The vein of my life force?
When I first started working with this trauma therapist almost twenty years ago, all I could feel was anxiety and terror. I wasn’t even aware of the rage, just terror. Beyond that, my emotions, as well as any emotional power, were a flat line. I was not a fully open, fully expressive human being
It took ten years of regular work for me to even reach the place where anger might be a possible emotion in me. It took a literal lifetime for me to mine deep enough into my psyche to finally hit that vein of rage.
No question, once opened, there was no turning back. But then…maybe that was the point? Could it be that maybe my very life force…the one I’d been denied since infancy, was also there? The life force that is the “light side” of rage, and that could finally allow me to accept and embrace all of me, all of my life and being, fully…with love?
I only knew that once I started through that swamp of emotions, I had to keep going…because the rage had something to teach me.
THIS TIME, I’ll win…
I talked about proxy battles — re-enacting past moments of abuse or conflict by “fighting back” in some current-day situation — my way to win some kind of perceived battle in the present day. They could be some small angry interaction with someone in the grocery store, or whatever. But if I perceived insult or disrespect, especially by a man, I would “stand up for me!”
Even as I know I don’t want to get hooked by whatever it is, and on some level I know it’s ridiculous, there are times I just feel compelled to do it anyway. And even more weirdly, I experience a tremendous sense of relief if I “win.” And it’s not just relief that I “won”, but…that I FOUGHT BACK.
Then I came across these passages in the book Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman, MD:
“Adults as well as children often feel impelled to re-create the moment of terror, either in literal or in disguised form….There is something uncanny about reenactments. Even when they are consciously chosen, they have a feeling of involuntariness…a driven, tenacious quality…Most theorists…speculate that the repetitive reliving of the traumatic experience must represent a spontaneous, unsuccessful attempt at healing….the person’s need to ‘liquidate’ traumatic experience, which, when accomplished, produces a feeling of ‘triumph.”
Boy did I get that…and more than ever, I wanted to be free of this. In that moment I understood that to finally stop that cycle I absolutely need to keep working the therapy, EMDR, and emotional release.
In reading further, I spotted the other half of what I feel – shame and unresolved grief at being unable to fight back against the abuser:
“…Janet (researcher)…recognized that helplessness constitutes the essential insult of trauma, and that restitution requires the restoration of a sense of efficacy and power. The traumatized person, he believed, ‘remains confronted by a difficult situation, one in which he has not been able to play a satisfactory part, one to which his adaptation has been imperfect, so that he continues to make efforts at adaptation.’”
My battles were about reclaiming my power, finally feeling adequate, and stopping the shame. Those were laudable goals, but for sure I was going about it all wrong.
Yes, I would pass that car, SHOW that person who cut me off how I was the better driver, whatever. Then, despite how useless and dangerous those behaviors were, I would feel tremendous relief, as if that “win” made “something” better. But it was all an illusion.
Thank God for therapy and those EMDR sessions. At the same time that I started to realize the uselessness of these behaviors, I also uncovered a few realizations about what might REALLY be operating in me. In one of those EMDR or therapy sessions, a few “belief statements” popped up, and boy did they explain a lot. Things like:
- To not fight “whoever” now made me a failure…again…just like how I saw myself in the past when I didn’t fight back against my father
- To not WIN now, ALSO made me a failure again like the past. To fail held that “shameful stink of powerlessness”
- And to not even try to fight or win was confirmation that I was worthless, ineffective, and… a failure
So if I hope to be free of this set of beliefs, defuse and transform my reactions, I need to keep digging and asking myself questions. My healing will be in the answers.
WHY rage? He re-programmed and controlled me!
If ever an author truly nailed the immense power an abuse victim is up against, it is Jen Cross, in her book Writing Ourselves Whole: Using the Power of Your Own Creativity to Recover and Heal from Sexual Trauma. She masterfully captures the impossible situation she was in with her stepfather who abused her:
“The man who abused me….did everything he could to take me apart psychically and reassemble me according to his desires and whims — and there was no one in my life who could contradict all he was teaching me. No one who could undermine his lessons.”
As Cross so aptly put it: “…a grown man fed identity to me, shoved it down my throat.”
She had a definition for trauma that brought up a heart-wrenching set of emotions for me:
“Trauma is a site of shock in the body and/or psyche. It’s a rupture, a…disassembly. Trauma marks the moment when what WAS ended, and something new emerged.”
When I read that, what tore my heart open was my question: “What happens when what ‘was’ was snuffed out right at the start…and you didn’t even get the chance to know what it was?”
For me, part of the intense rage was that I NEVER GOT TO KNOW my “original me.” He took it away right from infancy. For me, there never even WAS a “before” time.
He began in those “pre-memory,” deeply impressionable early years, then continued to take away my childhood. He derailed and re-routed my emotional development. Commandeered my thinking process…for YEARS. He was playing his own game with his own rules, and I was simply his chess piece.
He continued the brainwashing all through my teen and young adult years, which left me with no time or ability to unravel his twisted logic. And despite my gut-level discomfort, I had no ability to doubt him when he kept insisting this was normal
“A traumatic experience is generally thought of as something out of the norm — except, of course, for those living with incest or domestic violence, living in war zones, or experiencing political persecution or race-hatred: this IS our normal.”
The dilemma I was in during those years, the force I was up against, was far beyond my ability to counter. Cross mirrored my reality when she wrote of her own abuse:
“My stepfather had tried to occupy every fragment, every nook and cranny, every inch of my psyche — he believed, and trained me to believe, that he had a right to every thought in my head, every emotion, every instinct…What he wanted was for words to mean only what he wanted them to mean…I was required to say Yes…every time he wanted access to my body, even when what lived inside my mouth and skin, and could not be spoken, was NO….Having to say one thing while meaning another, over and over again, drives us more than a little crazy…”
So for years, while I hated what happened, I had no means to realize it was “abuse.” The first hint was on a trip to Nova Scotia with my parents when I was in my twenties. The TV news mentioned that a woman accused her father of sexual abuse and was pressing charges. My father turned to me and demanded to know if I would do that to him because “I was abused.”
In that moment, he actually said it. Just matter-of-factly admitted that he KNEW he had abused me. There was no misconception about it. But even then, I was still not truly processing that reality. It would take a few more years. I assumed he was exaggerating and that while he did bad things, our family life was “normal.”
The sad truth was that at that moment in time, my brain was like “mental Swiss cheese. He had pounded his beliefs into me so often, and drilled them into my brain like a parasitic worm or computer virus. He had almost totally replaced what I should have been with error messages that I absorbed and believed.
I say “almost” because yes, my gut kept telling me this felt wrong. But as to truly understanding what had happened, that was not yet possible. You can only have “so many holes drilled into your brain” before its ability to question and think clearly is demolished. At least temporarily.
Why rage? Violation!
Aside from all the programming and destroying my belief in myself, there were all the acts perpetrated on me. Assault after assault after assault. Violation upon violation. Year after year. And the twisting of my mind and sucking the very life out of me so I would do what he wanted. As my therapist puts it so well, the harm done is affected by the frequency of the abuse, the intensity of the abuse, and the duration of the abuse. I had them all.
There are no words that can ever clearly convey what thousands of “body violations” feel like…or what they do to your mind, your sense of personal wholeness, or your sense of self-worth.
Instead, there is just shame. Self-loathing. And the feeling you are a freak of nature, and “used goods” that no one could ever love….
Why rage? I was robbed!
So what do all of those attacks do to a 6- or 8- or 10-year-old child’s ability to learn in school? To learn how to navigate the world, develop emotionally, or build the skills needed to pursue their dreams?
I am a smart person. Not brilliant. But smart enough, and I always worked hard. And even despite a few of my elementary school nuns observing my difficulties in learning, I got good grades.
I can look back and know that I had it in me to be a doctor. And so did others. One evening on a trip to a local pharmacy, I crossed paths with the pharmacist I used to work for in high school. When he found out I was working in the hospital lab, he admonished me for stopping my education at that point. “You could have been a doctor!” he declared loudly. “You’re smart enough!”
In that moment, I was crushed. He wasn’t being mean. He meant it with total respect. He could NOT understand why I didn’t go further. In his mind, he was all for everyone going as far as they could in life, and he felt I was capable of so much more. And he was right.
But I was crushed because I also knew it was emotionally and mentally impossible for me then. I was just starting to work on my therapy. There was no way I could take on the challenge of med school. I could barely deal with life at that point. And there was no way I could tell him that. So I just quietly left.
What hurt so much that night was that he spoke the truth, which was that the future had been taken from me. If I’d had a chance to grow and mature in a healthy household, I could have possibly done med school. But I was not allowed to become the sort of person who could handle the complexities of that career path.
It is only now at my present age that I could emotionally be ready for it. But…it’s too late. To use one of those science charts I know so well, it is only now, late in life, that my level of shame (red line) is dropping, and my social and emotional health (blue line) is increasing. I was in my 60s before I really got the hang of good friendships (dots inside the sideways hourglass that increased over time).
But to be that “contender,” that person who could have been anything in life, even a doctor — It is too late. I am in my seventies. Many of the possibilities that could have been my future were crushed. I’ve done the best I could in life, and I have done well. But make no mistake about it – I was robbed.
To quote Jen Cross one last time because her words are perfection:
“Something in me, in us, screams…’This is not all I am. I had something more in mind to do.’”
Why rage? Even the emotions were gone…
All of that leaves a haunted shell of a person. I was so hollow, emotionally, that I couldn’t even cry. For years I didn’t cry. You have to feel something to cry…and I couldn’t feel…
Why rage? Complicity, thy name is parents…
And then, there was Mom. The most complex figure of my life. And back then, I had no idea of the Faustian bargain she must have made with herself. To turn the other way. To never turn to face me when I needed her. To question my love for her, but not hers for me…Complicity, thy name is parents.
From my journal, June, 2019:
What were her children to her? When she stopped him from hitting us, who was she REALLY protecting? Was it her own security because if he really got out of hand and harmed us, he could end up in jail and then where would she be?
She was the one who said to a friend over coffee, about someone who’d lost a child, “Well, you can always have another child. But you can’t replace your husband.”
It took me until late adulthood to realize she no doubt knew all along what he was doing to me. And that she must have made a bargain with herself for survival reasons, to “not turn around.”
For years I hated her. But in later years I also remembered that when he bludgeoned her in the bathroom or down in the cellar, there was no one there to pull him off of her. And when he wasn’t physically bludgeoning her, he was emotionally hitting her, telling his daughters in front of her, time and again: “Don’t grow up to be a stupid woman,” by which he meant, Don’t grow up to be your mother.
A few years ago I visited one of Mom’s friends and told her all of this. When I posed the question of, “Did Mom know?” she responded without a moment’s hesitation:
“She knew. It couldn’t go on that long and her not know….I also know that she was terrified of him.”
So she was complicit. She was also a victim of domestic violence…a battered wife. And I heard those hands hitting her when I listened to their fights as a kid.
Again from my journal:
“Can I hold in my heart both the pain/anger at that younger Mom who took from me and whose choices cost me; who didn’t care about me?” and now, the old woman, frail, sick, and afraid?”
I knew she was afraid of dying, afraid of going to hell, and in her old age, went to Confession every Saturday. WHAT could an old woman possibly have to confess every single Saturday at 90?
In 2017 I wrote to her, tried to open the wall between us, repair the huge breach he had put there. But she wouldn’t speak. Wouldn’t respond.
I kept trying to reach out, but she stonewalled me. By 2019, sick of her seeming lack of love, I remember driving home from one visit with her saying to my husband that I was so tired of trying to love her when she seemed not to love back.
In the car I just cried and said of her:
“Just DIE already will you! Spare the rest of us any more pain! For once in your life, make a g-ddamned decision and instead of waiting for fate to take you, CHOOSE YOUR PATH for once, do something for someone else besides yourself and just DIE!”
Just furious
As an aside, I will write more later about what I feel now, which is a testament to how hearts can open, and yes, hold both the pain and the love as you watch someone transform before their end.
But at this point in time, I was just furious. My parents’ mutual abuse – his actual abuse, her complicity and abandonment- had cost me time, life experiences, my future.
I was given pain – theirs and mine. I was the “food” they fed off of for a lifetime while I lost mine.
So at this point I finally realized “WHAT ABOUT ME?!”
Finally I realized –
I HAVE A RIGHT TO BE FURIOUS!
I DESERVED BETTER.
I DESERVED LOVE…NOT THIS!
And so, yes….RAGE.
But the human heart is strange…and resilient…and stretches. Even with all of those things, even as my anger was righteous and long overdue, a small part of my heart kept asking: “Is this as good as rage will ever get? Fury? Will there ever be something more beyond it? Something better? And if so, how do I get there?”
There are answers to those questions. But before I would be able to find them, I had, to quote Robert Frost, MILES to go yet. The bottom line is that when you finally get in touch with rage, it has to run its course organically. There is no short-circuiting the path. It had things to teach me yet, costs I had yet to realize even existed. And there are no shortcuts through the lessons.
Next
Those nightmares keep progressing….
Note:
I am seeking financial support to complete my memoir, work with an editor, and make a visit to my home state for fact-checking. Your help would mean the world to me as I take this step toward healing and giving voice to my journey.
Please like, comment, and share this post to help spread the word. The link for my fundraiser is on GoFundMe. Thank you for your support.
Tags: family, life, love, mental-health, writing
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