(Continued from Part I)
At this point I've been unleashed onto the world, and I have no idea how to admit to making a mistake. I have never made a mistake that wasn't punished harshly. I've never NOT been yelled at, criticized, called stupid for making mistakes I didn't know existed.
"Never put metal in a microwave!" Cool, daddy-o. Do you think you could have told me that when we got the microwave?
"I shouldn't have to tell you how this works!" Um, why not?
"You should know better!" I heard this approximately four zillion times. I could never figure out how I should know better, since no one had ever explained anything to me.
So any time I was in a position to say, "Oops, sorry," I couldn't. I froze. I was terrified of being yelled at. I didn't know what to do. It's been twenty years since I attended college, but I can think of three classes off the top of my head that I could have gotten credit for taking if I'd gone to the professors and said, "Um, I'm having trouble with the material. Can you help me?" A single five minute conversation, and I would have known what to do. Instead, I let it build until it was too late, and then just ghosted the final class. I loved the schoolwork, I loved classes, but when I got stuck, I didn't know how to handle it. In my brain, it was always my fault, and I had to pretend I knew what I was doing in order to be accepted. After I bailed on the last class, I would avoid that professor for the rest of my life because I knew they hated me now.
Super healthy, right??
All that to say, not so much with the whole admitting-I've-made-a-mistake dealio.
I worked a crappy temp job after college. I did a great job, and the boss kept saying she'd hire me as a regular employee, but it kept not being true. We always had a ton of work, and she was happy to authorize overtime for me to catch them up with different tasks. I was hired through a temp agency, so I filled out a little carbon postcard timesheet every week, and my boss signed it and we mailed it to the agency. One Saturday, I forgot that I'd put down overtime hours for that day, and didn't come to work at all. I panicked when I arrived on Monday and saw my timesheet. I thought I would just skate by, but my boss called me into her office. I told her I'd worked the hours, and she asked me what times. I didn't know what else to do, so I said I'd worked in the afternoon. She let me go back to my desk, and then called another employee to see her. Then my coworker went back to her desk. I tried to concentrate on work, but I was panicked. I could see this activity from my desk, playing out moment by moment. My boss called me back in, and said that my coworker had worked during the afternoon, and I wasn't there.
I was terrified that she would yell at me, that she would fire me, that she would tell me I was a horrible person and didn't deserve to have the job.
She asked me what had happened, and why I said what I did to her. I told her what happened, that I was really scared, and that I could make up the hours during the week. She said that we'd fix the timecard and that there wouldn't be any more overtime after that.
That was all.
There wasn't any yelling. There wasn't any blame. She even served as a reference for me when I applied for and got a regular position in another department. She didn't hate me. It was a mistake, and she probably chalked it up to my inexperience in the workplace. That's what I would do now, as a manager. I would probably do a little more behavioral coaching than she did, but that's how I roll.
What I don't do these days is lie, or hide, or look around for cover or plausible deniability. I learned from my mistakes. (No, that wasn't even close to the only one!) I've developed a healthy relationship with the truth, and, as malleable as the world around us may be, I do my best to see my behavior clearly. When someone accuses me of doing otherwise, I check myself, and then I look carefully at them.
That's what life with my mother taught me.
Sunday, June 24, 2018
Saturday, June 16, 2018
Truth, and How I Learned To Tell It; Or, As You Reap, So Shall You Sow, Dammit. (Part 1)
You may have gleaned that I grew up in a crooked house with weird ways, and my body and soul formed with a permanent list to one side. I didn't know who I'd find when I walked down the stairs into the kitchen each morning; would it be Affable Dad, or Angry Bastard? Would it be Neutral Mom, or Critical Angryface? They say you should choose wisely. If I'd had a choice, I would have! Any choice I had was strictly in the land of The Lady or the Tiger, and just as dangerous.
I was always on edge, holding my face in neutral until I found the lay of the land. I was always going to be at fault, blamed for whatever might happen that day. My brother would start hitting my sister, I would pull them apart, and I was yelled at. I was constantly in trouble, or on trial for just being me. "Can't you fix your hair!" "Why don't you change into something NICE for a change!" "What is WRONG with you!" All non-questions posed as questions, later explained as "Well, I was just trying to HELP. You said you wanted to make more friends; maybe if you looked better, more kids would want to be friends with you." Even years later, when I repeated her words back to her, hoping she would apologize, the only response I got was this gem: "Well you know what I MEANT."
I learned to hide at an early age, to do my best to obscure any- and everything I could. Any facial expression, any betraying gesture, any word spoken --- they were all calculated for the least possible impact, with no revelation of my actual emotions. Every one of my reactions was modulated to within an inch of its lives.
I find myself tap-dancing around the subject at hand, because I can anticipate the voices that still live in my head. If I say that I learned to become a liar in order to survive, then here comes the onslaught: "The LIE is that you were mistreated! I can't believe you would tell all these LIES about our family! You've always been so overdramatic, and now you're ADMITTING that you lied all along! You've always been so DIFFICULT." (If you'd been raised in that house, you'd hear the all caps, too. #funnynotfunny)
It's taken me a long time to reconcile my life in that house, and understand why I behaved as I did. For decades, I was broken, I was wrong, I was stupid, I was ugly, and I was their albatross. ("'Way I remember it, albatross was a ship's good luck, 'til some idiot killed it." Yes, I'm a geek.) I could not do anything right. With nowhere to hide, I hid in plain sight. I pretended a lot. And yes, I lied to my mom to survive. If I felt cornered, I would look her straight in the eye and lie to her.
I mean, of course I did. I was a kid. I didn't have any other option. I was trying to make my life bearable. Sometimes that meant dodging the truth, but other times, I just flat-out lied to make things easier.
I needed to survive. But I also watched my mother operate for decades. My mother knew how to put herself in the most favorable light possible; she preened under the spotlight, loved the attention, and bathed in adulation. And if someone called her behavior into question, Katy bar the door. The world might still end before she admits to any wrongdoing; I know I won't see that day. I watched her bend the truth, I watched her break it, I watched her run circles around people until they didn't know which way was up. I kept telling myself that she loved me, she couldn't be lying to me, and I was an ungrateful daughter who didn't deserve the roof over her head. Indoctrinated, sure. But I also learned her methods: how to squirm around the question until you were answering a different question entirely. And maybe the question had only changed in your own mind, not the questioner's.
Backwards engineering the question was one of her favorites. If you could change the question to ask for the information in front of you, you could change the entire interaction in your favor.
So let's say, for example, you've made a bet with someone about a television show, and the answer to the question is back at your place. They drop you off, you run to the source of the information, you check it out, and find the answer.
Normally, someone would see it, and figure out whether they were right or wrong.
My mother would look at the information, and figure out how to make herself right.
(End of Part 1. Part 2 forthcoming.)
I was always on edge, holding my face in neutral until I found the lay of the land. I was always going to be at fault, blamed for whatever might happen that day. My brother would start hitting my sister, I would pull them apart, and I was yelled at. I was constantly in trouble, or on trial for just being me. "Can't you fix your hair!" "Why don't you change into something NICE for a change!" "What is WRONG with you!" All non-questions posed as questions, later explained as "Well, I was just trying to HELP. You said you wanted to make more friends; maybe if you looked better, more kids would want to be friends with you." Even years later, when I repeated her words back to her, hoping she would apologize, the only response I got was this gem: "Well you know what I MEANT."
I learned to hide at an early age, to do my best to obscure any- and everything I could. Any facial expression, any betraying gesture, any word spoken --- they were all calculated for the least possible impact, with no revelation of my actual emotions. Every one of my reactions was modulated to within an inch of its lives.
I find myself tap-dancing around the subject at hand, because I can anticipate the voices that still live in my head. If I say that I learned to become a liar in order to survive, then here comes the onslaught: "The LIE is that you were mistreated! I can't believe you would tell all these LIES about our family! You've always been so overdramatic, and now you're ADMITTING that you lied all along! You've always been so DIFFICULT." (If you'd been raised in that house, you'd hear the all caps, too. #funnynotfunny)
It's taken me a long time to reconcile my life in that house, and understand why I behaved as I did. For decades, I was broken, I was wrong, I was stupid, I was ugly, and I was their albatross. ("'Way I remember it, albatross was a ship's good luck, 'til some idiot killed it." Yes, I'm a geek.) I could not do anything right. With nowhere to hide, I hid in plain sight. I pretended a lot. And yes, I lied to my mom to survive. If I felt cornered, I would look her straight in the eye and lie to her.
I mean, of course I did. I was a kid. I didn't have any other option. I was trying to make my life bearable. Sometimes that meant dodging the truth, but other times, I just flat-out lied to make things easier.
I needed to survive. But I also watched my mother operate for decades. My mother knew how to put herself in the most favorable light possible; she preened under the spotlight, loved the attention, and bathed in adulation. And if someone called her behavior into question, Katy bar the door. The world might still end before she admits to any wrongdoing; I know I won't see that day. I watched her bend the truth, I watched her break it, I watched her run circles around people until they didn't know which way was up. I kept telling myself that she loved me, she couldn't be lying to me, and I was an ungrateful daughter who didn't deserve the roof over her head. Indoctrinated, sure. But I also learned her methods: how to squirm around the question until you were answering a different question entirely. And maybe the question had only changed in your own mind, not the questioner's.
Backwards engineering the question was one of her favorites. If you could change the question to ask for the information in front of you, you could change the entire interaction in your favor.
Normally, someone would see it, and figure out whether they were right or wrong.
My mother would look at the information, and figure out how to make herself right.
(End of Part 1. Part 2 forthcoming.)
Wednesday, April 25, 2018
Rage, Rage, Rage: Medical Facts and Learning the Truth, Part 1
Asking for help, especially from an authority figure, is one of the hardest things to learn as a child of dysfunctional parents. But I've been going to the doctor and dentist when I have something wrong with me lately, saying, "Yes," every time I ask myself the question, do I need to get help. Silencing the voices that say I'm not worth it, it's too much trouble, it's my own fault for taking up space --- these voices are all lies. I'm learning, making progress, taking small steps. Ironically, some of those steps involve my literal feet. (Please forgive the puns that follow. I can barely, um, stand them.)
About three years ago, I discovered I'd been wearing shoes too small for me for probably twenty years, and about that time, I figured out that I had ingrown toenails as well. So I'd had consistent pain in my feet for most of my life, so what? I just thought that's the way things were.
You can collect similar stories from a lot of people who grew up in dysfunctional households. You don't know anything's wrong until you start comparing with normal people. But you can't compare with anyone because you don't know how to connect in a functional way for a long time. And even once you become functional, you aren't around normal people because they don't feel right to you for even longer. So it takes a long time to understand what the normal people experience actually is. If that makes any sense.
To sum up: What does a normal foot feel like? Apparently, not mine.
So I decided to go to a foot doctor to try to get this fixed.
There were many, ahem, steps to this process. Each of them took some time and deliberation. I got a recommendation from my doctor. I had to calm down from doing that and agree that yes, I was worth the time and money and investment to get this done. I called to make an appointment. Again, I had to calm down from that freakout and talk myself into not cancelling; yes, I am worth taking time off work to make this happen.
I had to go to the doctor and evaluate him as trustworthy and make sure I wasn't overriding my instincts with a fit of classic child-of-narcissists urge-to-please. (I did not want to get stuck with a horrible doctor and end up getting re-traumatized, which is a real risk for people like me.) I had questions I had to make sure I asked, with notes on paper so I wouldn't forget. I had to make an appointment for the minor surgery, take time off work, make sure my husband took time off to drive me home.
The first appointment was the hardest. It's tough for me to walk into any unknown situation, to face people I've never met, and wonder what judgement lies beyond the door, what they will think of me. I had the recommendation of someone I really trusted, and I knew that if I wanted to walk away, I could do that. During the appointment, Mr. Kind Podiatrist looked at my toes and wiggled them around, confirmed that I have ingrown toenails, and started talking about options. But amongst his kind and gentle poking and prodding of my big toes, he noticed my weird second toenail on my left foot.
There's a pretty good story to go with this toenail, and believe me, you do not want a picture of that toenail! My parents used to have these super dangerous lawn chairs from the 70s. Here, let's see if I can find a picture of the chair at least:
My siblings and I were making forts with the three lawn chairs, piling them on top of each other, trying to get them to stay upside down, having variable amounts of success. Per usual, my dad wandered by at one point with a drink in his hand and yelled at us to stop doing that, and we stopped for as long as he was in range, and then started up again as soon as he couldn't see us. Kid stuff.
Suddenly, one of the chairs collapsed, and one of the hinges grabbed my second toe and pulled out the toenail. I screamed and there was blood everywhere. My dad came running and the first words out of his mouth were, "I told you kids not to do that anymore, goddammit!" He grabbed me and ran into the bathroom, put me on the counter, and ran cold water over my bleeding toe. It hurt like hell, and I cried and screamed sitting on the counter. He held my foot under the water until it stopped bleeding, telling me to knock it off, I should have listened since I was the oldest. I don't remember the band-aid or anything, but when my toenail grew back, it was a quarter inch thick and cloudy like a goat's hoof. My dad said that was my toenail's reaction to getting pulled out. My whole family made fun of it for years, and my parents said it's what I deserved for disobeying. I couldn't really trim it very well, and it sometimes snagged my tights when I got older.
When Mr. Kind Podiatrist saw my blunt little stubby toenail, I was ready. I had my story prepared as a pre-emptive strike, isn't this funny, ha-ha! and told him my story about the lawn chairs and how the toenail got ripped out and that's why my toenail is that way and isn't that funny!
"Oh no," he said. "That's a fungus."
"What." I said.
"That's a fungus," he said. "We can clear that right up. Just takes a little medicine."
"Really." I said.
Reader. Oh Reader. It took every ounce of self-control I had to not pick up the entire exam table, crack it in half, and throw it through the wall. I just kept thinking, forty years. For almost forty years, I've been living with this toenail, letting my family make fun of me, blaming myself, letting them blame me, filing it down, being ashamed of it, of myself, when all it is is a fungus?
In that forty years, where were my parents? Why didn't they ever take me to a doctor to ask the question? Six words! "Is there anything we can do?" Nope, too much work. Too much effort. Too much trouble. It's her fault - never mind that they were the parents, I was the child. She should have minded - never mind that I was seven years old and just being a kid. This follows the pattern: Didn't do your job as a parent and you feel bad about it? Blame the scapegoat child and never admit you did anything wrong! Problem solved.
"It's just a fungus."
I got through the rest of the appointment the way I do everything else in my life. I shoved my angry, terrified, or difficult feelings into a box and pretended with all of my highly tuned acting skills that everything was perfect. I worked out all of the details of the upcoming procedure. I was present, and contained my fury until I got home. Driving home was tough. Every once in a while it threatened to swell up around the edges, but I knew I might drive into another car if I started screaming so I didn't think about it. I got home safely, played computer games, and zoned out with a cat on my lap until my husband got home and started making dinner. I perched on our table and tried not to rip things apart as I told him what happened.
My friend Karrie Higgins has written extensively on her medical issues and what requesting her medical records has revealed to her. I've considered doing the same thing just to see what else comes up.
I keep reminding myself that this will happen over and over. I wrote about this before in my Law & Order sound effect blog post. (Jung Jung!) There will always be something new that strikes me in a different way, or that I'm seeing with new eyes. Or someone will tell me a story about my parents that I've never heard before, and I'll listen and gain a perspective that sheds light in dark corners.
Knowing it will happen again doesn't keep it from being infuriating. The anger is fresh each time. If there were an Academy Award for Not Hulking Out in a Public Place, I would have twelve of them on my imaginary mantle. But it's worth the anger. It's confirmation of what I instinctively believed when I started this journey, and what I now know to be true. My parents chose to blame me for an accident that could have happened to any child, and when it happened, they sought no medical treatment for the next eleven years. In addition, they teased me about it, and never thought that I was worth the trouble of mentioning it to a doctor. That's not good parenting. That's not parenting.
I may find more surprises around other corners. Will I take care of them myself? The answer is YES.
About three years ago, I discovered I'd been wearing shoes too small for me for probably twenty years, and about that time, I figured out that I had ingrown toenails as well. So I'd had consistent pain in my feet for most of my life, so what? I just thought that's the way things were.
You can collect similar stories from a lot of people who grew up in dysfunctional households. You don't know anything's wrong until you start comparing with normal people. But you can't compare with anyone because you don't know how to connect in a functional way for a long time. And even once you become functional, you aren't around normal people because they don't feel right to you for even longer. So it takes a long time to understand what the normal people experience actually is. If that makes any sense.
To sum up: What does a normal foot feel like? Apparently, not mine.
So I decided to go to a foot doctor to try to get this fixed.
There were many, ahem, steps to this process. Each of them took some time and deliberation. I got a recommendation from my doctor. I had to calm down from doing that and agree that yes, I was worth the time and money and investment to get this done. I called to make an appointment. Again, I had to calm down from that freakout and talk myself into not cancelling; yes, I am worth taking time off work to make this happen.
I had to go to the doctor and evaluate him as trustworthy and make sure I wasn't overriding my instincts with a fit of classic child-of-narcissists urge-to-please. (I did not want to get stuck with a horrible doctor and end up getting re-traumatized, which is a real risk for people like me.) I had questions I had to make sure I asked, with notes on paper so I wouldn't forget. I had to make an appointment for the minor surgery, take time off work, make sure my husband took time off to drive me home.
The first appointment was the hardest. It's tough for me to walk into any unknown situation, to face people I've never met, and wonder what judgement lies beyond the door, what they will think of me. I had the recommendation of someone I really trusted, and I knew that if I wanted to walk away, I could do that. During the appointment, Mr. Kind Podiatrist looked at my toes and wiggled them around, confirmed that I have ingrown toenails, and started talking about options. But amongst his kind and gentle poking and prodding of my big toes, he noticed my weird second toenail on my left foot.
There's a pretty good story to go with this toenail, and believe me, you do not want a picture of that toenail! My parents used to have these super dangerous lawn chairs from the 70s. Here, let's see if I can find a picture of the chair at least:
My siblings and I were making forts with the three lawn chairs, piling them on top of each other, trying to get them to stay upside down, having variable amounts of success. Per usual, my dad wandered by at one point with a drink in his hand and yelled at us to stop doing that, and we stopped for as long as he was in range, and then started up again as soon as he couldn't see us. Kid stuff.
Suddenly, one of the chairs collapsed, and one of the hinges grabbed my second toe and pulled out the toenail. I screamed and there was blood everywhere. My dad came running and the first words out of his mouth were, "I told you kids not to do that anymore, goddammit!" He grabbed me and ran into the bathroom, put me on the counter, and ran cold water over my bleeding toe. It hurt like hell, and I cried and screamed sitting on the counter. He held my foot under the water until it stopped bleeding, telling me to knock it off, I should have listened since I was the oldest. I don't remember the band-aid or anything, but when my toenail grew back, it was a quarter inch thick and cloudy like a goat's hoof. My dad said that was my toenail's reaction to getting pulled out. My whole family made fun of it for years, and my parents said it's what I deserved for disobeying. I couldn't really trim it very well, and it sometimes snagged my tights when I got older.
When Mr. Kind Podiatrist saw my blunt little stubby toenail, I was ready. I had my story prepared as a pre-emptive strike, isn't this funny, ha-ha! and told him my story about the lawn chairs and how the toenail got ripped out and that's why my toenail is that way and isn't that funny!
"Oh no," he said. "That's a fungus."
"What." I said.
"That's a fungus," he said. "We can clear that right up. Just takes a little medicine."
"Really." I said.
[Let us pause here. No. Really. Let's.]
Reader. Oh Reader. It took every ounce of self-control I had to not pick up the entire exam table, crack it in half, and throw it through the wall. I just kept thinking, forty years. For almost forty years, I've been living with this toenail, letting my family make fun of me, blaming myself, letting them blame me, filing it down, being ashamed of it, of myself, when all it is is a fungus?
In that forty years, where were my parents? Why didn't they ever take me to a doctor to ask the question? Six words! "Is there anything we can do?" Nope, too much work. Too much effort. Too much trouble. It's her fault - never mind that they were the parents, I was the child. She should have minded - never mind that I was seven years old and just being a kid. This follows the pattern: Didn't do your job as a parent and you feel bad about it? Blame the scapegoat child and never admit you did anything wrong! Problem solved.
"It's just a fungus."
I got through the rest of the appointment the way I do everything else in my life. I shoved my angry, terrified, or difficult feelings into a box and pretended with all of my highly tuned acting skills that everything was perfect. I worked out all of the details of the upcoming procedure. I was present, and contained my fury until I got home. Driving home was tough. Every once in a while it threatened to swell up around the edges, but I knew I might drive into another car if I started screaming so I didn't think about it. I got home safely, played computer games, and zoned out with a cat on my lap until my husband got home and started making dinner. I perched on our table and tried not to rip things apart as I told him what happened.
My friend Karrie Higgins has written extensively on her medical issues and what requesting her medical records has revealed to her. I've considered doing the same thing just to see what else comes up.
I keep reminding myself that this will happen over and over. I wrote about this before in my Law & Order sound effect blog post. (Jung Jung!) There will always be something new that strikes me in a different way, or that I'm seeing with new eyes. Or someone will tell me a story about my parents that I've never heard before, and I'll listen and gain a perspective that sheds light in dark corners.
Knowing it will happen again doesn't keep it from being infuriating. The anger is fresh each time. If there were an Academy Award for Not Hulking Out in a Public Place, I would have twelve of them on my imaginary mantle. But it's worth the anger. It's confirmation of what I instinctively believed when I started this journey, and what I now know to be true. My parents chose to blame me for an accident that could have happened to any child, and when it happened, they sought no medical treatment for the next eleven years. In addition, they teased me about it, and never thought that I was worth the trouble of mentioning it to a doctor. That's not good parenting. That's not parenting.
I may find more surprises around other corners. Will I take care of them myself? The answer is YES.
Monday, April 23, 2018
Childhood Trauma: How What We've Experienced Shapes Us
I'm not gonna lie: None of this is easy to deal with. I may be able to tell some of these stories with a calm demeanor, but that's hard fought and not easily won. I've ranted and raved and screamed into a bonfire a few times, mourned the energy wasted and potential lost as I spun my wheels for years and years asking the wrong questions. "What's wrong with me? Why am I broken? Why am I doing all of the wrong things? Why am I such a horrible person?"
As a child of crappy parents, these were the questions I was trained to ask. Every time I did something that my mom didn't like, or made her uncomfortable, she turned it around and asked me, "Why did you do that? Why are you like that? What's wrong with you?"
Even these days, I still flinch if I think someone's going to judge me. I still anticipate the possible blow. I instinctively avoid doing or saying something if I can predict what they will say.
Let me pick apart that last sentence for you, and show you how limiting it can be.
"I instinctively" = the instinct is there, implanted. I have been trained to immediately react in a certain way, and must train myself to stop, think, and react in a different way. Anyone who has studied childhood knows how hard it is to retrain learned behaviors.
"avoid doing or saying something" = I'm stopping myself, not being limited by someone else, but by myself.
"if I can predict what they will say." = Ooo there's a lot there. "if I can predict" NO ONE can predict. I'm assuming a lot here. "they" is the big one. I'm taking my experiences with my parents, which were pretty horrendous, and projecting them onto whoever I'm with, and predicting that "they" whoever they are, will treat me in the same way that my parents did.
And then self-limiting based on that assumption.
That's not good. You can see that, right?
First of all, the general public will never treat me as poorly as my parents did. I know that for a fact. I've experienced it daily since I moved out of my parents house. Twice.
Second, even if they do, I know that they shouldn't be treating me that poorly. No one should ever treat me that poorly and my parents shouldn't have in the first place. Righteous indignation FTW.
So what I'm doing in that beautiful sentence is presuming that everyone I meet is going to treat me horribly, and that I should not be myself around them because of how they are going to treat me when I do.
If I speak my truth, people will treat me badly. Because I'm broken. There's something wrong with me. That's the lesson of my childhood.
But no one can stuff themselves down for their entire lives. Especially not me. So I finally reveal myself to someone, and if something goes wrong, I'm left with those questions. "What's wrong with me? Why am I broken? Why can't I ever do the right thing?"
These have never been the right questions to ask.
When I approach it from this other angle, it makes sense. What happened to me? I was raised in a house where no one took care of me. I was never acknowledged as who I was. I wasn't supported as a person. I was fed and clothed, but I was derided and chided and nagged and ignored but praised in public. I never knew if I was coming home to happy parents or angry parents. There was no safe haven, just the possibility of danger. The car in the driveway dictated your fear level.
I'm not broken. Someone tried to break me.
But I'm not broken. I'm still here.
As a child of crappy parents, these were the questions I was trained to ask. Every time I did something that my mom didn't like, or made her uncomfortable, she turned it around and asked me, "Why did you do that? Why are you like that? What's wrong with you?"
Even these days, I still flinch if I think someone's going to judge me. I still anticipate the possible blow. I instinctively avoid doing or saying something if I can predict what they will say.
Let me pick apart that last sentence for you, and show you how limiting it can be.
"I instinctively" = the instinct is there, implanted. I have been trained to immediately react in a certain way, and must train myself to stop, think, and react in a different way. Anyone who has studied childhood knows how hard it is to retrain learned behaviors.
"avoid doing or saying something" = I'm stopping myself, not being limited by someone else, but by myself.
"if I can predict what they will say." = Ooo there's a lot there. "if I can predict" NO ONE can predict. I'm assuming a lot here. "they" is the big one. I'm taking my experiences with my parents, which were pretty horrendous, and projecting them onto whoever I'm with, and predicting that "they" whoever they are, will treat me in the same way that my parents did.
And then self-limiting based on that assumption.
That's not good. You can see that, right?
First of all, the general public will never treat me as poorly as my parents did. I know that for a fact. I've experienced it daily since I moved out of my parents house. Twice.
Second, even if they do, I know that they shouldn't be treating me that poorly. No one should ever treat me that poorly and my parents shouldn't have in the first place. Righteous indignation FTW.
So what I'm doing in that beautiful sentence is presuming that everyone I meet is going to treat me horribly, and that I should not be myself around them because of how they are going to treat me when I do.
If I speak my truth, people will treat me badly. Because I'm broken. There's something wrong with me. That's the lesson of my childhood.
But no one can stuff themselves down for their entire lives. Especially not me. So I finally reveal myself to someone, and if something goes wrong, I'm left with those questions. "What's wrong with me? Why am I broken? Why can't I ever do the right thing?"
These have never been the right questions to ask.
When I approach it from this other angle, it makes sense. What happened to me? I was raised in a house where no one took care of me. I was never acknowledged as who I was. I wasn't supported as a person. I was fed and clothed, but I was derided and chided and nagged and ignored but praised in public. I never knew if I was coming home to happy parents or angry parents. There was no safe haven, just the possibility of danger. The car in the driveway dictated your fear level.
I'm not broken. Someone tried to break me.
But I'm not broken. I'm still here.
Saturday, April 21, 2018
Deserving Better
I started writing this blog with a purpose. I wanted to share my story with people just like me, who needed to hear that they weren't the only ones whose parents had tried to break them. I knew there were others out there who were suffering as I had because they didn't know that their trouble in relationships, with money, jobs, food, friendships, with feeling good enough ---- that all of these things could be linked back to their childhood experiences. They didn't know that what they went through wasn't normal, and it wasn't their fault.
I was excited when people started reading my blog. I could see the hits start piling up, and every now and then I could see when someone really dug in and read every single page. I know those were My People, the people who really needed to hear what I had to say. That excited me. But I hit 500 page views, and my excitement started curdling. I would report my numbers to my husband. "550 views. Oh my gosh." His support never wavered. "That's great, isn't it!" "I guess so," I would shake my head. He never pressed, but I could hear his question. If my intent was to reach people, why wasn't I happy that I was succeeding?
This got worse as the numbers grew higher. The last time I checked about a month ago, I had 900 hits on my blog, and I was so uncomfortable, I stopped writing completely. I also had foot surgery, so I had another reason to stop and take care of myself (which is another thing that children of narcissists are NOT good at, but more about that later, oh so much more).
I let it go. I know enough about myself to know that sometimes if I push on something too hard, I'm going to break it instead of fix it. I had to let it incubate. I worked on other things, other personal issues in therapy, books I'd been meaning to read, and let my mind wander. And it occurred to me as I was falling asleep one night that my problem was exactly the same in my work life as it was in my blog life.
In my childhood, I was given very little love and attention, very little of what I needed overall - school clothes, books that fed my soul, even basic hygiene instruction. I learned to make do with whatever I was given. It made me a really good survivor in deprived circumstances. I am excellent at handling terrible situations. I can thrive in horrible environments and just get things done regardless of whatever is being handed to me.
So I'm accustomed to those situations, in work, in relationships, everywhere. I'm built to handle whatever. I know what I'm doing in those worlds. They're my jam. I get it. I buckle down, I manage, I make it great. But that doesn't mean that I don't deserve better. That doesn't mean I should stay in a crappy situation.
As my blog started gaining a readership, I became increasingly uncomfortable. Yes, my intent was to reach people, but my old feelings about not deserving any attention came flooding back. I was doing what I do best - writing well, communicating the things I know best, and helping people along the way. But it still made me massively twitchy to be seen doing it, to know that others were acknowledging my skills and enjoying my work.
I've been lucky enough to have friends who are supportive of my work here; they've given me positive feedback on this blog, and I've received other feedback as well, saying it seems like I know what I'm doing, I've come so far from where I was, handled so many issues so well, and I seem so together. I always smile graciously and try to tell them basically:
LOL FOREVER.
You never really get away from being in a dysfunctional home. You work on it as long as you breathe. You make HUGE progress, and the first step is knowing where you really came from. Once you realize your true origins, you can start moving away from home, literally and figuratively. You can rebuild yourself from scratch. But you will always find another piece, or the same piece, of shame, or guilt, or weird feelings hiding within you somewhere. The good news is that it's smaller every time. And you know how to deal with it this time. You've been here before.
I had to share this. I've been here before. You can get through this. I promise.
Monday, March 5, 2018
A Love Letter to My Inner Critic
Dear Inner Critic,
I wanted to write you a letter and let you know how much you've meant to me for all these years. For so long I've treated you like a burden, like a horrible secret that needed to be hidden away. I've realized lately how much you've done for me, and I wanted to thank you for helping me get through the toughest times in my life.
In my earliest childhood years, I really didn't need you, and whether you knew that or I was just too young to criticize myself properly, you hung back and let me soak in all of the adulation that came from being the newest baby in a large extended family that had suffered terrible losses. You let me believe what they said --- that I was cute and smart and funny --- and you knew that I would need the memory of that pride and approval and love to sustain me through the next long, lonely decades.
When my mother's pride turned into anger and her smile turned to stone, you emerged from behind me with a shushing sound. You taught me to hold my tongue quietly in my mouth, to watch the language of the bodies around me, to be wary of feeling comfortable enough to speak freely. You showed me the traps laid for me to fall into, the pits in my path, the slipperly slides down the hill that would capture me if I strayed. You covered my mouth before I spoke and showed me how she would see my words --- as daggers aimed at her, not the innocent musings they were.
Sometimes I ignored your warnings. I couldn't help but break through and try to be myself. When I was punished for it, you repeated your warnings, and showed me that hiding was the only way to live through my childhood.
Your reprimands kept me safe at school as well. You held me back from always having the answer, or at least volunteering it, and from thinking that my intelligence meant anything to the world. You instilled in me a sense that I would never be enough, and that kept me striving for more, more knowledge, love, and skills, for a very long time. Any time I started feeling complacent, your relentless nagging kept me from standing still. My thirst for knowledge was born from your dissatisfaction with my achievements, whatever those happened to be. Thanks to you, I have learned and experienced so much that I might have otherwise missed.
Did I mention that you saved my actual life? I have no doubt that without your constant warnings, I might have been killed, physically or spiritually, by either one of my birth parents. Their volatile personalities, addictions, and sheer bottled rage could have exploded on me at any time, without your constant criticism to remind me that I was not measuring up to their impossible standards, and they might lose their temper at any moment.
I carried you with me to college and beyond, hearing your voice, the voice of fear, in my head any time I showed my true personality. You said my parents wouldn't like that, they wouldn't stand for it, they might slap or threaten or punish me for who I am, for who I was showing to the world.
I hated you for a long time. But I needed you in order to get here, to where I am today. I have a new life, and a new name, and no one has ever said hateful things about this new name, this new person that I am today. I'm stepping out into the light as my true self, and I don't need you to protect me anymore. Thank you for saving my life, for keeping me safe, but I'm okay by myself now.
You can rest now. I'll always remember you. Goodbye.
I wanted to write you a letter and let you know how much you've meant to me for all these years. For so long I've treated you like a burden, like a horrible secret that needed to be hidden away. I've realized lately how much you've done for me, and I wanted to thank you for helping me get through the toughest times in my life.
In my earliest childhood years, I really didn't need you, and whether you knew that or I was just too young to criticize myself properly, you hung back and let me soak in all of the adulation that came from being the newest baby in a large extended family that had suffered terrible losses. You let me believe what they said --- that I was cute and smart and funny --- and you knew that I would need the memory of that pride and approval and love to sustain me through the next long, lonely decades.
When my mother's pride turned into anger and her smile turned to stone, you emerged from behind me with a shushing sound. You taught me to hold my tongue quietly in my mouth, to watch the language of the bodies around me, to be wary of feeling comfortable enough to speak freely. You showed me the traps laid for me to fall into, the pits in my path, the slipperly slides down the hill that would capture me if I strayed. You covered my mouth before I spoke and showed me how she would see my words --- as daggers aimed at her, not the innocent musings they were.
Sometimes I ignored your warnings. I couldn't help but break through and try to be myself. When I was punished for it, you repeated your warnings, and showed me that hiding was the only way to live through my childhood.
Your reprimands kept me safe at school as well. You held me back from always having the answer, or at least volunteering it, and from thinking that my intelligence meant anything to the world. You instilled in me a sense that I would never be enough, and that kept me striving for more, more knowledge, love, and skills, for a very long time. Any time I started feeling complacent, your relentless nagging kept me from standing still. My thirst for knowledge was born from your dissatisfaction with my achievements, whatever those happened to be. Thanks to you, I have learned and experienced so much that I might have otherwise missed.
Did I mention that you saved my actual life? I have no doubt that without your constant warnings, I might have been killed, physically or spiritually, by either one of my birth parents. Their volatile personalities, addictions, and sheer bottled rage could have exploded on me at any time, without your constant criticism to remind me that I was not measuring up to their impossible standards, and they might lose their temper at any moment.
I carried you with me to college and beyond, hearing your voice, the voice of fear, in my head any time I showed my true personality. You said my parents wouldn't like that, they wouldn't stand for it, they might slap or threaten or punish me for who I am, for who I was showing to the world.
I hated you for a long time. But I needed you in order to get here, to where I am today. I have a new life, and a new name, and no one has ever said hateful things about this new name, this new person that I am today. I'm stepping out into the light as my true self, and I don't need you to protect me anymore. Thank you for saving my life, for keeping me safe, but I'm okay by myself now.
You can rest now. I'll always remember you. Goodbye.
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Movies I Watch on Repeat II: Recovery Edition
This one needs a little more 'splaining, Lucy, because it took me a while to understand exactly why I was so drawn to these movies. I've never been in rehab. I don't think I've ever been addicted to anything illegal. But I've longed for escape, escape from the pain and fear that were instilled by my family from childhood, and I get it. I understand what it's like to never want to feel like that again, to not care what you have to do to avoid it. I've chosen to stay in relationships just so I would feel loved --- even though I was being abused on a daily basis, I would have done anything to avoid being alone, to avoid hearing that voice in my head: No one will ever love you. Where does that fall on the irony meter: A women's studies major in an abusive relationship? You have to laugh! You have to laugh or it swallows you whole. So I smile now, because it's ridiculous, and it's been decades now. I know now that I'm not unlovable. I know that because I love myself. I don't need anyone else to do it for me.
All that to say, I know what that feels like, to do anything at all not to feel. Before I pinned that down (through a whole lot of self-reflection and counseling and work, yes I say that a lot, WORK), I just knew that I loved these movies. They spoke to me on a cellular level. So here's the list, and again, I'll keep the spoilers as light as I can.
Drunks
This movie is split into two separate plotlines, centering around an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The main character Jim, played by Richard Lewis, is a recovering addict, who is setting up for the meeting. He's something of an example for the rest of the attendees, but halfway through the meeting he bolts, and immediately starts drinking his way through the night, moving through progressively harder drugs. This is intercut with footage of the stories told at the meeting by the attendees about their lives and how they got to this point in their lives.
I watch this one about once every six months. Jim's descent into complete horrifying drugged stupor is pretty intense. The other stories are pretty awful, but I get a lot from their self-reflection and how they realized or were forced to realize how far they had fallen over the edge.
I have a Demotivational postcard someone gave me as a joke at work that says, "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others." In some ways, that's how I feel about these movies. If I don't do the work, if I don't watch my motivations and make sure that I'm not lying to myself about why I do the things I do, I could easily slip down that rabbit hole and disappear. I know it could happen. If I want to be who I'm meant to be, I have to be careful. I have to be vigilant. That's part of the attraction.
It's also what I always hoped my mother would do. I can see her in these stories. I know what her home life was like growing up. I know how she was treated. I can see it in how she treated me, in how she acted, in her behavior every moment I was growing up. And she knew I could see it, and she hated me for it. Nobody likes the truthtellers. (That's another blog post altogether.) And I always hoped she would realize how her background affected her, and try to do better than that.
But she didn't. She chose as her mother did. Wall it up, and move on. She never dealt with the past, left it in a huge mess in a room in her mind, to fester and leak out into her dealings with her family every day. She didn't realize it, but it poisoned everything around her. Including me. As William Faulkner said, "The past isn't dead; it isn't even past."
Rating: 20 viewings, but a big impact.
28 Days
Not to be confused with 28 Days Later (an excellent zombie film), this film centers around Gwen, played by Sandra Bullock, a trainwreck of a woman. In the first few minutes, she shows up wasted and an hour late to her sister Lily's wedding, stumbles through the ceremony, at the reception dances directly into the wedding cake, then steals a limo to go find another cake, crashing the car into a house.
Like I said, trainwreck.
After being placed into rehab for 28 Days (hence the title) in lieu of jail time, she proceeds to judge everyone and everything around her, correcting pronunciation, rolling her eyes at the chanting of the serenity prayer, refusing to participate in anything, and trying to find drugs immediately. Her boyfriend visits and slips her some drugs, she uses, and her counselor sets up a transfer to jail. Still in denial, she insists that she could stop using if she wanted to, saying she's a writer and they all drink, she likes to have a good time, she's not an addict, that's for those other people. Out of stubbornness, she throws the drugs out the window, then tries to shimmy down a tree to get to them. After injuring herself, she realizes the extent of her addiction and breaks down.
The rest of the movie involves her journey as she throws herself into treatment, participating in everything, trying to gain back everyone's trust, and reaching out to Lily for help in talking about family issues. One of the scenes that will always, always bring me to tears is when Lily talks about wishing she had helped Gwen when they were younger. Using her newly found knowledge from the program, Gwen says, "Well, I never asked for help, so." Lily replies, "But you needed it, didn't you?"
Everyone needs help in this world, at one time or another. Of course I was raised to believe that I didn't deserve help, and so I couldn't ask for any because no one would help me. You're reading this; you've probably already read something earlier so that's already a given. But even if I did get the courage to actually ask for help, I faced a huge wall of resistance. My mother would flip out, giving me all of the reasons that there WAS no help to give. No money available, no time to do what I was asking for, no way that it could be done. If it was something I valued, but it didn't line up with presenting to the world the image of her as a perfect mother, it just couldn't happen. Impossible.
So I learned. I learned not to ask, that help didn't exist. And I worked around that void for decades.
I had to start small, and ask for little things before I could believe that it would work. Any setback was a huge setback, and I had to start from zero many times. But eventually I was able to ask for help without feeling like a huge imposition, like I was asking too much, taking up too much space, being greedy when I should be giving instead of taking.
One of my friends said something a long time ago that reframed the situation for me. She asked me if I liked helping people, and how it made me feel. I said I loved helping people, and it made me feel good, and useful, and like I was needed. She said, why would you want to keep someone else from feeling that way? Wouldn't you want to allow someone else the pleasure of feeling that way if you had the chance?
Digression again. That's just one of the pieces of this movie that meant so much to me. Watching these characters deal with their past, and learn from their mistakes helped me figure out how to do that myself.
Rating: 300 viewings, at least. I could probably recite this one, easily.
I don't know that I'll ever fully recover from the childhood I had. I'll probably always be in recovery. But these movies gave me hope that I wouldn't have to use food or books or other people to hide from my feelings about my past forever. Instead, I could move through my feelings and step up into a new life, one where I could acknowledge where I came from, but live as myself without letting my past dictate who I would become.
All that to say, I know what that feels like, to do anything at all not to feel. Before I pinned that down (through a whole lot of self-reflection and counseling and work, yes I say that a lot, WORK), I just knew that I loved these movies. They spoke to me on a cellular level. So here's the list, and again, I'll keep the spoilers as light as I can.
Drunks
This movie is split into two separate plotlines, centering around an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The main character Jim, played by Richard Lewis, is a recovering addict, who is setting up for the meeting. He's something of an example for the rest of the attendees, but halfway through the meeting he bolts, and immediately starts drinking his way through the night, moving through progressively harder drugs. This is intercut with footage of the stories told at the meeting by the attendees about their lives and how they got to this point in their lives.
I watch this one about once every six months. Jim's descent into complete horrifying drugged stupor is pretty intense. The other stories are pretty awful, but I get a lot from their self-reflection and how they realized or were forced to realize how far they had fallen over the edge.
I have a Demotivational postcard someone gave me as a joke at work that says, "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others." In some ways, that's how I feel about these movies. If I don't do the work, if I don't watch my motivations and make sure that I'm not lying to myself about why I do the things I do, I could easily slip down that rabbit hole and disappear. I know it could happen. If I want to be who I'm meant to be, I have to be careful. I have to be vigilant. That's part of the attraction.
It's also what I always hoped my mother would do. I can see her in these stories. I know what her home life was like growing up. I know how she was treated. I can see it in how she treated me, in how she acted, in her behavior every moment I was growing up. And she knew I could see it, and she hated me for it. Nobody likes the truthtellers. (That's another blog post altogether.) And I always hoped she would realize how her background affected her, and try to do better than that.
But she didn't. She chose as her mother did. Wall it up, and move on. She never dealt with the past, left it in a huge mess in a room in her mind, to fester and leak out into her dealings with her family every day. She didn't realize it, but it poisoned everything around her. Including me. As William Faulkner said, "The past isn't dead; it isn't even past."
Rating: 20 viewings, but a big impact.
28 Days
Not to be confused with 28 Days Later (an excellent zombie film), this film centers around Gwen, played by Sandra Bullock, a trainwreck of a woman. In the first few minutes, she shows up wasted and an hour late to her sister Lily's wedding, stumbles through the ceremony, at the reception dances directly into the wedding cake, then steals a limo to go find another cake, crashing the car into a house.
Like I said, trainwreck.
After being placed into rehab for 28 Days (hence the title) in lieu of jail time, she proceeds to judge everyone and everything around her, correcting pronunciation, rolling her eyes at the chanting of the serenity prayer, refusing to participate in anything, and trying to find drugs immediately. Her boyfriend visits and slips her some drugs, she uses, and her counselor sets up a transfer to jail. Still in denial, she insists that she could stop using if she wanted to, saying she's a writer and they all drink, she likes to have a good time, she's not an addict, that's for those other people. Out of stubbornness, she throws the drugs out the window, then tries to shimmy down a tree to get to them. After injuring herself, she realizes the extent of her addiction and breaks down.
The rest of the movie involves her journey as she throws herself into treatment, participating in everything, trying to gain back everyone's trust, and reaching out to Lily for help in talking about family issues. One of the scenes that will always, always bring me to tears is when Lily talks about wishing she had helped Gwen when they were younger. Using her newly found knowledge from the program, Gwen says, "Well, I never asked for help, so." Lily replies, "But you needed it, didn't you?"
Everyone needs help in this world, at one time or another. Of course I was raised to believe that I didn't deserve help, and so I couldn't ask for any because no one would help me. You're reading this; you've probably already read something earlier so that's already a given. But even if I did get the courage to actually ask for help, I faced a huge wall of resistance. My mother would flip out, giving me all of the reasons that there WAS no help to give. No money available, no time to do what I was asking for, no way that it could be done. If it was something I valued, but it didn't line up with presenting to the world the image of her as a perfect mother, it just couldn't happen. Impossible.
So I learned. I learned not to ask, that help didn't exist. And I worked around that void for decades.
I had to start small, and ask for little things before I could believe that it would work. Any setback was a huge setback, and I had to start from zero many times. But eventually I was able to ask for help without feeling like a huge imposition, like I was asking too much, taking up too much space, being greedy when I should be giving instead of taking.
One of my friends said something a long time ago that reframed the situation for me. She asked me if I liked helping people, and how it made me feel. I said I loved helping people, and it made me feel good, and useful, and like I was needed. She said, why would you want to keep someone else from feeling that way? Wouldn't you want to allow someone else the pleasure of feeling that way if you had the chance?
Digression again. That's just one of the pieces of this movie that meant so much to me. Watching these characters deal with their past, and learn from their mistakes helped me figure out how to do that myself.
Rating: 300 viewings, at least. I could probably recite this one, easily.
I don't know that I'll ever fully recover from the childhood I had. I'll probably always be in recovery. But these movies gave me hope that I wouldn't have to use food or books or other people to hide from my feelings about my past forever. Instead, I could move through my feelings and step up into a new life, one where I could acknowledge where I came from, but live as myself without letting my past dictate who I would become.
Sunday, February 25, 2018
Movies I Watch on Repeat: Dysfunctional Family Edition
Stories have always helped me survive: books, comics, music, TV and movies. When I became financially stable, I immediately invested in a VCR and cable, and started recording movies at a prodigious pace. Back then I knew something was wrong with either me or my family, but I didn't know what, and I didn't know what to do about it. But even then, I was drawn to certain kinds of stories, and I'd watch these movies over and over.
I'll be posting about Truth Tellers and Recovery movies in upcoming posts, but for now, here are my favorite Dysfunctional Family movies. (There may be some spoilers, but I'll try to keep them light.)
Drop Dead Fred
This looks like a light-hearted comedy at first, and it's chock full of slapstick cartoonish humor. Phoebe Cates plays a young woman whose childhood imaginary friend shows up in the flesh and starts causing havoc in her life. Rik Mayall is hilarious as the imaginary friend, and it's easy to get caught up in the humor of it all. But the more we learn about her relationships with her mother, her husband, and herself, the more we understand how much she needs her friend and the gorgeous mess Fred makes of everything around her. It's probably a stretch to characterize him as destructive as the Indian goddess Kali, but he's at least on the same family tree. Sometimes the only way to grow something new is to burn it all down. That's something I've needed to use more than once in my life, and I've watched this movie dozens of times to help me relearn it.
The movie's accurate depiction of a narcissistic mother's relationship with their daughter is really accurate, creepily so. Of course your mileage may vary and all that, but obsession with appearances? Check. Use of guilt as a lever? Check. Threaten with loss of only valued possession? Check. Passive aggressive blaming? Check and mate! So many red flags you could build a factory around them. Showing these so clearly was massively illuminating to me. Life is never this clear, but it always helps to have an example to draw from.
My rating: About 60 viewings
Ordinary People
Ah, the gold standard for That Movie about a Narcissistic Mother, or, Isn't She Mean and a Horrible Mom. I love this movie, I really do. There's not too much to say that hasn't been said, but I love the accurate picture of therapy - the frustration, the annoyance, the focus on self, the desire for a quick fix that will make everything better. Conrad's eventual acceptance of himself and his mother for who they are, not who he wishes they could be, is hopeful, and his dad's acknowledgement at the end is so powerful for those of us who never had that privilege.
My rating: Probably 30 viewings
Bed of Roses
My goodness, this was a surprise for me (and please ignore the inaccurate framing - This is not a romantic comedy, end of story). I think I picked up this dvd because it was a double-set with Pump Up the Volume, and watched it when I had nothing else to watch. Mary Stuart Masterson plays Lisa, a successful businesswoman with exactly one friend, a no-strings boyfriend, and no life except for work. She receives a present out of the blue and meets a wonderful guy who sweeps her off of her feet, except she doesn't understand how that could happen to her. We learn through her reactions how damaged she is, and it doesn't help that her new guy is moving too quickly. So many children of narcissists don't understand what it's like to be in a normal relationship; we flinch at every loud noise, we apologize every time there's a misunderstanding, we leave the room at the whisper of a conflict.
At the same time, we don't understand niceness. If someone's nice to us, it's a trick, they must want something from us. If we're not being trapped or used in some way - for money, or sex, or something - we don't know how to handle it. If there isn't a blow-up or a passive aggressive manipulation happening, we're suspicious. Lisa's reaction to a normal family Christmas says it all; everyone's so nice and welcoming, the house is so full of people she doesn't know, they're all hugging and talking and laughing, and you can see her flinching at every noise and getting more tense with every moment that passes. People think that when you step out of an abusive situation, you're cured. You'll suddenly feel better, like the fever has broken, and you're ready to act like everybody else. It's not that easy. You have to relearn basic human interactions, or, if you were raised wrong, learn them for the very first time. This takes a lot of hard, frustrating work, and this movie gets it right.
My rating: 40 viewings, at least
Ulee's Gold
I caught this in our independent theater when it came out in 1997, and I went back that same week twice more. Peter Fonda plays Ulee, a beekeeper whose son is in prison for a robbery. When Ulee gets a phone call from his son's partners in crime, he has to jump through hoops to rescue his daughter-in-law and keep them at bay, all while taking care of his two granddaughters and tending his bees. At the same time, he's coming face to face with his failings as a father and grandfather, and trying to change how he approaches his family to close the gaps he's created between them.
I can't tell you how amazing it is for me to watch someone look deeply at their life, acknowledge the mistakes they've made, and attempt to change their behavior based on that knowledge. It's something that children of narcissists rarely get to see, nigh onto a unicorn.
My rating: This is becoming meaningless, because I have watched them all SO MANY TIMES. But probably 40.
Oh my gosh I'm looking at my handwritten list and I didn't even include
MURIEL'S WEDDING
I guess it was just too obvious. I'll do the rating first. This one's not meaningless.
My rating: 500 viewings. And I'm not kidding.
Where do I begin? There's so many scenes I could dissect. Just a few:
Muriel gets what she wants. She gains the notoriety and respect from the popular crowd. But then she suffers a real loss, and she learns what that notoriety and respect cost her. She grows. She changes. She becomes more herself, and stands up to her father, who is forced to realize what he's done.
Again, I saw this three times in the theater. I wore out the videotape. I have the dvd. This movie has sustained me in some really dark times. She did it; she got out, she built a new life, she changed who she was and apologized for what she'd done wrong. She figured out what really mattered to her and became stronger for her experiences.
I watched all of these movies over and over, just hoping that I could, too.
I'll be posting about Truth Tellers and Recovery movies in upcoming posts, but for now, here are my favorite Dysfunctional Family movies. (There may be some spoilers, but I'll try to keep them light.)
Drop Dead Fred
This looks like a light-hearted comedy at first, and it's chock full of slapstick cartoonish humor. Phoebe Cates plays a young woman whose childhood imaginary friend shows up in the flesh and starts causing havoc in her life. Rik Mayall is hilarious as the imaginary friend, and it's easy to get caught up in the humor of it all. But the more we learn about her relationships with her mother, her husband, and herself, the more we understand how much she needs her friend and the gorgeous mess Fred makes of everything around her. It's probably a stretch to characterize him as destructive as the Indian goddess Kali, but he's at least on the same family tree. Sometimes the only way to grow something new is to burn it all down. That's something I've needed to use more than once in my life, and I've watched this movie dozens of times to help me relearn it.
The movie's accurate depiction of a narcissistic mother's relationship with their daughter is really accurate, creepily so. Of course your mileage may vary and all that, but obsession with appearances? Check. Use of guilt as a lever? Check. Threaten with loss of only valued possession? Check. Passive aggressive blaming? Check and mate! So many red flags you could build a factory around them. Showing these so clearly was massively illuminating to me. Life is never this clear, but it always helps to have an example to draw from.
My rating: About 60 viewings
Ordinary People
Ah, the gold standard for That Movie about a Narcissistic Mother, or, Isn't She Mean and a Horrible Mom. I love this movie, I really do. There's not too much to say that hasn't been said, but I love the accurate picture of therapy - the frustration, the annoyance, the focus on self, the desire for a quick fix that will make everything better. Conrad's eventual acceptance of himself and his mother for who they are, not who he wishes they could be, is hopeful, and his dad's acknowledgement at the end is so powerful for those of us who never had that privilege.
My rating: Probably 30 viewings
Bed of Roses
My goodness, this was a surprise for me (and please ignore the inaccurate framing - This is not a romantic comedy, end of story). I think I picked up this dvd because it was a double-set with Pump Up the Volume, and watched it when I had nothing else to watch. Mary Stuart Masterson plays Lisa, a successful businesswoman with exactly one friend, a no-strings boyfriend, and no life except for work. She receives a present out of the blue and meets a wonderful guy who sweeps her off of her feet, except she doesn't understand how that could happen to her. We learn through her reactions how damaged she is, and it doesn't help that her new guy is moving too quickly. So many children of narcissists don't understand what it's like to be in a normal relationship; we flinch at every loud noise, we apologize every time there's a misunderstanding, we leave the room at the whisper of a conflict.
At the same time, we don't understand niceness. If someone's nice to us, it's a trick, they must want something from us. If we're not being trapped or used in some way - for money, or sex, or something - we don't know how to handle it. If there isn't a blow-up or a passive aggressive manipulation happening, we're suspicious. Lisa's reaction to a normal family Christmas says it all; everyone's so nice and welcoming, the house is so full of people she doesn't know, they're all hugging and talking and laughing, and you can see her flinching at every noise and getting more tense with every moment that passes. People think that when you step out of an abusive situation, you're cured. You'll suddenly feel better, like the fever has broken, and you're ready to act like everybody else. It's not that easy. You have to relearn basic human interactions, or, if you were raised wrong, learn them for the very first time. This takes a lot of hard, frustrating work, and this movie gets it right.
My rating: 40 viewings, at least
Ulee's Gold
I caught this in our independent theater when it came out in 1997, and I went back that same week twice more. Peter Fonda plays Ulee, a beekeeper whose son is in prison for a robbery. When Ulee gets a phone call from his son's partners in crime, he has to jump through hoops to rescue his daughter-in-law and keep them at bay, all while taking care of his two granddaughters and tending his bees. At the same time, he's coming face to face with his failings as a father and grandfather, and trying to change how he approaches his family to close the gaps he's created between them.
I can't tell you how amazing it is for me to watch someone look deeply at their life, acknowledge the mistakes they've made, and attempt to change their behavior based on that knowledge. It's something that children of narcissists rarely get to see, nigh onto a unicorn.
My rating: This is becoming meaningless, because I have watched them all SO MANY TIMES. But probably 40.
Oh my gosh I'm looking at my handwritten list and I didn't even include
MURIEL'S WEDDING
I guess it was just too obvious. I'll do the rating first. This one's not meaningless.
My rating: 500 viewings. And I'm not kidding.
Where do I begin? There's so many scenes I could dissect. Just a few:
- Muriel tries to gain her father's respect by getting a job interview. Her father completely negates her accomplishment. (The first time I brought poetry home that I had written, I was completely excited. Writing was something I could do! I showed my mom, and she frowned at me, and said, I guess that's okay, but you need to clean up your room.)
- Muriel escapes into her room and her music and her mirror, dreaming of a time when she'll be the chosen one. (I've been there, completely dissociating from the real world by dreaming of a new boy walking onto the school bus and sitting with me, choosing me, not anyone else.) .
- Muriel's "friends" make fun of her clothes and her music, and tell her flat-out that they don't want her to hang out with them anymore. (My best friend one summer was suddenly my second-best bully in school that fall.)
- And that's just the first fifteen minutes or so. Whew!
Muriel gets what she wants. She gains the notoriety and respect from the popular crowd. But then she suffers a real loss, and she learns what that notoriety and respect cost her. She grows. She changes. She becomes more herself, and stands up to her father, who is forced to realize what he's done.
Again, I saw this three times in the theater. I wore out the videotape. I have the dvd. This movie has sustained me in some really dark times. She did it; she got out, she built a new life, she changed who she was and apologized for what she'd done wrong. She figured out what really mattered to her and became stronger for her experiences.
I watched all of these movies over and over, just hoping that I could, too.
Thursday, February 22, 2018
"Why Do You Want to Rehash the Past?" Three Reactions to My Process
I've done a lot of work to get to where I am today. I'm not done. I'm not done. I'm not done, and I don't expect to ever be done. I'm still angry sometimes. I'm still sad sometimes. I'm still working and working and working on building myself back into the person I was always meant to be. I'll never have that happy childhood that others had; I'll never have that secure base John Bowlby talks about, and I've got a lock on a lot of the horrible stuff Alice Miller talks about in her books. I've accepted that, and I go to counseling twice a month, and I write and I read and I process and clearly I've hashed a lot of it out because I can write about some of these experiences without devolving into white hot rage the way I used to all the time.
And I can talk about them with other people, people who have had similar experiences. Talking is how I process, so this is really helpful to me. I also process through writing, which is one reason this blog is so helpful to me. I'm also writing to tell the truth to other people, and help in any way I can. If someone else reads these words and feels less alone, I've done my job and served my purpose in this plane of existence as I see it. But it also helps me to make sense of what I've been through.
I've had varying reactions when I talk about my family with people I know, and it's interesting to me how they play out. Most of these people have had issues with their parents, but I also noticed it when I've talked about difficult interactions with almost anyone. Let me be clear, I am not judging here. I know everyone has different ways of handling these issues. But I do find it fascinating how different people handle these difficult subjects. Here are the main reactions I've seen:
Type A: This person does not want to talk about it. Period, full stop, end of conversation. I get the feeling that these folks are just unwilling or unable to self-reflect at all. Sometimes they've been damaged by others and refuse to think about themselves at all, sometimes they are self-medicating to the point of self-abuse, sometimes they don't want to feel anything ever again. It's tough to get deeper than the next five minutes, and easy to see that you'll never make any headway with them. Glossing over is probably a really good summary, because they don't seem to have heard anything you've said.
Type B: This person is okay with you talking about it at first, but they get progressively uncomfortable the more you talk about it, or as they talk about their history. "Isn't this just dredging up old memories?" "Doesn't this hurt when you think about all the old feelings of the past?" When I asked one of these folks about what was making them uncomfortable, she said that she felt like she was back in the situation, and she was feeling the emotions that she felt back then. She was getting angrier and angrier every moment that she talked about it. I'm not a counselor, but I asked her if she could separate herself from that moment in time, and see her parent's ridiculous motivations through today's perspective, with the knowledge she has now. That seemed to help her and she's been easier about talking with me since then. But another woman has stuck in this same stage and unless she initiates the conversation, I steer clear of the topic out of respect for her.
Type C: This is my style, where delving in and really processing with someone else helps immensely. It makes things clearer for me, it defines terms, it makes things go deeper and opens them up to the fresh air. Talking to someone and exchanging ideas is a creative process, and you learn so much from the other person's perspective.
Everyone has their own way of processing, and far be it from me to prescribe the One True Way of dealing with stress and trauma. I'm always interested in how different people process things, and it'll be interesting to see if there are more categories as time goes on.
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Broken Friends and Judgement
Growing up, most of my friends were broken, or at least a little bruised around the edges.
I don't mean that as a value judgement; I was really broken myself. But it was more hidden for me than for most of my friends. They had divorced parents, or had suffered trauma. One of my friends from camp was a foster kid, in and out of different homes in the big city. I could barely imagine her life, let alone relate.
E was being abused by her dad.
T was traumatized by a sexual assault and later withdrawn from school entirely.
My friend D lived far away, and was severely abused by her family, and later diagnosed with multiple personalities.
B, the previously mentioned foster kid, had grown up way too fast, and was having sex with her much older boyfriend at fifteen.
A's mom was much like mine: narcissistic, controlling, angry all the time.
These aren't value judgements. I loved my friends, even if they were only my friends for a little while, or off and on. Most of the time it was distance that kept us apart. Sometimes they would become friends with someone closer, and I would slowly be phased out of their world. Other times, they would form an alliance against me, and use my confidences to make fun of me and gain currency with their newfound friend.
But my family looked perfect to them. My parents were high school sweethearts, and had been married for almost twenty years. I'd lived in the same house since I was nine. Both of my parents worked, and we had more than enough income to live on. I had pets and siblings and played sports and was in advanced classes. More than one friend straight up said as much to me: You've got it made!
It was something I'd thought about myself. Why did I gravitate toward these types of friends?
Now I know. Instinctively, I knew that I was just like them. I knew my family was broken, and that I could only seek refuge with other broken kids. I knew that I would only find comfort with other people who would understand what I was going through, who felt my pain and anguish, who would understand what I was saying when I said, I have to get OUT.
I was crying out to the wilderness that no one understood me, that high school was awful, that my parents just didn't understand, and they heard me. But even I didn't know the full scope of the problem. I didn't know that parents were supposed to help you, they were supposed to lift you up, they were supposed to listen.
To this day, when I watch a tv show, or even a commercial where a parent is truly parenting their child, sometimes I start crying. I don't know what that's like. I know what it's like to want that. I know what I wanted when I was a child, and I've done a lot of work to give myself that feeling from within. But if I'm in a good space, and my husband [who shares similar familial issues] is watching with me, I usually turn to him and say, "Hey, is that what real parents are like?" He just laughs and says, "Huh! I wouldn't know, but that's what I've heard." And we laugh.
Because making him laugh makes me feel better. And it's funny because it's true.
Not all of my friends in high school were broken. Those that had good parents and happy childhoods were worshipped, wide-eyed, and studied like rarities. Sometimes I felt like I was on uneven ground with them, as they just walked in the world not flinching or expecting bad things to happen at any moment. I had a few boyfriends like this who I dropped with no real explanation, because I couldn't understand why they were with me, a clearly broken person who didn't deserve them. (If you're reading this, sorry!)
But the thing that makes me angriest about my lovely, complicated friends is how my mom reacted to them, and what she would say to me later. I'm gonna have to bullet this because otherwise I'm going to type so angrily that nothing will extinguish the flames from my computer. Deep breath here.
So. Once my friend left, I would get an earful. "You sure do know how to pick 'em." "She isn't very smart, is she?" "I don't like the way she does her hair. Doesn't her mother care about how she looks?" "That friend of yours is weird. Why does she dress that way?" "Is her mother divorced? Well, I guess she can't help how she's being raised, but still. She could have been more polite."
When my friend B came to visit, my bedroom door latch had been broken for months (why bother fixing it just for me?). The door accidentally closed on her, and she had to climb out on the roof to ask someone to come and let her out. For months, I heard about the "Fiddler on the Roof" and how weird she was. During that same visit, our septic tank clogged, and I had to spend two days digging out the septic tank because my parents both had bad backs and they couldn't be bothered hiring someone to dig it out. Instead, their fourteen year old daughter was tasked with using a shovel to dig a hole in the ground five feet deep, eight feet long, and five feet wide. But yeah. My friend was the weird one.
These days, I still gravitate toward the people I think are different in some way. I can feel it in how they act, and sometimes we talk about our experiences. I'm not often wrong about it; it's a wistful type of radar, but one I'm glad to have. It's nice to know who will understand where you come from, and what you really mean when you say, "I couldn't stay in touch with them anymore. I had to get out."
I don't mean that as a value judgement; I was really broken myself. But it was more hidden for me than for most of my friends. They had divorced parents, or had suffered trauma. One of my friends from camp was a foster kid, in and out of different homes in the big city. I could barely imagine her life, let alone relate.
E was being abused by her dad.
T was traumatized by a sexual assault and later withdrawn from school entirely.
My friend D lived far away, and was severely abused by her family, and later diagnosed with multiple personalities.
B, the previously mentioned foster kid, had grown up way too fast, and was having sex with her much older boyfriend at fifteen.
A's mom was much like mine: narcissistic, controlling, angry all the time.
These aren't value judgements. I loved my friends, even if they were only my friends for a little while, or off and on. Most of the time it was distance that kept us apart. Sometimes they would become friends with someone closer, and I would slowly be phased out of their world. Other times, they would form an alliance against me, and use my confidences to make fun of me and gain currency with their newfound friend.
But my family looked perfect to them. My parents were high school sweethearts, and had been married for almost twenty years. I'd lived in the same house since I was nine. Both of my parents worked, and we had more than enough income to live on. I had pets and siblings and played sports and was in advanced classes. More than one friend straight up said as much to me: You've got it made!
It was something I'd thought about myself. Why did I gravitate toward these types of friends?
Now I know. Instinctively, I knew that I was just like them. I knew my family was broken, and that I could only seek refuge with other broken kids. I knew that I would only find comfort with other people who would understand what I was going through, who felt my pain and anguish, who would understand what I was saying when I said, I have to get OUT.
I was crying out to the wilderness that no one understood me, that high school was awful, that my parents just didn't understand, and they heard me. But even I didn't know the full scope of the problem. I didn't know that parents were supposed to help you, they were supposed to lift you up, they were supposed to listen.
To this day, when I watch a tv show, or even a commercial where a parent is truly parenting their child, sometimes I start crying. I don't know what that's like. I know what it's like to want that. I know what I wanted when I was a child, and I've done a lot of work to give myself that feeling from within. But if I'm in a good space, and my husband [who shares similar familial issues] is watching with me, I usually turn to him and say, "Hey, is that what real parents are like?" He just laughs and says, "Huh! I wouldn't know, but that's what I've heard." And we laugh.
Because making him laugh makes me feel better. And it's funny because it's true.
Not all of my friends in high school were broken. Those that had good parents and happy childhoods were worshipped, wide-eyed, and studied like rarities. Sometimes I felt like I was on uneven ground with them, as they just walked in the world not flinching or expecting bad things to happen at any moment. I had a few boyfriends like this who I dropped with no real explanation, because I couldn't understand why they were with me, a clearly broken person who didn't deserve them. (If you're reading this, sorry!)
But the thing that makes me angriest about my lovely, complicated friends is how my mom reacted to them, and what she would say to me later. I'm gonna have to bullet this because otherwise I'm going to type so angrily that nothing will extinguish the flames from my computer. Deep breath here.
- My mother will never self-examine enough to understand her own motivations. I'm doing more work here to understand her than she will ever do.
- She wanted to keep me isolated and dependent on her for everything, to keep me all to herself.
- She was constantly projecting all of her insecurities on me and everyone else. Everything she didn't like in herself, she projected into someone else and criticized them for it.
- Any time I had friends over, she had to treat me like a beloved daughter to preserve her public image as a doting mother. To put it mildly, this was not something she liked to do.
- She enjoyed putting me down, and this was just one more way to do it.
- Any time she had to treat me like a beloved daughter in front of other people, as soon as no one else was around, she would immediately cut me down so I wouldn't get too big for my britches. That's a direct quote.
So. Once my friend left, I would get an earful. "You sure do know how to pick 'em." "She isn't very smart, is she?" "I don't like the way she does her hair. Doesn't her mother care about how she looks?" "That friend of yours is weird. Why does she dress that way?" "Is her mother divorced? Well, I guess she can't help how she's being raised, but still. She could have been more polite."
When my friend B came to visit, my bedroom door latch had been broken for months (why bother fixing it just for me?). The door accidentally closed on her, and she had to climb out on the roof to ask someone to come and let her out. For months, I heard about the "Fiddler on the Roof" and how weird she was. During that same visit, our septic tank clogged, and I had to spend two days digging out the septic tank because my parents both had bad backs and they couldn't be bothered hiring someone to dig it out. Instead, their fourteen year old daughter was tasked with using a shovel to dig a hole in the ground five feet deep, eight feet long, and five feet wide. But yeah. My friend was the weird one.
These days, I still gravitate toward the people I think are different in some way. I can feel it in how they act, and sometimes we talk about our experiences. I'm not often wrong about it; it's a wistful type of radar, but one I'm glad to have. It's nice to know who will understand where you come from, and what you really mean when you say, "I couldn't stay in touch with them anymore. I had to get out."
Thursday, February 8, 2018
Starving to Be Seen; or Why I Can't Walk Away From a Good Conversation
Let's talk patterns.
I went to summer camp after ninth grade, one of the few things my parents paid for without question, probably just to get rid of me for ten days. It was transformative; I made friends immediately, and after camp, I wrote long letters to at least fifteen girls. Only four or five wrote back, and only one continued writing through the rest of the school year.
At my high school, I had a small group of core friends, but I never fit in to the larger class, and even those friends didn't seek me out very often; I was someone they hung out with if no one else was around. I would ask them to go places, or if they needed a ride. I was always more enthusiastic than anyone else about doing something together.
Every year, there would be someone new at school, and I would make friends and get to know them. For the first month or so, we'd be inseparable - Ali, Chris, Cynthia, the list goes on. Then they'd find their place in the school and I'd see them occasionally, but really the friendship was over. They'd found their real friends and didn't need me anymore.
In 10th grade, I was a page for our state's legislature, and for a week, I was dropped into a cross-section of teenagers from across the state. After the week was over, I wrote letters to about ten of them. Most of them didn't write back. One boy did, and I built an entire imaginary relationship with him until I received a letter where he boasted about vandalizing mailboxes and I realized he wasn't the person I'd imagined.
When I started college, I loved the intellectual, late night conversations that usually started over coffee and sometimes cigarettes, discussing philosophy, literature, politics, whatever, and led to talking about personal ideas and histories. Full disclosure: These were (usually) guys who I (usually) ended up sleeping with. Looking back, that was probably their objective, but I was a pretty easy target in those days.
In my twenties, in the infancy of the internet, I placed a personals ad on yahoo online and emailed with a number of guys on and off for about a year. Chad held my attention; he was smart, funny, and thoughtful. He was careful about his feelings, having lost his fiance to an illness two years before. I respected that, but a few months later I had a road trip planned to his city, and I wanted to meet him. He demurred, and I couldn't understand why; it didn't make any sense to me. We never emailed again.
I could tell more stories, but I think you've probably got it by now. I can't let go. For years I thought it was my failing --- why was I so different from other people? Why did I hold on so tight to people who really didn't value me? Why didn't I know that normal people didn't care about me as much as I cared about them? Why was I so broken?
It took a long time for me to put the pieces together. I was asked a question by my counselor: "Wasn't there anyone in your life when you were young who reflected you back to you, who really saw who you were?" I had to stop and think about that, think about my past and all the years growing up in my parents' house, all the years of bullying at school, all the teachers and classmates and babysitters and hairdressers and ----
You can see I'm digging pretty deep here. And coming up empty.
My mom saw only competition. A reflection of her faults. Someone to blame. Someone to hate and abuse.
My dad saw someone to keep in line. A source of labor to be cultivated. A threat to my mom.
Both of them were highly motivated to keep me from seeing my strength, my power, my abilities for what they were. If I knew who I was and what I could do, I could get away, and they wouldn't be able to blame me for their problems anymore. They would have no outlet for their bad feelings, their abuse.
Now it's clear to me, clear as day. My whole life, I was literally starving for connection. I was dying for someone to see me. Of course I wrote letters to anyone I met who showed me any kindness! Of course I created whole relationships out of thin air just to pretend that I was connecting with someone, anyone at all. I was dying inside, shriveling up, shouting and pounding on the walls from inside a hollowed out tree, staring from behind my own eyes as person after person looked at me and saw nothing but what they could get from me, what they could use me for, what they wanted to see.
I know now that I wasn't broken; I couldn't have been more wrong in how I posed the question. Why did I hold on so tight? I was holding on to keep myself alive, to keep from dying until I found someone else to talk to, to squeeze out the last bit of food before I starved to death.
These days I know I have connections with others who see me --- maybe not many, but a core group who accept and like me because, not in spite of who I am. I will always have a hard time handling that stomach-dropping situation when you realize you like them more than they like you, but that's part of life. It's just lovely to know that there's a conversation just around the corner, and I can have a snack whenever I want.
I went to summer camp after ninth grade, one of the few things my parents paid for without question, probably just to get rid of me for ten days. It was transformative; I made friends immediately, and after camp, I wrote long letters to at least fifteen girls. Only four or five wrote back, and only one continued writing through the rest of the school year.
At my high school, I had a small group of core friends, but I never fit in to the larger class, and even those friends didn't seek me out very often; I was someone they hung out with if no one else was around. I would ask them to go places, or if they needed a ride. I was always more enthusiastic than anyone else about doing something together.
Every year, there would be someone new at school, and I would make friends and get to know them. For the first month or so, we'd be inseparable - Ali, Chris, Cynthia, the list goes on. Then they'd find their place in the school and I'd see them occasionally, but really the friendship was over. They'd found their real friends and didn't need me anymore.
In 10th grade, I was a page for our state's legislature, and for a week, I was dropped into a cross-section of teenagers from across the state. After the week was over, I wrote letters to about ten of them. Most of them didn't write back. One boy did, and I built an entire imaginary relationship with him until I received a letter where he boasted about vandalizing mailboxes and I realized he wasn't the person I'd imagined.
When I started college, I loved the intellectual, late night conversations that usually started over coffee and sometimes cigarettes, discussing philosophy, literature, politics, whatever, and led to talking about personal ideas and histories. Full disclosure: These were (usually) guys who I (usually) ended up sleeping with. Looking back, that was probably their objective, but I was a pretty easy target in those days.
In my twenties, in the infancy of the internet, I placed a personals ad on yahoo online and emailed with a number of guys on and off for about a year. Chad held my attention; he was smart, funny, and thoughtful. He was careful about his feelings, having lost his fiance to an illness two years before. I respected that, but a few months later I had a road trip planned to his city, and I wanted to meet him. He demurred, and I couldn't understand why; it didn't make any sense to me. We never emailed again.
I could tell more stories, but I think you've probably got it by now. I can't let go. For years I thought it was my failing --- why was I so different from other people? Why did I hold on so tight to people who really didn't value me? Why didn't I know that normal people didn't care about me as much as I cared about them? Why was I so broken?
It took a long time for me to put the pieces together. I was asked a question by my counselor: "Wasn't there anyone in your life when you were young who reflected you back to you, who really saw who you were?" I had to stop and think about that, think about my past and all the years growing up in my parents' house, all the years of bullying at school, all the teachers and classmates and babysitters and hairdressers and ----
You can see I'm digging pretty deep here. And coming up empty.
My mom saw only competition. A reflection of her faults. Someone to blame. Someone to hate and abuse.
My dad saw someone to keep in line. A source of labor to be cultivated. A threat to my mom.
Both of them were highly motivated to keep me from seeing my strength, my power, my abilities for what they were. If I knew who I was and what I could do, I could get away, and they wouldn't be able to blame me for their problems anymore. They would have no outlet for their bad feelings, their abuse.
Now it's clear to me, clear as day. My whole life, I was literally starving for connection. I was dying for someone to see me. Of course I wrote letters to anyone I met who showed me any kindness! Of course I created whole relationships out of thin air just to pretend that I was connecting with someone, anyone at all. I was dying inside, shriveling up, shouting and pounding on the walls from inside a hollowed out tree, staring from behind my own eyes as person after person looked at me and saw nothing but what they could get from me, what they could use me for, what they wanted to see.
I know now that I wasn't broken; I couldn't have been more wrong in how I posed the question. Why did I hold on so tight? I was holding on to keep myself alive, to keep from dying until I found someone else to talk to, to squeeze out the last bit of food before I starved to death.
These days I know I have connections with others who see me --- maybe not many, but a core group who accept and like me because, not in spite of who I am. I will always have a hard time handling that stomach-dropping situation when you realize you like them more than they like you, but that's part of life. It's just lovely to know that there's a conversation just around the corner, and I can have a snack whenever I want.
Monday, February 5, 2018
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
Around 2000, I decided things weren't working for me. There were a lot of pieces to this, including an underpaid, frustrating job leading nowhere, a town with few eligible men, and, at the core, an optimism that somewhere, someone would value me more than where I was. I needed a change, I kept telling myself. Somewhere else would be better. I wanted to try new things. I wanted things to be different. I wanted ME to be different.
The picture in my head was amazing. I would put all of my stuff into storage, and keep a home base at my parent's house. Without rent stealing all of my money, I would make my savings last a really long time, and I would visit all of my relatives and friends up and down the West Coast, going where I wanted when I wanted. I was sure I could pick up work here and there to make ends meet, and get a temp job if I needed to. I didn't need a normal life. I could check out and do what I wanted instead of being like everybody else.
When I think about the picture I had in my mind, it feels like the road trips I used to take during the summers in college. My friends or boyfriends would drive with me across the state to visit or go to a far away concert in the boonies or hit every thrift shop in a hundred-mile radius. We'd pool our coin jars and make snacks for the road and drive all night playing mix tapes all the way. It was warm and summer and we were free to do what we wanted.
To be honest, I also wanted another chance to have actual parents. I thought that maybe now that I was a grown-up, I wouldn't disappoint them as much as I did when I was a little kid. I knew more, I was smarter, I could help them more. Maybe they wouldn't hate me, and I could get to know them and they would like me. I thought that if they just heard me, if we could talk more and I could explain better, they would see who I was and they would finally understand me.
You can imagine what's coming next, like a frickin' freight train. Work and friends gave me a great going away party; I put my non-essential stuff in storage. I moved into a room in my parent's house, and immediately launched on a road trip to visit my uncles a few hundred miles away. And it began: The visit was amazing, but my car decided to have an intermittent overheating defect during the trip. After I got back, there were no more long trips in case it happened again, which eliminated most of my plans. I wanted to bond with my parents, but they were gone most of the time doing their own things, leaving me alone in a house haunted by childhood trauma and hiding places. I'd watch tv, get on the internet, read, then hang out when they got home. I found myself zoning out a lot, killing time. I started collecting mysteries by a couple of new-to-me authors from thrift stores and soon had about fifty books piled around my single bed from childhood, where I stayed most of the day. I thought about trying to find a job, but the air in that house froze me up, and I couldn't even remember my plans, let alone figure out what grown-up me would have done.
The word spiral barely covers it. It only took two months to go from a fully functioning adult to completely depressed immovable pile of sludge. I finally broke down sobbing when I got my renewal notice for my car tabs and didn't have the $70 to pay for them. I'd been watching my checking account slowly disintegrate piece by piece, unable to figure out how to "just get a job" as I'd imagined before I'd landed in my hometown. As usual, my mom was her understanding self. "Well, I just don't know what you want!" <deep sigh> My despair was making her uncomfortable. Thanks, Mom. But I knew how to translate into her language. "Mom, I just need enough to cover the tabs. I'm going to look for a job back in Bellingham." "Well, I can give you enough for the tabs and some gas. I think it's a good idea for you to get a job. I just don't know why you had to quit the old one!" Yep. Why doncha pour just a little more salt on that one, Mom. I held my tongue, took the money, and got out.
I moved into a spare room in a friend's apartment and stayed with them for a couple of months until I unfroze a little. I eventually got another job, apartment, and my life back together. I felt like I'd been through a fire of some sort, burned it down to rebuild; I was furious when I realized some people hadn't even realized I'd been gone; hadn't missed me around town. It still feels like it was a hell of a lot longer than two months.
I'm sure my parents still don't understand what I was doing there. I wanted to connect with them in a way that I never had been able to before, that I'll never be able to. I wanted to know them as human beings, as people. I wanted them to see me as something other than the Role Of Daughter Will Be Played By....
I wanted to be seen.
When I finally realized they would never be the ones to see me, I was able to move on with my life and stop looking back.
The picture in my head was amazing. I would put all of my stuff into storage, and keep a home base at my parent's house. Without rent stealing all of my money, I would make my savings last a really long time, and I would visit all of my relatives and friends up and down the West Coast, going where I wanted when I wanted. I was sure I could pick up work here and there to make ends meet, and get a temp job if I needed to. I didn't need a normal life. I could check out and do what I wanted instead of being like everybody else.
When I think about the picture I had in my mind, it feels like the road trips I used to take during the summers in college. My friends or boyfriends would drive with me across the state to visit or go to a far away concert in the boonies or hit every thrift shop in a hundred-mile radius. We'd pool our coin jars and make snacks for the road and drive all night playing mix tapes all the way. It was warm and summer and we were free to do what we wanted.
To be honest, I also wanted another chance to have actual parents. I thought that maybe now that I was a grown-up, I wouldn't disappoint them as much as I did when I was a little kid. I knew more, I was smarter, I could help them more. Maybe they wouldn't hate me, and I could get to know them and they would like me. I thought that if they just heard me, if we could talk more and I could explain better, they would see who I was and they would finally understand me.
You can imagine what's coming next, like a frickin' freight train. Work and friends gave me a great going away party; I put my non-essential stuff in storage. I moved into a room in my parent's house, and immediately launched on a road trip to visit my uncles a few hundred miles away. And it began: The visit was amazing, but my car decided to have an intermittent overheating defect during the trip. After I got back, there were no more long trips in case it happened again, which eliminated most of my plans. I wanted to bond with my parents, but they were gone most of the time doing their own things, leaving me alone in a house haunted by childhood trauma and hiding places. I'd watch tv, get on the internet, read, then hang out when they got home. I found myself zoning out a lot, killing time. I started collecting mysteries by a couple of new-to-me authors from thrift stores and soon had about fifty books piled around my single bed from childhood, where I stayed most of the day. I thought about trying to find a job, but the air in that house froze me up, and I couldn't even remember my plans, let alone figure out what grown-up me would have done.
The word spiral barely covers it. It only took two months to go from a fully functioning adult to completely depressed immovable pile of sludge. I finally broke down sobbing when I got my renewal notice for my car tabs and didn't have the $70 to pay for them. I'd been watching my checking account slowly disintegrate piece by piece, unable to figure out how to "just get a job" as I'd imagined before I'd landed in my hometown. As usual, my mom was her understanding self. "Well, I just don't know what you want!" <deep sigh> My despair was making her uncomfortable. Thanks, Mom. But I knew how to translate into her language. "Mom, I just need enough to cover the tabs. I'm going to look for a job back in Bellingham." "Well, I can give you enough for the tabs and some gas. I think it's a good idea for you to get a job. I just don't know why you had to quit the old one!" Yep. Why doncha pour just a little more salt on that one, Mom. I held my tongue, took the money, and got out.
I moved into a spare room in a friend's apartment and stayed with them for a couple of months until I unfroze a little. I eventually got another job, apartment, and my life back together. I felt like I'd been through a fire of some sort, burned it down to rebuild; I was furious when I realized some people hadn't even realized I'd been gone; hadn't missed me around town. It still feels like it was a hell of a lot longer than two months.
I'm sure my parents still don't understand what I was doing there. I wanted to connect with them in a way that I never had been able to before, that I'll never be able to. I wanted to know them as human beings, as people. I wanted them to see me as something other than the Role Of Daughter Will Be Played By....
I wanted to be seen.
When I finally realized they would never be the ones to see me, I was able to move on with my life and stop looking back.
Friday, January 26, 2018
Growing Up in a Crooked House
Here you are, a kid growing up in a family. From a very young age, you're told things, and those things are the only things that are true. They have to be true, because your parents tell you they're true, and your parents are way bigger than you are, and they're smart, and funny, and beautiful. Your parents are gods. So they must be right about the world, and about your siblings, and about you. They know everything, and they have told you everything you need to know. You believe them, even if sometimes your inner voice disagrees. That voice must be wrong. Your parents are right.
As you get older, you notice more often that some things are out of whack. Mom says something nice to another grown-up, but you know that she doesn't feel that way. You can feel what she's feeling, and it isn't even close to the nice thing she said. If you're brave, you ask her about it. She denies feeling anything but niceness to that person, and says you must be imagining things. She gets that closed-face look, and you know better than to ask more questions. You open your book and start reading.
When you're ten years old, you find your voice. It was there all along, but you've read enough now to understand that you're the downtrodden person in this family. You're the oldest, and you're adopted and someday your real family will show up and take you away from these people and love you. That's all you really want. And your anger comes out of your heart, and you ask your mom questions, lots of them. She gets caught in a logic trap you've set, and she can't get out. She slaps you across the face to get you to stop. Two decades later, she'll tell that story at a funeral to a large group of family members, ending with, "I don't know what made you do that. If you had stopped yelling at me, I wouldn't have had to slap you!" Until that moment, you had no memory of that event.
As a teenager, you are trapped, and you are gnawing your own limb off at all times. You want to escape so badly. The migraines have been bad since seventh grade. Your family constantly blames anything wrong in the world, in the family, in the house, on you. You're too sensitive. You're too obnoxious. You are too ugly. You don't know how to do anything. You're ridiculous, and you don't take things seriously enough. You you you you you.
There's no way to succeed in this household. You can only survive. I used to look at all of my classmates in college and wonder what it would be like to be valued for 18 years before you had to go out into the world and try to achieve things. Instead, I had to fight just to feel like I deserved oxygen, food, love, housing. I fought and fought and fought, and gave up a lot. I spent a lot of my early years in a dissociative fugue, trying to escape my actual feelings. I couldn't face the world, and I couldn't face my own reality.
Someone asked me once, "Didn't you have a mirror in your life? Someone who would reflect back to you exactly how gifted and smart and beautiful you were? Someone who really saw you?" I couldn't think of anyone. My teachers knew my mom, and though I was a gold star student, I craved so much attention that I was probably off-putting in that desperate way. When I started going to public middle school, my bus driver was really sweet to me. In high school, I idolized my Spanish teacher, who ended up thoroughly disappointing me in a myriad of ways. For a time, though, I had someone who I thought valued me for who I was. That got me through a lot of years, despite how it ended.
I see my past clearly these days. I no longer have any contact with my parents. After decades of continuing to blame me for, well, everything, despite my success, despite my siblings' dependence and underachievement, despite any clues to the contrary, I finally gave up. I said, I am done. You have no idea who I am. I was shaking when I mailed the letter, but I wrote it, mailed it, and cried for a while. The letter was specifically for my mom, and my dad contacted me a few weeks later. Hopeful, I decided to have lunch with him. He made it clear during lunch that I was required to fall back into line and take care of my mother, who was crying every night.
I'm familiar with that crying she was doing. It says, "Comfort me! Make me feel better! Fix things for me! You have made me feel bad, so now it's your job to make me feel better! Come, prostrate yourself before me, and everything will go back to the way it was before, as long as you apologize for making me feel bad, and promise to never do it again, ever. Because my feelings are your responsibility, not mine. You are behaving badly, not me. I am long-suffering and so sad and that is your fault."
Because it's all about her. My dad asked me zero questions that day. He didn't ask me how I was doing, how my husband was, or even (logically) why I wrote the letter. He didn't want to know. He just knew that I had made his life harder by cutting contact with my mom, and he wanted it fixed, now. I walked away from that meal knowing that I had never had a mother or a father, just two people who wanted their every whim fulfilled by people they had abused into believing they could never be treated better.
These days, I work on myself, piece by piece. I know who I am. I know who I want to be. I also know exactly what it's like to grow up in a household where reality doesn't exist. On my last visit to my parents' house, I was alone for an hour or so. I walked through the rooms, just feeling all the pain and anguish and anger that lives there. It wouldn't be so bad if the family portraits of smiling faces weren't staring back at me from their spots on the walls. I remember what it was like being 10, 12, 15 years old there. I remember having to smile and pretend it wasn't like that.
The floors are crooked in that house. The foundation is partly wood, and it's been sinking since forever. For thirty years, that was my childhood home, my password when they asked What Street Did You Grow Up On? I remember every inch of the place, hiding places, nooks and crannies, secrets in every room. I will never go back.
As you get older, you notice more often that some things are out of whack. Mom says something nice to another grown-up, but you know that she doesn't feel that way. You can feel what she's feeling, and it isn't even close to the nice thing she said. If you're brave, you ask her about it. She denies feeling anything but niceness to that person, and says you must be imagining things. She gets that closed-face look, and you know better than to ask more questions. You open your book and start reading.
When you're ten years old, you find your voice. It was there all along, but you've read enough now to understand that you're the downtrodden person in this family. You're the oldest, and you're adopted and someday your real family will show up and take you away from these people and love you. That's all you really want. And your anger comes out of your heart, and you ask your mom questions, lots of them. She gets caught in a logic trap you've set, and she can't get out. She slaps you across the face to get you to stop. Two decades later, she'll tell that story at a funeral to a large group of family members, ending with, "I don't know what made you do that. If you had stopped yelling at me, I wouldn't have had to slap you!" Until that moment, you had no memory of that event.
As a teenager, you are trapped, and you are gnawing your own limb off at all times. You want to escape so badly. The migraines have been bad since seventh grade. Your family constantly blames anything wrong in the world, in the family, in the house, on you. You're too sensitive. You're too obnoxious. You are too ugly. You don't know how to do anything. You're ridiculous, and you don't take things seriously enough. You you you you you.
There's no way to succeed in this household. You can only survive. I used to look at all of my classmates in college and wonder what it would be like to be valued for 18 years before you had to go out into the world and try to achieve things. Instead, I had to fight just to feel like I deserved oxygen, food, love, housing. I fought and fought and fought, and gave up a lot. I spent a lot of my early years in a dissociative fugue, trying to escape my actual feelings. I couldn't face the world, and I couldn't face my own reality.
Someone asked me once, "Didn't you have a mirror in your life? Someone who would reflect back to you exactly how gifted and smart and beautiful you were? Someone who really saw you?" I couldn't think of anyone. My teachers knew my mom, and though I was a gold star student, I craved so much attention that I was probably off-putting in that desperate way. When I started going to public middle school, my bus driver was really sweet to me. In high school, I idolized my Spanish teacher, who ended up thoroughly disappointing me in a myriad of ways. For a time, though, I had someone who I thought valued me for who I was. That got me through a lot of years, despite how it ended.
I see my past clearly these days. I no longer have any contact with my parents. After decades of continuing to blame me for, well, everything, despite my success, despite my siblings' dependence and underachievement, despite any clues to the contrary, I finally gave up. I said, I am done. You have no idea who I am. I was shaking when I mailed the letter, but I wrote it, mailed it, and cried for a while. The letter was specifically for my mom, and my dad contacted me a few weeks later. Hopeful, I decided to have lunch with him. He made it clear during lunch that I was required to fall back into line and take care of my mother, who was crying every night.
I'm familiar with that crying she was doing. It says, "Comfort me! Make me feel better! Fix things for me! You have made me feel bad, so now it's your job to make me feel better! Come, prostrate yourself before me, and everything will go back to the way it was before, as long as you apologize for making me feel bad, and promise to never do it again, ever. Because my feelings are your responsibility, not mine. You are behaving badly, not me. I am long-suffering and so sad and that is your fault."
Because it's all about her. My dad asked me zero questions that day. He didn't ask me how I was doing, how my husband was, or even (logically) why I wrote the letter. He didn't want to know. He just knew that I had made his life harder by cutting contact with my mom, and he wanted it fixed, now. I walked away from that meal knowing that I had never had a mother or a father, just two people who wanted their every whim fulfilled by people they had abused into believing they could never be treated better.
These days, I work on myself, piece by piece. I know who I am. I know who I want to be. I also know exactly what it's like to grow up in a household where reality doesn't exist. On my last visit to my parents' house, I was alone for an hour or so. I walked through the rooms, just feeling all the pain and anguish and anger that lives there. It wouldn't be so bad if the family portraits of smiling faces weren't staring back at me from their spots on the walls. I remember what it was like being 10, 12, 15 years old there. I remember having to smile and pretend it wasn't like that.
The floors are crooked in that house. The foundation is partly wood, and it's been sinking since forever. For thirty years, that was my childhood home, my password when they asked What Street Did You Grow Up On? I remember every inch of the place, hiding places, nooks and crannies, secrets in every room. I will never go back.
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