”
But fine is just another mask, and deep down, you know it.
So what happens to that child when they grow up? They become adults who never feel safe, even in quiet rooms. They become lovers who can’t trust tenderness. They become givers who can’t receive. They become the type who apologizes for crying, flinches at compliments, and mistakes burnout for success.


This is the price of growing up too early. Because if childhood trained you to be strong at the cost of softness, silent instead of honest, fixing others while ignoring your own cracks, what kind of adulthood do you inherit?
You inherit a life where you’re always holding your breath, waiting for someone to finally let you break.
But here’s the truth: No one is coming to save the child you buried. You have to go back and take its hand. You have to say what no one ever said: “You didn’t deserve that. You were just a kid. You get to rest now.”


This is the beginning of shadow work—not fixing, not performing, not dodging pain with fake positivity, but returning to the abandoned parts of yourself and saying: “I see you now, I hear you, and I’m not leaving.”
That’s the rebuilding process, and it’s brutal because it requires you …

— attribution unknown

But I recognize the patterns

Before The Verdict 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Before the Verdict


A postulated reflection: If our histories shape what we see, what might change when we question our first judgment?
We meet one world through different eyes,
And each declares the picture clear;
But what we call another’s fault
May wear the face of our own fear.
Perhaps the past still frames the room,
And tells us what deserves our sight;
One seeks the comfort of straight lines,
One seeks a hand against the night.
We gather proof that takes our side,
And leave unwelcome facts outside;
Confirmation bias names the habit—
A tilted scale we call our guide.
Yet different views are not all true,
Nor does a wound make falsehood right;
The world resists what we believe—
Our claims must bear its testing light.
When someone speaks against our view,
The pulse may leap before we know;
Is this a threat before our eyes,
Or yesterday refusing to go?
Before the verdict leaves the tongue,
Could we allow one breath of space?
Not choke the feeling into silence,
But keep its heat from ruling the case.
What fact would make us change our minds?
What have we brushed aside as wrong?
Could reason test the claims we love,
Not merely make their voices strong?
To hear another is not to yield,
Nor must we bless the harm they do;
We can refuse a cruel demand
And ask what brought that hurt to view.
Must every difference draw our blood?
Can we meet doubt without the flame?
If anger keeps deciding for us,
How much of us will it reshape and name?

…

DCG


Transcript
Took me 42 years to understand what I’m about to explain to you in under a minute. And once you understand this, you’ll stop being so confused about why people do what they do.
There’s no one single right reality where you are right and everyone else is wrong. We assume that the way we see things is the way things are, right? Our values feel obvious, our priorities feel logical, our conclusions feel correct. So when someone disagrees with us, it feels wrong. And this is where the frustration starts.
But here’s what most people never consider. Other people are not just choosing different actions, they are seeing a completely different reality because everybody is experiencing life through their own lens, and it’s shaped by their upbringing, by their experiences, by what they’ve been rewarded for, what they’ve been hurt by—which means something subtle is happening.
Two people can look at the same situation and see two completely different things. One person walks into a messy room and feels stressed. Another person walks into the same room and doesn’t even notice it. But they do notice how people are feeling. One values order, the other values connection. Neither is wrong, but they both feel like the other is.
And Anaïs Nin said it simply: “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
Our view of the world happens through patterns the brain has learned over time. And once your brain builds a certain view of the world, it starts reinforcing it, looking for evidence that confirms it and ignoring what doesn’t.
So this leads to a very different way of thinking. What if the reason people frustrate you isn’t because they’re wrong, but because they’re seeing something that you’re not?
One of the strangest truths about life is this: we are not all reacting to the same world. We’re each reacting to the version of the world our mind has learned to see.
And the moment that you realize that is the moment you stop trying to correct people who are wrong and you start understanding them.[Attachment]
Attribution search
The strongest match was a Threads post by @flipbardinas, dated April 15, 2026 in the search results. It quotes:

—Transcribed from a social-media clip; original creator

Shannon Shallcross describes herself as a speaker, writer, founder, and two-time TEDx speaker. Her platform, The Gratitude Mind, explores gratitude and how perception shapes people’s experience of life

The Softened word

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

The Softened Word


We used to name the weather: rain,
And feel its cold upon the street;
Now storms are “moisture events” again,
With gentle warnings, soft and sweet.
A fact once stood on sturdy feet,
It asked to be examined plain;
Now it must wear a softer sheet,
Lest someone find its edges vain.
The headlines learn the practiced sigh,
A tear is worth a thousand proofs;
One chosen child beneath the sky
Can sell a roof above all roofs.
The numbers wait outside the door,
Their coats are wet, their voices low;
But feeling enters first once more,
With lights arranged to make it glow.
“Be moved,” the anchor says at nine,
“Be angry—then remain with us”;
The screen supplies the proper sign,
The sponsor thanks the frightened fuss.
In Meet John Doe, the noble cry
Was useful while it filled the square;
The men who owned the ink would try
To turn its hope to private air.
And if the movement would not bend,
If common people kept its flame,
They would prefer its public end
To letting truth outrun their name.
No party owns this oldest art,
No faction holds the only mask;
The left can tug the tender heart,
The right can make fear do its task.
A label takes a human face,
A slogan makes a neighbor strange;
Then thought is hurried from its place,
And anger calls itself “a change.”
We polish words until they hide
The thing we ought to plainly see;
“Collateral” means someone died,
“Messaging” means: agree with me.
The clever merchant of alarm
Will call his hook a public good;
He sells protection from the harm
His tale has planted in the wood.
Yet reason need not sneer or freeze,
Nor make compassion disappear;
It asks what happened, who agrees,
What proof is solid, what is fear.
Come, reader: let the loaded phrase
Be weighed before it takes command;
Truth needs no manufactured haze—
It needs a mind that understands.

…

DCG

—Cleaned transcript
The reason so many idiotic ideas now run society—where everyone listens to their feelings and stops needing facts or reality—might be that even major publications have switched completely from reasoning to emotion.
This is day 13 of The Psychology of Masses.
Researchers analyzed language across millions of publications going back to 1850. Until around 1980, language rooted in evidence and logic kept rising. Then the curve flipped. Starting almost exactly in 1980, fact-based language began declining while emotionally loaded language climbed instead—and that shift accelerated sharply after 2007.
Rational language is what real science runs on. Emotional language is what activism runs on, because an activist is producing a version of reality that confirms what they already believe.
You see the result everywhere. Entire groups get mobilized and controlled through emotionally charged language, because emotions are how you actually control people—not statistics. Use the right trigger words, the right examples, and hit the specific feeling you are after, and people will do what you want without ever checking whether the underlying claim was true.
Which specific emotions to use, and exactly how to trigger each one, is in The Psychology of Masses.
What the clip is attributing
The historical-language claim appears to be based on a 2021 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), “The rise and fall of rationality in language,” by Marten Scheffer, Ingrid van de Leemput, Els Weinans, and Johan Bollen.
The researchers analyzed Google Books Ngram data—millions of digitized books in English and Spanish—from 1850 through 2019. They found that words they categorized as relating to rationality, science, technology, quantification, and formal social systems rose in relative frequency after 1850, while words associated with intuition, belief, personal experience, sensation, and sentiment fell. Their trend reversed around the late 1970s/1980s, with a more pronounced increase in sentiment- and intuition-related language around 2007. They also reported broadly comparable patterns in fiction, a nonfiction-heavy book subset, selected other languages, and New York Times text.[nih]
Examples of the paper’s “rationality” language include words such as “determine,” “conclusion,” “data,” “result,” “test,” and “procedure.” Its contrasting category contains words such as “feel,” “believe,” “imagine,” “heal,” “dream,” and “comfort.” That distinction is central to what the speaker is paraphrasing.[nih]
Verification: accurate core, misleading conclusions

—

The clip has a legitimate scholarly source behind its narrow historical-word-frequency claim. But it turns that limited finding into a far larger political and psychological story that the study does not prove.
The defensible claim is: some selected word categories in a large digitized-book corpus changed direction around 1980, with a further shift around 2007. The unsupported leap is: therefore society has stopped caring about facts, activism is inherently emotion-driven, and emotionally charged language controls people.

Research attribution and context: The historical language claim is based on Scheffer, van de Leemput, Weinans, and Bollen’s 2021 PNAS study, “The rise and fall of rationality in language.” Using Google Books Ngram data from 1850–2019, the authors found that selected rationality-related words rose in frequency until roughly the late 1970s/1980s, while selected intuition- and sentiment-related words declined; the trend later reversed, with a sharper shift around 2007. The study measured long-run changes in word use—not whether people became irrational, whether facts ceased to matter, or whether activists control people through emotion. Its interpretation is disputed: a published response argued that the pattern may chiefly reflect increasing informality in writing rather than a cultural movement from reason to emotion.[nih +1]

It is now that I begin to truly see 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

The dream: 2247 Baily Avenue.

The childhood home — one room where I grew up, and then the other room, once my brother’s, where I stayed with my own children for a time after my divorce.


Two kinds of shame: one as a child, and one as an adult.
The shame of the adult takes an even tighter hold on the constraints of your manhood when it is shared with your own children. That differs from the shame you carry as a child yourself, growing up in the house of pain.

How you deal with the shame you feel depends a great deal on the audience around you.

Note

The trauma: CEN or childhood emotional neglect: CPTSD 

The father: authoritarian narcissistic

The mother: codependent, and lived in fear, but also looked away and did not protect

The ex-wife: also authoritarian with a need for control

In one room, you are the child

And in another room, you have your children who see 

Two rooms in the same bewilderment

The common denominator: me

The activities of a child versus 

The activities of a man

The comparison is poignant

But the shame still stands

I now understand my trauma

Unhealed wounds must be processed through connection

In silence, they fester unseen

So with this testimony, I raise my objection 

One shame is learned

One is self created

The burdens of inequity

When you point the finger at yourself – it’s related

The lessons of accountability

And the politics of shame

It’s extremely hard to point the finger

When the finger is pointed at your name

Oh how we justify

The economy of quid pro quo

Just what do we testify?

Sometimes, I don’t rightly know

Like sitting in your own church

Like sitting in your own pew

Just what will we receive?

Just what will we do? 

In childhood I learned to overthink

In adulthood, I did the same

I now try to integrate emotion 

The man, the boy, and the claim 

Over 50 years with living in silence

The reflection from the polished mirror, I am now me 

Funny how when I start to go blind

It is now that I begin to truly see 

CLG

…

DCG

Cognitive dissonance inside a lucid dream

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Cognitive Dissonance Inside a Lucid Dream
A thought experiment from DCG
~
Close your eyes.
You are asleep. You are dreaming.
And you know it.
The walls are soft. The rules are gone. No one is watching. Nothing you do here will follow you into the morning.
Or will it?
~
In my waking life, I hold certain beliefs. I have written some of them down and numbered them. I call them life hacks.
They are simple. They are mine. I live by them, or I try to.
But what happens to a belief when you carry it into a place where it no longer seems to matter?
That is the thought experiment.
~
Life hack #1 says:
It’s easier to avoid temptation
Than it is to resist it.
Life hack #5 says:
The more you tell the truth
The easier it becomes.
Awake, these two live together in peace. One tells me to step away from temptation. The other tells me that what I repeat, I become.
Now take them into the dream.
In a lucid dream, temptation does not wait at a distance. It stands in front of me. I cannot walk away from the room, because I am the room. Avoiding it is no longer possible in the usual way.
So life hack #1 goes quiet.
And life hack #5 begins to whisper something darker. If telling the truth gets easier each time, then what about everything else I repeat? If I give in once in a dream, knowing it is a dream, does it get easier the second time? The third?
One belief says step away.
The other says you become what you rehearse.
In the dream, I cannot step away.
So what am I rehearsing?
~
Here is the question underneath all of it.
If I know it is only a dream, is there any penalty?
No one is harmed. Nothing is broken. I wake up and the world is exactly as I left it.
And yet, I chose. I was awake inside the sleep. I knew my beliefs, and I set them down, just to feel what it would be like.
Is that a sin?
Or is it only a picture of one?
~
The other life hacks do not stay silent either.
Life hack #2 asks what I would find if I looked into my own heart. What was the true intent behind the choice? In a lucid dream, intent is all there is.
Life hack #6 warns that avoiding, done as a habit, can leave you always lost. Is calling it “just a dream” its own kind of avoiding?
Life hack #7 says what we run from pursues us, and what we face transforms us. Was the dream a place where I faced something? Or a place where I ran toward it?
Life hack #8 says the strength of your faith and the error of your convictions will entangle. Is that not exactly what happens here? The belief and the betrayal, tied together in the same moment.
And life hack #10 reminds me that the water never changed. Only the room. If I am the water, does it matter what room I am poured into? Or does the water remember every room it has been in?
~
I do not have the answer.
I am not sure there is one.
But I keep coming back to a few simple questions.
If I would not do it awake, why do I want to do it asleep?
If it means nothing, why do I feel it?
If I do it once to know the feeling, will I do it again to keep the feeling?
And if a pattern forms in the place where no one sees, is it still only a dream?
Or is it a practice?
~
Maybe the dream is harmless.
Maybe it is a rehearsal.
Maybe it is a mirror, showing me what I would do if the consequences disappeared.
Maybe that is the most honest place I will ever stand.
~
Close your eyes again.
You are dreaming. You know it.
The temptation is right there.
What do you do?
And who are you when you wake up?
…
DCG

Life Hacks, #1 to #11

  1. Life hack #1: “It’s easier to avoid temptation / Then it is to resist it.” (unknown)
  2. Life hack #2: “If you can look into the heart / What would you find? / The true motivation / What you have behind the mind? / If we do not mark our path / With our true intent / What then guides us? / In our true consent?” (DCG)[thundergodblog]
  3. Life hack number three: “To heal a heart and soul / You must reveal the heart and soul / Always consider forgiveness / Only we control what we console.” (DCG)
  4. Life hack #4: “To forgive is not for the ‘sole sake’ of relieving another of their guilt, but rather for the ‘sake of the soul’ that had been perpetrated upon!” (DC Gunnersen)[thundergodblog]
  5. Life hack #5: “The more you tell the truth / The easier it becomes.” (DCG)
  6. Life hack #6: “Ignoring, or avoiding is a pernicious kind of sloth / If it becomes a habit / You might always be lost.” (DCG)
  7. Life hack #7: “What we run from pursues us / And what we face transforms us.” (unknown)[thundergodblog]
  8. Life hack #8: “The strength of your faith / And the error of your convictions will entangle.” (unknown)[thundergodblog]
  9. Life hack #9: “Be the reason / Someone has a better day.” (unknown)[thundergodblog]
  10. Life hack #10, “The Water Never Changed”: A bottle of water costs $1 at the corner store and $6 on a plane, but the water is the same. “Nothing about the water was ever the problem. / Only the room it was standing in.” Your worth doesn’t change with the setting.
  11. Life hack #11: “Every day, you have two choices: to focus on what’s wrong, or to embrace what’s right. Choose gratitude. Choose joy. Choose to see the beauty in the little things…” (anonymous)[thundergodblog]
    The post for #1 on the site is dated August 11, 2026, even though #2 is from October 2025. It may have been reposted.

My Hacks and the Dream Experiment
My question: if you know you’re dreaming and still choose to sin, does that corrupt you? My own hacks mostly say yes, but only a little. What matters is the choice you make while aware, not the fact that it happened in a dream.
• Awareness makes it a choice (#2, #8). In a normal dream, things just happen to you. In a lucid dream you’re aware, so choosing the act is an “intent” in the sense of #2. #8 fits too: your faith and the conviction you’re breaking get tangled together. That tangle is the cognitive dissonance i’m describing.
• Repetition builds habit (#1, #5, #6). #5 says truth gets easier the more you tell it. The reverse would also be true: an act gets easier the more you rehearse it. #6 says a repeated habit can leave you “always lost.” #1 says avoiding temptation is easier than resisting it. Practicing the act in a dream wears down the avoiding, so waking life would take more resisting.
• Running from it vs. facing it (#7). This hack leaves room for a different answer. If you use the dream to face a temptation and understand it, it could change you for the better. If you use it to indulge the temptation, it’s the thing you run from, and #7 says that pursues you.
• The counterweight (#3, #4, #10). #10 says the water never changed, only the room. A dream is just a different room, so your core self is still there. #3 and #4 say it can be fixed: be honest about it and forgive yourself. In their terms, that’s “reveal the heart” and “the sake of the soul.”
• #11 suggests a way to aim your lucidity: use your awareness to practice what’s right instead of what’s wrong.
A possible conclusion: a dream doesn’t corrupt you, but deliberately choosing something in a dream and doing it again and again can wear down a belief, the same way a waking habit does. My  hacks point to three stages:

  1. The dissonance: #8
  2. The wearing down through habit: #1, #5, #6
  3. The way back: #3, #4, #7, #10
    This connects to real research. People practice skills in lucid dreams, and imagined rehearsal can shape how you act. Dream ethics, including Augustine’s worries about what he did in dreams,

Is not our own thinking?

Sometimes placed under lock and key

Hidden from ourselves

And from others to see

— DCG 

Three classes shy 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Three Classes Shy


Why do I walk the mesa late at night,
beneath the bell tower’s arch of sun-bleached stone?
Why does the old campus glow so bright
for one who walked away from it alone?
I left my home at seventeen, so young,
and paid my way with every dollar earned.
Who heard the quiet hope upon my tongue
each night I studied while the lamp still burned?
Why is there always one more class to find,
a room I cannot reach, a door that’s locked?
Why does the schedule blur inside my mind
while minutes slip away upon the clock?
Psychology, philosophy, two roads
I traveled far but never saw them end.
Three classes short. Who measures all the loads
a working heart must carry, lift, and tend?
I married, and I worked for forty-one
long years, and gave the best of what I had.
So why, when all those working days are done,
does one unfinished piece still make me sad?
Is this the reason that the dream returns?
Does painful truth play hide-and-seek at night,
and wait behind the library till it learns
I’m strong enough to face it in the light?
And if I face it, what else might I find?
That no diploma measures who I’ve grown?
That every lesson life has left behind
has taught me more than any class I’ve known?
The past is history, so let it be.
The future is a mystery, still unknown.
But now, this very moment, sets me free,
a gift we call the present, all our own.
So if a dream keeps calling you by name,
what hallway, what closed door, waits there for you?
Perhaps it doesn’t come to bring you shame,
but just to walk you home, whole, and new.

…

DCG

“If you don’t heal what hurt you, you’ll bleed on people who didn’t cut you.”

— unknown 

This was the dream. I woke up on the San Diego State University campus, wearing a very plush San Diego State letterman jacket, which I have owned in the past. I was surrounded by people, many of whom were from where I worked. The people I had my career with showed up throughout the dream, even though many of them did not attend San Diego State.
We were sectioned off, almost as if we had been told to serve the campus community for some unknown reason. We were grouped together in square formations, almost like attendance lineups, or even in classrooms. I walked around and saw people from my job. I didn’t know why they were there too, because many of them did not go to the same school I did.

This dream, in some form, keeps coming back: me on the campus of San Diego State University.

Transcription
“Here is the twist. I was three classes shy of getting my degrees at San Diego State University. One in psychology and one in philosophy.”
Annotation: the two degrees would have been a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy.
A Revelation
I left home at 17 and paid my own way through San Diego State University. I studied toward a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy while working full-time.
I always meant to finish. But marriage and work took priority, and I spent 41 years with my employer. I ended up three classes short of both degrees, and not finishing those classes is my biggest regret.
My education has always mattered deeply to me. That may be why the same dreams keep coming back. I think they may be my mind returning to the one important thing I never finished the way I wanted to. This isn’t a failure. It shows how much I still value what I worked so hard for.

I convalesce 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

In the sanitarium of my mind

I convalesce

Just what then will I epitomize?

Or, do I digress?

The mind is a curious domain

You can turn your attention inside

Discover the connections you’ve made

Then learn where the pit of your fears reside

Consider the invisible opérations

Disassociation or self defense

The subconscious training rituals

The impulse to build a fence

Observations from the playground

Internalized with limited objectivity

Often laid dormant or forgotten

In the shadows of obscurity

Is it really too much to ask?

How we descend upon humanity? 

How we treat each other and ourselves? 

The question in perpetuity 

Some say only knowing the reasons

Will not be enough

You must also be able to feel

Or your experience is just a bluff

The body holds its own accounting
A ledger written in the chest,
A tightness where the words fall silent,
A weight that will not let me rest


What wounds the most is often absent,
Not the blow, but what was never there,
The comfort missing from the doorway,
The empty space of unmet care


A child will trade away the feeling
To keep the bond that keeps him fed,
Authenticity for attachment,
A quiet bargain in his head.


So I learned to think instead of feeling,
To analyze and not to weep,
Assembled reason like a fortress,
And buried sorrow in the keep.


But thought without the heart is exile,
And feeling without thought, a flood;
The mind must learn to hear the body,
The pulse, the breath, the rush of blood.


So I return to meet the younger,
The one who stood beside the wall,
And name the ache he could not utter,
And answer, finally, his call.


To face the shadow is not surrender,
But gathering what was cast aside;
The anger I was taught to swallow
Becomes the strength I need not hide.


Responsibility becomes the medicine,
To carry what I did not choose,
To bear the load and find the meaning
Within the things I feared to lose.


Compassion, then, is not indulgence,
But curiosity made kind,
A question asked without a verdict,
A gentle light within the mind.


The fence I built becomes a garden,
With gates I open and I close;
Not every soul will find the entrance,
But those who do, the heart well knows.


So in the sanitarium of my mind,
I convalesce, but not alone;
The thinking and the feeling marry,
And I, at last, am coming home.

…

DCG

If every lock opened with every key, keys would become useless. People work the same way. You aren’t meant to connect with everyone. The people worth keeping are the ones your personality was meant to unlock. Because your job isn’t to open every door, it’s to find the ones you were made for.

— unknown 

Am I  Channeling  Carl Jung

~ DC ~ Leave a comment


Am I Channeling Carl Jung?


Why do I keep returning to the door
I learned to fear before I learned my name?
What am I hoping to find beneath the floor?
Why does each poem go back there just the same?
Jung called it shadow: what we push away.
Is mine the anger I was taught to hide?
If I invite it in, what will it say?
And can I hear it without taking its side?
I wrote of learning silence in a house.
Did silence keep me safe, or leave me small?
Do I still go quiet as a mouse
When no one here is angry after all?
I wrote of wearing calmness like a coat.
Who taught me how to fasten every seam?
When hurt comes near, why do I clear my throat
And speak as though I’m safely in a dream?
Why does my pride arrive prepared for court
With every slight arranged to make its case?
What does it guard when it cuts kindness short?
What fear is hiding underneath its face?
I wrote that thought could make a fortress last.
Was learning then a shelter from the pain?
When I explain each detail of the past,
Why does my heart still walk into the rain?
I studied how a person comes to be,
The mind, the soul, the habits we repeat.
Did all those years of study help me see,
Or keep me from the feeling at my feet?
Jung listened for the parts a life concealed.
Do I keep hearing them beneath my page?
Is there a grief I’ve carefully not revealed,
Or fear I’ve called good sense for half an age?
Why do I read a silence as a sign?
Why do I search a face for coming rain?
Whose old voice sounds so much like mine
When I tell myself I must endure the pain?
What do I make of that boy on the field,
Still waiting for somebody to draw near?
What did he learn when no one asked him how he’d healed?
Why does his silence still live in me here?
I speak of love, then turn and guard the gate.
I ask for closeness, then prepare to flee.
Is this the shadow Jung asked us to face:
The frightened part I will not let be me?
And what of all the good I set aside?
The softer self I feared the world would bruise?
Is there a gentleness I learned to hide
Because I thought that I would have to choose?
Would Dostoevsky’s man beneath the ground
Know why I argue with myself at night?
Do I build proofs where no proof can be found
So I can say I’m right instead of frightened?
Why does this question follow all I write?
Has something pressed its shape into my soul?
If I can name the thing and bring it light,
Must I still feel it to become more whole?
I think of Maslow and the life I sought.
Is growing more than reaching some clear height?
If all I’ve done is learn to master thought,
Who holds the hurt I keep outside my sight?
Am I, like Jung, pursuing what I miss
When I mistake the mask for all I am?
Can I hold both the wound and joy in this,
And stop condemning one to save the man?
I almost sign this page, then change my mind.
Must I give strangers every private name?
Can I leave those I love and hurt behind
The curtain, yet speak plainly of my shame?
Can I ask the question without scorn?
Can I meet the boy and not demand his proof?
What part of me was waiting to be born
While I stood outside myself beneath the roof?
Please help me understand what’s going on inside.
Not just the story, but the ache beneath.
Can I sit with what I used to hide
And let a feeling pass without a speech?
I think I’m on a path that Jung once knew:
To meet the hidden self, not win a fight.
My steps are mine; his questions help me through.
Could I be growing whole by facing night?

…

DCG

“The most self-aware person in the room is often hiding the deepest pain.
People who were emotionally neglected as children become the biggest intellectualizers in therapy and the healing journey. They get stuck overanalyzing over and over, but terrified of feeling anything in their body.
They might walk into a therapist’s office and get told, ‘Wow, you’re so self-aware. Seems like you got it all figured out.’ But instead of relief and validation, they feel hollow instead, because what’s actually happening is a defense. It’s the suppression of the grief, the anger, the shame, the anxiety that never got to cycle through to actually release.
You see, a child’s first instinct when they are neglected is to cry out for help, to reach for connection. But when that call keeps getting ignored, they learn something else instead: that their cries don’t work. And so they go into the prison of their mind instead. They suppress the feeling, they disconnect, dissociate, and intellect becomes the only safe place left.
And it sure fools everyone, including themselves. But what’s underneath is a nervous system that actually collapsed. It’s the belief that feeling emotions puts them in a helpless and hopeless situation.
The intellectualization isn’t really making them smarter. It’s just trauma that’s still in control, and it costs them dearly: relationships that never really feel safe, a body that never gets to relax and loosen up, years—maybe even decades—understanding themselves so perfectly while nothing actually changes underneath.
But eventually, like all coping mechanisms, it starts to break at the seams: random bouts of crying, reactivity that they can’t explain, numbing out, avoiding hard conversations, or having hard conversations that immediately turn into explosions.
Now, if this is you and you want to get out of this, you have to go beyond the mind, and that’s a journey into the body, into the nervous system, into the parts that you never got to develop.
So one quick move that you can do the next time that feelings come up inside you is to place a hand—a soft hand—on where you notice it in your body. And there’s a lot of science backing this up now: just stay with it for at least 60 seconds and ride it out. Let the feeling happen. Short window, but big impact.
You might find out that you actually move through the feeling and get to the other side without having to suppress and overthink.
— mindfulness 

The boy in the doorway

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

An announcer voice opens the show as “The Thunder God Radio Hour,” introduces the title and author, and calls out each chapter break the way a 1940s serial would.