A Refuge in my Mind

I’ve been mulling over how to start this for a couple of weeks. My mind tends to obsess on a subject, and then when it is in logical array in my head I write it down. But this one may be a little different, because it’s all about my mind. All you amateur psychologists have a field day!

The poem “A Reverie” by Katie Mulligan affected me very deeply, and only with the passage of time has some of the cause become clear. She describes mentally withdrawing into a small space inside herself to escape her abuser. Deeply buried memories and feelings have slowly been making their way back into my consciousness.

I have vague memories of what I call “tunneling” inside myself, similar to Katie’s description, but lasting only a few minutes, not years.

I don’t know if that experience is common to most people, or only happens to certain, more sensitive, people. Mine occurred when my father was beating me, usually with a leather belt or piece of wood. 

I don’t think I was abused much more than anybody else in the neighborhood. I had no scars to show afterwards. My father was probably in the middle of the bell curve when it came to whippings.

We had a boy on the farm next door who was tied to the corral fence and  whipped with a bull whip by his father when he was punished. He had the scars, too. He was also required to address his parents with “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma’am” or he got punched in the mouth. I felt pretty lucky I wasn’t him. He was the neighborhood bully--always beating up on the littler kids. Looking back now, who can blame him?

Back in the late 1940‘s and early 1950’s when I was a small boy it seemed every father whipped his kids. My father would hang onto my left arm and beat me with a belt on the backside, with me wailing and screaming and hopping around in circles and begging him to stop. Some people now probably see that as humorous, but it was not humorous to me then or now.

I remember that to make the pain stop, my mind would shrink away from what was happening to me, and I would feel myself falling or spinning down into a deep, dark well where all the outside noise went away, to be replaced with a loud roaring, buzzing sound that drowned out everything else.

The world around me was reduced to a small dot of light very far away at the other end of a long tunnel. It was kind of the reverse of the “Tunnel of Light” that people revived from death describe. I became very small, hidden in the darkness at the bottom of the well, far away from the light, and safe from anything outside. 

It was as if my mind couldn’t deal with the pain and violence, and in self defense dialed down the inputs for vision, hearing, and feeling. I became blind, deaf, and numb. 

After my father stopped the beating, he usually dragged me to my bed and told me to stay there, usually without supper. I would soon return to the real world, whimpering as the pain returned, and swearing someday to get way past even.

My mother would come in to my bedroom later with some food--a glass of milk, a sandwich or cookies--and talk to me about what happened and what I learned. She said years later that if he had beat me like that  in the modern age, he might have gone to jail. She knew at that time it was excessive.

The only time he ever got close to trouble was when he came home from work to find the neighbor girl, Patty Combs, and me inside his 1937 Pierce-Arrow punching holes in the radio speakers with a screwdriver. I was only six or seven then, but I still remember the cool “thock” sound it made going through the cones.

He ripped off my belt, whacked on me for a while, then grabbed Patty and whacked on her. My mother came out of the house yelling for him to stop, which he did. He led Patty next door to her house and explained to her parents what we had been caught doing and why he beat her. I never heard what their response was, but I guess they didn’t really mind.

I can honestly say I learned nothing from his beatings except rage and a burning desire for revenge. Whatever I did that inspired the beating, the memory was driven out by my terror and anger. In fact, the only beating for which I can remember the cause is the Pierce-Arrow speaker incident, and I think that is because I had an accomplice. 

On second thought, I guess I did learn not to poke holes in radio speakers with screwdrivers again. Patty didn’t play with us much after that, so her lesson was to stay far away from the Rogers’ house.

Everything important about living I learned from my mother. Sharing with others, being kind and considerate, treating others as I would like to be treated were all lessons I learned at my mother’s knee. She had memorized a bookful of poems in school to edify your character and she could quote them as necessary.

I can still almost recite Rudyard Kipling’s  poem “If” which is about standing strong when you know you’re right, and Edgar Guest’s poem “It Couldn’t be Done” on perseverance, and even Eddie Cantor’s song “I love Me, I love Me” which is about being stuck on yourself, or as they say now, being narcissistic.

What I learned from my father was washing auto parts, riveting brake linings and grinding valves, along with torquing crankshaft bearing caps and cylinder head bolts. And also fear and rage.

I now know that my father learned all those same lessons from his father. He ran away from home at an early age, as did most of his brothers, I think. I know my father was still furious at his father’s injustices to him until the day he died. And my grandfather hated his father so badly he would not speak of him.

My father left our family when I was eleven. He returned and remarried my mother in 1958, but that only lasted a few months. I never got a chance to beat him to a pulp, which for a while I thought I was living for. When I next met him in college in 1963, I towered over him by several inches, and I must have felt pity. Thank my mother for that emotion--I never learned it from him.

I now think my father’s leaving when we were so young was the best thing that could have happened. My brothers and I decided to raise our children as our mother raised us. None of us beat our kids. 

When my son or daughter did something wrong, we would sit them down and talk about it for a few minutes. As much as possible, we tried to describe what the consequences of acting badly might be. They learned that we wanted them to be happy and not hurting, and that our advice and counsel was aimed at that goal. We avoided saying, “No, don’t do that” and replaced it with, “If you do that, this is what might happen.” They learned to trust our judgement, and that rebellion was self defeating and useless.

We were not perfect parents for sure, but I can honestly say we never whipped, beat or spanked our children even once. I can also say Carolyn and I are very proud of our kids.

Both of our children have since grown up to be productive members of society, with a well developed sense of justice and compassion, and none of them are beating their kids, as far as I know. We stopped that tradition cold in one generation. Thanks for leaving when you did, Dad!

One interesting observation has occurred to me in the last few years. Most of the generations before me were very conservative and strictly religious. Starting with me, the generations following are nearly all bleeding-heart liberals, more or less. The divide is startlingly apparent.

My grandfather Irving Rogers was a racist to the core, besides being a very fundamentalist Seventh-day Adventist. We got into several heated arguments about the civil rights movement in the 1960’s, as he believed that Negroes were cursed by God and were meant to be the slaves of white people. He would try to prove it from the Bible. I think Philemon might have been his favorite Biblical book.

For those who are not Biblical scholars, the letter of Paul to Philemon was short note to the Christian slave owner Philemon to accept back his runaway slave Onesimus, who is also now Christian. Paul asks him to treat him kindly, and if Onesimus owes him anything, charge it to Paul’s account. Diarmaid MacCulloch in his A History of Christianity, describes the epistle as "a Christian foundation document in the justification of slavery." It’s not quoted much anymore for obvious reasons, at least in the last 150 years.

My wife later found out about his views when she first met him and he was so happy to meet her. During one of those earlier arguments he had asked,”Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro?” I told him my daughter might be one! He was aghast at the idea I would marry a black woman myself. He was overjoyed to find I had married a white woman after all.

To call my grandfather conservative would be a definitive understatement. Ironically, for all the bad feelings between them, my father Vernon Rogers was nearly as conservative as his father.

He became a devout Mormon back when that religion did not allow blacks to officiate as priests in that church. I think that was a major draw to that religion for him, along with the fact that his third wife was Mormon. He never advocated for the return of slavery, but he still held that blacks should be kept in their place, and believed in segregation. 

I was staying with him for a while looking for work in Los Angeles, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. He came home from work overjoyed at the news, and I had to fight back tears of rage. I moved out soon after, to keep from killing him, I think. Sometimes being non-violent is a hard row to hoe.

Politically, he was just to the right of Archie Bunker. He was a John Bircher, and spouted off about freedom and liberty a lot, all while he chose to live in the least free environment I’d ever seen. 

He lived in a walled in neighborhood--Rossmore, CA, where you were not allowed to park a pickup in your driveway--it had to be hidden in your garage. Only cars could be parked outside. No boats or RV’s allowed on your property, either. Drives down values, don’t you know. Lawn and shrubbery changes had to be approved, and you were not allowed to paint your house until the local rulers gave their approval for the color. He chose to live there and he liked it, all the while bemoaning the loss of liberty in the land.

He wouldn’t have known what liberty was if it bit him on the butt! He thought freedom meant the government should be free to keep Negroes or Mexicans from moving in next door to him.

So are conservatives just people who got beaten enough so they’re afraid of everything?

They are afraid of black people.

They are afraid of illegal Mexican immigrants without green cards.

They are afraid of Mexican immigrants with green cards.

They are afraid of anyone not speaking English.

They are afraid of Communists taking over the country.

They are afraid of creeping government Socialism.

They are afraid someone will take away their Social Security.

They are afraid the government is going to mess with Medicare. 

They are afraid of liberated women.

They are afraid to venture out without their concealed weapon.

They are afraid the national debt is getting too high.

They are afraid the government might raise their taxes.

They are afraid they will lose their jobs in the recession.

They are afraid they will lose their pensions.

They are afraid that union “thugs” will make them join a union.

Are liberals just people who didn’t get enough “whoop-ass” to make them afraid when they were young?

Liberals were not afraid to ride busses in the south for freedom, as racist bigots beat them and burned the busses.

Liberals were not afraid to march in Selma and Birmingham, even as the dogs and fire hoses and police batons were used on them.

Liberals were not afraid to register black people in the south, even as the FBI helped racists to shoot them and bury them in a earthen dam. 

Liberals were not afraid to strike and picket for better wages and working conditions, even as they were machine gunned down, or burned alive in their tents at Ludlow, Colorado.

Liberals were not afraid to protest an unjust war in Vietnam, even as they were beaten and gassed in Chicago.

Liberals are not afraid to run women’s health clinics, even when they are being spit at, cursed at, bombed and shot dead.

Liberals are not afraid to demonstrate peacefully for economic justice, even as they are being hosed in the face with pepper spray as they kneel on the ground.

Maybe liberals just need the fear of God beat into them! For sure there are enough conservative policemen trying!

I believe there must be a strong correlation between corporal punishment as a child and conservatism as an adult. I would like to see any research on this. 

I would also like to see any research on the subject of mental withdrawal from reality and sensory attenuation during extreme pain and violence. Is there a name for this phenomenon? If I knew what to call it, I could Google it.

Here is where I invite all amateur psychologists (or pros, for that matter) to leave me a note. 

Don Rogers     2/15/2012