Been kind of chewing on this post for a couple hours. There is a line that stuck with me and twisted me up. The question was asked "Did you let him express that pain or did you suppress it?" Are these actions not one in the same? Expression and suppression both coping mechanisms for pain. Whether we act out or upon the painful triggers or suppress and repress the emotions the underlying damage remains.

I am not an expert, but I wonder if damage like that heals. Like a broken bone, it heals, but it is never the same. Sometimes it is stronger, sometimes it is weaker or it just hurts like hell when the weather changes. The "wound" has "healed" but the scar still has it's impact on our lives.

What really sucks about a lot of this damage is that is changes out DNA. Maybe not in the physical sense, but in our conscious and subconscious. It rewrites pathways, triggers responses, makes us act in ways we can't understand, all from pain and damage that we might never understand.

This post triggered a song from my younger days into my brain. It is a song by the band Tool called Parabola.

Twirling round with this familiar parable
Spinning, weaving round each new experience
Recognize this as a holy gift and celebrate this chance to be alive and breathing
The chance to be alive and breathing

This body holding me reminds me of my own mortality
Embrace this moment, remember
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion

May not exactly fit, but for some reason it clicked in to my mental CD changer.