"By the Book or by the gun, there's fear inside of everyone."

Read this tonight in a book about losses of childhood. Not that I would ever or have ever read psychoanalytic feel-better-by-scapegoating-your-parents literature, but at my house-sit, the other options include 22 Keys to Creating a Meaningful Workplace and Bonsai: The Art of Dwarfing Trees:

"When our first connections are unreliable or broken or impaired, we may transfer that experience, and our responses to that experience, onto what we expect from [others]. Expecting to be abandoned, we hang on for dearest life: "Don't leave me. Without you I'm nothing. Without you I'll die." Expecting to be betrayed, we seize on every flaw and lapse: "You see--I might have known I couldn't trust you."

"Studies show that early childhood losses make us sensitive to losses we encounter later on...Emotional detachment is one such defense. We cannot lose someone we care for if we don't care. The child who wants his mother and whose mother, again and again and again, isn't there, may learn that loving and needing hurt too much. And he may, in his future relationships, ask and give little, invest almost nothing at all, and become detached...

"Another defense against loss may be a compulsive need to take care of other people. Instead of aching, we help those who ache. And through our kind ministrations, we both alleviate our old, old sense of helplessness and identify with those we care for so well.

"A third defense is a premature autonomy. We claim our independence far too soon. We learn at an early age not to let our survival depend on the help or love of anyone. We dress the helpless child in the brittle armor of the self-reliant adult.

"These losses we have been looking at...established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain. Absence can become gigantic and multiple."

I've grown to see the philosophy of my own mistrust,
We all have our faults, mine come in waves that you turn to rust,
Some of us laugh, some of us cry,
Some of us smoke, some of us lie,
But it's all just the way that we cope with our lives.

I've been hanging onto something,
You keep laughing awe-inspiring.
-Starsailor