Day S3B: Trauma and a Haunted House

July 14, 2024

My friend yesterday had highly recommended that I check out a haunted house tour nearby where my Airbnb is. More specifically, it is Sarah Winchester Mystery House and many tours are available. Basically there are over 100 rooms, and Sarah had enormous wealth to build this house after she lost everyone in her family including her husband in the late 1800s.

The house had all these bizarre and superstitious features, including many panels and windows built in sets of 13. There were also doors leading into walls, door leading to drops, and staircases literally going up to nowhere. She paid her workers very well and everyone lived in the house. They got much higher wages than average and also free meals. I have no doubt there was a condition: they couldn't leave the house. It was a perpetual state of covid lockdown for everyone basically. She never left the place too, and allegedly she died there.

We asked many questions and our tour guide was excellent, but the unanswered question we all had was why Sarah Winchester would build such a house. The central part of the house was some sort of a spirit room where she would contact demons every night from midnight to 2am, and it would explain the haunted and paranormal features that still exist to this day.

The best answer to the question we could find is that Sarah believed she was cursed and this house was a way of trying to ward off the spirits that had cursed her.

Exactly then I made a connection between this haunted house and the message they said at the church service this morning: when facing unresolved trauma, we end up creating the very thing that we are trying to hide or run away from. It becomes PTSD when we are unable to make sense of the trauma or process what happened emotionally. It was now evident that Sarah Winchester dealt with her trauma by creating a cursed house, in effect manifesting the very phenomenon that she believed had ruined her life. As if to prove all that, a nasty earthquake happened in the early 1900s that destroyed half the house she built, and she then rebuilt it. But then after that she developed arthritis and needed very small stair risers to climb.

At that point I could empathize with her because of the trauma I had gone through, including deaths of loved ones. A big part of it was specifically the Shanghai lockdown and policies that prevented me from seeing my Dad. This was not resolved. Although much progress was happening. The trauma had indeed developed into C-PTSD (complex PTSD).

To deal with this, I booked an appointment for online counseling as it was the only suitable option for Monday at noon before my flight. It cost $95 and was expensive as hell for online, but there were no in-person options. The counselor is a specialist in C-PTSD and to maximize the time I planned to split the session ino several parts: the covid lockdowns and the China dictatorship, my father dying then secretly disowning us, and my stepmother. If there was time, we could add the fallout with my former high school friend. Whatever insights she could give I would take notes and move from them.

The goal in all of this is to move from trauma to triumph. Several authors have written books on this, and they have lived through far worse than I went through with lockdowns. Yet they made it.

The haunted house tour was extremely significant because it taught me that I wasn't much different from Sarah and also had potential to create the same cycles that keep all this thing happening. Unless of course, the cycle of trauma could be broken. For whatever reason, I have this sense that Dubai is going to be the focal point of this trip and the place where this will happen. How it happens, I don't know, but I am looking forward to what's coning.

While walking back along Santana Row, I suddenly remembered what that 80-year old fit homeless woman had told me: "When things don't go right, you go left" She was completely correct. When you have a mentality of abundance, this is what you do. You don't keep on fixating on the problem and what went wrong, or why an appointment didn't work out, or a girl rejected you when you asked her out for example. Instead you realize there are tons of alternative options, you modify your approach, and you go for it again. In the case of asking women out, you don't stop at one rejection, you ask over 50 different women, heck even 100, and you don't let failure stop you.

Sigma males understand this metaphor very well: the brutal masters who raise elephants in captivity do so by tying babies with a strong rope around their legs to a tree. The elephant develops trauma and learned helplness by realizing they are tied down and cannot escape. Later when the elephant grows up, the cruel master replaces the strong rope with a weak link to a post that can easily be moved. But the elephant does not try to be free.

The way out of this trauma is to kick aside that weak link. Sounds easy right? Try telling that to the elephant. In much the same way, the solution to my crisis may be a lot simpler than I realize, it is just something I can't see yet.

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	0
Comment on this entry	Comment	0