When I was fourteen, something similar to stalking happened to me when two former friends turned on me. It is not nearly as severe as what Stormy and others have endured. But it had a terrible impact on me because of my age and the timing of certain other events in my life. It seemed relentless too because my sister befriended these girls. Therefore, I had to deal with them at school and in the classroom, but also in my home and car when my sister invited one of them over frequently and also got my mother to pick her up for a ride to school everyday. And if I wasn't dealing with them in person, my sister would relay nasty messages and threats from them to me and she would tell them what I had done the night before at home so they could broadcast it and humiliate me at school in front of my other classmates and teacher.
I never really learned to hide my feelings during that time. I bottled up a tremendous amount of fear, anger, frustration and betrayal. Betrayal by my sister who participated, and by my mother, those former friends and the peers who all witnessed it and did nothing in my defense. Occasionally someone would ask me, "What are they doing to you?!?!" and I would say, "I don't know," and silently to myself say, "Why won't anyone help me or stand up for me?"
I think of that period as the time my entire life fell apart. I rarely participated in school activities that I might otherwise have been interested in. I would scout out the street ahead of me so as to be able to cross to the other side or enter a store or otherwise delay having to pass by a potential bully or taunter. I seemed to draw that kind of thing to me then. So, I wasn't hiding my feelings, couldn't really. Instead, I tried to physically become smaller or invisible. I tried to prevent trouble. When it was in my house, I holed up in my room. I remember once the tormenter was in my sister's room and her shoes were in the kitchen. I felt complete revulsion towards those shoes. I picked them up for some reason, by the very tips of my fingers, almost as if I thought they would burn me up. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to destroy those shoes.
I guess for me it was a matter of physical safety. I felt in physical danger from those girls and maybe I was, too. They were certainly more evil to me than I have ever seen before or since except in movies.
So, when something happens in my life that is as bad as it gets, either a death or people treating me in ways that remind me of that time when I was fourteen, that switch goes off. The feelings go so underground that I don't even have to work at hiding them. Because I really can't hide feelings. So, my heart does it for me. Just puts those feelings away and lets them out a little at a time like an IV drip. Nothing for my face to hide because those kind of feelings go way deeper. This is only for the big stuff. I still have to deal with the everyday, run of the mill anger and annoyances that I can't hide. But since I have given myself permission to feel emotions and have been learning to sit with them and not flail out haphazardly, it has gotten easier.
Yes, this idea of stoicism seems to be directly related to safety. Physical and emotional safety, which in the child's mind become physical safety, I think.
