A choice I understand…
“‘Man or bear’ is a viral social media debate and thought experiment in which women consider whether they would prefer to be alone in the woods with a random man or a random bear. The debate originated from a TikTok video published by Screenshot HQ in April 2024, which interviewed eight women asking the question: ‘Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?’ with seven of them picking the bear. The post went viral and gained over 16 million views in two months.”
Wikipedia, “Man or bear”
When I read this, before I even gave it a second thought, I answered – “The bear.” And I meant it. A bear is a known threat. But it comes by it honestly. A man…well, a man can be many things…all of them unpredictable and many, not good. I’ll take my chances with the bear. And I am not being flippant.
There was a social media storm over this outcome, and there were articles written by men expressing outrage that women chose this. There was even one clueless man who went into a long diatribe to prove women wrong, using probability statistics of how many sex offenders there were in America, that it was actually a small percentage versus 17% of fatal bear attacks, and that OF COURSE women should take the odds of picking a man.
Truly, he has no idea what it is to go through life always having to consider whether an approaching man is a risk. To be told never to go anywhere alone. Or to be a woman who was assaulted and then criticized because she either tried to fight, didn’t fight enough, didn’t yell, yelled, wore the wrong clothes, went somewhere alone, and on and on and on.
Yet there were men who understood and chose the bear versus a man, when considering what their daughters should pick. And even social media influencer Amanda Wylie, who’d had an encounter with a bear in the Montana woods, said she would still choose the bear. I agree with her.
1 – Frozen
To understand my choosing the bear, it’s necessary to understand the emotions that drive such a choice. And to talk about the roiling mix of emotions locked up inside of me until after my mother’s death, I would first need to have felt them, and then, known what they were. And none of that was the case in 2018 and 2019.
EMDR Journal September 7, 2018:
“I felt tired and ‘flat’ going into the EMDR session – even the last few days. Just anxious, tired, sleepy and depressed. I could have done so much with the time off and I did nothing but nap….just a lot of fatigue, flat emotions…depression…it was like living through another layer of ‘back then;’ the grieving; the reliving of the emotions of ‘there’s no way out…there’s nothing I can do but try and maintain; make sure to keep him happy…do whatever it takes and forget my own needs…’”
I call this post the frozen bag of confusion because I had so many black emotions swirling around in me, locked under the surface, but they were all a jumbled mess. For a while at this time, I could feel them, but couldn’t identify what specifically was there. And, I couldn’t reach them. I was “frozen” emotionally, yet. I was banging on a locked door, and it was going to take some time to break it down and release whatever was in me.
Actually, I think the best description for this stage is to call it the emotional equivalent of the early stages of a stomach virus. You know something is wrong. You can feel the sense that something is off in your stomach. The food is not digesting or moving, just sitting there in your stomach, “going sour.”
Then your gut starts to distend, and the insides just ache. And no matter what you do or what medicine you take, nothing makes it better. That’s when you get the disturbing realization that this is going to get worse before it gets better. But it’s out of your hands to control what will happen or when. You are at the mercy of a microscopic virus, and all you can do is wait for something to finally expel itself from your body one way or the other.
That was 2018 and 2019 — frozen…sour…and clearly getting worse.
But slowly, that morass of frozen emotions began to thaw…
2 – The “Hypers”
One of the first things I finally started to notice was my behaviors, which I call “the Hypers.” I’d been living this way my whole life; I just never actually realized it before. It was just my “normal” to always live in a state of constant alert, ready to mobilize for protective action. Distilled down to its essence, the Hypers were all about personal safety and self-worth. There were a few of these behaviors.
The biggest one was hypervigilance. And by this, I don’t mean that state the Stoic philosophers recommended – “Premeditatio malorum.”
Premeditatio malorum (Latin for “premeditation of evils”) is a Stoic exercise involving the deliberate visualization of worst-case scenarios. By mentally rehearsing potential failures, losses, or hardships, you strip away the shock value of adversity, reduce anxiety, and build the psychological resilience needed to respond calmly.
From Google AI.
Considering possible worst-case scenarios from a place of centered calm and logic can be a useful tool for advance planning and resilience. It helps you choose possible paths proactively. But I lived in the opposite of centered calm- catastrophizing- which is based in reactive victim panic.
I was ALWAYS vigilant. HYPERvigilant. ALWAYS, I scanned. My husband’s mood. Friends’ facial expressions. How someone said “Good morning” to me. I was almost always sure I was in trouble, and ready to apologize for “something.” To be “safe,” I needed to be ready at a moment’s notice to spot a threat or problem and do damage control. Otherwise, I might be caught off-guard and blindsided by someone’s rage, criticism…or the worst – the silent treatment.
Silence was an especially torturous form of hell. It would be bad enough to get blindsided by an outburst. But to get NO response…AND not know why? What do you do with someone’s silence? I know Dad used it as a deadly weapon. It was intentional on his part. So of course everyone else operated the same way, right? I was convinced that if someone wasn’t talking to me, I MUST have done something wrong. And it would flood me with terror, and the desperate drive to make it better at all costs.
A related variant to hypervigilance was “hypersensitive.” To be successful at hypervigilance, I HAD to be extremely sensitive enough to immediately pick up on and identify stray emotions swirling around me. It was safety by not missing anything. From anyone.
Hyperproductivity was my security blanket, an insurance policy against anyone saying I wasn’t good enough. If I always overdelivered, I couldn’t be criticized. Again, I could be safe, AND I could briefly feel good about me because if I was overproductive, it was visible evidence of my self-worth.
A required corollary to hyperproductive was to be hyperEFFECTIVE. After all, what good is it to overdeliver if what you deliver is somehow flawed? That would be even worse to have a “flawed outcome,” because I was basically giving them both the evidence of my worthlessness and the ammunition to attack me.
3 – Fear, Anxiety, Body Memories, and the “Heaviness” of Despair and Depression
As I looked closer at those behaviors, I began to identify the emotions underneath them.
The biggest ones, of course, were fear and anxiety. While they still live inside of me today, at least now I know they are there, I know why they are there, and I have some tools to ease them. But a few years ago, I would be blindsided and in agony. And upset that I had somehow failed to “prevent them from coming on.”
They are from the place inside where old memories are still alive, triggering my nervous system to flood me with panic-driven hormones fueling terror. They are the sensations that pop up now when I am doing something ordinary that is too close to a past incident. My psyche identifies a past threat as a current one, and then all hell breaks loose inside me.
For example, I get up early every day and work straight through my day. I like being busy. But by the evening, I am often exhausted, and once settled into my chair in front of the TV, I sometimes just CANNOT keep my eyes open. When my mother would do that, my father would absolutely rage at her and yell at her to just go to bed. His opinion was that unless she was awake and always ready to respond to him, she was useless. So he would angrily dismiss her like a piece of trash. Now, when I fall asleep on the couch, I wake up terrified that my husband is going to be angry with me…even though he isn’t. He just laughs at my sleepiness and gathers stuffed animals around me. But I am terrified because one of these days I am convinced that my “man of the house” will dismiss ME as worthless to him.
Body memories are closely related to fear and anxiety. The difference is that unlike the fear and anxiety I feel when I recall a specific memory, THESE come from a time during my infancy, when I had no narrative memory or images I can recall. It was a “pre-verbal” time, so I had no words to express what was being done to me at that moment. I will be doing something simple like making a jigsaw puzzle, and I find myself getting more and more tense. Why?
Or I come out of a movie theater and am filled with dread as I shift back to regular life from the imaginary world I escaped into during the movie. All I have are these vague terrors, body aches, or a crushing darkness that makes it almost impossible to do anything.
About that heavy depression, it could go on for a few months at a time. It was like an actual physical presence, a force pressing down on me so hard I just wanted to stay in bed. I could barely make me do anything, and each day was a fight to get up and get going. That depression made the ordinary state of “inertia” look like an action movie.
I will talk about trauma and what it does in the body in a future post. But this painting is a very accurate depiction of what my insides feel like during those moments.
And if I could have taken a photo of my despairing “inner self” at the time, I suspect I would have looked like this:
4 – Worthlessness, Shame, Grief/Sorrow/Ache, and Anger – The “Mother Wound”
There was another powerful force fueling all the anxiety, fear, and despair – that “Mother Wound.” And the image that most defined that wound was “the turned back.”
I needed her in those moments…either he was groping me or yelling at me. And especially in those latter moments, she never once turned around and asked me if I was okay. He was groping me, and she was right there across the room, or a couple of feet away in bed. In my head I was screaming “TURN AROUND!!!!” Could she have been that blind? Or was it just that she knew better than to look?
Maybe it could be missed once or twice, but not 28 years. She was battered by him. Terrorized by him. And she had no means to support us. And it was the 1960s. No support system. No help from anyone. So I think she did the only thing she could – bury herself in a deep denial.
She was not an emotional force in my life and not a role model. Instead, what I learned was that I was on my own. That I didn’t matter except to do what I had to do to keep him happy, and me surviving another day.
I felt abandoned. And worthless. I served him. The family system. That was it. And 28 years of that creates a huge open wound of ache and grief, sorrow and …yes anger.
It’s why for so many years when my husband would tell me I was precious to him, I absolutely cringed and couldn’t stand to hear it. In my mind, I WASN’T precious! I was INVISIBLE! And no one cared. I just got used to that being the normal.
And all of that hurt fueled such a hunger for a mother’s love, protection, and caring that I spent decades of my adult life looking for it everywhere. It was the reason so many of my friendships with women went so poorly. I needed a mother and sought it in friends. An impossible and toxic situation. I’ll come back to this one later.
5 – The Shame of the “Stink of Powerlessness”
While I am known as a fighter now, I couldn’t be all those years in the past. And my current self in 2018 and 2019 absolutely DESPISED me for it. I felt such shame because I LET myself be helpless with him. All my adult years, I looked back at the me of those earlier years and raged at myself for not fighting back. At least I thought I didn’t.
It wasn’t until I started going back through all my journals from the years I was trapped in that house that I realized just how much I DID fight…and kept on trying until I finally got out.
The reality is that when someone “takes your power” from you right from infancy on, and uses you to fill their needs, they are essentially a parasite sucking the very life out of you. It was an unfair fight.
And for reasons I’ll share later, I knew that as I got older, I had to choose carefully how I fought back. To give in to my rage and physically fight back might have gotten me hurt or killed. The STRONGER choice…the one I made then…was to refuse to let him bait me. That was the one choice I had control over, and I stuck to it. And he hated me for it. So I know now that I wasn’t powerless or weak.
But in 2018 and 2019, I still thought so. And so, while underserved, I was drowning in self-inflicted shame…and self-loathing. Intellectually, I knew that was wrong, but emotionally I couldn’t accept it.
6 – Self-Hate
So, combine all of these emotions and what it came down to was this giant well of self-hate. I was punishing myself for his sin. But I had made it mine. I hated me for it, and my journal said it all:
7/22/18 Journal:
“Whatever it was he saw in me that made him choose me, I was determined that part of me would NOT survive.”
No one had loved me in that house. And because of all the things I carried, I didn’t either. And worse, I thought I didn’t deserve it. I wouldn’t allow it. At least I hadn’t…yet.
It was finally during this time in 2018 and 2019 that I started to see the true nature of all that toxic mess inside me. And it was finally at this time that I decided I had to confront it all if I was ever going to move into a better future.
It wasn’t going to be easy. And definitely not fun. If I had any doubt of that, the new nightmares that started appearing during this time would make that clear…..
Note:
I am seeking financial support to complete my memoir, work with an editor, and make a visit to my home state for fact-checking. Your help would mean the world to me as I take this step toward healing and giving voice to my journey.
Please like, comment, and share this post to help spread the word. The link for my fundraiser is on GoFundMe. Thank you for your support.
Soul Mosaic 
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