Lifecrafting's Journal First paragraph addresses possible triggers

[Lifecrafting]

I had an experience yesterday that shook my world and I want to share it. In this post I have used a certain profanity a few times, always with ***** and only in the context of the dialogue that was going on in my own head at the time this experience was happening. I don't believe I have misused it or broken any guidelines but if I have I will understand if my post is removed.
Triggers - Gosh, I don't know.
There is nothing of physical or sexual abuse.
My bedroom as a little girl was in a basement - it was dark and bugs were everywhere but I don't go into details - it's just part of the story. My parents were hunters of our food so there is some of what goes along with that.
May or may not be important; I'm just trying to cover my bases.

So here it is.

The Body Remembers

I stand there in the middle of the room trembling. The floor is concrete, the lighting, a single bulb hanging from the ceiling by an electrical cord, gives little light and the smell of dead mice permeates the air. I am in the basement. And I am, at 56 years of age, all of a sudden 5 years old.

It's a lovely home, kept by lovely people. It has  many years of joy, laughter, tragedy, grief and togetherness oozing from every nook and cranny; there has always been love here. I am in awe of the feeling I get that some people's lives have been... good. Just good.
The basement in this house is pretty decent as far as basements go - it's full of the usual stored Christmas stuff and some of the kid's old toys and picture frames no longer in use, that sort of thing. It's all good.

But, it is a basement and it has a mouse problem. And I volunteered to take care of the problem.  It's not a pleasant task and I don't really "WANT TO" but there you go; I volunteered so get on with it, right?

So I head downstairs and there it is - a trap with a rather large dead mouse in it and looking at it, I find myself catapulted into another world. I don't even know what happened but out of nowhere, I am so afraid, I don't know what to do. I'm standing there looking at it and before I know it, I am crying - tears just rolling down my  face and my body is trembling.  And I hear these words come out of my mouth: "I can't do it."
What? I'm standing there, talking to myself, "Whoa...what are you doing? What's going on? Of course you can do it! Shake it off woman!"

Taking on "just get the job done" motivation, I go searching for a long something or other to bring the trap out more into the open and I'm walking around feeling like my legs are going to give out on me any moment and all I can think is "How am I going to do this? I can't do this! How am I going to do this??? Well, I have to do this. Quit being a baby about it and just do it!"

So I find a small rake and start walking back over to to the trap and even before I get there, I'm crying harder and when I see the trap, I start walking around in circles talking to myself... and then I just decide "OK do it." So I stop and look at it and just thinking about reaching the rake out to bring it closer makes me f****** crazy with fear... And now the trembling is more like violent shaking and there's this continual dialogue in my head: "What is wrong with me? What is happening to  me?" And I'm walking around in circles.... and I'm panicking and I'm saying "F***" over and over, walking around in circles...

All I can come up with is courage. "Yep, that is what is needed here" so I wipe my tears, in a mad at myself, defiant sort of way and tell myself to "buck up and just do it."  I don't know if that is courage or not but that's what I'm calling it. Anyway, I turn around, face the dead mouse, reach out again with the rake and fall apart, start walking in circles again. Cry, cry, cry. F*** F*** F***
I won't go on and on but it did go on and on for about 20 minutes I would guess; good thing nobody was in the house but me...

Well, I did it.  And there was a second mouse. Did that. Talking to  myself, "OK. Done. Allright. You did it. Done. OK. You did it. It's over." And then reset them for the next round. It was the most excruciating emotional time I have ever experienced with regard to such a "trivial" event.

I sat down on the stairs and cried. Relief, I guess, releasing the tension? I don't know; I just cried.
Calming down, I wondered why I did it. If it's so horrible, why would I do that?? Well, I said I would, that's why! Well, yeah... it's only right to follow through, to be good with your word and all that but really?  Did I really need to go through all that??? And did I do something to create that drama? Is this my fault that it was so hard???
Now, I'm sitting there rationalizing the whole thing and berating myself and possibly creating more drama while I'm trying to calm down and... "Really! What is going on with me?"

And then it hit me. Good and hard. If I hadn't been sitting I probably would have fallen over.

I was 5 years old when my sister was born and that's when my mom moved me and my other younger sister into the basement of our house. It was a finished basement in that it had concrete floors and stuccoed walls. There were huge cracks in those walls, a few bulging so badly I sometimes wondered what would happen if they broke - would we be buried in the basement? And that is where the cockroaches lived too. I would watch them come in and out of those cracks and I don't believe I thought too much of it then because there were lots of bugs down there; the spiders scared me more.

Sometimes at night, when I was scared, I would call out to my parents thinking they could hear me cuz I could hear them but nobody ever came. The light in the room was a single bulb hanging from the ceiling, (if that light wasn't on, it was pitch black down there) it had a short chain that I had to pull to turn it on. Now that I think about it, that's pretty messed up; I'm not that tall at 5 years old. In the middle of the night, I would get out of bed, feel my way along the wall to a certain place where there was a chair that I could drag to the middle of the room to stand on to reach the chain; I have no clue what I did before I was tall enough to do that.

Well, that's the basement part of the story. Here is the other part:

My parents were hunters - deer squirrel, rabbit, pheasant, doves....there was always some beautiful animal hanging dead in our garage - the smell sickens me to this day.
We had an incinerator in our yard and when they brought home our "food", it was my job to take the birds out to the incinerator and take the feathers off. I would stand there and cry. I would tell them I couldn't do it. But I had to do it anyway. And then they made me eat it. I cried through that too.

I guess what this whole mousetrap thing did was bring alive the fear and loneliness of my basement life and the total despair I felt having to pluck the birds (handle a dead animal) - together they came crashing in on me, overwhelming me with feelings that I left somewhere in the past.
This is my current understanding of the body remembering trauma.

I feel better having written this. Thanks for reading.

[arpy1]

wow. wow,  respect for that!