A large cross section of society has those words scrapped into the raw emotion of their lives, and you either react to it positively or in rage.   It’s called Therapy.

Somewhere between knowing that a “Cigar is just a Cigar” and having a best friend to listen, Mental Heath Therapists as they are called – Politically Correctly,  have bloomed like mold on cheese.  Not sure if they do as much good as that bacteria either.  Having been on the receiving end of such therapy on one than more occasions due to emotional drama in my life, it gave me a place to chat but nothing more.  Having a place to air out emotion is a good thing and if you don’t have friends or family to listen, paying someone is the next best option I suppose.  However, getting to the bottom of a serious emotional problem isn’t as one sided as cleaning out a physical wound and watching for infection until it heals.  Mental injury is mocked, avoided and most of all based upon personal memory.  Personal memory is as individual as a fingerprint and no forensic science will ever find two identical sides of a memory.

After speaking with a therapist after my father passed away, it dawned on me each event I was dealing with in those days and months was directly tied to an emotion.  People remember more of their lives than other because of the same emotion and how they lived, loved, laughed and cried.   Several memories I see in photographs, I long to remember but they escape me.  Why?  for no other reason, than my emotionally response at the time.  It is much like cymbals at the end of a huge musical score, if the moment isn’t punctuated, it is just filed.

I can remember sounds, smells and everything connected one Christmas when I was about six.  Not bad for a 50 year old!  So why that moment, and not one tucking in my children at night?  I love them beyond words so why would a 44 year old thought mean more than one of my children?   Simple, the moments of love and compassion I gave and shared my daughters layered onto my heart in happiness and one into another I watched them grow and knew we loved each other.  The emotion was simple and calm.  However, that Christmas I got a doll I wanted more than anything, it was December cold and I was sitting on our beige sculpted carpet.  My older sister wanted to help out the poor doll and with a can of Aqua Net hairspray (I seriously can taste it in my mouth now!) she back combed and teased that hair into a cotton candy puff that was sprayed until her fate was “sealed”.  The doll was never the same, her early saran hair was melted, and the doll I loved was destroyed in a misguided act of kindness.  I was heart broken.

The memory was forever attached to a broken heart and quickly can be recalled.  But it was MY broken heart.  My sister I am sure not only doesn’t really remember it, she most likely remembers doing something nice and her stupid kid sister cried.  How could a therapist understand or help that memory?  Especially,  if I never forgave my sister and was damaged forever because of it.

They couldn’t understand. They could only offer airspace to get it off my chest and that sentence we all know”  “So how did that make you feel?   False memories became an outcry in the 1990’s when therapists in their inability to help adjust to emotional pain ended up re-writing the memories to make sense.  More harm than good.

It would be the total down fall of the politically correct Mental Health System if everyone could own their emotions and see how they attach to our history.  Just like the blind men examining the elephant, every touch, smell and feeling is unique to an individual and coupled with daily life we build the foundation we stand on.  No one else stands like we do or appreciates what we do because they aren’t there like we are.

I have an adult daughter who remembers her favorite guinea pig passing away during the winter.  She couldn’t bear to have him buried for weeks.  So he was put in a favorite basket with some silk flowers and tightly sealed in a film of clear wrap.  In her heart and memory I am sure she kept him alive in her daily visits until she was ready to let him go and made peace with a difficult moment in her childhood.   I however remember having an eternal Easter basket version of Lenin’s Tomb on cluttered work bench which I passed daily, sometimes smiling and sometimes rolling my eyes.  It became a family joke later.

The guarantee is that it added to the character of my daughter, filling her heart with compassion and learning lessons of life and death she will pass to her own daughter one day. She probably remembers we cared and helped make a difference.  But that is her memory just as mine is mine, and yet it is the very same event in our past.  Unlike a one-sided  physical injury that heals or scars due to treatment, these events react off each other even years later,  and can never be healed or understood in a stand alone solution.

One man’s Easter basket is another Man’s political tomb after all.