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.  

[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.

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.

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.