The human mind, with all its physical nerves, hormones and neurotransmitters, is quite an amazing thing. With all its intricate, miraculous abilities, it is remarkably programmable, even to a fault. I tend to personify the heart and the mind as two separate entities, but they both lead back to the same cranial control center. It is that detail under which I find myself currently struggling.

I had a gut reflexive emotional response to something that my intellect acknowledges is not worth that level of response. I sadly confessed to my court reporter this morning that I think I’m wired wrong now, after my last relationship. Remember the days when your brain would see a problem, and then you’d have an emotional response (anger, fear, whatnot) corresponding to that perceived problem? Now, the emotional response is all over the board, all on its own, when my brain is saying, “It’s a different guy, a different situation, and there’s no problem like that here.” Maybe I’ve been wishing too hard for weight loss. Ha, ha. My court reporter said that after 2.5 years of conditioning for this kind of response on nearly a daily basis, I’m responding to the shadow of a possible threat, even if I know that the threat isn’t really there. It’s just that I’d seen the shadow so many times before in the past and it always led to the threat, and I’m so deeply scarred, and I’m so aware that I can’t go thru that kind of crap again, that I have instantaneous knee-jerk reactions to anything that has similar “key words” like triggers. (I wonder if psychologists/psychiatrists would recommend my listing these triggers to force them into physical form.)

My reporter says it takes time to retrain the mind and break prior years of associations, and the fact that I am psychoanalyzing my reactions and recognizing the disparity between reality and emotions is a good thing. It means I’m working on it. It doesn’t mean I’m not scared that what the “shadow” is would turn INTO a threat, it just means I shouldn’t be responding as if it were a threat NOW when the other person has already nipped something in the bud and I can’t even think of a better way for him to have handled this particular incident than the way he handled it. In addition to the fear, I’m also angry, but that anger is tied to the experiences in the past and not the experience now. It’s like being angry that someone had kicked a cat in the past, altho nobody kicked or is kicking my cat.

Every time I realize new ways that I’m scarred, I’m angry on top of the other feelings that come with having a scar stirred.