I Have Something To Say

A couple years ago, I hit a serious wall.  I was emotionally and physically exhausted, but didn't understand why. Sure, I was a mom, wife, graduate student, and ran a business, but this exhaustion went much deeper than my chronic state of busyness and hypervigilance. Sure, I knew I had a rough childhood and had gone no contact with my parents ten years prior. I got on with my life. I made many positive and deliberate changes so I didn't repeat their patterns, but I hadn't fully unpacked just how vast that black hole of childhood trauma was. For me, awakening to the impact of my childhood trauma has happened over many years, with thousands of tiny steps toward recovery. But one day, the truth of it hit me so hard, I had to drop everything to process it. I had no choice because my body and brain simply gave out. I had to grow or succumb. I chose to grow. I threw myself headlong into the task of really looking at my issues. You could say I was hypervigilant about trauma ...

Abuse survivors are usually wary of new relationships for extremely good reasons that are not their fault. Almost always, the cycle of abuse starts out as something that appears wonderful. The new guy or gal is interested in them. Not only interested, but infatuated. They too-quickly claim they are "the one." They study their target, quick to note all their likes and dislikes, which feels like manna from heaven for someone who has been emotionally neglected. They are quick to become intimate, physically, mentally, and emotionally. Abusers hook their victims fast, always under some romantic guise of "fate" or "true love." Just when the victim believes it's real, the trouble starts. This initial stage of love bombing is how an abuser manipulates their prey into a false attachment. Everyone needs to be seen, heard, loved, and cared for, and this is the ammunition an abuser uses to target their victims. When someone feels loved, they relax. They bond...

One year ago today, I created my very first post, I Have Something To Say.  This was a huge milestone in my recovery for a few reasons. Because of the type of abuse I experienced, I had a huge mental and physical block about speaking up publicly. The knots in my stomach, lumps in my throat and overall panic came from a very real history and experience of being punished for telling the truth. When someone has been silenced and de-humanized from a time before they could even speak, it creates seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Ironically, I have spent much of my adult life learning how to write and express myself in creative ways. And yet, giving a voice to the parts of me that were abused were so blocked, I couldn't admit out loud what happened, let alone write about it directly. Too much misplaced guilt and shame prevented me from integrating my identity as an abuse survivor into my professional life. Sure, bits and pieces leaked out. I would casually mention to friends I tru...

My husband came home late last night to find me curled up in my favorite furry blanket, staring at the wall. He has found me like this many times before, often on days like this one, where I process a new traumatic memory in therapy. "Can I get you anything?" he asks. "A better childhood," I reply. He nods and sits next to me. He knows I want him near, but I don't necessarily want to talk about it. It's exhausting to explain trauma to someone else when it's raw, and besides, it's not so much the event itself but the fallout from it that needs care. At the moment, that means I'm tapped into a deep well of sadness for the child in me who was neglected, terrorized, and so unloved. This is a productive sadness. It's progress. I have earned enough breakthroughs in recovery to know how important it is for me to fully feel this sadness. The old me probably would feel shame for being upset about something that happened so long ago. The old...

Writing about the nature of abuse along with my own personal experience of it has been an extremely helpful tool for me to better integrate who I am. For a long time, I distracted myself from going there, knowing full well that when I did, it would be intense. Eventually, that strategy failed and I was left with no other healthy alternative than to face the big, hairy, purple monster head on. When I did face it head on, guess what? It was intense. I had to do a lot of interior work to get to a place where I could be fully honest and present with the full impact of what happened and the damage that was done. In this full embrace I finally allowed myself to grieve on a level I previously thought was "too selfish" (my abusers' words, not mine) to do. I allowed myself to fully acknowledge a range and depth of feeling that was previously inaccessible. The paradox of pain and relief that go with this sort of work often overwhelms me in a way that requires literally all I h...

I consider myself to be fairly self-aware and introspective. I've always been willing to look at my life and my life choices from every angle and make adjustments when necessary. And yet, there was this one area of my life that I felt, instinctively, was too big, too dark, too scary for me to face head on. I knew my parents weren't "normal" and that my childhood was lacking certain things, like, say, love. I knew enough about the dysfunction to go no contact over ten years ago. There was quite a bit I had already figured out and gained perspective on. And yet, there was this compartmentalized part of me that lurked in the shadows. I found myself thinking, fearing,  someday , I'll have to deal with that. Someday came. It came in the form of chronic illness, exhaustion, and collapse. It came in the form of feeling empty in spite of success. It came in the form of feeling responsible for burdens that weren't mine. It came in the form of nightmares. It came i...

Lately, whenever good and meaningful things happen, I burst into tears. They aren't happy tears, they are the tears of grief. And yet, this grief is mixed with gratitude. It's the simultaneous recognition of two profound truths: my past was indeed horrific and that I have already survived my past. For too many years, I held back, not allowed to feel my feelings or really admit what happened. Everything I should have expressed back then was frozen in time, along with my sense of dignity and self-worth. My way of coping with abuse was to first endure it, and then get far away from it. But even though I got away and made life choices completely opposite from my abusers, I was still bound up by all that was unvoiced. Instead of patting myself on the back for my accomplishments, I felt hypervigilant and guilty. I had not separated all the negative messages I was told by my abusers about who I was from the reality of who I was. My logical brain knew better, but my body still ...

I have survived quite a bit, and on most days, my resilience and adaptability are strengths, not weaknesses. But there was something about my resilience that made me feel like a fraud. Even though I did survive terrible things, and even though I did turn as much of my life as possible into something positive and productive, something in the background was nagging at me. My accomplishments felt empty. Even though there was obvious fruit from decisions I made to shut abusers out of my life, I still felt on some level like I didn't deserve to enjoy a good life. This nagging feeling was what eventually lead me down a deeper path of self-reflection and healing. Even though I knew all the facts of what emotional and narcissistic abuse was, I never felt comfortable fully embracing that I was, in fact, abused. I lived in a wasteland between the lie that I was somehow responsible for what happened to me and the horrible truth of what really happened. Resilience felt like a mask. Even...

"Well, admitting that I was abused emotionally, psychologically, sexually, and spiritually was healthy and important for a season, but I want to be done now. I'd like to go back to being myself again. You know, disconnected and ignorant of the real impact all this had on me. I'd like to move on now, as if it never happened." Lately I've been having thoughts along the lines of this. A couple years ago, I started making major adjustments to my life so that I could free up more time to deal with myself. Originally, it was involuntary. I got sick, and subsequently had to scale way back. As I went down the path of healing, I decided to strip more and more out of my schedule. The more I uncovered, the more I needed to make room to grieve and heal. While I do feel like I am experiencing major shifts in how I relate to my trauma, I also know it is far from over. Sometimes it feels like an eternal sentence, where I am destined to don my perpetual sackcloth and ashes. ...

It seems like a simple thing to figure out, but it's not. in order to cope, I spent many, many years believing my abusers' lies. It wasn't that bad. Other people had it worse. There was something wrong and shameful about me, especially if I had a problem with what happened. Even though I acknowledged the facts, for most of my life, I rejected the label that I was sexually abused. It was a club I didn't want to belong to, and on subconsciously I thought that if I could minimize it enough, maybe my abusers' lies would become true. Maybe it didn't happen. One of the most profound and horrible discoveries I have experienced as a result of intensive therapy and finally dealing with it all is that yes, in fact, it really was that bad. Denial and minimization had such a grip on me, even when I thought I was being "honest" with myself. I was so used to going numb and dissociating under stress, it was my default way of living. For the first time in my lif...

Oh, by the way. My birthday is coming up and I've decided my gift to myself this year is to swear more. It's one more way I'm going off script from allowing the expectations of others to control me. I mean, really. When someone is more worried about avoiding the word fuck than keeping their children away from sexual predators, that is some disordered thinking right there. I believe in the power of words, and I think the more words that are at someone's disposal, the better. If you've ever been abused or controlled by another human being, allowing yourself to use words that were once off limits are especially important. Which brings me to why I absolutely fucking hate platitudes, and the insipid people who say them. Platitudes are the lowest form of human thought. They are the cockroaches of words. Is there really anything less emotionally shallow than offering an "everything will all work out," or "God is in control" when someone bares the...

Because I was a good girl, I helped my parents cover their tracks. They were covert. They knew what to do and to say to look like normal people in front of others. I mostly played along with the image they projected out to the public, not because I agreed with it, but because it was the only way to get through it. The physical, emotional, and sexual abuse had become "normal," and I had become so conditioned to cope with it. There wasn't any kind of big, After School Special-type moment to reveal it to anyone. What would I say? My parents are mean? The only thing that seemed to get anyone's attention in the 1980's were bruises, and even then, things like that could be explained away. All of my prior attempts to communicate it to others were shot down, and no one (by design) was close enough to my parents to really see it. Sure, some people clued in to the fact that my parents were "weird," mostly due to their metaphysical beliefs, which I haven't e...

Dear Mom, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that you are estranged from your children. I'm sorry that you drove them away after years of blaming them for your own problems. I'm sorry that you only saw them as a extension of yourself, something to mold into your fragile self-image. You missed out on so much. They were strangers to you even when they lived under the same roof. How sad for you that you never got to know who they were. I'm sorry that you felt it was more important to enable an abusive father over protecting your own children. I'm sorry that you chose dysfunction and denial over integrity and truth. I'm sorry that you are estranged from your grandchildren. They are beautiful, shining little people full of heart and spunk. They are deeply loved. They are seen, heard, and protected. They are allowed to say no and to express how they feel. Because of your example, they are being raised to respect their bodies, hearts, and minds. Because of your example...

One of the most difficult aspects of facing the full impact of child abuse is the conflicting feelings that go along with it. The parent-child connection is hard wired into us, so when the people who literally gave us life become the ones we have to protect ourselves from, it's mentally and emotionally exhausting work. I think this is why people remain in denial about child abuse. Every cell in our bodies want a positive emotional bond with our biological parents, so it becomes extremely difficult to admit the betrayal. Sometimes it's just too much to think that yes, actually, they did mean to hurt you. Most challenging of all is that I still love my parents. It doesn't make what they did excusable or right. Not only is it deeply painful to admit what they did, but also that they were incapable of loving me back. It's a hard line to tow, to choose to love them and release them at the same time. I am continuing to work with the ways I shielded myself from the be...

I'm a cat person, and for me, my devotion to cats is directly linked to the abuse I endured as a child. When I was growing up, my cats were the only consistent source of companionship. Growing up in an abusive environment that where I left left essentially to raise myself, my cats were always there to comfort me. I was often attacked and then left to cry in my room while my dad continued to rage outside my door. When the yelling stopped and all was quiet, I waited in the darkness, trying to stave off the loneliness that consumed me. My cat Athena somehow always knew when I was upset or lonely. She came to me, and curled up against me, purring away. It occurred to me that this animal had more compassion than my own parents. She calmed me down and connected me to feelings of safety and affection. I spent a lot of time alone in my room growing up, feeling abandoned and hurting from the constant verbal attacks. My mother would occasionally come in after one of my dad's rages...

Since making my abuse known to the public, I have received a wide range of responses, from dead silence from close friends to private and public encouragement from acquaintances and unknown fellow survivors. I expected the range, and I was curious to see who would choose to step up and who would choose to slink away. There are two kinds of people who do not support victims of abuse. The first are abusers. These people must keep their own mask on at all times and make sure everyone thinks it's the victim's fault. These are deranged people who need help. It's imperative that they are to be avoided, especially during recovery. But sadly, abusers are everywhere. The second kind who do not support victims of abuse are those who are victims themselves. These people are in denial about the impact of abuse in their own lives, and when someone speaks up about it, their immediate impulse is to shrink, push it away, belittle, cover up, or make general platitudes about it. They...

I love inspiring movies, I really do. Give me a (deserved) happy ending any day. I believe in the power of storytelling to transform hearts and minds, and point people toward what's good, beautiful, and true. But a satisfying ending in a story is what Aristotle would call "better than the real." Stories can offer insight, but they can't be the literal answer. Take It's a Wonderful Life, for example. Inspiring, right? George's friends come through in the final hour. An angel gets his wings. Everyone leaves the theater (or living room) happy and fulfilled because the story ends on a high note and all seems right with the world. They've forgotten that, UM, HELLO, FIVE MINUTES AGO HE WAS TRYING TO KILL HIMSELF. George Bailey is a hero because he sacrifices all his hopes and dreams in order to help other people.  Admirable, right? When he wants to explore the world, he stays home to take care of the family business. When he still wants to explore the wor...

Since going public about the abuse, I've felt the urge to go back and explain myself to friends and (moreso to) acquaintances that, really, I'm fine. The fact that I am in a place where I am making this information known is a huge step toward releasing it and moving on. I don't want to burden anyone with it, or to for them to worry about me. I may sound sad and hurt and angry, but really, I'm OK... That is, until I'm not OK. The happy, positive, take-it-all-in-stride mask of mine is screaming to go back on. It's safer there. Pretending I don't have any problems feels comfortable.  I do believe there is some value to the attitude of "fake it till you make it." A positive attitude can take you far, and it's a heck of a lot less annoying to be around than a negative one. However, in my case, pretending to be fine used to be my only option. There wasn't a time or place where I was safe enough to stop faking it, until now. I have "ma...