I have some things to say about domestic abuse. And I’ll start with these quotes:
“I think about how easy it is for humans to make judgments when we’re standing on the outside of a situation. It’s easy when we’re on the outside to believe that we would walk away without second thought if a person mistreated us. It’s easy to say we couldn’t continue to love someone who mistreats us when we aren’t the ones feeling the love of that person. Colleen Hoover, It Ends with Us
“Most people have no clue hidden abuse is taking place right under their noses. It is being perpetrated by individuals who would never be suspected of being abusers. The concealed nature of this harm is what leaves its targets devastated….Normal people have a hard time comprehending that abusers go to such lengths, but they do.” Shannon Thomas, Healing From Hidden Abuse: A Journey Through the Stages of Recovery from Psychological Abuse
Photo by author
“Statistically we know now that once the hands are on the neck, the very next step is homicide.” Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us (67)
I lost count of how many times his hands were on my neck. God only knows how many more times they were on my mother’s neck….
“…survival…is not synonymous with wholeness. We don’t survive whole.” Daria Burke, Of My Own Making
The Superfund site
“Something in me…screams…This is not all I am. I had something more in mind to do….We are reclaiming what another human being…decided to ruin, to take for themselves…Many of us don’t die. But our trajectories are forever altered.” Jen Cross, Writing Ourselves Whole
And Cross goes on to so eloquently point out that they didn’t just TAKE from us; they left us with a MESS to clean up, comparing us to an “oil spill,” a Superfund site in need of cleanup that will never be quite the same. :
“We spend the bulb and blossom of our lives cleaning up a toxic waste site. Meanwhile, we watch our friends come into full flower: making connections, reaching out, writing books, making marriages and families, developing their crafts, their skills, themselves. We watch them build careers, and wonder what is wrong with us that we can’t do what they’re doing. But we are still salvaging the superfund site inside of us. We painstakingly wipe off every blade of grass and feather of every bird that is a necessary part of our inside selves. The oil is never completely eradicated. Some of the areas impacted never recover…never become what they ought to have been…And then we simply have to mourn their loss, grieve what might have been….Meanwhile, those who polluted us are allowed to continue…”
I agree with every word…and deeply feel the effects of both what was taken…and what was left…and what goes forward…
“The past is not the past…We all bring every second of our lives to who we are today.” Andre Dubus III, with Melanie Brooks, in Writing Hard Stories – Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art From Trauma
About costs
Let me first be clear… I have managed to reclaim a lot in life. And Cross notes the same in her book when she indicated that we can become a hybrid of what we were meant to be; that we can go on, go forward, and still thrive.
But too often society “glosses over” that whole in-between section, the blatant, cold, hard reality that exists in between “the abuse and the thriving.” So for once, I want to be very specific about just what this life of mine has cost me…about the fact that no matter how good we make it – there were…and ARE…costs we incurred.
And by “we” I mean not just myself, or other abuse survivors, but society in general.
But first, let me talk about my personal costs in this.
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:
There are things left within that remain still totally alive today, buried alive, even though you don’t know it. They lurk…in your psyche. Your nervous system. Your memories. Waiting.
Something happens in the moment – a loud noise, a smell, a touch- and you are suddenly spiraling backwards in time, to a place of total emotional chaos and terror. It doesn’t matter how old you are now, or how long ago that memory was buried.
They are happening again…right now.
Triggers and Flashbacks
There are so many instances that I will be having a pleasant day, absorbed in something fun, and then, when I least expect it, it overwhelms me.
A knob on the kitchen cabinet catches my shirt, and I react with fear and rage at “being pulled.” Someone starts up a loud motorcycle unexpectedly, and I jump out of my skin because the loud noise was like the noise of Dad coming into my room ready to grab me. Body and sensory memories.
Then there are the emotional ones. I have hated weekends most of my life. Except for when I worked in the hospital lab. At least on those weekends, I wasn’t home and was doing something useful. When I was at home, he was at me. Either sexually, or physically if I refused. It took me years to realize that my weekend “dread” was a powerful emotional flashback to “those weekends.”
These days the weekends still haunt me. I will be cleaning the house, then I sit down to rest for a moment and look over my to-do list. Immediately, from out of nowhere, I am filled with intense anxiety and the sense I am “bad.” I feel afraid. I feel like I’d better not be “caught” sitting down. I am in danger…or I am a “bad person” because he has made that clear to me.
Then, there is the “3:00 p.m. sense of dread” every day because “Dad will be home soon,” even though he is long-dead and I am in my seventies.
Or every year in July, on the anniversary of the first moon landing. I hate that day, feel anxious, and full of dread. I just want to sleep. That’s because it was one of the worst days of my life then. I had “avoided him,” and so he was at me all day verbally and emotionally. He didn’t hit me that day – he might have had to explain why to my mother. But he would shoot me “The Look” – that intense glare of pure hatred and rage that kept reminding me I was unloved and in deep trouble. When he wasn’t doing that, he was totally ignoring me. If I talked to him, he looked right past me.
So there is no question but that those memories are totally alive yet within me. I experience them all the time.
“The Look”
We all know those family photo albums full of pictures, especially those candid ones that can range from fun to outright silly because the camera caught the person off-guard in a hilarious position.
And then there are those posed family shots too, the ones everyone gathered for and smiled in unison.
My father’s posed photos sometimes captured a smile. But, especially back then, they usually looked more like his work badge. Sour. Unsmiling. “Tough guy.” Even when we were celebrating.
This was the photo from the celebration of my First Holy Communion when I was seven. In the Catholic Church, it’s a joyous time. Grandparents, cousins, aunts, everyone’s together laughing, smiling, eating. And photos. Lots of photos.
The smiling “posed ones” would always be taken outside by the flowering bush in the backyard. Here is Dad’s posed, “celebratory” face. Could he have been any happier that day??
“Whatever it was that he saw in me that made him choose me – I was determined that part of me would NOT survive!” My journal, July 22, 2018
If ever there was a statement that captured the self-hatred, blaming, and disgust that I felt toward me all through life, this was it.
I assumed it was me. I was wrong, somehow to blame, somehow responsible, contaminated with some trait that he couldn’t resist. I must have brought something to the table that caused this…and thus…it was my fault.
Or, even if I cut me some “slack” because, at least in the beginning, I was an infant, still, I was disgusted with myself. He had chosen me for this hell. So whatever it was that I possessed that drew him to me, I was going to PURGE it as soon as I could identify it.
Looking back, it’s a ridiculous idea…it wasn’t me at all. But given that he abused me right from infancy, it is a logical one. When bad things happen to young children, they assume they caused it and are to blame. They are still at that stage of thinking that everything is about them. So good or bad, it’s their fault. And on some deep and early emotional level within me, I carried that same message.
It was only now, in my late sixties, that a germ of a realization was dawning upon me and creeping into my consciousness…an idea I could finally FEEL, not just tell myself and try to believe it: Was it possible…that I was NEVER to blame? For any of it? That maybe it was about whatever he carried WITHIN HIM all along…
Before I relate the session experience, I need to take a moment to consider the question – Why rage?
Why did I carry white-hot rage toward my father? And why did that need to be the first thing we tackled?
I will let the images do most of the talking here.
Who was he?
Probably best answered by the stories he shared with me on our weekend car rides, all of them disgusting or upsetting. Such as the one about abusing cats when he was a kid.
In looking back at my 2018 notes, whatever the specific items I listed in that email, I realized they boiled down to these core items:
Fears (many)
Shame
Anxiety
Rage
Pain
Self-hatred
The usual culprits, at least for me.
Photo by author
As to fear, it was interesting to see how many different things I was afraid of. And I can’t say that any one of them was bigger than another. They were all about equal in size…huge.
For example, at that point in time, even as I started to consider writing this book, I was ADAMANT that it would be under a pen name. I was absolutely TERRIFIED that any family members or people who knew me would see my name on the book. And I fully expected I would be attacked for speaking out loud. For that matter, I may yet be. But I feel differently about it now.
But at that point, I was even terrified of using a pen name. I still hated my younger self, was drowning in shame over many things in my life, and I still believed that telling my story would cause others pain, that I didn’t deserve to pursue this “navel-gazing,” and I would, rightly so, be attacked, then abandoned.
So it was no small thing that I even considered writing this. I will discuss efforts surrounding the issues of “why write, how, and how to manage courage and fear” in a few upcoming posts.
Reassuring my inner person
I find it helpful, especially when all my fears and emotions feel like they are ganging up on me, to get it out onto paper. Like an exorcism. That way I don’t have to carry them in my head, which both releases the pain of them and reassures me.
On that latter one – reassurance – I feel like as long as I have a list on paper, I know those things won’t be forgotten. For that hurting inner person at my core, it is calming. Soothing. She feels like this time she won’t be forgotten, stuffed down, or….locked behind that door again like in the past.
Sharpening the focus
It also helps me to formulate a coherent plan. I can’t just splatter rage all over the therapist’s office…well, I can, and there is a time for that, but in terms of us making a clear plan for the upcoming EMDR, that wouldn’t do.
The thing about me, especially before all this work, is that I feared I might get stuck again. In fact, it is one of my biggest fears. I don’t easily slow down or rest because I fear I might not get going again.
After all the years trapped in my parents’ house, I never wanted to experience that again. So, for most of my adult life, I’ve operated from a frantic energy to heal. And “rest” was not a welcome part of that process.
My therapist has often remarked that for many of her patients, she has to give them a push sometimes. But for me, she frequently needs to slow me down and help me be more patient.
The EMDR failure
In 2009, when I started working with her, I was in such agony from PTSD that we tried to do a round of the EMDR routine – that process of eye movements while remembering a particular trauma, that helps the brain reprocess and heal that memory. I’ll explain more in the next post. For right now, enough to say that at least at that time, I reacted very poorly. It triggered such a high level of anxiety and stress that my therapist stopped the session and said we would use other methods.
Other tools
Since then, we’ve used, and continue to use, CBT- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. That is where we talk out the various issues, piece by piece, as often as needed, until I can figure out what is operating. Then we work to implement better ways to manage the trauma, and my life.
At times, she also taught me various Yoga breathing techniques to help my body relax. Or she would have me lie on my back with my feet elevated while breathing slowly. Both of these processes help the body’s parasympathetic nervous system to take over. That’s the one that helps calm you and slows down the stress and anxiety reactions.
The sympathetic nervous system is the one that is running in overdrive when triggered by trauma reactions. And no question, I spend a lot of time reacting from that sympathetic nervous system. Yet, these tools did help relieve some of that anxiety, and they continue to be very helpful.
The siren call of EMDR
But I also sensed that I wanted…and needed…to revisit that EMDR process again. It just kept “calling to me,” and my gut gave me no peace.
There is that question: “How do you eat an elephant?” And the answer: “One bite at a time.”
It was the same thing writer Anne Lamott was getting at in her book on writing, Bird by Bird. She tells the story of her brother, who had waited to write his school paper on birds until the night before it was due. Frantic, he asked his father how he would ever get it all done? And the answer was, just write it bird by bird.
In this last section of my memoir, The Undiscovered Country, I am trying to draw to a close the many threads of the previous section, The Old Country. This is the climax, the finale, the meaning, growth, and wisdom part.
While I was writing the deeply painful posts about the abuses in my life, I said to my husband one morning that the writing was “so very hard…it just hurt so much.”
His response, while it sounds harsh, was actually an affirmation of just how well I was doing this work. His comment was delivered with great kindness and encouragement. “I think that is a good thing that it hurts. Not that I wish that for you. But it means you are really hitting the heart of those memories. You’re not just speaking from your brain, but from all those harmed places inside.”
His comment actually gave me relief and the energy to go on.
Buried in binders
When I got through all of those entries, I felt a sense of great…achievement…relief…gratitude. I thought to myself, Well, I’ve made it through the worst of it. Now I just have to draw the threads together and finish. So that should be easier.
Yet, every time I looked at all the folders spread out on that bed, each carrying nuggets of insights on different topics I’d introduced before, I grew more and more tense.
I didn’t even know what I should be looking for or what to expect on this trip. It’s like going into a grocery store, uncertain of what you need or what you may find. So you just start looking around and flinging everything into the cart that you guess “might” be useful.
Then, when you get home, you find you have bags and bags FULL of things. So many things that you have to spend a fair bit of time just unpacking it all, then sorting it, before you can even consider “Is any of this useful…and…how?”
This post is the “unpacking.” I collected so many bits in the journal I kept on the trip. I’ll let those entries do most of the talking in this post. I’ll “sort and prioritize it all” in the next one.
“Landing…back in time
Looking out the window, it struck me that Connecticut always looks the same when we return: Thick bank of clouds below…as we descended, so much so that the plane got very dark inside…It was the familiar gray, bleak outside, the usual “Connecticut gray” overcast….”
As soon as I stepped from the plane into the building, “it was like stepping right back into ‘then’ as if it was all still waiting there….Like a radio that had been turned off, but as soon as I walked in there, the radio came on and resumed from where it left off.”
Walking through the terminal, I felt like I had stepped into a time warp. I was in the present, but at the same time, I definitely was NOT.
Soul Mosaic 