Author: KJ
239 Days
Today is the 239th day of my freedom. 34 weeks. Nearly 8 months. I’m still alive and kicking (although sometimes, I’m kicking myself).
For anyone that assumes that life is easy once you escape a trauma…it’s not. Thanks to PTSD, I oftentimes feel like I am reliving my past over and over again. I still get panic attacks. I still have parts that think we are living back home, and are scared of our mother. I still, in some sick way, miss being home.
It’s hard for people to understand why I do the things I do. In some ways, I am still a scared child stuck in an adult body. I lock the bathroom door because I feel safe that way. I lock my bedroom door at night for the same reason. I could live in the safest neighborhood on the planet, and I would still lock the door. I sometimes hide in my closet. No one can see me in there. I still wear 3-4 shirts and three pairs of underwear (simultaneously) every day. It is a habit I have had since I was young and even though I know I am no longer in danger, it still helps me feel protected. As an adult I should know better, but it’s not that simple.
I’m exhausted. I sleep for two hours and twenty minutes each night. Then I wake up, completely disoriented and not even sure WHY I am awake. If I’m lucky, I’ll doze off a couple of times before I have to wake up for work. My exhaustion is evident. My therapist even asked if I had considered taking my Ambien again. I realized at that point it must be bad, as we both believe that I have been better sans medication (in general).
Half the time, I’m battling a migraine. My feet are causing me excruciating pain. I go to the bathroom at work sometimes just to get a break for a few minutes. I hibernate in my room at night because I can’t physically handle going up and down the stairs.
A couple of weeks ago, my therapist called countless doctors, trying to find someone experienced in dealing with trauma patients. I give her a lot of credit. She worked her ass off trying to get me care, because we both know I need it, even though I deny it a lot of the time. Fortunately, she found a doctor who is experienced and is willing to take me on as a patient. The doctor is not even in my county, but I am sort of at a desperation point. My therapist has already filled her in on some of my problems and she seemed eager to help. I have an appointment on March 21st and I’m scared as fuck. My therapist keeps telling me that I deserve not to be in pain; but pain is something I’ve known my entire life.
Me and denial have been best friends lately. I still at times find myself denying my DID. My therapist talks about my parts and I go on as if they didn’t exist. I told my therapist in our session yesterday that I just wanted to be normal. I want to have a normal childhood. I want to have a normal life. I want to feel normal. I don’t want DID.
If that wasn’t bad enough, I am denying my past. Memories come up and I discredit them. That never happened. My mother would never do that. My therapist brought up a memory that came up in our session on Monday and I told her that it wasn’t true. I denied it. I didn’t want to acknowledge something so sick, something so vile. Even though on some level, nothing my mother did, does, or will do surprises me. But it’s just so much easier to deny it. Let’s just pretend it didn’t happen. Let’s just pretend I had a happy life. Please.
But we all know that never works out that way.
Denying my memories will only make them come to the surface more. Denying my parts will only make them louder in vying for attention.
But yet here I am, on day 239, still denying most of my life.
Twelve
I haven’t written much lately.
I’ve been stuck between two worlds. Sometimes, I am 29 year-old, adult me. Other times, I am 12 year-old, child me.
This has been going on for a couple of weeks now, but more in the last week or so. It is confusing because I know that I am a grownup, but I don’t feel like one.
While I know that I am free from harm now, my 12 year-old self is still frozen in time and constantly in fear that mother is coming.
As a result, I am in an ongoing battle in my head between what I know and how I feel. I know mother isn’t coming, but I feel unsafe. I’m on high alert, just waiting for her to come through the door. I panicked in school the other night because I was scared she was going to find me. I’ve been scared to go to sleep at night because I fear that she will find me and hurt me.
Irrational fears. I know they are irrational to me. But my 12 year-old self doesn’t know they are irrational. For her, they are valid.
My therapist said that there is dissonance between what my adult self wants and does and what some of my others parts want. While I don’t care whether or not my mother looks for me or knows what I’m doing, some of my parts are still too scared of her and feel unsafe that I am so open. It creates a chaotic experience, both inside and out, and ends up causing a downward spiral much like I’ve been experiencing over the last week.
I just want to be an adult again.
Trust
I’ve never been able to trust anyone completely.
It’s not surprising. Every survivor of child abuse I have ever met has had the same difficulty with trusting people.
Why is it so difficult for me to trust? Because the first people I met, the first people I ever formed relationships with – my parents – were also the people that abused me for my entire childhood. The very person that a child is supposed to be able to trust was the very person that shattered my ability to trust anyone.
In my healing process, I have come a long way. I have learned, to an extent, to trust other people. But I have never been able to put my full trust in anyone. There are things I keep inside, never feeling comfortable enough with anyone to let them out, never trusting anyone enough to be able to give those things a voice. And in the long run, it drains me.
I have so badly wanted to be able to trust someone enough to let everything out. And I think, just maybe, I finally found that person in my therapist.
I have been avoiding telling my therapist something that has been eating away at me. It has been eating away at me for years, really, but even more so in the recent months. I have made passive comments about it, but whenever she probed further, I said it was something that I couldn’t talk about. It came up again on Monday. I don’t remember everything because I had dissociated towards the end of our session, but it must have been significant because she brought it up again in our Thursday session.
By this time, I think she had an idea about what I was hiding. She asked if we could talk more about it. She asked if there was anything she could do to make it easier to talk about. I really wanted to say let’s forget this ever happened but on some level, I knew that wouldn’t help anyone.
My words were there but I was still so afraid to let them out. I sat there with my head down, staring at the rug beneath my feet, contemplating all of the possibilities that could come out of this. I must have told my therapist at least a dozen times that I was scared. She continued to reassure me that it was okay to be scared, that she understood. She told me that she would continue to care about me no matter what I told her, that no matter how bad I thought my secret was, we would work on managing it together. I told her that no one would understand the darkness within me. She wanted to try to understand.
After a half hour (though it seemed like hours) of inner turmoil and resistance, I finally broke down. I started crying and just blurted it out. The secret that I never told another person. The secret that I never even wrote on paper. The secret I will likely never tell another soul.
Now it was out there, out in the world, and I could never take it back.
I immediately turned away from her and hid my face. I was so disgusted with myself, so ashamed of what I had done. I couldn’t face her.
But she didn’t run away. She sat next to me, comforting me, asking me questions. I asked her if she hated me now that she knew the truth about me. I asked her if I was just like my mother.
“Your mother would never be sitting in therapy like this, feeling this intensely about anything she ever did. But you’re here, feeling all of these things because you care so deeply. You’ll never be like her.”
That still didn’t change what I had done. I still felt sick. I still felt unresolved. But in a way, I felt different. I didn’t feel weighed down. I felt like I could breathe a little deeper. I felt a release.
I realized, after our session, that my therapist is the first and only person I have complete trust in.
I never thought it would ever be possible for me to trust another human being like that.
The response
My grandmother answered my letter.
I emailed it to her, so there would be no trace of my location. I wasn’t sure if she was a fully trustworthy person.
She didn’t acknowledge anything I wanted her to. In fact, she completely ignored most of my letter.
She updated me about herself, about how no one visits her, about how she gave my father a car so they could come over and they still didn’t visit, about how she could have sold the car to someone else instead.
Then at the end, she asked what school I was going to, and what I did for work. And that was that. No acknowledgement of anything else I wrote. No apology, no further questions, not even a mention of the word abuse.
I was disheartened. I realized that she is likely in denial. I said all I could. There’s nothing more I can do. I can’t force people to accept a reality they don’t want to face.
I was angry. She’s continuing to enable my family. She got them a car. A fucking car. All the while they’re still driving the Jeep that I bought them years ago. And they get a car, too. You know what I get? Nothing. I continue to get nothing. I’m the only one in the family that’s not a complete asshole, and I get shit. I struggle to be on my own and they get consistently get handouts. They get rewarded for being horrible people. Ain’t it funny how life works?
I didn’t reply back to her. I sat with my emotions for awhile. I emailed my therapist about it, and she reminded me that I don’t owe my grandmother anything, and I’m not obligated to send her a reply. The fact that my grandmother is still actively enabling my family makes her an unsafe person. I’m not quite sure it’s worth the added stress to go through a relationship that will never be genuine.
It hurts, but I’m actually so used to the hurt now that it doesn’t affect me like it should.
At least I tried.
Secrets
Secrets are dangerous.
They eat away at you, slowly, from the inside, like a slow-acting poison.
The shame takes residence in the pit of your stomach, where it causes a nausea that never seems to subside.
The guilt takes residence in your chest, where it weighs you down so immensely that you can feel your heart hurting from the pressure, you can feel yourself slowly suffocating.
The memories take residence in your mind, where they replay over and over, reminding you of things you can never take back, things you can never change.
These secrets can never come to the surface, so you push them further and further down, hoping that one day, they will just go away.
But they never go away. You push them and you push them as far as they will go. They jounce back, beating you up, ripping you apart from the inside out.
No one can see the damage. No one can see the poison flowing through you. You look okay on the outside. No one suspects a thing.
So you learn to live with your secrets. You let them overtake you, control you, because the alternative seems so much worse.
You can never tell anyone. You can never even write it out because then the paper will know. No one, no thing, can ever know. No one will ever understand the darkness that lives inside of you.
You become a slave to your secrets until the day there’s nothing left of you. Your mind is shattered. Your heart is broken. Your soul is gone forever.
And now you’re just a shell. One final tap and you’ll finally crack, you’ll finally fall to pieces.
But your secrets fall with you, too. No one ever has to know the truth. No one ever has to see the darkness.
Your secrets die with you.
Why I’ve Been Crying
I’m so used to being able to shut down my emotions, to numb myself entirely of feeling. But for the last couple of weeks, I find myself crying. Consistently crying. I cry in the shower. I cry at work. I cry in the bathroom. I cry walking home. Most nights I cry so much that I end up falling asleep from exhaustion. Normally that would be a bad thing, except that has been the only sleep I’ve been able to get.
Crying gets you in trouble. Crying gets you beat. Crying creates more pain.
I hate crying. I hate feeling weak. I want people to think I am strong and put-together.
I hate crying.
I’m not even crying over one thing. I’m crying over everything.
I’m crying because I’m alone.
I’m crying because I want to belong to a family. I want my family.
I’m crying because I never had the childhood I deserved.
I’m crying because for 29 years, all I was was a pawn in my mother’s game. I was never a person.
I’m crying because the home I am living in doesn’t really feel safe.
I’m crying over all of the relationships I could have had with people, the relationships my mother stopped from happening.
I’m crying because I will never experience the joy of bearing a child.
I’m crying because I’m still so scared of the world.
I’m crying because my father will die before I ever tell him how I feel.
I’m crying because my brother is so far brainwashed, he will never experience true freedom.
I’m crying because so many people could have helped me, but chose to look away.
I’m crying because my mother will never get the justice she deserves.
I’m crying for the children my mother will hurt because I’ve allowed her to roam free.
I’m crying for the people that I’ve hurt because I didn’t know any better.
I’m crying for my younger parts, the ones who miss our mother, the ones who don’t understand why we had to leave.
I’m crying for my younger parts, the ones who got hurt instead of me, the ones still in so much pain.
I’m crying because I’m exhausted. I just want to be able to sleep.
I’m crying because of the pain in my heart.
I’m crying because I fear that a piece of my mother lives inside me, making me just like her.
I don’t want to cry anymore.
The letter to my grandmother
Grams,
I am sorry I haven’t reached out to you sooner. I had to make sure that I was safe, and that meant cutting contact with anyone who was still in contact with my immediate family.
I am safe now. I graduated from college (with high honors) and already started graduate school. I’m working at a great job, I write semi-professionally, and I recently started an organization to help others that have been through circumstances that no one should ever have to face. I am doing great things now.
I am not sure what my family has told you regarding my sudden disappearance, but I can be certain it hasn’t been the truth. I left to escape. I realized that I didn’t deserve to be controlled, hurt, taken advantage of, and abused any longer. I made the decision to leave on my own. No one made me leave. No one helped me except for a close friend. I left with two bags of clothes and shoes, my computer, and whatever money I managed to hide away. I left everything and everyone else behind.
I left because my mother is not a good person. She lies, manipulates, and controls people. She has abused her own children since childhood. She is dangerous. That is why I left. She will never change. I deserved better. R deserves better, too, but I worry that he is far too controlled to escape her.
I won’t get into too many details, because that doesn’t matter. I just want you to know the truth. My mother tries to discredit me by telling people that I am bipolar and a liar. I am neither. I have post-traumatic stress disorder, which is why I was hospitalized so many times in the past 18 months. I wanted to die because the memories of what happened to me were too painful to handle.
My mother has no genuine concern about me or why I left. She was and always has been only worried about herself. My mother sent me one text message a few days after I left. No one – not her, or my father, or Robin – has contacted me since. I have the same phone number and the same e-mail address I’ve had for the last decade. No one is blocked from contacting me. I specifically didn’t change my number because I knew my mother would make this claim. They are lying when they say that they have tried to contact me.
I worry that they are using you to create rifts in the family, and it’s not fair. They aren’t concerned, they are using you and others to get to me. If they really needed to contact me, they would have. It’s been seven months of nothing. My mother is playing a game. Please don’t be a part of it.
You don’t have to respond to me. You don’t have to believe me. I know the truth because I have lived it. Others know the truth because they have seen it, but they are too afraid to come forward, too scared to stand against my mother. I am not afraid. She can’t hurt me anymore.
I’m sorry that it came to this. If you take anything from this, know that I am safe and well. I am healing now. I struggle every day, but I am getting by. It’s better than the life I had before. I will be okay, and I will love you regardless.
I read the letter out loud to my therapist in our session yesterday. When I finished reading and looked up, I could see the emotion written all over my therapist’s face and I immediately turned away.
She told me my strength really comes through in my writing…the same strength that I so often have difficulty finding when I need it the most. I know I am strong, but I still feel so weak.
I could have said a lot more. But what would that have done? I didn’t even mention my father’s involvement. That’s her son. I am not doing this to hurt her; I am doing this to protect her. I don’t want her to be among my mother’s countless victims.
I don’t know what I’ve gotten myself into. This can be the beginning of something. I just don’t know what that something is yet.
Don’t believe her, she’s bipolar.
My mother worked hard to isolate me from the rest of the world.
She did it in childhood by instilling into me a fear of the outside. As I grew up, she isolated me by telling everyone else I was crazy and a liar.
I knew for years that she was telling people I was close to lies about me. She was telling people at my work, and people I considered my friends. It was pointless to fight against her. She had her game down pat. She would talk all of her shit about me, and then would tell a sob story about how she was so hurt by my behaviors, how she just didn’t understand why I treated her so badly, why I hated her so much.
Why I treated her so badly? Guess who was paying the bills, cooking meals for the ‘family’, and cleaning up after everyone. Me. Who bought a vehicle for her? Me. I certainly didn’t need the vehicle; I’ve never even had a license. I did all of that because that’s what she instilled in me since youth. If I didn’t support her financially, I was selfish and bad. Yet even when I did support her, she’d still tell people I was selfish and bad. I could never win.
The biggest blow came last spring, when I realized just how low my mother would go to sabotage my life. I woke up to a series of text messages from my mother. My mother allegedly thought she was texting my brother the whole time, and then conveniently realized her mistake a few texts later and then started texting me this sob story about how she was so concerned about me and blah blah blah. I say blah blah blah because that’s all it was. Lies and nonsense. I could see right through her. And I would bet my life savings that her texting me this was no accident. My brother and I have names on complete opposite sides of the alphabet. For a woman so careful in every action of her life, she would never make a mistake like that. She wanted me to read this. She wanted me to know that she was in control of everything and everyone, even the people I called friends.
My mother told everyone she met that I was bipolar, as if it were the main descriptive criterion of my entire existence. She never told anyone how intelligent I was, how selfless I was, how hard I worked…no, instead she told everyone that her daughter was crazy. Even worse, I don’t even have bipolar disorder. She liked to throw that diagnosis around because it came with all the added stigma that played perfectly into her game.
What kind of person tells everyone that their child hurts themselves as a part of regular conversation? I guess she used it to add on to my “crazy” label. But why did nobody question WHY I was hurting myself for the last 19 years? Ten year-old children don’t normally understand self-injury, and they shouldn’t comprehend that type of pain. That is a red flag that everyone just kept ignoring.
Why did nobody question why this woman’s other child, her adult son, my brother, was also hurting himself? What are the odds that a perfectly innocent parent raises two children who end up with psychological problems and extensive self-injury? If I had to hazard a guess, I would say those odds are pretty low. But damnit, my mother just played on people’s emotions like a violin. The odds never mattered because all people could focus on was my mother’s fictitious plight.
She just picks up and leaves without saying anything to anyone! Oh my God, someone call the police! I say that jokingly, but my mother would threaten to call the cops in the rare times I managed to escape from home prison for a few hours unsupervised. But why did no one see an issue with this? Why would her 29 year-old daughter need to ask permission to leave the house? THIS IS NOT NORMAL BEHAVIOR. It angers me that people did not question her at all. It really angers me. They enabled her, allowing her behavior to continue until the day I finally left.
She doesn’t want friends. Wow. I longed for friends. I never had real friends as a child. I was never allowed to spend time with anyone outside of school, and I was never allowed to have anyone over our house. I was alone my entire life. I looked forward to work because that was the only way I could have friendships. Unfortunately, that also meant my friendships were easier for my mother to control, because she had access to everyone I also had access to. I can’t imagine how many people she told these same lies to. I can’t think about all of the people I could have gotten closer to had my mother not poisoned their opinions of me with her lies. I actually had a few people come forward in the months after I left and told me similar stories – that my mother had told them I didn’t want any friends, that I didn’t like anyone, and that I thought I was too good for people. I would be lying if I said it doesn’t hurt me. It hurts me to this day.
She thinks she’s better than everyone else. That could not be farther from the truth. I still struggle with my own self-worth. My problem is I don’t think enough of myself, not that I think too much of myself. I downplay my intelligence and my abilities. I treat myself like shit often because that’s how my parents treated me. I never thought I was better than everyone else. I thought I was worthless and undeserving of life. I figured I never had any friends because I didn’t deserve them. I didn’t realize that my mother played a hand in every aspect of my life, even my potential relationships with others.
The truth is that my mother thinks she is better than everyone else. She believes that she is worthy of respect, that she is above the law, and that she deserves everything to be handed to her.
I can’t find it in my heart to delete these screenshots from my phone. The day this happened, I realized that I could trust no one. I realized that my mother had poisoned everything and everyone around me. It hurt then, and it still hurts now.
It hurts because I know my mother continues to tell lies about me, even to other members in our family. She tells people I have problems, that I make up stories. For so many years, I didn’t fight back.
Today, I have chosen to fight back. I sent a letter to my grandmother tonight. I told her why I left. I told her the truth about me. She deserves to know the truth, and not the lies my mother has continued to tell. I will not continue to be torn down by this woman any longer. I don’t deserve it.
I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid
My mother would have made a brilliant cult leader.
I say that half in jest, and half in all seriousness.
When you think about it, my mother already has her own cult. It may be small, it may only consist of some family members and those around her, but it has the dynamics of a cult nonetheless. Her followers do her bidding, no matter how out there her requests and teachings may be. She gets them to leech on to her as if she was their only remaining source of life. By some miracle, I managed not to become a member in my mother’s cult.
Today’s therapy session was mostly about my feelings of guilt concerning my brother. I realized, thanks to my therapist, that these feelings of guilt were the result of my mother’s programming. My mother ingrained in me a sense of responsibility for everything bad that ever happened, even the things that had nothing to do with me.
My therapist is already well aware of the differences between my brother and I, despite the fact that we both experienced some of the same abuse and trauma growing up. While I distanced myself from my mother as best as I could, my brother did the exact opposite; he was drawn to her. My therapist reminded me that even though our approaches were quite different, my brother and I were working towards the same goal: keeping ourselves safe, and not “poking the bear” that was/is my mother.
In the middle of our discussion, my therapist told me “you’re here because you didn’t drink the Kool-Aid.” She was right. I didn’t drink it. But my brother did. And as a result, he is stuck with her, physically, emotionally, and financially. He is so deeply brainwashed that I don’t think there is a chance for him to ever get free. I can’t change him. I can’t save him. He’s been drinking my mother’s Kool-Aid for so long that it’s in his blood. Even though he has brief moments of clarity, moments where he feels fear of her, it’s not enough to break free. He has always, and will always, report back to his leader.
My therapist asked me if there was a way my brother could ever be free. My immediate thought, which I said out loud, was when my mother finally dies. But as I thought about it, not even her death would help him. It may even damage him further. They are so enmeshed that I’m not sure he could survive without her. I have hope that he can, but I’m also realistically doubtful.
“It’s remarkable that you came out of this the way you did. You developed empathy in an environment where there was no empathy, you learned how to feel even though you were punished for feeling.” My therapist was right. But that very fact is why I often doubt my own experiences. How did I end up halfway decent of a person? How am I able to function? It doesn’t make any sense.
And then I look at my brother, a man so badly damaged, so unable to control his anger, living his life as a puppet with my mother as his master puppeteer. Although he experienced much less brutal abuse than I had, he is suffering nonetheless.
We are a perfect example of nature versus nurture. There is likely something in my wiring, something in the way my brain works, that allowed me to respond to my life experiences in the way that I did…something very different from how my brother’s brain is wired. These differences allowed me to survive and eventually to live a free life. While my brother is technically surviving, he’s not really living at all.
I used to be so envious of my brother. Now I see that my mother treated him differently in order to keep him in her favor. She needed a member, and my mother knew early on that I was too resistant, too obstinate, too strong-willed to succumb to her ways. My brother, however, was too easily swayed, too willing to follow, too blind to see reality – he was the perfect candidate. And my mother groomed him so perfectly that now, as a man in his mid-to-late thirties, he knows nothing other than what comes out of my mother’s mouth. I would never want his life. It’s not a life at all.
He drank the Kool-Aid. I didn’t.
Life Without Hurt 