Curing trauma drama

"Good lord, get over it." I said to myself with a laugh about a complaining friend. As I uttered those words it was as though someone had held up a mirror in front of me.

"Huh..." Okay, so I ramble about old shit too, probably more than I realize.

Some of us go over old situations in our heads a zillion times getting us caught up in a ground hog day effect per say. Why? It surely won't change the outcome but it will change how we view our world today. Playing that record over and over again in our minds trying to figure out at what point it all went wrong and what we could have done differently. Then we project it into the future onto people we haven't even met yet.

I have been presented with yet another friend this year that bitches, moans and goes over negative scenarios a hundred times like they happened yesterday. Charged with the same emotional state, it's like cutting open an old wound and reliving the trauma.

Trauma Drama!.....

A natural function of our brain is to rationalize what it experiences through senses, categorizing every smell, assigning a memory to it and filing it away. Next time we smell apples that memory is brought up. But what happens when our brains experience a traumatic event? How does it rationalize what it experienced? Unless there a tangible method to analyze the data, it can't. Kinda like Robot from Lost in Space. "Does not compute." Then, like a computer we go over it and over it and over it struggling to make sense of it.

When you throw a ball up into the air and it lands on your head, it's not difficult to theorize why it happened, learn from it and move on. But when situations happen where one is the victim of someone else's  rage, negligence or harm it's impossible to test theories to find out what went wrong. Like opinions about rape victims from the way they were dressed to leading them on, yadda yadda. Just ways for the brain to rationalize a traumatic event. Shameful I know. Just ask any rape victim how many times they go over the situation in their minds trying to make sense of it?

 This is where religious people claim faith using a god, universe or purpose for some event that the brain can't rationalize.

Unless everyone sits down and goes through psychotherapy, the purpose of an event may never be known. There is no way of  knowing what's going on in someone else's mind, they may not even know why they did something. Mistakes, accidents, random events happen all the time.

I've created a miscellaneous folder in my brains filing system called "HUH..." filled with events that make no sense whatsoever. I contains sub-files like:

"Couldn't have done it any different"
"WTF!"
"Limited technology"
"Well find out when we die"

In the mean time people do and say stupid shit, and I am people too. I'm sure there's a guy out there somewhere banging his head on the wall wondering what happened to us and where it went wrong. Sorry man....I don't even know.

I remind myself often something my dad told me when I was young. If there's something you can do about it, do it, if not let it go.

Don't get caught up in the trauma drama.

Homeless system

Our society frowns heavily on homeless people. "Bums, drugs addicts, alcoholics, dumb people who can't manage money, con-artists or lazy." Homeless shelters, community programs, friends and family will just help you get back into the system. But what if you don't want to be part of the system?

Gone are the days of traveling west, finding a homestead and building a life for you and your family. Farming, owning a retail store, fixing things. Every  inch of our country is either privately owned or owned by a government agency. It's not illegal to be homeless, as long as you keep moving. If you stop on private property you are a vagrant who is either squatting, trespassing or loitering.

I once watched a group of homeless people sit in a park who chose to be homeless. They "didn't want to be part of a broken system."

"But you're wearing commercially made clothing paid for by someone else, using a commercially made toothbrush paid for by someone else, using commercially made toilet paper also paid for by someone else and eating food made and paid for by someone else." I said. "How is that NOT being part of the system?"

Choosing to live out of the system requires intelligence and resourcefulness. Living alone or in pairs, understanding sanitation and cleanliness, making money and buying your own food, clothing and necessities. Living that lifestyle because of life events is another story.

I've seen and experienced people going from relationship to relationship, family member to family member utilizing their kindness until the welcome wears out. The family members still have to pay for shelter, food and comforts. One can't "mooch" off those who are "in" the system, find those you can join that are not "in" the system.

Living in monasteries, work in exchange for room and board situations or finding a remote location are about it. If you're quiet, clean and don't start too many fires it can be done in smaller towns. Our system has been set up so no one gets out. While no one can force you to get a job, pay rent or buy their crap laws have been set up to make living homeless in the open almost impossible.

The only way to not be part of any system is to be dead and even then your ashes are now part of the earth or your body is taking up space in the ground someone had to pay for. Getting into the system to get out of the system is another way.