A Lifetime of Healing

I contemplate things a lot. Sometimes, I think about things ad infinitum to try and resolve what is bothering me. One of those that captures my full attention is my toxic childhood.

For most of my life, I've chased after other people's approval of me. I continue to hope and believe that someone, somewhere, wouldn't see me like a piece of shit, a horrid person, or anything else negative they could think of.

In my own family, I dealt with an alcoholic mom and dad. The former hated me, and the latter was emotionally distant. I believe my dad loved me to the best of his ability and was overall a decent person. However, my mom, her mom, and other relatives decided I had no value. I was the source of everything wrong in my mom's life and therefore didn't deserve love, kindness, or mentoring. I became their punching bag.

There wasn't an area of abuse that my mother didn't touch on in one way or another. The five majors are physical, sexual, emotional, mental, and community sabotage. Her abuse was an equal opportunity employer. My grandmother, cousins, sister, and brother-in-law bought into my mom's distorted view of me. Some of them, including my father, continued to see me as my mom defined me and treated me that way. One of those relatives found her own healing journey, and we have a good relationship today.

Then there was the family who lived up the street. Their oldest daughter was my age, and we were best friends. As children, she felt more like my sister than my own did at the time. We did everything together, and we managed to get in trouble a lot. In fact, the adults kept us in separate classes throughout elementary school. For my entire life, I've loved that family, even in the face of their mother deciding I was the worst child on the planet and then banning me from playing with her daughter. Isn't it a horrible kind of person to tell a 7-year-old that she is the worst thing to exist? To this day, I don't know what I did to receive such a verbal lashing. I know that I've looked for their approval and acceptance since I was a child. And it's time to turn around and walk away, which is also painful.

I struggled with self-esteem, trust, and identity issues as I grew into adulthood. As a result, I sought approval from anyone I thought could give it to me. I put myself in many high-risk situations with men, giving freely of my body to find that one person who might finally love me for me and want to be with me.

For the family up the street, in adulthood, I maintained contact with the father of the family, who became a dear friend. He mentored me, prayed for and with me, and spent time with me just listening. When he discovered what my mom did to me (the incest), he saw that I was working hard to become a better person. I felt a newfound respect for and from him. Sadly, he passed recently, and I saw the entire family (except their mom, who the father divorced a long time ago) for the first time in over 40 years. He became a very different man from when I was a child, who I found very dark and scary and abusive towards his children. I cried inconsolably at his funeral.

I was stunned by the continued dysfunction in that family. I am surprised and saddened that few of them can see me as I am today: a strong, independent woman who has overcome so much in my life. Comments from them hurt because I'm not seen as the person I am today. Instead, I'm seen as the dysfunctional little girl from 40 or 50 years ago.

All of this aligns with the community sabotage my mom perpetrated throughout my childhood. My third-grade teacher wasn't surprised when I told her about my mom's abuse when I became an adult. She said that my mom never wanted to hear the good things I did in parent-teacher conferences, only the bad.

A 4th-grade classmate recently told me about the abuse she witnessed in class by our teacher. I don't remember the particular incident she related, but I don't doubt it happened. Still, I remember the teacher telling me that "she and my mom talked and that she knew all about me," which meant that I was a terrible person. This response is a classic example of the community sabotage mentioned previously. The same classmate saw how I was treated by the adults in my hometown and asked her mom about it, who didn't know why. And for me, it opened a thinly scarred and deep wound from long ago.

So now I'm on the road to healing another piece of my childhood. I must find how to let go of a past unjustly thrust upon me. So, I'm trying to find compassion and forgiveness for the unloved little girl who didn't (and still doesn't) understand why so many adults abused her.

I also have other questions that might shed light on the "why." Do I have fetal alcohol syndrome or a form of ADD? Was I hyperactive as a child? Did I operate out of fear and therefore was willful and stubborn? All these questions need answers, and I will never find one. Most of the people I could ask are now dead. Even if I did ask them, I probably wouldn't get a truthful answer.

Of course, maybe, just maybe, I wasn't the original problem with any of the adults in my hometown. Perhaps the problem rested within my mother and her sick thinking. Did she have depression and not want to deal with a second child? Maybe alcohol was the driving factor, and she couldn't get as drunk as she wanted when I was little. I did ask her once why she was so mean to me. Her answer "You are the secondborn and will always be the secondborn!" I pondered that answer for a long time until I realized she didn't want a second child; she was perfectly happy with one.

Today, my mom's community sabotage affects my life more than any other area of how she abused me. Various coworkers, one of whom made my life a living hell for a year, have always backstabbed me, and I wondered then and now what I did to deserve it. Was it my tendency towards isolation that made them resent me? Do I wear a sign on my forehead that says "Abuse me!"? Is it my competence, dedication, and learning my craft well that made them jealous of me? Or was it their own insecurities that made them reach out and try to utterly destroy me (the one mentioned earlier was damn near successful)? I sit in a well of anger that people are so shitty and take it out on those of us who do not deserve to be mistreated. But, I still have a visceral reaction when I recognize sabotage. I become enraged, try to defend myself, and try to fix the problem when it is the manager's job to rein in the dysfunction. And mostly, it hits that inner child of mine who never caught a break.

Healing from abuse is a lifelong journey where the layers are peeled back slowly, revealing ugly truths about ourselves and the people around us.

I know today that abuse is never about the person receiving it but the person giving it out. Abuse is all about power and control. But sometimes, when a new layer rises to the surface, it's still as painful as when I experienced the events.

I hope to stop chasing after people who obviously don't approve of me, my beliefs, or my choices someday. We each have to make decisions for our own well-being. However, abuse survivors rarely know how to do that. We aren't necessarily emotionally healthy people, and we have a myriad of things to overcome. It's hard work to survive and thrive in a world that, through their own insecurities, abuses others in many possible ways.

We abuse survivors are so vulnerable and work hard to fit into a hostile world. We erect 5-foot thick invisible plexiglass barriers to protect ourselves from others. We isolate, we definitely don't trust, and some of us become super achievers. On the other side of the coin, we become homeless or addicts, or both. We stuff our feelings as deeply as possible because expressing them is dangerous.

Being an abuse survivor is about recovering from loss. The grief we feel is different from when a loved one dies. Instead, it's about those pieces of our soul that were ripped away from us as children. It can be a lifelong search to find those pieces if we can.

We all need empathy, caring, and compassion for each other; this world definitely needs more. It means attempting to understand what another person has gone through in their life before making a judgment. It even means challenging ourselves and our own internal beliefs and discovering if they really fit who we are.

As I'm currently discovering, I have more healing work to do in my life. The pain I feel is deep, so deep I haven't wanted to face it. I still don't want to face the hurt. However, I must do this work to improve my life and by extension, those I love better.

Some will tell me to "let it go," that all of it happened long ago and that I must move on. But, telling me, or any other abuse survivor that can cheat us of a fuller, richer life. It can also keep us in the toxic cycle of self-harm and abuse from others. So, let us do the work. Listen to us if you can, and if you can't, love us with the knowledge that we will heal and eventually move on to brighter, better things. Know that we will become better people who are more empathetic to you and the problems you might encounter. That the pain we feel really does help us to let go.

Healing for all of us is a process, and it can be a lengthy one. Grieving the loss of something never ends. However, eventually, we find a place to put the sadness where it is not overwhelming and all-encompassing. Please be patient as I walk through this process and let go of others' negative beliefs about me and, by extension, let go of them. It's just one more step in my recovery journey.