I had a seemingly normal middle class childhood until 3rd grade, after which I had a hidden psychological injury that would horribly affect me for decades to come; and only one person in my family knew anything had happened. It happened slowly over the school year. My father didn’t notice anything happening, but my mother knew something was happening. She was making it happen. She was planning to divorce my father and they had told me this at the beginning of 3rd grade. When I had said that I wanted to live with my father and stay in the town I had grown up in, my mother spent the next nine months secretly trying to alienate me from my father and his family, without anyone knowing that she was doing it, including eight year old me.
I started 3rd grade as a bright happy young child and by the end of the school year, I had become badly depressed. I was constantly under stress, I had dropped out of baseball, was getting in fights with my childhood friends, and had hidden psychological injuries that I would not understand and that would plague me for the rest of my life; until now. Due to the unique circumstances of my childhood, the memories of the entire school year became suppressed. I never recalled them for forty five years until the year 2020 when I was going through a severely stressful legal action. I now know that my suppressed memories of 3rd grade have affected me negatively and horribly throughout my life. I believe that the fact that the emotional memories were never processed properly has caused me to develop many negative pathologies and have many adverse behavioral reactions to important situations throughout my life.
During my 2020 legal action I was under enormous stress and something kept bothering me about my 3rd grade teacher, whom I had made a partial recollection of ten years earlier. As I kept thinking about this teacher, additional memories began to be recalled of 3rd grade and of other things that happened that year, and as I reprocessed these memories as an adult, it became clear to me that my mother had been intentionally causing extremely stressful things to happen to me in an attempt to alienate me from my father and his family prior to divorcing my father.
The underlying details of my childhood are a confluence of specific circumstances that led my mother to take the secret and horrible actions that she did. My mother’s side of the family is from a scenic area of rural Missouri, tracing its origins back to an eighty acre homestead in 1859, which is still in the family and on which annual family reunions are still held. The family refers to this farm and surrounding area as “the country”. My mother spent approximately half of her childhood living in this part of Missouri and half as an Air Force brat.
My father is from Youngstown Ohio, where his father was a second generation union steel worker and a first generation Italian-American. After high school, my father enlisted in the Navy for five years. He met my mother at a military base in Arizona when his enlistment was almost over; she had just graduated from high school. They married in Arizona and returned to Ohio, where my father then worked as a third generation union steel worker, and my mother was a stay at home mom. They had four children, of which I am the oldest.
Prior to 3rd grade, my childhood seemed completely normal, except that I was unusually smart in certain areas. It was the early 1970s and we had a single family house, a stay at home mom, four kids, and two cars. Years later I would find out that my mother was secretly unhappy the whole time she lived in Ohio. She had kept diaries and I found these as an adult, while on a trip to her house with my children and we were looking through old memorabilia. These diaries contain many pages of rage filled rants from these years. She wrote that “the Del Signores only care about keeping up appearances” and of “the Del Signores coming over to see the baby” and how this enraged her. During this trip I also found a birthday card that my mother gave me when I was one year old. In it she wrote, “I’m sorry for screaming at you.”
About five years after finding this birthday card, I was about to fall asleep one night, and I spontaneously recalled an audible memory of my mother screaming my name, “Kenny!”. I recalled the pitch and timbre of her nineteen year old voice with the perfect crystal clarity of an infant’s neural imprint of its mother’s voice.
Over the years since then, I have recalled one additional detail related to this audible scream memory, namely that the scream would seem to come through my bedroom door; I have a fuzzy recollection of the image of the wall of my bedroom, with the sound coming through the open door, as if I was laying in my crib and had cried and caused my mother to scream my name from somewhere else in the house. I don’t know how often she screamed at me, but it was often enough that she wrote an apology to me when I was one year old, and also that I was able to form a memory of the scream that I was able to recall when I was in my forties.
My mother and father had separated the summer before my 3rd grade, but then reconciled. We kids were told that we were going to spend the summer in Missouri with our mother as a vacation, which we did, living in a small camper in the country1. At the beginning of Aug, my father visited Missouri and brought me back to Ohio with him for the remaining month of summer. It was on the car trip back that he told me that he and my mother were going to divorce.
A month later, my mother and siblings returned from Missouri, and I was told that my parents were going to divorce in 9 months, after the end of the upcoming school year, and then we would go with our mother back to Missouri. At this point, I said that I wanted to stay in Ohio, but I was told that it was the law that the children had to go with their mother until age 12, at which point the law allowed the child to pick which parent s/he lives with. I recall asking if I could come back to Ohio when I was 12 and my father said yes, so I had said that I planned to do that.
There was a memory of this time that I had not suppressed. There was one day early in the year where my mother told me that when my father gets home, if he says it’s OK for me to stay in Ohio, then I can stay. I waited excitedly all day and when my father got home I told him what my mother had said and he immediately looked at her with a scowl and I knew instantly that it was not true. I recall later that my mother said she thought that if I heard my father tell me no, that that would make me not want to stay in Ohio.
The next unusual thing that happened was that my 3rd grade teacher started being unusually strict with me in class. I had made a partial recall of this 3rd grade teacher in the summer of 2010 after visiting my grandmother in a nursing home and I saw the teacher in the nursing home at the same time. I was in a common room with my grandmother and from across the room I saw the teacher sitting against the wall in a wheelchair, staring at me with a half frozen look. I recognized her face and smiled and nodded to her, but did not recall who she was at the time. Sometime later I recalled that she was my 3rd grade teacher and that there was something unusual about her. I recalled her pulling me aside from the class and telling me “You have to change the way you are going at home”, and I remembered being confused by this.
Later that year at Thanksgiving I visited my one year younger sister and told her about seeing the 3rd grade teacher and that I remembered there was something strange about her. My sister said, “Oh, I remember that teacher, she used to stop me in the hallway and talk to me about you.” My sister said she recalls the teacher telling her that she was really worried about me and that I was a ticking time bomb.
At home, my mother said that the teacher said that I had to do extra handwriting practice at night. She said the state of Ohio has very high handwriting standards and I was far below the standard. I was made to do repetitive handwriting drills on a desk in the basement under the stairs. I remember I had a desk lamp and it felt like I had a brick on the back of my head as I repetitively wrote out the same thing over and over again under that fucking lamp. I don’t remember if I had to do this every night, but I recall that it was for an hour before bed.
The teacher would then routinely berate my handwriting in front of the class. She would walk around the class returning homework individually to each student and give them each feedback as she did so. I recall one day when she got to me, that I looked down and clenched, awaiting my daily emotional beating, but on this day she did not berate me, she instead held my paper up and said it was good. I looked up at her puzzled, because this was a change from the daily routine. She smiled at me and then held the smile like I was supposed to show public gratitude to her for not beating me on this day. As I recall, I did not express anything in return to her.
There was one specific memory of 3rd grade that came back to me in 2020 that tied the teacher to my mother. I recalled one day while I was being berated in class, that the teacher said, “they’re moving to Poland next year, they think they are better than us in Poland.”2 Two years later, my mother did divorce my father and moved us to Missouri, and she would routinely use the phrase “the people in Ohio think they are better than us” when berating our father in front of us to her relatives and to others.
One day in the spring of 3rd grade, I returned to class after lunch and the teacher asked if anyone had come into the classroom during the break. I had come into the classroom to put a pencil back in my desk and I replied as such. The teacher then said that a girl’s show and tell glass jar was broken and I must have broken it. I said that I didn’t do anything to the glass jar, but the teacher still blamed me and ostracized me in class for breaking the jar. At home, my mother told my father that the teacher said I was lying in class and I got in trouble with my father for lying to the teacher.
The in-class ostracization over the glass jar continued and I recall a couple days later that I was trudging home from school in the hot sun with my bookbag on, feeling like I had a brick on my head, and just stewing mad about the injustice of the glass jar, when on the other side of the street a group of kids, including the girl, caught up to me and something was said. I lost my temper at the kids and crossed the street and got in front of them and screamed in an enraged voice “I didn’t break the glass jar”. I remember their feet were jumping up and down as I screamed. My words of course got back to the teacher who relayed the information to my mother and I then got in even more trouble at home. I recall walking home alone on the Friday of that week and I was going to be grounded all weekend because of the sidewalk incident. The girl lived four houses past my house and I went to her house first before going home and her father was kneeling down in the garage , working on something. I told him that I didn’t break the glass jar and I remember thinking from his facial response that he probably doesn’t even know what I’m talking about, then I went home to my punishment.
One explanation for why a 3rd grade teacher would have harassed a student in the manner that I was harassed is that in the area of Youngstown, Ohio, there had been a deep ethnic animosity between the Irish and Italian immigrants. The teacher was Irish3 and my grandfather was a well known Italian member of the community. Our last name is a relatively rare Italian name and there were only about fifteen Del Signore families in the phone book that mostly lived in Struthers. The teacher had graduated from Struthers high school in 1944, eight years after my grandfather had. There had been Del Signores attending Struthers high school since the early 1930s and thereafter, so it is highly unlikely that she did not recognize my family name.
I had one further interaction with this teacher in the summer following the end of the school year. My mother had decided against getting divorced and instead my parents did buy a house in Poland. The abuse had stopped as far as I know at this point. We hadn’t moved yet and one day I had met some boys I knew from school that lived a few blocks outside of my normal neighborhood range. I went to their neighborhood with them and we were playing in a dirt spot on the back edge of one of the boy’s yards. The teacher then appeared in the back door of the house behind my friend’s house. When I saw her, I froze and thought of running home. I remember that I instantly recalled the way to get back home. Then I saw that she was holding a tray with three glasses of lemonade that she was going to give us. So we went over to her back porch and stood there with her for a few minutes and drank the lemonade.
It may have been that the teacher had realized that my mother had been manipulating her and she wanted to see my condition. Another similar event happened three years later when I returned to Poland from Missouri. My 2nd grade teacher had retired and lived a couple blocks from my father’s house in Poland and she got in touch with my father and invited me to come over and visit her, which I did. We had cookies on her front porch. I can say now that the psychological damage that was done was going to cause pathologies to develop and persist throughout my life and this damage would not have been apparent at this point.
My mother also caused horrible incidents to occur with my father and grandmother. There was one day that I had gotten into a fight with my two best friends, Tommy and Lisa. I punched them both in the eye and knocked them both down after they had chased me into Lisa’s garage. We were all sad and we all cried for a long time afterwards. Tommy called me an a**hole and I recall being shocked for the first time to hear a little kid swear. Later my father traumatized me further for hitting a girl. My sister and I were in the bathtub and when he found out he ran into the bathroom and yelled at me and held my face with his hand and shook it. I had remembered this incident and I always remembered that my father was holding his lunch box in one hand while he was yelling at me in the bathtub. As the memories of 3rd grade began to be recalled, I remembered more of this incident. I recalled that my mother had been sitting with us in the bathroom, and then we heard the door open when my father came home from work. My mother got up immediately and went out and then my father came running into the bathroom yelling. He still had his lunchbox in his hand because she didn’t give him enough time to set it down after walking in the door from work. My father remembers this incident and he told me that he came home from work and went into the basement and my mother followed him down the stairs and said “Kenny beat up a girl”. This sequence of events then implies that my mother had premeditated the act of telling my father about the fight so that he would get angry and cause a negative emotional event.
Of all of the adverse events that had occurred to me in 3rd grade, I was not aware that any of the events were caused by my mother, except for one. I now believe that this one single event has caused numerous negative pathologies to develop that have affected me negatively throughout my life. My mother intentionally caused a horrible childhood incident to occur with my grandmother on Christmas eve 1974, and I knew she had intentionally done so when it happened. This caused a feeling of betrayal in me that was the most intense feeling my 8 year old self had ever felt, similar in intensity to the learning of a loved one’s death. I recall that the immediate feeling was crushing and I felt like I was flattened. I think my 8 year old mind reacted by completely blocking out this memory. I now believe that this suppressed memory has caused myself and others many adverse emotional and behavioral impacts throughout my life. I believe that at any point, if I would have recalled and processed the 3rd grade memories, and in particular the Christmas eve betrayal, that I could have led a much improved life.
I remember being happy the week before Christmas because school was out and I did not have to do handwriting homework that week. On Christmas eve, my grandparents hosted about 30 family members for dinner and it was my favorite night of the year. I had developed a plan with my sister at home the week before Christmas that we would sneak into the spare bedrooms and peek in the closets and find the Christmas presents. I had talked about doing so all week at home with my sister and within earshot of my mother. I remember that when I first I realized that my mother had heard me talking about the plan, she was doing dishes, and that she did not react in any way or tell me not to do what I was planning, so I thereafter talked about the plan in front of her. On Christmas eve, my mother waited until after my sister and I had found our presents and then, while dinner was being prepared, told my grandmother that she just overheard me saying that we had found the presents in the closet. I was running through the my grandmother’s kitchen, having the happiest night of the year, and I felt a sharp pain in my left bicep. My grandmother had grabbed my arm and spun me around. Her face was right in my face; she had makeup on and I could smell her perfume and the garlic from the spaghetti sauce. She yelled in my face “Kenny did you look in the closets and find the presents?!!”. My mother was standing right behind her and I remember looking at her and instantly feeling crushing betrayal. I never once thought anything negative about my grandmother. They took us into a bedroom and closed the door and my grandmother yelled at us and said that she was not going to give us our presents, a telescope and a typewriter. My sister sat on my mother’s lap and cried horribly the whole time.
I recall being stunned while in the room, I don’t think I cried. I recall that after getting yelled at, my grandmother said, “now go out there and play and don’t get in any more trouble”, and that I went into the bathroom by myself. Three minutes prior I had been having a happy childhood holiday surrounded by family, and now suddenly I was sitting alone feeling a negative emotional pain equivalent to the loss of a loved one, and my mother had caused it to happen. Later, after the other kids had opened their presents, my grandmother brought the telescope and typewriter out and let us have them. My sister recalls that my mother later made the statement about my grandmother: “that was a mean thing to do on Christmas eve.”
I believe that I have developed a number of adverse behavioral pathologies from this event that have affected me negatively throughout my life. I also think that these adverse effects were greatly increased by the event being suppressed. There is a part of your brain that is associated with your mother, happiness, love, and joy. After Christmas eve 1974, the worst feeling I ever felt in my life was secretly attached to my happiness and love circuit in my brain. Now, after having recalled this trauma, I can reprocess my emotional reactions to important events in my life and I believe this one single event has caused a horrible butterfly effect for myself and others.
Aftermath pathologies:
Mammals will hide their injuries so as to not reveal weakness. In retrospect I can say that growing up, I knew there was something different about myself and that I did not feel comfortable most of the time, but I did not know the cause of my constant discomfort and I hid my injury.
I did not begin using anti-depressants until age 44, four years after divorcing. After I began the medication and had felt the positive effects, I told my children that if I had been taking this medicine while married, that likely their mother and I would not have divorced.
I think my suppressed memory of 3rd grade had a large effect during this time. During 3rd grade, I had developed the behavior of persisting through adverse feelings and to block them out; I had no other option and this pathology was manifest in myself to a large degree at the end of my marriage.
I had become slowly more and more depressed during the 10 years I was married and had no desire to divorce at the time it occurred. In retrospect, I would say it is irrational to not want to divorce from a non functioning marriage, but I think now that the suppressed memory of 3rd grade caused me to want to remain married through the desire to persist through the discomfort.
Fundamentally what I needed was to recall the memories of 3rd grade. I believe if I would have done so at any point in my life, it would have greatly changed my future outcomes.
The first missed opportunity was when I was 11.9 years old. My mother had let me move back to Ohio prior to turning 12. She appeared in Ohio unexpectedly 6 weeks later with my uncle to collect me and take me back to Missouri. The police came and we all went to family Court the next day in Youngstown, Ohio with Judge Leskovansky.4
During the proceeding, I said “I am not going back to Missouri”, and I turned and nodded at my mother and said, “with her”. Judge Leskovansky strongly admonished me and said he would not tolerate anyone in his court calling their mother “her”. I wisely did not respond, but I vividly remember thinking that it doesn’t matter what this guy says, I wasn’t going back to Missouri. The Judge adjourned until after lunch for a decision and my father and I got a sandwich in a deli. I remember my father saying he wasn’t sure how the Judge would decide and I remember thinking I would set out on foot from the courthouse if I was ordered to go back to Missouri.
If the Judge had ordered an evaluation of me by an experienced professional, they may have uncovered the 3rd grade memories. I think that if I could have told the Judge the things my mother had done to me in secret that year, that he would have taken custody from her of the remaining siblings. Memories would have still been fresh in the witnesses. There were her diaries and there was the one year old birthday card screaming-apology, and just six weeks earlier when I was leaving Missouri, my 6th grade teacher had ostracized me in front of the class for my impending move. Unfortunately I could not tell the Judge these things and he did not remove custody and my siblings have suffered the butterfly effect consequences.
Florence Nightingale effect
The story of a wounded soldier falling in love with his nurse occurs during wartime. The scenario is a man under great duress, and then he is suddenly safe and a beautiful nurse is attending to him routinely. I now think something similar happened to me when I was 9 years old after my family had moved to Poland and the abuse had stopped. My mother had decided against divorce and the abuse had suddenly stopped and I was exiting from a prolonged childhood depression. Several neighborhood girls began regularly coming to our house to play with my sisters and I formed a unique attachment to one of the girls. This likely started as no more than a crush, but coupled with the childhood PTSD that had just ended, resulted in an unusually strong attraction for a 9 year old.
social anxiety
In 7th grade the school began using class periods. For the first couple months of seventh grade, I would sprint in the hallway in between classes, every class, every day. I think now this was an anxiety response to the crowded hallway.
inexplicable fear of commitment
Starting in 7th grade and ending in graduate school, every time I formed a relationship with a girl or woman, I would end the relationship shortly afterwards. I never understood my actions, but now as an adult with the context of the Christmas eve memory, I think that I was reacting to the suppressed memory of my mother’s betrayal and the duress of 3rd grade, and that this was causing me to have a negative internal reaction when trying to form a normal human relationship with a woman as a teen or young adult.
I’m terribly sorry for hurting people’s feeling as I did. It is a terrible outcome for a young woman to enter a relationship and then have the relationship ended abruptly and inexplicably. I caused this scenario to happen multiple times. Ironically, everyone was definitely better off with someone else; I was going to go on to have lifelong behavioral pathologies that would plague my attempts to maintain a long term relationship.
In retrospect, I think that intimacy would cause me to have panic attack type reactions to events that would have normally caused lifelong beautiful memories to form. This occurred from both the immediate intimacy of interacting with someone, and also from the longer term psychological effects of falling in love.
One night while dating my first wife, she played her guitar for me in her apartment. I had some kind of sudden nervous reaction and became anxious and told her to stop playing and said don’t do that anymore. Years later, in counseling prior to divorcing, she wrote about this event and how it affected her. She wrote that she never played her guitar for me again. I had never thought about that night again before she wrote about it. This was just one of many such behavioral pathologies that I have had and never understood.
persistent agitated state
When I relax, I become anxious. Around age 14 I had an under the table job cleaning a bakery after it had closed. I recall being alone in the bakery one night as I was about to leave for the day, and I began to feel the relaxed-then-anxious feeling sequence, and I recall spending some time introspecting, trying to figure out what was causing me to suddenly feeling anxious, but I never once thought back to the trauma of 3rd grade.
drinking
I first got access to alcohol at age 14. I’ve told my kids that when I first got drunk in 8th grade, that I felt better for the first time since the divorce. I had regular access to alcohol thereafter and I became a weekly binge drinker throughout high school and college. By my mid 20’s I was drinking a nightly six pack and developed heart palpitations that would follow my weekend binge drinking. I stopped drinking at age 27 due to the heart palpitations.
obsessive compulsive working
After I quit drinking, I can now see that new pathologies developed in following years. I began working 16 hours a day soon after I had quit drinking. I worked in the daytime on an experiment for my PhD research at the Naval Research Laboratory, and then in the evenings I would log into a server at Fermilab and work on a second experiment writing software until I went to sleep.
sleep paralysis/sleep terrors
Starting at age 18, I began having sleep paralysis. I describe this experience as a panic attack that occurs immediately after falling asleep. One wakes up, but in a paralyzed state for approximately 30-45 seconds. During this time I have to consciously force myself to inhale. This experience can produce dreamlike hallucinations and was initially horrifying until I eventually came to understand it. It still occurs and is still unpleasant, but now I just wait the paralysis out and keep sucking in air and trying to wiggle my pinky to break the paralysis.
In my 30s, I began to experience sleep terrors. I believe these are similar to sleep paralysis, except that you wake all the way up, but in a terrorized state. I think a runaway process occurs in the mind that causes an intense feeling of anxiety, similar in magnitude to the feeling just before impact in a car crash. Both sleep disorders occur for me immediately after falling asleep and will usually cause me to be awake for at least an hour afterwards.
call of the void
I began to experience call of the void in my mid 30s. I recall my 1.5 year old daughter standing at the window watching me practice archery in my backyard (that backs up to a cornfield) and the thought of turning towards her and shooting an arrow through the window popped into my head. Another example I remember is eating with my first wife and laughing about something and suddenly the thought of stabbing her popped into my head.
there is something wrong with him
I have heard throughout adulthood that I am different. I have also heard the “there’s something wrong with him” from professional colleagues. I worked in the academic sector as a post doc in high energy physics. This field requires the interpersonal adroitness of a royal court to remain employed in and I soon left for the industrial sector.
Others
My life story has several parallels to the movie “The Sixth Sense”. I had something bad happen and then had something wrong with me that I did not know about for the rest of the story. Also, Munchhausen by proxy syndrome is featured in the movie. My mother had a similar pathology where she would premeditate the idea of hurting her child, and then act on it. However, I think my mother was doing what she was doing for some other purpose than attention. It’s not clear to me why my mother was taking the actions she was because when I was 8, I had to go to Missouri with her at the end of the school year regardless of my desire to return when I was 12.
Since recalling my suppressed memories of 3rd grade one year prior to this writing, I have been reprocessing my life memories with this new context. This is also similar to the movie when Bruce Willis finds out he is dead and reprocesses the events of the movie in the new context.
In the movie, the affected (dead) people cannot see each other. This is dissimilar to real life. In general I can say that if you see any kind of behavioral pathology in someone you care for or yourself, there is probably something causing it, and it probably worth figuring out...
This summer spent in the country was a very rich and beneficial childhood experience. There were many interactions with my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Later, throughout my life, I would have a recurring dream that starts out in the beautiful and idyllic country, and then everything turns awful and terrible. There are usually animals in the dream and the skin would rot and decay off of all the animals when the dream turned bad. Now, having recalled the suppressed memory of third grade, this dream evidently stems from my having formed beautiful memories of the country that summer, which were then followed by the extreme duress of third grade.
We lived in the suburb of Struthers, Ohio, and my father had been planning to buy a house in the neighboring town of Poland.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/68596286/violet-agnes-rodgers
My mother said that she let me leave Missouri a couple months before I was 12 because she thought I would find my father and Ohio so terrible that I would not want to stay. In retrospect this is a highly irrational statement, and coupled with her unannounced trip to retrieve me, could/should have alerted the other adults, including the Judge, that there was something wrong with my mother.