“Your family couldn’t help take care of you?”
This question has disturbed me almost my entire life. I know what it feels like to be a person with insanity. Hearing the question, “Your family couldn’t help take care of you?”, from those younger days, was the closest feeling I have ever had of being in a simulation. I did not realize I was supposed to survive in an enigma from the beginning of my existence into this world.
I understand the feeling so many people have believing we are in a alternate universe and reality. It’s possible. Why else would so much horrific things happen to a child who loved to laugh and help everyone naturally around them? Even aliens coming to this planet seems like a more explicit and satisfying way to explain our human destruction than to go deeper and see the more implicit and silent events that aid to the demise of our planetary existence.
Our own darkness and unregulated or untapped emotions manifest into devils and demons they can only try and describe in the doctrines. They can infiltrate into our existence more quietly than a girl hiding behind the bushes on the side of the house to avoid the hands of a mother’s rage. They can justify our irrational and dangerous tendencies to possess, inflict, and abuse others as we have first received.
Childhood trauma feels like staying in a reality of a world for too long that says you can’t exist here, yet you are not allowed to leave. It has taken me a very long time to believe again that I am a happy, loving person. That I do get the right to be happy. That I am able to feel the air on my face, or truly enjoy the sweetness of a fruit on a summer’s day without thinking of the next person who will be there to hurt me in my life. However, we are here almost 3 decades later after all this and I have just scratched the surface. Do you really need the time back? Can we do things better? Different? Should we? Is my pain worth your progression yet?
The clinician can never fully prepare you to what your life will be like with a mother that has “bipolar disorder”. They never tell you that the first slap never loses the sting. The first chase and cower around the house is the reason for why you try and pretend to run away. That you will look to eventually appease your abuser. That, even after the abuse is done, you will gravitate by some force, naturally, like breathing air, to similar people and situations, believing somehow the outcome might be different. You hope and you pray. You pray as though you truly have no control either way in the outcome. It is inevitable what is to happen to you. After all, life has only been happening “to” you for so many years.
The symptoms of abuse is like a hidden disease. It fragments every major core belief that you have, and, if not paid attention to, will split your psyche with multiple realities, having you act out of multiple false pretenses that then drive you to perpetuate the very things that caused you the most harm. You were forced to live that reality. Not only that, but your definition of a caregiver is actually a caretaker.
You end up hating yourself and, in return, you project that anger to also hate many other things in this world. After all, why should you help people and love when no one was able to do the same for you? You only just learn to survive from the broken functioning parts of yourself and end up in all the situations you were avoiding. Only now, as time has passed, the validation of you being right is more chemically satisfying than all the alcohol, drugs, money, and sex in the world. You, for the first time, can be right. Better to be right than a fool as you have been for so long.
From the side of my house, I remember hearing my mother’s voice call for me. It was quieter than usual, calmer. I almost came to her again, except, I remembered the last time I did the tone sharply changed the moment we went back inside. I became unsafe again. This time I stayed hidden longer than I ever had before.
I was sad. I was sad because I didn’t want my mother to think I wasn’t really there. I just wanted her to hopefully listen to me seriously and realize that she was hurting me. I hoped I could influence the thought for her maybe to understand that this time I wouldn’t really come back home. Later, I would have the decision to finally do just that, but for now, I was stuck in her fury. I held out hope one day we could have only the times when her laughter filled the room with joy and everyone else couldn’t help but feel the same.
You hope doing these things, that you have seen on the tv, will make them miss you and stop hurting you. Again, you don’t quite really understand what running away is. You cannot comprehend that your reason for being hypersensitive is a result of the overwhelming memories, buried in your subconscious as your conscious tries to protect you, triggering you. How else would a child even begin to lay down their head in knowing that their biggest shelter is also their biggest disaster?
This is the feeling of a child coping through abuse without the words or the anger to put a stop to it. You are to stay in this world until it’s your time to leave if you are lucky. A slave to someone else’s existence where your needs are never fulfilled and you are there only to bend to their whim; sober or not.
I have been ripped from therapist office to therapist office since the age of 5 as a result of my mother’s obsession with finding a diagnosis. After all, we needed to find out exactly why her “frustrations” towards me were justified. There was no way that she herself could be the reason for so much darkness and unrest. Against some of the earlier recommendations, my mother did not receive the answers she wanted and therefore was relentless with her powerful energy to find some relief of all that was constantly charging and firing her pandemonium
Why do I write these things? Because these are the things that have given me the perspective to stand up and say enough with the oppression. Enough with the abuse. Enough with the smallest understanding of an idea a human being can have to enforce onto others as if they know what is right for another person’s life. You may have a child have less room to speak up because they are still learning and growing. But I am a person who was a child and did still not have the time to learn and to grow. Abuse and opression only contributes to more abuse and opression.
Educational institutions, intervention programs, religious organizations, not-for-profit entities, friends, family, the stranger in the grocery store, the preacher on the stage, will not be there for you in your lowest moments. The ability to stop the conceptualization and rationalizing with the number of events that have happened “to” you will not stop the attacking of intrusive thoughts because you have leaned into pain, uncertainty, or “faith”. Not even for the writings of the stories people have created and been accepted by millions.
I have had more experiences of religious institutions, intervention programs, and encounters of what happens when broken people create more within broken systems than most. Am I to look back at my life and say that I could have only been as wonderful as I am now because of such situations? Or, am I to catapult from the top of the mountains that the truth is hurt people hurt. Hurt families will hurt their children. Not every child is able to surmount to the top of the mountain with such white fire and force that they are able to start to foster real rehabilitation.
I have had the unique opportunity to be in a position to do better. Not everyone gets that. What harms people is when their freedom or choice is taken away. You do not need to tell a child that a slap, punch, kick, inappropriate touch, or that a sexual contact is harmful. You only need to help give them the words to share what their experience is and they will profoundly tell you.
I have found the words to share what my experience is. Oppression is the opposite of life. Control feels like death. Not having the ability to formulate and express your own inner experience as truth is to betray every part of your soul. If you want people to see your truth, help them understand. Forcing someone against their existing truth will only stir more dark realities in our societies, communities, and families.
The religious institution’s weekend stay in the Holiday Inn, because they could not afford any more than that, for my father and us six siblings did not quell my mother’s fits. The various therapeutic sessions for my entire family did not stop some of our family member’s children from also going into the same care system I did. The box of food for a family of five did not feed my family of eight. Staying at friends’ houses and apartments in the ghetto did not stop the holes in the wall from being punched in front of us. The cops picking up my sister did not stop her from bouncing checks.
There is no shortage of overwhelmed health care workers trying to help heal the reality we all face when another person decides to say that there is no need to look at their own demons before making choices for others. Like my mother did with medicating me my entire life. Like was my ability to understand that an abusive man should never be my husband. Perpetuating chaos and selfishness fueled by the delusion of righteousness is more deadly than the ability for women to take certain pills or have certain surgeries.
This is no disrespect to my mother or any religion or institution. I believe in something beyond all of this too. After all, where did I come from? But this is the reality of my upbringing that I vulnerably share to help give the deepest perspective into the ramifications of giving people no other choice than delusion, pain, and the perpetuation of abuse. I have deep respect for my mother as she was a force to try and do anything and everything to find herself. That’s the level of commitment we all need to have. Hopefully, more people will get to have the right of receiving information and services that will help create less hurt and suffering.
The decision I had at 14 years old to go to Sunshine Acres Children’s Home was actually my choice. The therapist that saw my mother and father for many many years gave her the number to the children’s home when my mother’s cancer came back the second time. She told the therapist that after raising the other 5 kids she knew that at my age she would not be able to raise another teenager. On my tour of the children’s home, I was able to see horses, a boy outside, by himself, tending to a garden. He even waved at me seeming to be happy. He was not hiding behind a bush. I saw this new reality come into my world and I thought I could be more safe here.
The night before I was to go to the home, my mother said I was not going to go anymore. I had already spent the last few weeks telling my few friends in 8th grade that I was leaving to another place because of my mom’s health. Her telling me I was not going any more created more distress thinking about how this will affect me at school than what it was going to be like at home. I had been bullied for many years. I feared that I would be utterly rejected again and receive even more abuse. I immediately called my father’s work. He spoke with me later that night. He told me that he loved me and never wanted me to go. But, with complete clarity, I told him I was to go.
What I didn’t know was that I was about to be in a completely new reality. One of hope, of moral truth, and more awareness to what healthy love is. I was able to gain the opportunities to go and be something outside of myself and define who I wanted to be. I can’t force you to not have your belief systems. I can’t force you to stop perpetuating the cycles you are learning and growing through in your stage of life. I can only share to you that other people’s realities are just as important as your own. Should not the consequences of their actions not be meant to receive mercy and grace just as much as you would want for yourself? Consequences affect not just the individual person but to the next generation and the generation after that.
I hope that we use the realities that true experiences and stories give to help us no longer repeat the patterns of harm. I hope that you see I wrote this for love, not politics. That you can see the other side of the very real reality in causing more struggle for those that just need to take back control of their lives. Sometimes people have been in disarray for too long that they are not able to understand exactly what their place is. Share your truth, and never take away another one’s freedom. Such is the loss of all that is to live.
What inspired me to write about my thoughts and healing journey:
Eben Alexander, M.D, “Proof of Heaven. A Neurosuregon’s Journey into the Afterlife.”
Daniela E Sieff “Understanding and Healing Emotional Trauma”
The Bible
Endless Ted Talks
Dave Barnhart
All the Instagram therapists I follow that I will continue to update!
Real experiences
Real people
