Soul Mosaic

First rule of domination: establish the right “Family System”

“Chronic childhood abuse takes place in a familial culture of pervasive terror, in which ordinary caretaking relationships have been profoundly disrupted. Survivors describe a characteristic pattern of totalitarian control, enforced by means of violence and death threats, capricious enforcement of petty rules, intermittent rewards, and destruction of all competing relationships through isolation, secrecy, and betrayal….children who develop in this climate of domination develop pathological attachments to those who abuse and neglect them, attachments that they will strive to maintain even at the sacrifice of their own welfare…reality…or their lives.”
Herman 98

This description might seem like something from a concentration camp and one in which the people in it knew it was deranged and wrong. But this was normal life in our house – our “home environment. And we never realized just how ABNORMAL things really were.

Frankly, whatever environment you live in begins to shape you, whether you realize it or not. It shaped us, our assessment of things, our reactions and beliefs. After a while, whatever we were living in was our “normal life.”

How did he succeed in creating such an environment and such control over us? Rules and tools….

“…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.

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: