“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
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 my body seems to.
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, because the place I really considered my childhood home would be a house my grandfather purchased across town. But this was the first home.
Google Maps Street View
A few years ago, on a quiet afternoon, I thought I would revisit that first home, just to see what the place looked like now. I knew the address and that it was on the west 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 an online search 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.”
What 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, my body reacted…and not in a good way.
There was no logical reason for my chest muscles to tighten, my pulse to speed up, but they did. Fear, not just a mild anxiety, but full-blown terror shot through me along with heaviness…sadness…foreboding.
I looked past the porch at the gray-black windows and had to quickly look away. Window shades blocked my view into the house, and I was actually relieved. I was suddenly consumed with an awareness that this was not a place I wanted to see into, much less enter. I smacked the exit key on the laptop and closed the screen.
A personal visit
A few years later, I visited Torrington, drove up that street, and stopped in front of that house. That reaction haunted me, and I had to know if it was just a fluke. So I went to see the place in person.
But again, as I slowed to a stop and shifted into park, my heart started pounding. It was all I could do to stay long enough to snap the picture above. For no reason I can give, I was totally afraid and recoiled at the thought of going in that door. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of there. I put the car in gear and drove off.
If you could ascribe energy to a place, this one would be “horror movie.” Whatever was stored in my “infant nervous system” while living in that house, whatever went on behind those windows in the 1950s, I have no conscious memory of. But my body remembers something, and I don’t ever need to go back there again.
Soul Mosaic 
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