Dr. Emmi Pikler writes in Peaceful Babies – Contented Mothers:

Hands constitute the infant's first connection to the world (outside of nursing). Hands pick her up, lay her down, wash and dress and maybe even feed her. How different it can be, what a different picture of the world an infant receives when quiet, patient, careful yet secure and resolute hands take care of her – and how different the world seems when these hands are impatient, rough, or hasty ... and nervous. In the beginning the hands are everything for an infant. The hands are the person, the world. The way we touch a child, lift and dress him: that is us more precisely, more characteristically, than even our words, our smile, or glance.

I've written a few posts now about how I began to use the lens I got from studying fairy tales to look at different movies and stories in different ways. There was something that unveiled itself over time (between 2016- 2022) as I did this.

When my then-husband left in 2016, there was a single moment in which it felt like my body was literally ripped in half as if you'd tear a piece of paper. His book makes it appear as if the decision to divorce was mutual, that I got to pursue the farm-loving life of my dreams (nope, he owned all property and all things and the divorce settlement was decided by him saying: "What were you making at the job you had before we met? I'll multiply that by five years.") – and – while I'm on the subject – the not-disclosed-as-fictional world of the book implies that I discouraged him from working on his game project when I was the one who encouraged him to move to France in the first place and then offered to come and join him there.

With the end of the marriage, my body felt ripped in half. Divorce literally means a separation of connected things and it felt like half my body was gone – my family and stepchildren gone to France – and the other half was left with two Siamese cats, a little dog, 10,000 bees, my big blue truck and a car.

I'm mentioning this because the theme of trust is so central to my life story, and when I felt silenced and put out on the curb in the process of the divorce itself, the conditions were ripe to allow something deeper to surface.

I would also figure out later (in 2024, when I revisited The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk) that the ripped-in-half sensation was not only metaphorical (this is a story of broken communication between two world hemispheres), but it was also physical. At the moment when Jordan walked out, the median section of my brain (which help to pass messages between the hemispheres of the brain) probably went dark, which would have produced a similar sensation to being ripped in half.

This is what happens as a survival mechanism when too much stress stacks up. Now I can understand that my grandmother's death, the exit of my father, and the exit of my husband all lived in the same timeless area – but at the time, I just split in order to protect myself.

This shutting-off of the mohawk section of the brain is the physical condition that underlies what we call PTSD. There's a wonderful podcast on the subject called Optimistic, Fluid, and Alive.

Around this same time, my father had a heart attack and my mother told me we "didn't have much in common." I navigated the end of my marriage more or less alone, and even though it was scary, the aloneness helped me solve an early mystery that changed my understanding of myself, helped me understand my relationship to my voice, to my mom, and to this theme of trust.

I will try to describe it to you but the trick is to make sure I do it in a way that doesn't violate myself. A lot of times when people talk about difficult things that have happened and they do so without affect – nothing is able to change from the telling. I'll do my best.

I would get very upset when I couldn't control my little dog's potty training. The farm was really dark at night and there were coyotes and bears around. When I saw her fear, I would react very poorly and feel a lot of rage. It would well up from a deep place and most of the subsequent years were in a tango with this pattern that I did not understand.

I could not sleep.

I was scared because I had lost my home; I felt ashamed and overwhelmed.

I was able to find a log cabin in Asheville that I could afford, and I threw myself into renovating it. The rage kept coming, especially when the male Siamese cat would steal food from the kitchen.

His greed reminded me of Jordan. I found a good home for him so I could properly care for the other animals.

Different pieces of this puzzle came in at different times between 2016 - 2021, but the dwarf spaniel and the Siamese cats were living symbols from a story and a very deep fear that had popped into my consciousness when I was about eight years old.

When I was about eight, I was in the living room and I was standing in front of the television, watching the second Care Bears movie. I saw this scene:

When I saw the part with the mechanical hands that change the Care Bears and the conveyer belt, there was a powerful rush of energy up from my lower body and I felt very disoriented by the image. It felt like something in me had unlocked from seeing the disembodied hands and the conveyer belt. I didn't know exactly what I was feeling but I felt like I shouldn't talk about it because it was bad.

Also in that moment, the inner image changed and rotated spatially in my mind. Years later, I could understand that this was a memory of a wall of my left side and a person on my right.

In the weeks after I saw this movie, there was a powerful fear that formed. Every night before I went to sleep, I was convinced that there was a rat under my bed, and it was a very specific rat – it was the rat from The Lady and the Tramp.

I knew it was there. I don't think I talked about it to my parents, who didn't often listen.

In retrospect, this was a time when something important could have come up and cleared. That's one of the reasons I care so much about listening skills with young children and with people of all ages. Without someone to listen, those fears turned into other nightmares, and eventually into behaviors like compulsively keeping myself clean after using the toilet.

The fear of the rat feels like it lasted for about 10 years, but it had faded out by the time I went to college. There were other pieces of evidence that appeared in its wake.

When I lived in Eden Prairie in 2021, I felt like looking at stories was my job, and every day there would be something important to do. One day I decided to look at The Lady and the Tramp through the lens I had used on The Great Mouse Detective and other Disney movies and stories. Who's the main character? What's this story about? Who enters, who leaves?

Here's what I noticed.

Lady is the main character. She's a little puppy and she's scared to sleep alone.

The mother and father have a baby. There is a rat that lives under the house and the bassoon plays every time it shows up.

The mother and father leave. An auntie comes in and she fusses over the baby in a cloying way. She's an older woman.

Her Siamese cats steal the food meant for the baby. Lady barks at them and the auntie is cruel to her. Lady runs away with a muzzle on.

(( she gets jerked around a lot by the Tramp but he is ultimately a helpful figure – this is animus ))

Lady is chained up and she barks at the rat who intends to hurt the baby.

Tramp and the rat fight. It's scary.

The auntie blames the dog. The parents return, the auntie leaves, the truth is revealed and the story ends.

Twinsen's Odyssey was my favorite game when I was 12 or so. The disc was bright green with an interesting pattern on it, and I installed and re-installed it so many times it got scratched. I had to buy a special goo to repair it.

Deep in this game, there is an island with characters called the Frankenfurters. They have a crèche, a nursery, with baby Frankenfurters. Because this is an action-adventure game, you can go through different modes as you move through the world – sporty or sneaky or normal or aggressive.

My first job used to include doing geopolitical, legal, and localization checks on games. Being able to punch a baby Frankenfurter would never have made it through that company. But in Twinsen's Odyssey, you can. You can walk into the crèche and pound on the infant Frankenfurters and they will cry.

I would do this and feel the same weird feeling I felt when I had watched the Care Bears movie. A very bad and twisted kind of relief.

This year, I added something at the beginning of this post to say that I'd taken down the blog around 2021 because I had pretty bad health problems and wanted to get to the bottom of them. I'd been living in a small motorhome from August 2019 - spring 2021, and by the time I got to Minnesota, major fears began to surface every time I tried to write or speak. I would write, and then run to the kitchen to eat in order to soothe myself.

When the world shut down in 2020, and everyone started to wear masks, I couldn't handle it. From a metaphorical perspective, I didn't want to have to cover up who I was in order to survive. I didn't want to cover the part of my body that connects me to life.

I feel very very scared if anything tries to cover my mouth or stop me from speaking. Now I think I'm okay because I understand what the main root cause of the physical fear was. But at the time, I couldn't go along with it. In hindsight, the intense fear was a gift because it was more evidence that something had happened that should not have.

All the pieces eventually fit together but I couldn't have done it without being in direct communication with my body and without being really stubborn about figuring out what was making me so scared. Two books in particular set me up for success in communicating with my body and myself --

one was written by Jordan's mother, and it led me to the Rubenfeld Synergy Method, which I'd learned in 2015. Nothing syncs up your neocortex and the limbic brain like this gentle method of talk and touch that's intended to develop a conversation between the body and the conscious mind. I'll write more about my experiences with that later. but I used those skills to listen to that deeper Whitney that exists well beyond the layers that show up in most social interactions.

the second book was Addiction to Perfection by Marion Woodman, which drifted into my mind in late 2020 while I was alone in a campground in Arizona, and which contained my entire psychological profile at the time. My family had hosted a German girl with an extreme case of bulimia while we lived in the same house where I'd seen the Care Bears film, and it was eye-opening to realize that the deeply religious context I grew up in was absolutely connected to the struggles I had with feeding myself.

The perfectionism that had taken hold when I couldn't control the circumstances while living with Jordan or the behavior of his ex-wife turned into an eating disorder that went unrecognized by me for some time – I just thought I didn't feel hungry. It was a cocktail of grief and trauma, and learning to feed myself became a key endeavor as I left the situation I'd been in when the world shut down and tried to find stability in Minnesota.

I connected Addiction to Perfection to other stories in this post. At the time, my mind seemed to work by just swirling images together in a way I've consciously stopped doing. I think it was because my right side was the only side I was really aware of – it took months to even realize I had a left side of my body and to train myself to rely on her.

A holistic dentist in Edina mentioned to me that I had a "moderate tongue tie," and my ears perked up – this is how I'd felt for such a long time. In Asheville, I was dealing with a lethal feeling of being unable to express myself creativity, and I had many powerful dreams at the time. I was willing to see what the process of undoing a tongue tie release might look like.

A frenuloplasty involves cutting the frenulum, which is part of a network of fascia that connects your tongue to your toes. Although many practitioners happily cut the frenulum on infants and adults without any preparation, it can have terrible results. I worked with someone who required that I prepare the fascial system beforehand, which involved several months of a particular style of yoga called Bowspring. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. Stretching out the fascia was incredibly painful and brought up a lot of emotion.

Three women were present when they did the frenuloplasty. It felt like someone cut a very tight rope that was running all down my right side. After the surgery, I got half an inch taller, and it was easier to breathe and walk and talk. But my right arm curled up into a very distinct posture near my chest. The dentist worked primarily with infants, and she said, "That's a very protective posture."

I had seen a movie called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. There's a woman who helps this injured guy write his book by saying the alphabet over and over and he blinks his eyelids at the next letter in each word or sentence.

I slept often and I slept on the floor on a few yoga blankets. For years I'd never really been able to fall into a deep sleep and so I'd gotten good at navigating preconscious thought and maintaining awareness even while I was resting.

Over time I learned to focus deeply into early motor patterns and architectures in my bodymind. During 2021, while I was doing all this investigation, it was hard because the fear was always so intense, but while in this kind of conversation, I could piece things together in a similar way, seeking a movement or a response as part of an inner conversation.

These conversations were one of those pieces (of the puzzle), and I trust them because I trust myself, and because there is nothing glamorous about this story at all. It is the kind of thing nobody would ever want to remember, but it was a mystery that needed to be solved because I wanted to know why I felt so fucking scared whenever I tried to express myself.

My parents have not spoken to each other since they divorced when I was 16, but they both helped toward the end, along with that close look at The Lady and the Tramp.

I said to each of them, "I've been having all of these problems – eating, sleeping, talking, writing, pooping – I've been tracking these patterns in my body and in my reactions to things, and what I think is that someone hit me when I was an infant, and I think they covered my mouth and shook my neck during a diaper change. I don't know any more than that."

They independently agreed that was a serious thing to have possibly happened, and a few weeks went by while I kept digging into the patterns and letting things bubble to the surface.

It was The Lady and the Tramp that solved it – I was writing the story out on a piece of paper, again focused on "who enters, who leaves?" – and I circled auntie comes in. I called my mom and asked:

"Was there anyone else who had care of me when I was very young? Between three and six months old?" I had no memories of such a thing.

"Yes," she said, "We took you to the nursery at First Baptist."

I started to cry.

"Oh no," my mom said, understanding what was happening. "It was a caregiver."

"That was the whole reason I decided to homeschool you," she said. "You freaked out so badly when I tried to take you to preschool there."

In a separation conversation, my father said, "We couldn't figure it out. We thought it was just stranger danger. I'm so sorry, Whitney."

A woman at First Baptist Church in Atlanta was both the auntie in the story and the rat at the bottom of the house. And I in the story – I am Lady, and I am the baby.

That cloying energy of the Care Bears –the bluster of the auntie and her treatment of Lady, the covering up of Lady – the physical posture of being on my back, which is when the terror would always surface – it fit together. The slower brain waves, closer to sleep, probably matched whatever programming was still left over from infancy.

The mechanical nature of the image of the Care Bears nursery also fits with my perception of how church encourages women to produce children but does not empower them to go far beyond any role that might threaten male dominance. It does this by maintaining a fiction that women are secondary. It is bullshit.

When this puzzle first came together, there was a feeling of great sadness but also relief. If my wiring from age 3 months - 6 months was influenced by this – it just explained so much. Even really basic things like the fear of leaving the house and getting into the car. The connection between talking and going potty – they're kind of the same thing, you're letting something go –

what impresses me so much, and my entire reason for writing all of this, is how inner images (and the body) can tell the truth if you let them and if you get into conversation with them.

This experience is what shaped so much of my relationship to images, and to fiction. Fiction lives in service of the truth. Reality is harsh and fiction is a buffer, not an escape. I'm fed up with anything that praises men for creating fiction, and I listened to The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman for an example of how fiction can be a gross cover for not only Something That Really Happened to someone else, but Something That Really Happened to the author – Nabokov, in this case.

The Lady and the Tramp itself, and Dumbo – women were speaking through those films in deep ways.

The earliest parts of ourselves speak in image and metaphor and in sensory memories. I re-read a lot of Temple Grandin during this time because she's all about the image and the sense memories. This is the core of our brain(s). The verbal mind is totally separate function, and (according to Iain McGilchrist anyway) it's inferior.

Trauma (read: helplessness) exists in the limbic system where there is no time. In a way, stories are a perfect medicine because they exist in a timeless space as well, and in a good story, all the bits and pieces fit together.

Behaviors are never random. They come from somewhere and they serve to meet a need. So when your child is crying – stop and listen.