Five letters. That’s all it is. It’s not that the word is long or difficult to pronounce. It’s all the baggage the word carries.
Abuse.
Funny how difficult it is to say, isn’t it, when I’m describing something about myself. It’s the lump in my throat as I work up the courage to admit it - to myself, first.
I was abused.
I don’t really feel like I own that word. After all there are so many other people out there with stories that make mine look normal in comparison. I remember, then, being told that one person’s suffering does not negate another’s. Pain isn’t ranked.
I had an abusive childhood.
No one would believe me. I was fed (too well, some might say - and they are wrong), clothed, sheltered, sent to school. It wasn’t like I grew up in a shack. I remember telling other kids that said they wished they had my parents, that they didn’t know what my parents were like at home.
I was emotionally neglected.
I try not to think about it, the plummeting feeling of being canceled on again, the stomach twist of being yelled at in the car every morning, the heavy stone of giving advice on workplace conflicts and marriage troubles, the double-edged cut of sneaking chips - candy - anything I could eat that would make things a little brighter even for a moment.
My parents were emotionally abusive.
I want to say it’s not true. Maybe I imagined it? - except who would imagine a childhood so lonely by chance, or even design. My best friends were a guinea pig, stuffed animals, and books - not people and certainly not them.
My parents abused me.
Deep in my core, I know. This was not how growing up was supposed to be. Despite that, I have to deal now with the scars that take unusual shapes and the habits that no longer aid my survival. C-PTSD, they say.
I am a survivor of child abuse.
Trying to form new ways of talking, communicating, learning that asking for help is okay. Being an adult is so strange when the skills I’ve been taught my whole life are the opposite of what I need to thrive. How to eat, how to approach others, how to believe in myself.
I refuse to let their abuse win.
I don’t think they treated me so by design. That would require a deeper level of self-awareness, and they don’t like therapists. Funny, that - the ones who have tended the lighthouses on the shore of mental health for me are Scylla and Charybdis for them.
I will triumph.
I do not want to just survive.
Note: Scylla and Charybdis are monsters from the Odyssey that live on either side of a narrow strait; one is a multi-headed creature that eats men, and the other is a whirlpool that devours any ship unlucky enough to get too close.
Thursday, January 23, 2020
Thursday, January 9, 2020
Older musings on The Body Never Lies by Alice Miller
p.146
“The child was not given the nourishment needed from [the mother] and has found no substitute for this in later life. Without drugs, this gap can literally express itself as a feeling of physical hunger, gnawing away at the stomach, which contracts in response.”
- The Body Never Lies by Alice Miller
Constant hunger, but not for food; for attention and affection.
I remember saying I was jealous of her students because they got more of her time than I did - and I was told that was wrong because they’re impoverished, etc. That doesn’t change the fact that I felt - and still do - that my mother had chosen to lose herself to her school.
I remember doing assistant work for so many projects - worksheets, goody bags, cataloging, marking books for the collection, inventory, stuff for the yearly ‘reading carnivals’... I probably could have paid for college had I been paid minimum wage for all the time I spent working. I was “paid” in Tootsie Rolls or occasionally some thing I wanted.
All I really wanted was to be treated kindly, listened to with respect, and engaged with on an appropriate level. I can count the number of times my father has played chess with me (supposedly he likes chess) and it’s in the single digits. The only game mom really has ever played with me since...middle school? is Uno. I’m very aggressive in these games, possibly as a way of ‘punishing’ her for ignoring me all those years.
I still feel her school took her from me - although ‘took’ isn’t really correct; it’s more like a person who enters and stays in an emotionally abusive relationship despite everyone telling them to get out. School is where she hurt herself to the point of being almost disabled; she’s hurt both ankles, one to the point of requiring surgery and removal of the nerve to alleviate the pain. Even now, years after, she can only hobble.
I see in her constant martyrdom and stupid, arrogant overachieving the little kid still trying to impress a parent who only sees her as a tool. It’s not going to work. It never would have. You can’t make a narcissist love you, accept you. You might as well try to teach a snake to tap dance.
-
I don’t understand the whole “inner child” concept. Probably because I don’t think I ever really thought of myself as a child, nor was I really treated as a child when I was one. I was usually treated as a miniature, inexperienced adult - the curse of the gifted/autism spectrum.
I wasn’t supposed to get frustrated or want things that didn’t have monetary value or couldn’t be bought. I remember dad yelling at me over math homework when I asked for help, as even with his explanations I just wasn’t getting it. Small wonder I don’t like math and insist on doing things entirely by myself - that’s what I was forcefully taught. To not ‘bother’ other people by asking for help and to be the ‘little adult’ they expected.
I am in no way upset or angry at the (informal-ish) diagnosis of ASD; it just confirms what I already knew on some level.
I AM upset at the adults who constantly treated me as not a child and expected behavior more appropriate from an adult.
“The child was not given the nourishment needed from [the mother] and has found no substitute for this in later life. Without drugs, this gap can literally express itself as a feeling of physical hunger, gnawing away at the stomach, which contracts in response.”
- The Body Never Lies by Alice Miller
Constant hunger, but not for food; for attention and affection.
I remember saying I was jealous of her students because they got more of her time than I did - and I was told that was wrong because they’re impoverished, etc. That doesn’t change the fact that I felt - and still do - that my mother had chosen to lose herself to her school.
I remember doing assistant work for so many projects - worksheets, goody bags, cataloging, marking books for the collection, inventory, stuff for the yearly ‘reading carnivals’... I probably could have paid for college had I been paid minimum wage for all the time I spent working. I was “paid” in Tootsie Rolls or occasionally some thing I wanted.
All I really wanted was to be treated kindly, listened to with respect, and engaged with on an appropriate level. I can count the number of times my father has played chess with me (supposedly he likes chess) and it’s in the single digits. The only game mom really has ever played with me since...middle school? is Uno. I’m very aggressive in these games, possibly as a way of ‘punishing’ her for ignoring me all those years.
I still feel her school took her from me - although ‘took’ isn’t really correct; it’s more like a person who enters and stays in an emotionally abusive relationship despite everyone telling them to get out. School is where she hurt herself to the point of being almost disabled; she’s hurt both ankles, one to the point of requiring surgery and removal of the nerve to alleviate the pain. Even now, years after, she can only hobble.
I see in her constant martyrdom and stupid, arrogant overachieving the little kid still trying to impress a parent who only sees her as a tool. It’s not going to work. It never would have. You can’t make a narcissist love you, accept you. You might as well try to teach a snake to tap dance.
-
I don’t understand the whole “inner child” concept. Probably because I don’t think I ever really thought of myself as a child, nor was I really treated as a child when I was one. I was usually treated as a miniature, inexperienced adult - the curse of the gifted/autism spectrum.
I wasn’t supposed to get frustrated or want things that didn’t have monetary value or couldn’t be bought. I remember dad yelling at me over math homework when I asked for help, as even with his explanations I just wasn’t getting it. Small wonder I don’t like math and insist on doing things entirely by myself - that’s what I was forcefully taught. To not ‘bother’ other people by asking for help and to be the ‘little adult’ they expected.
I am in no way upset or angry at the (informal-ish) diagnosis of ASD; it just confirms what I already knew on some level.
I AM upset at the adults who constantly treated me as not a child and expected behavior more appropriate from an adult.
Wednesday, January 8, 2020
My Inner Child
My therapist asks me to reconnect with my inner child.
I cannot. There is none.
Surely you were little once. Think of yourself then, she says.
There were times when I was five, eleven, thirteen, sixteen
but I was not a child.
I was an adult who had not yet reached the age of majority.
When I was five, my frog died.
I am told I grieved so much
they asked the priest to talk to me,
about life and death, fleeting joy.
A teacher’s aide turned forty.
They decorated with tombstones;
prognostications of inevitable death.
When they found me under the table,
They were surprised
That I was angry,
That I vowed to hermit until I too was old.
When I was eleven, I learned
That I was fat.
Irredeemable. My crush didn’t like me back
So my mother (in her infinite wisdom)
“helped” me
(what I now recognize as sexual assault)
We bought him Halloween boxers
hung them in the cloak room
for all to see.
I wonder now whose humiliation was worse.
A classmate was harassed by a boy.
The school did nothing
until she left him vulgar, insulting notes to stay away-
then she got in trouble.
When I was thirteen, I had never realized before
that dichotomy between lonely and alone.
By yourself - at peace - was alone.
It comforted. Restored.
Surrounded by people and not one kindred soul
No confidante, no lunch buddy
my mother could not listen
her ears full of her own worries
made her deaf to mine.
That was lonely. Suffocating.
I can’t remember if it rained more that year
or if that is what I remember.
I lost my great-grandmother that year.
She treated me as a child - beloved but not
yet expected to shoulder the burdens of adults.
She taught me to crochet.
I have her hooks - a tiny touchstone with a loving person.
When I was (almost) sixteen, I learned
about kissing and desire.
Not from a boy - from a man six years older.
an ex-convict, tattooed, living in a trailer
parked on his father’s wife’s front lawn.
I learned too about adults and their whims.
The wife, once a friend, showed her true skin -
a creature bent on obtaining its own desires
without regard to anguish of any other.
That was the year I learned how to cut people out.
Later I had a boyfriend
brainwashed by his parents and the church.
I tried to raise him
but the damage had been done.
I could not raise us both.
When would I have been a child?
There was no time
between work, internships, angry bosses,
bitchy coworkers, marriage troubles,
history, science, English, geometry,
finances, traffic, French, statistics
feeding another’s desire to prove themselves
To whom? My question was never answered.
My inner child was sacrificed
on the altar of adults’ busy lives.
I cannot. There is none.
Surely you were little once. Think of yourself then, she says.
There were times when I was five, eleven, thirteen, sixteen
but I was not a child.
I was an adult who had not yet reached the age of majority.
When I was five, my frog died.
I am told I grieved so much
they asked the priest to talk to me,
about life and death, fleeting joy.
A teacher’s aide turned forty.
They decorated with tombstones;
prognostications of inevitable death.
When they found me under the table,
They were surprised
That I was angry,
That I vowed to hermit until I too was old.
When I was eleven, I learned
That I was fat.
Irredeemable. My crush didn’t like me back
So my mother (in her infinite wisdom)
“helped” me
(what I now recognize as sexual assault)
We bought him Halloween boxers
hung them in the cloak room
for all to see.
I wonder now whose humiliation was worse.
A classmate was harassed by a boy.
The school did nothing
until she left him vulgar, insulting notes to stay away-
then she got in trouble.
When I was thirteen, I had never realized before
that dichotomy between lonely and alone.
By yourself - at peace - was alone.
It comforted. Restored.
Surrounded by people and not one kindred soul
No confidante, no lunch buddy
my mother could not listen
her ears full of her own worries
made her deaf to mine.
That was lonely. Suffocating.
I can’t remember if it rained more that year
or if that is what I remember.
I lost my great-grandmother that year.
She treated me as a child - beloved but not
yet expected to shoulder the burdens of adults.
She taught me to crochet.
I have her hooks - a tiny touchstone with a loving person.
When I was (almost) sixteen, I learned
about kissing and desire.
Not from a boy - from a man six years older.
an ex-convict, tattooed, living in a trailer
parked on his father’s wife’s front lawn.
I learned too about adults and their whims.
The wife, once a friend, showed her true skin -
a creature bent on obtaining its own desires
without regard to anguish of any other.
That was the year I learned how to cut people out.
Later I had a boyfriend
brainwashed by his parents and the church.
I tried to raise him
but the damage had been done.
I could not raise us both.
When would I have been a child?
There was no time
between work, internships, angry bosses,
bitchy coworkers, marriage troubles,
history, science, English, geometry,
finances, traffic, French, statistics
feeding another’s desire to prove themselves
To whom? My question was never answered.
My inner child was sacrificed
on the altar of adults’ busy lives.
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