MARKETING

Ever wonder what goes through the minds of marketing professionals?

Let’s explore the subject, shall we?

Example – ‘Lunesta’

Sleeping Aid (read ‘new’ drug)

Active Ingredients: Eszopiclone

Representative Names: Lunesta

What are Eszopiclone tablets?

ESZOPICLONE ( Lunesta™ ) is a sedative-type drug that helps to relieve insomnia (sleeplessness). Trouble falling asleep, waking up too early in the morning, or waking up too often during the night are symptoms of insomnia. Eszopiclone helps treat these problems with sleep.

Step one – Develop ‘new’ drug.

Step two – Develop marketing campaign to sell ‘new’ drug to ‘Baby Boomer’ generation.

Okay. We want to hit a chord with Baby Boomers. Let’s think –

Step Three – Research Baby Boomers and associated possible pleasant memory associations and somehow tie it into the marketing of our ‘new’ drug.

Aha!

Most Baby Boomers have precious childhood memories of those large, pale green moths that used to flutter gaily around outside lights.

They were huge suckers that only came out for a short time in summer, making deep and intense memories of childhood nocturnal activities.

So, we give our ‘new’ drug the name ‘Lunesta’ and our marketing ‘mascot’ will be the lovely, gentle, surrounded-by-childhood-memories Luna moth.

On the ‘flip’ side of this marketing coin:

‘Lunaria’ – Garden flower. Lovely purple flowers followed by unique seed pods prized by florists for their dried shape and size.

Seed pods, after seeds are removed, look like quarters.

Common name – ‘Money Plant’. If you grow these in your garden, heritage superstition says you will ‘always have money’.

Hmmmmmmm………………………

Pretty damn sharp, no?

FAILURE TO THINK THINGS THROUGH DEPARTMENT:

The Luna moth IS NOCTURNAL! The damn things DON’T SLEEP AT NIGHT!!

They spend their VERY SHORT lives fluttering around a street lamp , hanging out and looking for love at night.

They are fast becoming extinct, due to environmental pollution and loss of habitat. (I saw only one last summer – 2006, and it was very small – 3 inch wingspan compaired to the 6-inch wingspan I saw on them as a kid.)

So the marketing ‘mascot’ for a sleep aid is a NEAR-EXTINCT MOTH WITH INSOMMNIA?

BUT, (Money Plant superstition) it brings in a ton of money to the pharmacuetical company that owns the ‘new’ drug patent.

Ain’t that a female dog?

(C) 2007theherbwoman

The Price of Coal

I can’t quit crying.  My eyes are filled with tears as I write. 

As I watched the tragedy in West Virginia unfold, a childhood memory surfaced in my mind.  I was 7 years old, and my family and I, with the rest of our small community, were gathered around the mouth of a coal mine.  There had been a rock fall and a cave-in, and several miners were trapped. 

We stood there for hours, in the cold and wet, watching, listening and hyper-alert for news of any kind, good or bad.  I was tired and thirsty, and began to whine.  My normally gentle mother slapped me, knelt down and shook me.  “This is more important than your needs”, she told me. 

While waiting for the drama to end, we prayed, sang songs, and held each other tight.  We tried to comfort each other.  I remember hugging a little girl younger than me, about 5 years of age.  Her Daddy was in that mine.  She was standing silently near her family, with them, yet alone, and something in her silent pain pulled me out of my preoccupation with my own small discomfort. 

She and I gradually wandered over to the edge of the lot, and sat down on a damp log. We were trying, as small children do, to distract ourselves from the overwhelming emotion running rampant from the adults. She was shivering from the cold, and her little threadbare coat was too small to provide much warmth. She inched closer and closer to me, and I put my arm around her.  Her body was trembling from the chilly air, and with fear.  I began to rock her back and forth, humming a song, a child comforting a child.

All at once, the air was torn open with wailing and screaming.  The first bodies had been brought out, and there was no life in them.  The keening cries rose in volume; they took on a life of their own.  Not even knowing whose broken body had been found, she and I opened our mouths, and the grief poured out.

One of those bodies was that of my brother-in-laws’ father.   At the age of 17, it now fell on his young shoulders to suddenly become the man of the house, and to try and hold his large family together in the face of our greatest fear made reality.

I had pushed this memory far, far back into the remotest recesses of my mind.  It broke out of its’ mental cage as I watched the families in West Virginia make the journey from joy to grief.  The keening rose in me, and I mourned out loud.

These keening cries of grief are torn straight from the soul of the Appalachian spirit.  It lays bare the anguish, it is pure emotion, and it shreds the hardest heart among the listeners. 

There are no myriad layers of polite veneer back here.  There are no social pretenses in the presence of death.  There is just the agony of loss laid bare.

Compounding this tragedy was the miscommunication between the rescuers and the surface.  To believe that your loved ones were safe, and then to be slapped across the face with the brutal truth, put these people on an emotional seesaw nearly beyond bearing.  So much for technology.

Reality show?  This was a reality show.  Do you sincerely believe that Fox or any other network has a clue?  Survivor?  What a farce.  This is survival.  This is reality. The reality of this life is that my people die because the Federal and State governments in charge of rules and regulations governing safety are more interested in making sure that the white-collar owners and lobbyists continue to make the most money at the least expense.

I was astonished and disgusted by the litany of violations in the Sago mine.  It is, however, much cheaper to pay small fines, ($200) for each violation than it is to make the necessary and expensive changes to insure that this and other mines in the mining industry are safe. That’s called ‘good’ business – keep costs down and profits high.

As my husband and I watched this agonizing chain of events, we saw something that gave us some small hope of future change.  After the truth had been broken to the families, one of the family members verbally cut loose on West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin III.  There were several police officers, including West Virginia State Troopers nearby, and they started to move in to protect the governor. 

In an act of supreme courage and compassion, Joe Manchin waved them back.  He knew that this man needed to vent his rage and grief on an official figure, and he just stood there and took it.  Joe is West Virginian and Appalachian.  He knew just how quickly the raging emotions could have gotten out of hand, and he stood in there in the face of this man’s awesome rage and just let him pour out all his anger and grief.  He put this man’s emotional needs ahead of his personal safety, and I thank him for this with all my heart. 

We are encouraged by the brave actions of Governor Joe Manchin.  He has exhibited the necessary traits of understanding, compassion and courage that are desperately needed to address the problems and to try and right some of the tremendous wrongs continually being done to the mining communities of Appalachia.

Although little can be done to change the past, the fact that the mineral rights to the coal in Appalachia were stolen by glib ‘company men’ who befriended the mountain people only long enough to get their ‘X’ on a binding contract needs to be brought back out into the public eye.  It was a massive, wholesale theft of invaluable rights, and should be expunged from our country’s ‘black gold’ history.

Exploitation of these socially impaired people for their mineral rights was only the beginning.  These companies then employed the local men to dig their own coal, and sold it for the companies’ profit.  The history of coal mining in this country is literally ‘littered’ with bodies of Appalachian people.  They call it ‘the true price of coal’, and it is a price America should never have paid, and the Appalachian people can no longer afford to pay.  The coal that fuels America’s industry has been drenched with generations of Appalachian blood.

What hypocrites we are!  Our leaders carp about conditions in China, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, while ignoring the desperate straits of Appalachia.  We hear Bush, Cheney and Condi Rice talk about ‘human rights’ in undeveloped countries nearly every week. The Appalachian Regional Commission receives millions of dollars ($92 million for 2006) for improving the living and working conditions of Appalachian people, yet my people still have the lowest economic standard of living in the entire country!

It is this same administration that has gutted safety laws and environmental laws pertaining to ‘deep’ mining and mountaintop removal.  Have you ever seen what mountaintop removal does to the environment?  It fills in the breathtaking valleys, coves and ‘hollers’ that make Appalachia the most unique mountain range in America.  There are species of mussels, salamanders and wildlife that are found nowhere else in the world!

Why do we continue to cling to our way of life in the mountains? Why don’t we all just move away?  Appalachian people are bound to the mountains by much more than coal and blood.  When our Scottish forefathers made the long journey across the ocean and over the plains of the Eastern coast, they did not stop until they lifted their eyes up to the hills of the Appalachian mountain range.  When they saw the tops of the mountains shrouded in mist, their hearts told them they were home.

Have you have ever seen a computer graphic of how the continents of the world were once one large piece?  The Discover channel has shown this graphic in one of its’ fine shows.  If you watch it closely, you can see that as the continents began their shifts eons ago, the country that is now Scotland and Ireland was once physically attached to the end of what is now the Appalachian mountain range.  There is a band of red clay that runs through Appalachia to the end of our continent and continues across the Atlantic Ocean to Ireland and Scotland.  Geographically, it is identical with the red clay here at home.

My people, in their racial intelligence, knew in their souls that they had come home, both physically and spiritually.  This ancient land called to their blood.  The King James Bible says it best in Psalm 121: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.  My help cometh from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”

So much history, so much pain, so much agony, and all of it is unnecessary.  All of it is for profit, for the pursuit of the almighty dollar by people whose greed demeans the lives of good men and women who pay the ultimate ‘price of coal’.

My family and I have paid the price for your coal far too often.  It is my hope that Governor Joe Manchin III will take the lead in pushing for these critical, overdue changes in regulation.  I hope he will lead the charge in calling for overwhelming changes and strict enforcement on both State and Federal statutes.  It is a tall order, but Governor Manchin is a man of courage and conviction.  

In the meantime, I grieve.  My keening cries of today pave memory’s path to the two little girls sitting on a log and crying out to God:

“Daddy!  Not my Daddy!”

Shamblin’ Man

You may have noticed him when you passed through our small community; a tall, slight, shambling figure of a man walking on the side of the road.  Perhaps you gave him only a glance; perhaps you didn’t really see him at all.  He wasn’t much to look at.

His clothes were usually well worn and slightly shabby, his glasses nearly always sat at the end of his nose, and sometimes his chin bore testimony to his last meal.  He wore his cap pulled down over his forehead to shield eyes weakened by many years of bright sunshine and age.

He never officially ran for office, he never achieved much in life – according to most people, that is.  No, he just quietly walked up and down Route 58 picking up after other people who threw their garbage out of the windows of their cars. 

He used his own money, and sold the aluminum cans he picked up to buy food to feed the stray and feral cats in our community. These feral cats will certainly miss their gentle friend. He always worried about them making it through the cold winters.

He spent his days quietly in the back of the local Food Market, reading the Roanoke Times and underlining articles and words of particular interest to him.  To those of us who took the time to sit with him and talk, he was a walking encyclopedia of mountain genealogy.  He could tell you who was related to whom, who had married whom, and who was kin to whom.  He remembered birthdays, anniversaries and dates of death, and could discuss current events with an acuity few could match. 

He delighted in learning new facts and new words; whenever, in the course of one of our many conversations I would use a word unfamiliar to him, he would stop me and ask me what the word meant and how it was used.  He would make a note to himself, look up the word, and proudly mention it to me the next time he saw me.  He sometimes misused words, and we would quietly laugh together. 

I remember well one day at the Market.  He had previously had laser eye surgery for cataracts, and he was worried that they were returning.  He said to me, “I’m afraid I may be gettin’ another Cadillac in my eye.”  I replied, “Well Tommy, I sure hope not, ‘cause that would hurt like the very Dickens!”  He immediately caught what he had said, and we stood there before the counter and quietly enjoyed a good laugh together.

He was never proud and vain; he just went about his life, a simple, good man.  He never married because, as he explained to me, he had to take care of his parents after he got out of the military, and then he ‘never could find nobody by then’. 

He graduated from High School in 1938, and served honorably in the United States Navy during World War II.  He was a member of the local VFW Post, and turned up faithfully for meetings, trusting that one of his friends would see that he got home safely.  He was a familiar figure at any ‘doings’, he loved to hear music, but what he loved most of all was just to talk, to chat with anyone who came across his way.

He lived his last years with some very dear friends, who remodeled their basement to make him a comfortable apartment.  There, thanks to their caring hearts and kindness, he was able to maintain his independence.  Nearly every day, he would walk up Route 58 to the Market, where he would do odd jobs, pick up aluminum cans for recycling, and pass the time of day with anyone who came in and wasn’t in too big of a hurry to share a few words with him.

His self-depreciating humor was legend to those of us who took the time to know him. Years ago when he drove a vehicle, a 1951 Chevrolet pickup, he stopped to give a ride to my teenage husband-to-be and two of his cousins.  Packed into the front of the truck like sardines, the truck crept down the road towards Jack Archer’s store.  He told them, “You boys ‘ll just have to bear with me – sometimes I get a wild hair and just have to drive fast!” Glancing over at the speedometer, the boys saw that he was driving 25 miles an hour!

I first met Tommy in 1973, when I moved to the Blue Ridge.  That same year, I introduced him to my older sister, who lives in another city.  We stood and chatted for a few minutes, and then left.  In 1978, I moved to Wisconsin, stayed there for 14 years, and then moved back home to the Blue Ridge.  Tommy was one of the first locals I saw upon my return.  You can only imagine my amazement when he greeted me by name, and then asked me, “How’s your sister?  Marie, wasn’t that her name?”   His memory was astounding!

As the unofficial mayor of our small community, he was our good will ambassador, greeting tourists, inquiring where they were from, and giving them a wonderful impression of mountain friendliness.  I wonder how many picture albums in the world have his picture in them – hundreds, I am sure.  Yet how many people really knew him?

Tommy was a member of the greatest generation this world has ever seen.  He belonged to an era when you took personal responsibility for your words and actions.  His was the generation when a handshake sealed an unbreakable agreement, when your word was your bond, and you stood by what you believed.  He loved God, country and community and the natural world.  He quietly grieved when the beauty of the mountains was bulldozed flat by progress, but he turned his thought and deeds to preserving the little that was left.

Tommy and I both shared a common belief – when Jesus our Lord said “When ye do this unto the least of them, ye do it unto me’ – Tommy and I both believed He wasn’t just talking about people.  We shared a love of all animals, and he was devoted to taking care of the stray cats around our tiny hamlet. 

On November 25, he was walking across Route 58, either coming or going from feeding his cats.  This being Thanksgiving Day, he was making sure his ‘kitty cats’ had a good meal.  He was struck by an automobile and died at the local hospital the same day.

The shock waves generated by his death throughout our community are incomprehensible to outsiders.  Our hearts and prayers are not only with our friend, but also with the unfortunate teenager who struck him.  Tommy would have been the first one to ‘take up’ for them, and not associate them with blame in any way.  This was just the way he was.

Something good, and gentle and kind has left us.  To strangers and to most people, he was just a quiet, shambling figure of a man walking up and down the road.  To his friends and intimates, he was a fountain of information, cheerful good will, and a kind-hearted friend to all the stray cats in our area.

Who will pick up our roadsides now?  Who will feed his beloved cats?  Who will ever take his place?  No one can fill his shoes.  Tommy Cockram was a rare man, and our community and our lives are much the emptier for his absence.
 

THOMAS JEFFERSON COCKRAM 1918 – 2004

Appalachian Legacy

She was two years old.

Before dawn, her grandmother awakened her and told her to get dressed.  Breakfast was on the huge round table; sausage, eggs, biscuits  & gravy and fried mushrooms. 

After washing the dishes, they assembled the tools for the days’ work; scissors, knives, baskets, woven bags, small spade and clippers. 

Dawn was just beginning to break as they left the house.  The grass, heavily wet with dew, drenched her bare feet as they began the slow walk up the mountain. Birds greeted the coming of the sun with their incredible melody of praise; taking brief flight at the advent of their passing, then settling back to their business. 

“Now, I want you to larn this ‘un today”, said her grandmother.  Setting the little girl down before the selected plant, she instructed her grand-daughter to stare at the plant until she told her to stop.

The little girl sat down beside the plant, and began to study it.  She noted the overall shape of the plant, its’ leaves, the stem, the bloom.  Then she pinched off a piece of it, rubbed it between her hands, smelled and tasted the essence of it.

 After ten minutes of study, her grandmother said, “There.  That’s enough.  Now look for it.”

When she raised her eyes, the child was once again astonished at her new ability to see that particular plant everywhere she looked.  Now she had another wild herb stored in her memory, added to the many already embedded there.

Then the real work of the day began.  Grandmother always had a specific list of plants and herbs she needed for her herbal remedies.  She was an Appalachian Herbwoman.

A racial mix of Scots, Irish and Cherokee, her grandmother had learned her trade from the hands of her mother and grandmother.  For decades, the only ‘doctor’ in this isolated area of the Appalachian Mountain chain was the ‘yarbdoctor’.  Equally deft at delivering a baby, setting a broken bone, and treating the various illnesses of her people, the ‘Herbwoman’ held a position of immense respect in the mountains.

Now, with the coming of modern life, none of her 4 daughters wanted to continue the practice of herbal medicine.  Of 29 grandchildren, only the 2-year-old daughter of her youngest son had any interest in her craft.  She found the child to be an apt pupil, who delighted in the natural world and was never happier than when out foraging with her grandmother.

God gives the gift of connecting with the natural world to very few.  The little girl felt completely at home in the woods and fields of the mountains.  The plants were her friends, the flowers and fruits of nature her playthings.  She made her dolls from fresh flowers, and built entire communities for her dolls with moss, leafy twigs and nuts. 

Her Grandmother’s mental list of  plants was not cast in stone.  In addition to the specific needed items, they were open to accept any of nature’s bounty as they came across it.  They could always make ‘room’ for ‘shrooms’.  Wild berries, tree fruits, nuts, roots, shoots, seeds, plants, leaves and other treasures were easily accommodated.  Wild food was as much a part of the daily table fare as was the produce from the large family garden. 

Indeed, her grandmother looked upon the mountains as one huge natural garden, given to her people by God Himself, complete with instructions for its’ usage.  “Never take the best plant”, she instructed the little girl.  “Always leave the best ones to go to seed and replenish the supply.”

It was the same with bramble plants.  When they picked wild black raspberries, wineberries, dewberries, or blackberries, her grandmother would always pin the tops of the new canes to the ground with homemade staples.  She cut lengths of wire, bent them into a ‘U’ shape, cleared a small patch of dirt and pinned the top 4 inches of the cane to the earth.  Later, when they came back in the fall, she would cut the newly rooted cane free from the mother plant.  In this way, she perpetuated the growth of the patch.

When gathering ginsang, she only took 4 or 5 year old roots, carefully planting the berries from each plant to ensure the survival of the valuable herb.  These roots were carefully trimmed, washed and dried in the hot, airless attic.  After drying, they would be sorted, weighed and either made into a premium tonic or sold for ‘cash money’.

Her ‘medicine cabinet’ was filled with tonics, remedies, concoctions, tinctures and salves.  All of her liquid ‘medicines’ were alcohol based; her husband made and sold the best ‘moonshine’ in those parts.  He used only ‘red corn’ for his still, and the faint red tint given by the corn was his products’ ‘signature’. 

She had remedies for everything; she fully believed that God had given mankind a natural medicine for ‘everthin’ that ails a body’ in nature’s pharmacy.  She was deeply distressed and concerned with the damage being done to the mountains by coal mining.

She was wise in all areas of life.  She was a psychologist, therapist, mentor, guide and spiritual advisor.  She often commented that her shoulders made ‘dandy cryin’ posts’, and she dispensed comfort along with some hard, good common sense. 

Her views on life were simple yet incredibly deep.  “A body knows right from wrong”, she often said, “They just need to be reminded of it sometimes.”  Young troublemakers were brought to her door for correction.  Those who just needed extra attention got it; those who needed a ‘whuppin’ got that as well.  The leather strap on the woodshed door was well known and feared in the commuity.  She had deadly aim, but she dispensed hugs and kisses after the discipline.  “It’s for yore own good,” she would say, and she meant it. 

“Think it through.”, was her mantra.  In that one sentence, she expressed all the common sense anyone would ever need in life.  It wasn’t enough to just act and react to life, she would sit and think of all the possible connotations to words, deeds and actions.  Then, once her course of action was decided upon, she would ‘go to work on life’.

Always open to new knowledge, new facts, constantly re-assessing the situation and correcting her course, she was a role model of all role models.  Long before the slogan became into popular usage, she believed that a ‘mind was a terrible thing to waste’.  “Get some schoolin’, but get enough education to help you, not jest ruin you.  And never, ever, git above yore raisin’.”

This, then, is the Appalachian Legacy I have inheirited; like my grandmother before me, I am an Appalachian Herbwoman.

May my life be an honor to her.

The Miracle of the Crab Pot

Crab fishermen have odd customs at sea.  Living and working in the sea gives them a unique perspective and understanding of our oceans and their conditions.

When these fishermen dump a load of crabs into the holding ‘pot’ on board, the majority of the crabs will fight and wrestle and try to kill each other to get to the top of the heap of crabs.  It does no good to get to the top, because the crabs still can’t get out – they’re too far from the sides of the pot.  But they don’t know that; they are frantically driven by primal instinct.

Other, instinctively smarter crabs, attempt to scale the walls themselves.  Due to the wear and tear on the metal or wooden sides of the ‘pot’ from the nets and the loads themselves, large and minute dings, scratches or ridges develop on
the walls.  These dings provide essential handholds for the freedom-seeking crabs.

These crabs attempt to climb up the sides of the pot, clinging to precarious hold after hold, but always headed up.  The crabs on the edges of the center heap notice these climbing crabs.  They then come to the wall, grab hold of the climber, and haul he/she/it back down to the bottom where all crabs are ‘supposed’ to be.

Psychologists have called this type of behavior in nuclear families ‘the crab pot mentality’.  When one member of a deeply dysfunctional family realizes that they and their family have emotional/psychological problems and earnestly seeks help, the dysfunctional family circle becomes threatened. 

The dysfunctional nuclear family lives and functions only within the complete denial of the true family dynamics. The stigma of the very words ‘mental illness’ unleashes a firestorm of fear within the family.  As the causation of the change, you become the focal point of the pathological anger/fear driving the family psychological engine.

The nuclear family turns on the one seeking help, assuring themselves that ‘they’ are fine, that ‘you’ are the crazy one because you had to finally admit that you were ‘mentally ill’ and had to seek help.  That means, to the rest of the dysfunctional family, that they have no problems, ‘because they never had to get help’!

You become a threat to the functioning of the dysfunctional family.  By your beliefs and actions, you are, in effect, upsetting the dysfunctional ‘norm’ they so desperately try to maintain.  You are in a process of personal change, and a nuclear family locked into a pattern of denial, abuse and maintaining the ‘status quo’ has to discredit you and the work you are undertaking in order to feel ‘safe’.  When you change, you change the family dynamics, and that is devastatingly threatening to the ingrained order of the family.

They try to discourage you in every way they can, with anger, verbal attacks, or replaying the family myths, with their completely re-written family history.  Their version of the past is so twisted and so far from the truth that you sometimes react with horror at the depth of their delusions.  Nothing in the past actually happened as it really happened.

Nothing you do in the present is accepted as reality.  Your accomplishments are ignored, downplayed and/or given a negative spin that must, by dysfunctional family necessity, reflect badly on you and positively on them.  You must be kept in your place.

Unable to understand you on any level, the nuclear family ignores you, chastises you, tries to ‘talk some sense into you’ and uses every emotional and psychological weapon they can muster to bring you ‘back in line’ with the dysfunctional family norm.  The more progress you make, the further you draw away from the discord, the more the family gets upset and frustrated by your ‘selfishness’. 

Their biggest fear is disclosure in any form of the twisted, demented and unstable family structure.  “What will people think?” or “What happens in the family stays in the family!” are familiar formulas for the secrecy practiced by abusive and dysfunctional families.  For the rest of the family, even the slightest hint of exposure of the warped family dynamics is unbearable and cannot be tolerated.

As you continue your personal journey, seeking to understand the truth about yourself and your family, their attacks become progressively more personal and increasingly vicious.  They may constantly belittle you verbally or ply you with obviously false, passive-aggressive compliments designed as a ‘back-hand’ slap at who you are becoming. 

You are never given the benefit of a doubt.  Every act and action you undertake is denied and downplayed to reassure the nuclear family that who you are and what you do is not important and as such, is in no way is a reflection on their
inadaquacy.

If, for example, you are overweight, they try to push food on you that you don’t want.  Your are the ‘jolly fat clown’ and your assigned role is that of the ‘family buffoon’.  God forbid that you should lose weight and regain your health.  Discarding or trying to redefine your role in the family is a psychological sin.  This the family cannot allow.

If you continue with your education, thereby elevating yourself out of their comprehension, you have ‘got above your raising’.  One of the cardinal rules of dysfunctional families is that you are not supposed to succeed at anything; by your success you demonstrate their inadaquacy and this cannot be allowed by the family.

If you persist in speaking the truth, they can even get to the point of taking your picture off their walls, thereby cutting you out of their lives until you ‘see the light’.  Although their walls are plastered with pictures of the entire nuclear and extended families, there will not be one single picture of you.  This perverted attempt to ‘cut you out of the family circle’ physically,
emotionally and psychologically is another desperate attempt to pressure you back into your ‘place’. 

You are no longer invited to family get togethers, no one calls, no one visits you, because you make them uncomfortable by seeking and living your own personal truths.

The dysfunctional family functions exactly like the crabs in the above mentioned crab pot.  They see you trying to get out, they see you reassessing your role, and they do their damndest to pull you right back down there in the pot of dysfunctional family dynamics, where your reward is that you get to assume your assigned role again.

You keep trying, braving their displeasure, ignoring their comments, and they pull out all the stops.  They tell their friends, their children and even your friends, spouse and your children that ‘you’ obivously have ‘mental problems’ in whispered asides, as if the subject is much too taboo to talk about, except, of course, as how it applies to only you.

You try to share what you are learning with them, but, locked in a mental/psychological cage of denial, their brains refuse to accept in any way, how, form, shape or choice of words the self-knowledge and the understanding of the family functionality you are gaining.  They absolutely, passionately refuse to acknowledge how you are changing.  To them, your ‘assigned’ role in the family dynamics is cast in stone. Talk about an exercise in futility!

Finally, the abuse becomes so toxic that you are forced to make a choice – re-enter the family dynamics and assume once again the crippled role they assigned you, go along with all the re-written family myths, and ‘know your place’ once again;

Or, you can finally get to the uppermost point in your life (the top of the crab pot) and decide to fall outside the pot.  Even the fear of the unknown is finally preferable to the abusive family dynamics.  Letting go is the hardest part of the entire process.

You let go and fall outside the pot.  You cut off contact with your toxic family because you realize that there is no way they will ever accept you as you are now.  Their rage at you has been built to massive proportions because you have escaped their clutches.  The family applecart is upset big time.  You have committed the sin of chosing sanity over myth, of putting yourself and your mental health before the unity of family dysfunction.  How dare you?

Ah, but here’s the nice part.

When the rare crab finally does manage to climb up the sides of the crab pot, and fall out onto the deck below, what do you think happens?  Does the crab fisherman, realizing that every ounce of crab is worth money, toss that crab back down into the maelstrom of crab pot?

No.

He picks up the crab, and tosses it over the side of the ship, back into the ocean, from whence it came.  He sets it free, because he knows that the genes for survival, instinct, intelligence, whatever you choose to call it, are very strong in that particular crab.  That crab, left to breed, will produce stronger crabs, crabs that are better able to survive in the ocean and to perpetuate the crab species.

So, what happens to the human being who finally manages to get to the top of their personal ‘crab pot’ full of dysfunctional people?

If they decide to let go and fall onto the deck of reality, then the miracle really begins.

The Hand of God picks them up, and gently sets them free in the Sea of Life.
********************************************************************************

“Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming,”  *

*Dory, in “Finding Nemo” Copyright 2003 Disney/Pixar