Wow…so little known about it, such a huge and impactful issue.

I have brain trauma…and likely have had (very mild) Reactive Attachment Disorder since my inception.  That is not an official diagnosis, for Reactive Attachment Disorder is something very severe…certainly I have Early Trauma.

That makes me something called

“non neurotypical”.

A neuro-typical person has a brain more like a Four-Square Ball…slap it around and it dohing dohing dohing bouncy bouncy back up to the next player no problem.

A non neuro-typical person has a brain that is like a finely fashioned delicate blown-glass globe. It is scary beautiful, capable of much…except that since most people’s brains resemble said Four-Square Ball, they take the delicate glass globe, call out SERVICE and slap it down to the ground…

…and when it doesn’t just bounce back up?

They get angry and blame the non neuro-typical person.

Whose brain is splattered/shattered on the cement and needs time and space and something…SOMETHING…to reset it, and that thing is never the same and often times never comes and the storm just has to be ridden out…the raging river rapids ridden, bashed from rock to rock and battered until it spits you out at the other side…

It is awful…because as a non neurotypical I always feel so guilty…and I always feel like no one else receives the reality that I am trapped in. It feels like they think I am copping out and giving an excuse, having a built in alibi and justification…

…when the truth is during those times my brain aches and throbs and hurts and my mind feels like molasses-soaked cotton…and I have to work about a million times harder to just to be in my expected place.

When I was little, I used to walk around the house crying for no apparent reason, and according to the stories when I was asked what was wrong, I would wail “It’s the end of the world”…

…that is how it feels.

Typical reaction of others is either some form of shaming that I am not “bucking up and coping” and that is accompanied with boasts of how that person bucks up and deals with it, and concluding with castigation to quit feeling sorry for myself and just move on.

just move on. wow. if only.

if only…moving on sounds wonderful.

There is another reaction that follows often as well…someone will get close, someone will feel some twinge of sympathy or compassion and choose to come close, seeing ONLY the outlands of this territory of hellish trauma…and they will say things that lead me to believe they will be present in the nightmare.

Until they get a few leagues into it…and realize this land is like the Marshes of the Dead that abutted Mordor.

And WHOOSH…they disappear and brush out their tracks fast as they go…and I am accustomed to that and know how to cope with that. Cultivation of hobbies that can be done alone are therapeutic.

The last group though…they are the most onerous and dangerous. They are the ones who will not hear me when I ask them to please stop…please stop pushing me, please stop trying to help me in ways that are not helpful but are actually just all about them and their power-play (that they are totally unaware they are engaging in, as they see themselves as the great educator of the poor benighted and incapable person)…to them, they imagine I will fall to my knees sooo grateful that they deign to give me the off-scourings of their greatness.

That group is the worst, because I know what happens to me…and I beg them to please stop because they push me too far and I snap inside my mind and all my abilities and all my capacities go into defending me from harm…and I am intellectually capable of abstract thought and I am quick to sense and perceive what others are trying to do and I can out-think them and out-argue them.

I go into defense mode, and I cannot stop. Not “I won’t stop”.

I cannot.

I will observe every contradiction and throw it in their face. I will sense every inconsistency and challenge them about why they are trying to hold me to some things but not hold themselves to the same standard.

And those people? They leave finally, and usually bruised and hateful towards me because I hurt them…

…and I am the bad person, the unpredictable person, the inconsistent person, the unreliable person.

When in reality, my brain lies shattered on the playground pavement.

And then, the easy peasy low hanging fruit begins to beckon and croon…and the gender issue raises, and the tranny-freak thing sneaks in…their minds, my mind…it doesn’t really matter which by this point.

Sometimes I want to take spoons and go in thru my eyes and scoop my brain cavity clean and start fresh.

That, my friends, is what brain trauma does.  And by the way?  It can be traumatized by just about anything, really…the obvious culprit of war or tragedy…but it can be from bullying, it can be from the way our brain chemistry is, it can be from dysphoria…it can be from childhood events that were done without any bad intent but still resulted in trauma…

…and some brains can skate right thru things that traumatize other brains.
There is nothing to boast of if you are neurotypical…and there is no shame if you are not.

In the meantime, if you have a loved one who has trauma, be aware that PTSD is a real thing…

…for the traumatized person, from a neurological point of view, it is not just a memory.  The traumatized person experiences the events of the moment, but their brain is present in the midst of the actual trauma!

The brain that is traumatized is functioning in the midst of trauma even though the events in that moment may not actually be traumatizing…but soon do become so due to the brain functioning in trauma.  It adds itself to the pot of trauma, to the witches’ brew of horrors.

So that is the story of brain trauma.  For more information, google it.

For more information about this, check out this link:

chrome-extension://oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm/http://attachmentnewengland.com/documents/educators.pdf