Healing from an emotional trauma or extended traumatic experience is a like a long, intimate dance with reality. Or perhaps a three-act ballet. We are on the stage of our own minds, surrounded by the props of our lives, dancing to the music of our emotions. Our memories flash on the backdrop or float around like ribbons in the air. Down below the stage, in the orchestra pit, a chorus puts words to the feelings and gives us advice drawn from our parents’ rules, our church’s rules, all the rules from the movies and books and conversations that have ever colored our thinking.
And our job is to dance our way through the acts.
The first act is named “Magic Thinking.” We stumble onto the stage, stunned, confused and in pain. Our first dance is denial — the “it doesn’t matter” dance. Our second dance is bargaining — the “maybe I can persuade whoever is in power to fix this” dance. The third and last dance before the intermission is anger.
This article is about anger.
The emotional spine
Everyone here who has gone through the angry phase knows how complex it is. We are indignant, bitter, sarcastic, outraged, waving our fiery swords of blame. We are also — finally — articulate, funny, re-asserting power over our lives. We are hell on wheels, demanding justice or retribution. We are also in transition between bargaining and letting go, so all this is tinged with hope on one side and grief on the other.
Anger really deserves a book, rather than a brief article. It is the end of the first act of our healing, because it really changes everything — our way of seeing, our thinking, our judgments, the way we move forward. Like the element of fire, it can be clarifying, but it can also be destructive. To complicate the situation further, many (if not all of us) tended to repress our anger before we entered this healing process.
So it may be helpful to discuss what anger is, where it comes from. What we call anger is part of a spectrum of reactions that originates in the oldest part of our brain. The brain stem, sometimes called the lizard brain, oversees automatic survival mechanisms like breathing, heartbeat, hunger, sleep and reproduction. It also generates powerful emotional messages related to survival.
These messages travel through increasingly sophisticated layers of our emotional and intellectual processing. One of those layers, the limbic system or mammal brain, is where we keep memories of good and bad events, and work out how to maximize pleasure and avoid pain (often through addictive strategies). The messages pass through this layer on the way to our cerebral cortex.
There in the thinking layer, we name things and organize them. We maintain concepts of community and identity (right and left brain), and we manipulate them continually to run our lives as thinking, self-aware beings. Beyond the thinking brain is the even more advanced area of the frontal cortex, which maintains our awareness of the future, interconnectivity (holistic thinking), and the “high level” views that further moderate our primitive responses into philosophic and spiritual meanings.
What our thinking brains name “anger” is actually a sensation of physical and emotional changes caused by the brain stem in reaction to perceived danger. The spectrum of those danger-related sensations roughly includes alertness, fear and anger. While our higher brain may see a purpose in separating fear and anger into different categories, our lizard brain doesn’t make those distinctions. It just keeps altering our hormones and brain chemicals for all kinds of situations, depending on its analysis of what we need to do to survive.
The point of this long digression is this: alertness-fear-anger responses are a normal part of our ability to survive. They travel “up” into our higher processing as the strong spine of our survival mechanism. There is nothing wrong with feeling them. In fact, paying attention to them is better for us in every way than ignoring our feelings (denial) or trying to delude ourselves about what is happening (bargaining).
The many forms of anger
One of the most interesting things about the English language is its many verb forms, which express various conditions of timeliness and intent. I can. I could. I could have. I would have. I might have. I should have. I will. I might. I was going to.
Those same factors of timeliness and intent can be found in the many facets of anger. Bitterness and resentment are simmering forms of anger related to past and unhealed hurts. Likewise sarcasm and passive-aggressive communications are expressions of old disappointment or despair. Frustration is a low-level form of anger, judging a circumstance or result as unsatisfactory. Contempt and disgust are more pointed feelings associated with negative judgments.
When anger turns into action, we have explosive violence, plans for future revenge and sabotage. When anger is turned on ourselves, we have depression and addictions. The judgments associated with anger foster black-and-white thinking, which can be the basis for bias and all kinds of “ism’s,” especially if the anger is old, blocked for some reason, and thus diffuse or not directed primarily at its source. This typically happens when we feel disempowered to defend ourselves.
All of that sounds pretty terrible and toxic. But, in fact, the most toxic forms of anger are the ones in which the anger is not allowed to surface. The lizard brain does not stop trying to protect us until we deal with the threat, and so we live with the brain chemicals and hormones of anger until we do.
Anger can also be healthy. The anger of Jesus toward the money changers in the temple is a model of righteous anger. In response to trauma, righteous anger is a crucial part of the healing process. Anger has these characteristics:
• Directed at the source of the problem
• Narrowly focused and dominating our thinking
• Primed for action
• Intensely aware of personal resources (internal and environmental)
• Willing to accept minor losses or injuries to win
Anger is about taking care of business. At its most primitive level, anger is what enables us to defend our lives, to kill what would kill us. In modern times, it enables us to meet aggression with aggression in order to defend ourselves or our turf. We expect to feel pain in these battles, but we are fighting to win.
However, anger also has its exhilaration, a sense of being in a moment where we claim our own destiny. For those of us who have been living through the relatively passive and self-defeating agony of denial and bargaining, anger can feel wonderful.
As it should, because anger is the expression of our deepest self, rejecting this new reality. We are finally in speaking-up mode. We are finally taking in our situation and saying, “No! I don’t want this. I don’t like it. I don’t like you for creating this in my life. I don’t like how it feels. I don’t like what I’m getting out of it. And if it doesn’t stop this instant, I want you out of my life.”
Getting over our resistance to anger
Of course, we don’t exactly say that when we’re inside the relationship. In fact, we don’t exactly think it, even when we’re out of the relationship. And why is that? Because — and this only my theory, but it seems to be born out here on LoveFraud — people who get involved with sociopaths are prone to suppress their anger, because they are afraid of it, ashamed of it, or confused about its meaning.
When faced with a painful situation, they suppress their inclination to judge the situation in terms of the pain they’re experiencing, and instead try to understand. They try to understand the other person. They try to understand the circumstances. They try to interpret their own pain through all kinds of intellectual games to make it something other than pain. To an extent, this could be described as the bargaining phase. But for most of us, this is a bargaining phase turned into a life strategy. It’s an unfinished response to a much earlier trauma that we have taken on as a way of life.
Which is very good for the sociopath, who can use it to gaslight us while s/he pursues private objectives of looting our lives for whatever seems useful or entertaining. Until we have nervous breakdowns or die, or wake up.
We can all look at the amount of time it took us to wake up, or the difficulty we’re having waking up, at evidence of how entrenched we’ve been in our avoidance of our own anger. It retrospect, it is an interesting thing to review. Why didn’t we kick them out of our lives the first time they lied or didn’t show up? Why didn’t we throw their computer out of the window when we discovered their profiles on dating sites? Why didn’t we cut off their money when we discovered they were conning us? Why didn’t we spit in their eye when they insulted us? Why didn’t we burn their clothes on the driveway the first time they were unfaithful?
Because we were too nice to do that? Well, anger is the end of being nice. It may be slow to emerge. We may have to put all the pieces together in our heads, until we decide that yes, maybe we do have the right to be angry. Yes, they were bad people. No, we didn’t deserve it. And finally, we are mad. At them.
Anger in our healing process
Anger is the last phase of magical thinking. We are very close to a realistic appraisal of reality. The only thing “magical” about it is this: no amount of outrage or force we can exert on the situation can change it. The sociopath is not going to change. We cannot change the past, or the present we are left with.
But anger has its own gifts. First and foremost is that we identify the external cause of our distress. We place our attention where it belongs at this moment — on the bad thing that happened to us and the bad person who caused it.
Second, we reconnect with our own feelings and take them seriously. This is the beginning of repairing our relationships with ourselves, which have often become warped and shriveled with self-hatred and self-distrust when we acted against our own interests in our sociopathic relationships.
Third, anger is a clarifying emotion. It gives us a laser-like incisiveness. It may not seem so when we are still struggling with disbelief or self-questioning or resentment accumulated through the course of the relationship. But once we allow ourselves to experience our outrage and develop our loathing for the behavior of the sociopath, we can dump the burden of being understanding. We can feel the full blazing awareness that runs through all the layers of brain, from survival level through our feelings through our intellect and through our eyes as we look at that contemptible excuse for a human being surrounded by the wreckage s/he creates. Finally our brains are clear.
And last, but at least as important as the rest, is the rebirth of awareness of personal power that anger brings. Anger is about power. Power to see, to decide, to change things. We straighten up again from the long cringe, and in the action-ready brain chemicals of anger, we surprise ourselves with the force of our ability and willingness to defend ourselves. We may also surprise ourselves with the violent fantasies of retribution and revenge we discover in ourselves. (Homicidal thoughts, according to my therapist, are fine as long as we don’t act on them.)
It is no wonder that, for many of us, the angry phase is when we learn to laugh again. Our laughter may be bitter when it is about them. But it can be joyous about ourselves, because we are re-emerging as powerful people.
The main thing we do with this new energy is blaming. Though our friends and family probably will not enjoy this phase (because once we start blaming, it usually doesn’t stop at the sociopath), this is very, very important. Because in blaming, we also name what we lost. When we say “you did this to me,” we are also saying, “Because of you, I lost this.”
Understanding what has changed — what we lost — finally releases us from magical thinking and brings us face to face with reality. For many of us this is an entirely new position in our personal relationships. In the next article, we’ll discuss how anger plays out in our lives.
Until then, I hope you honor your righteous anger, casting blame wherever its due. And take a moment to thank your lizard brain for being such a good friend to you.
Namaste. The healing warrior in me salutes the healing warrior in you.
Kathy
Milo,Oxy & Sky,
Bipolar looks somewhat different in adolescence than it does in adults.
And when my son was first Dx…I thought really??
But I did find Child & Adolescent Bipolar Foundation & joined their support group that was geared towards parents & teenagers and the more I learned the more I found that the Dx actually fit him like a glove.
My son went for counseling for months before and manipulated the counselor…. I finally INSISTED that he see a psychiatrist. And the psychiatrist nailed him in the first visit. There wasn’t any manipulation going on in this client/dr relationship. So of course my son decided he was done going after a few of these visits with the P doc. He denies that he has bipolar. So why should he go see a doctor?
He was never med compliant….He was a rapid cycler. And that is what really kind of threw me for a loop before I learned more about the disorder.
Milo I can relate when you were saying that when you punished or grounded your daughter she would never learn any lesson by that experience. My son would just get angy & act like he was baffled when he would have a privilege taken away.
It was as if the older he got, he didn’t get the simple concept…… A action + B behavior = C consequence. Yet he DID seem to get this concept when he was younger? Before his “issues” presented.
Skylar, I do really get that I am definately the “person” in my sons life that he hates.
But the rest of the criteria for the father figure doesn’t apply.
He doesn’t remember his father. He was young when his father suicided and whatever happened that day for him emotionally (he was with him) he has since suppressed those memories.
Initially right after the suicide he saw a child specialist. Naturally it needed to be determined if he had actually witnessed what had happened or if he had woken up in the morning to find his father. It was determined that he woke up to his father already being dead. This is also supported by the time of death etc.
And was further supported by my young sons “version” of the memories he would “chatter” to me about for approx 6 months after.
When I came home from work that day my son was young enough that he didn’t even REALIZE that his dad was dead.
He met me at the door and said “mommy daddy is sick”. And led me to his dad. I was devastated by not only what I saw but slowly the realization hit me……That my young son had spent the entire day ALONE with what I saw….
It was almost as if at that moment my brain couldn’t even COMPREHEND this. I can only describe this initial feeling as my brain felt as if it was short circuiting…..One minute I felt as if this was sureal….And the next minute it was as REAL as it could possibly be. It WAS the reality that I wanted to slip away from….And I felt myself slipping away from it. The room felt like it was spinning….And I had an out of body experience. That is the only way I can describe it. Sounds crazy I know, but it was during that out of body experience that I took care of “business” and comforted my son who was tugging on my arm & dialed 911. But it wasn’t really “me” who did those rational things. It was as if I somehow seperated from myself. VERY hard to articulate. But it happened.
As became evident in the months after…..My son shared with his moments of “chatter” his frustrations of the long hours he spent there with his dad. I never questioned him…..I just let him take the initiative when he needed to talk about it.
He would say things such as…mommy when I woke up daddy was so sick he wouldn’t get up to help me get dressed…..I was hungry…..Or mommy I shook daddy really hard, he wouldn’t get up…Mommy daddy had a REAL gun, I touched it.
Whenever he spoke of the gun it would almost take my breath away. When he told me he touched it, I thought OMG….All those “what if’s”. He could have shot himself if he had decided to play with that gun.
He also said to me one day. “mommy I didn’t see the bad guys” I asked him what he meant about the bad guys….He said that if his daddy had a gun he must have been fighting with the bad guys…but he said the “bad guys” were gone when he woke up…
What I DO know is that my son experienced extreme frustration during those long hours he spent alone with his father. He wasn’t of the age to take care of himself all day. He still needed help getting dressed, he couldn’t even understand the concept of fending for himself when he was hungry, or be able to “entertain” himself all day long. He didn’t know his father was dead…He thought he was sleeping because he was sick. He also told me once that he “knew” his daddy was sick because he “threw up”. Well what he thought was throw up was the BLOOD.
OMG I can’t even tell you how hard it was to hear so many of the things he shared with me in those months. But I knew how important it was for him to talk about it…..His childlike “version” of that day.
The reason I know that my son as he got older suppressed the memories of that day is because he told me he doesn’t remember “that day” at all anymore….Or even the things that he told me in his childlike “chatter” in the months after….
He only knows his dad by the “stories” that I have told him or that his older brother (this was his step-dad) has told him over the years. The happy stories. He says he doesn’t remember his dad by any memories.
The child specialist that my son saw right after (recomended by the police) said that it would be VERY possible that as my son grew he might not remember the “details” of that day. Because he was RIGHT on the boarderline of the age where the tramatic memories might or might NOT be retained.
Still what always stuck with me is that because he DID experience this tramatic event as a child at SOME point in his life he would have to deal with the “normal” issues of the suicide of his father. With or without the childhood memories attached to it.
And suicide FEELS like the absolute ULTIMATE rejection. Talk about abandonment issues…He has reasons to feel those. Not only did his father commit suicide but he took his life when he was “babysitting” for his son. This could be taken very “personally” until you would be able to work through it.
The FACT that his father took his life on the ONE and ONLY day he was with his son for the entire week that he was drinking (he left our home for that week)……
This WAS the hardest thing for me to comprehend. Why, when he was with his son?
At different age appropiate times I would ask him how he felt because he didn’t have his dad in the stands watching his baseball game..Or something to that affect.
He would say that he didn’t really miss having a dad because he didn’t really know what it was like TO HAVE a dad.
He said that many of his friends (products of divorce) would talk about their dads not being at the games etc….But he couldn’t relate to how they felt.
Observing him during the the years when the issues first presented during puberty and the years since then….WHAT I do notice the most is that he is totally disconnected.
He lives his life often in a “dissacociation” state.
The older he gets the more apparent this becomes.
He can have that flat affect at times.
Has an “indifference” air to his personality. Girls seem to gravitate towards that indifference. Yet his relationships with girls are more what you would call friends with benifits. Never has had a one on one emotional involvement.
He hasn’t spoken to his brother for months. His brother used to be the “one” person in his life that he seemed to love and look up to even during those difficult years.
If he ran into me on the street he would hug me & say that he loved me (wouldn’t ask me for money or a ride or anything) tell me he would see me soon…..And I might not see or talk to him again for 6 months.
He seems to sometimes present with dissociative amnesia.
He has many symtoms that seem to overlap different disorders. And as he gets older these seem to multiply and also change from some things that presented in the younger years.
Dear Witty,
I am so sorry that you have had to endure such a trauma, and worrying about it effecting your son as well.
I can relate to the “out of body” experience with part of you calling 911 and doing what had to be done, and another part of you like observing your body doing these things. I have that same feeling from the aircraft crash, but now after the EMDR it isn’t “traumatic” any more it is like a memory of a movie I saw once a long time ago, and there is not attachment to that movie emotionally any more.
I understand your wondering and worrying about Son D because of the suicide and what it might have done to him. No one really but HIM knows for sure. The doc nailing the bi-polar and then your son refusing to go or take medication is not unusual at all. The rapid cyclers are actually “the worst” as far as bi-polar is concerned, and the “over lap” of various symptoms or disorders is normal too. The self medication that your x husband did with alcohol is also very “usual” and normal and to be expected.
Trying to “figure out” all these things especially from a distance and without any cooperation on his part is frustrating to you I am sure, but it is impossible to do and ends up only being a “guess.” I too spent years trying to ‘figure out” Patrick. Why he hated ME worse than anyone else in particular, why he this and why he that. It drove me crazy. Ultimately I kind of came to a “guess” but realize that is all it is. I don’t doubt that he is a psychopath, he scores 38 on the PCL-R as scored by me! He is dangerous and he hates me with a passion, so I have just had to accept that he is what he is. With my con C, he isn’t a psychopath, but he isn’t the kind of man I want to trust as my friend either, so my relationship with him is very distant, which makes me sad, but I can accept that it is what it is. I’m not part of his life, and he’s not part of mine.
Witty,
what a terrible memory to have to live with. I’m so sorry that he did that to his family. What was life like with your husband in the years since your youngest son was born?
It isn’t surprising that your son called death, “sick” and blood, “vomit”. He was trying to make sense of what he saw. When I was with my spath and “saw” things that were too horrible to even consider, I made up things too. I re-interpreted what I saw, knowing full well what it was, but not being able to KNOW it. Near the end of my time with him, I was almost completely delusional, but at the beginning I COULD see through the lies and I went rigid with fear and denial.
If an adult does it, imagine how much easier would it be for a toddler to re-intrepret what he saw as something else? Something more in his realm of understanding.
Milo and Shelley,
I really really love Girard theory but don’t want to mislead you. It’s a really difficult book to read. It was originally written in French, and translated. Further, the author is really really old and so his writing style is not easy to grasp. I did struggle with the book, but it was SO worthwhile. There is a reason why the man is famous and college courses on Girardian theory are popular all over the world. He’s a freakin’ genius.
He doesn’t talk about spaths, so it is shocking to me that his theories absolutely paralleled the way my spath thinks and behaves! As I considered why this might be, I noted that his theories about human societies were based on his decades of studying primitive cultures and their mythologies. I think that basically, a spath is like a primitive person or like an infant. He hasn’t grown up. He’s like a throwback from ancient times when humans were more violent and the masses were uneducated and un-selfaware. Of course, some spaths are very intellectually sophisticated and educated, but it doesn’t make a whit of difference in their emotional development. They may be cunning but they are flat and emotionally shallow. That’s why I call my spath a “mythological creature”. It fits.
Girard’s theory is that we are still re-enacting all the same old dramas we have been, since human time began. We haven’t changed, only the curtains that we use to conceal the mechanism keeps changing. So that no matter how sophisticated we become, as soon as we uncover one lie, we cover it with a new curtain.
Shelley,
thanks for the heads up on the Anderson Cooper show, but I don’t have a tv. I wonder if it will show online?
Witty,
I can only imagine and it is a shadow of what the experience must have been for you both.
Don’t know if you’ve ever explored it, but I found out recently that the same gene for Bi Polar has a circadian clock in it that if its broken can cause delayed sleep phase disorder and that can create a host of presentments.
While its possible not to have either or to have either one, it is possible to have both.
The genetics are closely related.
Not a lot of docs know about it so, if that is happening too, then there may be something that will help with that presentation which you describe.
Don’t know, but it struck me when I read your story.
My heart for you both.
I just read your post again, Witty, and I knew some of it of course, but this is the first time I knew the “whole story” where I could visualize what happened that day…I think, from what I am hearing is that the trauma was more yours than son D’s. He was so young, and interpreted it differently (sick, vomit etc) and though he may have been frustrated that he couldn’t wake daddy up to dress him, you, understanding the worst of it, SEEING the worst of it, probably were more traumatized than son D was by the whole thing. How could you have NOT been traumatized by it all?
I can only relate to the feelings I had at the aircraft crash, that “out of body” experience you described….that shock, that dissociative feeling. How horrible for you, my friend. (((Hugs)))) Dealing with that, and then later having to deal with the falling apart of your son. of your son..along with the frustration of trying to get him help while your x in laws enable him and the “system” totally fails you and your son. Talk about frustration!!!!!
God bless.
Witty ~ I read your post awhile ago and then again, hoping I could come up with something to say. I can’t begin to imagine what you went through that day and the days following. Trying to hold yourself together for you son, I just don’t know how you managed.
I did relate to your son’s “chatter” about the events he didn’t fully understand. Grand would also “chatter” about traumatic events that happened around him and to him. He doesn’t seem to have too many memories of the events now, although a few he still remembers but not entirely correct in what he remembers.
Unraveling the emotional from the neurological would make your son’s problems extremely difficult to understand and/or diagnose. I don’t know where you would even begin.
Actions = consequences – my daughter NEVER got that, from the time she was little up until present. As an adult, she has had more warrants out for her arrest than I can count. Over and over simple traffic tickets have turned into huge court cases costing thousand of dollars simply because she doesn’t show up for court. She would be jailed, bailed out and not show up again. She was jailed countless times for probation violations. She hasn’t had a drivers license for years, still drives, gets caught and pays thousands, then repeats the whole thing again.
While many of the bipolar symptoms fit my daughter, I just kept saying “OK, but there is something else, there is more.” I struggled with this for years, until I read the checklist for psychopathy – I checked off every single thing, except one. That’s what fit her like a glove.
I don’t know if I understand the disassociation state. I’m not sure if I’m familiar with that. I can tell you my daughter does not live in reality. I have often said she could be homeless, living in her car and she would describe it as “having a wonderful view”.
I wanted to note something very important that you wrote. “I finally INSISTED he see a psychiatrist. And the psychiatrist nailed him in the first visit.” I tried so hard to get this exact point through to 2B. I hope she reads this, therapists have a tendancy to be so easily munipulated. If you find an adolescent/pediatric psychiatrist, who deals with behavioral problems, you usually get a completely different outcome. I am sorry your son would not keep going. I hope at some point he seeks further help.
Again, I am so very sorry you have been through so much over the years. I just don’t know what to say. I hope somehow you find peace.
God bless you Witty.
Sky,
Life with my husband was “familiar” to me as in the fact that he was an alcoholic and I grew up in an alcoholic home.
As a child I also lived with the “pink elephant in the room” but we didn’t talk about it.
I WAS hell bent on NOT becoming my dad. But I made the other mistake…By marrying an alcoholic.
Half of the time we spent together he was actively drinking and the other half he was sober. There was also a period of time that he was a dry drunk, before he started drinking again.
We had a pretty intense relationship. He was the love of my life. But our time together was short…5 years. So who knows if he had lived longer.
He was raised by an N mother. Not his biological mother. He was adopted. Neither of his adoptive parents drank. But it sounds like his family of origin were all heavy drinkers. My husband started to drink very young, at 11 years old…
His bio mother, bio father & bio brother all came to the funeral from out of state. That was the only time I ever saw them. I am often curious about his bio family’s history. (other than the addictive issues)
My husband had some issues. But my perception was that the addiction was behind these issues.
In sobriety many of those issues started to surface.
One of his major issues was not so much that he had been given up for adoption. But that HE was given up at 18 months old (not an infant) and his bio mother KEPT his brother but gave him up.
I believe that my husband was a person that had MANY demons that he wrestled with.
Because he started drinking heavily at such a young age he didn’t have any coping skills whatsoever. Alcohol was his coping skill.
Witty, Here’s a big bear ((HUG))…sigh..goodness Witty I am so sorry for you and your son..I can not imagine what it was like for him that day or for you, but I do know children can block traumatic thing’s out of their mind, I mean I would, how does one wrap their brain around that.
Oxy,
Well as it was explained to me by the professionals and what I later accepted…..As it made more and more sense as time went by…..
Was that we BOTH experienced a major trauma. But the trauma was very different for each of us.
For me: My trauma was a twofold thing. I was just as traumatized by my son being there alone with his dead father as I was by the suicide itself. They were both equally tramatic to me. And this made more and more sense the farther along I went through my healing & grieving journey….
My guilt was also twofold. I felt as guilty about not seeing any red flags before the suicide as I did for leaving my son with my husband that day to babysit while I went to work. His father rarely babysat. I had to work a Sunday. Child care wasn’t available.
The counselor that I went to see wasn’t any help at all for the healing of the suicide. His specialty was addiction! However he did help me deal with the guilt…Of being able to read into the fact that he was going to drink but not that he was going to take his life.
My healing for the suicide itself came when I went to a suicide support group. The facilitator & the people who belonged to the group had all walked in similar shoes….
Now my sons trauma was also twofold to some degree. He HAD to experience SO MANY emotions during these HOURS. Plus at his age 8-10 hours (depnding when he woke up) had to seem like an ETERNITY. He was probably hungry, angry, lonely, tired (no nap) frustrated, sad, scared, bored, irritated, and most certainly couldn’t figure out why no one was there to tend to his needs. God only knows what else he felt.
He really didn’t know what death WAS at this age and maybe that was a good thing. But ALSO a bad thing.
If he had any understanding that his father was UNABLE to take care of him……He might have had more fear than frustration. It is hard to know if his age worked for him or against him under the horrific unusual circumstances. A year or so older he might have understood enough to dial 911? Hard to know…
HOWEVER the major thing that he probably went through was feeling abondonment. I was the primary care giver in his life. So where the HELL was I in his time of need?
His major trauma was simply that his father died. He might not understand the “day” his father died at this age…But he would learn in the days ahead that he would never see him again.