WRITINGS: STUFF AND STORE

Stuff and Store

No. This isn’t about the stuff in the store. Well, maybe it is. This is about the emotions we experience, don’t deal with, let our subconscious mind stuff and store them in an internal ‘big box warehouse’. The ‘stuff’ that keeps repeating itself in the disguise of different scenarios, different people, but the pain is the same. So are the re-act-ions — reacting the same way we do every time they show up.

This is about the repeated scenarios of abuse through generations of ‘stuffers’ who don’t deal, get batted around and imprisoned in their ‘don’t you get it, I don’t care’ coat of protection, and are repeat offenders, not even realizing it because they don’t want to hear about any of it. So Sad!

If 50% of the American population is divorced, then this article may be approaching 50% of you all. Those are not very friendly statistics and are nevertheless, facts. Who gets the brunt of this destructive tearing family fabric?

Let’s talk for a minute about how fabric is made. We have woven goods and knit goods. There is a Bible verse in the New Testament: “that their hearts may be encouraged, having been knit together in love, and attaining to all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, Cor.2:2…”. One more… “And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit* with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” 1Sa18:1.

In this reference it tells us that two men, from opposing sides, became friends who were closer than brothers. They joined together having their individual lives knit together, supporting one another as one. In a moment, I will explain how that concept is a beautiful picture of a knitted work. The woven fabric is not stretchable. If you pull a thread out, it beings to fray, like distressed jeans. It puckers and folds rather than neatly wraps about a form. It needs darts and other sutures to fit.

We can learn from each other if we allow a fine-tuning to take place. Each person has a side of their story to tell; they each have their ‘come-from’. Together weeding out the erroneous thoughts we have come to believe are the facts that really aren’t facts, reveal (unveil) the cause of our denial and pain. When anything close to the real issues are mentioned it is about allowing each other to speak while one listens, then reciprocating. Calling the other person slanderous names, shouting ‘don’t you get it I really don’t care, it’s too painful to go there’, the bottom line is this: If they really did NOT care, there would be no pain.

Pain is proof that they DO care, they do feel. Bringing the ‘stuff’ up is not about being disrespectful, it’s about finding a healing place. We cannot go around. We have to go through. Remaining shut down, not wanting to listen or hear what the other has to say in a neutral, charge down state of being, leaves them closed to receive breakthrough ideas that may heal some of that pain, closes off the portal to receive SATORI (explained in another essay). They avoid seeing how they are another generation perpetrating the abuse syndrome, with no choice about behaving differently to achieve better relationships in their life. They were not born being a ‘people hater’. They learned that from someone else.

Let’s look at the word ‘BEHAVE’ for a moment: BE and Have. Does Be and Have, put together, equal ‘ACQUIRE’? When we are ‘being’ a particular way we get to ‘have’ or acquire the results or consequences. Results being positive gains, or con-sequences (con=without) being subtractive, negative ramifications. Which one do you think pain falls into? It’s the dump, the receptacle for left over garbage. Garbage smells real bad after lying dormant for a long time. When it lays dormant in the human body over time, the invisible pain ferments and transforms into physical ailments, weight gain, and most often, into terminal dis-ease.

Let’s face it. We all have baggage. Some even have wreckage. Handling it is an art, like packing a suitcase is an art. If we learn how to pack our bag-gage (the larger the suitcase, the more ‘stuff’ inside), our lives would be richer and better off.

Getting back to the Stuff and Store. Why is it that some people treat their pets better than their spouses or children? They even show more love to their fish than each other! It is a question to ponder. Perhaps in their childhood they were the secondary victim of abuse, and lived through two parents constantly bickering and at each other’s throats.

The child learned to cope by hiding, burying his head under the pillow on his bed, and eventually, cramming the pain so deep it got forgotten as he aged into an adult. So often this same child, as an adult, will begin treating his mother the same way he heard his dad treat her, in a demeaning, disrespectful, nasty and cruel manner.

When the mother attempts to broach the subject with him twenty years later, she witnesses the same behavior rise up, the same words come out of her son’s mouth. Where she sees pain, and knows she is only being a mirror of what he has stuffed and stored over twenty years, he sees her as the b—h, talking about the taboo ‘stuff’ he doesn’t want to hear, and writes to her in an email, “we just don’t get along”.

He’s right! He is numbed out, refuses to listen to the facts in a neutral manner and causes, denies the past even existed. No way in perpetration of his own hell will he go there. So what’s left? Being ‘politically correct’? Discussing the weather? Recounting his day? He can do that with a stranger, who really doesn’t care. How is THAT ‘knit together in love’? It is a woven fit, frayed edges, holes and all… not a knit fit.

Lastly, a knit* fabric has stretch and give. It withstands pulling and tugging. It is pliant, durable, molds itself into many shapes and forms, is warming, temperate, and above all, flexible. When two people are knit together in love, they don’t dis one another, call each other destructive names and accusations. They are temperate, Allowing, Accepting, Appreciative, Acknowledging. Four ‘A’s’. Openness is being Vulnerable; creating a viaduct for healing to replace the pain of the past. Did you ever hear ‘you can’t change the past’?

Well, we can’t change the events, but we can surely change the emotional price tags born from them. If we don’t get that every event shows up to be a lesson for us to become better people (what doesn’t kill us, strengthens us), in jumping over the hurdles instead of turning the other way in defeat, then we continue to suffer. People, no matter who they are, if they get honest, will always be the mirror of your ‘big box store’, where your pain is stacked on huge shelves. The difference between actually going into a ‘warehouse’ like Costco and the ‘warehouse’ of your soul, is this: In the physical store you can never find a sales associate to assist you; in the place of your soul, the people that love most, the ones you continue to abuse are ready, willing and able to assist healing your pain, of sharing your burden, getting you ready to face the shattered past, knit together, and clear out where you have stuffed and stored the heart of love you were born with.