Bear Mauling You To Death Had Unhappy Childhood

Glacier National Park, Montana —

Yes, the immediate reason for this vicious ursine attack is that you left half a tuna sandwich in your sleeping bag last night. But have you stopped to consider the deeper root causes?

All too often, this sort of abusive behavior is the product of emotional instability in the childhood den. Take a distant, foraging father, add in a mother with a serious, untreated salmon addiction, and this is what you get — you get your left leg being torn off and eaten at 3 AM, a hundred miles from the nearest hospital.

Sure, you’re losing several quarts of blood a minute, but this is not all about you. Perhaps if you bothered to learn that your crazed interlocutor was mercilessly teased by the other cubs because his fur was “different,” you’d have a more empathetic perspective on the whole situation.

You still wouldn’t have any ears or a face, but at least you’d have therapeutic insight into the psycho-dynamics giving rise to all this hostile over-projecting.

Remember, everyone brings their own personal history, baggage, and six-inch claws into any relationship. Looking past the fact that your aorta just got sliced open, and focusing on your intruder’s underlying developmental issues, will help you comprehend this moment from a larger, more psychologically enriched point of view.

By Joe Lichtblau