Five years ago I sat on the woodland-themed, chunky-legged, Americana-colored collosal bed in the guest room of my roommate’s parents’ lakehouse, near Tallulah Gorge, GA. Sobbing. Journal open. Wave after wave of emotion and epiphany slamming into my core. Twisting my spirit. Flipping my perpective. Opening doors to rooms inside of myself that had been long-ago nailed shut, rusted into place, and forgotten.
Suddenly, I was seeing it. All of it.
The ways my early life shaped my later fuckups. The ways my fuckups were not stories of victimhood and predation, but, actually, remnants of childhood, repeated by yours truly. The ways I was roughly formed, tossed into the world, and recreating the same tumultuous circumstances that had sculpted this personality system in the first place. The ways I was in some part responsible for the dramatic explosions in recent years, in subtle ways.
And I had a story to tell.
It went like this.
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My father was an aggressive, domineering, unpredictable man. He found my mother and tucked her under his wing with promises and plays on her insecurities – her wounds of unlovability thanks to her own mother. From this abusive partnership, a family was sprung. The family arrival exacerbated the abuse and underlying issues, rather than stabilizing the relationship.
My dad’s addiction to medical opioids then ripped into the family, slashing at any functional strings that had once held us as a unit. He became bigger, louder, more reactive, as he prowled around the house at odd hours, unable to sleep and untethered from the structure previously enforced by full time employment.
Life went from unstable and emotionally immature to an actual survival scenario in his rapidly deteriorating state.
Meanwhile, the eldest pup in the clan – my brother, 5 years older than myself – took up the charge and followed in my father’s footsteps. Transitioning rapidly from that ever-damned “gateway drug” of smoking pot, he was soon ripping whippits in the stockroom of his teenage job, smoking crack (I have no idea how or where that fell into his hands), and then dipping fingers into my father’s prescription bottles.
The heroin addiction took over shortly thereafter.
My brother became a secondary threat to the family, deeply intertwined with the first. Neither of them helping each other, except when my brother was selling excess opiates to other teenagers per my father’s request.
Long stories short, my father was removed from the house by police force after my mom obtained an order of protection for his stalking behaviors, physical violence, and gun-carrying threats against all of our lives. The divorce began, it would be dragged out for about the next 5 years. He continued his family assault through long, voicemail tape-filling, messages describing his martyrdom, Jesus-status, and right to wash us all off the face of the earth. He showed up randomly, staking out our home, when he wasn’t solitarily sequestered 4 hours away in his family cabin situated near a casino in the Northwoods of Wisconsin.
My oldest brother – who’s 10+ year relationship with thievery, homelessness, paid violence, and monthly arrests, all in the name of his heroin lover, also churned out endless stories – flitted here and there, dropping off the map and then reappearing, seemingly teleporting through locked doors and windows to re-emerge in places he wasn’t supposed to be. With his arrivals and departures came continuations of my dad’s domestic abuse, loss of any meager resources my impoverished family had, and nonstop screaming from the mouth of my mother.
And so, I realized that day, bawling alone in a stranger’s home, madly journaling between heaves, with this foundation laid for my understanding of “home life and relationships”…
Yeah, I suppose it was no fucking wonder that I was in the chaotic, gaslighting, world-upending midst of leaving my own abusive partnership.
The process had started officially two months before – the day that I left with two Aldi bags full of essentials, reported to work, and never returned to our shared home. A gracious coworker who had been blossoming, lightly, into a friend welcomed me into her home with her boyfriend – the offspring of the people whose vacation home I found myself in – with no questions asked, and I hadn’t yet left.
But, really, the breakup had been in the works since nearly the day that we moved in together, I now realized. As soon as we were contained under the same roof, my partner suddenly controlling almost every aspect of life, my brain had gone haywire. My fear and distrust driving anxiety and depression that I couldn’t rein in, as I had for decades in other situations.
The relationship had imploded through daily battles, mutual resentment, and a sense of imprisonment. Marked, all along, with the all-too-familiar accusation we all hate the most, “You’re being exactly like your dad right now.” On the other end, “You’re being exacty like MY dad right now,”
I’m saying – to cut the flowery writership short…
In 2019 I realized that my relationship was doomed from the start – as were all other relationships – because the framework I carried for human engagement, home, family, and daily living was… fucked.
NO WONDER everything changed as soon as we were living together. As soon as “survival” depended on working together. As soon as I was reliant on this individual.
In my upbringing, these were the conditions inextricably linked to violence, deceit, loss, chaos, powergames and grief. So, to put it lightly, “yeah, duh, everything got shitty when circumstances felt a little too close to home.”
Sure, my ex was problematic. A grandiose narcissist who charmed everyone, until the charm faded away in his private life. An emotionally immature and self-centered specimen who knew how to maintain appearances as only a literal stage performer could, while underneath that calm, chill, “good guy” facade bubbled insecurity, entitlement, and aggression.
But the truth is…
I had chosen him.
I thought now, that I chose him because he was a lot like my dad – though no one would ever think so on first, second, or third assessment.
I allowed myself to be sucked into this relationship. Barring all doubt from my brain, I had allowed him to trounce upon my boundaries early on and he had become a daily fixture, despite my protests that I needed alone time, which were quickly forgotten. I had left the world I knew behind for him, putting myself in a vulnerable position. Within a year of getting together, tentative relocation to the other pole of the country had pulled me away from my stable career, friend group, and financial position, at the emotionally-manipulating pleas of my partner.
And once we were living together, truthfully, I was a nightmare. Perhaps not the major driving force of our relationship dysfunction, but not far from it. I was certainly unable to be a positive influence on our interpersonal dealings.
I had been anxious to the point of agoraphobia, relying on him to do all the shopping and planmaking. I was depressed to the brink of suicide, often crying my way through the day as I sat in my solo prison in our shared home, where he left me for 8-14 hours daily. And I was drowning in self-criticism, uncertainty, and shame, having lost my identity as a scientist/lab supervisor/boss bitch with a bounty of nearby friends who’s discrepant walks of life added richness and continual learning to my regularly scheduled programming.
In other words, I was in a state of crisis and internal chaos.
Which did not help our household state of crisis and internal chaos one bit.
Now, July of 2019, I had seen it. I felt it all. My mind popped out of its victimized station – I wasn’t hunted, kidnapped, and exposed to two years of covert-becoming-overt abuse. And this hadn’t happened for no reason.
I was an equal part of the problem, and the bases for my behaviors could easily be spotted in my childhood and teenage experiences with my family of origin.
An enormous relief ripped through me, like ten thousand pounds were lifted from a brittle rib cage. There’s a reason for everything. I understand myself now. I don’t have to keep questioning how this happened and what it says about me. It says, “You’re a traumatized motherfucker. And you didn’t know what you had never been taught.”
What I had never been taught?
How healthy relationships work. What a relationship IS. And how to feel safe within them. How to BE safe within them, when they are so (for some of us) inherently dangerous. I was never taught what a healthy home life was – how to exist with others, without sick mindgames and powerplays dominating the space. I didn’t know about social hierarchies,manipulation, or financial abuse. Hell, I didn’t even have a comprehension of “abuse,” beyond knowing that my dad shouldn’t have been choking my mom that one time in the breezeway.
So how could I have done things any better? Given the instructional system I inherited from the dominating men in my FOO, what could anyone expect?
Nothing. Unless a bitch set out to re-educate herself and reprogram the lessons sewn most deeply into her bones about love, family, and what it means to be in relationship.
And from these realizations, Traumatized Motherfuckers came to be.
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Flash forward to July of 2024.
For five years I blogged, researched, podcasted, and created resources in the name of understanding the connection between family dysfunction and subsequent lifetimes of miserable, stressful, dangerous-feeling relationships, addictions, and generalized misery that made being alive feel like a second by second punishment.
How does family trauma trickle into romantic partnership? What about work dynamics? Friend relationships? Disembodiment? Psychosomatic illness? Self-sabotage? Inauthentic living? Learned self-hatred and the many forms of punishing living that it inspires?
Five years of digging deeper and deeper into that age old question, “what the fuck is my problem and why am I like this?” then basing those findings in peer-reviewed research and clinical findings, in so many ways.
Again lying on a bed, in a woodland themed room (with more subtley and none of the Americana coloring), crying my eyes out alone with a journal next to me, coming to terms with emotional and spiritual enlightenments that weren’t necessarily on the radar for the day…
Q: Is this the story that I would still say “explains it all”?
A violent dad, an addict brother, violence, threats, and lies underscoring “my problems?” Big, openly aggressive, demonstrations of physical abuse – of those who had brute strength and those who did not – driving my system into fear states that overwhelmed my best self and put my body into hypervigilance overdrive? All relationships mirror images of these force-based power dynamics?
A: Fuck no.
So here’s my origin story – Now.
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I was born to two people who never should have had children.
Firstly, neither of them wanted children, which is a rough start for the rest of what was to come.
Did my mother say she wanted children? Perhaps. It was the “thing to do” at the time of her reproductive age and everyone around her was already in the process. Both of her sisters – one older and one younger – having married and pumped out a child a piece at this point. My mother’s mother, supposedly informing her that “she didn’t need to go to college, she would just be a housewife anyways.” And so, she was.
Was this an authentic expression of her actual wants and needs? No. She dropped out of school for a career she would have been excellent at, considering she plays amateur health detective to this day – veterinarian. Tucked into her life of knowledge, reason, and intellectual superiority, she could have been very happy dealing with animals all day rather than raising children or mucking around with a husband. But that’s not what happened. I believe, due to social pressure and lack of other perceived options.
My father? He blatantly did not want children and never masked his distaste for us. Which brings us to our next point.
Secondly, the way to bring children into the world isn’t “against the will of your partner.”
My father never wanted my eldest brother, my middle brother, or myself. My mother was the driving force behind all of her unagreed-upon pregnancies. When I was conceived, my parents were split up, supposedly due to my father’s cheating.
Does that sound like the correct circumstances for bundle of joy #3, when the first two iterations were already not allowed to be left alone with their paternal DNA donor, due to his temper and prior displays of infant abuse? When my father’s reaction to news of his first child had been “I’m going to punch you in the stomach?”
Or, do you think my would-be twin had the right idea when it aborted itself in the face of this environmental stress – leaving only one heartbeat to palpitate for the rest of its life while that wiley fucker wisely noped its way back to source?
Right.
Since my father never wanted children, DID want to travel freely and explore his many interests, and this family life was, instead, now his forced reality… how do you think that went over?
Thirdly, enslaving someone as your breadwinner will not make that individual enjoy bread. It might make them cut off their own arms.
My mother stayed at home with her foolishly unplanned-planned children while my dad took the brunt of the financial strain. He worked third shift at a mold making factory and we had a working class home in the middle of a tiny, backwards-minded town that neither of my parents particularly enjoyed despite moving us there. My dad was trapped in a life he never wanted, due to the fact that my mom was trapped in a life that she never wanted.
Then he got in a work accident, which one might call “a subconscious self-sabotage move,” and was never able to work again.
This is when the opiates enter the picture, and everything spirals out from there.
Suddenly at home, 24/7, without a purpose, and with immeasurable pain… my father began to fray. Which, lord knows, was not helped by my mother’s insensitivity, self-centeredness, and demands for life to return to the structure she had built for herself. Her bills were not being paid. Her despised partner was in her space, awake, all day. His every move a reminder of what he wasn’t doing for her. All the weight he wasn’t carrying anymore.
What good was he?
None. After letting this man trap her in marriage, and trapping him in fatherhood in return, she now had to reckon with being the household provider and caregiver, which is not the suburban-dream she had signed up for. She was no longer keeping up with the Joneses. And her inherited beliefs about the proper role of a man (worker, abuse acceptor, quiet servant and supporter of lifestyles) and wife (stay at home spender, beauty provider, mother-when-convenient) sparked outrage that her useless partner was denying her of “the correct way to be.”
Fourthly, leveraging your children against your personal problems does not create a positive life for them.
Once everything started crumbling – my mother’s material resentment vs. my father’s emotional resentment – we children were pawns in their strategic methods of supporting themselves, both personally and against the other parent. We were born to check certain boxes, and later we became foot soldiers and ego supports in a similar manner. “Listens to my troubles, check. Engages with the information and expands upon it, check. Demonstrates opposition against the other parent, check. They’re on my side, which validates that I’m correct and loved, check.”
And so, all three kids wound up in full-, semi-, or cyclical- estrangement from one or both parents, while those parents launched every possible attack at each other.
One parent, physically, cognitively, and emotionally damaged, isolated, and removed from the home that he purchased for his family.
The other parent, fraught with nerves and indignant about the stresses she ‘had been put through.’
Two compelling perspectives. And two highly reactive, emotionally immature, big-egoed individuals, fighting for their story to be the greater story of victimhood vs. villainhood.
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So as you can see, the story of my father is not such a simple one. Rage, aggression, reactivity, depression, low-esteem, conflicting thoughts of current worthlessness (as a husband/father) and prior valiance (as a motorcycler, daredevil, outlaw)… And a long history of CPTSD due to his orphaned WWII veteran father… Is it any wonder that he became the hulking, drugged out, stomping and slamming and screaming, emotional tornado, who dominated our household?
In truth, I would say that he was fighting back against the force that really dominated the property.
My mother.
And her covert abuse tactics.
Which, if I had to choose one now, I would label as the real villain and continual provokateur of my family’s trauma story.
My father may have had CPTSD and violent tendencies… but my mother was the one who experienced both of these threats, decided to marry him anyways, forced him to have children, locked him in a lifestyle that didn’t align with his needs, then discarded him when he no longer supported her desired life, and called his reaction “evil” as she had him legally extricated from the house and refused to speak to him.
And, looking at how these patterns have repeated with my mother vs. my self, I have to propose that the small t traumas inflicted maternally were not only the instigators of much of the Big T Traumas inflicted paternally… but also the influences of the majority of my mental illness.
My mother is the source of the introjected abuse that wrecks this brain, to this day.
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My mother raised me to be her.
Yeah, you can read that sentence again, it won’t change.
My mother raised me to be her.
Not her shadow, not her best friend, not her favorite little companion. But her, herself. I was birthed to be the second coming of my mom, one tiny part of an enmeshment that swallowed me up so deep I’m still not sure that either of us understands where one person ends and the next begins.
And to address my favorite question “Why am I like this and why is life little more than a tedious experience crawling over broken glass while calling myself scum while trying to survive each day?” it turns out, this codependent relationship is the real root of the majority of the answer.
My mother’s unhealth, though more subtle and hidden than my father’s, was the template that my brain was drawn from. With the added weight of being her sole supporter, cheerleader, therapist, and confidant from the ages of birth until my late teenage years. And this, of course, culminated in daily rag sessions against my “horrifying monster of a narcissistic dickhead father,” as we gathered round that answering machine, listening to his 20 minute long threats together.
A protector of her child, my mother was not. A user of her child for her own purposes, she surely was. And, to me, she was all I needed. If I was loyal to her, she was loyal to me. Which made it simple for me to decide to stop speaking to my dad entirely, just as she had.
It was simple for her to attain and maintain this position in my life, as she was the only source of. sometimes-kindness and care in my nuclear family. As the youngest, the only girl, and the least wanted in the clan, it was a hard time coming into the dysfunctional and abusive social structure that awaited me. And those differences were played up, as much as possible. “The boys” vs. “The girls” were rigid lines drawn across the family circle. Discrepant treatment and expectations from both parents led to tribalism under one roof
I was born to be the enemy of my brothers, labelled ‘the reason why they didn’t receive adequate care.’ I was an emotional prison shackle on the ankle of my father, identified as a completely unecessary child who only complicated the financial situation and family dynamic.
In other words, I arrived to an unwelcoming environment where I was instantly “the problem,” as a way to mask the real problems. My brothers took their parental abuse out each other and myself, displacing their frustration and fear with fists and nonstop verbal picking. My father had nothing to do with me, mostly entering the picture when he yelled in the background or threw tantrums. Occasionally he insisted on driving me to elementary school; I was terrified the entire 15 minute drive but unallowed to say no. My mother was the only source of comfort, protection, and, often over-coddling, which all painted her as the only light in a very bleak universe… as did her stories about the rest of the world being dangerous.
And so, I was my mom’s devotee.
I only did things she approved of; it’s all that she allowed. I went everywhere with her and had anxiety attacks with distance. I listened to her words like sermons and programmed every word as the direction of god.
Which means, I soaked up all her covert narcissism. Her destructive ideas about relationships. Her mental gymnastics that defended her against all threats of acknowledging a reality she didn’t want to see. Her confusion around femininity and what it means to be a woman; her inherited sexism and virgin/whore complex. Her exaggerated fear of all other human beings. Her tit-for-tat relationship style. Her way of dealing with people who upset her – brutal stonewalling, triangulation, and punishment via external authorities.
But also, as an extension of my mother, I was subjected to the mental programming meant to ensure that I became good enough to represent her, as she wanted to be seen.
Despite the enmeshment there was highly conditional approval. I only was a part of her when I did everything correctly. Making a mistake or acting in a way that didn’t reflect her beliefs/behaviors immediately made me “a dangerous and disgusting other.”
I was berated with ideas about working versus worth. Proving yourself good enough to be alive and special enough to enslave men through intellect and appearance. Staying busy, holding a job, and making money as pillars of acceptable persondom. Never overtly relying on anyone – I was not permitted to express needs or emotions, or to expect that I could directly ask for help in my lifetime – but covertly coercing them to be dependable sources of care through contradictory demonstractions of excellence and victimhood.
From my mother, I learned how to be a user of people.
A hater of my authentic self.
A lover of herself, which could extend to me if I played the part right – mimicked her just so.
A fawner.
A people fearer / isolator / pleaser.
An overworker.
A perfectionist.
An eating disordered skeleton.
A cold hearted, overly reductive, judgmental, woman.
An enemy of all other women.
A play thing, a victim, or a destroyer of men.
A disintegrated personality.
A narcissist in the making.
I learned hypervigilance. Continual self-editing. Withdrawal. Hiding. And that the path to staying alive – the very right to BE alive – was to devote myself to education, work performance, staying out of close relationships, and staying cute.
All the subtle lessons that, now I would say, led to the nightmare I was recovering from in 2019 and the even bigger nightmare of who I had begun to become. A self-scorning yet conflictingly self-adoring individual whose self-esteem depended on conditions outside of herself and the maintaining of inauthentic facades that could be hidden behind when that innate self-doubt started to creep up, so that an honest self-reflection never had to take place, and, instead, I could continue wielding weaponized intellect, storytelling, and attractiveness as social tools, empowering me to bounce between preferential narratives and self-protection mechanisms while strategically positioning myself within falsely supportive relationships that were dependent upon convincing people of the persona that I wanted them to see. The persona that my mother prefered to see.
From my father, perhaps I learned about physical Trauma and acute fear.
From my mother, I learned about cognitive and emotional trauma, as well as chronic fears of unworthiness that percolated beneath and promoted abusive behaviors onto myself and everyone else. I learned that to be alive was to be in danger, because the very danger of being alive was to be myself. I learned that the only way to offset this handicap was to be anyone BUT myself, and to fight for the validity of the false person I presented myself to be as if it was a life and death matter to be “discovered.” To be seen for the vile creature I actually was.
I learned to use books, mascara, egoic backflips, and strategic occasional exaggerated displays of maternal instinct to move through the world, like a succubus hidden beneath “strong, empowered, yet soft and victimized” sheep’s clothing.
From both parents I learned about walking on eggshells – in the sense that it doesn’t matter how delicately you tiptoe, those shells break themselves via lacking emotional management skills and call it your fault, anyways.
I also learned about financial trauma. Another point that I now identify as the backbone of my mental and physical illness.
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Growing up, we were never wealthy. We heard plenty about being resourceful, making sacrifice, and “those rich assholes” who lived better lives than we.
But after my dad’s work accident we were struggling. After he and his workman’s comp paychecks left the household and divorce lawyer fees started stacking up, we were officially below the poverty level.
And, oh, how that fact was never hidden or softened in an effort to shield the youths from additional stress.
My mother spoke to me, as her only confidant and daily therapist, often and at great length about her financial challenges. There wasn’t a day when I didn’t think about the fact that, according to her, we were struggling to eat, she didn’t know where next month’s mortgage would come from, and there wasn’t a spare dime for anything.
Forget “family support.” It was an “every man for himself” world we lived in. Get used to it.
And if I wasn’t actively, constantly, pursuing goals of earning and hoarding, I was a silly, pointless, little girl.
As such, and in response to my father’s previous unemployment that destroyed my mother’s sense of deserved lifestyle, the narrative about having a job as the most important qualifier of humans was doubled down upon. It was expanded to include instructions about never spending, always saving, and living in a state of chronic, purposeful, deprivation to demonstrate personal piety and worthiness.
These messages were burned into my body, into my circulatory system, nerve endings, and bones, for as long as I can remember.
I took odd jobs as a child and saved every dollar from birthdays and holidays. I earned my first official paycheck at 11. I worked 1-3 jobs all throughout high school. I accepted any work that came my way, never believing I had the right to turn down an opportunity to sell portions of my life away, even when I already had other obligations. If someone offered a job, you gave them everything you had to keep it. You sacrificed your existence for $7 an hour. Failure to maintain even a part time high school position signalled entitlement, idiocracy, worthlessness.
Ps – it’s not enough to work, to go to school, and to have your own concerns. You must also be continually monitoring the environment for ways that you need to serve your mother. If she’s inconvenienced in any way it means you were actively working against her; heads will roll.
To this day, these lessons ring through my body.
Never able to relax.
Never content to sit still.
Never able to answer the question “what do I want to do today?” Because it doesn’t matter what you want, it matters who you owe your time to.
Waking up, already panicking about who I’m failing and how its impacting my right to survive.
Pushing and pushing and pushing, accomplishing more, always, when energy stores have long run dry.
Landing myself in states of debilitating illness, over and over again.
“I’m too hard of a worker” sounds like an interview humblebrag.
In reality, it’s a life-destroying problem to have.
Especially when those work ideals are tethered to practical survival in your poverty-stricken world.
…. And it was only about a year ago that I wondered, “Is any of this even real? Was it ever real?”
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My mother put our poverty on a pedestal. Or, used our poverty to put herself on a pedestal. It was the reason for her continual stress and screaming. It was the threat that she martyred herself to protect us from, once she was forced to return to work. It was the driving force behind all she did, all her decisions, and all the abuse that was dealt down to her children. But as long as there was a reason – and an honorable one at that – all my mom’s neuroses could be explained away.
Meanwhile, she refused to ask for help from anyone. Hiding our feeble financial status from her entire family and insisting that she had to do it on her own. Well, she, alone, on her own… plus the little critter she cried her stresses to, filling its head with tales of impending doom, living on the streets, and starving.
One embarassingly recent day it finally dawned on me… If things were that bad and she cared about her children that much… Wouldn’t she have simply asked her well-off parents for money to keep us from perishing? From being thrown out in the cold? Would they really have denied her that assistance? Their grandchildren? And, even if so, couldn’t her sisters have helped?
My mother is not an island. And yet, she chose to be.
Call it pride or expectation of disappointment that held her back from seeking assistance….
But she was willing to put her children – at least one child – through the stress and uncertainty and real survival fears of this poverty narrative and lifestyle, in some way, to spare herself, for many years.
And the effects of those decisions and those daily stories about “doing whatever it takes to get by” haunt me, taunt my brain, and taint my experience of every moment of life, to this day.
I’m never doing enough.
I’m never earning enough.
My job is never impressive enough.
And neither are my attempts to please the people around me.
If I sit, I’m a worthless piece of shit.
If I spend, my life is doomed to end.
Deprivation is the key to life…
You’re doing it wrong you’re not in continual strife.
And my health – physical, mental, and emotional – has never recovered from the subservient lifestyle that is “correct” to embody.
All, in the name of rectifying and continually supporting my mother’s ego.
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From my mother I learned I was all wrong the way I originally came out.
I can be “right” if I follow all her rules, hold her beliefs, and mimick everything she does.
Only, I have to do it better.
Because I was born to amend her mistakes and validate her greatness, as the object she vicariously lives through.
Don’t make the same mistakes as her – AKA – partnership. So I live in fearful celebacy.
Don’t give up on education. So I finished the degree that she never completed, at the school she formerly attended.
Don’t trust people. So I’ve lived in increasing solitude since adulthood.
Don’t fuck up your finances. So I refuse to stop working or start spending.
And meanwhile, DEFINITELY…
Never question her or examine her past choices.
It’s the greatest betrayal to wonder “where did these subtle traumas come from that prevent me from ever feeling calm, content, or confident in my right to breathe?” and “did it have to be this way?”
Which… is where my relationship with my mother has fallen apart in recent years.
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It spits in the face of every self-protective story she’s ever spun to inquire, “but what was your part in the family dynamic?” or “but why did you marry him and continue having children with an abuser?” or “don’t you think there’s another way to interact with other people, besides trying to control them or call them your tormentors?” or “wouldn’t life be better if you addressed the anxiety that caused you to be a screaming evil-stepmother-esque figure from the ages of 10 to today?” or “don’t you think it means something that you’re so defensive against other people, to this day, that you openly antagonize your children to protect yourself?”
“Hey, mom, have you considered that maybe there was more than one abuser in the household? Maybe there was a reason WHY you got together with my dad? Perhaps its possible that your behaviors after his accident didn’t help? Do you think there’s anything you might need to address, still, with your mother who supposedly forced all of this to happen by calling you a future housewife and *taking away college funding?”
*according to my grandmother this never happened.
For 5 years, I’ve asked hard questions about myself.
And found immense clarity and relief in acknowledging how I had been a part of my own trauma story.
For 3 years I started asking hard questions about my mom.
And for 3 years she’s made sure my life was hell for the dishonor of suggesting she had any part in hers. Or, ours.
Which has continued to prove my point.
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While she believes that the antidote to being identified as a past abuser is to be a current abuser. And to escalate her tactics beyond what could be considered covert or easily hidden. To intimidate her mini-me back into a controllable and subservient position, like I was trained….
Obviously it has only served as validation of what I came to find in these years of trauma archeology.
And this uncovering has changed my entire narrative about my life.
Yes, my dad and my brother were the Big T Trauma donors who taught me to expect screaming as a normal response to minor inconveniences, holes in walls as displays of what your face could look like, threats of mortal harm as a sign of love, and all my shit to get stolen if I ever turn my back on my belongings…
But my mother taught me the small t trauma that has rotted me from the inside, out.
She taught me that it’s dangerous and dishonorable to be me, that being a woman is simply a flaw which can be turned into a power by teasing the idea of fucking, that my place in the world is to work while relaxation is a sign of worthlessness and weakness, that misery is a sign of “doing things right,” that all humans are threats – not only physically, but mentally, as they tend to spawn realistic comparison that questions how wonderful your ego has decided you must be, that all relationships can be weaponized – especially those of mothers and children – especially when triangulation and turning the crowd holds such power, that I’m not deserving of anything… unless she’s decided to gracefully grant it, that there will always be a price for every relationship interaction because tit-for-tat engagements are what keep human beings connected, that mindreading should be possible, that my emotions do not matter but authority figures’ do, and failures to anticipate every want and need of these authority figures means you’re purposely trying to harm them, that every potential mishap which isn’t actively being worked against means you deserve whatever misfortune befalls you.
The daily terror I live in is not because of the domineering, in your face, large, aggressive men who made the walls shake.
The daily fear I wake with and numb myself enough to sleep despite, the self-doubt and hypervigilance that structure every thought I have, the self-criticism that keeps me endlessly picking at myself until I’m only bones, the illness that collapses my body every few weeks from overwork, overworry, and overdeprivation…
Is from my mother. The person who was once my hero. My source of comfort in a sea of dislike. My everything.
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And it only took 5 years of deep trauma research, concurrent with her increasing, self-protective, abuse, to figure out.
Which is why, I believe, most of us don’t sort out these small t traumas effectively; the circumstances required for identifying and verifying them accurately are rarely stumbled upon. This MF just so happened to be studying relational abuse when my mother couldn’t stop herself from re-enacting it.
(A note to everyone out there, that behaving badly does not force others to forget your abuse. It serves as evidence of the abuse that’s always been there, which, perhaps, they only recently have the re-education to identify.)
All my mom had to do was contain her self, around solely me, one person. And she could have continued to keep her victimhood narrative while eating all my love and respect, too. Never truly seen. Never questioned. Never letting anyone get close enough to realize who she really ws. The same way she hid reality from herself up until this point.
She was in the clear, able to create the world she wanted to live in through manipulation, masking, and making everyone else the problem.
That is, until she birthed a child.
And forced it to be exactly like her.
And didn’t expect that child to dive headfirst into the lifelong goal of self-examination.
Which, was akin to mother-examination due to the enmeshment pattern.
Which revealed the true artist behind the personality and life disorders in question.
A revealing that started, roughly, in July of 2019.
But first, all the old stories had to be recontextualized, in order for the true story to unravel.
What I believe now appears very different, and far more complicated, than what I thought I knew at the start of my trauma recovery. And in 5 years, it has ripped out the very foundation of my false sense of safety and forced me to start building a new one, based on what I believe, not the stories I inherited.
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ps – It deserves to be said that another part of my updated story includes “sibling abuse, instigated by parental abuse,” previously known in my family as “silly sibling rivalry.”
My brothers also continually bullied me as a united front, which didn’t help with the self-esteem or sense of being innately wrong problems. It was a household of tribalism, inclusion, and exclusion. And none of these things have escaped my investigation, either, as they relate to feeling unfixably ugly, stupid, silly, weak, and “other.”
But in the environment that they, too, were raised in… I can’t really say that I blame them.
Thanks to the dysfunctional environment that we tried to navigate, mother vs. father, girls against boys, not enough love or care to go around, I WAS the enemy, from the day I was born.
And I continue to be.
Next time… “The family beard joins the circus! And becomes everyone’s enemy.”
Part II of my updated story.