Sounds of old music awakened repressed feelings from my past

I found myself in a time machine Monday night. My body didn’t move, but my mind and my heart were transported to the years when I was a teen-ager.

I didn’t mean to take this trip into the past. I ran across a YouTube video promising snippets of the most popular song from every month of the decade of my youth. I was curious whether I’d know all the songs. It never occurred to me that the music would awaken something disturbing.

At first, I didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary. Then the songs reached the years when I was about 14, 15 and 16.

All of a sudden, I was feeling emotions I had experienced during those years. Some of the sounds awakened specific memories. My mind was a blur. What I didn’t expect was the flood of emotions.

I can talk clinically about the experience of growing up with a narcissistic father and an absent mother. I can outline the ways this affected me, but I almost always talk about it with the matter-of-fact tone of reciting facts.

What I felt tonight wasn’t about reason or psychology or dry narrative. It was a flood of feelings such as fear and shame and pain. They were emotions I was too terrified to openly feel at the time.

Nobody knew me then. I see that now. I didn’t even know myself.

I don’t have specific stories that the songs awakened for me. I’ve told you some of the stories from my past. Tonight wasn’t about stories as much as it was about snippets of scenes from those years — and the awful feelings that were inside me. Things which I hid from myself as the only defense I had against them.

I felt completely out of place among the people my own age. Those were the years when I first started feeling like an alien.

I consciously saw myself as one of my peer group, but I also saw myself as superior to them. I believed I was smarter and more talented and more driven than any of them would ever be. That made me aloof and arrogant. There were bits and pieces of truth in what I believed about myself. But I mostly believed those things because I was so terrified that I wasn’t good enough.

The scenes in my mind kept shifting with little rhyme or reason. I was in Mrs. Lollar’s geometry class there. Then in Mrs. Dutton’s trig class. Then I was with a group of friends from church at Wendy’s on a Sunday night. Suddenly, I was walking alone down tree-lined Sixth Avenue in Jasper, Ala., near my home on an autumn evening. Then I was sitting in Mrs. Hill’s English novel class near a vivacious girl who seemed so lovely and desirable to me — but so out of my reach.

The shades of emotion changed with each passing scene, but the themes were the same.

I was afraid of these people. They wouldn’t like me. I didn’t know how to be like them — and I didn’t know how to make them like me. I told myself I didn’t want to be like them. In many ways, I really didn’t want to be what they were.

But I wanted them to like me. I wanted some of them to love me. I wanted someone to tell me that I was OK. That I was good enough. That I wasn’t some freak who didn’t belong here.

I wasn’t conscious of any of those feelings at the time. It wasn’t until well into my college years that I realized something wasn’t quite right. I saw a psychologist for a few months then, but he didn’t uncover anything — and what I felt was still buried too deeply for me to access it myself.

I’ve spent years uncovering a lot of these things. I’ve talked with you about some of them, at least in part. But I still usually feel as though I’m approaching this old psychological damage from the dry, clinical point of view of my head.

Tonight, my head had little to do with it. My heart was in full control. And what I felt was the repressed fears and shame of someone who was afraid he could never be good enough — and who would never be loved.

Decades later, I’ve worked through a lot of these issues with a good psychologist. I’ve done quite a bit of thinking and reading and feeling on my own. But I’m usually still stuck in my head.

Tonight, I descended into an unconscious maelstrom of emotions which I was too afraid to feel back then. It made me realize that I do still need to actually feel some of those things — but it gave me empathy for my teen self.

I understand why I wasn’t able to feel those things. I wasn’t strong enough or mature enough at the time. Feeling those things then would have killed me. And I mean that literally.

Now that it’s over, I’m left to realize that for all that’s changed, some things haven’t changed. I’ve made peace with the memories of my father and mother — to the degree I can — but I still haven’t found all the peace I need about who I am.

I still want people to like me. I still want some people to love me. I still want someone to tell me that I’m good enough and that I’m OK just the way I am.

I still want all of the basic emotional assurance and acceptance that I wanted as a teen — the things I’d not gotten even as a small child.

And those things don’t seem to come any easier for a grown man if he never really learned how to find them within himself. And never learned to to accept them from anyone else.