Back to the beginning…
“What do you do when the person you are dependent on for safety becomes the source of danger
Dr Becky Kennedy on parenting and how trauma happens
https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/dr-becky-kennedy-protocols-for-excellent-parenting-improving-relationships-of-all-kinds
57 xxxx Avenue, Torrington, 1955-1957
In one respect, I wish I could go back in time to 1955-1957 and be a fly on the wall in this apartment. But maybe it’s better I can’t. Whatever went on at 57 xxxx Avenue is something I will never know because I can’t remember…consciously. But boy my body does.
This was the first place my parents lived when they got married, and it was my home for the first two years of my life. It’s always been almost an afterthought, a place mentioned in passing by my parents without much significance. After that, we moved to the house my grandfather purchased across town and the one I really consider my childhood home.
Google Maps Street View
A few years ago, with nothing better to do on a lazy afternoon, I thought I would check it out just to see what the place looked like. I knew the address and that it was on the western side of town, but that was about it. But, one of the benefits of the digital age is that if you have an address you can instantly “travel” almost anywhere in the world via Google Maps and get a street view.
With no notion one way or the other about what to expect, I typed in the address and hit return. The view was off by a house or two so I adjusted the image and closed in on “57.”
The body remembers
However, even before the house was totally in the frame or I could form a conscious thought about it, as soon as I spotted the porch and the number 57 on the post I was flooded with fear. Not just a mild anxiety, but a full-blown terror. Depression. Sense of foreboding.
I looked past the porch at the gray-black windows and my gut tightened. While the window shades blocked any view into the house, I was immediately aware that this was not a place I wanted to see into, much less enter. Shaking, I closed the screen.
A personal visit
A few years later I visited Torrington, drove up that street, and stopped in front of that house. I wondered if the original reaction was just a fluke and wanted to see the place in person.
However, the minute I parked, it was all I could do to stay long enough to snap the picture above. I felt afraid and just wanted to leave. If a place could be described by the energy it gave a person, this one would be “crushing heaviness.” Whatever was imprinted into my “infant nervous system” in that house, whatever the story was of what went on behind those windows in the 1950s, I don’t remember it. But my body does, and it was not good.
Get the hell out
Choking on anxiety and a rising sense of depression, I put the car in gear and drove off.
Tags: 1950s, abuse, anxiety, Dad, depression, domestic abuse, fear, foreboding, Google Maps, health, mental-health, recoil, sexual abuse, Torrington CT, trauma
Soul Mosaic 
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