Templates for the Future

How early experience comes back to haunt us…

image by Bricolage/Shutterstock

I’ve been thinking about how experiences early in life serve as some kind of template or stencil into which future experiences fit, or we force to fit, to support and correspond to some belief the original experience created.

Example: I’m a toddler, ambulatory but not able to speak yet. I can think in words, but my soft palate hasn’t developed enough to enable me to make sounds that correspond to the words I’m thinking so clearly.

My father, alternately my hero or my tormentor, is getting ready to leave the house. He’s standing at the front door looking at me with what I think is love, amusement, delight. At that moment, he’s in hero mode. His hand is on the doorknob. I’m thinking: “Take me with you!” but what comes out of my mouth is garbled gobbledygook to which my father responds by waving and saying cheerfully “Bye bye. Bye bye.” I realize that my attempts to communicate the urgency of my desire to go with him have been misinterpreted, and I renew my efforts to put my thoughts into words: “Goddamnit! Take me with you! Don’t leave without me!” but my efforts result in “Bamadahpegaananaba!” and are met with, yet again, the benign smile as though he understands everything I’m saying and responds with “Bye bye. Bye bye.”

He then opens the door, walks out and shuts it behind him leaving me bereft on the other side.

The effect of this early experience, a memory I consider a “screen memory,” a term Freud coined to describe a memory from childhood that may or may not be accurate. In any event, it sort of sets the stage for a belief followed by behavior based on the belief.

My speculation is that this memory created a belief in me that I am not understood. The behavior that emerged from this belief is that I take great pains to be understood, going on and on well past any audience I might have understanding what I’m trying to convey. For most of my life, being understood has had a tinge of urgency to it, and at any hint of being misunderstood the urgency gets ramped up a notch or two and I search for analogies, synonyms, metaphors. Tolerating being misunderstood is not an easy state for me to be in without some agitation. I’ve had to work at it, but am known for being somewhat verbose.

Another possible “screen memory” is something that happened when I was in fifth grade.

I was just starting to find my way socially among my classmates, never developing close friendships the previous years in school, not having friends over to my house or being invited to friends’ homes. My recollection is that for much of those first 5 years, including kindergarten, I was essentially invisible––not particularly noticed, noone seeking to be my “special friend” until somehow it was discovered that I played the piano fairly well right around forth grade and I became somewhat famous in my school for that.

In my fifth grade was a girl, Joyce. Joyce was popular, a girl others wanted to spend time with, others wanted her to want to spend time with them. She took ballet, something I longed to do after seeing the 1947 movie “The Unfinished Dance” with Margaret O’Brien and Cyd Charisse. I was not allowed to take ballet because I was an asthmatic child, but the longing was there and I would practice dancing around the house on my toes without toe shoes (I was apparently light enough to do this without breaking my toes, a condition never to be enjoyed by me again in my life as my skinny self morphed into a more substantial corpulent body thanks to adolescence and beyond).

Back to Joyce, or I should say Joyce and me. Our friendship was nascent, and we had actually had some activities outside school that was promising to perhaps develop into a “best” friendship.

Sometimes during the school day, our teacher would allow us to go outside to read or study with a companion where there were park benches and tables set up nearby. On the particular day of my trauma, Joyce and I had agreed to go outside together during this prescribed period of time. We got to the front door of the classroom, when Nancy, another popular girl who also took ballet, approached Joyce, whispered something in her ear, after which Joyce turned toward me and while they both looked at me said: “Sorry Patsy.” (I was Patsy in those days.) And with that they both walked out together leaving me standing by the door, crushed.

Just “Sorry.” No explanation. No reason. Was it because I didn’t take ballet also? Who knows. Dropped, just like that.

Now one might think “Yeah. That sucked!” but it might be difficult to see how it would affect one’s future life except to not trust incipient friendships. Which would be not altogether a bad thing.

Fast forward 60 years. There is a group of maybe 5 or so older women who sometimes socialize, celebrating each others’ birthdays, having lunches and sometimes dinners as a group or two or three together. Coming up is the birthday of one of us. One of the friends –– I’ll call her Joan –– tells me that she and one of the other women –– whom I’ll call Sarah –– are taking out a third friend, Monique, for lunch for her birthday, and would I like to come? Of course.

Next day, the friend that invited me gets ahold of me to tell me that she was so so sorry, but Sarah, the organizer of the birthday lunch, told her not to invite me. Sarah told her that Monique wouldn’t like there to be so many of us, and that her intention was simply to organize a small group of the three of them and having me would take away too much attention from the birthday celebrant. So I was uninvited.

Suddenly, I’m 10 again standing alone by the classroom door, hearing Joyce say “Sorry Patsy.”

So many early experiences create these soft vulnerabilities that are accessed unexpectedly, and we’re thrust into a psychological time in the past in which our wound’s scab is ripped off. And even with years of therapy and insight and maturity, emotionally there it is again. Even with understanding where the feeling comes from and when it originated, being able to logically think “what the hell is wrong with them that they could do something so hurtful?” the “ouch” is real and surprising.

Much of our navigating through life as we age is ideally recognizing and knowing where our feeling states originated, learning to regulate emotions, realizing that now is not then, that we have some emotional maturity and tools to deal with what some might call “triggers.”

Still. Ouch.