“Scared animals return home, regardless of whether home is safe or frightening.”
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Why couldn’t I leave?
“…we are hardwired to seek out and trust the familiar, even when the familiar isn’t safe or good for us….we are hardwired for hope”
Daria Burke, Of My Own Making 71
“Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom.”
Herman 110
I know I did. I thought that somehow, once I grew up, the abuse would just magically end…somehow it would all be over with. Then, like a “responsibility fulfilled,” some “debt paid,” I could then be free to go on and live out my dreams. And of course, there would be no “aftereffects.” I would just magically be fine.
“But the personality formed in an environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the tasks of early adulthood — establishing independence and intimacy — burdened by major impairments in self-care, cognition and memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships. She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.”
Herman, 110
That totally sums it up. I was so damaged by the abuse that I “couldn’t” make that break. Because I wasn’t a “whole” person, I was totally unable to envision even having the right to my own life.
It was like all the studies said — I had not been allowed my own identity, and I couldn’t develop one later because I’d missed all the developmental stages. I couldn’t break from my family of origin; I was afraid to go out into the world, and I feared any deep relationships.
Add to it that it was constantly communicated that for me to want something for myself was wrong. That my claiming my own life would hurt my parents’ feelings.
Then there was inertia and learned helplessness. The longer that something goes on, the harder it is to change it. Because you’ve already invested so much time in the status quo, you feel like a fool. Because you feel ashamed of all you had to do to survive. Because you feel so weighed down and exhausted by it all that even getting up and showering, going to work, anything, takes all you’ve got, and there’s nothing left for dreaming, moving forward, creating a new life. Because…what’s the point – you’re dirty and worthless anyway.
In a previous post, I said that what you think is what you feel is what you do. In this post I would expand that motto:
What you think is what you feel is what you do….or don’t do. And the longer it goes on, the longer it goes on…
Even so, it would see-saw. I would periodically expend tremendous effort and make a small move forward – in college, in a new job, in dating. In those moments, teachers and co-workers would perceive me as a real go-getter.
But I couldn’t sustain it. Part of it was that eventually, I would run out of steam and then disappoint their initial view of me. And I couldn’t explain to them WHY I was failing in that moment. I had no friends close enough that I could turn to for that kind of support or understanding. So it was the same cycle: try, get exhausted, then have to stop and slip back into the old despair.
The other part was fear of the unknown. I really didn’t know how to embrace the new challenges your average young adult wants and seeks. Whether in career or relationships, I would reach a place of “stability” and want to stay put in that secure spot. But life is always bringing the next change or challenge. And I had used up everything just to get to the spot I was in. Couldn’t life just leave me alone there?
It was like that time when I was a kid in the “Pollywog” swim class at the YMCA. To pass my test and move forward, all I had left to do was let go of the side of the pool and kick across the pool with a foam board. Everybody else had already done it and passed their test. But I was safe where I was. The pool looked so large. WHY would I trust that the foam board would keep me safe? WHY couldn’t they just leave me alone on the side of the pool?! And so I failed my test. And was kicked out of class.
So that brought me back to my house. Whatever went on in our house was the devil I knew, and occasionally could navigate. It was its own kind of stability versus the dangers of “out there.” I hadn’t been given the tools I needed to sustain creating my life. I only knew the rules I had acquired to survive my house:
“…in…profoundly disrupted relationships, the child faces a formidable task. She must find a way to form primary attachments to caretakers who are either dangerous or, from her perspective, negligent. She must find a way to develop a sense of basic trust and safety with caretakers who are untrustworthy and unsafe. She must develop a sense of self in relation to others who are helpless, uncaring, or cruel. She must develop a capacity for bodily self-regulation in an environment in which her body is at the disposal of others’ needs, as well as a capacity for self-soothing in an environment without solace…she must develop a capacity for intimacy out of an environment where all intimate relationships are corrupt, and an identity out of an environment which defines her as a whore and a slave….the…existential task is equally formidable. Though she perceives herself as abandoned to a power without mercy, she must find a way to preserve hope and meaning. The alternative is utter despair, something no child can bear. To preserve faith in her parents, she must reject the …obvious conclusion that something is terribly wrong with them. She will go to any lengths to construct an explanation for her fate that absolves her parents of all blame….Unable to escape or alter the unbearable reality in fact, the child alters it in her mind.”
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 101
Yet despite all of this, somehow I still kept a part of “ME” alive inside. And each time I would resist, fight back, capitulate, then try again, I did get a little bit further. It’s just that it took so very long for me to break through all his brainwashing and programming from a lifetime. I just kept thinking that if I could just find the right words and the right combination of behaviors, maybe, just maybe, I could change things at home and it would all just be “normal.”
It was only when things got so bad, and I feared that either my father would kill me or I might kill him, that I knew I HAD to get out, even as I was totally unprepared for that. I would have to “abandon my mother,” which I hated. But if I stayed, I would be destroyed. So to save myself, I “jumped off the dock into the water over my head,” hoping somehow, I’d survive.
And even then, there was still a part of me that kept hoping that eventually, it could all be “normal.” That it was possible to “move beyond it all” and still maintain some kind of connection with my parents. I didn’t want to live with no family. But slowly, I would come to realize that everything I thought was true and good was really a mirage. And then, I beat myself up for “being so stupid” as to think that. So for a lifetime, I despised that broken young adult that I was, for what I saw as her abysmal failure.
Yet writing the previous posts on the damage from trauma, the reactions, behaviors, flashbacks, and then this post describing why I couldn’t leave, my new question now is:
How did I survive that house with ANYTHING OF ME still intact?
I’ll come back to that question in a future post.
Up next
It took me so long to get free… I know now that I did the best I could, better than I gave myself credit for, for so long. And I succeeded in getting out of that house even though I shouldn’t have.
But for sure, growing up there and staying so long cost me. It cost me big. And I am still paying those costs.
That post will come up shortly. But first, one other “trauma insight” about the relationship between rage and anxiety…
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.
Soul Mosaic 
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