Month: November 2015

A Letter to My Father

~ KJ ~ 7 Comments

I managed to write that letter to my father yesterday.

I went through a whirlwind of emotions as I was writing it, but it didn’t stop me. I cried, I wanted to throw my pen at the wall out of anger, and then I cried again. And then it was finished. I didn’t read the letter over; I folded it in half and put it in my planner so I wouldn’t forget to bring it to therapy. Then I laid in bed for an hour and just let whatever was going on inside of me flow through. I was okay.

During our session today, my therapist asked if I wrote the letter. I told her I did. I told her that at first I was afraid that I would break down like I did so many months before, but that I did it and I was okay. She asked if I wanted to go over it, and I said yes. I thought I would be able to hand her the letter and she would read it to herself. But no. She wanted me to read it. My anxiety kicked in. I didn’t think I could do it. I started second-guessing everything. Writing the letter was one thing, but reading it out loud felt like I was putting everything out into the world, that I was voicing everything I felt. I struggle with having a voice because it still feels so inherently wrong to speak.

My therapist saw that I was struggling. She asked me why it was now so hard to talk. She knew why. She said I didn’t have to read it or talk about it if I wasn’t ready. I went back and forth in my mind for a few minutes. Then I told her I wanted to read it. I told her I didn’t want to be afraid of speaking for the rest of my life. I needed to start somewhere. We went over a plan to keep safe in case I started to dissociate or it got to be too much. Then I took a deep breath and started reading.

Dear father,

I have trouble just calling you father. Fathers are supposed to love their daughters. You never showed me love. You never hugged me or showed me that you cared. You only showed me disdain. How could you let me suffer for so long? I was hurting, and instead of making me better, you only added to my pain.

You and my mother should have never had children. Neither of you know how to be a parent. You brought me into this world to torture me. I don’t understand why you and she just didn’t drop me off in a ditch somewhere. Sometimes I think that I would have been better off if one of you just killed me. You would have saved me a lot of pain. But you couldn’t even do that. Instead, you killed my spirit. You made me dead on the inside.

It scares me that I can’t remember everything you did to me. I know that if I asked you, you would never admit to anything anyway. You and my mother choose to live in your own made-up world where everything is perfect and you are perfect. That is nowhere near reality. There is no way that you didn’t know what my mother was doing to me all those years. I have memories of you being there with her, but I told myself they couldn’t be real. How could you? You are no better than she is.

You’ve broken me, but none of that hurt more than that night you broke my spirit. Instead of being concerned about why I was feeling sad and depressed, you took all of your anger and hatred out on me. You told me I had nothing to be depressed about. Nothing to be depressed about? How could I NOT be depressed? I had every reason to be sad, to be angry, and to be depressed. But you told me you were going to give me something to be sad about, and you did. You broke me. The only way I could make you stop was to not feel at all. You made me believe that feelings meant pain, and I didn’t need any more pain.

I’ll never forget that night. I still cringe when anyone says I’m depressed because it reminds me of what you did to me. You taught me that feeling anything is a punishable offense. But you got your way. I wasn’t sad or depressed anymore. I couldn’t feel anything. I lived for years without feeling anything. It was the only way I knew how to survive.

Even after all of the shit you put me through, I dropped everything to take care of you when you got sick. Your wife didn’t care whether or not you died. But why? You would have never done the same for me. I still had hope that you would be a father, that you would see what a good daughter I was, that you would be proud. But you weren’t. I held out hope for something that would never be. But I know now that it is not my doing; it’s yours. You’ll never know what love is. You should have died years ago.

Now that you’re sick, I’m not sorry at all. I actually find it a little funny that your heart has been slowly dying all these years – I would have never known you had a heart. My heart may still be beating, but you broke it long ago. And now yours is broken, literally broken. At least my heart can be fixed with time. You’re shit out of luck.

I hope when you finally die, that it’s painful for you. Maybe you would feel just a fraction of the pain you caused me. You’re lucky in a way. You’ll die soon and you’ll no longer have to live with what you’ve done, as if you let it affect you anyway. Your pain will end while I will have to live with mine.

All I ever wanted was for you to love me. I never did anything wrong. I never deserved the pain you caused me. I did everything a daughter was supposed to do and more. It was never enough for you. I hate you now, and it bothers me to hate another human being. But you deserve my hate. You deserve my anger. You don’t deserve to be my father.

Thank you for showing me everything I never want to be.

Through tears and with shaking hands, I managed to read the entire letter out loud. By the end, I couldn’t stop crying. It was the first time I allowed myself to show my emotions to my therapist. As I folded the letter and looked up, I saw the sadness on my therapist’s face. Part of me felt bad. I’ve upset her. I knew this letter was horrible. I apologized, but there was nothing for me to be sorry for. There was nothing in that letter to be sorry for. Neither of our feelings were anything to be sorry for.

My therapist reminded me that all of my feelings were valid, but I had drifted back into my childhood beliefs that feelings were not allowed. I told her it was wrong not to love your parents. I’ve always felt intense shame and guilt for hating them, especially in childhood, when society seemed to push the idea that all parents must be loved and honored (an idea I still see presented way too often). My therapist told me I had every reason to be sad, and that I had every reason to be angry at him. She told me she was angry at him, too. And she doesn’t even know him. It was relieving to know that someone else was feeling what I felt towards him. It sort of pushed me out of that child-like state and back to my adult self.

I’ll never be able to get that validation from my father. Even in the extremely small chance he would ever provide it, I can never see him or my mother again. It will never be safe for me to go back. He’ll never know how I really feel. Maybe it’s better that way.

17 weeks

~ KJ ~ 4 Comments

It’s been a tough week. There have been a lot of emotions and a lot of memories coming back to the surface, and I’ve been struggling with managing it all. But, as usual, I pulled myself together and got through it.

Therapy was difficult this week, but I was a lot better than I was the week before. Writing a letter to my therapist beforehand actually made discussing things much easier. We’ve been talking about some of the issues I have with my father; there’s a lot of shit to muddle through concerning that topic. I’m having trouble believing that my feelings towards him are valid. There are even times when I’m not even sure how to identify my feelings at all.

During our last session, my therapist suggested that I write a letter to my father. I actually knew that was what she was going to say before she even said it – I would have suggested the same thing to one of my clients (I guess I may not be so horrible at being a therapist after all). She said I can bring in the letter on Monday and we can work through it. I haven’t written the letter yet; I will probably write it tomorrow once I am done with work. I am hesitating a little because I know that I tend to let it all out on paper. At the retreat in April, I wrote a letter to my mother during a letter-writing session and I ended up having a mild breakdown. I had written so many things that I didn’t even realize until I read it over. Then I felt like a horrible person for thinking and writing the things that I did. I don’t want that same thing to happen when I write this letter to my father. I want to be able to handle my feelings without feeling guilty. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m also still struggling with the DID diagnosis. My therapist asked me in the beginning of our last session to ask my parts if they had anything that they needed to say. I couldn’t do it. One reason was because it meant acknowledging that my parts exist, which is an ongoing back-and-forth for me. The other reason was because of what happened on Tuesday; I didn’t want that child to come out and talk about missing our mother again. My therapist could tell that I wasn’t comfortable with it, so she didn’t press the issue any further. But I also wasn’t honest with her about why I didn’t want to do it.

I was having a rough time Thursday night. I had worked all morning, went straight to therapy, and then came home and had to process everything. Something happened that put me over the edge and I just had to go outside and breathe to try to gain back some stability. I ended up sitting outside for over an hour, contemplating whether or not I should cry, light something on fire, or go back inside and go to sleep.

As I was sitting outside, I decided to e-mail my therapist. She had e-mailed me a link to an article on DID disclosure after our session that day. As odd as it is, I am okay with disclosing the DID to the outside world. Because of my work with HealthyPlace, my name is now permanently associated with DID. I am less okay with disclosing the DID to myself. Internally, I am finding it difficult to accept, even though I know that I have it. I am trying to be in denial while at the same time being fully aware that I am trying to be in denial despite the reality. Denial doesn’t quite work out so well when you are aware of it; it only creates dissonance. I also have a tendency to tell myself that I failed somehow and that is why I have DID, that it’s just another one of my many failures.

I also revealed what happened with my younger part the other day, and why I was so afraid to get in touch with those parts during therapy. My therapist wrote back that even though it is unnerving to be able to sense their feelings and hear their voices, that it is actually a good sign. She also wrote that I may not have been ready to hear those younger parts before, but now my consciousness is allowing it for a reason. I know that she’s right. but it still scares me. I feel ill-prepared. It’s just been me and Charlie for so long, and I wasn’t even handling that relationship well. My therapist is going to work with me on how to respond to my parts, because I told her I don’t think I know what to do and it overwhelms me, like it did on Tuesday. I need to get myself to a point where I can just accept my DID and my parts, and realize that this is not an indication of failure. I feel horrible for not being able to protect all of my parts from their traumas, when the reality is that I have these parts because they were protecting me.

With all that’s been going on these last few weeks, I put grad school preparation off to the side. I have just over three weeks before the application is due. I am going to need to make it a priority to get everything finished. This is something I need to do, not only for financial reasons but because deep down, I feel like I have a purpose as a therapist. I feel that a lot of what has happened has happened for a reason. I moved to this specific location for a reason. I was chosen to write about living with DID for HealthyPlace for a reason. I started this blog for a reason, and it has evolved into so much more than I intended it to be. All of these things have helped me to grow, even though I have trouble seeing that sometimes. I think grad school will also help me grow. It will give me more purpose.

Thankfully, I’ve been given extra hours at work this coming week. It will help keep me busy, and I’ll have more money to pay my bills. I’m just hoping that I will be able to handle the extra work, and the blog, and the grad school prep, and therapy. It’s draining, but it’s what I need to do.

Daddy

~ KJ ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been struggling the last week or so in dealing with emotions surrounding my father. He has been declining in health for some time, and will probably die soon. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel.

For a long time, I had diminished a lot of what my father had done to me. I wanted (needed) to hold on to the belief that I had at least one decent parent. But I’ve slowly come to realize that my father was not a good parent. He was just as damaging, physically and emotionally, as my mother was.

I don’t even know the exact level of involvement my father had in the abuse my mother perpetrated on me. In a few of my flashbacks my father was there, right next to my mother as she was violating me. I told myself that those flashbacks couldn’t be real. I dismissed them as a  figment of my imagination. I don’t want to believe that my father would ever do that. I don’t want to believe that he knew what she was doing and let it happen. I want to believe that he knew nothing about it. I want to believe that some part of him was a decent person. But part of me knows that what I want to believe likely isn’t the truth at all.

I don’t know whether or not I want to confront him or let him die in ignorance. I want him to know how I feel. I want him to know how much I hate him. I want him to tell me why. It’s not fair that he gets to die and I have to live and suffer from the damage he’s done.  His heart may be failing, but my heart was ripped apart long ago. There’s no cure for either of us.

It makes me feel like a horrible person for wanting another human being to die. I feel no  sympathy for him. I want him to suffer and I want him to die. What kind of person does that make me?

Why couldn’t he just act like he loved me? Why did he have to hurt me? Why did he have to break my heart?

Daddies are supposed to love their daughters. Daddy only showed hate. Daddies are supposed to teach and guide their daughters. The only thing daddy taught me was how not to feel. Daddies are supposed to be role models. Daddy showed me exactly how not to be.

Why, daddy? I’m sorry. I’m sorry for not being good enough. I’m sorry I disappointed you.

I’m sorry you were my father.

16 weeks

~ KJ ~ 3 Comments

I have so many things to write; I’ve started writing none of them. I have to write my essay for grad school; I can’t think of what direction to go in. I have to write a letter to my therapist before our session on Monday. Since I’ve had a lot of trouble communicating verbally the last few sessions, my therapist asked if I would write her a letter and include all of the things that I’ve wanted to say but couldn’t. I do have a lot of things I want to tell her, but I don’t even know where to start in writing it, so I’ve avoided it altogether. Instead, I’m sitting at my desk and writing this blog about how much crap I have to write. Clearly my prioritization needs work.

I’m still walking on a thin line between giving up and going on. The fact that I recognize this is actually making it more difficult for me. I hold myself to such high standards that it bothers me when I feel so low. I tell myself I should be stronger than this. I tell myself I should be over it. But I’m not.

During this week, people have shown me more affection and care than I’ve ever received from my own (immediate) family. Today, I felt like going for a walk just to get some air. I stopped in a Chinese restaurant to pick up some soup because I was cold, and a man who I hadn’t seen in a couple of months must have seen me and stopped in. He works at a place I frequented before I broke my foot; as I was recovering, I had to find another place that involved less walking and got used to going there instead. He asked if he could give me a hug. He said he wondered where I had been and was worried that I moved away. I told him what had happened, and that I should be around more often now. I never realized I impacted someone enough that they would miss me. A few days before, a man who I frequently see and interact with on the bus saw me at the bus stop and asked how I was doing. I wasn’t in a very communicative mindset, so I gave very basic answers and continued to listen to my music instead. A few minutes later as he got on the bus, he turned around, made an “air hug” gesture, and said “Love ya C, take care of yourself and be safe.” Take care of yourself. Such a simple phrase, yet so difficult for me to actually put into action. Am I really taking care of myself? And why does this man care so much to even say that? He cared enough to remember my name, and I can’t even remember his.

I realize I have difficulty processing the idea that other people care about me, because my mother made it very clear to me growing up that no one ever would. It goes against the reality that I’ve formed of myself and my world. But that reality is entirely based off of what my mother told me all of these years. It’s so hard for me to erase everything and start over. Parents are supposed to guide you and teach you things that are right; instead my parents instilled in me a warped sense of the world that I just can’t seem to override.

I’m a little worried about how I’m going to handle the next two months. Tomorrow is the unofficial start of the holiday season. The holidays are about family…something I no longer have. It’s going to be another reminder that I am alone. As much as I can try to keep busy with work and with school prep, I’m still going to be reminded of all that I’ve lost. It doesn’t even make much sense. I’m grieving something that really wasn’t even there anyway. Family wouldn’t have done those things they did to me. Family wouldn’t have made me suffer. They were never my family.

I’ve tried to pretend like everything is okay this past week, and it ended up doing more harm than good. I need to learn to be honest with myself and with those around me. I need to learn to say I’m not okay when I’m not okay. I need to learn how to ask for help when I need help. I need to learn to accept that everything is not going to be perfect…that I’m not perfect.

I need to be the person that got me free. She knew how to be strong. She knew how to stand up and fight. Where did she go?